Ruining a Hercules

I am in the middle of Alec Nove's An Economic History of the USSR (Pelican Books, 1975) and have found some interesting parallels with the - not economic, but anti-economic - policies of communist Russia and the anti-economic policies of the Obama regime. So far the most disturbing similarity I discovered is between pre-communist, czarist Russia and America on its current fast-track to some form of neo-communism. The big-picture views of both their situations are identical in essentials - and profoundly scary.

Consider what is happening around us. The government's policies are stifling America's private sector and keeping her natural resources in their useless natural state. There is the communist-directed OWS movement which has the potential to become violent. There is a TEA Party movement trying to bring constitutionalism to an incompetent government engaged in continuous power grabs and spending wildly to the point of bankruptcy.

All that has happened before - a century ago, on the other side of the world.

From Nove:

The following is an extract from a book by an Austrian observer, Hugo Ganz, published in 1904 and entitled The Downfall of Russia. It is said to be a conversation between Ganz himself and a senior official who asked to remain anonymous:

   "What will be the end, then?"

   "The end will be that the terror from above will awaken the terror from below, that peasant revolts will break out and that assassination will increase."

   "And is there no possibility of organizing the revolution so that it shall not rage senselessly?"

   "Impossible..."

   "There is no one with whom I have spoken who would fail to paint the future of this country in the darkest colours. Can there be no change of the fatal policy which is ruining the country?" 

   "Not before a great general catastrophe. When we shall be compelled for the first time partly to repudiate our debts - and that may happen sooner than we now believe - on that day, being no longer able to pay our old debts with new ones - for we shall no longer be able to conceal our internal bankruptcy from foreign countries and from the Emperor - steps will be taken, perhaps..." 

   "Is there no mistake possible here in what you are saying?" 

   "Whoever, like myself, has known the state kitchen for the last twenty-five years has no longer any doubts. The autocracy is not equal to the problems of a modern great power, and it would be against all historical precedent to assume that it would voluntarily yield without external pressure to a constitutional form of government." 

   "We must wish then, for Russia's sake, that the catastrophe comes as quickly as possible."

   "I repeat to you that it is perhaps nearer than we all think or are willing to admit. That is the hope; that is our secret consolation...We are near to collapse, like an athlete with great muscles and perhaps incurable heart weakness. We still maintain ourselves upright with stimulants, by loans, which like all stimulants only help to ruin the system more quickly. With that we are a rich country with all conceivable natural resources, simply ill-governed and prevented from unlocking our resources. But is this the first time that quacks have ruined a Hercules that has fallen into their hands?" (p. 27)

Need America continue this repeating of Russia's history?

America's crisis has been a long-time in the making and is arriving at its climax, but it is not too late for us to get to work at stopping the quacks in Washington from ruining this Hercules.

Newest Old Book Round Up

Spring is here and that means library book sales begin! This is an important part in giving oneself a good education! You can study what you want; you can discover forgotten, excellent scholarship of decades ago; and a few bucks go a long way. Library sales are a lot of fun because I never know what I'll find among the boxes and boxes of donated, used, out-of-print books that sell for dirt cheap. Well, that used to be so. Lately, however, I've acquired so many books this way that I can no longer leave a sale with boxes or bags full of books and instead leave with just a few or, rarely, only an armful at most. This is for two reasons. First, I have pretty much got enough good books on subjects that interest me that I really do not need a whole lot more any time soon. Second, many books at any sale are - ones I already have! There's no more for me to get! Wow!

Some of the best finds for me are books by those I consider philosophical opponents. It's important to know what statists, religionists and others believe and are up to. The best way is to get their writings, especially the ones out of print. There are a lot of them and they wrote a lot of books - and I'm collecting them! Those books have had their impact on their time which in turn influenced what is happening today and what will happen in the future. They are worth knowing about in understanding the battle of ideas going on.

Here is what I acquired from a library sale this weekend. I thought I will share my finds in case anybody might be interested in any of them.

On religion:

Religion In America: An historical account of the development of American religious life (2nd ed.) by Winthrop S. Hudson (1973). This 400+ page book starts with the Puritans and ends with black theology. That's hardly what I would call progress! Anyway, I expect it should be good.

Also I obtained Vol. 3 of Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas (1985). This volume is "From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms" and I suspect this might be a textbook, but it looks like good overview of the subject matter all the same. Old textbooks tend to be of better scholarly quality than today's, I believe.

On philosophy:

I found one book on philosophy that looks very insightful, Nicolas Berdyaev's The Origin of Russian Communism. This is a 1966 edition, the original published in 1937. It is a short book, but the chapter titles look like it should be an interesting read. Some chapters are "The Russian idea of religion and the Russian state", "Russian socialism and nihilism", "Russian 19th century literature and its predictions", and "Communism and Christianity." I intend to read this soon and I would not be surprised if it is worth reviewing.

In history:

A History of the Weimar Republic Vol. 2: From the Lacarno Conference to Hitler's Seizure of Power by Erich Eyeck (1967). I do not know much about Weimar Germany but I know enough about it to understand that there are important lessons to be learned from it. From the blurbs on the back cover I gather that Eyck was an expert authority on the subject and his book is first-rate. If so, I have to track down a copy of Volume 1.

The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972 by Irwin Unger (1974). I knew I found a dandy when I saw that title! I am reading it now and it is very informative and revealing. This one will be in my next book review.

Turning to what is a more positive subject compared with religionists, communists, and New Leftists is Peter Gay's Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (1965). I read Gay's excellent two volume The Enlightenment: An Interpretation so I knew had to grab this. This is a history of Voltaire's political and social thinking, not presented merely in itself, but how his experiences and events shaped it. I expect I'll be enjoying and learning a lot from this book when I get to it.

Economics:

John K. Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967). I know that Galbraith is a "big name" in economics and this is an important book. Being a free-marketer I am not likely to agree with this book, but I am curious about what Galbraith's ideas were and what their impact was.

Lastly, environmentalism:

The Ages of Gaia : A Biography of Our Living Earth by James Lovelock (1988). I think to be in a frame of mind suitable to reading a biography of the organism that we are parasites on Gaia, a.k.a. "the earth" I should first consume ample quantities of Killian's Red. Good thing this book is on the short side!

So those are my library's new additions.

And come to think of it, it is just as well that I am not buying as many books as I used to. My book cases are way overcrowded!