Day of the Long Knives

cross-posted at PFS blog
Related:

• Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow

After some problems, not to speak of the whole Mark Skousen debacle, the venerable Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) seems to be on the right track.

But an interesting PC episode has been on my mind recently. The November 1996 issue of The Freeman contained a Book Review (2; 3) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe of The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars (edited by Richard M. Ebeling and Jacob G. Hornberger).

In the review, Hoppe pointed out–in arguing against the war–that Hitler had killed relatively few people until the war, mostly fellow Nazis, as compared to US ally Stalin; Stalin had killed 20 million of his own people before the war. This true statement angered a number of people, including a famed Austrian economist on the FEE board [Kirzner, IIRC]. As he wrote:

While the facts and the conclusions reached are largely correct and reasonable, the book is not without shortcomings. Even a professed “revisionist” such as Ebeling cannot free himself entirely from orthodox-leftist historical myths when he appears to liken and classify as on a par the “evils” of Stalin and Hitler and the socioeconomic character of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. From 1929 to 1939, in peace time, Stalin and the Bolsheviks killed about 20 million Soviet citizens, for no predictable reason. Hitler and the National Socialists ruined the businesses and careers of hundreds of thousands ofGerman citizens, but the number of people killed by them before the outbreak of the war was only a few hundred, most of them fellow Nazis and all of them for a predictable reason. Even immediately after the onset of the war, when it became known that the Nazis had begun to engage in “mercy killings” of the incurably insane (euthanasia), the Catholic bishops, led by Bernhard von Galen, openly protested, and German public opinion compelled the Nazis to halt the program. Bishop (later: Cardinal) von Galen survived the Nazi regime. Under Stalin and the Bolsheviks, any such opposition was impossible and Bishop von Galen would have been quickly disposed of. Also irritating is Hornberger’s inclination toward psychobabble, according to which Hitler and national socialism are somehow the outgrowth of parent alcoholism and child abuse.

Next came Robert W. McGee’s article “Arab Terrorism: Causes and Cure” in the December 1996 issue of The Freeman, about the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights. McGee pointed out that Palestinians have had their land stolen and have been subjected to numerous other abuses since the 1940s, with the help of American taxpayers.

The economist, angered by the two articles, resigned from the Board in protest. The president of FEE [Hans Sennholz, I believe, who as a former German Luftwaffe pilot was bending over backwards in contrition] then fired Lawrence White (2), the editor of the November issue in which Hoppe’s book review appeared; Robert Batemarco, the book review editor; and Robert Higgs, the editor of the December issue, in which McGee’s article appeared.

So at this point it appeared that Hoppe, McGee, White, Higgs, and Batemarco were persona non grata with FEE. One ironic aspect of this is that White, who has disagreed with Hoppe over free banking issues, was fired for publishing Hoppe’s book review.

And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the father-in-law having an affair with his daughter-in-law, who ends up committing suicide. Wait, whoops, I think that’s Hillsdale (Liberty‘s Hillsdale page) I’m thinking of. Nevermind.

[From LRC Blog, May 20, 2004]

Update: see Paul Gottfried, “Hoppe and the Freeman,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (April 1997): 14–16

HOPPE AND THE FREEMAN

Paul Gottfried

Recently bad feelings were aroused when social economist Hans-Herman Hoppe, in a book review, questioned whether Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were “on a par” politically in the 1930s. On the basis of economic control, degrees of surveillance, and the difficulty one would have had leaving or entering these countries, Hoppe considers Soviet Russia in the thir-ties to have been more totalitarian than Nazi Germany.

Note that Hoppe does not draw this comparison as a Nazi apologist, a charge that was made against him by several “libertarian” New York critics, after his review came out in The Freeman. Nor does Hoppe underestimate Hitler’s destructive capacities that were fully unleashed during the Second World War, especially against the Jews.

Hoppe only says that the book he is reviewing is wrong. A disinterested spectator looking at the Soviet and Nazi experiments in the thirties would have found the Soviets to be more murderous and socially intrusive. He cites the case of Bishop Bernhard von Galen and other Catholic prelates who pro-tested the Nazi program of euthanasia. Unlike the response of the Soviet regime, which would have been to kill the churchmen, something Stalin had already done to Orthodox and Catholic clergy by the hundreds of thou-sands, the Nazis halted the off ending program.

But many intellectuals today continue to whitewash Soviet agents and perpetrators of Communist atrocities. Then and now, many in America and elsewhere have tried to defend the Soviets as an alternative to fascism, although neither fascist Italy nor Nazi Germany until the forties came close to replicating the brutal horrors of Communist rule.

Hoppe was guilty, however, of violating another less offensive leftist historical myth, one that requires that Stalinists and Nazis be treated as equally totalitarian. Supposedly both represent two sides of the same coin—or two different fascist faces, one the unadorned article and the other what Harry Truman called “Red Fascism,” i.e., fascists who pretend to be progressives but behave like menacing rightists. Alas this unhappy metaphor sacrifices veracity for the sake of sensitivity.

In order to make anti-Communism respectable to those who fear the nationalist right and dread whatever is associated with Nazism, liberal anti-Communists (and for years yours truly) presented the Communists as imitation Nazis. Like Nazis, Communists, we said and were told, practiced terror, persecuted demonized minorities, and fought wars of expansion.

Works by Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brezinski, and Hannah Arendt were cited repeatedly in support of the argument that right- and left-wing totalitarians were more alike than different. After all, didn’t both engage in mass-killing, manipulate communications and education, and make truth relative to what those in power wanted their subjects to believe?

One problem with most of these presentations, and with George Orwell’s anti-Communist (but really anti-fascist) novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the reduction of the Communist totalitarian model to its Nazi counterpart. Most analysts of totalitarianism impose the Nazi model upon the Soviet experience. This is equally true for the interpretations of Soviet tyranny offered by some of the conservative emigres whom I grew up reading. Both Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss seem to have had in mind the Nazi regime that they encountered as young men when they described the Soviets. Significantly, both were far more terrified by the anti-democratic neopagan Nietzsche than by the fathers of European revolutionary socialism.

The most dangerous sources of totalitarianism are on the left, as Hoppe suggests in his critical observation and as George Watson and Ralph Raico, among other historians, make clear. With Communist regimes, totalitarianism has been the rule, and some have killed even more victims than Nazi Germany. At its worst Hitler’s government was following the pattern of mass extermination initiated by the Soviets.

By the late thirties, taking into account the forced starvations of Soviet farm collectivization and the mass killings of political and “class” opponents, the Soviet Union had killed many millions more than all the fascisms in existence. Moreover, mass killing and the suppression of all dissent was not characteristic of all fascism, as witness Mussolini’s regime in the twenties and clerical fascists in Austria in the early thirties. Clerical fascists were, for the most part, only mildly authoritarian, made minimal efforts to control the economy, allowed people who were not active enemies of the regime to cross borders, and had more of a dissenting academy than exists in today’s America.

By contrast, Communist regimes have been totalitarian, unless in a state of utter collapse. Stalinism, Maoism, PolPotism, and Castroism have involved paradigmatically totalitarian forms of government. Erasing any line of separation between state and society, nationalizing the economy, and incarcerating and murdering large percentages of the indigenous populations, the Communists have behaved inhumanely because of their obsessive goal of transforming the human race.

Truth was not served by treating this phenomenon as “Red fascism.” Nazis but not all fascists took over Red totalitarianism, after the evils of the: revolutionary left had been unleashed upon Russians and other hapless Eastern Europeans. And while Nazism was not simply a variant on Stalinism and had its own obsessions and gangsterism, much of what made it demonic was what it borrowed from the older and better-established totalitarianism.

Hoppe’s making of this argument may be an exercise in futility but one that should be made nonetheless. For unless our generation can be made to grasp what defines the socialist left, the passion for unbounded power to change human nature, we shall likely have to endure more of the same.

Socialism, after all, did not disappear with the fall of the Berlin wall; nor is the major danger to once free societies now being posed by neo-fascists. No less now than seventy years ago, socialism remains by far the most formidable threat to bourgeois classically liberal society, or what remains of it.

While fascism was merely a generational phenomenon that took both relatively benign and extremely malign forms, administrative collectivism allied to egalitarian doctrines has a far larger historical significance. It is the poison on which we continue to choke.

* * * * *

A concluding observation may be in order. Having read Hoppe’s offending statements to several scholars without any link to the “conservative movement,” none found anything particularly controversial about their content. My associate at Telos magazine, Paul Piccone, observed that I—or Hoppe—”was repeating something that even the Frankfurt School knew, that while both Stalin and Hitler killed, the Soviets were the first to create a totalitarian state.”

In conversation with Eugene Genovese, David Gordon obtained more or less the same response when he discussed Hoppe’s faux pas. Like Piccone, Genovese thought that what he was hearing was a historical commonplace. Whether it should be a commonplace, it is not, at least not among movement conservatives (and libertarians), who remain terrified of the charge of insensitivity. The publisher of the Freeman, for example, banned Hoppe forever more, and even fired the book-review editor [Batemarco —SK] and the guest editor of that issue [White —SK].

Thus we have more “concerned” robots, who cannot mention the horrors of Communism without bringing up the H-word. While he was admittedly quite horrible, the revolutionary left would have turned the 20th century into a night-mare even without that grotesque little man with the funny mustache. [RRR]

***

Appendix:

The Foundation for Economic Education — www.fee.org

Dr. McGee teaches at Seton Hall University.

Some of the information in this article was obtained from the April 1996 issue of Washington Report On Middle East Affairs.

Politicians are quick to condemn Arab terrorism such as the 1983 attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, Lebanon, the Oklahoma City bombing (that turned out not to be the work of Arab terrorists), the World Trade Center bombing, and the Saudi Arabian bombing that killed or injured hundreds of people. The press always devotes substantial coverage to such events. But the big question—the one that neither politicians nor the press ask—is, Why do some Arabs engage in such activities? Why are they willing to engage in suicide attacks and bombings, and why do they single out the United States (as well as Israel) as their target? What grievance makes them so willing to kill, and to die?

Anyone who pays any attention to the news knows that the United States has been the strongest supporter of Israel since its founding in the 1940s, and that various Arab states have, at one time or another, been enemies of Israel. Much less reported by the U.S. media is the violent Israeli aggression against the Arabs—Palestinians in particular—since the founding of Israel.

The Palestinian problem exists because the state of Israel was established on Palestinian land. During the 1948 war, the Israeli forces not only drove the Palestinians from their homes, but also made a point of dismantling more than 400 Palestinian villages, towns, and cities stone by stone, so that the Palestinians would have nothing to return to. As a result, three million of the estimated six million Palestinians are refugees, a million of whom are forced to this day to live in appalling conditions in refugee camps with little hope for the future.

The Palestinians’ property right, one of the most basic of all human rights, was systematically disparaged. The disparagement continues to this day, as evidenced by the West Bank settlement policies of the present Israeli government. Russian Jews and others are being given Palestinian land to live on, and the Palestinian owners are being driven from their land without compensation. Whole Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem have been confiscated and turned over to Jewish settlers in an effort to consolidate the Jewish hold on the city, which Israel is making the capital of the Jewish state.

The land grab is only one of many human rights abuses that the Palestinians have endured. Palestinians are subject to searches at numerous checkpoints in their own country. Their homes can be blown up without due process if a family member is merely accused of terrorist activity. There have been systematic attempts to prevent Palestinians from getting an education, as evidenced by the closing of Palestinian schools. While the official reason for the shutdowns was to close places where Palestinians could gather and organize, Israeli government officials also closed correspondence schools, where no gathering could take place.

Beatings, torture, imprisonment, and even killings of Palestinians have become commonplace. Palestinian farmers have been deprived of water for their farms, while Israeli farmers get what they need. Palestinian freedom of travel has been restricted or denied on numerous occasions, making it difficult or impossible to visit family or go to work, thus causing economic hardship. Christian and Moslem Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza have been prevented from worshiping at Jerusalem’s religious sites for security reasons. Palestinian merchants who sell watermelons in the local market have been beaten because they sliced open the watermelons, revealing the colors of the Palestinian flag, which was forbidden at the time. Palestinians have also been beaten for wearing shirts in the colors of the Palestinian flag. During the recent election, right-wing Israeli party posters placed in front of polling places falsely warned Palestinians that their health and pension benefits would be taken away if they voted, greatly reducing the number of Palestinians who dared to vote. Some of those who tried to vote were beaten by police.

About 40 Israeli police beat one young Palestinian in front of James Moran, a member of the U.S. Congress. Bystanders said this sort of thing happens all the time. Israeli rubber bullets have caused some Palestinian youths to become brain dead. Between the start of the intifada in 1987 and mid-1995, more than 1,400 Palestinians, including 260 children were killed. The American press devotes little or no space to these Palestinian murders, yet never fails to cover a story involving the death of one or two Israeli soldiers.

U.S. press coverage is biased toward Israel. But that is not why some Arabs want to blow up Americans and American property. One of the main reasons these Arabs are outraged is because the U.S. government has been the strongest supporter of Israel from the very beginning. Sirhan Sirhan, the Arab who assassinated Robert Kennedy, said he did so because Senator Kennedy approved the sale of military aircraft to Israel, which would be used to kill Palestinians. While the Holocaust was a tragedy, and while everyone agrees that systematic extermination of an ethnic or religious group cannot be condoned, it does not follow that the survivors of an abused group have some inherent right to found a country on someone else’s land.

U.S. taxpayers have been forced to support this land grab, and the many human rights abuses that have accompanied it, since the 1940s. For the 1996 fiscal year alone, American taxpayers had to pay more than $5.5 billion for various kinds of aid to Israel—$1,375 for every Jewish man, woman, and child (Palestinians don’t get the benefit of the aid). Yet Israel cannot be called a poor country. It has a gross domestic product per capita approaching that of England.

Re-Examining Foreign Aid

The whole issue of foreign aid needs to be reconsidered. The U.S. Constitution provides for a government of limited powers. The government can do constitutionally only what is specifically enumerated. As the Constitution says nothing about foreign aid, it is constitutionally suspect. Those who favor foreign aid programs might argue that giving foreign aid is in the best interest of the United States. But even if that were sometimes the case, it does not follow that foreign aid programs become constitutional just because they might be in America’s best interest. Besides, the best interest argument does not seem to apply to Israel, a country that has received nearly $78 billion in foreign aid from the United States between fiscal 1948 and 1996. At least part of the military aid Israel receives is used to deny the human rights of Palestinians. The nonmilitary aid is used to support an economic system that is basically socialist. How can the United States have an interest in supporting such a regime?

American taxpayers are being forced to support Israeli terrorism and socialism. At the very least, the foreign aid spigot should be turned off, the sooner the better. In addition, politicians who have the courage should speak out against the human rights abuses perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Even if one concedes that the United States has some strategic interest in Israel (I do not concede this point), it does not follow that American taxpayers should be forced to support a corrupt regime that systematically abuses the human rights of a targeted ethnic group. Human rights are human rights, and no government should ever condone or financially support a regime that systematically disparages them. Once U.S. support stops, Arab terrorists (some of whom may legitimately be called freedom fighters) will be far less likely to attack U.S. property and citizens.

Although some Arabs hate the United States because of its support of Israel, that is not the only reason why some Arabs are angry with the United States. Historically, various U.S. governments have supported corrupt regimes. The United States government supported the Shah of Iran; a fascist South Vietnamese dictator who was fighting a communist North Vietnamese dictator; Stalin’s enslavement of millions of East Europeans; and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines when it was fashionable to do so. During the Gulf War the United States government came to the aid of a family of dictators in Kuwait who were being attacked by an Iraqi dictator. American soldiers were summoned to a Kuwaiti prince’s house to reinstall the gold plumbing that had been stolen by Iraqi soldiers—hardly a legitimate use of American troops. The U.S. government has supported a number of corrupt regimes in Arab countries over the years because American leaders thought it was in the best interest of the United States to do so. Although it is seldom in anyone’s true best interest to support corrupt regimes, it is a morally bankrupt policy, and the Arabs recognize that fact.

While cutting off American aid to Israel and ending support for corrupt Arab regimes might stop Arab terrorism against the United States, it will not stop the violence in Israel. That is unlikely to cease until human rights abuses are stopped and the land that has been taken is restored to its rightful owners. Muslims, Jews, and Christians can live in peace, but only when human rights, including property rights, are respected.