Canadian Cincinnatus

Ernst Zundel and his secret Liberal past

Every Canadian past the age of 40 has a mental image of Ernst Zundel: the neo-Nazi in a hardhat, surrounded by goons in Brownshirt uniforms, perpetually in trouble with the Canadian justice system. For those too young to remember, Zundel was a graphics artist who ran a print shop that became one of the world’s leading publishers of National Socialist and anti-Semitic books and paraphernalia, including “Did Six Million Really Die?” and “The Hitler We Loved and Why” - the latter written by him under a pseudonym.

This much of his biography is fairly common knowledge among Canadians, but how many also know that he was an active member of the Liberal Party of Canada? I recently stumbled across this fact. Here’s what it says in Wikipedia about him:

“In 1968 he joined the Liberal Party of Canada and ran in that year's Liberal leadership convention under the name Ernest Zundel[10] as a self-described "nuisance candidate" running on an "immigrant rights" platform. He used his candidacy to campaign against anti-German attitudes. He dropped out of the contest prior to the election, but not before delivering his campaign speech to the convention.”

A campaign speech at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention – the same convention that elected Pierre Trudeau. Heh.

Now I am sure a Liberal reading this would immediately object: Oh come on. You can’t blame the Liberal Party for this. Nobody knew he was a neo-Nazi at the time, and besides, he was only a fringe candidate who got no support.

Perhaps. But why did he choose the Liberal Party over, say, the Progressive Conservative Party? And why did it take a right-wing Sun Media reporter – Mark Bonokoski, a man who tried to get the nomination for the Canadian Alliance Party in Ottawa West Napean in 2000, and the former communications director for Tim Hudak - to expose him? Rather than, say, somebody at the Toronto Star? And while we are on the topic of inconvenient questions, what is it about Tommy Douglas, founder of the CCF, the man who was christened by the CBC as the “Greatest Canadian”, but who wrote a master’s thesis extolling the need to sterilize Canada’s natives? What gives with that?

So many questions, so few asked by polite Canadians. Perhaps they are too busy attending Jian Ghomeshi’s book launch party to pay attention.

Tantrums about “Tantrums about China”

One of my recurring themes is that foreign dictatorships are never as efficient and successful as they look from the outside. As a result, I am compelled to respond to David Goldman’s recent column extolling China’s economy. Goldman is an interesting writer. I like him because his take on current events is often different from what you hear elsewhere. On the other hand, he can be completely off the mark, as he is about China.

“China is succeeding despite many problems (including authoritarian administration) because the Chinese are working very hard.”

The Chinese have been working hard for millennia. The Chinese economy didn’t experience explosive growth in the last thirty years because, all of a sudden, the Chinese people discovered the work ethic. Their economy came to life because they started to copy Western liberal principles. The fact that they imitated these ideals so imperfectly is hidden away by the fact that they started from such a low economic base.

“The most important New York Times dispatch about China was the magazine item last week that reported on the cram schools that offer rural students a shot at admission to top universities. China now produces as many PhDs as the U.S., and twice as many STEM PhDs.”

You know, the old Soviet Union provided excellent technical training. If memory serves me correctly (please update me on this if you know better), they had more engineers per capita than the US. And if not more, they at least had the same number. The issue is not the quality of the technical training or even less the amount of people you graduate in STEM fields, but the incentive structure they live under. That’s what determines how much they produce.

“China’s merciless meritocracy makes university admission entirely dependent on examination scores. It is a transparent, rules-based system that cannot be gamed. One can bribe a public official in China by covertly paying the college tuition for a child at an overseas university, but not at a university in China itself.”

The children of high-ranking communist party officials don’t get a special break when applying to Chinese universities. Really? Considering all the stories I hear about rampant corruption in China, I find that assertion very hard to believe. According to Transparency International, China ranked 100 out of 174 countries in 2014 on the Corruption Perceptions Index. (It beats Russia and Mexico to be sure, but the latter just barely. Barely more honest than Mexico - what a feat!) Nevertheless, I am sure the admissions department at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard is squeaky clean.

“Inevitably, a great deal of effort is devoted to memorization… No matter: memorization also requires work. An economy doesn’t need a lot of creative people. It needs a few creative people and a great many people who are simply competent.”

This is very true, and a good insight on Goldman’s part.  But as I said before, what matters with the creative and also the simply competent are the incentives you give them. In a free society, they can go in unexpected but fruitful directions. Look at Steve Jobs. Who could have said beforehand that the courses he took in calligraphy as a young man would change the shape of modern society.

“I believe that China is a competitor, but not necessarily (and hopefully not) an enemy.”

I hope the CHiCom’s believe the same thing, though their naval buildup (and the propaganda run on their state-run media) say otherwise.

“I’m also tired of hearing about the imminent collapse of the Chinese financial system. China had the best-performing stock market in the world last year (see above chart), and the big Chinese banks outperformed the overall market index.”

I understand that from June 2006 to Oct 2007, the US stock market also had a great year.

“The Chinese have had an emperor for thousands of years, and view the present emperor (the Communist Party) as the bringer of a Golden Age.”

Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote just a couple of days ago:

“I am also not bullish on China in the long-term. The Chinese Communist Party’s Politbureau isn’t smart enough to run the entire Chinese economy. China’s explosive growth has been due to the fact that it has taken Chinese peasants, effectively living in the middle ages, and transported them into a ramshackled, semi-free, crony-capitalist simulacrum of a free economy. The growth rate has been high for so long because China has had a big supply of medieval peasants. These are beginning to run out. From now on, growth will be harder to achieve, and will require real policy smarts. All the problems that the ChiComs have papered over, ignored, swept under the carpet, or simply not heard of, will need addressing.

As a result, I see a severe economic downturn and significant political instability in China’s near future and America will remain number 1, in spite of the bumblers ‘running things’ from inside the beltway.”

 

Terror attack in Paris was not ‘senseless’

On the aftermath of yesterday’s Islamofascist atrocity in Paris, one of the adjectives one hears from the mainstream media to describe the event is that it was ‘senseless’. This is nonsense. It was not senseless in any meaningful way. It was a deliberate, premeditated, well-planned operation designed rationally to achieve specific political goals: to intimidate Western media outlets into refraining from criticizing Islam and its jihadis. Their strategy is to do that by concentrating their fire on one outlet at a time.

(This is why it is important to reprint the Charlie Hebro cartoons that drew their ire, even if they might offend an old, well-established religion. I just did. We need to show our enemy that we stand together, that divide and conquer tactics won’t work on us.)

If you want an example of a senseless slaughter, consider the mass murder in Edmonton nearly two weeks ago when a Vietnamese man shot and killed eight people and then killed himself. That was senseless. It was an emotional outburst by a mentally ill man that was designed to achieve nothing and achieved nothing. The nut had no goals, and none were achieved.

And while I am on the subject, it wasn’t ‘cowardly’ either, as weren’t the attacks on the World Trade Center. These were evil acts designed for the furtherance of barbarism at the expense of civilization, but there is nothing timid or meek about purposefully flying a fully-fueled aircraft into a building at 500 mph to certain death.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are at war. It is high time we start working to win this war. This requires strategic thinking, which demands, above all else, clarity of thought. To triumph, one must be able to coldly examine the facts of the world as they really are, not as we wish them to be. Magical, wishful thinking does us no good, regardless of how emotionally satisfying it may be. 

Je Suis Charlie

The real lesson of fracking

After the 2012 Presidential Election, conservatives despondent with Barack Obama’s re-election predicted an economic collapse in the US thanks to Obama’s dirigisme.  So far it hasn’t happened. Not only that but all indications point to real economic recovery – at long last. It’s amazing what a $60 per barrel drop in oil prices will do for an economy. A conservative objection would be that low oil prices were hardly due to Obama, that their drop was precipitated by the fracking revolution – something that Obama’s policies actively hindered, and that Obama is only benefiting from forces that he actively tried to stop. Yes, this is all true, but that’s the point. Thanks to the decentralized, federal system possessed by the United States (in spite of a century’s worth of effort by progressives to centralize all decision-making in Washington), America is able to heal itself in spite of its leaders.

Taken as a whole, Obama, Biden, McConnell, Reid, Boehner, and Pelosi are probably the worst group of leaders that the United States has had in recent memory. And yet, there is a profound renewal going on at the state and local level where a group of new, young, energetic Republican reformers have taken over many governorships and state houses. Blogger extraordinaire Walter Russell Mead has extensively chronicled this phenomenon, which he has coined, The Death of the Blue State Model. The result has been a grass-roots rejuvenation. For every Bill de Blasio (currently screwing New York City into the ground), there are a half-dozen reforming governors, like Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Nikki Haley. The great Liberal Justice, Louis Brandeis, said it best:

“A state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

What he meant was that competition between individual states ensures that the best policies win out while, at the same time, no individual has too much power to screw up. Will Bill de Blasio ever win another executive office again? Anywhere?

This phenomenon is best illustrated with a counterexample. Look at a country plagued by overcentralization, like Russia. On the surface, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is powerful, exuding competence and glistening pecs. He made Obama look like a fool over the Syrian red-line fiasco. But in the long run, short-term victories don’t count. No man - no matter how tactically brilliant - is smart enough to run an entire country from a central location. (The governors of all its provinces are selected by the Kremlin). As a result, the Russian economy is a one-note song. Even when oil prices were $115 per barrel, Putin couldn’t maintain the road network he inherited from Yeltsin. It doesn’t matter if his American opponent is a lethargic golf-a-holic, promoting destructive policies. America is greater than that. Its wisdom is distributed and America is stronger and wiser for it. America is regenerating in spite of its worthless ruling class.

It is for this reason I am also not bullish on China in the long-term. The Chinese Communist Party’s Politbureau isn’t smart enough to run the entire Chinese economy. China’s explosive growth has been due to the fact that it has taken Chinese peasants, effectively living in the middle ages, and transported them into a ramshackled, semi-free, crony-capitalist simulacrum of a free economy. The growth rate has been up for so long because China has had a big supply of medieval peasants. These are beginning to run out. From now on, growth will be harder to achieve and will require real policy smarts. All the problems that the ChiComs have papered over, ignored, swept under the carpet, or simply not heard of, will need addressing.

As a result, I see a severe economic downturn and significant political instability in China’s near future and America will remain number 1, in spite of the bumblers inside the beltway. 

Russians skeptical of war in Ukraine

These days, the unwritten assumption underlying many articles written about Russia is the belief that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is some kind of superman, who, among other things, has the ability to mesmerize Russian people the way Hitler captivated Germans in the 1930’s. Well, here is some polling information that provides a much-needed perspective:

“Even as Moscow sends columns of tanks, artillery, air-defense systems and combat troops into the eastern Ukraine for a possible winter offensive, the Russian public’s support for the war could be quite low.

A recent survey by the Levada Center, considered the most important independent pollster in Russia, offers compelling evidence that enthusiasm for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is waning—or was never very high in the first place.

According to the survey, 68 percent of Russians polled “do not want their sons to fight” in southeastern Ukraine on the side of pro-Moscow militants. Only one in seven—13 percent—would support their sons doing so.”

“The survey took place between Oct. 24 and Oct. 27 and contacted 1,600 people ages 18 and older in 134 localities throughout the Russian Federation. Levada Center estimates statistical error as 3.4 percent.”

Though there were obviously no public opinion polls conducted in the Third Reich, many historians have concluded that the average German was lukewarm to Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of Russia. It seems that ordinary Germans evinced more common sense than their messianic leader. They correctly saw the trouble that could arise from such a reckless enterprise.

‘“By contrast, support for Russian annexation of Crimea remains strong. Fifty-five percent of Russians polled said they approve.”’

‘In large numbers, those who approve of the Russian takeover of Crimea say “it is Russian land” and believe Russia annexed Crimea without force.

“People consider the unification of Crimea the result of a free referendum without military interference,” Aleksey Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center, said in a written statement.’

Just as Germans were supportive of Hitler when he took back the Rhineland, an area inhabited almost exclusively by German people and was historically a part of Germany.

“The situation in Ukraine’s southeast is different, and Russians do not consider that Russian military units are required to interfere in this conflict.”’

At the same time, this poll also shows that Vladimir Putin remains personally very popular.

“Putin’s polling numbers remain sky-high. One recent Levada Center poll indicated his approval rating with the Russian people is 88 percent—and his numbers steadily increased during the last six months of the Ukraine crisis.’

You know why this is so? Because – until very recently – he has been winning nonstop. People like me could – and did - see past the Putin regime’s glitz to note its rotten foundations, but to most people victory is a powerful aphrodisiac.

To bring in another historical analogy, Putin is enjoying the same wave of support that Argentinian dictator Leopoldo Galtieri experienced after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. It is widely believed that Galtieri invaded the islands because his junta was unpopular with Argentinians. Significantly, Vladimir Putin experienced surprising difficulties in the Presidential election of 2012, in spite of media domination and widely reported dirty tricks such as ballot box stuffing and multiple voting. We all know what happened to Galtieri’s popularity after the war went south on him. Hmm… I wonder if there are any lessons there for Putin here?

Another question is how reliable is the Levada Center?

“Levada Center is an independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research organization named after its founder Yuri Levada, the first Russian professor of sociology.”

“However, the Levada Center has proved a political irritant to Putin, rousing him to action last year in an effort to shut down the independent pollster.

In May 2013, Moscow prosecutors threatened the center with closure, accusing the organization of violating Putin’s law on foreign agents and agencies receiving financial support from foreign nations.”

Sounds like they’re legit.

Of course, how reliable can a poll taken in present-day Russia be, even if a reputable pollster has conducted it? After all, there is a constant stream of reports about regime opponents being threatened with dismissal, or being arrested, or even being machine-gunned in back alleys. In such a climate, how many Russians would be willing to tell an anonymous phone caller that he doesn’t like Putin, even if that’s what he really thinks? Given this, it seems prudent to factor in an inherent pro-Putin bias into all polling data coming out of Russia today – including those from reliable sources.

Given this, how unpopular must the war in the Ukraine actually be if 68% of Russians are willing to say so in such an environment?