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.

HIGNFY Spreads More Lies about Russian Interference in American Election

The Beeb really does seem as determined as possible to spread as much Tory and right-wing American lies as they can, even if it brings us closer to a needless war with Russia.

Mike has already commented yesterday on the Beeb’s highly biased reporting of the sexual abuse scandal now engulfing parliament. The Beeb has seized on the Kelvin Hopkins story, and has been banging on about this, while casually ignoring the even bigger scandal about the number of Tory MPs, who sexually harass staff. Hopkins was briefly a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before retiring to the backbenches. He is accused of harassing Ava Etamadzadeh, to whom he allegedly sent an inappropriate message, and held his body close to hers when they shrugged. The major question here is whether Corbyn knew about the allegations when he appointed Hopkins to the shadow cabinet.

The Beeb has been endlessly promoting this story, with Corbyn stopped in the street by a Beeb reporter. And Laura ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg, who tweeted thirteen times about the allegations but has made no mention of the far greater number of Tory MPs accused of sexual harassment.

While it’s unclear if Corbyn knew anything about Hopkins, the MPs has been suspended from the party and the Labour whip withdrawn. Unlike the Tory party, where Theresa May certainly knew about the unwelcome attentions 36 of her MPs were foisting on their staff in a weekly reported nicknamed ‘the Ins and Outs’. So far, none of the MPs accused have been suspended and they are not being investigated. The only casualty so far seems to have been Michael Fallon, who resigned from his role as Defence Secretary. But Kuensberg wasn’t interested in this, preferring – as good Tory propagandist – to continue harping on about Hopkins instead.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/11/03/the-bbc-has-turned-the-kelvin-hopkins-sexual-assault-allegation-into-a-story-about-its-own-bias/

Then last night the Beeb decided it was going to retail once again Killary’s lies that she lost the election due Russian hacking and meddling in the US election on Have I Got News For You. They reported that Trump’s aides Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort were arrested for their corrupt links with Russia and Ukraine.

This is debatable. I can’t comment on Papadopoulos, but the FBI file on Manafort only mentions Ukraine. It doesn’t mention Russia.

The show also claimed that all the files that incriminated Hillary, showing her corrupt dealings in the Democrat party and her connections to Wall Street, were also released through Russian hacking.

They weren’t. As WikiLeaks themselves have said, and indeed the former British diplomat who took custody of the documents for them, the information was leaked by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Russia had nothing to do with it.

Now there’s probably a big story there about Manafort’s connections with Ukraine. Ronald Reagan patronised and supported the ex-pat Ukrainian organisations during the Cold War, giving their leaders posts in the various anti-Communist propaganda departments. These organisations and their leader, Vladimir Stetso, were former Nazi collaborators with a virulent hatred of Jews. Just as the current ruling Ukrainian coalition contains fully paid up, unreconstructed Nazis from the Pravy Sektor.

But we ain’t supposed to know about them. It might put us off the lie that the Maidan Revolution of 2012 was entirely spontaneous and democratic, instead of being stage-managed by Obama’s State Department under Victoria Nuland, George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which took over the CIA’s task of engineering ‘regime change’ when the Agency became too notorious for fomenting coups.

As for Killary, when in government she was one of the most hawkish members of Obama’s team, and was needlessly ramping up tensions with Russia and China. And the people backing her story about how it was due to the Russians, rather than her own venality and colossal lack of sympathy for the American people, are another bunch of sordid Nazis. They include the Von Mises Society, which is dedicated to privatising the state and destroying what little is left of American welfare provision. They also used to subscribe to eugenics and pseudoscientific racism. That means, they published a series of pamphlets and other literature intended to demonstrate that Blacks were thicker than Whites, and that America should not set up a welfare state, because this would simply be a waste of money. If people were poor, it was because they were biologically unfit. Particularly Blacks.

This is the kind of people, who are promoting Hillary’s lies about the Russians stealing the American election. And the Beeb seems happy to repeat this garbage, even if it means creating another wretched Cold War of the time that dam’ nearly destroyed the world the last time under Reagan.

I don’t know why the Beeb is actually doing this, apart from the issue of right-wing bias within the Corporation. Possibly its part of the whole Atlanticist mindset, which permeates much of the British governing class since America superseded us as a world power after the Second World War. We can only be a major force on the world stage by riding on America’s coat-tails. Everything they do, we have to follow. One British ambassador was told by his superiors in the Foreign Office that his job in Washington was to get up the Americans’ backside and stay there. And so Blair enthusiastically joined Bush in invading Iraq, creating the ‘dodgy dossier’ and lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to do so. And certain NATO generals were predicting that by May this year we would be already fighting Putin’s forces in the Baltic States.

That fortunately hasn’t happened, but I wonder if the generals, civil servants and politicians, who promoted this feel disappointed.

As it stands, it certainly looks like the Beeb are keen to defend Killary, even to the point of lying about Russian involvement and ratcheting up the Cold War a further notch or two.

And showing further that you cannot trust the Beeb to tell the truth about either the Labour party or the real state of affairs in eastern Europe.

RT America and Lionel on How New York Times Is Envious of RT’s Success

The American media and political establishment have launched a witch-hunt against left-wing alternative media, and especially RT, because of the way these news outlets are becoming increasingly popular. People are becoming disenchanted with the lamestream media, just as they are heartily fed up with establishment, corporate politicians. And that has got the media-industrial-political complex very worried.

RT is being particularly targeted for suspicion, ’caused it’s owned by the Russian state, and so must be part of a terrible plot by Putin and his minions to undermine America and destroy capitalism by, er, doing their job as reporters properly and holding government to account. Which means covering Killary’s corruption.

Now the New York Times has joined the witch-hunt with an article attacking RT.

In this clip from RT America, Ashley Banks and the media commentator, Lionel, of Lionel Media, discuss this story. They make the point that it’s based fear much in fear of Russia, and that RT is doing nothing more than every other media outlet. They’re expanding, yes, but every media outlet wishes to pursue excellence. RT has 2.1 billion views worldwide, and 2.2 million subscribers. But Pewdiepie has 57 million subscribers. Lionel goes on to say that the NY Times article is ‘confused and envious’, embarrassing, and looks like it was written by someone, who has only just found out what the Internet is and that it helps people. It’s like the Saturday Night Live sketch about the caveman, who says he just a simple man and doesn’t understand your modern ways.
He also makes the point that perhaps if the New York Times paid the same attention to their own affairs and developing their audience, they wouldn’t now have to sell off several of the floors in their 8th Avenue office block.

The Republicans hate the New York Times, as they somehow perceive it as a ‘liberal’ paper. But Counterpunch has repeatedly shown how it has a very corporatist, very pro-War bias. It was consistently for the Iraq invasion, and Chris Hedges, the Socialist journo and war correspondent, was sacked because he wrote opposing the War. Much of this new ‘Red Scare’ about supposed Russian interference comes from the corporate Democrats trying to find a scapegoat for Killary’s failure to win the American presidency, supported by some very unpleasant, extremely right-wing organisations. Like the Von Mises Institute, which used to publish pro-eugenics material and argued that Americans shouldn’t have a welfare state, because it would just keep the biologically unfit alive. Like Blacks. You won’t be surprised to hear that they also subscribed to pseudo-scientific racism, and so put out article which supposedly showed how Blacks were thicker than Whites etc. These are the people that Killary and her supporters have now allied with in their determination to close down RT and other left-wing or alternative media news outlets.

RTUK: Google Pulls RT from Prime Ad List in US

The assault of monopoly capitalism on alternative news sources continues. This very brief video from RTUK reports that Google have removed RT from its prime ad list in the US without notice, and quotes Kirill Karnovich-Valua, RT’s deputy editor in chief, as saying that the move ‘speaks to the unprecedented political pressure increasingly applied to all RT partners and relationships in a concerted effort to push our channel out of the US market entirely, and by any means possible’.

The pretext for this attempt to force RTUS out of the American market is that RT is owned by the Russian state, and the Russian government have been interfering in US politics. Such as by leaking all the incriminating documents showing how corrupt Killary and her corporate Democrats are, and how they manipulated the Democratic primaries in order to steal the nomination from Bernie.

In fact, this is just lies. The Russians haven’t interfered in the American elections, or at least, no more than usual, and they weren’t responsible for leaking the docs that embarrassed Hillary Clinton. It’s just Killary and her supporters, including far rightwing organisers like the Von Mises Institute, ramping up a new Cold War with Russia to deflect attention from the corruption and widespread discontent with capitalism in America.

It’s part of the same process of demonetization that is being inflicted on all the alternative news sources under the pretext of protecting the public from ‘fake news’. Those affected include left-wing news sites like The Young Turks, Democracy Now, Secular Talk, The Jimmy Dore Show, the David Pakman Show and Sam Seder’s Majority Report.

These shows don’t broadcast fake news. They are very different from Alex Jones’ Infowars, which has done nothing except push stupid conspiracy theories and extreme right-wing bilge about how the Democrats/Globalists/Reptoids or whoever are planning to take over America, put everyone into FEMA camps and turn them into mind-controlled slaves.

The real reason Google has done this is because no-one trusts the mainstream media, and the alternative news programmes on the internet are eating them alive. And so that corporate capitalism can remain in place, and that Americans and the rest of the world are denied any rights in the workplace, welfare benefits or single-payer healthcare, Google are now trying to push out RT and close down the others by starving them of advertising revenue.

Chicago University Bans Alt-Lite Speaker for Incitement to Violence

There’s a grim piece by Simon Murdoch on Hope Not Hate’s site today, reporting that DePaul University in Chicago has cancelled an event by Gavin McInnes because of a speech McInnes gave at one of the unis in New York urging his supporters to use violence against left-wing protestors. The article also discusses the formation of a militant ‘Alt-Knight’ organisation by another member of the same far-right grouping, which also shows how the Alt-Right and its ‘soft’ counterpart, the Alt-Lite, are becoming just another form of the Klan.

McInnes is the co-founder of Vice and a host on Rebel Media, a far right platform. In his speech at New York University, McInnes told his audience

“We’re the only ones fighting these [protesters] and I want you to fight them, too […] When they go low, go lower. Mace them back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them.”

Last year, 2016, he also founded Proud Boys, a fraternal order for men, ‘who are unapologetic about creating the modern world.’ Initiation into the organisation consists of four stages, the last of which is a physically violence confrontation with the Left. McInnes told Metro that this means involvement in ‘a major fight for the cause’, saying “You get beat up, kinck [sic] the crap out of antifa”.

He also told Metro that “not only would [he] love to speak” with those who protest in disagreement of his views, but that he will also “get violent and beat the f–k out of everybody”.

Members of the Proud Boys were involved in the violence at Berkeley, which erupted when Anne Coulter was due to speak there. The order also has a more ‘militant’ wing, founded by Kyle Chapman, who goes by the name of ‘Based Stick Man’, with McInnes’ approval. This calls itself the ‘Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights’. Chapman himself was arrested after fighting a member of the public at a rally in Berkeley. Before that, he had also been arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon at a Trump rally.

http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/05/18/rebel-media-hosts-speech-banned-statements-encouraging-violence/

It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear members of the far-right advocate violence against their opponents on the Left. It’s always been there, ever since Hitler founded the SA and then SS as the official paramilitary wings of the Nazi party, the squadristi of Fascist Italy, and the ‘Biff Boys’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Quite apart from the skinhead boot boys, who form the thuggish hard core of post-War Fascism in Britain, North America and Europe.

As for the Alt-Knights, the Hope Not Hate article states that it refers back to the ‘Alt-Lite’ movement of which McInnes and Chapman are members. Well, perhaps. But it also seems to be a nod to a much older, violently racist organisation: the KKK. The Klan’s full title, or at least one of them, was ‘The Invisible Empire of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.

The Alt-Right has been described as the Klan with keyboards. Now it seems that the similarities with the KKK are becoming ever stronger and more blatant every day. The other day The Young Turks commented on a torchlight vigil organised by supporters of the Confederacy to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee by the town council of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those protesting was Richard Spencer, the White nationalist, anti-Semitic founder of the Alt-Right. The protestors chanted ‘You will not replace us’, ‘Russia is our friend’, and ‘Blood and Soil’.

The presenters of the video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the comments by the protestors that it wasn’t a racist issue, is contradicted by Spencer’s presence. They also demolish attempts by the supporters of Confederacy, who have tried arguing instead that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They point out that instead of northern liberals not understanding history, it’s really southern Conservatives, as if you look at everything the leaders and defenders of the Confederacy wrote, they made it clear that it was about defending slavery.

This is a sharp refutation of some of the propaganda coming out of organisations like the Von Mises Institute, named after another Austrian free trade economist, who scarpered to America to escape the Nazis, while sharing their hostility to socialism and the organised working class. This outfit has also tried to argue that the Civil War was really about trade tariffs between the South and the rest of the US.

What they don’t comment on, but which makes the racist overtones of the protest very clear, is one of the slogans the crowd chanted. ‘Blood and soil’, or ‘Blut und Boden’ in German, was one of the watchwords of the Nazi party. It was based on the pseudoscientific doctrine that national characteristics were determined by the environment and landscape of a people’s racial homeland.

Observers of Trump’s rise last year remarked on the Fascistic violence that broke out against people of colour and left-wing protestors at the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. Trump himself in one speech actually urged his supporters to beat his opponents, promising to pay their legal bills if they did.
This development shows just how deeply rooted is violence in the far-right organisations that back him. And they also show how close these organisations are to the older traditions of violent racism in Nazi and Fascist paramilitary organisations and the weird regalia and ritual of the KKK.

A Fitting SF Book For Trump’s Attitude to Mexicans?

Fritz Leiber

Looking around one of the charity bookshops in Cheltenham on Friday, I picked up a copy of the novel A Spectre Is Haunting Texas (London: Granada 1971) by the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror novelist, Fritz Leiber. Leiber’s probably best known for his series of Fantasy novels featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. David Pringle, the former editor of the British SF/Fantasy magazine, Interzone, named Leiber’s You’re All Alone as one of the 100 greatest fantasy novels in his book of the same title way back in the 1990s. That novel is about a man, who gets caught up in parallel society of people, who live outside ordinary humans’ perceptions, very much like the denizens of London Below in Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel and TV series, Neverwhere.

I’ve wanted to get hold of a copy for some time, ever since the Scottish space scientist and science writer, Duncan Lunan, briefly mentioned it in his book on the colonisation of the Solar System, Man and the Planets. It was that night, after I’d gone to bed, that I realised how weirdly fitting the book is now that Donald Trump is president of the USA. Here’s the blurb:

El Esqueleto!

Christopher Corckett la Cruz (or ‘Scully’) is an actor, an extrovert and a ladies’ man. To most of the inhabitants of post-World War III he looks outlandish, even sinister. To their women he looks very comely. Earth looks equally odd to Scully. Hormone treatment has turned Texans into giants and their Mex slaves into unhappy dwarfs.

To the Mexes, Scully is a Sign, a Talisman, a Leader. To Scully the Mexes are a Cause. The time is ripe for revolution…

It wouldn’t surprise me if some Hispanic Americans didn’t find the book’s politics offensive or condescending. In fairness, the book was published in 1969, when attitudes to race were extremely different, and its heart is in the right place.

And the future the book describes could, terrifyingly, become all too real. The Washington military and intelligence establishment seems all too keen to start some kind of altercation with Russia, egged on by the Democrats, desperate to deflect attention away from the sleazy contents of the material published by WikiLeaks on the shady business dealings and corporate funding of their leaders. Trump wants to end immigration from Mexico by building the wall. He also wants to repatriate 11 million undocumented immigrants. But he’s not the most extreme of the Repugs. One of the most bizarre and reactionary suggestions for stopping immigration from Latin America I’ve come across from the party of Ronald Reagan and George ‘Dubya’ Bush was that illegal immigrants from Mexico should be forced into state servitude for a period of seven years. You know, like slavery.

There’s a nasty movement amongst the Republican extreme right, led by the Von Mises Institute and other corporate think tanks, to try to rewrite the American Civil War. Apparently, the issue wasn’t about slavery. It was about tariff reform. I’m not an expert on American history, but I very much doubt it. And so, I think, would just about every respectable history of the War between the States. Lincoln only reluctantly freed the slaves. There’s a quote from him, in which he said that if he could maintain the unity of the US by keeping slavery, he would. I think by that he meant that if keeping slavery would prevent the break up of the US, then he’d make that decision. And when you consider the horrific carnage that the war brought about, you can easily understand why. Nevertheless, he couldn’t avoid civil war, and freed America’s enslaved. And thus he rightly became one of America’s greatest politicians.

Now right-wing extremists in the Republicans are trying to reverse Lincoln’s achievements, and obscure the causes of the Civil War in an attempt to make a suitably inspiring, sanitised history for those raised on Reagan, von Hayek, and the Fascist enablers of the Chicago school, like Milton Friedman.

Leiber’s title seems to me to be taken from the Communist Manifesto. This opens with the line ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, before going to claim that it’s the spectre of revolution or Communism. It was rushed out in 1848, the year of revolutions, when all over Europe working people and occupied nations rose up against their class and imperial overlords.

We don’t need violent revolution, and the horror and mass death that comes with it. But we do need strong, left-wing movements to defend and protect ordinary people from increasingly predatory and exploitative political and industrial elites.

And perhaps the whole world now need an El Esqueleto to protect them from Trump.