The Truth is More Hiddeous Than People Would Willingly Believe

It's good to read this in conjunction with this, especially the section quoting Quentin Reynolds' book and his mens rea. Though this is reported, it won't really seep into most people's conciouses, nor will it be drummed into the conciousness like certain other episodes are. But in a just world, it would be.

Forgotten and Neglected History

First, I hate blogger's new format. Perhaps it's not new, but it's "new" to me because I haven't posted in quite some time. In any case, I'm posting from sections of a Gonzalo Lira post; setting asside the predictions he made in that post for the moment (they're hyperbolic), and referring only to the historical episode he describes. That episode was the reall nature of the Allende government in Chile:

However, my personal history gives me a slight edge in this discussion: During the period 1970–’73, Chile experienced hyperinflation, brought about by the failed and corrupt policies of Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Government. Though I was too young to experience it first hand, my family and some of my older friends have vivid memories of the Allende period—vivid memories that are actually closer to nightmares. . .

To begin: In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president by roughly a third of the population. The other two-thirds voted for the centrist Christian Democrat candidate, or for the center-right candidate in roughly equal measure. Allende’s election was a fluke.

He wasn’t a centrist, no matter what the current hagiography might claim: Allende was a hard-core Socialist, who headed a Hard Left coalition called the Unidad Popular—the Popular Unity (UP, pronounced “oo-peh”). This coalition—Socialists, Communists, and assorted Left parties—took over the administration of the country, and quickly implemented several “reforms”, which were designed to “put Chile on the road to Socialism”.

Land was expropriated—often by force—and given to the workers. Companies and mines were also nationalized, and also given to the workers. Of course, the farms, companies and mines which were stripped from their owners weren’t inefficient or ineptly run—on the contrary, Allende and his Unidad Popular thugs stole farms, companies and mines from precisely the “blood-thirsty Capitalists” who best treated their workers, and who were the most fair towards them.

Allende’s government also put UP-loyalists in management positions in those nationalized enterprises—a first step towards implementing a Leninist regime, whereby the UP would have “political control” over the means of production and distribution. From speeches and his actions, it’s clear that Allende wanted to implement a Maoist-Leninist regime, with himself as Supreme Leader.

One of the key policy initiative Allende carried out was wage and price controls. In order to appease and co-opt the workers, Allende’s regime simultaneously froze prices of basic goods and services, and augmented wages by decree.

At first, this measure worked like a charm: Workers had more money, but goods and services still had the same old low prices. So workers were happy with Allende: They went on a shopping spree—and rapidly emptied stores and warehouses of consumer goods and basic products. Allende and the UP Government then claimed it was right-wing, anti-Revolutionary “acaparadores”—hoarders—who were keeping consumer goods from the workers. Right.

Meanwhile, private companies—forced to raise worker wages while maintaining their same price structures—quickly went bankrupt: So then, of course, they were taken over by the Allende government, “in the name of the people”. Key industries were put on the State dole, as it were, and made to continue their operations at a loss, so as to satisfy internal demand. If there was a cash shortfall, the Allende government would simply print more escudos and give them to the now State-controlled companies, which would then pay the workers.

This is how hyperinflation started in Chile. Workers had plenty of cash in hand—but it was useless, because there were no goods to buy.

So Allende’s government quickly instituted the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios (“Unions of Supply and Price Controls”, known as JAP). These were locally formed boards, composed of loyal Party members, who decided who in a given neighborhood received consumer products, and who did not. Naturally, other UP-loyalists had preference—these Allende backers received ration cards, with which to buy consumer goods and basic staples.

Of course, those people perceived as “unfriendly” to Allende and the UP Government either received insufficient rations for their families, or no rations at all, if they were vocally opposed to the Allende regime and its policies.

Very quickly, a black market in goods and staples arose. At first, these black markets accepted escudos. But with each passing month, more and more escudos were printed into circulation by the Allende government, until by late ’72, black marketeers were no longer accepting escudos. Their mantra became, “Sólo dólares”: Only dollars.

Hyperinflation had arrived in Chile.

(Most Chileans, myself included, find ourselves both amused and irritated, whenever Americans self-righteously claim that Nixon ruined Chile’s economy, and thereby derailed Allende’s “Socialist dream”. Yes, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, Nixon did in fact tell the CIA that he wanted Chile’s economy to “scream”—but Allende did such a bang-up job of fucking up Chile’s economy all on his own that, by the time Richard Helms got around to implementing his pissant little plots against the Chilean economy, there was not much left to ruin.)

One of the effects of Chile’s hyperinflation was the collapse in asset prices.

This would seem counterintuitive. After all, if the prices of consumer goods and basic staples are rising in a hyperinflationary environment, then asset prices should rise as well—right? Equities should rise in price—since more money is chasing after the same number of stock. Real estate prices should rise also—and for the same reason. Right?

Actually, wrong—and for a simple reason: Once basic necessities are unmet, and remain unmet for a sustained period of time, any asset will be willingly and instantly sacrificed, in order to meet that basic need.

To put it in simple terms: If you were dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, would you give up your family heirloom diamonds, in exchange for a gallon of water? The answer is obvious—yes. You would sacrifice anything and everyting—instantly—in order to meet your basic needs, or those of your family.

So as the situation in Chile deteriorated in ’72 and into ’73, the stock market collapsed, the housing market collapsed—everything collapsed, as people either cashed out of their assets in order to buy basic goods and staples on the black market, or cashed out so as to leave the country altogether. No asset class was safe, from this sell-off—it was across-the-board, and total.

Anyhow, in that post Gonzalo Lira's focus isn't (primarily) the essentially lawless and vicious nature of the Allende government, but the economic results of its destructive and inhumane ideological policies aimed at enriching supporters and crushing dissenters.

This is what is ignored in the mythiography of Allende-as-martyred-democrat meme that is spread by our own ideological reality-shaping community, a movement with a long and ignoble history, but still a bright future for ambitious young people who want to combine passion with casuistry along with their devotion to the unlimited state.

Men at Work

A snapshot of something that's not usually so overt and generally doesn't work as conciously:

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

This is the underlaying mentality, almost never expressed at all, much less so starkly.

Compare with:

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

Quite candid, really.

Oh, and: Eric Alterman was on JournoList, and I think its predecessor, and no doubt will be on whatever succeeds it. Remember that next time you're tempted to take his claims of how stories in the Official Press are or are not formulated seriously. Though there is always this.

Holding the Gun and Pulling the Trigger

A response to this worthy post at Classical Values:

1) It is quite often helpful knowing the origin of an action, motivated by the ideas behind it, in order to combat it. Especially when the action often comes in the form of spreading concepts it advocated.

2) Holding X Cultural Marxist (either originator or successor) accountable in debate is not the same as jailing them or even outlawing them or even their ideas. It's part of responding to speech with speech.

3) I'm pretty sure you know both of the above, but your recent post on the subject could be clearer, implying as it does clearing their names. If for example Marx's ideas when put into practice tend to lead to what they have always led to, one can and should point out that there seems to be something wrong with Marxism (to put it mildly), not *just* with their practitioners. Otherwise it tends towards lending credence to the oft-asserted claim that "it wasn't really Marxism" or "that's not what Marx intended" - sure it may not be, but if the story always ends the same way, maybe the author is subject to a critique?

4) If people say "I advocate that X, Y, and Z be done to tear down this capitalist society we dislike," and then they teach people to do X, Y, an Z, and who then teach others, &tc. &tc, that's not just creating an idea, that's putting it into action. Especially if the ideas themselves revolve around marching through cultural institutions in this way. The hands of people like Marcuse aren't clean. To continue the analogy you initiated, if they're holding the gun and pulling the trigger, then it's not the same as sitting in a institute somewhere and imagining how one might bring down a society, then others stumble across your texts through no fault of your own and put the ideas into practice while you're at saying "no, no, I was only describing how one could do it, I wasn't telling you to do it" or at least maintaining a discrete neutrality. The members of the Frankfurt School may all be dead today, but they were the first not only to come up with their ideas, but to put them into practice, since that practice consists precisely in spreading certain attitudes and belief-sets.

5) Thus the best analogy might be akin to "Patient Zero" of AIDS, who kept deliberately spreading it after he was told what it was. Even then it's perhaps an inapt analogy, because at first he spread it unaware of what he was doing. These people knew from the start.

Politics and the Arabic Language

Musing a bit further on this article, particularly this section:

Next, our counterterror adviser evokes the perverse logic behind the administration’s recent decision to censor words offensive to Muslims (which I closely explored in this PJM article):

Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

Inasmuch as he is correct in the first clause of that sentence — “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” — he greatly errs in the latter clause, by projecting his own notions of what constitutes “holy,” “legitimate,” and “innocent” onto Islam. In Islam, such terms are often antithetical to the Judeo-Christian/Western understanding. Indeed, the institution of jihad, according to every authoritative Muslim book on Islamic jurisprudence, is nothing less than offensive warfare to spread Sharia law, a cause seen as both “legitimate” and “holy” in Islam. As for “innocence,” by simply being a non-Muslim infidel, one is already guilty in Islam. Brennan understands the definition of jihad; he just has no clue of its application. So he is left fumbling about with a square peg that simply refuses to pass through a round hole.

Until the recent "troubles" it wasn't just Islamic jurisprudence that properly understood what the term Jihad meant; it was universally understood throughout not just Islam but all cultures that had contact with Islam to mean warfare, specifically directed at non-Muslims or those declared heretics and thus deemed to be un-Islamic.

In recent times Muslim spokesmen working in conjunction with the usual suspects of PoMo intellectuals/pseudo-scholars and progressives have attempted to re-define the term. But one needs only to pick up any book from the previous era that even tangentially touches on the subject to see the term used in its proper historic meaning. As a student of ByzantinoRoman history I know this full well. Thus Ibrahim is actually wrong when he says, almost reflecting the thinking of Edward Said, that his "dual Middle-East/Western background gives me the advantage to understand both the Islamicate and American mindsets equally." Previous generations of Westerners also understood the term Jihad properly. The ethnocentric projection Ibrahim rightly condemns is actually a post-modern and multiculturalist phenomenon, and thus a rather recent innovation. This might seem like a minor quibble, but it's critical to our understanding of the problems we face.

It would be more proper to say that the word "Crusade" has transformed from its original meaning than it is to say "Jihad" has. After all, we have such things as "crusades for peace" and "The Billy Graham Crusade," neither of which involve mobilizing armies to recover¹ lands from Islam by military means. Jihad has never ceased to mean what it means, however, up through the mobilization of Arabs to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets and down through the present, though we are asked to believe otherwise. But we are told we cannot use the word "Crusade" because it is inflamatory, while also being instructed to re-conceive our understanding of calls for Jihad. This is a form of mental manipulation inflicted upon us not by our enemies, but by ourselves - or at any rate one wing of our own civilization.

And of course many young people, knowing little, having come of age in this era of degenerate pseudo-scholarship, educated by the instructors they have been educated, sincerely believe Jihad does not mean what it means. This is one means of intellectually disarming us, and leading people into accepting the received wisdom of progressivism on the sources and causes of this conflict, rather than connecting it to history. It helps open them to the conclusions of a Said or a Fisk or even their slightly-less-radical imitators: That we are to blame.

Redfining terms by those with an ideological axe to grind is almost invariably aimed at controling the thinking of others.

¹Yes, recover: Crusades, aweful as many Crusaders behaved, were launched as counter-attacks. To call any but the 4th aggressive is akin to calling D-Day agressive. But, in this degenerate age, that history, however bad it was even told "straight," has been corrupted for ideological ends.

The Governments Have Learned from their Mistakes

It's too easy to satirize the mocking of naive innocents such as Jonah Goldberg, to engage in the fun but unedifying art of tu quoque aimed at the well-meaning gentlemen who note market failure and imply the panacea: Good for what ails you! Got market failure? Government will cure it. Government failure? More government will cure it. Personal problems? Government is here to help you with all your needs.

We live in an era where some fringe cranks focus in an inchoate way on government failure, or the pitfalls of government solutions for perceived market failure.

Sophisticated people focus more on how we acting together in a socially-responsible way can fix the problems that irresponsible private actors have inflicted upon all of us. The enlightened main currents of opinion recognize that it is certainly annoying to clean up after these messes created by private individuals and institutions, but if we don't accept the burden, the costs to us all will be higher.

The trouble is, as sagacious as people like Kevin Drum are when compared to simple-minded people like Jonah Goldberg, these guardians of the main currents of enlightened opinion fail to think beyond stage one: Why is it that bankers won't learn from their mistakes? What incentive structures have been put in place or, as importantly, what has been demolished, so as to discourage them from learning from their mistakes?

Demolished might be too strong a word. Decayed, dissolved, deteriorated might all be better descriptions, as in a building not well maintained, as with much of our public infrastructure (oh, but shovel-ready will fix this as well!)

Here is the question they dislike most, as it reflects a shocking lack of faith in our ability to solve public problems through collective action: Have the institutions they favor demonstrated a better capacity for learning from their mistakes than the ones they mock? If not, why not?

Are California or Michigan or New York &tc doing better learning from their mistakes than Goldman Sachs is? Are they really? We mock the idea that bankers are, but is it a fair mockery? Or the gaunt, chilling laugh of those who are practically undead themselves?

Have the PIIGS learned from their mistakes? Really now, have they? Is there at least as much at stake here as there is in even the biggest "too big to fail" bank or corporation?

Those who think the problem was embedded in a previous Administration or one side of the aisle need to free their minds as well. The reassuring myth that it is all caused by having the wrong sort of people in government, and now we've got the right sort of master-minds involved; those who believe in government and have faith in its capacity to solve all problems, is one they may want to reconsider, and take a more historical view. If they can open their mind to untainted history.

A few points to keep in mind as they open their minds: Firstly, a group that swept into power asserting that they were going to make break with the failed policies of the past often use as one of their cudgels against those who object to their policies the fact that their policies are no different from that of the previous Administration's. This double-think has an old and dishonorable history, dating back at least to the Administration they most admire: FDR's, which has gone down in progressive history as a sharp contrast from the supposedly do-nothing lassez faire Hoover Administration, when the truth was "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started," as Rex Tugwell admitted.

Why is this ancient history important? Isn't it true that only cranks and nutters, usually on TV or Radio or at some obscure Think Tank, rave on about comparisons between Hoover and FDR? True, but ideological finger-pointing and sneering over this obscures rather than illuminates: It closes the mind you want open to engage in any reconsideration.

Exactly as it is meant to.

In this way, we lose track of the original task: Unravelling the big ball of string that has come down to us, in order to see where it leads us in answering our question: Why our are institutions, private as well as public, apparently no longer capable of learning from experience?

(Btw, how's fixing education working out for you? How has throwing money at the problem worked out for you? Do you retain faith in the same government that has complete and sole responsible for one District's public education system, the District of Columbia's, to solve the problem's of our country's education system? Where does DC rank in per-pupil spending? Has it become the shining jewel which the rest of the country should emulate?. Over the last, pick a time period, lets say 35 years, has government learned from its mistakes when it comes to the provision of education? And yet the wise are confident it will do the best of all possible jobs when it comes to, say, health care...or student loans...or home mortgages...or the auto industry).

Our enlightened, when they speak of society's problems and the need for "society" to address them, they always mean by the later government. <--- Non-sequitur inserted to keep in mind when considering all of this. Is their confident mocking laughter really warranted? From who's knee have the Banker's learned from since 1933 (or before)? Who shields them from the consequences of their own decisions? Who is shielding the rest of us from the consequences of ours? This confidence that we out here, private individuals and institutions, make mistakes, make blunders, but they are wise and will ever nudge us in the Correct Direction, save us from folly, and never lead us all into folly or, like lemmings, off a cliff (such as a cliff of unsustainable unfunded future mandates): Is it justified?

I assume the proper response is: If only we fallible members of the public would ever select the "correct" people to hold public trust, and never the "Right", all would be well: But again, it is our blundering that makes a mess out of their efforts on our behalf. We should not mock this confidence they have in their own ability, good intentions, and their sense that it is only the saboteurs and wreckers that constitute their political opposition who cause failures in government. But we should question this confidence as we untangle the ball of string that they have handed us in the form of opinion-leading Lippmanesque journalism and Schlessingeresque Court Historianism.

We might find that the tu quoque isn't a tu quoque at all, and that indeed it is their mindset that is the source of much of what they decry: That in the evolution of things, the problem is they have created a government that creates problems, then appoints itself to fix them, rinse and repeat ad infinatum, and that after sufficient iterations of this there is an utter displacement of responsibility. Who or what for example is really entirely to blame for the financial crisis? Both and all sides have some merit in the narratives they construct in order to point fingers at their despised boogiemen and hated political opponents. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible, and this is the political economy we have created, and will deserve until we fix it "as a society."

If you know the solution, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. But if you think you know the solution with the confident mockery that some have, but the solution you have is a sham-solution, one that merely iterates the cycle again rather than breaking and reversing it, then you are not a better man at all, but the worst, however full of passionate intensity you may be.

Not Can't. Won't

A decent post here, but I must quibble with some things.

First, if you're British, I can't give you better advice than what Peter Hitchens regularly gives: Don't vote BNP. Ever.

If you're looking for a solution to these problems, look elsewhere. If none exists, create one. Anyhow UKIP is much preferred over anything akin to the BNP. (I'm sure Shannon Love feels the same way about the BNP).

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces, in a narrative both historical and current that all the "stupid" people know is rubbish, but which the educated, intelligent people either believe or people pretend to believe and insist we all must as well.

That is because discussion of many of these problems are ruled out of bounds of civil discussion, except in the most anodyne and Progressive ways. But, more importantly, a response to a section later in the post is required:

If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift.

Not "cannot" but will not. They could address these things, but they have become so wedded to certain ideas, they do not want to. For the Progressive Left, these are not "problems", except to the extent that people resist their effects, and the mainstream conservatives have largely been coopted for their own reasons, suffering from, at best, learned helplessness in the face of them, because seriously working to fix these problems and undo their effects gets you castigated as a fascist hatemonger.

So then it should not be surprising to anyone that real problems that the political mainstream will not address are left to the real fascist racist hatemongers. They remain real issues, and people who want them fixed are left with no real recourse.

Let us not kid ourselves that this is a meta-Political Problem that only Britain or Europe faces. In America as well, matters which receive upwards of 70% of public support when polled are routinely declared "outside of the political mainstream", off the table of civic debate. The problems are real and remain, however. Eventually some person or party will come around vowing to address them, as things worsten.

A mainstream political party could. It is not a matter of they can't. They simply will not, for reasons of their own. This then makes it inevitable that solutions will be extremist ones. No one should want that, but they are making it increasingly likely.

This then is the real corruption of our political class, our elites, what Glenn Reynolds has called "the worst political class in [American] history". Petty graft in the form of earmarks pale by comparison.

The Real ACORN Scandal: The Responsible Press

As another video is released showing ACORN to be what it is, a question of how deep the corruption goes might arise.

As bad as it is for any institution claiming to work on behalf of the needy to be revealed as corrupt, and as bad as it is that this institution was long, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, given public funds with apparently little accountability or even desire for it, there is something worse that has been revealed.

As with the nature of ACORN, this exposure does not come as a surprise to many. But that in itself is appalling. What do I speak of?

It used to be that journalists would run with a good story without fear or favor. Even if they were "scooped" on it. It wasn't long ago that every aspiring member of the Responsible Press^® wanted to be the next Woodward & Bernstein, or air a grainy video expose' on 60 Minutes. It is not cuts at newspapers or network news desks that caused this to die. For here is a story given to them on a platter, a juicy story of sex, corruption, and politics. All they had to do was follow it further.

But they show no interest in it whatsoever. There is no member of the Responsible Press^® who is interested in the story. Not one. After five days, apparently many know little about it, when their job relies upon them being informed.

The era of Upton Sinclair & "Yellow Journalism" would be better than this. This is what professional journalism has produced, a Responsible Press^® that is not "biased", but completely blind in one eye, and that therefore fails catastrophically in its function as a reliable source of information.

ACORN at least is fulfilling it's intended purpose. The same cannot be said of the press corps.

They thus become enablers of corruption, in government and out, rather than watchdogs serving the public, the mantle they claim for themselves.

Resistance is Futile

So, Van Jones resigned and concerned citizens are rightly taking credit, while others plot their revenge.

Two questions:

1) Will the person the Administration appoints be substantively different from Mr. Jones?

2) What do you think the narrative of this will be in 30 days, if not less?

I think the answers are obvious, given that the well-informed segment of the population, which depends upon the Responsible Press^™ for information, is and will remain clueless about what was really going on here. This is because the problem is much larger than what you imagine it to be.

Two things will happen. First, a narrative will be constructed - is already be constructed - by the Responsible Press^™ that Mr. Jones was a victim of a vicious, unprincipled right-wing hit. The well-informed will accept it uncritically and tame in-house Conservatives, like David Brooks, will "concede" there is "something to that." They will consider this an "ugly episode" that distracted from serious public policy conversations.

Second, when the Administration, either through it's next "Green Jobs Czar" or not, advances the identical policies that they would have if Jones were still in the seat, if anyone resists, the cry will be "See? You won't compromise! You're hard-liners. We got rid of Jones for you, and still you reject any bipartisan effort in enacting these vital policies!"

Van Jones was at least a known quantity. It might have been easier to thwart the substance of the policies they want if he had stayed on. Getting rid of him is surely an accomplishment, of sorts. But really in the great scheme of things, it is small beer. If this is the height of triumph for opponents of Progressivism, they're in a sorry state indeed.

Update, 09/09/09: NYT writing the narrative