Mises Wire |
- Why Die for Ukraine?
- George Hearst: Entrepreneur in the Mises Mold
- How the Left Defends Communist Totalitarianism
- Unmask America
- Italy's Covid Despotism Just Got Worse
| Posted: 31 Jan 2022 12:00 PM PST You would think that the problems facing the United States would be enough for brain-dead Biden. With massive inflation, the economy is teetering on the brink of ruin. We face tyrannical control because of harmful vaccine mandates. Bogus propaganda about "climate change" threatens to cripple American industry. The government seeks to monitor all our financial transactions. We threaten China with a new Cold War. But it isn't enough. Now Biden wants to ignite a war with Russia that could easily turn nuclear and destroy us. Why is this happening? Biden says that Putin is about to invade Ukraine. We can't let this happen because that would be "aggression." If Putin does invade, we will impose massive sanctions on him. But the neocons who control American foreign policy are the real aggressors. As Larry Johnson says,
The great expert on Russia Stephen Cohen warned us over two years ago that trouble lay in store for us:
If Biden doesn't want Putin to invade Ukraine, he should remove the NATO bases around Russia and take away the missiles. If he won't do this, a Russian invasion can still be stopped. All that's required is that a pro-Russian government take power in Ukraine. This is what Putin wants, but Biden has threatened sanctions against him if he supports this. According to Henry Austin of NBC News, "Britain's accusation that the Kremlin is seeking to install a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine is 'deeply concerning,' a National Security Council spokesperson said. 'The Ukrainian people have the sovereign right to determine their own future, and we stand with our democratically-elected partners in Ukraine,' the spokesperson, Emily Horne, said in a statement late Saturday. 'This kind of plotting is deeply concerning,' she added." If Ukraine does get a pro-Russian government, this would not be Russian "aggression." It would restore the situation in Ukraine before a US-backed coup overthrew a government friendly to Russia. In February 2014, the US pushed out Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovich by orchestrating demonstrations against him. As Eric Zuisse noted in an article in Modern Diplomacy in June 2018,
If the US does become involved in Russia, the result might be nuclear annihilation. Eric Margolis says, "Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the US and its allies. No one in their right mind should contemplate a nuclear confrontation. Russia has repeatedly made clear that if backed into a corner, it may well use tactical nuclear weapons." The saddest part of this whole manufactured crisis is that it should make absolutely no difference to us whether Russia controls Ukraine. How is that a threat to the United States? Whatever Biden and his neocon advisers say, America should stay out of conflicts that are none of our business. As usual, Murray Rothbard put it best. "In the context of the 1980 Afghan war, he quoted Canon Sydney Smith—a great classical liberal in early 19th century England who wrote to his warmongering Prime Minister, thus":
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| George Hearst: Entrepreneur in the Mises Mold Posted: 31 Jan 2022 09:00 AM PST The reality is the primary quality of an entrepreneur can't be taught: the stomach to risk everything and keep wanting more. Original Article: "George Hearst: Entrepreneur in the Mises Mold" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack. |
| How the Left Defends Communist Totalitarianism Posted: 31 Jan 2022 09:00 AM PST In September 2010, Stanford University published an article called "Stalin killed millions", with the punchline: "When it comes to use of the word "genocide," public opinion has been kinder to Stalin than Hitler". The sentiment has been echoed more than a decade later, and across the Atlantic ocean, in an interview with British historian Giles Udy who was asked by the hosts: "why is it that the Nazi's swastika is deservedly seen as a horrendous symbol of evil and of oppression, but the hammer and sickle, people just shrug their shoulders?", "why were we never taught this?", referring to the crimes committed under communism. Poll after poll, conducted over the years and across different Western countries—such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, New Zealand and other nations that share the two pillars of Western civilization—have showed that those below the age of 35 support socialism, with a startling number of young people living in the UK believing in 2018 that "communism could have worked if it had been better executed".  As such, many young Westerners continue to have a romantic view about international socialism (communism), often expressed in apologetic slogans such as the well-known "that was not real communism", aimed at whitewashing Marx's ideology that has been responsible for over 100 million deaths over the past 100 years. Why is this the case? A simplistic but not entirely untruthful answer would be that the West was allied with the USSR against the Nazis, hence why the difference in perception of the two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. However, if the main reason for why public perception of the diabolical actions of national socialists was because they were the enemies of the West, then what about Imperial Japan? As Avani Sihra from the Atomic Heritage Foundation, a Washington DC institution that is "dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age and its legacy", wrote: "German crimes such as human medical testing committed in concentration camps tend to receive more attention than Japan's crimes against humanity […] However, the Japanese too played a part in human medical testing in a secret project called Unit 731." How many times did you hear Emperor Hirohito being talked about as the face of evil? Probably never. Moreover, ask yourself when was the last time you saw an advertisement for a movie, a show or a book about the ideas and behaviors of Imperial Japan throughout the twentieth century? Take all the time you need, but I bet you don't need much to think about when was the last time you saw a movie about the Nazis, or you heard them being discussed in the press. I have provided a trove of evidence to back this claim in my full report. The similarity of the gravity behind what the actions that the Nazis committed and how Imperial Japan behaved is probably best illustrated by the Nüremberg and Tokyo Trials, during which high ranking officials from the two regimes were tried under Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for crimes against humanity. Consequently, here we have two genocidal regimes ruled by authorities charged with crimes against humanity who were allied against the West and yet one of them—Nazi Germany—has received a lot more attention than the other one—Imperial Japan. What is even more interesting is that, in comparison with Nazi Germany, a regime which had socialist elements embedded in its ultra-nationalistic ideology, Imperial Japan was purely ultra-nationalistic, what is known as far-Right. Also important to note is that there have never been similar trials for the crimes of communist regimes. The fact that Westerners do not see what happened under the USSR as crimes against humanity was vividly displayed by a poll conducted by the New Culture Forum in 2017. This is despite the many similarities between Hitler's regime and that of Stalin. Surprisingly however, it is not because "communism" or "Stalin" are obscure terms for Western audiences that the crimes of communist regimes are not seen with the same severity as those of the Nazis. As I showed in my essay, there is plenty of information on communism and its crimes. The answer is to be found in two powerful forces that shape the public perception on socialism and even communism. One is the academia. As early as 1941, English writer, George Orwell observed that "there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense "Left"." Orwell's observation remains true today as a 2017 poll which shows that "the academy's Left-liberal skew may have increased since the 1960s." A similar development has happened in the United States as well. The fact that Left-wing views dominate Western academia, at least higher-education, can be seen in the way some of the teaching staff views themselves as political activists for socialist ideals and through the imposition of political correctness (which is "communist propaganda" according to English cultural critic, Theodore Dalrymple) and critical race theory, a primary vector of today's version of Marxism: Identity Marxism, or Woke-ism which is the result of Neo-Marxism (itself the overlap between Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory Marxism) and postmodernism. Moreover, outside the university campuses, the perception of communists and national socialists remains distorted. In an article for The Guardian entitled "Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?", the author stated: "The ideology that underpinned Stalin's policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler's lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today." This is a false statement: communism did not die out in 1989 (or to be more accurate, in 1991, when the USSR did finally fall). As the Washington DC-based research institute, The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, states on its home page: "The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but communism didn't. One hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution, one-fifth of the world's population still lives under single-party communist regimes in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam." The widespread misconceptions detailed above are also made possible because the academia is not the only place that shapes the young minds of Westerners to be more loving of socialism. Artists and entertainers are also predominantly "on the Left". As Mark Dice's 2020 book—Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture—documents, America's film industry has done wonders in promoting Left-wing views. For example, the Hollywood Reporter recently wrote an article on how "Leah Cameron takes pride in The Communist's Daughter having an unabashed socialist streak, even if her Canadian uber-left web comedy is a world away from Russian bread lines and iron-fisted Stalinism." Cameron added: "I wanted to make a show where even if the quest of the politics and the neighborhood gets petty and silly, we can still see the positive in the ideals of socialism and Marxism, and they're worth fighting for." Moreover, in a 2021 paper entitled "Left turn?", the Institute of Economic Affairs gathered a long list of articles from Teen Vogue, a publication directed towards teenagers which, in 2017, stated that "our readers consider themselves activists", that illustrates the acute Left-leaning angle in its articles. Therefore, the reasons why too many young Westerners don't seem to be appalled by Soviet totalitarianism is a mix of Left-leaning intellectuals in the teaching institutions and in the entertainment industry, two of the most powerful forces that shape the mind of today's youth. To read the full report Why Many Young Westerners Hate Hitler but Are Unsure about Stalin?, please visit Power of Ideas. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2022 07:00 AM PST It is time to get back to normal life, and that starts with visible human faces. Original Article: "Unmask America" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack. |
| Italy's Covid Despotism Just Got Worse Posted: 31 Jan 2022 04:00 AM PST The news from Italy has started to sound like good incipits for a dystopian fantasy novel or like a déjà vu recalling the Soviet Union. A couple of weeks ago, a new decree of the Draghi government established yet more rules restricting the lives of people who have not been injected with the latest vaccine booster and who therefore cannot show the latest version of the Green Pass. These second-class citizens, who have already been stripped of their right to move, work, and participate in a great number of social activities, are now forbidden from entering post offices to withdraw their pension, and they are to be allowed access to supermarkets only to buy "goods of primary necessity." In other words, the Italian government decides what kind of food and what other goods (if any) these people will be able to purchase. It is unclear how exactly the government intends to enforce this new decree: Will we see policemen putting their hands into shoppers' bags? Will bread be considered a "primary" good while shaving foam and candies will be seized? There is no limit to the madness. And a recent note from the executive to clarify the situation only made things worse: the state now decrees that the unvaccinated can actually also buy nonprimary goods in the few shops they are allowed to enter. For the time being. In other words, Italy is now a society where your sphere of action goes only as far as the prime minister's website explicitly and graciously allows. Heading out for a stroll at the park? You better check the latest blog post from Mario Draghi to see if he explicitly grants you this freedom! How did it come to this? Among Western countries, Italy has been one of those experiencing the most systematic denial of basic civil rights over the past two years. Coalition governments led first by Giuseppe Conte and then by Mario Draghi have empowered an unelected committee of "experts" called the Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, which has in turn empowered the governments by assigning a scientific aura to every decree, every action, and every word coming from the executive. This has resulted in an endless series of lockdown measures that for long periods have erased freedom of movement, the right to work, property rights over businesses and shops, freedom to assemble, freedom to worship, and even the distinction of jurisdictional spheres between church and political authority (with state bureaucrats closing churches and then handing out petty instructions on what rites could be carried out, how liturgies should be curtailed, and how many people if any could be present at masses and funerals). In the meantime, the legislative branch has been humbled, and government by urgent decrees from the executive has become the norm. The very constitutional structure of the country has been bent, and a new concept called "stato di emergenza" (state of emergency) has been invented out of thin air, even though it is nowhere to be found in Italy's republican constitution. If we were not living in the age of CNN, fake news, and outrageous subsidies handed out by politicians to newspapers and the media, one could legitimately wonder where the journalists were while all this was going on? In fact, journalists in Italy are among the main culprits of the current dystopian reality, since they have given platforms to "experts" who agreed with lockdowns and other measures that expanded government control over all aspects of life, while at the same time they ferociously mocked and ostracized doctors and scientists who dared to question the logic of outdoor mask mandates and curfews for restaurants. Anybody who dared to point out the disastrous consequences of a prolonged lockdown on mental health and on people suffering from other pathologies, or the link between the economy and public health, was accused of being a "covid denier." This is a pattern that surely readers recognize, as they have seen it in the US and many other countries over the past two years. The fact that virtually every opinion labelled by the media as "conspiracy theory" has turned out to be true just three or four months later has done nothing to shake the arrogance of the corrupt mass media, who are entrenched in their monopoly over the news cycle, thanks to their access to state funding and political favors. And this is true in Italy as virtually everywhere else. Giuseppe Conte's administration was followed by another government coalition led by Prime Minister Draghi, not thanks to free elections but through a move by the president of the republic, Sergio Mattarella. In a solemn speech on February 2021, the head of state explained to the country that it was inopportune to have an election in the midst of a pandemic—even though during the same period Romania and Portugal had elections and their rate of infection was not altered. Instead, Mattarella entrusted the government to Draghi, claiming that this would be a nonpartisan, "technical government" simply charged with the tasks of obtaining funds from the EU and overseeing the vaccination campaign. Obviously, the idea of a "technical," neutral government is absurd, since every modern state expropriates, inflates, and moves wealth from some social groups to others. I will not get into the many lies spewed by Draghi and his ministers about the effectiveness of the vaccines, nor into the series of grotesque restrictions progressively imposed on the unvaccinated. Suffice it to say that, once again, the media was complicit, as for months it covered any failure by the Draghi administration with wild accusations against the "no-vax." Just like those accused of being "covid deniers" never denied the existence of covid, those who are now labelled as "no-vax" have in most cases nothing against vaccines per se. Many of them simply explain that whether to take the vaccine or not should be a decision freely made by each person, considering their age, clinical history, and other factors; and they correctly note the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity. But these are unimportant details for journalists, who at the year-end press conference put up a show worthy of a banana republic by greeting Draghi with cheers and a long applause rather than with probing questions. Interestingly, the change at the helm from Conte to Draghi has had the effect of showing the true colors of Italian liberals, who are in fact ill-disguised statists. Even Amnesty International has expressed concern about the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Italy, while Italian liberals and leftists cheer Draghi on. The only coherent, courageous opposition to Draghi is coming from the fringes and from unlikely allies like Marxist professor Ugo Mattei and libertarian professor Carlo Lottieri (a friend of the Mises Institute). Mattei has tirelessly denounced the unconstitutional nature of the "state of emergency" as well as the cowardly blackmailing of workers forced to decide between taking the vaccine or losing their job. Lottieri has led the small movement of resistance among university professors fighting discrimination against unvaccinated students and explaining how the pandemic has been an excuse for modern states to take one step further in their control over the body and mind of each individual. The measures to which Italian people have been subjected in these two long years of unchecked statism and shameless propaganda have not only been unjust: they have also been utterly useless in fighting the pandemic. Italy has seen exactly the same trajectories and timeframes in the different waves of the virus as those experienced by countries like Sweden or even the UK, where liberties and the economy have not been trampled—or at least have not been trampled to the same extent! The failure of streams of government decrees is not a surprise for those who, having read Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, know very well that human societies are complex and that we should be humble when devising solutions from the top. Central planning—whether for the economy or for healthcare—is destined to fail. On the other hand, central planning serves a political class and crony corporations ceaselessly attempting to micromanage our lives. 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