The extremist group Antifascist Action (Antifa)began as part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a Communist dictatorship in Germany, and worked to label all rival parties as “fascist.”
September 23, 2025 - "The extremist anarchist-communist group Antifa is in the headlines because President Donald Trump has announced that he will be designating it as a terrorist organization. The organization was initially part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a communist dictatorship in Germany, and it worked to label all rival parties as 'fascist.'
"The organization can be traced to the 'united front' of the Soviet Union’s Communist International (Comintern) during the Third World Congress in Moscow in June 1921 and July 1921, according to the German booklet 80 Years of Anti-Fascist Action by Bernd Langer, published by the Association for the Promotion of Anti-Fascist Culture. Langer is a former member of Autonome Antifa, formerly one of Germany’s largest Antifa organizations....
"Moscow ... sought to unite the various communist and workers’ parties of Germany under a single ideological banner that it controlled. 'The "unified front" thus did not mean an equal cooperation between different organizations, but the dominance of the workers’ movement by the communists,' Langer wrote....
""Benito Mussolini, a Marxist and socialist who ... founded the fascist movement as his own political party ... took power through his 'March on Rome' in October 1922.... The KPD [Communist Party of Germany] decided to use the banner of anti-fascism to form a movement. However, Langer noted that to the KPD, the ideas of 'fascism' and 'anti-fascism' were 'undifferentiated,' and the term 'fascism' served merely as rhetoric.... Both the communist and fascist systems were based on collectivism and state-planned economies. Both also proposed systems wherein the individual was heavily controlled by a powerful state and both were responsible for large-scale atrocities and genocide.
"According to the 2016 annual report of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, from the viewpoint of the 'left-wing extremist,' the label of 'fascism' as pushed by Antifa often does not refer to actual fascism but is merely a label assigned to 'capitalism'.... This held true from the beginning, according to Langer. For the communists in Germany, 'anti-fascism' merely meant 'anti-capitalism'.... A description of Antifa on the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s website notes that the organization still holds this same basic definition of capitalism as 'fascism'....
"Langer wrote that, historically, by labeling the anti-capitalist interests of the communist movement as 'anti-fascism,' the KPD was able to use this rhetoric to label all other political parties as fascist. 'According to this, the other parties opposed to the KPD were fascist, especially the [Social Democratic Party of Germany],' he wrote. Thus, in a move that today would be considered ironic, the group that the communist 'anti-fascists' most heavily targeted under their new label of 'fascism' was the social democrats....
"At this time, Hitler and his Nazi Party had begun to emerge on the world stage, and the Nazi Party employed a group similar to Antifaschistische Aktion in its use of political violence and intimidation, called the 'brownshirts.' Antifaschistische Aktion, meanwhile, began to attract some members who opposed the arrival of actual fascism in Germany and who did not subscribe to — or were potentially unaware of — the organization’s ties to the Soviet Union. However, the violence instigated by Antifaschistische Aktion largely had an opposite effect. The ongoing tactics of violence and intimidation of all rival systems under the Antifa movement, along with its violent ideology, drove many people toward fascism.
“'The Communists’ violent revolutionary rhetoric, promising the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a Soviet Germany, terrified the country’s middle class, who knew only too well what had happened to their counterparts in Russia after 1918,' Richard J. Evans wrote in The Third Reich in Power. 'Appalled at the failure of the government to solve the crisis, and frightened into desperation by the rise of the Communists, they began to leave the squabbling little factions of the conventional political right and gravitate towards the Nazis instead.'
"Langer noted that, from the beginning, the KPD was a member of the Comintern, and 'within a few years, it became a Stalinist party,' both ideologically and logistically. He wrote that it even became “financially dependent on the Moscow headquarters.' Leaders of the KPD, with Antifa as their on-the-ground movement for violence and intimidation of rival political parties, fell under the command of the Soviet apparatus. Many KPD leaders would later become leaders in the communist German Democratic Republic and its infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi.
"As Langer wrote, 'Anti-fascism is a strategy rather than an ideology.' It was brought into play in Germany in the 1920s, not as a legitimate movement against the fascism that would later arise in Germany, he wrote, but instead 'as an anti-capitalist concept of struggle.'”
A version of this article was first published on Aug. 18, 2017.
Oct 20, 2025 - "'What do you expect when you sue the president?' Hearing that comment, some people may guess the comment was made by someone addressing one of President Trump’s political opponents who has been targeted for federal prosecution. That quote, though, is much older. It is from an IRS agent addressing officials of a conservative organization that was being audited during Bill Clinton’s presidency. This illustrates that the use of federal agencies to punish presidents’ enemies did not start with President Trump.
"The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used tax investigations against political opponents. Targeted individuals included publishers of newspapers that were highly critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.
"President John F. Kennedy used the IRS and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drive his conservative critics off the radio. President Lyndon Johnson also used the IRS and the FCC to silence conservative critics. One tool that was used to silence conservatives was to accuse broadcasters of violating the “fairness doctrine” by favoring conservative commentators.
"President Richard Nixon used the IRS to target political enemies. The Nixon administration also threatened television and radio companies with revocation of their broadcast licenses unless they provided favorable coverage of the administration.
"During the Clinton administration, the IRS not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations. It audited Paula Jones after she sued President Clinton for sexual harassment.
"During the George W. Bush years, the IRS targeted organizations critical of the Iraq War. When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the tax agency turned its attention back to conservative and libertarian groups, with a focus on organizations associated with the Tea Party. The Department of Homeland Security also issued a warning that those with pro-liberty bumper stickers — including supporting the Libertarian Party or my presidential campaign — might be violent extremists.
"During the Biden administration, many Americans received harsh sentences for being present at the Capitol on January 6 even if they did not commit any violent acts.
"Federal agencies can also target presidents’ political enemies without a presidential order to do so being issued. Some ambitious and unscrupulous individuals will target a president’s enemies believing that this is an effective way to curry favor with the president or high-level administration officials. Others will use the power of the government against the president’s political enemies or those involved with political movements seeking to change the direction of the government out of a belief that these people or groups constitute a threat to the federal government that justifies violating constitutional rights.
"This history suggests that abuse of power is an inevitable feature of the modern welfare-warfare-regulatory state. Therefore, instead of focusing just on electing the 'right' president, we should focus on shrinking the size and scope of the federal government to its constitutional limitations. This will ensure that Americans can exercise their right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal. As Thomas Jefferson said, 'in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.'"
As with many Canadians (and Americans) these days, my starting point for reading the daily news day is social media site, X. The site owner, Elon Musk, maintains a free speech policy one cannot find anywhere else. The advantage of that to me is that, after an hour or so, I can get both an overview of the news and a short list of stories to follow up for possible mention on my blog.
Yesterday, though, all I could find was one story that everyone wanted to post about, the 2024 American election result. It was not just that the Republicans won, but the size of their win. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency; his party also took control of both houses of Congress. That is hyuge (as the new president would say) in the American system, where the Presidency and Congress (the executive and legislative branches) are formally independent. Let me emphasize its hyugeness by repeating it in its own paragraph.
( A ) In 2024, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.
It seems that everyone on earth, or at least everyone on X, wants to talk about nothing else; and everyone has their own theory of why (A) occurred. One theory that I could not find anywhere on X was my own. I would like more people to know of my theory – not just because it was mine, but because it allowed me to predict (A) four years ago. Indeed, I offered my prediction at the time as a test of my theory: (A) happening would not prove my theory correct, but the failure of (A) to happen would have falsified this version of it.
I wrote up my theory, and made my prediction, back in November 2020, in an article called " US election results are more of the same ." I was commenting on the fact that:
( B ) in 2020, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.
Checking back, I also discovered that:
( C ) In 2016, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;
( D ) In 2008, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;
( E ) In 2000, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and
( F ) In 1992, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate and the House.
To sum up: For the entire millennium so far, every incumbent president has been replaced by a challenger from the other party, in a repudiation of the incumbent's party. This repudiation has been total, with the challenger's party taking control of Congress as well as the White House.
Those are facts. Are they just a coincidence or is there a theory that explains them? The theory that I have come up with goes like this:
The first part follows from Ludwig von Mises' theory of interventionism. Mises taught that, while intervention was meant to be a compromise between minimal and total government, it would always tend toward the total. Each government intervention would have new, unintended consequences, new problems which had to be solved by yet more intervention. In that way, government would grow. But (and this is my own idea at this point), as government increased, so would the problems it created. It would tend to become a bigger, more commanding government trying to perform ever more functions; but it would also increasingly tend to fail at performing any of those functions well. It would increasingly tend to fail at even its core functions of courts, police, and national defense. Given enough time, it would become both a totalitarian state and a failed state.
Long before that point is reached, the government would be failing to satisfy the needs of an increasing number of voters. Ironically, the more it tried to do, the more people it would fail to satisfy: as a government grows through interventionism, so does the number of dissatisfied voters. Those voters would give up on the party system to some degree. Some reject the system only slightly, becoming nominally independent but still retaining some loyalty to their old party. Others reject it completely and become non-voters. In between are the true independents, dissatisfied voters who reject and will vote to throw out either party. As their numbers grow, true independents increasingly determine the outcome of elections; and as they tend to vote against incumbent government, those incumbents will be totally repudiated at regular intervals.
While the interval is regular, it is not independent of human agency. It can and has changed. Currently it is four years (A-C), but before that it was eight (C-F). Since that change coincided with the first election of Donald Trump, it is fair to speculate that his first election is the main reason for the speed-up. Since his election, both parties have become increasingly negative. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy, but since Trump's election both parties have taken negativity to a whole new level.
In the past the negativity of political campaigns began and ended with political campaigns. members of both parties were able to coexist socially outside political life. Today, though, politics and its negativity, never ends. Partisans of both parties have come to see the other party as intrinsically evil, good only to be destroyed. The challenger party does little more than point to the failures of the incumbent regime. The incumbent party increasingly dismisses the challengers' criticisms as "playing politics" and does nothing to correct them. As a result, the all-important true independents – who can confirm the flaws for themselves, as well as their failure to be corrected – are increasingly unsatisfied, increasingly likely to defect to the challengers at the earliest opportunity. They have become motivated by anti-incumbency.
This election has confirmed that four-year interval. However, since Trump remains a player it does not tell us whether the interval stays at four years or reverts to eight following his retirement. Based on the data, there is no way to predict that, for now. All that can be predicted is that in four years' time both parties will once again march into battle as if marching to Armageddon; and in that election the Democrats will win. However, how long that Democratic president will stay in office cannot be answered at this time.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Was Hitler's National Socialism really socialism? In the Marxist paradigm, obviously not: it was a "far right" manifestation of "late-stage capitalism". But the Marxist paradigm is not the only way to look at it.
December 8, 2020 - "Words are powerful things in that they enable us to share a common world of understanding with our contemporaries and, in the written form, with generations long past. But too often words can just as easily cause confusion, misunderstanding, and conflict among people in any society. One such word that keeps causing this type of confusion and conflict is 'socialism.' What does it mean, what forms has it taken, and why does it generate so much intellectual 'heat' rather than 'light?'
"This has come up, again, in a recent article by Ronald J. Granieri, who is research director of the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, on why 'The Right Needs to Stop Falsely Claiming that the Nazis were Socialists' (Washington Post, December 5, 2020).... He seethes with frustration that those he calls on the political 'right' attempt to classify the German Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s as 'socialist.' Yes, the formal name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers Party ... [and] prominent Nazis may have played to the 'working-class resentments' with the hope of attracting people away from the communists and the democratic socialists ... but there was no directed and consistent challenge against private property....
"Granieri says: 'National Socialism preserved private property, while also putting the entire resources of society at the service of an expansionist and racist national vision, which included the conquest and murderous subjugation of other peoples.' The Nazi regime, therefore, cannot be considered to be 'socialist,' because National Socialism was not interested in controlling the means of production or redistributing wealth to build an egalitarian utopia....
"Granieri also takes a swipe at the Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich A. Hayek, for attempting to put the socialist label on Nazism in his book The Road to Serfdom (1944).... Hayek was 'enormously influential,' he says, on both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and 'Hayek’s assertion that all government interventions in the economy led to totalitarianism continues to animate popular works' that warn of the 'genocidal dangers' from implementing a welfare state.... Granieri would rather drop all of this distracting labelling controversy and search for ways for 'protecting citizens against the negative exigencies of the market'.... He also wants 'rightists' to drop harping on early 20th century American Progressives who heralded and advocated eugenics as a means of designing superior human types. (But, wait! Were they not simply 'following the science' as widely understood and accepted at the time?)...
"[I]n the house of collectivism there have been many socialist mansions. Among the early 19th century French socialists there was a diversity of views as to whether the socialist society to come, for instance, would be an industrial or agrarian paradise. There were disagreements about whether people could reason their way into radical social change, those whom Marx labelled the 'utopian socialists,' or whether it would come only in its own good time due to inescapable historical evolution and revolution, as Marx insisted.
"The first socialist party to seriously move towards political influence in the second half of the 19th century was the German Democratic Socialists, who shunned the call for violent revolution, and amassed a growing number of votes in electing their candidates to the Imperial German Parliament by pursuing power through the ballot box. This frightened the German powers-that-be, so besides attempting for a while to suppress the German socialist party, Otto von Bismarck, as Chancellor of the German Empire in the 1870s and 1880s, introduced all the major component elements of the modern welfare state as well as interventionist regulations over parts of German industry and trade. Bismarck’s brand soon was labelled 'state socialism' or sometimes 'monarchical socialism'....
"Further to the East in Europe, more doctrinaire Marxian socialists in Imperial Russia rejected the niceties of elections and legislative welfare-state reforms. Only violent revolution could break the capitalist hold on the exploited masses, with, as Lenin came to insist, a dictatorship of the proletariat once in power. This resulted in a schism between democratic and dictatorial socialists for a good part of the 20th century. But ... while these two groups of socialists denounced each other over the means of coming to power, well into the second half of the 20th century they almost all agreed on the desired end: the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the introduction of central planning....
"From these forms of 'socialism,' Granieri’s desire for a democratic 'balancing of interests' based on the expediency of what 'works,' Bismarck’s state socialism seems the closest to what he is looking for. As William Dawson expressed it in Bismarck and State Socialism (1891), 'No department of economic activity should on principle be closed to the state.... The state socialists say that this must be determined by expediency, and by circumstances of time and place.' (pp. 4-6) It was a state socialism in which, as an American admirer of the German system, Frederic Howe, expressed it in his book on Socialized Germany (1915): 'The state has its finger on the pulse of the worker from the cradle to the grave. His education, his health and his working efficiency are matters of constant concern'.... Howe later served in FDR’s New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) that attempted to plan the output of American farming....
"Granieri insists that National Socialism could not be 'socialist' because it did not pursue a 'utopian' ideal for greater equality for all as a whole. But this presumes that the only legitimate utopian dream, and therefore benchmark for labeling something 'socialist,' is the one that Granieri considers good and right. In fact, the Nazis had a utopian vision for the future; it began with their notion of German race purity on the basis of which they rejected the older Prussian idea of aristocratic and class hierarchy. All 'real' Germans were equal and were to be given opportunities for education, occupational and professional advancement as the means by which they could make their contribution to the high good of the German people as a whole.
"That Nazi egalitarianism was limited to only those 'real' Germans possessing the racial characteristics that guided their ideological thinking, with Jews classified as the lowest and most treacherous of race enemies, does not change the fact that they, too, were 'utopians' with social equality goals, but only for those within the 'in-group.' This was nothing but a variation of the Marxist theme that the world is divided into irreconcilable social classes, with the 'capitalists' being the inescapable 'class enemies' of 'the workers.' And as in the Soviet practice, they and their children were stripped of all rights and opportunities, and made into permanent pariahs to be reeducated to serve 'the building of socialism' or liquidated.
"It may be a notion of a utopia that both Granieri and I would reject, but for many in the Nazi leadership and among the wider German population at the time, it was believed in and worked for, no matter [how] reprehensible it may seem to others.... This is what made it a 'national' socialism rather than an international socialism. Its call and appeal were to a segment of humanity defined by asserted racial characteristics, rather than a call for all workers of the world to unite regardless of who or where. In retrospect, this meant that National Socialism could never have a following great enough to conquer and control the world, since its pool of members was definitionally too limited.... Most of the world’s population had to find itself in conflict with Nazism precisely due to its race-based exclusivity....
"It would be possible to draw upon any number of Nazi sources to determine and decide whether National Socialism was a form of 'real' socialism. In 1936, Nazi educator Friedrich Alfred Beck said in Education in the Third Reich, a text meant as a guide for German teachers around the country:
National Socialism has restored the concept of a people from its modern shallowness . . . By people we understand an entire living body which is racially uniform and which is held together by common history, common fate, a common mission, and common tasks . . . Education, from the standpoint of race and people, is the creation of a form of life in which the racial unity will be preserved through the totality of the people . . .
Socialism is the direction of personal life through dependence on the community, consciousness of the community, nationalism is the elevation of individual life to a unique (microcosmic) expression of the community in the unity of the personality.” (Translated in: National Socialism [U.S. Department of State, 1943], p. 28)
"The individual lives through the community, and race and nation define to which community an individual owes his allegiance. Rather than social classes, National Socialism classifies people by race category. This makes you who you are and provides meaning to your life, in the Nazi worldview.
"But what about National Socialist economics? Let us look at Gustav Stolper’s German Economy, 1870-1940 (1940). Stolper was the long-time editor of a German economic magazine oriented toward a classical liberal viewpoint. He was forced to leave Germany with Hitler’s rise to power due to his politics and his Jewish family background, and found refuge in the United States. Stolper explained some of the socialist aspects to Nazi ideology and policy:
The National Socialist party was from the outset an anti-capitalist party. As such it was fighting and in competition with Marxism.... National Socialism wooed the masses [from three angles]. The first angle was the moral principle, the second the financial system, the third the issue of ownership. The moral principle was ‘the commonwealth before self-interest.’ The financial promise was ‘breaking the bondage of interest slavery’. The industrial program was ‘nationalization of all big incorporated business [trusts]’.
By accepting the principle ‘the commonwealth before self-interest,’ National Socialism simply emphasizes its antagonism to the spirit of a competitive society as represented supposedly by democratic capitalism . . . But to the Nazis this principle means also the complete subordination of the individual to the exigencies of the state. And in this sense National Socialism is unquestionably a Socialist system . . .
The nationalization of big industry was never attempted after the Nazis came to power. But this was by no means a ‘betrayal’ of their program, as has been alleged by some of their opponents. The socialization of the entire German productive machinery, both agricultural and industrial, was achieved by methods other than expropriation, to a much larger extent and on an immeasurably more comprehensive scale than the authors of the party program in 1920 probably ever imagined. In fact, not only the big trusts were gradually but rapidly subjected to government control in Germany, but so was every sort of economic activity, leaving not much more than the title of private ownership.” (pp. 232-233; 239-240)....
"Guenter Reimann, in The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism (1939), highlighted that while most of the means of production had not been nationalized, they had nonetheless been politicized and collectivized under an intricate web of Nazi planning targets, price and wage regulations, production rules and quotas, and strict limits and restraints on the action and decisions of those who remained; nominally, the owners of private enterprises throughout the country. Every German businessman knew that his conduct was prescribed and positioned within the wider planning goals of the National Socialist regime.' Not much differently [from] the state factory managers in the Soviet Union, even at that time under Stalin, the German owners of private enterprises were given wide discretion in the day-to-day management of the enterprises that nominally remained in their possession. But Nazi planning agencies set output targets, determined input supplies and allocations, determined wage and work condition rules, and dictated the availability of investment funds and the rates of interest at which they could be obtained through the banking system, along with strict central control and direction of all import and export trade....
"[W]e can turn to a more recent historian of the Nazi regime, that being Goetz Aly in, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007). Aly 'focus[es] on the socialist aspect of National Socialism' so as to better understand 'the Nazi regime as a kind of racist-totalitarian welfare state.' Aly emphasizes that the ideology and practice of the Nazi regime were in fact deeply socialist. Within Germany, among the German people of 'pure Aryan blood,' the ideal was an egalitarian social order in which every German would be freed from traditional class barriers so that he might have the opportunity to rise to any level of success in serving the fatherland. The welfare-state policies begun by Bismarck ... were viewed by the Nazis as a prelude to a complete guarantee of a quality standard of living for all 'real' Germans that would be paternalistically provided by the National Socialist state....
"Aly points out that before and during World War II, the German 'capitalist class' was made to pay its 'fair share' for the benefit of the rest of the German people. Taxes were proportionally far higher on the 'rich' in Germany than the rest of the population. During the war the government established mandatory overtime pay in all industries and imposed wage increases to keep 'the masses' loyal to the regime – all at the expense of German business. At the same time, German industry worked under government-commanded four-year plans from 1936 until the end of the war in 1945....
"But it was only after the war started that the machine of redistributive plunder was really set into motion. Every country overrun by the German army not only had to pay the costs of the occupation, but also was systematically looted for the benefit of the German population as a whole.... In every occupied country the Nazis initiated similar confiscatory policies with local accomplices with whom they shared looted Jewish property. (Only in Belgium and Denmark did large segments of the population and the bureaucracy resist participating in this plunder of the Jews.) The Nazis first nationalized Jewish property and then distributed it to those deemed worthy among the German or occupied populations.... Aly estimates that because of this looted property and the goods sent back to Germany by soldiers, many, if not most, Germans enjoyed a more comfortable standard of living throughout most of the war than the civilian population in Great Britain.... The vast majority of German families continued to feast, even under the allied bombings, thanks to the locust-like seizure of anything and everything across occupied Europe....
"No doubt this summary of the content of Goetz Aly’s analysis of the National Socialist welfare system and its version of central planning would convince Ronald Granieri even more that the Nazi regime should not be classified as 'socialist.' But in my view, it demonstrates that all of its characteristics find their family resemblance in socialist regimes. Institutionally, the starting premise is that the individual is little or nothing, and must view himself as dependent upon and working for a wider 'common good,' other than his own personal self-interest.
"In the name of 'the people' those in political authority, whether in that position through votes or violence, establish in the name of 'the people' the hierarchy of social goals, purposes, and collective ends for which a set of government planning policies, interventions and welfare redistributions will be set in motion. Individual choice and decision-making as consumers and producers are significantly reduced or even totally eliminated with government central planning and decision-making replacing voluntary association and exchange.... Prices and production no longer fully reflect the valuations and appraisements of the multitudes of interacting buyers and sellers in the society – which means all of us.... Instead, government plans and interventions determine or heavily influence wages and prices, along with what gets produced and how much; which means everything concerning our personal lives, livelihoods and standards of living.
"In other words, extensive and intrusive government regulations, restrictions, redistributions, and imposed centralized plans demonstrate what Friedrich A. Hayek was arguing over 75 years ago in The Road to Serfdom: that the more government command and control replaces market-based choices, decisions, and opportunities, the less freedom we have over increasing corners and aspects of our lives....
"Ronald Granieri may very well pooh-pooh this because he may not consider some loss of personal liberty something much to despair when it’s replaced with compulsory political paternalism that 'guarantees' various material wants for some that he considers more important than the degree of freedom forgone by some others. But I would ask him to at least admit that this is freedom lost for a coerced 'security,' ... still a compulsory 'taking,' whether done by a voting majority or dictatorial elite.
"And I would further ask him to concede that whether he agrees with the ends and goals of other socialists, their use of command and control and their introduction of some form of institutional central planning to pursue their declared 'social good' makes their system just as much a 'socialist' one as any other that Ronald Granieri might endorse or look more favorably upon. So, whether he likes it or not, the Nazis, too, were socialists, just a different stripe than the ones he feels more comfortable with."
Black Ribbon Day, August 23, commemorates the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia which led to their joint attack on Poland and the start of the Second World War a week later.
August 21, 2024 - "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. That’s why the Alberta government is marking one of the darkest days in 20th Century history by commemorating ‘Black Ribbon Day’ — the 85th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.... [O]n August 23, 1939 the foreign ministers of Germany and Russia signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact that set the groundwork for the invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War a week later on September 1.
"In a statement, the UCP government said it plans to mark the ignominious event with a special event in the rotunda of the Legislature on Friday. 'On the 85th anniversary of Black Ribbon Day we pause to look upon the horrific events of the past and renew our resolve to forever honour the victims of tyranny,' said Legislative Assembly Speaker Nathan Cooper. 'People from around the world observe Black Ribbon Day and we stand with them to uphold the importance of freedom from oppression now and for the generations to come.'
"On August 22 [1939], Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to finalize the treaty.... The so-called Hitler-Stalin pact, signed the next day, guaranteed peace between the parties and was a commitment neither government would aid or ally itself with an enemy of the other.... [T]he treaty included the Secret Protocol, which defined the borders of Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland which would later make up the Iron Curtain....
"‘Black Ribbon Day’ originated in the protests held against the Soviet Union in western capitals, including Ottawa, in the 1980s that led up to the Baltic Revolutions in the countries directly affected by the deal and its aftermath starting in 1989.... In 2009 the European Parliament formally recognized August 23 as the European day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism which was briefly even acknowledged by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
"[Putin] backtracked in 2014 and called the treaty as 'necessary for Russia's survival.' Then in February 2021, the State Duma voted in favor of a law to punish the dissemination of 'fake news' regarding the Soviet Union's role in the Second World War, including claiming that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union held equal responsibility due to the pact." Read more: https://www.westernstandard.news/alberta/day-of-infamy-alberta-govt-marks-85th-anniversary-of-nazi-soviet-pact/57170
August 23, 2013 - "Black Ribbon Day, also called the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, originated in the 1980s. Central and Eastern European refugees then living in Canada organized a series of peaceful protests on both sides of the Iron Curtain to draw attention to the rampant human rights abuses perpetrated by authorities across the Soviet bloc. They chose August 23, the anniversary of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to hold the annual rallies.
"On August 23, 1989, about 2 million people formed a human chain spanning more than 600 kilometers across the Baltic republics. Known as the Baltic Way, this protest is seen as a defining moment in the Baltic states' battle for independence from the Soviet Union. As the Soviet bloc crumbled in 1991, Black Ribbon Day demonstrations were held in as many as 56 cities around the world.
"Today, Black Ribbon Day commemorates both victims of Stalinism and Nazism and, more generally, all those who died, suffered, or perished under authoritarian regimes. In 2008, the European Parliament became the first entity to formally designate August 23 as a day of remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Canada followed suit in 2009 and Georgia, in the Caucasus, one year later." Read more: https://www.rferl.org/a/black-ribbon-day/25083982.html
Historica Canada, a primarily government-funded* charity, has taken down its Heritage Minute on Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, from its YouTube channel due to its failure to address "controversies regarding Macdonald's treatment of indigenous peoples."
July 8, 2024 - "A Conservative MP is taking aim at Historica Canada for deleting a Heritage Minute highlighting Sir John A Macdonald’s role in Confederation amid what it called 'controversies regarding Macdonald’s treatment of Indigenous peoples'.... Historica Canada, the charity that produces the long-running Heritage Minute series, quietly removed the episode in question, which was produced in 2015 in the leadup to Canada’s sesquicentennial, from its YouTube page.
Sir John A. Macdonald statue vandalized in Montreal,
"The Heritage Minute in question, which remains available on Facebook, encapsulates Macdonald’s vision of a nation stretching “from sea to sea,” a dream realized through the construction of the Canadian Pacific railway.
"In the video, the actor portraying Macdonald expresses his enthusiasm for Confederation: 'To the east, the Atlantic provinces, then Upper and Lower Canada, across the Prairies, to the Rockies and beyond. A new country made one by a railway from sea to sea'....
"A spokesperson for Historica Canada ... reiterated the organization’s commitment to 'educate Canadians on the history of this country, including both its achievements and failings.... In the case of Macdonald that means recognizing both his many accomplishments while in office – including his key role in Confederation – while also acknowledging those areas where his legacy is more complicated,' [the] spokesperson told True North. 'The Minute is on hiatus from distribution – not permanently withdrawn – while we discuss ways to address that'....
"Historica Canada told True North last week that when the Heritage Minute was produced, 'the more intense discussions and subsequent controversies regarding Macdonald’s treatment of Indigenous peoples had not yet taken place.' 'To present a Minute – particularly given their extensive use in schools – without mentioning these other aspects of his time in office is to provide an incomplete image lacking proper context,' the spokesperson said. 'This view was reflected in some feedback from educators.' [It] said it was putting the minute on 'hiatus while we assess what other accompanying content we can provide in order to offer a more complete treatment.'
"[Conservative heritage critic Rachael] Thomas linked the decision to a broader 'woke culture' she says a Conservative government would reject. 'Instead of Trudeau’s woke culture that is attempting to tear down our country, common sense Conservatives will restore the Canada we know and love and celebrate the proud country we call home,' she said.
"Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre similarly chided the Trudeau government for being governed by a 'weird, woke ideology' in his speech to supporters at the Calgary Stampede on the weekend. It 'destroys our education, dishonours our history, and divides our people,' Poilievre said."
* "Historica Canada received $2.3m in donations in F2022 and $3.5m in government funding. Government funding represents 60% of total revenue." Charity Intelligencer, "Historica Canada," June 15, 2023. Web, July 10, 2024.https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/796-historica-canada
June 24, 2024 - "A plane carrying Julian Assange took off from Bangkok on Tuesday after refuelling, as the WikiLeaks founder was on his way to enter a plea deal with the U.S. government that will free him and resolve the legal case that spanned years and continents over the publication of a trove of classified documents. Chartered flight VJT199 from London's Stansted Airport landed after noon at Bangkok's Don Mueang International Airport.... Airport officials told The Associated Press earlier the plane would then depart for the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific, where Assange is to appear in court Wednesday morning local time.
"Assange is expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information, according to the U.S. Justice Department in a letter filed in court. Stella Assange told the BBC from Australia that ... details of the agreement would be made public once the judge had signed off on it.'He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,' she said....
"The deal ensures that Assange will admit guilt while also sparing him from any additional prison time. He had spent years hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Swedish authorities sought his arrest on rape allegations. Assange denied those charges, and whle Sweden eventually dropped its sex crimes investigation because so much time had elapsed, he had remained in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison during the extradition battle with the U.S."
June 25, 2024 - "Assange, who has been at risk of being extradited to the U.S. and prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing documents — an activity protected by the First Amendment — that the government says contain classified national security information, will plead guilty to a single felony count and return to his native Australia. Prior to reaching this deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange could have faced up to 170 years in prison if extradited to America.
"From 2012 to 2019, Assange had been living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, caught in legal limbo and fearing extradition by British authorities. In 2019, Ecuador's president was angered by allegations of corruption made public via WikiLeaks and pulled Assange's asylum protections. The British authorities rounded Assange up and put him in Belmarsh....
"In 2010, WikiLeaks published a video called 'Collateral Murder,' which showed a 2007 U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in which several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were killed. The organization, which received leaks from various government and military personnel, including the now-famous whistleblower Chelsea Manning, received retribution from the U.S. government for publicizing possible violations of military rules of engagement and showing the extreme brutality of war, including the massive civilian death toll in Iraq at the hands of the U.S. Army. For more than a decade, Assange was not treated like a journalist, but like a criminal. Now, his ordeal will finally come to a close."
June 7, 2024 - "David Boaz (/ˈboʊ.æz/; born August 29, 1953 - June 7, 2024, Mayfield, Kentucky) was Distinguished Senior Fellow and the former executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank. He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997 by the Free Press and described in the Los Angeles Times as 'a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.' He is also the editor of The Libertarian Reader and co-editor of the Cato Handbook for Congress (2003) and the Cato Handbook on Policy (2005).
"He frequently discusse[d] such topics as education choice, the growth of government, the ownership society, his support of drug legalization as a consequence of the individual right to self-determination, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and the rise of libertarianism on national television and radio shows.... Boaz, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, is the former editor of The New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981."
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boaz Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0; additional terms may apply.
David Boaz at Young Americans for Liberty conference, 2019. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
June 7, 2024 - "Our inestimable colleague, David Boaz, passed away on June 7, after a year‐long battle with cancer. It’s impossible to express how deeply his friends, colleagues, and all libertarians will miss him. David was the longest‐tenured staff member in the history of the Cato Institute, serving the organization and its mission for forty‐three‐and‐a‐half years. He was the executive vice president of the Institute for decades until 2022, when he ascended to the title of distinguished senior fellow of Cato....
"David made an incalculable contribution to building Cato into the respected institution and voice it is today, as well as to the “mainstreaming” of libertarianism as a legitimate political philosophy worthy of a seat at the table in all of the nation’s policy debates. Few did more than he did to earn it that seat.
"David was the first person from Cato whom I ever met. I was a new contributor in 2001 when he visited my office in New York to thank me.... I learned from David during that 2001 meeting and would never stop learning from him over the next 23 years. The visit took place about two weeks after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The building was across the street from Ground Zero.... We went up to the top‐floor cafeteria to look over the devastation of what used to be the World Trade Center. David remarked, 'After this, I’m very concerned about terrorism. But I’m equally concerned about what this will mean for our civil liberties.'
"This was a lesson. Because at that time, I only shared David’s first concern — of terrorism. Barely a month later the PATRIOT Act was passed into law, and we would soon see the national security surveillance state mushroom in ways few might have imagined. Later came revelations of extralegal and unconstitutional spying programs. This confirmed that, in the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy, authorities’ respect for civil liberties were at a low ebb and these rights indeed had been degraded. David’s fears back in September 2001 were well‐founded and prescient.
"I recall this story because it epitomizes the most important thing I learned from David: all our liberties matter. In defending individual rights we can’t pick and choose, or somehow prioritize the ones that are most important to us. First, because they are interconnected. If we allow some to be threatened or diluted, others will soon be. Second, the ones we deem 'less important' may be crucial to us in ways we can’t foresee. And even if not, they are undoubtedly critical to other fellow citizens.
"David did much to imbue Cato with a similarly holistic view of individual liberty. He also never ceased to stress the Institute’s need to be truly independent, to be truly nonpartisan, and to adhere faithfully to libertarian principles. It’s now the duty of the Cato staff of today, and of the future, to honor David by upholding all of these values as faithfully and as capably as he did."
March 15, 2024 - "In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
"The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
"Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob....
"Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
"Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts. Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
"Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.... Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
"The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
"In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called 'high fructose corn syrup,' why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
"In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
"What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
"This used to go by the name 'crony capitalism' which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream.... That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
"Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry. This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications. Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
"How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes....
"It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities....
"[T]his corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
"This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
"How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
"And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
"We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
"This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets. I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
"Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."
Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95
March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.
"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.
"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.
"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.
"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'
"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'
"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.
"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....
"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....
"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'
February 28, 2018 - "Back in the summer of 2006, Pierre Trudeau’s youngest son, Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau wrote a fawning happy 80th birthday column in the Toronto Star in praise of then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.... Castro, Trudeau claimed, was 'an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets, on everything'. Alexandre pressed upon his readers ... to think of Cubans as children and Castro their father. Trudeau then fondly recalled his late brother, Michel, who when they were young kids complained to their mother that he had fewer friends than his brothers. Margaret Trudeau replied that unlike his brothers, Michel 'had the greatest friend of all: he had Fidel.'
"I thought of Alexandre Trudeau’s fawning 2006 tribute recently given it was 10 years ago this month that Fidel Castro resigned.... But the anniversary also brings to mind Alexandre Trudeau’s brother — the prime minister, and his weird, fantasy belief that another autocracy, China, is somehow efficient on economic and environmental matters.... Having a soft spot for tyrants prompts multiple blind spots, whether on democracy, the economy or, more recently, on the environment. All have been on display in the Trudeau family’s ongoing infatuation with tyrannies and autocracies.... [I]n the comments from Alexandre, Margaret and Justin Trudeau ... [w]e see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants. But the problem started with Pierre.
"Bob Plamondon, author of a 2013 biography of Pierre Trudeau recounts how Trudeau the Elder visited the Soviet Union in 1952 to discuss economics, this accompanied by four Canadian communists. 'It was there that he remarked to the wife of U.S. chargé d’affaires that he was a communist and a Catholic and was in Moscow to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union,” Plamondon writes....
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau meets Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1973. Credit: Government of Canada.
"Similarly, in 1960, Trudeau accepted an invitation from the Chinese government to visit along with Jacques Hébert, a friend whom Trudeau would appoint to the Senate. They travelled around China for six weeks on a state-sponsored tour.
"And they did so smack dab in the middle of a wrenching state-imposed famine courtesy of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward 'reforms', which began in 1958 and would last until 1962 ... [and] would take the lives of 'somewhere between 20 million and 42 million people' as French authors Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot recounted in the Black Book of Communism.....
"[T]he father and son Trudeau approach to China then and now is revealing.... Canadians, then as now, are treated to an over-eager approach which mirrors Justin’s father’s mindset and reveal his enduring influence on his son.... As an example, from economics and the environment, recall Justin Trudeau’s unguarded comments made in 2013, where he expressed 'a level of admiration I actually have for China' with his reasoning that 'their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say "we need to go green fastest, we need to start investing in solar"'....
"These comments reveal a modern Trudeau fascination with autocracies; in particular, the notion that China’s severely polluted environment can be helped by central, top-down planning from Beijing. Beijing can announce all the windmills and solar panels it wants. But recall the politically-centralized model in existence since Mao which forestalls the political consequences of issues (pollution in China today as a severe example), which would explode in a liberal democracy.
"The very Chinese model of governance, which represses dissent, was not only unsuited to economic growth before the 1979 reforms by Deng Xiaoping, it has been deadly to Chinese health. That’s because public pressure cannot swap sub-par politicians out for accountable ones. In an economy of state-owned companies, no one is responsible for pollution, or to enforce pollution laws in the private sector.... In China, public pressure at the ballot box and even by consumers is either nonexistent or feeble. And Chinese government statistics are unreliable, a fact which additionally complicates environmental reform. Anyone, including the prime minister, who thinks China has an effective or enlightened policy on the environment is unaware or blithely ignoring just how corrupt, ineffective and inefficient autocracies are....
"The father-son reunion on China is not mysterious. Nor are their basic flawed assumptions about how political power can solve all problems if only the rulers somehow have enough control. The Trudeau family’s dewy-eyed approach to tyrants has always been unfortunate. Their family-tyrant friends were economically illiterate and, just as often, deadly to their own populations. Central planning was of no use and was of much harm to Russians, Chinese and Cubans.
"The elder Trudeau’s acolytes always thought of him as a 'philosopher king' — that he knew better than markets and ordinary mortals and business owners how to manage the economy efficiently from the top down. His son has imbibed the same conceit. Justin has continued in that tradition in his own political life, with his fawning Castro comments and his weird China-worship on environmental matters."
February 25, 2023 - "New academic 'histories' now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on 'market fundamentalism' or 'neoliberalism.' The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a 'manufactured myth' arising from the 'inventions' of 20th century business interests.... All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.
"At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.... A reader ... will be left wondering why this same story needed yet another repackaged recitation....
"The Big Myth is structured in sequential vignettes about various themes and figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Friedrich Hayek, Rose Wilder Lane, and Milton Friedman, all of whom are portrayed as either willing propagandists for big business or hapless dupes of the same. The authors expend almost no effort on understanding the arguments of the thinkers they set out to debunk.
"A revealing example appears in the book's treatment of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil." Read's story is a fairly straightforward allegory for Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand," showing how complex social coordination arises from routine economic exchanges and signals in the absence of a centralized design. To Oreskes and Conway, however, the metaphor is literally the hand of God working from above to ensure the market system provides. As they put it, 'God made the marketplace and the marketplace made the pencil; ergo God made the pencil'....
"Interpretive peculiarities continue in their treatment of Ludwig von Mises' Socialism. After initially acknowledging that the book was written in German in 1922, Oreskes and Conway soon drift into anachronism by insinuating that it was intended as a critique of President Franklin Roosevelt. ("Mises's use of the term socialism was misleading," they contend, "because no credible American political leader in 1944 was advocating central planning.") They augment this ascription of prophecy with a sleight of hand, replacing the revolutionary Marxists of Mises' original commentaries with the comparatively benign Norman Thomas as their own preferred avatar of socialism. Like other texts in the anti-neoliberalism genre, The Big Myth removes 20th century free market authors from their historical context by hand-waving the Soviet Union out of existence and proceeding as if socialism means nothing more than a narrow swath of modern Scandinavian social democracies.
"Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors' fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical. This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target's qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an 'absolutist who sympathized with fascism,' Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist's migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises ... struggled to find a respectable academic job until 'dark money' funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University..... Meanwhile, Mises' academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved....
"They casually brand Milton Friedman a 'racist extremist' and defender of segregation, but not for any actual defense of segregation. The authors simply disagree with his argument that markets were more effective tools for bringing about integration than government edicts.....
"They accuse Friedrich Hayek of eschewing 'the essence of scholarship,' which 'is to look past the immediacies of time and place,' while themselves constantly processing history through their modern partisan commitments. They accuse free market economists of venturing outside their scientific expertise while offering their own decidedly nonexpert opinions on everything from economic inequality to COVID-19.
"The authors' discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. 'market failure' with the alleged success of 'countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,' China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China's centralized 'zero-COVID' regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair."
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