Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2013

North Korea struggling with loss of faith in the state

Filed under: Asia, China, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Strategy Page on the challenges facing the government as the younger generation grows up:

A major source of information about North Korea is obtained by South Korean intelligence experts interviewing the steady flow of refugees arriving in South Korea (via China and the South Korean embassies in neighboring countries like Thailand). For the last decade, over a thousand of these refugees have arrived each year. In the last few years China and North Korea have increased their efforts to reduce that number, which peaked at 2,900 in 2009 and was 1,500 last year. These determined and desperate people keep coming. Separate interviews are compared and checked against each other to obtain an updated and accurate first-hand view of life in the north. This also helps detect the spies North Korea tries (often with success) getting into the south via the refugee route. While the refugees detail the growing decline in living standards up north, it’s also become clear that there is a very real generational shift in loyalties in the north. The generation who grew up during the 1990s famine (that killed about ten percent of the population and starved most of the rest for years) no longer believe in the North Korean dictatorship. Many who came of age before 1990 still do, but for most everyone under 30 the state is the enemy and self-reliance, and not a benevolent dictatorship, is the only way to survive. The North Korean government has been fighting these attitudes more and more, as this generation of unbelievers grows larger each year. The more astute members of the northern leadership see this as a no-win situation. Eventually most North Koreans will be very hostile to the state and more adept at making money in spite of the government, or simply getting out of the country. Most of the leadership is still afraid of enacting Chinese style economic reforms because they believe a more affluent population would seek revenge for the decades of misrule and tyranny. The Chinese say that didn’t happen in China. The North Koreans point out that, as bad as the Chinese communists were in the 1950s and 60s (killing over 50 million people via starvation, labor camps and execution) that was not as bad (proportionately) as what the North Koreans have suffered. Moreover, the North Korean leaders point out that, historically, Koreans have been a bit more excitable and brutal when aroused by misrule. The Chinese say times have changed but the North Korean leaders are not yet willing to bet their lives on that being the case.

The refugees report that most North Koreans understand that the police state up there is strong enough to suppress any uprising now or in the foreseeable future and that the only real threat to the dictatorship is intervention (openly or via a coup) by China. Refugees also report that it’s common knowledge that hundreds of North Koreans have died of radiation poisoning or been born with birth defects because of the uranium mining and working with nuclear materials. The government has responded by offering large cash bonuses to those who will work in the uranium mines. The refugees report in detail many other ways the Kim government abuses their subjects.

February 16, 2013

The socialist origins of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Everyone “knows” that Fascism is an ideology of the extreme right, and Communism is an ideology of the extreme left. Benito Mussolini’s fascist state was bankrolled by big business and the Catholic Church to suppress the democratic demands of the workers in the wake of the First World War. Except that isn’t actually true:

… Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.

[. . .]

When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?

[. . .]

During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.

After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.

It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else.

November 20, 2012

50 years later: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s being called “one of the most significant books of the 20th Century”, and it was published 50 years ago this month:

The character was fictional. But there were millions like him — innocent citizens who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had been sent to the Gulag in Joseph Stalin’s wave of terror.

Censorship and fear had prevented the truth about the camps from being published, but this story made it into print. The USSR would never be the same again.

“We were absolutely isolated from information, and he started to open our eyes,” remembers writer and journalist Vitaly Korotich.

[. . .]

It was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who had sanctioned publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel nearly a decade after Stalin’s death. Allowing a book on the Gulag, he thought, would help debunk Stalin’s personality cult. However, one story sparked many more.

“After it was published, it was impossible to stop it,” Korotich recalls. “Immediately we received a lot of illegal publications. A lot of people who were in prison started to remember how it was.

October 14, 2012

Imagine if Eric Hobsbawm had been a Nazi apologist rather than a Communist apologist

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

Hobsbawm […] was a lifelong Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party from his teens until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Long after it was evident to even true believers that the Bolshevik Revolution had unleashed a nightmare of blood, Hobsbawm went on defending, minimizing, and excusing the crimes of communism.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1994, he was asked whether he would have shunned the Communist Party had he known in 1934 that Stalin was butchering innocent human beings by the millions. “Probably not,” he answered — after all, at the time he believed he was signing up for world revolution. Taken aback by such indifference to carnage, the interviewer pressed the point. Was Hobsbawm saying that if a communist paradise had actually been created, “the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm’s answer: “Yes.”

Imagine that Hobsbawm had fallen in love with Nazism as a youth and spent the rest of his career whitewashing Hitler’s atrocities. Suppose he’d refused for decades to let his Nazi Party membership lapse, and argued that the Holocaust would have been an acceptable price to pay for the realization of a true Thousand-Year Reich. It is inconceivable that he would have been hailed as a brilliant thinker or basked in acclaim; no self-respecting university would have hired him to teach; politicians and pundits would not have lined up to shower him with accolades during his life and tributes after his death.

Yet Hobsbawm was fawned over, lionized in the media, made a tenured professor at a prestigious university, invited to lecture around the world. He was heaped with glories, including the Order of the Companions of Honour — one of Britain’s highest civilian awards — and the lucrative Balzan Prize, worth 1 million Swiss francs. His death was given huge play in the British media — the BBC aired an hour-long tribute and the Guardian led its front page with the news — and political leaders waxed fulsome. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair called him “a giant … a tireless agitator for a better world.”

October 2, 2012

Eric Hobsbawm is about to be beatified as “the most celebrated British historian of the 20th century”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

Michael Burleigh on the recently deceased — and totally unrepentant Communist — Eric Hobsbawm:

I can almost hear the wave of mourning that is about to fix Hobsbawm in the public consciousness as “the most celebrated British historian of the 20th century”. You have to understand the British Left, which is still near hegemonic in the humanities and social science departments in our universities, to grasp why those of a more liberal conservative persuasion will disagree.

First there is the tendency to worship at the feet of foreign gurus, a failing George Orwell (or as Hobsbawm had it, the “upper-class Englishman Eric Blair”) attributed to Britain’s alienated intellectuals taking “their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow”. This led them to give credibility to such evanescent charlatans as Michel Foucault, the chief exponent of “knowledge as power”, and the Palestinian activist and literary critic Edward Said.

[. . .]

Throughout, there was a dogmatic refusal to accept that the Bolshevik Revolution had been a murderous failure. Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR — not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward — might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.

Everything Hobsbawm wrote deceitfully downplayed the grim role of the Communists in Spain in the Thirties or the forcible nature of the coups the Soviets carried out in Eastern Europe after 1945. Such a cosmopolitan thinker had ironically become imprisoned within a deeply provincial ideological ghetto, knowing or caring nothing for the brave Czechs or Poles who resisted Stalin’s stooges, while being manifestly nonplussed by the democratic transformations of Central Europe since 1989-90. That the secret police — the Sword and Shield of the Revolution — would end up running Vladimir Putin’s FSB-mafia state was literally inexplicable to him.

August 27, 2012

Central planning is always attractive to the ones who see themselves in charge

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

At the Why Nations Fail blog, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain that central planning is not just a Marxist idea:

Essentially central planning is not about the efficient allocation of economic resources, it is about control.

Central planning maximizes the extent of control that the state, and the people running the state, exercise. The desire to control others is a constant in history and is part and parcel of the construction of states. If the state can grab all the land and resources and control who and on what terms people get access to them, then this maximizes control, even if it sacrifices economic efficiency.

This sort of economic and political control — not Marxist ideology — is what central planning is all about. This is not to deny that Marxist ideology supported and legitimized central planning in several 20th-century societies. But it is to emphasize that the emergence and persistence of central planning is often a solution to the central economic and political problem of many elites: to control and extract resources from society.

The people who push for central planning may say they’re trying to solve a problem, but the problem they say they’re trying to solve is just an excuse. They really just want to gain control over you.

July 13, 2012

Questioning the accuracy of official Chinese economic figures

Filed under: Business, China, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Yes, we’ve heard this several times before, and for good reason:

China’s relatively mild slowdown in the second quarter has reignited a controversy about whether its official statistics can be trusted.

Chinese growth edged down to 7.6 per cent in the second quarter from 8.1 per cent in the first quarter, and analysts said the momentum in June, from stronger bank lending to rising investment, pointed to a rebound in the second half of the year.

But rather than delivering reassurance, the numbers instead provoked questions about whether the reality is worse than the government is letting on.

Economists with Barclays noted that a deceleration in industrial production was consistent with 7.0-7.3 per cent growth. Analysts at Capital Economics said that the true figure was probably closer to 7.0 per cent.

[. . .]

Doubts about Chinese data have a fine pedigree. Li Keqiang, who is widely expected to succeed Wen Jiabao later this year as premier, confided to U.S. officials in 2007 that gross domestic product was “man made” and “for reference only”, according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.

Earlier posts on the Chinese economy are here.

June 29, 2012

From Maoism to Kleptocracy in one generation

Filed under: Business, China, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

China’s economic growth has been one of the wonders of the modern world, as one of the poorest nations has pulled itself well up the economic tables over just the last twenty years. What it has not done, however, is replace the communist leadership with democratically elected leaders. What has happened is that switching from a pure command economy to a freer economy has created fantastic opportunities for graft and corruption. Opportunities which have been grasped eagerly by party leaders and their friends and family:

As I set out in The Fall of the Communist Dynasty, and a HT to John Hempton’s piece within which he contends that the entire Chinese economy is a Kleptocracy , this week we have news from Citron Research who reports that Evergrande Real Estate Group Ltd is ‘a deception on a grande scale’ .

Citron quote ;-

‘Evergrande who ranks among the top 5 Chinese property companies. Our analysis and primary research reveal that: 1] Evergrande is insolvent; and 2] Evergrande will be severely challenged from a liquidity perspective. The Company’s management has applied at least 6 accounting shenanigans to mask Evergrande’s insolvency. Our research indicates that a total write-­down of RMB 71bn is required and Evergrande’s pro forma equity is negative 36bn.’

What sparked Citrons interest in Evergrande was the mail order doctorate the chairman claimed from the University of West Alabama, a small college 230 miles north of New Orleans with 2300 on-campus students. Evergrande’s is one of the top 5 players in the Chinese property market that fell for its 8th consecutive month in May. My experience with these types of matters is that small things can be excellent markers to greater problems. Small examples of dishonesty in one area of life are often reflected in larger undiscovered examples in other areas of a person’s life.

[. . .]

Zoomlion has an interesting business model, it is similar in many of ways to Caterpillar, except whereas Caterpillar report falling sales, Zoomlion reports astounding sales growth with a fivefold increase in revenue since 2007. Zoomlion customers sometimes buy ten concrete mixers when they planned to initially by one or two. They have a perverse incentive to buy more than they need because these concrete trucks are purchased via finance packages supplied by Zoomlion.

Then the machines can be garaged and used as collateral to borrow further funds from other lenders. Zoomlion continues to grow while cement sales have plunged. In May, cement output increased 4.3 per cent YoY, down from 19.2 per cent recorded last year. Zoomlion’s new debt of $22.5B buys roughly 900,000 trucks which could produce enough concrete (at six loads a day) to build over thirty Great Pyramids of Giza a day.

[. . .]

All revolutions have class and economic matters at their core. Ironically, the difference in a future Chinese collapse is that the expropriators in China in this cycle have been the Communist Party political class. The CCP have become the Kleptopreneur bourgeoisie who have expropriated from China’s proletariat (the industrial working class), via corruption and theft from the state and state owned enterprises. The Ka-Ching Dynasty is responsible for the greatest looting of a nation in history.

Marx wrote that modern bourgeois society (Capitalism) has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells (Karl Marx)

The CCP ‘sorcerers’ have summoned up a political and economic nether world that is so systemically corrupted it is in the process of spiralling into same revolutionary physics that destroyed the original Chinese merchant bourgeoisie that Mao overthrew.

Earlier posts on China’s economy are here. H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

May 30, 2012

The end of the “predictable” China

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Robert D. Kaplan on the end of an era in geopolitical calculations:

The United States has had it easy over the past third of a century in regards to China. Washington has been able to proclaim moral superiority over the Communist Party dictatorship in Beijing, even as those very dictators provided Washington with a stable, businesslike relationship that fostered immense opportunities for American companies in China and for the American economy overall. China’s rulers, ever since Deng Xiaoping consolidated power in 1978, may have been nominally communists, but they have also been professionals and technocrats who have ruled in a self-effacing, collegial style. Yes, they may oppress dissidents, but they have also been enlightened autocrats by the standards of the suffocating rulers who have governed in the Middle East.

But the purging of the pseudo populist boss of the megacity of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, may indicate that a less predictable period in Chinese politics lies ahead. Bo was something not seen in China since Mao Zedong: a leader with real charisma. Bo may indicate that the age of the technocrats will give way to the age of politicians — and politicians, even in liberal democracies, exploit people’s emotions. That could lead to more erratic, nationalistic rulers.

[. . .]

China’s autocrats have for many years been nervously riding a domestic tiger. With communism no longer a philosophical organizing principle for the state, they have had to justify their rule by delivering double-digit annual economic growth — or close to that — to provide jobs for a potentially restive younger generation. Thus, even while China has amassed impressive new air and sea power, it has — by and large — not tried to employ that power in a particularly hostile way. China’s communist rulers have had too much domestically to worry about without creating new problems for themselves by constantly challenging the United States or its allies on the high seas. While China’s push to acquire air-sea power most specifically dates to 1996, when Beijing was humiliated by Washington’s ability to drive two aircraft carrier strike groups through waters near the Taiwan Strait, the building of a substantial air force and navy have so far been part of the natural, organic process of a new and rising great power. At least so far, it has not been particularly destabilizing to the world or regional order, unlike Iran’s push to develop a nuclear capability as part of a drive for Near Eastern leadership. China’s rulers may be dictatorial, but they are not radical and messianic.

April 29, 2012

QotD: Bankers, Marx’s dream workers

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

In a way bankers are Marx’s dream, it’s the workers getting the fruits of their labours. It’s funny that the left is usually angry at shareholders, for taking money out of companies and thereby bringing down workers’ salaries. Yet with the banks they want shareholders to press the banks to do exactly that, and curb pay.

Joris Luyendijk, “External auditor: ‘Nobody at a bank can have a complete overview any more'”, The Guardian, 2012-04-28

March 7, 2012

“The EU’s definition of a free society is where people do the authorities’ bidding voluntarily”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

George Jonas who “imbibed too many Molotov-cocktails in his youth” on the European project:

The news comes on a day when market analysts observe “a sea of red.” European bourses are down 1.5%, China’s growth target is lowered from 8% to 7.5%, and the Greek government’s contingent liabilities are likely to exceed a trillion euros. While Europe’s debts are going through the roof, Viviane Reding has her eye glued to the glass ceiling. The European Commissioner for Justice doesn’t like what she sees.

“The European Commission is considering introducing mandatory quotas for female members on corporate boards,” reports Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung. The meticulous newspaper leaves no doubt about the reason. “Pleas for companies to voluntarily introduce such quotas themselves produced no effect.”

The EU’s definition of a free society is where people do the authorities’ bidding voluntarily. The EU is socialist, of course, not communist. Socialists consider an intermediate stage of voluntary compliance essential before turning to coercion.

Communists find this a hoot. They say it’s hypocritical and a waste of time. It’s hard to disagree with them. Communists are always nasty, but not always wrong.

Update: Of course, with their top-down, we-know-best approach, it’s no surprise that they were totally astonished when people interpreted their latest pro-expansion video a bit less positively than they expected:

H/T to the Adam Smith Institute blog for the video:

Critics of the EU are often accused of being “Little Englanders”. In the light of rhetoric like this from the EU it’s clear that the mindset behind the EU itself is little more than Little Englanderism writ large across the continent — still preoccupied with keeping out scary foreigners and closing Europe off from alien cultures. If the EU is offering an insular Europe that demonizes and builds walls against foreigners, I would turn it down. There’s a whole world out there to trade and engage with.

February 10, 2012

Before Watergate the FBI had to put together files using wiretaps, informants, and detective work

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Nowadays, of course, they wouldn’t need to do any of that: most of what they collected then could be gathered by looking you up on Facebook:

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are perhaps best known for their comedy sketch Who’s on First?

But in the 1950s, the duo caught the FBI’s attention for other reasons.

“A police informant furnished information to the effect that Bud Abbott, the well-known motion picture and television star, is a collector of pornography, and alleged he has 1,500 reels of obscene motion pictures,” an agent wrote in an FBI file.

Of Costello, agents reported: “Information was secured reflecting that two prostitutes put on a lewd performance for Lou Costello,” for which they were paid $50 each.

[. . .]

During the era of legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover, “you could find a reason to open a file on anyone”, says Steve Rosswurm, a historian at Lake Forest College in Illinois and author of a book about the FBI’s dealings with the Catholic Church.

“The reasons for the surveillance are as varied as the people being watched,” said British writer Nicholas Redfern, author of Celebrity Secrets: Official Government Files on the Rich and Famous

“It was very much dependent upon the character or the situation the subject of the file was in.”

Today, the bureau’s Cold War-era fears of communist infiltration, obscenity and homosexuality sound almost quaint..

February 5, 2012

Celebrating 1989

Filed under: Europe, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Janet Daley thinks we’ve been under-appreciating one of the most momentous years in modern history: the end of the Cold War and the collapse of state communism.

Can I suggest that you try the following experiment? Gather up a group of bright, reasonably well-educated 18-year-olds and ask them what world event occurred in 1945. They will, almost certainly, be able to give you an informed account of how the Second World War ended, and at least a generally accurate picture of its aftermath. Now try asking them what historical milestone came to pass in 1989. I am willing to bet that this question will produce mute, blank looks.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism which followed it are hugely important to any proper understanding of the present world and of the contemporary political economy. Why is it that they have failed to be addressed with anything like their appropriate awesome significance, let alone found their place in the sixth-form curriculum?

The failure of communism should have been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power — the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact — but in modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly (and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded with almost sentimental condescension.

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