Mises on War and defense

"The Germans will one day recover their reason. They will re­member that modern civilization was to some extent an achieve­ment of their own. They will find the way back to the ideals of Schiller and Goethe. But this process of recovery must come from within. It cannot be forced upon Germany—nor upon Italy or Japan—by a victorious army or by compulsory education on the part of foreign teachers. The Germans must learn that their ag­gressive nationalism is suicidal, and that it has already inflicted irreparable evils upon themselves. They will have spontaneously to reject their present tenets and to adopt again all those ideas which they dismiss today as Christian, Western, and Jewish. Out of the midst of their own people men will have to emerge who ad­dress them with the words once used by Saint Remigius at the bap­tism of King Clovis: "Adore what you used to burn, and burn what you used to adore." From Omnipotent Government

“The import of weapons and ammunition is a governmental prerogative. Prohibiting exports is defensible in periods of political tension only on military grounds.” “The right to free commercial activity can legitimately be restricted in only three cases: the production and dissemination of weapons, ammunition, and explosives; retail trade in medications and poisons; and activities involving sanitary and veterinarian regulations.” ( p. 150)

(“Draft of Guidelines for The Reconstruction of Austria” which Mises prepared at the request of the late Otto von Hapsburg, and published in the book “The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction” (Liberty Fund, 2000) edited by Richard Ebeling and described in his short essay “The Other Mises.”