Communism Pretty Much Sucks

A couple of statistics about Germany:

Among more than 600 members of management and supervisory boards at Germany’s 30 largest companies, fewer than a dozen lived in the German Democratic Republic when the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989. Many of them are politicians or labor union officials, not executives.

That is 2% of the nation's executives from an area that makes up around 20% of the population.

The rapid productivity gains eastern workers made after reunification have stalled: they are still only 76% as productive as western ones. That is partly because the east German economy is concentrated in less productive industries, like construction and agriculture. But even in others, like finance, eastern workers have made smaller productivity gains than westerners.

Unless there were major regional economic  differences between the east and west of Germany before World War 2, and as far as I'm aware the east wasn't considered notably poorer, it illustrates just how much an atrocious political idea can deplete the human capital of a country. That the legacy of communism is still so pronounced more than 25 years after it collapsed is a pretty damning indictment of the system.

Quote Of The Day- Perspective Edition

George Monbiot tweets about Rupert Murdoch withdrawing his bid for BSkyB:

This is our Berlin Wall moment.

Well the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't his Berlin Wall moment.

CAMRA- Or COMRA

The Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) may be a fine example of the free market working well. One of the little known facts about the organisation is that the most important figure in it's early years was the editor of the Socialist Worker. It may not be going to far to say that CAMRA is a Trotskyite entryist organisation hell bent on the destruction of the free market. On the other hand it may be going to far.

In support of this consider the appearance of Viz's "Real Ale Twats" with a typical meeting of middle aged Trots.

A Moral Vacuum

I missed the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks about Chinese communism when they were first made but they are actually quite disgusting:

SUE LAWLEY: I'd love to hear if there are any Chinese voices out there anywhere. If you'd like to put up your hand just to make a quick comment. But in the meantime, I'd like to go to the Archbishop of Canterbury no less who's sitting on the front row, Dr Rowan Williams, who went on an official visit to China a couple of years ago, didn't you?

DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That's right and the contacts I've kept up since then. But one of the things which struck me there was that we were not talking just about a moral vacuum in general, but a vacuum in what was once before the Cultural Revolution essentially something which guaranteed everyone's welfare. In the absence of that is quite a development of small local NGO's, a volunteer ethos beginning to grow, civil society beginning to spring up. But my question really is how all of that volunteer ethos with its inevitably pluralist assumptions, how that sits with a Confucian approach to society?

As Andrew Stuttaford points out the period that the druid is referring to includes the great man made famine of 1958-1960 where tens of millions of Chinese peasants were left to starve to death by the Chinese Communist Party.

If there is a moral vacuum it is the casual indifference of Rowan Williams to human suffering on a scarcely imaginable scale.

Seamus Milne Does History- Oh Dear

Compare and contrast- Seamus Milne discusses the history of Communism and the history of the British Empire:

Nazi Comparisons:

With the USSR are bad-

The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions.

With the British Empire are entirely reasonable-

No wonder Hitler was such an enthusiastic admirer of Britain's empire, which he described as an "inestimable factor of value". The echoes of Nazism in the colonial record are unmistakable

The Ends Justifies The Means:

With the USSR, yes-

communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

With the Empire, no-

But the question, as Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, puts it, should be: "Which narrative?" If Britain had genuinely come to terms with its imperial history, no senior politician would have dared suggest celebrating it or mobilising apologists to sanitise its record for schoolchildren.

The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.

By the numbers:

For the USSR, we must avoid an "ideologically-fuelled inflation game":

The real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.

With the Empire we can cherry pick sources about death tolls from idealogically fuelled nutjobs whose estimates are more than ten times those of mainstream historians:

To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead.

Etc etc.

How The World Sees Communism.

Interesting survey* at the BBC on how the world views the collapse of Communism 20 years on: Relief at the demise of the USSR seems to be widespread throughout the West even though feelings are mixed in the poorer countries. I'd argue that it the poor countries who have benefited most from the end of communism with the wave of democratisation that has spread throughout Eastern Europe, South East Asia and Latin America being a direct result of the absence of a communist threat.

The survey also asks what people think about free markets and the results are much more mixed:

With more than 40% of the French population believing that capitalism is "fatally flawed", the failure of the French left to win power for 15 years is remarkable.

In Britain only about half that number believe that capitalism is doomed and an even smaller number that the demise of the USSR was a bad thing although if they had surveyed Guardian Towers the results would have been very different.

* and an "interesting" headline!

Anti-Ostalgie

With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (metaphorical fall, the Germans are quite good at engineering), the commemorations are portraying it as the trigger for the fall of communism. However the event occurred about two weeks after the Hungarian government authorised multiparty elections, so I wonder whether undue significance has been placed on the Berlin Wall because of it's obvious symbolism.

I remember at the end of 1989 the news seemed to be coming from a different Eastern European capital each week as one by one the old regimes fell like dominos. The Romanian revolution was probably the most dramatic although not as I remember for the events which seem most significant in hindsight- the Ceaucescus on the balcony and their later execution- but for the brief civil war that occurred between the army and the secret police. The Western reporters would be on the streets filming the Army when shots would be fired from a tower by secret police snipers and everyone would react but the snipers would have disappeared by the time the army got there.

Mr Bono....

Tear down this wall.

A Communist Plot

I can't believe some people still support putting fluoride in the water more than twenty years after P.J. O'Rourke demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it causes communism:

Quote Of The Day.

John Bilger has an article in the Guardian calling for those Westerners who sided with Pol Pot to face justice. My reply in full:

Isn't Noam Chomsky a bit too old to stand trial now though?

Strangely enough they've deleted me.

Shameless Bilge.

Shameless Milne decides to apply his vast intellect and deep understanding of world affairs to Latin America. Joy.

I would have just commented at the Grauniad's site but as is traditional they are furiously censoring criticism of Milne but instead I'll do a partial fisking here.

On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran, ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared: "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." The climax of Stephen Soderbergh's two-part epic, Che, in real life this final act of heroic defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America.

Actually his last words were "Don't shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead"

But 40 years later, the long-retired executioner, now a reviled old man

Reviled by whom? Certainly not the Bolivian peasants who were only too glad to help get rid of the T-Shirt salesman.

Teran was treated as part of a programme which has seen 1.4 million free eye operations carried out by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. It is an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Guevara's legacy, but also of the transformation of Latin America which has made such extraordinary co-operation possible.

You know if I wanted to highlight the "humanity of Fidel Castro" I'd keep quiet about his involvement in Africa.

The seeds of this Latin American rebirth were sown half a century ago in Cuba. But it is also more directly rooted in the region's disastrous experience of neoliberalism, first implemented by the bloody Pinochet regime in the 1970s

The Pinochet regime was bloody, although considerably less so than Castro's regime. Secondly if 'neoliberalism' is so disastrous how come Chile is so much wealthier than the rest of Latin America now? Back in the 1950s Cuba was richer than Chile so if you want to compare their current status we can see which philosophy works best.

Cuba, famous for first world health and education standards - with better infant mortality rates than the US - in an economically blockaded developing country.

Cuba's literacy rates and infant mortality figures were always very good long before the arrival of Castro. In fact before Castro Cuba's infant mortality figures were the 12th best in the world compared to around 30th best today. Does Shameless want to guess as to who established Cuba's education system?

Less well known is the country's success in diversifying its economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union

That's a nice euphemism for promoting child sex tourism.

I must admit I'm a little bit surprised that Seamus Milne is such a avid fan of 'Che'. What on earth can he see to admire in an over privileged and somewhat dim radical who used the poor as an excuse for promoting his extremist ideas....

Quote Of The Day.

It is the 50th anniversary of Castro's seizing of power in Cuba, so naturally the Guardian is publishing lots of celebratory articles (mostly repeating the same lies and propaganda that the regime has been pumping out for 5 decades). In the comments to one such article a Guardianista addresses the inconvenient fact that Cubans are effectively imprsioned on the island:

Here's one aspect of this. Cubans have free education and medical care. The illiteracy rate is one of the lowest in the world. Also, many people have govt. related jobs.

Imagine if the States had the same thing. And then suddenly huge numbers of people who received this emigrated. How would the govt. react? Would they say so long? Would they make it hard to leave? Would they say, ungrateful ____. After all we did for you and THIS is how you thank us?

'Protection'

In Richard Gott's latest article the former paid KGB stooge, writes:

Land devoted to growing cannabis, coca and poppies has grown five-fold since the 1960s, and the Farc found new support by offering its protection to rural workers on these plantations.

That's awfully good of FARC, protecting all those poor workers. It seems to be a stock euphemism of his, since in a previous article he wrote:

Land in Colombia devoted to growing cannabis, coca and poppies has grown fivefold since the 1960s, and the Farc has long provided protection to the rural workers on these plantations, as well as exacting tribute from the drug barons.

Using almost the exact same phrase to absurdly misrepresent a situation several months apart is very strange. Writers tend to express similar ideas in different ways in order to keep it fresh, the fact that Gott is repeating himself suggests to me that these are talking points he has agreed to propagate. It wouldn't surprise me if he is back on the payroll of a foreign government.

Maoists & Gurkhas

Daniel Hannan MEP is in Nepal, presuambly observing the election, and he reports that Nepal's newly elected Maoist* government wants to stop the recruitment of Nepalese men into the Gurkha regiments of Britain ( along with those of India and Singapore).

They have been serving in the British Army since the end of the Gurkha War ( 1814-1816), a conflict which was concurrent with the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Not to be jingoistic, but fighting three wars on three continents simultaneously and achieving the desired objectives in all three is a pretty impressive feat!

Anyway hopefully the prospect of losing the Gurkhas can encourage the British government to treat them correctly.

* Hopefully their Maoism is about as deep as that of peace protesters who wear Mao T-shirts and 'Free Tibet' badges together.

War What's It Good For?

Whilst I'm on the subject of western leftists who have man crushes on Latin American demagogues, there is this article about US involvement in Latin America particularly Colombia and Ecuador, by someone called Hugh O'Shaugnessy. He asks:

The incident, in which at least 21 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) were killed, has had international repercussions. What use are armies in a region like Latin America?

The answer is in the question, killing marxist terrorists is a pretty good use of an army.

Livingstone's Stooges Smear Again.

Ken Livingstone's response to the rising tide of sleaze revelations concerning his channeling of funds to various racial grievence mongers is to get a racial grievance monger who receives finds from the mayors office to pen an attack on Boris Johnson. Michael Eboda is the editorial director of the 'Ethnic Media Group' which receives at least £38000 of taxpayer's money from Livingstone (there are probably far more indirect subsidies from advertising), a fact he neglects to mention in his Guardian piece.

I was going to do a complete fisking of Eboda's smear piece, but it scarcely needs it, the smears are so transparent that anyone could see through them. Apparently someone shouted "Fuck off back to Uganda, you cunt" at the Yazz monster, in a room that Boris Johnson was in, so therefore even though Johnson didn't say anything of that nature it proves that he is a racist. Ken Livingstone actually does tell ethnic minorities to go home if they disagree with him, as the Jewish-Iraq Reuben brothers found out when they had a planning disagreement with the mayor who told them, “They should go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs, if they don’t like the planning regime or my approach.”.

I would say that this demonstrated some Chutzpah on the part of Team Ken, but I suppose throwing a Yiddish word in there would send them crazy.

The lack of self awareness on Ebola Eboda's part gets worse though. After castigating the audience's racist resposnses to him and Yazz (which oddly enough the recordings of the debate didn't pick up) he provides a bit more context.

And it was towards her that this particular volley of abuse was fired after, in response to a question from a saner member of the audience, she had had the temerity to suggest that there might, in certain circumstances, be a case for affirmative action to be employed.

The crowd seemed to get even more upset when I agreed with Yasmin. And I went further, to say that Britain had actually been practising positive discrimination for decades, but that the beneficiaries had, by and large, been white men; so why shouldn't we level the playing field?

So the crowd's supposed outburst of abusiveness, which wasn't picked up by the racist recording equipment, was in response to him and Yazz advocating racist recruiting policies. If the thin skinned, corrupt, alcoholic, antisemitic, totalitarian mayor of London is going to conduct a smear campaign he really should look for allies who are at least competent enough to fool readers of Comment is Free.

Cafe Hitler.

Samizdata highlights a bar named after the world's greatest mass murderer ever, Mao, with a quote from one of their commentators:

Kill six millions Jews in Germany, your name becomes a synonym with evil. Kill between 44 and 72 million Chinese, you get a café named after you. It's a funny old world, eh?

Actually there are bars named after Hitler or the Nazis, just not anywhere in the West where knowledge of his atrocities is almost universal. There are actually several Nazi themed institutions in South Korea:

Seoul - Israel's ambassador expressed outrage on Monday over a Nazi-themed bar in a South Korean city, calling it "revolting".

A report on the bar was published in Monday's Korea Herald, which carried a photo of a flaming-red swastika decorating the establishment's entrance, while a poster of a Nazi soldier wielding a rifle is displayed inside, the paper said.

"I think it's a disgrace, it's really revolting," ambassador Yigal Caspi told AFP.

Caspi said he was especially angry at the bar owner's explanation that he adopted the theme just to be different.

This isn't the first time that a controversy* over Nazi bars in South Korea** have hit international headlines. It isn't because Koreans are a nation of neo nazis, but because there is a level of ignorance about Hitler's crimes that doesn't exist in the West. The same level of ignorance that exists about the atrocities of Mao in the West.

* Is it really a controversy if almost everyone is on one side of the debate?

** I shouldn't single out South Korea, the same frivolous attitude to the Nazis exists in several East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Hong Kong.

{ Via Stephen Pollard }

Fun With Cut & Paste.

I might be to lazy to write anything original at the moment but I can cut and paste someone else's work just fine. There is an interesting piece on 'Comment is Free' about Iran's human rights abuses, the reaction of the commentators is predictable, but I thought this one by "Damntheral" might be the post of the year so far, this an abridged version:

HOW TO ANSWER AN ARTICLE ON HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE ON CIF - a quick how-to.

1) Check if the article is about Israel - if not, got to 2. If it is, go nuts with disapproval, use hyperbole, and wish for the disappearance of that country. If the writer is from that country, shout at them as if they support the abuse even though they are highlighting it in the first place. Explain how Israel is a puppet of the US anyway. Don't be scared of getting carried away: remember, you can't be anti-semitic, you're left-wing! Keywords: genocidal, neocon.

2) Check if the country is the US or the UK - if not, go to 3.....

Keywords: lapdog, orwellian, neocon.

3) Does that country have links, however tenuous and interested with the US/UK? If not, go to 4. If it does, go nuts with disapproval, huff and puff and explain that the entire regime is entirely the fault of the US/UK as though its inhabitants are sub-human beings with no moral capacity. Hey don't worry: you can't be racist, you're left-wing! Keywords: neocon, lapdog, puppet, neocon.

4) Take a deep breath: this is the big one. The author of the piece (and anyone agreeing with them) is a toxic neo-con warmongering zionist neo-con warmonger (if white) or a toxic neo-con warmongering Uncle Tom/coconut/quisling neo-con warmonger (all other options) and needs to be exposed as such. Make this dirty, make this personal, repeat yourself a lot. Anything goes frankly, slander, insinuation, insults. .....
Keywords: neocon, warmonger, what about, neocon, islamophobia, empire, neocon, discursive machine of hegemony, neocon.

.......

HELPFUL TIP: if you know absolutely nothing about the country in question and no one else has commented yet, a handy solution is to look at the victims instead. Are the victims Muslims? If so 3 probably applies. However keep in mind that Serbs and other Muslims are exceptionally allowed to kill Muslims and anyway it never happens ever so go to 4 instead or just ask what the point of the article is, and if someone answers call them boring.

Read the whole thing.

Politics & Threats To Science.

Like most people in this country I regard creationism as an intellectual absurdity, I was going to say I regard creationists as absurd but I realise that otherwise very intelligent people can sincerely believe ridiculous propositions, Isaac Newton and his belief in alchemy springs to mind. As long as they aren't aggressively trying to assert their idiotic beliefs I have no problem with them. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review has a post up about remarks made about evolution and creationism in politics by Marty Peretz of the New Republic:

He writes at the New Republic: "My minimum condition for and from a plausible president is that he accept that men and women are descended from apes and monkeys. Huckabee surely doesn't. But, then, I'm not sure that George Bush does either." Do scientists accept this either? Back when I was in high school, they taught us that apes, monkeys, and humans shared ancestors in common rather than that the last group evolved from the first two. It seems like an awfully imprecise way for Peretz to state a truth he considers so important.

This encapsulates a lot of the problems I have with those who sneer about the views held by certain people about creationism, usually they are just as ignorant and misguided about the science as the creationists themselves. The likes of Peretz who don't understand evolution but know that they are passionately supportive of it aren't a huge concern in any practical sense, they're just annoying. The real danger to evolutionary science comes not from creationists or the Peretzs of this world but rather from those who claim to believe in evolution but try to silence anyone who proposes that it may apply to humans as much as any other species.

E.O. Wilson's landmark book, Sociobiology, was met with immense hostility by the far left, including by supposed scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. He was variously physically attacked and smeared as a Nazi* by members of the far left under front groups like 'Science for the People' a totalitarian anti-science movement. Wilson's offence was to write a book about the biological origins of behaviour in animals, including humans whereas devout marxists like Lewontin believed that this blasphemes against Das Kapital. Whilst creationists and ID'ers believe errant nonsense they pose no serious threat to the advancement of science, the radical left on the other hand have a consistent track record of trying to derail politically inconvenient science.

* I don't endorse the whole contents of this site, I'm only linking to them because they have reproduced one of Wilson's essays.

Western 'Radicals' Support Murdering Indians.

One of the most contemptible features of the 'radical' far left is the enthusiasm of its members for sacrificing the lives of people in poor countries in order to indulge their narcissistic preening.

Attempts by India's communist party to rebrand itself has sparked a war of words between leftwing intellectuals in India and those abroad after a violent attempt by the party to seize paddy fields in West Bengal to be turned over to big business.

When armed communist cadres raided the village of Nandigram last month, killing six people and raping several women, thinkers and writers from across India decried the violence as a "bloody capitulation to globalisation and imperialism". Houses were burnt and thousands fled to refugee camps.

But the party has received support from fellow travellers in the west, notably academic Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn and writer Tariq Ali, who put their names to a letter in the Hindu newspaper highlighting the dangers of splitting the left at a time "when a world power has demolished one state (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran)".

[my bolding]
These people are complete and utter vermin.

Sumit Sarkar, a leftwing historian, said the western authors had an "ignorance of what is happening in India. They have no idea of the on-the-ground facts."

They don't care about the on-the-ground facts, as far as these sociopaths are concerned the lives of the poor are expendable in the service of their ideology.