The saying “Truth is the first casualty of war” is said to have originated in ancient Greece with the writings of playwright Aeschylus. For thousands of years, it has been recognized that most wars are wars of conquest, plunder, and destruction. War is an opportunity for the state and the ruling classes to prosper and gain power. “War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne said in his famous essay of the same name. Has there ever been a truer statement?

For the citizens, on the other hand, war means death or crippling injury, taxes, debt, sacrifice, impoverishment, the slavery of conscription, and the loss of many freedoms. The soldiers themselves always pay the highest price in any war, as Ludwig von Mises observed in Human Action.

During the Nuremburg trials, the notorious Hermann Göring declared that to get the public to acquiesce to war, “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism. . . . It works the same way in any country.” Indeed, it does…….

Truth is not only the first casualty of war, but also a casualty of writing the history of war. The state itself and all its war-profiteering appendages—the deep-state bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex, and the “intelligence community”—dominate the narrative of the history of war to make sure their war crimes are expunged. However, the state does not have a monopoly on writing history.

All states are empires of lies about the state’s alleged benevolence, omniscience, and necessity, and about the supposed failings of individuals, communities, civil society, and especially free-market capitalism. But nowhere are the state’s lies more extreme, pervasive, and ridiculous than when it comes to its wars. That is why, as Randolph Bourne wrote in his World War I–era essay, “criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity and beauty of conscription, are subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding [in] severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.” All states become totalitarian states when it comes to dealing with critics of their wars.