By the end of 1775, Congress had already increased the nation’s money supply by 50 percent in less than a year, and state paper issues had already begun in New England. The Congressional Continental bills followed what was to become a sequence all too familiar in the western world: runaway inflation. As paper money issues flooded the market, the dilution of the value of each dollar caused prices in terms of paper money to increase; since this included the prices of gold, silver, and foreign currencies, the value of the paper money declined in comparison to them. As usual, rather than acknowledge the inevitability of this sequence, the partisans of inflationary policies urged further accelerated paper issues to overcome the higher prices and searched for scapegoats to blame for the price rise and depreciation. The favorite scapegoats were merchants and speculators who persisted in doing the only thing they ever do on the market: they followed the push and pull of supply and demand. In another familiar attempt to deal with the problems of inflationary intervention, they outlawed the depreciation of paper, or the rise of prices.
[…]
State and local governments presumed to know what market prices of the various commodities should be, and laid down price regulations for them. Wage rates, transportation rates, and prices of domestic and imported goods were fixed by local authorities. Refusing to accept paper, accepting them for less than par, charging higher prices than allowed, were made criminal acts, and high penalties were set: they included fines, public exposure, confiscation of goods, tarring and feathering, and banishment from the locality. Merchants were prohibited from speculating, and thereby from bringing the needed scarce goods to the public. Enforcement was imposed by zealots in local and nearby committees, in a despotic version of the revolutionary tradition of government by local committees.
Price controls made matters far worse for everyone, especially the hapless Continental Army, since farmers were thereby doubly penalized: they were forced to sell supplies to the army at prices far below the market and they had to accept increasingly worthless Continentals in payment. Hence, they understandably sold their wares elsewhere; in many cases, they went “on strike” against the whole crazy-quilt system by retiring from the market altogether and raising only enough food to feed themselves and their own families. Others reverted to simple barter.
Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived In Liberty, Volume IV, 1979.
October 28, 2018
QotD: Revolutionary price controls and the plight of Washington’s army at Valley Forge
October 24, 2018
QotD: The diminishing importance of the Russian revolution of 1917
Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle.
The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history. During the interwar era, many of the intelligent acquaintances of Lewis Eliot, Snow’s fictional alter ego, took it for granted that socialism, or perhaps communism, not only should but would prevail as the guiding doctrine of most democracies.
Lower down the social scale, Clyde shipworkers, indeed most of the world’s industrial classes, saw the Bolsheviks as harbingers of hope. The bayonets thrust into the bosoms of the imperial family in the cellar at Ekaterinburg roused a pleasurable frisson in some radical hearts. Ten Days that Shook the World, the American reporter John Reed’s eyewitness account of October 1917, conveys the thrill the revolution evoked among those who, like himself, considered capitalism doomed.
Max Hastings, “The centenary of the Russian revolution should be mourned, not celebrated”, The Spectator, 2016-12-10.
September 6, 2018
Feature History – Chinese Civil War
Feature History
Published on 25 Jul 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring a civil war that done happened in China.
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I do the research, writing, narration, art, and animation. Yes, it is very lonely
September 5, 2018
QotD: Why did appeasing the Fascist dictators seem such a sensible policy?
It is a familiar student essay question, whether the revolution could have been averted, but for the world war and resultant loss of up to three million Russian lives. It seems more useful merely to suggest that, in the political and ideological climate of the early 20th century, the collectivist experiment was bound to be attempted somewhere, and Russia or China were obvious testbeds. The consequences for millions of Russian peasants, together with the ferocity of Soviet oppression, were successfully concealed from most western eyes for half a century. The 1789 French revolution killed only a few thousand aristocrats and transferred land to peasants, who thus became ardent upholders of property rights. The Russian version required liquidation of the entire governing class and transfer of land to collective ownership, an incomparably more radical proceeding. Douglas Smith’s 2012 book Former People gives a harrowing account of the fate of the Tsarist aristocracy.
In the West, the gullibility of the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and the rest of the ‘true believers’ was fed by a desperation to suppose the Soviet example viable. ‘Looking around us at our own hells,’ wrote the historian Philip Toynbee, who became a communist at Cambridge, ‘we had to invent an earthly paradise somewhere else’. As late as 1945, the leftist publisher Victor Gollancz brought posterity’s contempt upon himself by declining to publish Animal Farm, George Orwell’s great satire on Bolshevism.
For a counter-revolutionary contemporary perspective, it is impossible to understand the 1930s appeasement of the dictators without grasping the traumatic impact of events in Russia on the propertied classes everywhere. The Winter Palace was stormed only 16 years before Hitler came to power. For at least two decades, Europe’s ‘haves’ were far more frightened of Bolshevism than of fascism.
The ‘clubland hero’ novels of John Buchan and Sapper offer embarrassing glimpses of the British bourgeois view of Lenin’s people and their followers in the decades following the revolution. A belief took hold in polite circles that the bloodiest revolutionaries were not merely communists but also Jews, which meant they were doubly damned in St James’s clubs.
Max Hastings, “The centenary of the Russian revolution should be mourned, not celebrated”, The Spectator, 2016-12-10.
August 19, 2018
Recruits from Alsace – Angel of Siberia I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Aug 2018Next to the Chair of Wisdom, Indy Neidell talks about how the German Army dealt with recruits from Alsace-Lorraine and how Elsa Brändström became the Angel of Siberia to many prisoners of war.
May 10, 2018
Enter ADOLF HITLER stage left I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 4 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 8 May 2018The fledgling democracy in Germany struggles to survive as the German Revolution escalates into a downright civil war. In one of the German States Bavaria, Adolf Hitler appears on the stage within the context of the Bavarian Soviet Revolution.
Click here for the rest of the Between 2 Wars series: http://goo.gl/enXJWf
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or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistoryHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
CORRECTION: Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution gave the PRESIDENT of the German Reich the power to suspend civil rights and take armed action, nothing else… our apologies. In this episode we meet Adolf Hitler for the first time. Now some might be surprised about how we portray Hitler and his political views in 1919 and this needs some commentary. Before you go off in any specific direction about Hitler and Naziism, you should therefore read our commentary here https://community.timeghost.tv/t/enter-adolf-hitler-from-the-left-between-2-wars-1919-part-4-of-4/262/3:
Commentary regarding our portrayal of Hitler:
Those of you who follow our work since a longer time will know that we are loath to tell a skewed or biased version of the events we portray. Our aim with how we tell Hitler’s story is neither to exonerate him, nor to vilify him; the facts speak for themselves and we are convinced that we neither need to add, nor subtract emphasis to the story of Hitler and the Nazis.
In many other works covering Hitler you will see a tendency to hang the events of this epoch on the leaders that rose to power in the period. While it is unquestionable that the impact of those leaders was far reaching and instrumental in how the events evolved, it should not be forgotten that these men (and a few women) were not created in a bubble. As postulated in the main historiographical theory dealing with the impact of leadership, Zeitgeist Theory (from where we take or brand name btw.) it is easily seen at that it was not the characters that created the times, but the times that created the characters who then steered the events as they evolved.
This is an uncomfortable position to take, because it leads to the next conclusion: Germany, Japan and Italy did also not exist inside bubbles. This in turn leads us to have to look at the entire picture of the world to understand the events that followed. Inevitably this will not lead to a black and white picture of good guys vs. bad guys. Instead we face a complex situation where many cogwheels interact to bring about the situation that eventually leads to war.
To be clear: once again we are not seeking to exonerate, or vilify anyone. What with the extensive crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Axis powers before and during the war, there is always the risk of comparing apples and oranges when you dive into this area. To avoid that conundrum, the war crimes perpetrated by the Allies are often brushed aside, or simply justified as an unfortunate part of war. Again to be clear: while the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Osaka and many other cities does constitute war crimes, it does not exonerate the murder of tens of millions of people by the Nazis. Furthermore the sheer difference in numbers and method speak for themselves (if you must look at a comparison of who was worse than the other).
Our interest will always be to tell the story as accurately as we can and let the story itself provide judgement. At no point will we waiver from telling a part of the story just because it makes one side or the other look better or worse. Also, we will not get involved in the moral arguments surrounding this, such as that certain acts were justified because they led to victory, or were the lesser evil. It is not our job to make that kind of moral judgement – that is up to the philosophers of the world and we’re mere tellers of history.
Regarding Hitler’s political views in 1919:
The fact that Hitler had liberal sympathies in 1919, should not be misunderstood as a foundation for an argument that Naziism was a left wing ideology. While Hitler and Drexler did incorporate social welfare concepts and anti-capitalist ideas into their agenda, the national socialist doctrine is clearly a derivative of conservatism, not progressivism.
Contrary to communism that focuses on class and internationalism, Naziism focuses on race and nationalism. Naziism espouses traditional social conservative views regarding gender roles, division of labour, social values, and foreign relations. Communism claims to be egalitarian while Naziism espouses an elitist world view. Communism seeks to create a completely new economic system based on overthrowing traditional trade and profit ideas, Naziism espouses economic protectionism and state regulated capitalism. In one aspect the two ideologies do share a common denominator, namely in the repression of the financial transfer economy (money lending, property speculation and so on). This last bit has often been misrepresented as proof that Naziism is a left-wing ideology, but that would be a fallacious conclusion as this is not at the centre of the ideology, but rather an artifact of the somewhat contradictory antisemitic ideas of Naziism.
Last but not least the main unique feature of Naziism that differentiates it from Fascism is the outspoken antisemitism at the heart of the ideology. Absurdly Hitler came to equate Jews with robber capitalists AND communism. As strange as that is, it’s a way of thinking that was not only prevalent with Hitler, but also with other political thinkers like Charles Maurras, a Frenchman who formulated an early form of Naziism already in the late 1880s and 1890s (yes we will cover him). The basis of this is their belief in a world conspiracy led by the Jews that was aimed at the overthrow of what they perceived as ‘their race.’ Based on that, robber capitalism and Bolshevik Communism were seen as instruments in this imaginary war of the races. The idea was also promoted within the context of the Russian Revolution, where for instance the fabricated Protocols of The Elders of Zion, aimed to show that the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ was a driving force behind the revolution.
April 15, 2018
Rise of the Nations I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1918 1 of 2
TimeGhost
Published on 14 Apr 2018After the War to End All Wars, there’s more of two things. More nations and more wars. Wars of independence, civil wars, ethnic wars, ideological wars and just plain old wars. In the first Prelude to the Between 2 Wars series, covering the years 1919-1939 from WWI to WWII chronologically, we look at the rise of nationalism out of the ruins of The Great War. Indy Neidell and Spartacus take you on a historical journey through 20 years of dawn, light, and dusk back into the darkness of war.
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Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistoryHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson & Indy Neidell
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera and Edit by: Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
From the comments:
TimeGhost
20 hours ago (edited)PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU COMMENT (AVOIDS REPEATING FEEDBACK): The first episode of Between 2 Wars focuses on what happened after The Great War. Out of respect for those of you that are anxiously waiting for the TGW series finale later this year, we’ve avoided any references to WWI as far as possible. This episode is a prologue to future episodes that go into more detail of the actual events starting in 1919. The episode focuses in broad strokes on the rise of nationalism and the conflict that this creates, as well as the situation in Germany and Russia at the end of 1918. Here some notes on feedback we have already received:
1. We will avoid text and pictures at the same time when Indy speaks in the future.
2. There is an error in the map on the Balkan peninsula, we missed to turn off the country layer for modern Macedonia, this country does not exist at the time as it is part of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece in 1919. Our apologies. [Iceland is also labelled as “Island”.]
3. Some borders are drawn as the modern countries (e.g. Finland) although this is not correct at the time. This is a conscious decision to avoid an impossible dilemma. As pointed out in the video borders are in a state of flux in 1919, or even more often; just recently created. In cases where there is border contention that is not relevant to the current events of the video we have to choose between the following scenarios: A) Draw the border as one or the other side saw it – leads to controversy that we would like to avoid. B) Draw the contended area in as contended – doing that for one place leads to us having to do that for the rest of the world, we don’t have the capacity for that. C) Accept that we can’t solve this as the basis is not an exact fact base, but political problems that are way out of our program scope. We have tried other solutions, but C was the only one that worked (B would be the right thing to do, but we just can’t afford to invest the time it requires).
4. Some borders are not exactly right even when they are drawn for the events we speak of. This is due to 3. as well, but also because borders shift even within the year we speak of so that it becomes impossible to choose exactly the right line. We try our best to hit the least erroneous approximation, but it won’t always be perfect.
Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 14 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
April 4, 2018
DicKtionary – I is for Investment – Gregor MacGregor
TimeGhost
Published on 3 Apr 2018I for investment, for financial success,
Or for a failure, cause it’s hard to guess,
But if there’s one man who could make you a beggar,
It’s today’s star, Gregor MacGregor.Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Based on a concept by Astrid Deinhard and Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera by: Ryan Tebo
Edited by: Bastian BeißwengerA TimeGhost format produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
March 6, 2018
Lenin & Trotsky – Their Rise To Power I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 5 Mar 2018Felshtinsky, Yuri: Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Ltivosk. The Collapse of the World Revolution. November 1917- November 1918, Milford 2012: http://amzn.to/2oILHmK
Swain, Geoffrey: Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. New York 2014: http://amzn.to/2CY0gqF
Swain, Geoffrey: Trotsky. Edinburgh 2006: http://amzn.to/2FoRnfb
Wolkogonow, Dimitri: Lenin. Utopie und Terror. Berlin 2017
Vladimir “Lenin” Ilyich Ulyanov and Leon Trotsky are two of the most well known communists today. But how did they meet and how did they rose to the top of the Bolshevik movement? And how did they manage to overthrow the Russian Empire? We take a look at their lives and their early days until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
January 14, 2018
January 7, 2018
QotD: The Whiskey Rebellion
Ninescore and fifteen years ago, with the ink only just sanded on the United States Constitution, President George Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton decided it was time to try out their shiny brand-new powers of taxation.
Their first victims would be certain western Pennsylvania agricultural types long accustomed to converting their crops into a less perishable, more profitable high-octane liquid form. Unfortunately for the President and the Secretary, many of these rustics, especially near the frontier municipality of Pittsburgh, placed a slightly different emphasis than high school teachers do today on the Revolutionary slogan regarding “taxation without representation”. In their view, they’d fought the British in 1776 to abolish taxes and they weren’t interested in having representation imposed on them by that gaggle of fops in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. They made this manifestly clear by tarring-and-feathering tax collectors, burning their homes to the ground, and filling the stills of those who willingly paid the hated tribute with large-caliber bullet holes.
Feeling their authority challenged, George and Alex dispatched westward a body of armed conscripts equal to half the population of America’s largest city (Philadelphia once again, later famous for air-dropping explosives on miscreants charged with disturbing the peace). Four hundred whiskey rebels, duly impressed by this army of fifteen thousand, subsided. The miraculous process by which the private act of thievery is transubstantiated into public virtue was firmly established in history. The results — chronic poverty and unemployment, endless foreign wars, and reruns on television — are with us even today.
L. Neil Smith, “Introduction: A Brief History of the North American Confederacy”, The Spirit of Exmas Sideways: a “novelito” by L. Neil Smith.
January 5, 2018
QotD: Revolutions and revolutionaries
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.
January 2, 2018
The Defence of Baku – The Adventures of Dunsterforce Part 2 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 1 Jan 2018In part two of the Adventures of Dunsterforce, we follow the Hush Hush Army on their travels through the Caucasus. Picking up where we left off, the Dunsterforce leave Enzeli, clash with Jangalis en route, and head for Baku. They had to journey through territory controlled by warlords, cossacks and bolshevik soviets and when they arrived during the Siege of Baku, Dunsterville and his men meet the five dictators that make up the Centrocaspian Dictatorship.
QotD: Political Correctness
What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American Revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness — when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them.
Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech”, Heat Street, 2016-05-09.
