Tag: history

History is freedom

Brandon Smith notes the collectivist hatred for heritage and history:

A distaste or hatred of heritage is very common at the onset of any collectivist restructuring. These restructurings usually target principles of individual liberty and self governance while masquerading as a fight against oppression or corruption. The old principles are either presented as too outdated and insufficient to deal with the new problems of a culture, or, they are presented as the actual SOURCE of the problems of that culture. In either case, the elites wielding the collectivist machine inevitably call for a purge of all bygone ideals.

In Communist China, Mao instituted the Cultural Revolution, which encouraged the mindlessly mesmerized collectivists in the Chinese populace to destroy everything which represented the past. Artwork, buildings, historical artifacts, books; even teachers and proponents of any brand of pre-communist heritage were targeted.

In Fascist Germany, the Nazis destroyed countless books and manuscripts, rewrote German history, censored and removed thousands of artworks, instituting state designated artforms that depicted the collectivist vision of the new society.

In Russia, the Communists focused intently not only on liquidating manuscripts extolling the methods of different eras, but also the people who wrote them. Under Lenin and Stalin, the goal was to annihilate the memory of the world before, even if it meant annihilating the masses along with it.

A complete reformation of educational infrastructure came next. The children of the collectivist age had to be indoctrinated as if there had never been another way of doing things.

These purges, as numerous examples have shown, are only temporary. The great conundrum for the elites has not only been the obstacle of memory, but the obstacle of the soul; that inherent quality in human beings that compels us to pursue freedom, balance, and truth, regardless of the constraints of our environment. The documents and remnants of heritage that oligarchs seek to destroy are ultimately only expressions of our inborn consciences. Deep down in each person, no matter what they have been conditioned to believe, there is a well-spring of vital ideas that conflict with the mechanizations of collectivism. Individualism finds a way to surface, and so, the central rulers must start over once again, looking for an insurmountable method of control.

I’d never associated my love of history with my intellectual affinity for human liberty. I’d merely regarded history as a useful tool for potentially avoiding past mistakes. But it is true, the totalitarian thirst for eliminating and creatively rewriting history does tend to lend some credence to the idea that the knowledge of history is important, perhaps even integral to understanding and upholding human freedom. The goal of the totalitarian is always stasis, which involves not only destroying the future and turning it into a facsimile of the present, but the past as well.

This seemed apt

I thought this comment at In Mala Fide was particularly on target in light of the ongoing discussion at Wängsty’s place:

Jonathan Haidt has shown that most liberals are simply people who only care about care/harm and fairness, while discounting loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity. For liberals there are no transcendent moral values, only utility and fairness. Furthermore, other scholars have found that most people tend to rely less on those latter three moral foundations when they are comfortable and safe. Which means that liberalism is the natural and spontaneous result of living in a safe and prosperous society. Haidt has also found that liberals can’t even understand loyalty, respect for authority and purity/sanctity. So they tend to think their political opponents are just being massive dicks.

The landmark performance of the National Front in France yesterday makes it very clear that conventional left-liberalism can’t survive economic hard times. As unemployment continues to rise and economic pressure intensifies, people will quite naturally become far less indulgent of the various absurdities that the Left continues to push on the populations of the West. It’s simply not credible to argue “immigration is good for the economy” when the youth unemployment rate is north of 50 percent and 50 percent of college graduates are either unemployed or working at jobs for which their degrees are absolutely unnecessary.

History has always been cyclical and it is not different this time. I pointed out that peak atheism corresponded pretty closely with the tech boom, and I think it is safe to conclude that we have likely passed the peak of social liberalism and multiculturalism as well. The problem, of course, is that while some left-liberals will return to sanity, many more will move to the hard left, or what the Communists call “the fascist right” and all of the violence that necessarily entails.

It’s worth noting that according to Haidt, the only arguments to which liberals are likely to convincing are utility-based. You’ll note that those are the sorts of arguments upon which I tend to heavily rely when engaging in discourse with them.

The end of the Holocult

Germany is finally rejecting the self-serving religion of collective ethnic responsibility for historical crimes:

Sharp criticism of Israel, particularly from the left, has long been a tradition among European intellectuals, and Mr. Grass’s poem caused little stir on the Continent outside of Germany. But political and scholarly elites here have more often resisted that trend, tending to see basic support for Israel as a German responsibility, if not a necessity, after the Holocaust.

But the public response to the furor over Mr. Grass’s poem suggests that that attitude is breaking down as World War II recedes into history. “In the populism you see surfacing on a large scale, the public is all behind Grass,” said Georg Diez, an author and journalist at the magazine Der Spiegel who has written critically of the poem.

One needn’t be a Holocaust denier nor an anti-semite to recognize the fundamental absurdity of the “Never Again” cult. After all, there is no more justification to hold the Germans of today responsible for the large-scale slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews sixty years ago than there was for medieval Christians to hold the Jews of their day responsible for crucifying Jesus.

The Holocaust doesn’t justify anything. It doesn’t justify Jewish paranoia about American Christians, it doesn’t justify open immigration, it doesn’t justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East, it doesn’t justify American aggression in the Middle East, and it certainly doesn’t justify the neocon willingness to sacrifice American interests for Israeli ones. The Holocaust was just one of the many bloody historical tragedies that illustrate the fallen state of Man, and it wasn’t even unique at the time given the Nazi slaughter of the Slavs, the Soviet slaughter of the Ukrainians, and the Japanese slaughter of the Chinese that all took place during the same historical milieu.

Nor is it necessary to justify the existence of Israel. Israel has the same right to defend itself that every other nation does. Israel has the same right to exist that every other nation does. Israel is neither a saintly nation that can do no wrong nor an evil fascist state that can do no right. It’s just a small nation-state that is both praised and criticized to a degree that greatly exceeds what its actions merit.

Now, despite the best efforts of Hollywood’s Jews to preserve it as a useful propaganda device, people are increasingly beginning to abandon the iconic notion of collective ethnic responsibility for past events. This is in part due to immigration, as I doubt any of the 50 million Central and South Americans now resident in the United States feel any more residual guilt for the Holocaust than they do for 19th century slavery or the Mongol invasions. But it’s also due to the perspective that the passage of time always eventually brings.

It’s hard to believe in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust in the light of the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the massacres in Rwanda. It’s even harder to believe that the National Socialists were viciously attacking completely innocent scapegoats for absolutely no reason in light of how the members of an ethnic group that comprises only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population are now massively overrepresented in the House and Senate, at 6.2 percent and 13 percent respectively. And while the Federal Reserve isn’t doing anything it hasn’t been doing since 1913, it probably doesn’t greatly help the Jewish cause that Ben Shalom Bernanke is the individual now presiding over a particularly problematic stage for the US fiat currency.

Anyhow, my thought is that if a small and distinctive group of people want to band together and acquire as much political power as possible, they had damned well better be sure to do a good job of running things for the benefit of everyone, not merely their own particular interests, because if they’re simply going to play the interest group game, eventually the majority or one of the larger minority groups is going to band together and do whatever is necessary to throw them out of power and keep them out. The fact that the two primary interests of the U.S. Congress presently appear to be a) sending trillions to Wall Street and b) supporting Israeli foreign policy does not bode well in this regard, as it suggests that there is a small, but real risk that if the U.S. economy crashes and the nation begins to divide on its ethnic fault lines, even Americans may eventually find themselves casting about for an all-too-familiar scapegoat.

The voice of the failed revolutionary

It is truly amazing to see how many revolutionaries are historically clueless intellectual totalitarians, regardless of whether they are socialist, communist, democratic, religious, or secular revolutionaries. It underlines the fact of how unusual the American revolution was:

One of the biggest mistakes of this revolution, and there are plenty to go around, was that we allowed its political aspects to overshadow the cultural and social aspects. We have unleashed a torrent of art, music and creativity, and we don’t celebrate or enjoy it, or even promote it. We have brought the people to a point where they were ready to change. To change who they are and how they act, and we ignored that and instead focused all of our energies in a mismanaged battle over the political direction of this country. We clashed with the military, and we forgot the people, and we let that small window that shows up maybe every 100 years where a nation is willing to change, to evolve, to go to waste. Even the work that was being done, it focused on teaching them their political rights, or superficial behavioral things like “don’t litter” or “don’t break traffic laws”, and nothing regarding respecting the women or the people from other faiths that share this cursed land. Wasn’t a priority back then, because in our arrogance and hubris we assumed that people will change by themselves. That they will act right, despite the fact that throughout the history of humanity, there wasn’t a single proof that people, by themselves, will act right. Sorry everyone, we were arrogant and idealistic. Forgive us.

Now, this Egyptian revolutionary is obviously much more decent than some. One doesn’t get the idea that he is willing, let alone eager, to kill anyone in order to make them “act right”. But it underlines the point that I have repeatedly made with regards to the atheist tendency to commit mass slaughter once in power; every revolutionary has to make a choice once he reaches a position of sufficient power and learns, to his historically ignorant astonishment, that the mass of people are simply not going to go along with his plans for them.

The dreadful reality of history is that there are few governments so bad that they cannot be made much worse by a revolution. And in the very rare instance of the non-totalitarian revolutionary, the great majority of intellectuals and people alike tend to regard them as a combination of naive and crazy. This is why Ron Paul’s libertarian revolution, regardless of its merits, is unlikely to succeed. Which, of course, does not mean that it is not a worthy one.

Those who don’t know history

One of the most startling things about reading Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is how old many of the issues presently being discussed today are. Consider the following passage in light of the FOMC meeting today:

Josiah Child’s pamphlet and his testimony before Parliament were centrepieces of the debate swirling around the proposal. Child’s critics pointed out effectively that low interest in a country is the effect of plentiful savings and of prosperity, and not their cause. Thus, Edward Waller, during the House of Commons debate, pointed out that ‘it is with money as it is with other commodities, when they are most plentiful then they are cheapest, so make money [savings] plentiful and the interest will be low’. Colonel Silius Titus pressed on to demonstrate that, since low interest is the consequence and not the cause of wealth, any maximum usury law would be counterproductive: for by outlawing currently legal loans, ‘its effect would be to make usurers call in their loans. Traders would be ruined, and mortgages foreclosed; gentlemen who needed to borrow would be forced to break the law….’

Child feebly replied to his critics that usurers would never not lend their money, that they were forced to take the legal maximum or lump it. On the idea that low interest was an effect not a cause, Child merely recited the previous times that English government had forced interest lower, from 10 to 8 to 6 per cent. Why not then a step further? Child, of course, did not deign to take the scenario further and ask why the state did not have the power to force the interest rate down to zero.

Notice that these critics of artificially low interest rates already knew in 1668 what Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve still deny today. Force interest rates too low and the result will not be an increase in loans and subsequent business activity, but a rather reduction in the number of loans, decreasing business activity, and even an increase in the number of mortgage foreclosures.

It’s hardly possible to claim that the outcome was unforeseeable, much less some sort of black swan, when it was foreseen 342 years ago, more than 100 years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. I cannot recommend APHET enough. It is the absolute gold standard of economic history and I have been astonished how many of the core concepts I was taught were developed decades after Adam Smith actually preceded the man by centuries. And I finally understand why Schumpeter thought rather more highly of Turgot than Smith in his excellent History of Economic Analysis. I haven’t finished APHET yet, but I have already learned more economic history from this monumental two-volume work than I did from the works of Friedman, Schumpeter, and Hayek combined.

In related news, the Federal Reserve announced the following: “The Committee also decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions–including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run–are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013.”

And by “exceptionally low”, they actually mean “artificially low”, you understand. It seems relevant to cite the way Rothbard noted that the anticipated bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures weren’t the only expected result from the forced lowering of the interest rate.

Even more revealing was Child’s reply to the charge of the author of Interest of Money Mistaken that Child was trying to ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants who have money enough of their own to trade with, to the excluding of all young men that want it’. Child replied to that shrewd thrust that, on the contrary, his East India Company was not in need of a low rate since it could borrow as much money as it pleased at 4 per cent. But that of course is precisely the point. Sir Josiah Child and his ilk were eager to push down the rate of interest below the free market level in order to create a shortage of credit, and thereby to ration credit to the prime borrowers – to large firms who could afford to pay 4 per cent or less and away from more speculative borrowers. It was precisely because Child knew full well that a forced lowering of interest rates would indeed ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants’ that Child and his colleagues were so eager to put this mercantilist measure into effect.

Translation: if you’re concerned about growing income inequality, then you should support higher interest rates, not rates that the central bank has artificially forced down to zero.

Mailvox: the Muslim myth

The aptly named Sub Specie has fallen for a common legend believed by many of the half-educated and historically illiterate:

“If it weren’t for the goddamn Muslims, we wouldn’t have great ancient literature!!! They preserved it for us, you know. Oh, fcuk, no, you didn’t know…did you? Not only did they preserve all that s#it, but they contributed so much to math, medicine and science (ironically while Europe was a chaotic s#ithole full of rotting bodies).”

It’s always interesting to receive what apparently is intended as a history lesson from someone who quite clearly knows nothing of the Eastern Roman Empire. The idea of “the Arab transmission of the classics” is false, as should be readily apparent to those who are aware that most of the ancient works lost to the West were “discovered” in conquered Spain, not the Middle East. Moreover, it is obvious that the Muslims did not contribute much of their own in the interim period when they possessed the Greek classics and the post-imperial Latins did not.

“The Arab transmission of the classics is a common and persistent myth that Arabic commentators such as Avicenna and Averroes ‘saved’ the work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European dark age between fifth and the tenth centuries, had the Islamic philosophers not preserved them by translating them into Arabic, to be passed on to the Latin philosophers in the West after the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims during the twelve and thirteenth centuries. This is incorrect. It was actually the Byzantines in the East who saved the ancient learning of the Greeks in the original language, and the first Latin texts to be used were translation from the Greek, in the 12th century, rather than, in most cases, the Arabic, which were only used in default of these. “

The danger of Wikipedia

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that you can always find a quote for every subject. The dangerous thing about it is that you can easily find yourself applying such quotes incorrectly when you clearly don’t know a damn thing about the subject:

The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”

History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.

The minor point that David Leonhardt omitted from his article is the small fact that Hoover didn’t listen to Mellon. Mellon’s strategy was never enacted. Hoover overrode the objections of his “liquidationist” Secretary of the Treasury and embarked upon a spending program that was increased faster, in percent of GDP, than anything that FDR subsequently did. The failure of Herbert Hoover was not a failure of austerity, it was the same failure of Keynesian interventionism that FDR repeated.

There are 112 comments from the educated readers of the New York Times following the article. Not a single one points out this fundamental error. So, it appears that the old adage about those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it is more than a little applicable to the present situation.

Calvin Coolidge on the 4th

Chad the Elder highlights an important historical speech by one of the greatest American presidents:

“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man…are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions…Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.”

He also observes that the Declaration’s principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress. To deny the truth of human equality, or inalienable rights, or government by consent is not to go forward but backward—away from self-government, from individual rights, from the belief in the equal dignity of every human being….

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first…If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped.”

This illuminates the great blunder of the self-styled “rational materialists”. Because they know nothing of history, they assume that the fruits of Christendom are its foundations. Christianity alone did not create the freedom and subsequent wealth of the West, but it was one of the most important elements. And without that element, without a population steeped in that element, it is logically apparent that the fruits of it will gradually wither, one by one.

Coolidge was merely recognizing a truth that was equally obvious to the Founding Fathers and astute visitors such as de Tocqueville alike. The concept of “Progress”, which itself is an evil fruit of a 19th century Christian heresy, is nothing more than a descending return to the historical norms of impoverished slaves forcibly ruled by an immoral and unaccountable elite.

More and smaller wars

The post-WWII period has not been as peaceful as is usually presumed:

We may think the world enjoyed periods of relative freedom from war between the Cold War and 9/11 but the new research by Professor Mark Harrison from at the University of Warwick’s the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and Professor Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University, shows that the number of conflicts between pairs of states rose steadily from 6 per year on average between 1870 and 1913 to 17 per year in the period of the two World Wars, 31 per year in the Cold War, and 36 per year in the 1990s.

Professor Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick said: “The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.”

One of the key drivers is the number of countries, which has risen dramatically – from 47 in 1870 to 187 in 2001.

As the historically aware observer increasingly gathers, the second-worst president in the history of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, has an awful lot for which to answer. It is largely his pre-neocon vision of world democratic revolution and declaration of U.S. support for tribal self-determination around the globe that is behind this increase in the amount of international conflict. I note that this study does not take the rising amount of intra-national violence into account, or the historical picture would likely look even worse.