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 200,000 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 or 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
