Politics & Power Quote by Ludwig von Mises

The line lands like a scalpel aimed at a favorite political alibi: the idea that maps and chronicles can be converted into moral title deeds. Mises isn’t arguing about who was where first in some antiquarian sense; he’s diagnosing how “history” and “geography” get laundered into legitimacy for domination. The verb “pretend” does the heavy lifting. It frames conquest not as tragic inevitability but as a conscious performance - a story told to make violence sound like administration.

Placed in Mises’s world, the warning is less pacifist sentiment than a hard-nosed forecast. Writing in the shadow of collapsing empires, border churn, and the nationalist intoxication that fed the world wars, he saw that claims of ancestral soil or strategic necessity don’t stay on paper. They become policy: annexations, forced assimilation, trade restrictions, population transfers. Once a state asserts a permanent right to rule “other races, nations, or peoples,” negotiation becomes cosmetic, because the hierarchy is the point. “No peace” is not rhetorical excess; it’s an economic and political logic. If domination is justified by immutable facts (the past, the landscape), then conflict is also made permanent, because those “facts” can’t be bargained away.

The subtext is a liberal counter-myth: peace requires treating borders and sovereignties as contingent arrangements subject to consent, not destiny. Mises is quietly refusing the romance of national grandeur and replacing it with something colder: stability is procedural, not poetic. When politics elevates grievance into entitlement, war becomes a sequel, not an exception.