The Myth of a Guilty Nation

Albert Jay Nock

This was Albert Jay Nock's first great anti-war book, a cause he backed his entire life as an essential component of a libertarian outlook. The book came out in 1922 and has been in very low circulation ever since.

The narrative has incredible staying power. The burden of the book is to prove American war propaganda to be false. The purpose of the war was not to liberate Europe and the world from German imperialism and threats. Today most everyone knows and understands this, but this was not known in 1922. If there was a conspiracy, it was by the allied powers to broadcast a public message that was completely contradicted by its own diplomatic cables.

Nock's book reminds us of what most everyone has forgotten, namely, that this was sold as a war for freedom and self-determination over imperial ambition. Along with that came some of the most rabid war propaganda ever fabricated until that point in time, all designed to make Germany into a devil nation. Nock's brave book took on that idea and demonstrated that there was fault enough to go around on all sides. All through the 1920s, a Nockian-style retelling of the facts behind the war led to a dramatic shift in public opinion against World War I.

As the introduction by Anders Mikkelsen points out, "Nock makes the reader aware of the great extent to which the allied politicians continually lied to blame Germany and justify the war, or at least told stories with no regard for the truth. No wonder Hitler found British propaganda so inspiring. In fact the story at the time made it sound like Germany was trying to overrun Europe the way Hitler temporarily did a few decades later.

"What makes this book worth reading is not whether this is the best explanation for WWI. It is worth seeing how small groups of state officials engaged in secret actions that led to a catastrophic war, and continually lied throughout the whole process to provide themselves ideological cover."

For lovers of Nock's work, this book is a fantastic addition. For those who have never encountered his writing, this book shows how he came to be such a powerful force in the world of literature and letters in the years between the wars.

Myth of a Guilty Nation by Albert J. Nock
Meet the Author
Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock

Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870–August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle twentieth century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free market thinkers of the 1950s.

Mises Daily Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock, in this seminal essay, discusses his gradual realization that the state is not what it claims to be: "The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit—murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion, and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. "
View Albert Jay Nock bio and works
References

Originally published in 1922 by B. W. Huebsch, Inc. Published in 2011 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.