Democratic Socialist on the Von Mises Institute’s Lies About the Pinochet Coup

I’ve blogged several times about the Von Mises Institute. They take their name from Ludwig Von Mises, one of the founders, along with Von Hayek, of modern libertarianism.

And they’re a deeply, deeply unpleasant lot. They hate the welfare state, demand the complete privatisation of every state enterprise or service, and are thoroughly racist. Von Mises’ himself was a member of Dollfuss’ austrofascist government, before fleeing to America when the Nazis invaded. He was instrumental in setting up the Chicago School, which included Milton Friedman, the father of Monetarism, and which provided the economic doctrines for Pinochet’s disgusting regime in Chile. Von Mises, like Friedman, used to go down there to see how their doctrines were working out under the old dictator.

During the Cold War they used to publish pseudo-scientific racist and eugenicist literature, arguing that Blacks were mentally inferior to Whites, and that there was no point in setting up a welfare state, as you’d just be wasting your money keeping alive the biologically unfit. Which means Blacks, as well as poor Whites. Or indeed, anyone who isn’t rich and White. More recently they’ve been pushing the lie that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but about tariff control and states’ rights. Which is rubbish, because the leaders of the Confederacy said they were going to war to defend slavery.

In this video, Democratic Socialist, who sounds Antipodean to my ears, tears apart the lies in an article about the Pinochet coup by George Reisman in the Institute’s wretched journal.

Reisman claims that Pinochet was absolutely correct to overthrow the government of the Marxist president, Salvador Allende, because Allende was planning to overturn democracy and incarcerate and kill millions in concentration. Pinochet did not do any of this himself. If he had lived in Germany, he would have stopped Hitler coming to power, and would similarly have overthrown the Russian Revolutionaries under Lenin.

This is all hogwash.

Democratic Socialist uses the Pinochet Coup to demonstrate that it seems to bear out Trotsky’s comments that Fascism is the highest stage of capitalism, when it is challenged by the workers. He begins by stating that capitalism is the system under which the means of production are owned privately by a group, which then forms the working class. It needs a state apparatus to defend itself from being attacked and taken over by the exploited workers. This is followed by footage of Hitler’s ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’, Nick Robins-, sorry, Josef Goebbels, ranting about how Hitler had saved Germany from the threat of Bolshevism. Just as Pinochet claimed he had saved Chile from Communism.

In fact, Allende had been democratically elected and his government had been in power for three years when Pinochet overthrew him. Allende himself never imprisoned anyone, did not shut down any opposition radio stations or newspapers, nor set up a single concentration camp.

But Pinochet certainly did. He imprisoned thousands of Chilean left-wingers. If you read the text shown in the video, it gives the number of people imprisoned by the b*stard as 3,000. Reisman claims that these victims were not innocents. They were. One of them was Victor Jara, a popular singer and musician. Apart from imprisoning and torturing members of the Chilean left, he also used football stadiums as the venues for their execution.

As for preventing Hitler from coming to power, Democratic Socialist points out that both Hitler and Pinochet had the backing of the capitalist class, and both claimed they were saving their countries from Marxism. This is accompanied with footage showing troops in coal-scuttle helmets doing a kind of goose-step. They could be Nazi storm-troopers, but they’re not. Democratic Socialist doesn’t point this out, but they’re actually Chilean soldiers. Pinochet was a fan of Adolf Hitler, and deliberately modelled the uniforms of the Chilean army on those of Nazi Germany. And to anyone from the Right, who wants to dismiss this as coming from a tainted left-wing source, I didn’t get it from a left-wing newspaper. It came from an article in the Daily Mail years ago. So definitely not from a left-wing source!

Democratic Socialist also puts Reisman right about the possibility that Pinochet would have saved Russia from Communism. Well, that was what the Russian Civil War was about, when the Whites tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks. They had thousands of little Pinochets, but were defeated as they faced an army of armed revolutionaries, not unarmed, innocent civilians.

He then goes on to demolish the claim that Pinochet stepped down voluntarily in 1988. He didn’t. He was forced out by the other members of his vile junta after he lost a referendum. Pinochet himself was planning to overturn it.

And unsurprisingly, Reisman claims that Pinochet’s economic reforms benefitted ordinary Chileans. They didn’t. They simply plunged them into even worse poverty.

Democratic Socialist also compares Pinochet’s regime with Castro’s revolution in Cuba. Pinochet overthrew a democratically elected government, and imprisoned and tortured innocents. Castro, by contrast, overthrew the Bautista dictatorship, which was also supported by the capitalists, and which had killed thousands of political opponents.

He also takes issue with the claim that capitalism has not killed anyone, or is not responsible for the same number of deaths as global communism. He shows this to be untrue by citing the figures for the famines in China and India created by capitalism, and of the horrific punishments inflicted by capitalist regimes when their workers aren’t productive enough.

He ilustrates the last with pictures of Black Africans with missing limbs. These are from the poor indigenous people of Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, when it was the personal possession of King Leopold in the late 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. These people were forced to cultivate and produce rubber for the king. If they were unable to meet their quotas, they were flogged or had their hands and feet hacked off. If you want to see the photos for yourself, along with some of the other grim depictions of slavery and the slave trade through the ages, try Susan Everett’s Slavery, published by Buffalo Books. It’s a big coffee table book, rather than academic text, but it does cover slavery throughout history, including the ‘Coolie Trade’ in indentured Indian and Chinese migrant workers.

This is very much the type of pernicious lies which the Republicans and the Libertarian wing of the Tory party over here have been trying to spread about Pinochet’s regime in Chile. Thatcher was very much part of the Libertarian wing of the Tory party, and she was very much a friend and admirer of the old b*stard, when he came over here for medical treatment. Or to evade arrest after a left-wing government took charge of the country.

And far from Allende destroying democracy and setting up concentration camps, part of what made him so dangerous to the Americans was that he was democratically elected and was not destroying democracy in Chile. This undermined the right-wing attempts to present Communism as a threat.

The Communist regimes have been responsible for massive repression and famine across much of the world, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China. I wouldn’t like to say that capitalism has killed more people than Communism, but it has certainly produced millions of deaths. For example, capitalist ideas about the sanctity of free trade were partly responsible for a horrific famine in India, which carried off millions. See the book Late Victorian Holocausts, which is shown in one of the pictures in the video above.

Cenk Uygur Demolishes Confederate Mythology around General Lee

Cenk Uygur is the main man of the American left-wing internet news show, The Young Turks. He’s said in the past that when he was at College he used to be a Republican, until he woke up to how harmful and vicious their policies were. He has also said that he was unaware just how brutal and horrific segregation and White supremacy in the South was until he visited a museum of Black history in the South, and found out from there just how absolutely horrific and barbaric the abuse and lynching of Black Americans actually was. He is passionately and very loudly anti-racist, and in this clip from his news show, he very loudly and angrily demolishes not just the myths surrounding the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, but also the racist mentality amongst the Republicans that still claims that Lee should be respected and promotes a whole series of myths about the South and how they were the real victims of what they term the War of Northern Aggression.

The occasion for his tirade was the appearance on Fox News of Trump’s chief of staff and foreign policy expert, John Kelly. Fox is outraged at the taking down of statues to Confederate generals and politicians up and down the country. After asking Kelly questions about contemporary issues and Trump’s policies towards them, they then asked for his views about General Lee, whose statue and commemorative plaque in Washington were also coming down.

Kelly replied that Lee was a decent and honourable man. He defended his state because at the time, the states were considered more important than the Union. One’s first loyalty was to their state, then to the US as a whole. And the Civil War was provoked by the North’s refusal to compromise.

Uygur points out that all of this is a lie. States weren’t more important than the Union, as that was the whole point of the Civil War. He also shows a whole series of tweets from the Black activist, Ta-Nehisi Coates correcting some of the deliberate falsehoods Fox and Kelly spouted.

Firstly, in stark contrast to Kelly’s comments, the North repeatedly tried to reach a compromise with the South. For example, they compromised with the South over the three-fifths rule, in which enslaved Blacks in the South were considered three-fifths of a human being. This was to allow the South to retain its power to elect presidents based on the size of their populations, while at the same time denying them the right to vote. Lincoln himself wasn’t an abolitionist. He just wanted to limit slavery, not abolish it. But that wasn’t good enough for the South. And there wasn’t just one compromise, but a series of compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise and so on. Finally, in order to hold the Union together, Lincoln offered a compromise in which only ten per cent of the population of the South had to swear allegiance to the Union. This was rejected as well.

And then there were the reparations payments Lincoln offered to the slave-owners to compensate them the loss of their property. Uygur states very definitely that he’s glad this was rejected and the country went to war, as this meant that the slaves were freed and the slaveowners got nothing.

He also takes the opportunity to demolish the myth going round the South that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was about ‘states rights’. States’ rights to what? Slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy made no secret that they were going to war to defend slavery. He quotes one Southern politician as stating that he wanted to invade Central America, in order to extend the blessings of slavery there, and also export it to the North despite their aggression.

He then goes on to tackle the argument that the people back then didn’t realise how evil slavery was. Quoting Ta-Nehisis Coates, he argues that the majority of people in South knew all too well how evil slavery was. This was the enslaved Black population. But no-one asked them, as they didn’t count.

As for Lee himself, the myth is that he personally didn’t believe in slavery, but was forced to defend it through his loyalty to his home state. This is rubbish. Lee believed very much in slavery, as Uygur goes on to show. Not only did Lee own slaves himself, but he also inherited them. However, it was a condition of the will that those slaves should be freed. Lee actually went to court and contested the terms of the will, so that he could keep them in slavery. When his army invaded Pennsylvania, Lee enslaved a number of free Blacks, and brought them back with him as booty to the Confederacy.

And he was personally brutal to his own slaves. When two of his slaves were recaptured after escaping, Lee either personally beat them himself, or ordered his overseer to ‘lay it on well’. Not content with the suffering inflicted by the whipping, according to one of the recaptured slaves, he ordered that their backs should be washed in brine.

Uygur makes the point that, rather than being men of honour and integrity, the Confederate leaders were traitors to America, and it’s very, very good indeed that they lost a war, which ended slavery without giving the slave-owners any compensation for their losses. He fully supports the taking down of the Confederate statuary, and states that if Fox doesn’t like living in modern America, they should leave. But in stark opposition to what supporters of the Confederacy say in the South, it is not northerners, who don’t understand their history, it’s those in the South, who believe in and propagate these myths.

Secular Talk: California Moves to Introduce Single-Payer Healthcare

In this clip from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski comments on a move by politicos in California to introduce single-payer healthcare. He states that it’s been a great week for such initiatives. His show had already covered the way a crowd of Republicans at a town hall meeting in the American south had cheered when a Christian lady stated that, as a Christian, she believed her country should introduce ‘Medicare for all’. Later in the clip, Kulinski reports how poll research has shown that support for the government ensuring that all Americans have healthcare has now grown to 60 per cent. This is something of a recovery, as 64 per cent of Americans had supported this statement, but this had then dropped much lower. Kulinski says that he used to believe that single-payer healthcare should be introduced at the federal level. However, Conservatives object to this on the grounds of states’ rights, feeling that the power here should be kept to the local state authorities. Kulinski feels that we should now meet them halfway on this. It will, however, be extremely difficult to do it this way, as the healthcare companies, big pharma and the other corporate interests realise they will lose some of their profits if single-payer is introduced. So they will do everything they can to prevent it, just as they have done with the other states that have tried to introduce it.

Kylinski is still optimistic, as he feels that if anyone can do it, California can simply because of the state’s size. And he looks forward to other states following it, so that there are separate single-payer healthcare systems in place in Kentucky, Alabama and so on, until eventually single-payer is introduced for all Americans at a federal level.

Amen to that.

Secular Talk: Oklahomas Bans History Course; Fox News Wants to Ban State Schools

This video from Secular Talk, the atheist news show, dates from February 2015. I’m not an atheist or secularist, and this is an American issue. Nevertheless, Murdoch is over here too, and he would just love to buy up the Beeb and replace it with his own grotty channel. And likewise, his stooges and collaborators in the Tory party want to privatise state education, just as Dirty Rupe would like to take over part of the school system. So, this needs to be put up, and discussed over here.

Kyle Kulinski, the show’s host, talks about a clip on Fox News, where one of the hosts simply says, flat out, ‘There shouldn’t be any state schools’. Why? Well, the school board in Oklahoma has taken the step of getting rid of a history course on the grounds that it contradicted the doctrine of American exceptionalism. This is the idea that America is simply far and away better than anybody else, full stop, and has never, ever done anything wrong. The course taught students about slavery, Jim Crow and Segregation, and the genocide of the Indians. This all happened, and were part of American history. As Kulinski points out, this needs to be taught along with all the good America has done for the world, like the Marshal Plan and so on. But it didn’t satisfy the Right, who have totally abolished the course and replaced it with Reagan’s speeches.

I’m surprised they got away with that, as it is political indoctrination. There’s no two ways about it. My guess is that there’s some arcane clause in the Constitution connected to states’ rights which allow them to do so. Which is probably why Kulinski recommends making state education a federal, not a state responsibility. And naturally, as an atheist he’s concerned about what would happen if the schools in Alabama and the Conservative southern states were privatised, with the introduction of religion and the probably removal of evolution. I don’t share his concerns here, having attended an Anglican Church school which did teach evolution, and actively preached against sectarianism and racial hatred. I’m more concerned about the privatisation of education and its replacement with fee-paying schools. But on a wider issue, Gove and the Tories want to do much the same over here as Oklahoma has done. Gove wanted the school curriculum here in Britain to be reformed to celebrate Britain more. He was particularly incensed at teachers for informing their students about the horrors of the First World War, rather than celebrating it. You may remember Mike over at Vox Political attacked Gove for whining about how the history taught about the War resembled Blackadder Goes Forth. Presumably, this is what Gove and Thickie Nikki Morgan would like to replace proper history with. Only instead of Reagan’s speeches, it’d be Thatcher’s.

We need proper state education, and the impartial teaching of history, which tell its students about both the good and the negative parts of their countries’ past. And we definitely need to stop propagandists like those on the Oklahoma School board, Murdoch, Gove, Morgan and the rest of the Right trying to indoctrinate young minds with their own skewed views.