U.S. spends $1 billion on Israeli defense

source: SF Examiner)
Thursday, August 5, 2010

Recently we reported on the Israeli test of the Iron Dome missile defense system. It has now been reported that the US has provided more than $1 billion towards three of the missile defense systems under development by Israel.

The US House of Representative appropriations defense subcommittee recently appropriated $217 million to help develop a joint missile defense system with Israel. The appropriation is reportedly $95.7 million more than requested. (Read more from campaigniran.org)

Time Magazine Exploits Afghan Girl Who Had Her Nose Cut off to Defend Occupation

The cover of the new issue of Time — with its photograph of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban, accompanied by headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” — is disgraceful on several levels. (The image is here, and no, it’s not pretty; the cover story is here.)

Atrios (here and here) and Greg Mitchell (here) have made the obvious point: um, this happened while we were in Afghanistan. So the proof of how necessary it is for us to protect young women from brutal attacks of this kind is the fact that we couldn’t protect this young woman?

And does anyone at Time know the story of Zahida Parveen? She suffered a similar attack, yet even more brutal: her husband, believing she was having an affair, not only cut off her nose and earlobes but blinded her and beat her while hanging her upside down. Oh, but that took place in Pakistan in 1998. Following Time’s logic, I suppose the U.S. should have invaded and occupied Pakistan to prevent this from happening. (Read more from blogs.alternet.org)

This is so fucking dishonest, and an example of why I find it hard to not hate the mainstream media. They would just as quickly sensationalize the Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja if they could blame it on terrorists.

Shadowy Spy Group Building Dossiers On Internet Users For Feds

An organization that tracks 250 million IP addresses a day has been developing portfolios on Internet users and handing the information to U.S. federal agencies as the latest incarnation of the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness spy program is revealed.

A group calling itself Project Vigilant went public at yesterday’s Defcon security conference in an effort to add more recruits to its 600 member strong cyber spy force. The outfit announced that it had been tracking “Internet villains” for no less than 14 years and handing the information to federal authorities as part of a massive intelligence gathering program.

However, the target of one such investigation did not fall into the category of cyber criminals – “terrorists, drug cartels, mobsters” – that the group claims to be fighting.

The organization “encouraged one of its “volunteers”, researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April,” reports Forbes.

. . . .

Project Vigilant is an offshoot of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness, a program designed to catalogue, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend,” as the New York Times’ William Safire wrote in November 2002.

TIA, symbolized by its logo of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid shining upon the globe, was supposedly nixed by Congress shortly after it became public, but the program merely went underground and continued as a part of the Pentagon’s “black budget” and in conjunction with a plethora of private contractors in the same mould as Project Vigilant.

As Capitol Hill Blue reported back in 2004, “Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the program’s controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA’s TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

DARPA has hired private contractors to perform the exact same duties set out in Total Information Awareness, and Project Vigilant is undoubtedly one of them. By hiring private companies to do the dirty work of spying on the American people, Congressional audits can be avoided and legal barriers can be sidestepped.

Project Vigilant is clearly nothing less than a government controlled attack dog fulfilling its role to implement the cybersecurity agenda, which as we have exhaustively documented has nothing to do with security and everything to do with political oppression, Chinese style Internet censorship, and the total evisceration of free speech on the world wide web. (Read more from prisonplanet.com)

Idiots in Congress

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): 500,000,000 Americans a month lose their jobs unless we pass another corrupt, disgusting economic stimulus bill to transfer money from the average American to the politically connected businesses and individuals.

***

Pete Stark (D-CA): The Federal Government can do most anything in this country

***

3 charges filed against Rep. Waters California Democrat Maxine Waters faces a House trial this fall on three charges of ethical wrongdoing, setting the stage for a second election-season public airing of ethics problems for a longtime Democratic lawmaker.

The charges focus on whether Waters broke the rules in requesting federal help for a bank where her husband owned stock and had served on the board of directors. She denied the charges Monday. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

When I saw this story covered on CNN by Wolf Blitzer, the caption on bottom of the screen read “are black Congressmen being singled out?” or something like that, which seems like a desperate attempt at distracting from the issue of corruption.

President Obama’s electric car subsidies are snobby and foolish

It’s official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost $41,000—that’s a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a $7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to $33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price.

. . . .

And that’s my problem with the Obama administration’s energy policy, or at least with his lavish subsidies for the Volt, Nissan’s all-electric Leaf (likely sticker price $33,000), and Tesla’s $100,000 all-electric Roadster: Where does the federal government get off spending the average person’s tax dollars to help better-off-than-average Americans buy expensive new cars? (Read more from slate.com)

Surprising that this was publish by the leftist, pro-state, pro-green Slate.com.

The Crises of Capitalism (???) — my critique

It always troubles me to see professionally produced, economically illiterate videos condemning capitalism. Here’s one:

David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

@ 3:20 — The fifth of his list of “popular explanations of the crisis” is pretty much correct, though Glenn Beck and the World Bank are hardly apostles of deregulation. Why doesn’t he cite Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, Mises, etc? This guy would do well to study the Austrian School.

@ about 3:40, the narrator asks, “What kind of plausible story can I write [explaining our economic crash] which is none of the above?” I think, WTF? Uniqueness is not how we should judge economic theories. How about a meticulous logical examination? “Renowned academic,” my ass.

@ 4:20, the narrator relates a story about the Queen of England asking economists why they didn’t see it coming. “Story” is a good description for what David Harvey is telling. He ignores the many Austrian Economists who did see it coming, and now see things getting much, much worse before they get better. Maybe we should listen to them before we try David Harvey’s workers’ paradise.

@ 6:00, he speaks from Marx’s flawed class analysis. In a free market, the interested of capital are not opposed to those of labor. They are complimentary. In fact, capital competes with other capital for the best of labor, and labor competes with labor for the best jobs. If you consider each a monolithic class opposed to the other, you will be blind to much of the world. Significantly, Marx, in his writing, never defined his most crucial term: class.

@ 7:15 — Capitalism DOES solve its own crises, if you let people fail, and let people accept whatever they damn well please as money. Bailouts and forcing people to use fiat money have nothing to do with free markets or capitalism.

@ 8:50 — Financial innovation does not empower financiers. Government bailouts and government subsidies empower financiers. If firms were allowed to go bankrupt they would regulated themselves / be regulated by their investors.

@ 10:15 — “I don’t have the solutions.” Here, I completely agree with you, Mr. Harvey.

From their website: For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

That’s not enlightenment suckling in their cradle. I think the previous century has seen enough of their sort of “progress.”

Obama Administration Considers Bypassing Congress on Immigration Reform

The Obama administration, anticipating that Congress might not pass comprehensive immigration reform this year, is considering ways it could act without congressional approval to achieve many of the objectives of the initiative, including giving permanent resident status, or green cards, to large numbers of people in the country illegally.

The ideas were outlined in an unusually frank draft memo [1] prepared for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, director of the federal agency that handles immigration benefits, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). The memo lists ways the government could grant permanent resident status to tens of thousands of people and delay the deportation of others, potentially indefinitely. (Read more from propublica.org)

Great Moments in American Statesmanship

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
― U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln, 1858

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.
― General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1866

It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.
― Major General William Shafter, 1899

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
― President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940

The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese armed forces] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.
― Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 1941

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
― President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

Money talks and bullshit walks.
― Congressman Michael Myers, 1979

Bitch set me up . . . . I shouldn’t have come up here . . . goddamn bitch.
― D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, 1990

I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.
― President Bill Clinton, 1998

There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. … Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan. … Let me turn now to nuclear weapons. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons. … Iraq could use these small UAVs which have a wingspan of only a few meters to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States. … Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants. … We are not surprised that Iraq is harboring Zarqawi and his subordinates. This understanding builds on decades-long experience with respect to ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. … Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.
― Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2003

(Read more from independent.org)

Two Peter Schiff Videos — the best economic analysis today

* Dollar continues to decline.
* US continues to follow misguided Keynesian stimulus philosophy.
* GM (government motors) spends bailout money to buy sub-prime-like auto loan business.
* GM bailout was actually bailout of auto workers union.
* The most interesting part of this video begins at 6:00. He talks about how Goldline, a gold selling company, has abused customers by selling overprices antique coins. Peter predicts that this will be leveraged to attack all gold dealers. Remember, tyrants have always hated gold.

* 7th week in a row of declining value of the dollar.
* Propagandists say that the U.S. will not be like Japan. Peter argees only in a perverse way: the U.S. will suffer much, much more than Japan did in the 80’s.
* GDP is bullshit. It’s recent increase is completely attributable to debt and deficit spending.
* Politicians claiming credit for the abomination that was the auto bailout. They will need another bailout soon.
* The 2008 crisis was a UNITED STATES crisis. The world was exposed to it because they had loaned us so much money, but don’t believe the propaganda of the U.S. getting caught up in a world crisis.
* Expect people to begin fleeing the dollar, and U.S. assets. Expect gold to make another run, despite some talking heads claiming that it’s about to crash.
* No sign of a stricter Federal Reserve. As November elections approach, all incumbent politicians will fight for more easy money — which will be like drinking more booze to avoid a hangover.

Socialism versus European Democracy by Ludwig von Mises

This fantastic essay casts much light on European history and Marxism.

This article first appeared in the American Scholar (Spring 1943): pp. 220–31. This is its first appearance online.

The nations that have been lucky enough to preserve their democratic way of life are eager to learn what caused the failure of European democracy. They want to be prepared for the defense of their own freedom, and are therefore eager to know the enemy whom they may one day have to fight at home.

Public opinion has viewed the European history of the last hundred years mostly in the light of Marxian legends that badly distort the facts. According to this interpretation the bourgeoisie abandoned the cause of freedom and established the dictatorship of capital. Big business and finance became aware that democracy, the rule of the majority, must necessarily lead to socialism.

Eager to maintain their position as an exploiting class, the capitalists and entrepreneurs plotted against democracy. They hired scoundrels to fight against the people. Their sycophants disparaged democracy and popular government, and their armed mercenaries succeeded in overthrowing the majorities that aimed at government by the people. Modern tyranny is an outcome of capitalist machinations. The only sincere and unswerving supporters of democracy are the socialist proletarians.

Every page of European history contradicts these statements. Let us review the most significant facts and see whether they verify the Marxian interpretation.

French Experience

In February of 1848 the French dethroned Louis Philippe, the Orleans king. They substituted universal manhood suffrage for the special privilege of only 250,000 electors. All adult male citizens of France, roughly 9,400,000, now had the right to vote. On April 23 about 84 percent of them made use of their newly acquired right. They voted quite freely; nobody was in a position to prevent their voting as they pleased, and nobody ventured to try.

The outcome of these elections was a National Assembly in which 90 percent of the deputies unconditionally supported private ownership of the means of production. It was a smashing defeat for socialism. The socialists were forced to realize that only a small minority of the nation approved their plans. Their illusions were dispelled: the sovereign people had decided against them.

[All attempts at socialized life must quickly decide between failure and tyranny. The large the sphere of socialization, the more quickly the decision is forced.]

But they were not prepared to yield to the verdict. Hoping to seize power by violence, they rose up in arms. Of course they were defeated.

The Paris revolt of June 1848 was the most frivolous rebellion ever instigated. A small minority of armed men tried to defy the vast majority of the nation and establish a reign of terror and tyranny. The June conflict was not, as the socialist propagandists like to say, a “cowardly massacre of innocent proletarians by the soldiers of reaction”; it was the defense of democracy against the assault of a small minority. General Cavaignac and his troops safeguarded democracy for the moment against the conspiracies of those who aimed at minority rule.

The experience of June 1848 had momentous consequences. A specter has haunted Europe ever since — not the specter of communism, as the Communist Manifesto asserted in 1847, but the specter of terrorist dictatorship by a fanatical minority.

. . . .

French social and political conditions and thinking have been deeply influenced by the menace of socialist usurpation. This fear was the largest factor in the revival of French militant Catholicism; it fanned the flames of aggressive nationalism, Boulangism, and the anti-Dreyfus campaign. It had its share in the evolution that ended with the capitulation of 1940. There were very few friends of democracy left in France by that time. The rest of the nation was in two hostile camps; both the communists and the nationalists violently opposed democracy.

From France the fear of revolutionary socialist assaults spread to the rest of Europe. The French experience motivated Bismarck’s efforts (1878–1890) to put down the Social Democrats by the same oppressive methods that their own champion Karl Marx approved in the acts of the Paris Commune and recommended in writing.

. . . .

The Bolshevik Mind

The frustration of the revolutionary attempts in France forced new tactics upon the friends of socialism. As they did not want to renounce their ambitions entirely, disappearing from the political scene, they had to acquiesce in the peaceful methods of democracy. They organized political parties and ran for seats in parliament. There were socialist groups in every parliament of continental Europe. The socialists became an important factor in most of those countries. Some optimists were prepared to believe that the Marxists had renounced their spirit of usurpation, giving up their revolutionary inclinations and hoping to realize their plans by parliamentary and democratic methods alone; but this was an illusion.

. . . .

But this success of socialism was not an achievement of the Marxist parties, united from 1889 onward in the second International Workingmen’s Association. New socialist parties sprang up, parties firmly opposed to Marxism. There were Catholic socialists, nationalist socialists, and many other parties seeking social reform and prolabor policies. There were governments eager to restrict capitalism and embark upon social legislation. Foremost among them was the German government, whose new social policy, inaugurated at the end of the seventies and solemnly announced in the old Kaiser’s imperial message of November 17, 1881, shaped the pattern of the later American New Deal.

The Marxists saw themselves outdone by governments and rival parties; they began to realize that notwithstanding their electoral successes their prospects of sweeping the masses with them were but small.

A socialist party always tries to achieve its own brand of socialism, not the simple victory of any socialist group. The socialists do not advocate socialism and planning in general, but only a system of socialist planning in which they themselves are supreme. They regard the rule of another socialist party not as a partial success for their own aspirations, but as a greater evil than the capitalist market economy. The mutual animosity of Stalinists and Trotskyites, of the Marxian socialists and National Socialists, is in a class by itself. It is easy to see the reason for this hatred: as long as there is still a market economy, socialist minorities enjoy civil liberties and are free to propagate their doctrines; in a socialist community they are deprived of this opportunity. Where all assembly halls, newspapers, periodicals, and printing offices are in government hands, and where every citizen depends on the whims of the rulers, there is no room left for opposition activities.

. . . .

In Western and Central Europe the Marxians were prudent enough not to express such opinions in public. It would have jeopardized their chances in election campaigns. They discussed these questions in the inner circle and dealt with them in their writings, which few non-Marxists read. But the majority of the Russian Marxists, the Bolsheviks, openly adopted the principle of the revolutionary elite: a group of professional conspirators must snatch the reins of government and subdue the majority of the nation. Lenin’s and Bukharin’s writings preach the gospel of forcible oppression, dictatorial rule, and totalitarian extermination of dissenters. They too, of course, were ignored by the Western European public until 1917.

It is not necessary to dwell upon the Russian events in the fall of 1917. The Bolsheviks failed lamentably in the electoral campaign; the parliamentary majority was radically opposed to their plans. But they were an armed body of fighters; they dispersed parliament, and firmly established their rule — the rule of an elite, say they; the rule of a gang of murderers, say their adversaries. The knell of European democracy had sounded.

There are people who honestly believe that the Bolsheviks are right, that socialism is a blessing and that capitalism is all wrong. It is not the task of this essay to investigate that problem. We have only to underline the obvious fact that Bolshevism does not mean democracy.

. . . .

German Experience

The outcome of the First World War had destroyed the old prestige of the Hohenzollern family, of the Junkers, the officers, and the civil servants. The democracy of the West had shown its political and military superiority. The war, which according to President Wilson had been fought to make the world safe for democracy, appeared as an ordeal by fire for democracy. The Germans, beginning to revise their political views, turned toward democracy. The term democracy, almost forgotten in Germany for half a century, became popular again in the last weeks of the war. The Germans saw democracy as not only a return to the civil liberties — rights of man — suspended for the duration of the war, but above all the substitution of parliamentary government for monarchical near absolutism. These points, as every German knew, were implied in the official program of the Social Democrats. People expected that the Social Democrats would now put into practice the democratic principles of their program, and were ready to back them in their effort at political reconstruction of the Reich.

But from the ranks of the Marxists came an answer that no one outside the small group of professional Marx experts could have foreseen. “We class-conscious proletarians,” the Marxians declared, “have nothing in common with your bourgeois concepts of freedom, parliamentarism, and democracy. We want not democracy, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., our own; we are not prepared to grant you bourgeois parasites the rights of man, the franchise, or parliamentary representation. Only Marxists and proletarians shall rule henceforth. You are perplexed: you say you had always thought we were sincere in formulating and advertising the democratic points on our program. That is your fault; if you had studied the writings of Marx more carefully you would have been better informed.”

These revelations were a terrible shock not only to the rest of the nation — the majority of the Germans — but also to the greater part of the people who had long voted the Social Democratic ticket. The eyes of the Germans were opened. Now they learned that everything the Social Democrats had professed for fifty years was a lie. All their talk had had but one end in view: to put Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the place of the Hohenzollerns. Democracy was evidently a mere term invented for the deception of fools. In fact, as the conservatives and the nationalists had always asserted, the advocates of democracy meant to establish mob rule and the tyranny of demagogues.

The communists grossly underrated the intellectual capacity of the German nation. The very idea of boasting after fifty years of prodemocratic agitation that they had never honestly wanted democracy — of telling the Germans: You dupes, how clever’ we were to take you in! — this was too much even for the old members of the Social Democratic party. Within a few weeks political Marxism — not socialism as an economic system nor Marxism as a sociological doctrine — had lost all its former prestige. The idea of democracy became hopelessly suspect. From that time on the term democracy was, to many Germans, synonymous with fraud. The immense majority solidly rejected communist dictatorship.

. . . .

By October and early November 1918, the nationalists were in a state of utter desperation. But they were quick to see the situation and seize their opportunity. They were quicker than the Marxists in sensing the radical change of mood brought about by the menace of communist dictatorship, and they were ready to profit by it to stage a comeback. They knew what their policy for the immediate future must be. Their most urgent need was to prevent a Red dictatorship and wholesale communist extermination of the nonproletarians.

The nationalists, adamant foes of parliamentary government and democracy, decided to support the cause of freedom and democracy momentarily so that they might overthrow them later. They were ready to cooperate with the right-wing socialists in carrying out the first part of this program, and to support the government that they detested. For purely tactical reasons they offered the nation a program of liberalism and democracy. Marxist methods found imitators; the nationalists had profited from reading Lenin and Bukharin. And, faithful to the revolutionary tactics of the Bolsheviks, they armed for the fight.

In January 1919, the rising of the communists and independent socialists in Berlin was defeated by the not-yet-disbanded cavalry division of the ex-Kaiser’s guards and by volunteer corps made up of nationalists and demobilized soldiers who were not too eager to go back to humdrum civilian work. This battle did not end the civil war; it continued for months in the provinces, and broke out afresh time and again in the capital. However, the victory won by the troops in January 1919, at Berlin, safeguarded the elections for the constituent assembly, the session of that body, and the promulgation of the Weimar Constitution.

William II used to say: “Where my guards set foot, there is no more question of democracy.” The Weimar democracy was of a peculiar sort. The horsemen of the royal guards had fought for it and won it. The Constitution of Weimar could be deliberated and voted only because the nationalist enemies of democracy preferred it to the dictatorship of the communists. The German nation received parliamentary government as a gift at the hands of deadly foes of freedom who were only waiting for a chance to take back their present.

Both the nationalists and the communists saw the Weimar Constitution simply as a battleground in their struggle for dictatorship. Both armed for civil war, and each, trying repeatedly to open the attack, had to be put down by armed resistance. But the nationalists became daily more powerful, while the communists were paralyzed. It was not a question of votes and seats in parliament; the centers of gravity of these parties lay outside parliamentary affairs.

[This reminds me of the very vocal and very publicized struggle between the so-called left, and the so-called right in the Unites States. Each fights for its own agenda and uses the idea of liberty only to criticize the other.]

The nationalists were openly supported by the greater part of the intellectuals, white-collar workers, small business, entrepreneurs, and farmers, and they also enjoyed the secret sympathy of a good many workingmen who still voted for the Social Democrats. They could act freely, were familiar with the problems of German life, and could adjust their actions to the changing political and economic conditions of the whole nation and of each province; the communists, on the other hand, had to obey orders issued by Russian leaders who did not know Germany, and were forced to change their tactics overnight whenever the central committee in Moscow ordered them to.

No intelligent or honest man could endure such slavery. The intellectual and moral quality of the German communist leaders was consequently far below the average level of German politicians. They were no match for the nationalists. The communists’ only role in German politics was that of saboteurs and conspirators. After January of 1919 they no longer had any prospect of success, though of course the ten years of Nazi misrule have revived German communism.

The Germans would have chosen democracy in 1918, if they had had to choose. But as things stood they had only the choice between the two dictatorships, Left and Right. Between these two dictatorial parties there was no third group ready to support capitalism and its political corollary, democracy.

[I think Hoppe would disagree with the last part of the previous sentence.]

. . . .

No Democracy without Democrats

It is not necessary to elaborate with further examples drawn from the history of smaller European nations. What happened in France, Russia, and Germany happened there too.

It is a bold distortion of historical fact to say that the Left, the socialists, were eager to establish popular government and that the Right, the bourgeois capitalists, defeated these attempts. Neither the Marxists nor the other socialists ever aimed at democracy.

(Read more from mises.org)