# As We Go Marching By John T. Flynn **URL:** **By** Murray Rothbard **Published:** May 1, 1974 --- “As We Go Marching is a brilliant book and must reading for libertarians still wedded to the interventionist foreign policy under which they were brought up.” Nowadays, we think we know what "right-wing" foreign policy is. Made familiar to us by such Conservative organs as _National Review_, the policy is essentially one of battling Communism and national revolutions all over the globe. Conservatives have long been in the forefront of pursuing and trying to heat up the Cold War, and of trying to suppress Communist or revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia, or any other parts of the world. It was not always thus. Thirty years ago, the right wing, what we might call the "Old Right," propounded a blistering critique of burgeoning foreign intervention, warmongering and American militarism. For them, American interventionism and foreign wars were to be condemned as both murderous and counterproductive, whether it was World War I, World War II or the Cold War in the spotlight. Of all the Old Right "isolationist" attacks on the war policies of the New Deal, none was more trenchant, more incisive and more brilliantly written than John T. Flynn's _As We Go Marching_. Flynn saw what the current right wing has so tragically missed: Big Government is just as evil, just as much a threat to our liberty in foreign affairs as it is in domestic; in fact, that war and threats of war have always been the major weapon by which the State and its allies fasten their oppression over the general public. Written with high courage in the midst of the war hysteria of World War II, and thereafter promptly forgotten, _As We Go Marching_, with keen political and historical insight, first describes and analyzes the fascism of Germany and Italy, and then turns to the New Deal, and points out that the New Deal, in its corporatist and interventionist policies at home and abroad, was in the process of bringing the essence of fascism to once-free America. The essence of fascism, Flynn warned, is not brown shirts or pogroms, but the political economy of statism: Big Government dominating and planning the economy at home, the Leader (or President) virtually all-powerful within the government and a foreign policy of perpetual war and intervention to establish hegemony over the globe. With brilliant insight, Flynn condemned the New Deal system as not only fascist, but also as imperialist; like his fellow Old Rightist Garet Garrett, Flynn realized that the Wilson—F.D.R. policy of global intervention was a virulent form of American imperialism, a policy under which both the subject American and foreign populations are bound to suffer. It is unfortunate that now when we hear charges of "imperialism," we automatically condemn the speaker as Marxist—not realizing that the original anti-imperialists of the nineteenth century, the Cobdens and Brights and Sumners, were libertarian laissez-faire thinkers who saw deeply and correctly that war and militarism would be the death not simply of free markets and a free society but of the classical liberal movement itself. Flynn's _As We Go Marching_ applies these antimilitarist and anti-imperialist insights to the New Deal and, by clear implication, to the entire postwar American System (Truman—Eisenhower—Kennedy—Johnson—Nixon) that followed—and that continued explicitly and implicitly in the Wilson—F.D.R. tradition. Professor Ronald Radosh contributes an excellent preface to this edition, placing Flynn and his contribution in its historical context and showing how, after _As We Go Marching_ was published, Flynn continued to oppose interventionism in the form of the Cold War and American imperial adventures in Asia. In 1956, Flynn submitted an article to _National Review_ attacking militarism and military spending as a socialistic "racket." Characteristically, Buckley refused to publish the piece; the reason was that Flynn had failed to succumb to the bogey of the "Soviet threat" in the same way that he had rejected the bogey of the "Nazi threat" a decade and more earlier. Previously it was the liberals who denounced Flynn and now it was the conservatives. As Radosh concludes, "In both cases, Flynn remained true to the analysis put forth most clearly in _As We Go Marching_. The threat was not abroad; it was internal. It was not Soviet Communism that menaced America—it was the Statism at home and the growth of domestic fascist trends . . . the militarism and fascism within ourselves." Anyone who is inclined to dismiss this as left-wing propaganda especially owe it to themselves to read John T. Flynn and to find out what the libertarian-oriented Old Right was all about. _As We Go Marching_ is a brilliant book and must reading for libertarians still wedded to the interventionist foreign policy under which they were brought up. _©1974 Reason Enterprises. Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard / History (272 Pages, Indexed) / BFL Price $3.45_