Thomas Sowell and The Quest for Cosmic Justice

For the most part, I admire Thomas Sowell’s writing very much. He does seem to have a gift for putting things simply, although he is rather modest about it. I especially admire his economic analyses, such as those found in Basic Economics and Applied Economics.

While it is not his most recent book, I have most recently read The Quest for Cosmic Justice. It is something of a follow-up to The Vision of the Anointed. Both books take the intelligentsia to task, chiefly for the consequences of their ideologies, but also for their smugness and arrogance. It’s hard not to smirk as Sowell mercilessly skewers the policies of the ruling elite, whether left-liberal or right-wing conservative.

A Revisionist History of WWII. And it’s not even by a libertarian.

I prefer to read the books that I review prior to reviewing them, but this one doesn’t even come out until March 11.  So this will merely be a plug for something I haven’t read, but that looks very promising.  Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker implicitly takes the stance, shared by antiwar libertarians, that World War II was unnecessary and gullible Americans were conned into fighting.  More specifically, it relies on selective quoting, in chronological order, of those involved in the run-up to and execution of the war; there is almost nothing in the way of personal polemics. What a relief!  What’s worse than reading someone who not only presents the facts but tries to reason from them too?

It’s important because it exposes Churchill and FDR as warmongers, not heroes.   This is nothing new to antiwar libertarians, but it’s not like anybody’s listening to us.  As Baker happens to be an established novelist, his work will probably reach a wider audience than we Ron Paul-supporting kooks can dream of.

Of course, there are those who argue that “the end of civilization” began not with World War II, but with the unnecessary wars that preceded it, especially the Civil War.   Again, I could offer the names of a few nutjobs who swing that way, but instead I’ll offer a more mainstream publication backing that view, namely Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, by former Ebony editor Lerone Bennett.  (Oops, haven’t read this one either.  Sorry.)  To quote Amazon.com’s book description:

Beginning with the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free African American slaves, this dissenting view of Lincoln’s greatness surveys the president’s policies, speeches, and private utterances and concludes that he had little real interest in abolition. Pointing to Lincoln’s support for the fugitive slave laws, his friendship with slave-owning senator Henry Clay, and conversations in which he entertained the idea of deporting slaves in order to create an all-white nation, the book concludes that the president was a racist at heart—and that the tragedies of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era were the legacy of his shallow moral vision.

To wit, the Civil War was unnecessary because it was not needed to free the slaves, especially since abolition was not Lincoln’s intention.  The 18th Amendment freed the slaves–not the Emancipation Proclamation, which was intended to hobble the South, not free anyone (otherwise, why didn’t it apply to the North?)  Mr. Bennett is African-American, so he won’t be easily confused with any of the paler Confedrut scholars who say the exact same thing.

So, WWII does have parallels with the Civil War:  just as opposing the North’s invasion of the South is generally interpreted as racist, to oppose American intervention in WWII is tantamount to saying you’re all for the Holocaust.  In fact, you undoubtedly have a very, very large barbecue in your backyard as well.  But if WWII was intended to free the Jews and other concentration camp inmates,  then why didn’t America have a more generous asylum/immigration policy at the time?  Why did America turn away a ship full of Jewish refugees to send them back to certain death?  Why did they take so damned long to liberate them?  It will be nice to read a book that shows that you don’t have to endorse mass incineration (the atom bomb) to oppose mass extermination.

Please forgive all the sarcasm today; I’ve had one too many conversations lately about My Controversial Opinions, and it’s damned annoying when some fellow looks alternately pained and concerned about my utter backwardness.  Sure, I nominally grew up in Los Angeles, but I must really be from some backwater to oppose, say, voting, that great American tradition.  You have no right to complain about politics if you don’t cast your meaningless vote in a rigged election with candidates ranging from Lesser to Most Evil!   Jesus, who even wants to talk to you?!  Hasn’t anyone thought to challenge you with simple-minded questions, guaranteed to snap you out of your embarrassing conclusions?  How can you refuse to be bound by the Constitution??  Because you’d certainly the first one to go beyond the letter of that document!

Ahem.  I plan to pick up Human Smoke  at some point.  But I’ve got a long book queue.

Ron Paul, Super Tuesday and Libertarian Infighting

Yesterday I attended a luncheon and book signing with David Boaz of the Cato Institute, in spite of some (ok, a lot of) reservations about Cato’s brand of libertarianism.  As is often the case at such events, I was probably the only woman under 50 in the room, with the exception of the Pacific Research Institute’s staff member.  And we had to be the only women who weren’t married to one of the (overwhelmingly) male attendees.

 

Enough about demographics for now:  Boaz gave a good talk that recycled some of the better points he’s made in his columns.  The best of his columns have been collected in his new book, Politics of Freedom, which I dutifully purchased. 

 

However, during the Q&A, while he did refrain from slinging additional mud at Ron Paul, he was hardly complimentary.  His blog entry of January 11, titled “Ron Paul’s Ugly Newsletters,” was more brutally forthright and gave hindsight justification for the general silence about Ron Paul over at Cato.  You see, they always knew something bad would come out about him, due to the “company [he] had been keeping,” and they had “feared that they would have tied him to some reprehensible ideas far from the principles we hold.”  And now they have something to point to as an excuse for distancing themselves from the most prominent libertarian presidential candidate ever.

 

During the Q&A, then, when a younger man asked Boaz about Ron Paul (a question greeted with at least one derisive snort from the fellow attendees), he didn’t even manage to damn him with faint praise.  Instead he answered that “Paul lacks the charisma people look for in a presidential candidate,” and went on immediately to discuss Ronald Reagan.  You know, the man who inspires so many young people and libertarians these days.  Eventually, and very briefly, he conceded that Paul has done even more to spread libertarian ideas than Reagan ever did, but his answer definitely focused on Reagan’s campaign and the ideals he had espoused.  He neglected to mention that Reagan almost entirely abandoned these ideals once elected.

 

What matters, then, is charisma, not principles.  Sure sounds like the foundation of libertarianism to me.  Anyway, if charisma were the determining factor in an election, shouldn’t Obama, with all those comparisons to JFK, have won by a landslide later that very day?  And listening to Boaz speak so dismissively of Paul on Super Tuesday, of all days, probably scared off a few more potential Paul voters in the audience.

 

Perhaps because time was short, or to avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest, Boaz did not mention the newsletters or his stance on them.  And I wanted to say something about it to him at the book signing, but I was quiet. 

 

Why?  For one, I’m a coward; also, I’m not sure how to be diplomatic about these things, so I didn’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest either.  Also, given his blog entries and Cato’s generally deafening silence, it seemed like he’d already made up his mind on the subject.

 

But the more important reason, which breaks my heart, is that he’s probably right about the racist company Paul occasionally keeps.  This is not at all to say that LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute are uniformly racist institutions, not by a long shot.  However, there certainly are individuals affiliated with these two places who hold some racist beliefs.  I wouldn’t even point to the ones who are the usual suspects by now, such as those who uphold the right of secession, for instance:  it’s absurd that a critique of Lincoln, such as those authored by Thomas DiLorenzo, is tantamount to defending slavery.  Yet some of the Mises faculty and LewRockwell.com contributors, like Hans Hermann-Hoppe, do not bear closer scrutiny.

 

For instance, I actually heard a call for racial purity in the 2006 “Health & Wealth” conference put on by LewRockwell.com.  In his lecture on “The State-Pharma-Medical Complex”, Dr. Thomas P. Dorman mentioned his opposition to miscegenation; specifically, he warned of the state-pharma-medical complex’s intention to force widespread miscegenation upon the Western world.  When I asked him what he meant by that during the Q&A, he said something to the effect that it is a controversial topic, but that we should respect the cultures of other peoples.  Which means, don’t interbreed/intermarry with them.

 

Well, there are almost certainly critics on the left and of other races who would say the same, perhaps in the guise of anticolonialism; but, no matter its source, such sentiments certainly make this libertarian extremely uncomfortable.  It was the only base note in an otherwise very interesting conference, but it is enough to substantiate the association, however loose, of Paul with racist characters; after all, he gave the keynote speech at that conference.

 

Then there’s the newsletters themselves, some of which turn out to be innocuous when the quotes are restored to their original context, others which are much harder to justify.  I would echo those who believe that Paul is not himself racist.  But this is terrible PR for him, to say the least.

 

And yet, I am not at all convinced that this is the real reason for Cato’s total dissociation from Paul.  For one thing, there is all the cringe-inducing documentation of the spats between Tom Palmer, Cato’s vice president, and the Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo.  Palmer calls his log “The Fever Swamp Archives,” to give you an idea of the tenor these disagreements have taken.  As far as I can tell there have been ad hominem attacks and misstatements on both sides, as well as selective quotation.

 

More importantly (I hope), Cato is committed to minarchism (one of the chapters in Boaz’s new book defends Cato against the charge of “anti-government”) whereas LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute are, as a rule, committed to anarchocapitalism.  This disagreement over the role and size of government, not a question of racial tolerance, would seem to be the fundamental difference between them.  Cato, after all, is based in Washington, D.C.:  it’s hard to imagine a bastion of anarchocapitalism springing up there, of all places.

 

In the end, however, I have to throw my hat in with Ron Paul, and even with most of the crew affiliated with LewRockwell.com.  Why?

 

Not only because I identify as anarchocapitalist, but because these charges of racism, even if true, could never equal the amount of damage that the war in Iraq has already brought about, a war that Cato has openly endorsed. 

What is worse?  One million dead and counting in Iraq?  Or Hans-Hermann Hoppe, adjunct faculty of the Mises Institute, publishing in a white supremacist publication in Germany and advocating a return to back-alley abortions?  Vicious as these are, Hoppe’s expressions of racism and misogyny utterly pale in comparison to the naked, murderous racism we’re carrying out, and will continue to carry out, in Iraq and no doubt other countries.  There are still people who apparently can’t distinguish between the Iraqi Saddam Hussein and the Saudi bin Laden, and are content to kill any and all in the same region of the world.

 

As for the homefront, the War on Drugs disproportionately jails blacks and Hispanics.  Racist slurs are indeed hurtful; are they as cruel as police harassment and imprisonment?  Paul would return control of the drug laws to the states.  While this is far from perfect, it at least would allow states to decriminalize and even legalize illicit substances, and surely at least some states would take the opportunity.  I think it safe to assure the reader that those released from jail by the presidency of Ron Paul would probably be grateful in spite of his very loose affiliation with Hoppe (who how many people read again?  Especially those jailed due to the War on Drugs?)

 

I want to make it clear that I am not defending racism from any source.  But Hoppe and Dorman et al. are not advocating that their racism be enforced by the U.S. Army.  In contrast, Cato and other libertarian outlets have openly supported the destruction of Iraq:  they abhor expressions of racism, yet are content to back a government that does not even tally the number of non-American casualties it inflicts.  Are we to believe that it is only intentions that matter, no matter the outcome? 

Allied “Liberators” and their Post-war War Crimes

The Telegraph reviews a new book by Giles MacDonogh entitled After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation that will be available in the U.S. in July 2007. It was released in the U.K. under the more neutral title After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift.

To summarize, approximately a million German soldiers died before they could return home, some in Soviet camps but the majority in Anglo-American ones. Two million German civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were subject to outright slaughter, if not starvation, forced labor or crowding into the concentration camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz.

MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler’s Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.

His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide – and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh – for the first time in English – is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly) innocent. MacDonogh’s answer is that it could all have been even worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

First Kurt Vonnegut. Then one of my hamsters basically dropped dead overnight. Just last night she was running in her wheel. There won’t be a single Google news story about it, either.

The LewRockwell.com blog linked to Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” When I first read it a few months ago, I thought it was genius; now I detect some Rand-style obviousness. Oh well, polemical lit fared much better (far more succintly, at least) in Vonnegut’s hands.

Continuing to knock over the NYT’s Strawmen

David Boaz at the Cato Institute does a pretty good job breaking down many of the weaknesses in Leonhardt’s review of Doherty’s newest book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

However, I’m beginning to take some real umbrage with the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” characterization of libertarians.  For one thing, this runs counter to the instincts of lefties and everyone else that many libertarians tend to be conservative across the board, not just in terms of government spending.  A libertarian opposed to government prohibition of street drugs is probably well aware that these controls only lead to greater use and abuse of these substances, not to mention the violence associated with the black market.  Thus even a person who was vehemently opposed to recreational drug use would be fully rational and consistent in calling for an end to the “War on Drugs.”

Admittedly, I could probably be described fairly as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.”  I’ll stop now before I wander (further) into a semantic mess.