Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum 2025
Tom DiLorenzo on “Virtuous” War Crimes: The American and Israeli Traditions
Reported by Sebastian Wang

This was a characteristically incendiary address. Tom DiLorenzo, now President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and long known as the author who tore Abraham Lincoln from his pedestal, spoke under the title “Virtuous War Crimes: The American and Israeli Traditions.” It was a long and angry catalogue of atrocities, but one that carried a sharp theoretical point.

DiLorenzo began by quoting Ludwig von Mises’s Nation, State and Economy of 1919. Mises noted how the colonial powers of the nineteenth century, including the Americans, made wars of conquest and extermination palatable to their own people by a simple trick. First, they dehumanised their victims, calling them “lesser races,” incapable of self-government and destined to remain so. Then they congratulated themselves for fighting on behalf of civilisation. The massacre of tribes and nations became a moral duty, wrapped in a cloak of virtue. This, DiLorenzo argued, was the founding myth of the American Empire.

The conceit hardened after the Civil War. The Union victory, bloody and destructive beyond anything yet seen in the modern West, was written up by its apologists as a holy war. Out of this emerged the phrase “the Treasury of Virtue.” It was a kind of plenary indulgence for the American state. Having supposedly fought for freedom and union, every subsequent act of aggression could be justified as another page in the same moral ledger. The result was the peculiar phenomenon of a war of extermination against one’s own countrymen held up as the moral charter for global conquest.

DiLorenzo insisted that this was not rhetoric but policy. He lingered on the figure of General William Tecumseh Sherman. In the Civil War, Sherman pioneered what was then called “hard war” and would now be called crimes against humanity. The march through Georgia and the Carolinas left civilians destitute, cities burnt, and food stocks destroyed. Yet Sherman’s real career, DiLorenzo said, came after 1865. He was made responsible for clearing 45,000 Native Americans from their lands to make way for the transcontinental railways. His orders were explicit: women and children were to be killed, buffalo herds wiped out to starve the survivors, and all who resisted herded into camps that can fairly be called concentration camps. Sherman gloated about this work. He even scandalised German officers, not themselves known for delicacy, when he explained his policies. He called Mexicans “mongrels,” sneering at racial mixing as if it were a crime. The moral language of “union” and “freedom” concealed a campaign of genocide.

There was, however, an alternative path. James J. Hill, who built the Great Northern Railway, did not rely on extermination. He traded cattle and money with the Indians for rights of way, leaving them with resources rather than corpses. But Hill was the exception. The other railways were built on blood. In the logic of the Treasury of Virtue, America had already bought the right to kill and dispossess, and it exercised that right without restraint.

The pattern repeated abroad. In the Philippines, after the defeat of Spain in 1898, Americans congratulated themselves for liberating a colony only to impose their own dominion. Theodore Roosevelt told the Filipinos that independence meant rule by America. Resistance was crushed with massacres that killed between 200,000 and a million. Filipinos were denounced as “half-Chinese mongrels,” unfit for freedom. The absurdity reached grotesque heights when American politicians claimed to be “bringing Christianity” to a people who had been Catholic for four centuries. Senator Albert Beveridge, remembered in DiLorenzo’s retelling as a drunken bigot, embodied the blend of arrogance and ignorance. Roosevelt, meanwhile, denounced “the menace of peace” and was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize. The conquerors committed atrocities and were congratulated for their virtue.

The question DiLorenzo posed was whether the Founding Fathers of the United States would have approved of this. They had fought a war of independence against Britain, an empire that—brutal enough in Ireland and India—was nevertheless less savage than the emergent American empire. Would Jefferson, who denounced standing armies and foreign entanglements, have celebrated the burning of Manila villages? Would Washington, who resigned his command rather than grasp at monarchy, have embraced concentration camps for Native Americans? The obvious answer is no. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century the United States had become the very empire it once rejected.

Hawaii offers another case. A kingdom with its own monarchy and constitution, it was gradually stripped of sovereignty by American settlers. The “Bayonet Constitution” of 1887, signed under duress by King Kalākaua, disenfranchised native Hawaiians and gave power to the white planter class. The rhetoric was the same as always: the natives were said to be unfit to rule, their monarchy a relic of barbarism. Judge Sanford B. Dole became president of a provisional government, while his cousin James Dole founded the fruit company that monopolised Hawaiian agriculture. The fusion of legal trickery, racial contempt, and corporate privilege was presented as civilisation.

All these episodes, DiLorenzo argued, demonstrate the enduring mechanism of American imperialism: first dehumanise, then sanctify. The victims are savages, incapable of freedom; the conquerors are virtuous, carrying liberty to the world. The bloodier the conquest, the more loudly the virtue is proclaimed. The Treasury of Virtue never runs dry.

From this catalogue DiLorenzo pivoted to the present. American support for Israel, he claimed, is not an aberration but a continuation. Once again we see the same language: Palestinians are “human animals,” in the words of Israel’s Defence Minister. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spoken of Gaza being “wiped off the face of the earth.” Other Israeli officials have mused about using nuclear weapons. The President of the Knesset has predicted that Gaza will “soon be empty.” Every Palestinian woman is reclassified as the mother or sister of a terrorist, and therefore a legitimate target. The dehumanisation is complete. The moral self-congratulation is equally intense: Israel presents itself as a democratic outpost of civilisation, a beacon of virtue in a savage region. The pattern is the same as Sherman’s buffalo hunts and Roosevelt’s massacres.

Why does America support this? Because it is a return to its own traditions. The United States, DiLorenzo insisted, has always justified its imperialism by moralising rhetoric. To support Israel’s campaign is to indulge once again in the Treasury of Virtue. The dispossession of Palestinians fits seamlessly into the nineteenth-century model of Red Indian policy and the early twentieth-century conquest of the Philippines. What is new is only the theatre of operations.

To this DiLorenzo added a theological dimension. Much of America’s support for Israel comes from Evangelical Christians who embrace dispensationalism, a nineteenth-century heresy which teaches that Jews remain God’s chosen people and that the state of Israel is the fulfilment of prophecy. Against this, DiLorenzo invoked the older Christian tradition that saw the Church as the new Israel after 70 AD, when Jerusalem was destroyed and the covenant extended to all Christian believers. The dispensationalist obsession with Israel is therefore both false theology and bad politics. It ties millions of American voters to unconditional support for a foreign state, justified by misread scripture.

The legal point, often neglected, is also clear. International customary law, even before the codification of The Hague and Geneva Conventions, forbade deliberate attacks on civilians. The North violated this in the Civil War, with Sherman’s burning of Atlanta a gross atrocity. The Allies violated it in the Second World War, firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The principle is that civilians are not combatants. To target them is a crime. Yet Americans, protected by their Treasury of Virtue, insist that their own violations are exceptions, even examples of virtue. It is, DiLorenzo concluded, the American way.

The rhetoric of virtue is one of the most effective weapons of imperialism, and to unmask it is a duty.