The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.

A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.

However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time. (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

One of the sacred cows of statism is the idea that government needs to protect us from predatory price-cutting. Large corporations, according to this argument, have big advantages in the marketplace. They can cut prices, drive out their competitors, then raise prices later and gouge consumers. Antitrust laws are needed, so the argument continues, to protect small businesses and consumers from those corporations with large market shares in their industries.

The story of Herbert Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Company, is an excellent case study for those who think predatory price-cutting is a real threat to society. Dow, a small producer of bromine in the early 1900s, fought a price-cutting cartel from Germany. He not only lived to tell about it; he also prospered from it.

. . . .

For Dow Chemical to become a major corporation, it had to meet the European challenge. The Germans in particular dominated world chemical markets in the 1800s. They had experience, topflight scientists, and monopolies in chemical markets throughout the world. For example, the Germans, with their vast potash deposits, had been the dominant supplier of bromine since it first was mass-marketed in the mid-1800s. Only the United States emerged as a competitor to Germany, and then only as a minor player. Dow and some small firms along the Ohio River sold bromine, but only within the country.

About 30 German firms had combined to form a cartel, Die Deutsche Bromkonvention, which fixed the world price for bromine at a lucrative 49 cents a pound. Customers either paid the 49 cents or they went without. Dow and other American companies sold bromine in the United States for 36 cents. The Bromkonvention made it clear that if the Americans tried to sell elsewhere, the Germans would flood the American market with cheap bromine and drive them all out of business. The Bromkonvention law was, “The U.S. for the U.S. and Germany for the world.”

Dow entered bromine production with these unwritten rules in effect, but he refused to follow them. Instead, he easily beat the cartel’s 49-cent price and courageously sold America’s first bromine in England. He hoped that the Germans, if they found out what he was doing, would ignore it. Throughout 1904 he merrily bid on bromine contracts throughout the world.
A Visit from the Cartel

After a few months of this, Dow encountered in his office an angry visitor from Germany—Hermann Jacobsohn of the Bromkonvention. Jacobsohn announced he had “positive evidence that [Dow] had exported bromides.” “What of it?” Dow replied. “Don’t you know that you can’t sell bromides abroad?” Jacobsohn asked. “I know nothing of the kind,” Dow retorted. Jacobsohn was indignant. He said that if Dow persisted, the Bromkonvention members would run him out of business whatever the cost. Then Jacobsohn left in a huff.

. . . .

Dow, however, was determined to compete with the Bromkonvention. He needed the sales, and he believed his electrolysis produced bromine cheaper than the Germans could. Also, Dow was stubborn and hated being bluffed by a bully. When Jacobsohn stormed out of his office, Dow continued to sell bromine, from England to Japan.

Before long, in early 1905, the Bromkonvention went on a rampage: it poured bromides into America at 15 cents a pound, well below its fixed price of 49 cents and also below Dow’s 36 cents. Jacobsohn arranged a special meeting with Dow in St. Louis and demanded that he quit exporting bromides or else the Germans would flood the American market indefinitely. The Bromkonvention had the money and the backing of its government, Jacobsohn reminded Dow, and could long continue to sell in the United States below the cost of production. Dow was not intimidated; he was angry and told Jacobsohn he would sell to whomever would buy from him. Dow left the meeting with Jacobsohn screaming threats behind him. As Dow boarded the train from St. Louis, he knew the future of his company—if it had a future—depended on how he handled the Germans.

On that train, Dow worked out a daring strategy. He had his agent in New York discreetly buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of German bromine at the 15-cent price. Then he repackaged and sold it in Europe—including Germany!—at 27 cents a pound. “When this 15-cent price was made over here,” Dow said, “instead of meeting it, we pulled out of the American market altogether and used all our production to supply the foreign demand. This, as we afterward learned, was not what they anticipated we would do.”

Dow secretly hired British and German agents to market his repackaged bromine in their countries. They had no trouble doing so because the Bromkonvention had left the world price above 30 cents a pound. The Germans were selling in the United States far below cost of production, and they hoped to offset their U.S. losses with a high world price.

Instead, the Germans were befuddled. They expected to run Dow out of business; and this they thought they were doing. But why was U.S. demand for bromine so high? And where was this flow of cheap bromine into Europe coming from? Was one of the Bromkonvention members cheating and selling bromine in Europe below the fixed price? The tension in the Bromkonvention was dramatic. According to Dow, “The German producers got into trouble among themselves as to who was to supply the goods for the American market, and the American agent [for the Germans] became embarrassed by reason of his inability to get goods that he had contracted to supply and asked us if we would take his [15-cent] contracts. This, of course, we refused to do.”

. . . .

More Price-Cutting

The confused Germans kept cutting U.S. prices—first to 12 cents and then to 10.5 cents a pound. Meanwhile, Dow kept buying cheap bromine and reselling it in Europe for 27 cents. These sales forced the Bromkonvention to drop its high world price to match Dow and that further depleted the Bromkonvention‘s resources. Dow, by contrast, improved his foreign sales force, often ran his bromine plants at top capacity, and gained business at the expense of the Bromkonvention and all other American producers, most of whom had shut down after the price-cutting. Even when the Bromkonvention finally caught on to what Dow was doing, it wasn’t sure how to respond. As Dow said, “We are absolute dictators of the situation.” He also wrote, “One result of this fight has been to give us a standing all over the world. . . . We are . . . in a much stronger position than we ever were.” He added that “the profits are not so great” because his plants had trouble matching the new 27-cent world price. He needed to buy the cheap German bromides to stay ahead, and this was harder to do once the Germans discovered and exposed his repackaging scheme.

The bromine war lasted four years (1904–08), when finally the Bromkonvention invited Dow to come to Germany and work out an agreement. Since they couldn’t crush Dow, they decided to at least work out some deal so they could make money again. The terms were as follows: the Germans agreed to quit selling bromine in the United States; Dow agreed to quit selling in Germany; and the rest of the world was open to free competition. The bromine war was over, but low-priced bromine was now a fact of life.

Dow had more capital from the bromine war to expand his business and challenge the Germans in other markets. For example, Dow entered the dye industry and began producing indigo more cheaply than the dominant German dye cartel. (Read more from thefreemanonline.org)

Lecture from last summer @ Iowa City public library. Sorry for the poor quality.

This is an absolutely fascinating interview. Mr. Gatto was the New York State 2009 public school teacher of the year.

Mr. Gatto quit as a public school teacher in order to stop harming kids. He had discovered that institutional schooling is designed to prevent the natural genius of children from emerging. Public schools impose a state of permanent incompletion to our kids, by teaching habit-training, not intellectual development. The power elite deliberately suppresses independent and critical thinking, to make us obedient citizens and consumers. Gatto, author of the best-selling Weapons of Mass Instruction, Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education, discusses how the twenty elite boarding schools teach their students according to ancient principles, and homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing the same.

Gatto’s website

Many modern day communist wannabe’s cling to the idea that the catastrophic, mass murdering failures of communism can be blamed on bad people being put in charge in the system. “If only Trotsky had risen to power instead of Stalin,” they lament.

This essay is for them. Is is largely a critique of the book “Leon Trotsky” by Irving Howe, Viking Press, 1978, which offers a very tepid criticism of the mass murderer.

Some excerpts:

BACKGROUND:

Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn’t be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.

Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory.

. . . .

Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin’s Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades.

THE IGNORANCE:

In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky’s time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe’s book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]

This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — “nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist ‘ideal’ was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state.”

Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: “To the end of his days,” as Howe writes, he “held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a ‘conquest’ of the Russian Revolution” — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!

It remained for some of Trotsky’s more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a “workers’ State,” nor was there any danger that “capitalism” would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a “bureaucratic collectivism” even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.

. . . .

One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: “Reality,” as Trotsky noted, “came into increasing conflict” with the economic “system” that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.

The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,

The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.

With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn’t he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.

The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These “materialists” and “scientific socialists” lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring’s philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.

Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.

THE EVIL:

Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, “Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen.” And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? “In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of ‘theses’ [sic] before the party’s Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline….”

So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:

“Was it so true,” Trotsky asked, “that compulsory labor was always unproductive?” He denounced this view as “wretched and miserable liberal prejudice,” learnedly pointing out that “chattel slavery, too, was productive” and that compulsory serf labor was in its times “a progressive phenomenon.” He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that “coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing.”

And why not? Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, “Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.

. . . .

He [Howe] says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he “fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power.” But why is this assumption located on the enemy’s terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch’s right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot “like partridges” — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.

. . . .

When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of “something else” for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.

This, then, is Trotsky’s final goal: a world where mankind is “free” in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by “society,” which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!

Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.

Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that “the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come,” adding that, “even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century.”

This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
― U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln, 1858

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.
― General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1866

It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.
― Major General William Shafter, 1899

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
― President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940

The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese armed forces] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.
― Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 1941

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
― President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

Money talks and bullshit walks.
― Congressman Michael Myers, 1979

Bitch set me up . . . . I shouldn’t have come up here . . . goddamn bitch.
― D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, 1990

I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.
― President Bill Clinton, 1998

There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. … Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan. … Let me turn now to nuclear weapons. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons. … Iraq could use these small UAVs which have a wingspan of only a few meters to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States. … Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants. … We are not surprised that Iraq is harboring Zarqawi and his subordinates. This understanding builds on decades-long experience with respect to ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. … Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.
― Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2003

(Read more from independent.org)

This fantastic essay casts much light on European history and Marxism.

This article first appeared in the American Scholar (Spring 1943): pp. 220–31. This is its first appearance online.

The nations that have been lucky enough to preserve their democratic way of life are eager to learn what caused the failure of European democracy. They want to be prepared for the defense of their own freedom, and are therefore eager to know the enemy whom they may one day have to fight at home.

Public opinion has viewed the European history of the last hundred years mostly in the light of Marxian legends that badly distort the facts. According to this interpretation the bourgeoisie abandoned the cause of freedom and established the dictatorship of capital. Big business and finance became aware that democracy, the rule of the majority, must necessarily lead to socialism.

Eager to maintain their position as an exploiting class, the capitalists and entrepreneurs plotted against democracy. They hired scoundrels to fight against the people. Their sycophants disparaged democracy and popular government, and their armed mercenaries succeeded in overthrowing the majorities that aimed at government by the people. Modern tyranny is an outcome of capitalist machinations. The only sincere and unswerving supporters of democracy are the socialist proletarians.

Every page of European history contradicts these statements. Let us review the most significant facts and see whether they verify the Marxian interpretation.

French Experience

In February of 1848 the French dethroned Louis Philippe, the Orleans king. They substituted universal manhood suffrage for the special privilege of only 250,000 electors. All adult male citizens of France, roughly 9,400,000, now had the right to vote. On April 23 about 84 percent of them made use of their newly acquired right. They voted quite freely; nobody was in a position to prevent their voting as they pleased, and nobody ventured to try.

The outcome of these elections was a National Assembly in which 90 percent of the deputies unconditionally supported private ownership of the means of production. It was a smashing defeat for socialism. The socialists were forced to realize that only a small minority of the nation approved their plans. Their illusions were dispelled: the sovereign people had decided against them.

[All attempts at socialized life must quickly decide between failure and tyranny. The large the sphere of socialization, the more quickly the decision is forced.]

But they were not prepared to yield to the verdict. Hoping to seize power by violence, they rose up in arms. Of course they were defeated.

The Paris revolt of June 1848 was the most frivolous rebellion ever instigated. A small minority of armed men tried to defy the vast majority of the nation and establish a reign of terror and tyranny. The June conflict was not, as the socialist propagandists like to say, a “cowardly massacre of innocent proletarians by the soldiers of reaction”; it was the defense of democracy against the assault of a small minority. General Cavaignac and his troops safeguarded democracy for the moment against the conspiracies of those who aimed at minority rule.

The experience of June 1848 had momentous consequences. A specter has haunted Europe ever since — not the specter of communism, as the Communist Manifesto asserted in 1847, but the specter of terrorist dictatorship by a fanatical minority.

. . . .

French social and political conditions and thinking have been deeply influenced by the menace of socialist usurpation. This fear was the largest factor in the revival of French militant Catholicism; it fanned the flames of aggressive nationalism, Boulangism, and the anti-Dreyfus campaign. It had its share in the evolution that ended with the capitulation of 1940. There were very few friends of democracy left in France by that time. The rest of the nation was in two hostile camps; both the communists and the nationalists violently opposed democracy.

From France the fear of revolutionary socialist assaults spread to the rest of Europe. The French experience motivated Bismarck’s efforts (1878–1890) to put down the Social Democrats by the same oppressive methods that their own champion Karl Marx approved in the acts of the Paris Commune and recommended in writing.

. . . .

The Bolshevik Mind

The frustration of the revolutionary attempts in France forced new tactics upon the friends of socialism. As they did not want to renounce their ambitions entirely, disappearing from the political scene, they had to acquiesce in the peaceful methods of democracy. They organized political parties and ran for seats in parliament. There were socialist groups in every parliament of continental Europe. The socialists became an important factor in most of those countries. Some optimists were prepared to believe that the Marxists had renounced their spirit of usurpation, giving up their revolutionary inclinations and hoping to realize their plans by parliamentary and democratic methods alone; but this was an illusion.

. . . .

But this success of socialism was not an achievement of the Marxist parties, united from 1889 onward in the second International Workingmen’s Association. New socialist parties sprang up, parties firmly opposed to Marxism. There were Catholic socialists, nationalist socialists, and many other parties seeking social reform and prolabor policies. There were governments eager to restrict capitalism and embark upon social legislation. Foremost among them was the German government, whose new social policy, inaugurated at the end of the seventies and solemnly announced in the old Kaiser’s imperial message of November 17, 1881, shaped the pattern of the later American New Deal.

The Marxists saw themselves outdone by governments and rival parties; they began to realize that notwithstanding their electoral successes their prospects of sweeping the masses with them were but small.

A socialist party always tries to achieve its own brand of socialism, not the simple victory of any socialist group. The socialists do not advocate socialism and planning in general, but only a system of socialist planning in which they themselves are supreme. They regard the rule of another socialist party not as a partial success for their own aspirations, but as a greater evil than the capitalist market economy. The mutual animosity of Stalinists and Trotskyites, of the Marxian socialists and National Socialists, is in a class by itself. It is easy to see the reason for this hatred: as long as there is still a market economy, socialist minorities enjoy civil liberties and are free to propagate their doctrines; in a socialist community they are deprived of this opportunity. Where all assembly halls, newspapers, periodicals, and printing offices are in government hands, and where every citizen depends on the whims of the rulers, there is no room left for opposition activities.

. . . .

In Western and Central Europe the Marxians were prudent enough not to express such opinions in public. It would have jeopardized their chances in election campaigns. They discussed these questions in the inner circle and dealt with them in their writings, which few non-Marxists read. But the majority of the Russian Marxists, the Bolsheviks, openly adopted the principle of the revolutionary elite: a group of professional conspirators must snatch the reins of government and subdue the majority of the nation. Lenin’s and Bukharin’s writings preach the gospel of forcible oppression, dictatorial rule, and totalitarian extermination of dissenters. They too, of course, were ignored by the Western European public until 1917.

It is not necessary to dwell upon the Russian events in the fall of 1917. The Bolsheviks failed lamentably in the electoral campaign; the parliamentary majority was radically opposed to their plans. But they were an armed body of fighters; they dispersed parliament, and firmly established their rule — the rule of an elite, say they; the rule of a gang of murderers, say their adversaries. The knell of European democracy had sounded.

There are people who honestly believe that the Bolsheviks are right, that socialism is a blessing and that capitalism is all wrong. It is not the task of this essay to investigate that problem. We have only to underline the obvious fact that Bolshevism does not mean democracy.

. . . .

German Experience

The outcome of the First World War had destroyed the old prestige of the Hohenzollern family, of the Junkers, the officers, and the civil servants. The democracy of the West had shown its political and military superiority. The war, which according to President Wilson had been fought to make the world safe for democracy, appeared as an ordeal by fire for democracy. The Germans, beginning to revise their political views, turned toward democracy. The term democracy, almost forgotten in Germany for half a century, became popular again in the last weeks of the war. The Germans saw democracy as not only a return to the civil liberties — rights of man — suspended for the duration of the war, but above all the substitution of parliamentary government for monarchical near absolutism. These points, as every German knew, were implied in the official program of the Social Democrats. People expected that the Social Democrats would now put into practice the democratic principles of their program, and were ready to back them in their effort at political reconstruction of the Reich.

But from the ranks of the Marxists came an answer that no one outside the small group of professional Marx experts could have foreseen. “We class-conscious proletarians,” the Marxians declared, “have nothing in common with your bourgeois concepts of freedom, parliamentarism, and democracy. We want not democracy, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., our own; we are not prepared to grant you bourgeois parasites the rights of man, the franchise, or parliamentary representation. Only Marxists and proletarians shall rule henceforth. You are perplexed: you say you had always thought we were sincere in formulating and advertising the democratic points on our program. That is your fault; if you had studied the writings of Marx more carefully you would have been better informed.”

These revelations were a terrible shock not only to the rest of the nation — the majority of the Germans — but also to the greater part of the people who had long voted the Social Democratic ticket. The eyes of the Germans were opened. Now they learned that everything the Social Democrats had professed for fifty years was a lie. All their talk had had but one end in view: to put Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the place of the Hohenzollerns. Democracy was evidently a mere term invented for the deception of fools. In fact, as the conservatives and the nationalists had always asserted, the advocates of democracy meant to establish mob rule and the tyranny of demagogues.

The communists grossly underrated the intellectual capacity of the German nation. The very idea of boasting after fifty years of prodemocratic agitation that they had never honestly wanted democracy — of telling the Germans: You dupes, how clever’ we were to take you in! — this was too much even for the old members of the Social Democratic party. Within a few weeks political Marxism — not socialism as an economic system nor Marxism as a sociological doctrine — had lost all its former prestige. The idea of democracy became hopelessly suspect. From that time on the term democracy was, to many Germans, synonymous with fraud. The immense majority solidly rejected communist dictatorship.

. . . .

By October and early November 1918, the nationalists were in a state of utter desperation. But they were quick to see the situation and seize their opportunity. They were quicker than the Marxists in sensing the radical change of mood brought about by the menace of communist dictatorship, and they were ready to profit by it to stage a comeback. They knew what their policy for the immediate future must be. Their most urgent need was to prevent a Red dictatorship and wholesale communist extermination of the nonproletarians.

The nationalists, adamant foes of parliamentary government and democracy, decided to support the cause of freedom and democracy momentarily so that they might overthrow them later. They were ready to cooperate with the right-wing socialists in carrying out the first part of this program, and to support the government that they detested. For purely tactical reasons they offered the nation a program of liberalism and democracy. Marxist methods found imitators; the nationalists had profited from reading Lenin and Bukharin. And, faithful to the revolutionary tactics of the Bolsheviks, they armed for the fight.

In January 1919, the rising of the communists and independent socialists in Berlin was defeated by the not-yet-disbanded cavalry division of the ex-Kaiser’s guards and by volunteer corps made up of nationalists and demobilized soldiers who were not too eager to go back to humdrum civilian work. This battle did not end the civil war; it continued for months in the provinces, and broke out afresh time and again in the capital. However, the victory won by the troops in January 1919, at Berlin, safeguarded the elections for the constituent assembly, the session of that body, and the promulgation of the Weimar Constitution.

William II used to say: “Where my guards set foot, there is no more question of democracy.” The Weimar democracy was of a peculiar sort. The horsemen of the royal guards had fought for it and won it. The Constitution of Weimar could be deliberated and voted only because the nationalist enemies of democracy preferred it to the dictatorship of the communists. The German nation received parliamentary government as a gift at the hands of deadly foes of freedom who were only waiting for a chance to take back their present.

Both the nationalists and the communists saw the Weimar Constitution simply as a battleground in their struggle for dictatorship. Both armed for civil war, and each, trying repeatedly to open the attack, had to be put down by armed resistance. But the nationalists became daily more powerful, while the communists were paralyzed. It was not a question of votes and seats in parliament; the centers of gravity of these parties lay outside parliamentary affairs.

[This reminds me of the very vocal and very publicized struggle between the so-called left, and the so-called right in the Unites States. Each fights for its own agenda and uses the idea of liberty only to criticize the other.]

The nationalists were openly supported by the greater part of the intellectuals, white-collar workers, small business, entrepreneurs, and farmers, and they also enjoyed the secret sympathy of a good many workingmen who still voted for the Social Democrats. They could act freely, were familiar with the problems of German life, and could adjust their actions to the changing political and economic conditions of the whole nation and of each province; the communists, on the other hand, had to obey orders issued by Russian leaders who did not know Germany, and were forced to change their tactics overnight whenever the central committee in Moscow ordered them to.

No intelligent or honest man could endure such slavery. The intellectual and moral quality of the German communist leaders was consequently far below the average level of German politicians. They were no match for the nationalists. The communists’ only role in German politics was that of saboteurs and conspirators. After January of 1919 they no longer had any prospect of success, though of course the ten years of Nazi misrule have revived German communism.

The Germans would have chosen democracy in 1918, if they had had to choose. But as things stood they had only the choice between the two dictatorships, Left and Right. Between these two dictatorial parties there was no third group ready to support capitalism and its political corollary, democracy.

[I think Hoppe would disagree with the last part of the previous sentence.]

. . . .

No Democracy without Democrats

It is not necessary to elaborate with further examples drawn from the history of smaller European nations. What happened in France, Russia, and Germany happened there too.

It is a bold distortion of historical fact to say that the Left, the socialists, were eager to establish popular government and that the Right, the bourgeois capitalists, defeated these attempts. Neither the Marxists nor the other socialists ever aimed at democracy.

(Read more from mises.org)

Here’s the video of the lecture I posted about earlier.

Socialism in the 21st Century by Dr. Yuri Maltsev at the University of Iowa from Michael McKay on Vimeo.

This video offers a strongly dissenting view of the relationship between Democrats and black people. The most interesting part to me comes at 14:15 when he talks about the 3/5th clause of the Constitution.

Here is the text of article 1 section 2 paragraph 3:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Like the narrator of this video, I don’t see this as a statement about the value of human life.

Without independently verifying the claims in the video, here are some of them:
* KKK founded by Democratic Party.
* Martin Luther King was a Republican.
* History is being rewritten. “Democrat” being replaced by “conservative” in historical accounts.
* Truman (D) ended discrimination in public schools on paper for political reasons.
* Eisenhower (R) actually desegregated schools.
* Kennedys helped MLK get out of jail to break black support for Republicans.
* Woodrow Wilson (D) segregated military, hosted KKK film at White House.
* Teddy Roosevelt’s (R) friend Booker T. Washington.
* 3/5 clause hurt slave owners, because they gave them less representation.

In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices. … Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”

. . . .

Mauro relates the visit of Grover Whalen, New York’s police commissioner and president of the World’s Fair Corporation, to Rome to persuade Mussolini to authorize an Italian pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. The conversation, Mauro says (as summarized by Cahalan), began like this:

“I understand you served as Police Commissioner of New York,” he said. “How did my people behave?”

“Some good, some bad,” Whalen responded.

“The bad ones — from Sicily?”

Mussolini first balked at participating in the Fair.

“What, Italy compete with Wall Street?” the dictator said. “What, for example, would it accomplish?”

“The American people would like to know what fascism is,” Whalen responded.

“You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”

(Read more from cato-at-liberty.org)

From the moment Mises’s 1912 book, The Theory of Money and Credit, made its appearance, and warned about the grave danger to free enterprise represented by paper money and central banking, the Austrians have been right.

That’s 100 years of “we told you so.”

Right in the middle of these years, there is a forgotten episode in monetary history that teaches us lessons today. It concerns the controversial role that Henry Hazlitt played in battling the Bretton Woods monetary system enacted after the Second World War.

Under Mises’s influence, Hazlitt used his editorial position at the New York Times to warn against the plan, predicting correctly that it would lead to world inflation. For saying what he said, he was pushed out of his position at the Times.

. . . .

They met from July 1 to July 22, 1944, at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and drafted the Articles of Agreement. It was nearly a year and a half later, in December 1945, that the agreement was ratified. On March 1947, one of the monstrosities created during event, the International Monetary Fund, began operations.

What was the goal of the plan? It was the same goal as at the founding of the Federal Reserve and the same goal that has guided every monetary plan in modern history. The stated idea was to promote economic growth, encourage macroeconomic stability, and, most absurdly, tame inflation. Of course, it did none of these things.

There are other analogies to the Fed. In the same way that the Fed was to serve as a lender of last resort, a provider of liquidity in times of instability, so too the Bretton Woods Agreement obligated all member nations to make their currencies available to be loaned to other countries to prevent temporary balance of payment problems.

. . . .

Keynes’s message at Bretton Woods, in Mises’s summary, was that the world elites could turn stones into bread. And so under the influence of Keynes, the target at the Bretton Woods meeting was liberalism itself, which was widely assumed to have failed during the Great Depression. The elites also came out of World War II with a more profound appreciation for the role of central planning. They had reveled in it.

The Bretton Woods plan for monetary reconstruction did not go as far as Keynes would have liked. He proposed a full-scale world central bank and a single paper currency for all nations, which he wanted to be called the “bancor,” so there could be no escaping inflation. That plan is still awaiting implementation. As it was, the Bretton Woods conferees, under pressure from the United States — which wanted the dollar to be the bancor — took a compromise position.

. . . .

The Bretton Woods system established a gold dollar that was fixed at $35 per ounce. But it was the only currency so fixed. Every other currency could be a fiat currency based on the dollar.

. . . .

The breakdown really began soon after the plan was implemented. But most of the effects were disguised through currency controls. Once the 1960s came, and the expenses of LBJ’s welfare-warfare state mounted, the Fed played its traditional role as the financier of big government. Pressure on the dollar mounted, foreign governments became more interested in the gold than the paper, and the whole cockamamie scheme unraveled under Nixon’s welfare-warfare state. When the world entered the all-paper money regime, most economists said than the price of gold would fall from $35. The Austrians predicted the opposite.

. . . .

Hazlitt wrote, “it would be difficult to think of a more serious threat to world stability and full production than the continual prospect of a uniform world inflation to which the politicians of every country would be so easily tempted.”

. . . .

On July 1, 1944, when the representatives [of an international monetary council] first gathered, he [Hazlitt] greeted them with a punch in the nose.

it would be impossible to imagine a more difficult time for individual nations to decide at what level they can fix and stabilize their national currency unit. How could the representatives of France, of Holland, of Greece, of China, make any but the wildest guess at this moment of the point at which they could hope to stabilize?

. . . .

The whole project, wrote Hazlitt, “rests on the assumption that nothing will be done right unless a grandiose formal intergovernmental institution is set up to do it. It assumes that nothing will be run well unless Governments run it.”

. . . .

In 1967, Hazliltt also had a last laugh, if it is a laughing matter to see your worst predictions come true. Hazlitt was now a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times. He wrote about the unraveling of the system, which finally happened in 1969. By 1971, the entire world was on a fiat-money paper standard and the result has been nothing short of catastrophic for societies and economies, which have been thrown into unrelenting chaos.

To be sure, Hazlitt was not, as he said, the “seventh son of the seventh son.” He wasn’t born with some amazing prophetic power. What Hazlitt did was read Mises and come to understand monetary economics. It sounds easy until you realize just how rare these talents were in his day and in ours. (Read more from mises.org)

I’ve been reading alternative news sources for a few years now and feel like most of what I encounter are elaborations of what I already know. This wonder documentary, however, really covered a lot of new ground, mostly about the recent history of neo-conservatism and their ideological roots. I highly recommend it. I’ve bullet pointed the main/most interesting points from each of the three parts, stressing the history of neo-conservativism, as that was what interested me most.

* The cold war rise of neo-conservatives & radical islamists.

* Both philosophies preach that ends justify the means.

* Leo Strauss supports spreading myths that would fill Americans with identity and purpose. He seems disgusted by the American left because it’s liberalism ushers in what he perceives as moral depravity. America, he contends needs a great myth (manifested in defeating an evil enemy) to fill people with virtue and purpose. He supports lying to establish this myth because it’s done for the greater good. Many present-day neo-cons are his students.

* Neo-cons supported organization called Team B to spread myths about Soviet power, contradicting CIA findings (much like the administration contradicted CIA findings before the Iraq war).

* When William Casey became head of CIA, he began pressuring CIA to exaggerate Soviet Threat along the lines of Team B.

* Neo-cons supported rise of Christian politics.

* Both radical Islamists & neo-cons considered the fall of the Soviet Union (which was a house of cards all by itself), as an endorsement of their violent ideology.

* Radical Islamists pursue war against corrupt regimes in the Middle East, but fail to win popular support.

* Straussians compared to Marxists. Conceal their agenda. Lie to promote their vision of the world. They consider the Christian right’s emphasis on social issues combating the moral depravity they perceive. They consider themselves warriors against liberal social corruption.

* Algerian generals infiltrate and radicalize radical Islam to use them as enemy.

* Radical Islamist ideology fails because there is no end to the list of enemies. One group concludes that the whole world (except for their group) is unfaithful and must be killed.

* Rise of Christian right causes many defectors who elect Clinton. Neo-cons begin propaganda against Clinton including this story and this one, which I posted here on lost republic. Was I overzealous? Paranoid?

* One neo-con writes a book entitled “The Death of Outrage” blames America’s moral corruption for failing to impeach Clinton.

* Radical Islamists failed to gain popular support in the years which followed the victory in Afghanistan. They attempted to regain support by striking at the West.

* This fit the neo-con plan of replacing the Soviet enemy with the Islamic one.

* Bin Laden began calling his organization Al Quaeda AFTER he realized that was how American’s referred to him.

* Neo-conservatives return to power under Bush W. They exaggerate Islamic radial threat similar to how they exaggerated the Soviet threat. They work from the Straussian philosophy that America’s purpose is to fight evil. I think they are like adolescent boys who find meaning in their lives and feel manly when they send better men off to war.

* So much of the sleeper cell hype is complete nonsense. The government “experts” who interpret much of the evidence in the legal cases against sleeper cells are extraordinarily creative nonsense, in which every gesture, scribble, and photo is an elaborate secretly coded message.

* Both the radical Islamists and neo-cons continue to benefit from the Straussian idea of creating a false mythology.

* All studies show dirty bomb (radiation bomb) would do zero damage. Despite this, its mythology grows.

* Politics of fear, ie. insisting on preparing for the worst-possible case scenario, began with ecology movement. (I can understand why they saved this controversial statement for the end of the three-hour documentary.) Ecology movement considered it government’s duty to prepare for the worst, regardless of evidence. This is the same principle which shaped the war on terror, the “preventive paradigm.”

The communist movement in United States has been portrayed as so many embattled victims of McCarthyism. I think of something that Dr. Yuri Maltsev said: that the KGB considered Senator McCarthy the best agent they never had, because he did so much to discredit the very worthy anti-communist movement in the United States.

A deadly Israeli attack on a US ship — an incident largely kept in the dark by Washington — receives new attention with survivors reliving the painful memory.

USS Liberty survivors gathered in Washington on Monday to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the incident and expound on how they were sprayed with bullets by America’s “closest ally and beneficiary”.

On June 8, 1967, the unarmed spy ship USS Liberty was on duty in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula when it was bombarded by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.

The two-hour-long attacks killed at least 34 sailors, wounded 173 others and nearly sunk the ship.

The attack on the Liberty came at a time when Israel had engaged in a brief but intense war with Egypt and its Arab allies, which coincided with the US war on Vietnam.

Although the ship was clearly marked as an American vessel, Israelis declared the attack on Liberty as a simple case of “friendly fire” and “mistaken identity”.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, former US president Lyndon Johnson accepted the Israeli claim and cancelled all investigations into the incident.

“It was a case of mistaken identity …I do not care if every man drowned and the ship sank, we will not embarrass an ally,” Johnson had told his opponents who demanded an open congressional hearing to address the Israeli claim.

USS Liberty survivor Rick Almett, however, begged to differ.

“There was a conspiracy between our government and Israel. So that’s the reason why they didn’t pursue it and why the investigations were covered up because of the alliance of Israel and the United States,” Almetti told Press TV.

In a separate interview with Press TV, Jim Smith — another surviving member of the USS Liberty crew — said the incident was “an intentional act by Israel to sink the ship with all hands and no survivors”. (Read more from globalresearch.ca)

Interesting Biblical arguments for and against libertarianism from contrast2.wordpress.com.