PFP359 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Learning and Revising History: Rothbardian Lessons (PFS 2026)
Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 359.
This talk is from the recently-concluded PFS 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting (Sep. 17–22, 2026, Bodrum, Turkey).
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), Learning and Revising History: Rothbardian Lessons.
An edited transcript (thanks to Fernando Chiocca) is appended below.
Other talks will appear on the Property and Freedom Podcast weekly, on Mondays, in upcoming weeks. Other videos may also be found at the PFS 2026 Youtube Playlist.
Related
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “On War, Democratic Peace, and Reeducation: The “German Experience” in Reactionary Perspective,” Property and Freedom Journal (July 28, 2026)
PFP307 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democratic Peace and Re-Education: The German Experience (PFS 2025)
PFP290 | Hoppe: Considerations and Reflections of a Veteran Reactionary Libertarian (AERC 2025)
Edited transcript below; Brazilian Portuguese translation.
Relearning and Revising History: Rothbardian Lessons
Based on the transcript of the talk presented at the PFS 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting • Sep. 20, 2026 • Bodrum, Turkey
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
I’ve given it the title “Relearning and Revising History” and, to a certain extent, I might say, this is some sort of intellectual autobiography in very rough strokes. Many details are left out. Of course, I’m not a believer in the blank slate theory: Everyone is born with a body and some hardware, and the hardware that all humans have has certain similarities, but the hardware from one individual is certainly not identical to the hardware of another person.
But in some ways we do begin with a blank slate: that is the external experience that will be fed into the hardware, we don’t have from the beginning, we just learn about the outside world. What you learn first is the language, of course, where you live, the social rules, conventions and all the rest of it. Of course, I learned that too. Then from my parents, in particular, I learned the so-called secondary virtues of Germans: punctuality, reliability, diligence, ambitions and all these sorts of things.
And I should mention, by the way, that children of refugees—like I am—tended to be more successful in life than those people who had already resided at the place at the end of the war where they had resided at the beginning of the war, in contrast to refugee children. Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009), a German sociologist, investigated that. That is in the meantime, of course, no longer of relevance, but for my own generation—I was born in 1949, so shortly after World War II—that was definitely the case.
What I did not get from my parents was some sort of explanation how the world works, about history, about a world view. And there’s a very easy explanation for that too, that happened also not just to me but happened also to an entire generation of Germans of my age.
The Germans had lost a devastating war. My mother came from a family that was called East Elbian Junkers—land owners in the eastern part of Germany. And her family had been expropriated by the Soviets in 1946, and they were expelled from their home. They could take whatever they could carry and leave the scene.
My father had been imprisoned in the in infamous Rheinwiesenlager. It was prisoners of war camps, administered mostly by Americans, where the prisoners were completely brutalized. The Americans did not care about them, they even forbid German civilians to throw care packages into these Rheinwiesenlager. The Americans, of course, presented as if that had only cost a few 10,000 people dead. Other estimates go to 50 to 100,000 who simply starved—were starved to death, deliberately. And there are even estimates by James Bacque, a Canadian author who goes as high as 1 million people were killed by that.
That indicates already a topic I will come back to: that the Germans—even the West Germans, which was occupied by the western allies—were not liberated by the Americans. Obviously, a liberation looks slightly different than being treated like that in prisoners of war camps.
And because of this experience—of having been expropriated, having been incarcerated under most brutal circumstances—those were topics that simply was never brought up. They shut you up. That was nothing that you would talk about. You accepted the status quo as it had been installed by the western powers.
And the western powers left a system. They installed the new German government. They licensed the constitution, the Grundgesetz. They licensed textbooks. They licensed political parties. They licensed all the media and so forth. And that was, so to speak, what you learned in school from the very beginning: that that was all normal.
What that meant was we got the American type of liberal democracy imposed in in Germany, with a central bank, with paper money, shortly after the founding of West Germany as member of the NATO. We all learned to hate the Soviet Union—which was in my case easy to do because I had seen what they had done to my family. And we learned by and large that Germans are bad and Americans are great. America is the exceptional nation. Everything that they do is something that we should emulate—this is our great example.
And, of course, we also learned what still exists to this point, the so-called German guilt. Germans were responsible for all the wars. They were solely responsible for World War I and World War II. Germany was bad and America and the West were all fantastic and great. And in addition to this, that goes up to this day, we were always hearing about “what you did to the Jews?”. And the Holocaust, up to this day, comes up at least once on TV in some connection or another, and instilled in Germans was this attitude: never say anything about them. You are all guilty—despite the fact that I was born after the war and obviously could not have done anything whatsoever.
Any type of criticism of these things that we were told as being perfectly normal—and to which our parents did not show much of an opposition because after all they had been traumatized—everything of these narratives that they told us, if you would doubt that, you would become an outsider. And the more you started to doubt or question, the more you became an outcast.
Such is in the end what happened to me, that I became some sort of outcast by all the things that I learned in the course of my life. And the biggest role in relearning and revising history did, of course, Rothbard play—by no means the only one, but he played an enormously important role in this.
The first insight—well, it was not the first in a chronological sense, but one of the most fundamental insights I gained—was that there is something wrong with the institution of a state. That was, of course, never taught in school, the state was a wondrous organization.
And I discovered a very elementary truth: the state is a monopolist of ultimate decision making and ultimate arbitration in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state itself. Now you can easily predict what will happen if you accept an institution like this. I think no normal, sober person would ever agree if that would be written down explicitly: “There is one institution that is always the final judge in any type of conflict, including in conflicts in which Iiself have been involved. I complain about the police, the decision will be made by a judge, but the judge is an employee of the same company as a policeman.” So you can roughly predict what the outcome of these types of institutions will bring about.
Of course, if you are always the ultimate judge in any type of conflict, including those in which you are involved yourself, you can of course also tax. You can rob people and then have your judges decide that is perfectly legitimate: “We don’t call that robbery, we call that taxes or contributions.”
If I’m the ultimate judge in any type of conflict, I can also make laws. I can get engaged in legislation. And in what type of legislation will you predictably I will engage in? In passing such laws that will benefit you at the expense of others. You can also immediately recognize that there is a tendency that the power of a state will continuously grow, because the more you tax the better off the taxmen is. The more you legislate the better off you can make yourself and your friends.
We also had the institution of a central bank—that was, of course, also under control in a way of the Americans who was a dominant western force in West Germany. Besides taxing, if you have a monopoly of printing paper money, of course you will print more. All of a sudden you discover that you have many friends that you never thought might be your friends, but you can buy them. So there’s a tendency that a state will continuously grow.
Now add to this democracy. So there are democratic elections to determine who is the head of the state. Now I have a little book in German called The Competition of Crooks. So democracy introduces a competition of people who want to rule over other people or have no inhibition to rule over other people.
Normal economic competition leads to better products out compete worse products. But going into politics is not a good. It is from the very outset a crime, because you want to rule over other people. So competition, as far as democracy is concerned, means that the worst people will rise to the top. Hayek has written an article about that: How the worst people rise to the top. I have written some little pieces on that subject too.
If you look at the current leadership in the western world, it is easy to see how this tendency has worked out. Our leading politicians, almost from one to the next, have become worse than what existed before.
If you go just Clinton and Bush, and then Obama, and then Biden, and Trump—you start with a crook like Clinton and you end up with a moron like Trump. If Trump would not be as powerful as he is and the president that he is, we would consider him a joke. He could appear in comedy shows. But in fact, of course, the whole thing is far more serious. We have the most powerful nation in the world ruled by a nut, who should be placed more appropriately in a looney bin rather in the position that he currently holds.
But of course, this is also true for Germany. In Germany, we had the previous foreign minister whose only qualification was that she was very good at trampoline jumping. We had an economics minister who did not know what insolvency meant. We have currently people in charge who, when they take up a huge amount of additional debt, they call this a wealth fund.
And if you look at other countries, you see a similar picture. The quality of these people… you are ashamed to be ruled by people like that. They don’t know anything about you. I don’t know anything about them. They know nothing about my circumstances, and nonetheless they have the arrogance to pass laws that affect me in my most intimate dealings without ever having my consent in anything that they do.
Now given that the state always grows—that the size of the state always grows, of course at the expense of the private sector that is really productive—and the fact that these people are rather of mediocre intelligence who run the show, you can easily predict also what will happen under these circumstances.
The really successful people—the big businessmen and big finance—will realize that the size of the state growing continuously makes it, of course, worthy of being captured. So they gain increasingly control—they are the smarter people, big industry, big finance—they are the ones who actually, of course, bring support to these idiotic politicians that rule us and benefit from them in so far as they get special privileges. They get then government contracts, after all, the government has more money than anybody else—huge contracts can be struck with the government and they can make you rich and they can also destroy you.
So big businessmen are becoming statists too. Big businessmen have also always an interest to eliminate competition from smaller, more competitive, companies, and it is easy for them to have the politicians pass laws that disadvantage small firms and benefit large firms.
So this was one of my first insights that already as you can imagine would make you a somewhat suspicious person. The next insight concerned the relationship between state, war and imperialism, and the special role of central banks in all this.
I discovered, easily, that states have, of course, the possibility of going to war and getting involved in struggles more easily than private people do. Because states can externalize the cost of war to draftees and all involuntary participants.
States then are the cause of wars—and far more likely the cause of wars than any criminal gang ever is—because the cost of war can be socialized. And that leads to the insight that those states that have the most solid economic basis—since every war has to be financed somehow—that those states that are internally most liberal and thereby produce a more prosperous population, and a more solid economic basis, tend to be, as far as their foreign policy is concerned, more aggressive than states that are oppressive internally and have to rely on a population that is very unproductive, with an underdeveloped economy.
So this brought me then further to consider especially the German-US relations. As you recall, Germans and Germany are bad, the United States and Americans are all great.
Now I discovered then of course relatively easily that the United States had been for quite some time already an imperial power that started already—at the latest—with the Spanish-American Wars. The United States was one of the wealthiest countries by the end of the 19th century, so, as I predicted, those places tend to become more aggressive because they know they will likely win any war.
So first there was a Spanish-American war, they occupied Cuba, they occupied the Philippines, then they were interested in the Pacific, Hawaii was occupied and so forth. Which brings me to World War I.
Obviously, World War I was initially an inner European war. And certainly, the German Empire was not in any way threatening the United States, being a war separated by two oceans from Germany. Nonetheless, Germans who were considered to be solely guilty of World War I—which is of course not the case, Britain had at least as much to do with it than Germany, if not more.
The war that broke out in in Europe initially led to some sort of standstill. Peace was in sight. That could have ended in 1916, something like this. And then the British, through financial and family relations to the Americans, were able to entangle the United States into World War I, and it was the intervention of the United States in World War I that brought victory to the western powers.
That was the Americans who came to Europe, with President Wilson in charge, and his motto was: “We have to make the world safe for democracy.” So one of their goals—of the Americans entered the war and ultimately decided the outcome of the war—was the destruction of all monarchical empires in Europe: the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the German Empire and the Russian Empire.
So what was the outcome of the destruction of the monarchical empires in Europe? In Russia we had communists coming to power. And in Germany—and just my main top topic here—democracy and the abolition of monarchy meant that communists and, on the other hand, national socialists both parties grew continuously in size, with the ultimate winner being the national socialists over the communist or the Soviet interested and connected communist parties in Germany.
So obviously that was not a fantastic outcome. If the United States would not have been in World War I, the situation might have been a far better outcome than what it happened to be after the United States actually entered and decisively ended the war.
Germany was stripped of all sorts of lands and had to pay reparations. You have heard about the Versailles treaty that by all decently objective people at that time was considered that that’s a guarantee that there will be a revision, that there will be the next war coming. Some historians have, because of that, described the period from the end of World War I to the end of World War II as one 30 years war. So the second world war was very much predictable based on the outcome of the first one.
So what about the second world war? Again the history that we learned in Germany was of course that the Germans started that damn thing too. In fact it was by no means the case.
Hitler was a great friend of Great Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world. He thought they were genetically related to the Aryan race and so forth. He had no interest in conducting war against England or the United States. What he did want was to regain some of originally German territory that had been occupied by Poland, which was created after World War I. Even though Wilson’s idea was there should be self-determination of people to what place they would want to belong, self-determination was largely ignored when it came to the execution of the Versailles treaty.
There existed plenty of German populated territories that voted to become part of Germany but were not allowed to do this. So Germany had some fights there with Poland. The Poles were very intransigent, encouraged by the British and the French, that if anything ever happened to the Poles that would be a reason for war of them against Germany.
When Germany invaded Poland in agreement with Russia—which invaded Poland a couple weeks later—Britain declared war on Germany, Britain and France. So there was no war declaration of Germany against any of the western powers. To the contrary, the western powers declared war against Germany. But they did not declare war against Russia that at two weeks later did exactly the same thing and took the other part of Poland as Germany and Russia had before agreed what their plan was. So no de declaration of war to Russia but declaration of war against Germany.
Germany was forced to conduct a war in the west because, after all, Britain was now in a state of war. Then came the famous German blitzkrieg. France and England were quickly defeated. The Germans were generous enough to leave hundreds of thousands of British troops—that they could have easily captured—return to England. And Germany wanted peace—it sought to secure peace in the west—because its ambition, Hitler’s intention, was directed toward the east. He wanted to have nothing to do with the west. They were considered even friends. (You see, like in every case when we talk about governments, we talk about groups of gangsters, but this group of gangsters have of course different interests and some gangsters are worse than others.)
Now how did this world war end? Again, the British managed to get the Americans entangled in this war too, just as they had done during the first war, and it was again of course the Americans who ultimately decided the outcome of the war.
Soviet Russia had killed far more people even during peace time than Hitler did. Hitler had killed maybe a few thousand people during peace time. Stalin had killed 20 million by that time, but it was the Soviet Union that became the ally of the western powers.
So what was the outcome of that? The outcome of that was the Americans now occupied Germany. They occupied also Italy. They occupied many many states all over the world in the meantime, as indicated by military bases that they have. To this day, we have military bases in Germany. To this day, they have military bases in Italy, in Spain, in Turkey. There’s practically no European countries where the Americans do not have military installations.
What does that indicate about the status of these types of societies? Obviously, they are some sort of vassals. Germans have no military installations in the United States or in France or anything like this. Normal countries do not like to see foreign soldiers running the show in their own country.
In addition, all of central Europe and Eastern Europe fell under communist rule. That was another great outcome of this war. 14 million Germans were expelled from their former homes—where they had lived sometimes for hundreds of years—and put on the march as refugees, five six million of them were simply killed by those people at the various location who expelled them and took over the property that previously belonged to Germany.
Again, this reminds me of what I said before: America did not come as a liberator to the Germans, Americans came to Europe as conquerors.
By the end of World War II, America was by far the most powerful empire in the world. The British Empire had basically gone bankrupt and it was inherited by the United States.
And now I see that this expansion of territories and vassal states has continued and the United States is on the forefront of this process for decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s the Warsaw pact dissolved. The Russians actually withdrew from East Germany; they went home.
The reason for NATO, which initially had been “we have to defend Europeans from the evil Soviet Union”, the reason for the establishment of NATO had essentially disappeared. But in contrast to the dissolution of the Warsaw pact, which was the equivalent in the Soviet block to NATO in the western world, NATO was not dissolved.
There were initially oral agreements that the western powers made: “we will not expand NATO beyond East Germany.” East Germany will include now also because there was German reunification, but beyond that no more expansion of NATO. But what has happened of course is precisely that countries have this imperial inclination if they have the economic power to just sustain such a thing.
So Poland became a member of the NATO. The Baltic states became members of NATO. Czechoslovakia became part of NATO. And Russia was no longer the Soviet Union. It was just Russia. Many people even to this day make the mistake of thinking that Russia is the Soviet Union. No, Russia is not the Soviet Union. I have been to Russia a few times. No, that is definitely not the Soviet Union. I have been to East Germany when it was communist. I know how communist countries work. Russia today is not like the Soviet Union. It’s completely different.
In any case, the animosity that we were educated to have against the Soviet Union was now transferred to the animosity against Russia. Russia was encircled, and then you know of course the most recent story there about the Ukraine war, which they claimed was completely unprovoked. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It was of course a clearly provoked war.
They did one of these orange revolutions in Ukraine, overthrew the president that existed there before, then they built American installations in Ukraine, and at some point Putin had enough of it and said that’s enough of expansion.
In any case, my point is only this: if you go into the history of this, the war did not start with Putin attacking Ukraine. The eastern provinces in Ukraine all speak Russian. They did not feel like they you were Ukrainians and they wanted to have a moderate amount of autonomy. And as they attempted to do that, Zelensky and his henchmen conducted a war against this part of the population in Ukraine, against the Russian speaking population in the Ukraine, for 14 years. That was never reported—or very limited reports—about these types of atrocities that happened there.
Again, I’m not defending anyone on this side. We always talking about gangsters. But the biggest gangster in that case again is the United States.
If we widen the picture a little bit, look who conducted, in most recent times, most foreign wars: Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, now Iran. One war after the other against nations that did not pose a threat for the United States in the slightest way. The Vietnamese did not want to invade America. The Koreans did not want to invade North America. Neither Sudan nor Iraq or any of these places had any intention or capability of even considering such a possibility.
America led most of these wars claiming this is the war against terror. But I come to the conclusion, as compared with all those these various terror attacks, as bad as they are, that happened here and there and so forth, as compared with these terror attacks, the greatest terrorist in the world currently is the United States.
There are estimates of at least 20 million or 30 million dead as a result of American wars, and of course also of American sanctions against all sorts of countries which starve the civilian population.
Why did these wars take place, even though these wars have no immediate benefit for people, it is destructive and so forth? We have to realize, hey, there are obviously people who benefit from wars. There are war manufacturers who benefit from wars. They have an interest of starting wars and getting them going as long as it is possible.
So we come back again to what we call the deep state. Again it’s not the stupid politicians, or intellectually handicapped politicians, that are on the top of all of this that make these decisions alone. It is the smarter influential businessmen and financiers that have an interest in war.
And since the United States is of course the superpower, the United States financiers and big businessmen are the ones that gain the most from this. Look for instance at the current situation when Europe is always supporting the Ukraine. The Americans ask them: you have to just rearm and get your army stronger. But where do these the Germans or the Italians buy these weapons to make their own army stronger? Yeah, they buy them mostly from the United States.
Then let me come to the final and most controversial insight that I reached—and again Murray Rothbard was instrumental in helping me come to this insight. And of course it was an insight that is the most taboo insights that any German could ever entertain.
And it was a very simple observation. If you look at these most influential businessmen, financiers and so forth that run the American government, that represent the deep state in the United States, you find that there is one group that is of over proportional influence. And this is the Jewish lobby in the United States.
If you look at academia, all top positions are occupied by Jewish people. If you look at the American administrations, all top appointments are Jewish people who are relatives of Jewish people. There are many dual citizens, Israeli American citizens that play an enormous role.
And this brings you then of course also to the question of Israel. Rothbard was also of the opinion that all states are criminal, but Israel is especially criminal, because there you had a foreign population, who did not live at that place, come in and occupy and conquer a territory that was inhabited by other people, who had lived there forever. They killed them, they eliminated them and they were constant source of conflict in the entire Middle East.
And there was this close association between the American Jewish lobbies and all of their representatives. There are some people say that every member of Congress and Senate in the United States has, so to speak, one person assigned that is under Israel control them and ruins them if they don’t do what they tell them. If you look at the Iran war right now you see to what extent Trump was persuaded by Israel to start this war. And now even though he would like to get out of this war, he is prevented basically by Israel—by Netanyahu—to continue the war forever.
And of course the excuse that is always given for this is, “Yeah, but Israel deserves special protection because of what happened 80 years ago.”
I must say I consider this to be a cruel joke. First of all, the population in Palestine, whatever the Germans might have done to the Jews, they had not done anything to them. And it was not a government that grew out from the indigenous population that was established in Israel, it was a foreign invasion to that took place of this place.
And if you look at what Israel—with Americans assistance—is doing in the Gaza Strip, is doing in Lebanon and doing in Iran, of which we all have documentation—we can see it, there are videos of that, the cruelty that is unrivaled. Nothing like that happened in World War I. Nothing like that happened in World War II. Look at Gaza completely flattened. And that is all explained to us as self-defense.
And of course the Europeans, dumb as they are, having been made even dumber by the dumb Americans, they believe in this sort of thing. They compare what happens to Gaza with the so-called Holocaust.
As far as the Holocaust is concerned, if you deny the teeniest detail in the official narrative of the Holocaust in Germany, you will be jailed. Despite the fact that nobody, even among those people who are called Holocaust deniers, has ever denied that cruel, evil, ugly things happened during that period.
But if you study these things a little bit more closely—again I learned that all from Rothbard too—there are huge holes in the story. There are lots of lies mixed into certain things that are undoubtedly true. There were never forensic investigations done in these places.
The so-called Nuremberg trial was—even by high ranking American politicians like Taft, who was a presidential candidate—considered to be kangaroo courts.
If you compare the evidence that had large holes with the evidence that we have about the cruelty that is done in Gaza, you must say: how can anybody not blame people who support this sort of thing.
I was shocked to hear that, for instance, the Austrian leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) also now all of a sudden came out as a big Israel fan: “We have to defend Israel under all circumstances.”
I hope people will come to the conclusion that whether the Left says something or the Right says something, that doesn’t matter so much. It matters what the truth is. Some people who attack Israel or criticize Israel are now blamed: “Oh, you do the same that the Left people do.”
I mean there is no person that is more viciously opposed to socialists than I am. But nonetheless, if a socialist say that what is going on there in Gaza that is genocide, then the guy is right. And if the Right people with whom I have normally more sympathy said, “No, no, there’s nothing. It’s all self-defense. All self-defense and don’t forget the Holocaust,” then I think these people are wrong.
As you can imagine, with these types of views that I have, I have become one of the most popular person in Germany.
