Ben Franklin on Nationalized Health Care

In 1778, while serving as Minister of the Continental Congress to the French government, Benjamin Franklin received an insulting anonymous letter from some British “gentlemen,” expressing contempt for the American Revolution and the scorn felt by ruling elites in all ages for the common people. His answer was interesting in the context of the current debate over nationalized health care. An excerpt:

The weight, therefore, of an independent empire, which you seem certain of our inability to bear, will not be so great as you imagine; the expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed, determining, as we do, to have no offices of profit, nor any sinecures, or useless appointments, so common in ancient or corrupted states. We can govern ourselves a year for the sum you pay in a single department, for what one jobbing contractor, by the favour of a minister, can cheat you out of in a single article.

We’ve wandered far from the vision of our Founding Fathers, haven’t we? They valued Liberty. Today the sine qua non is Security, not Liberty, whether for “liberals” or “conservatives.” The left would secure Security with state power. The right would secure it with torture, indefinite detention without trial, and the assumption that “terrorists” are guilty until proven innocent.

Hugh Thomas’ “The Spanish Civil War”

I just reread Hugh Thomas’ “The Spanish Civil War” after a lapse of many years. Thomas has the ability, rare in our times, to write histories peopled by human beings, rather than good guys and bad guys. In this book he portrays an event that is still well within living memory, but seems as remote as the middle ages. It is well worth reading, if only to recall what human beings are capable of. It was a war marked by furious ideological passions, a version in miniature of the titanic struggle between fascism and Communism that was to follow it. Especially in the beginning, but throughout the war, both sides systematically hunted down and shot any person of talent they had any reason to believe might favor the other side. Many tens of thousands of Spain’s best and brightest were squandered in this national decapitation that is such a trademark of the 20th century, mimicking the even more devastating self-immolation that reached its peak of fury in the Soviet Union at the same time, and decades later in Cambodia. Imagine what it would be like if people in a town 20 or 30 miles from yours grabbed weapons, climbed onto trucks and drove to where you live, and then began systematically going door to door, shooting down 100’s of your neighbors for the flimsiest of reasons, including pure malice and personal revenge. That’s what it was like. We forget such events at our peril. They are still quite recent, and could easily happen again.

One wonders how many of the later dictators of central and South America were “inspired” by Franco and his fascists. After all, in the end, he “won,” in the sense that his will prevailed. How many of the organizers of death squads, the “revolutionaries” who murdered and still murder whole villages, and the military thugs responsible for the “disappeared ones” learned their lessons from him? It’s ironic to consider what has become of his “victory,” paid for with the blood of so many of Spain’s most talented children.  Today she is ruled by a socialist he certainly would have shot back in July or August of ‘36.  Franco posed as the defender of outraged Christianity.  Recently, I saw the Spanish film “Talk to Her,” in which one of the characters claims that those priests who don’t rape nuns are pedophiles.  The wheel of Nemesis rolls on.

There is a fine sentence in Thomas’ Epilogue that epitomizes both the war and the century:

The Spanish Civil War was the Spanish share in the tragic European breakdown of the twentieth century, in which the liberal heritage of the nineteenth century, and the sense of optimism which had lasted since the renaissance, were shattered.

The Conservative Narrative of Yesteryear: Observations of a Monday Morning Quarterback

Europe in 1848

We have already observed that the form of nationalism, which reposes on the basis of a common language, is, from the nature of that basis, aggressive in its tendencies.

Not much of a stretch there. They were referring to German nationalism.

…the supremacy of race is not the principle on which the Austrian empire has been built up, or can be maintained.

The Austrian Empire collapsed into pieces determined on the basis of nationality 70 years later. As for Italy, scene of some of the year’s most spectacular revolutionary eruptions, the editors were not sanguine about its population’s readiness for self-rule, and, like our own conservatives in the cold war, suggested that “anti-Communist” dictators were needed to save it from the forces of darkness:

No men have less political sagacity than the modern Italians, and it is the singular mixture of indolence and vanity of which the national character is compounded that has ever kept them in ignorance of political science, and which, on the downfall of their absolute governments, has exposed them to the seduction of French democracy, and plunged them into excesses that disgrace the name of Cristendom… The Socialist and Communistic party (my emphasis) – in other words, the Italian “liberals” – dreaded, above all things, the quiet establishment of a limited monarchy.

Referring to the murder of one of the Pope’s ministers, the staunchly Protestant editors of the Quarterly plead for the temporal government of the Pope!

With him fell the temporal government of the Pope – the last hope of social order.

(!)

On the possibility of intervention in Italy by Britain’s ally, Russia, to “restore order”:

What if Russia, who has hitherto been a watchful though inactive observer of these transactions, should, under such circumstances, offer herself as an ally… to the King of Naples? Is our Foreign Secretary prepared to advise his sovereign to unite in such an event, her fleet to that of France, and aid the spoliation of our ally?

Apparently so. Five years later the Russian ally had become the enemy in the Crimean War. Moving on to the question of Italian unity:

We are well aware of the cry for an Italy, one and indivisible, but that vision is older than the Treaties of Vienna themselves, and does not seem, even after all the efforts and all the successes of the Italian revolutionists, to be one jot more rational or more feasible than it originally was.

In fact, a dozen years later, the final unification of Italy was all but complete, although the capital could not be moved to Rome until 1871.

…the great powers who guaranteed the Treaty of Westphalia (ending the 30 Years War in 1648) had thereby indirectly declared the political unity of Germany to be inconsistent with the general interests of Europe… It was thus necessary… to avoid establishing in the heart of Germany, and in the person of any one of its members (German states) a State whose power of aggression would be out of all proportion to the means of resistance which the combined action of the other States could present.

That certainly would have sounded prophetic in 1940.

The fall of the throne of the Bourbons in France was, in a great degree, the penalty which they paid for having assisted the British colonists in North America, in violation of the law of nations, to emancipate themselves from the mother country.

I wonder when they finally stopped bitching about it?

It is to be hoped, however, that after the pursuit of German Unity shall have been abandoned, it will have served, like the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, to produce indirect results of more value to the German people, than any which could have been directly achieved by the success of the experiments in the Frankfort Laboratory.

German unification, like Italian unification, was a reality less than a quarter of a century later. In retrospect, it seems they were inevitable. Yet the writers for the Quarterly were not stupid men. They were the best and the brightest that conservative thought had to offer in their day. The moral of the story? Perhaps that we are all fallible, and should not be too quick to accept popular certainties. Reality has a bad habit of intruding and making the certainties of yesterday the mockeries of tomorrow.

In a later post, we will consider whether the “liberals” of 1848 fared any better.

Update: Iran and Twitter

Here’s something from Debka that adds point to my earlier reservations about Twittered revolutions. Some excerpts:

Part of the reason (the Iranian demonstrations petered out) was their organizers’ heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down…

The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists…

Within a few days of their protest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the bulk of his supporters, realizing their electronic campaign had been taken over by the regime to hunt them down, disappeared from the streets of Tehran.

Debka is occasionally too quick to credit rumors in its zeal to scoop the mainstream news organizations. I suspect they’re right on the money this time, though. The Internet was never designed to be secure. It can be a great mobilizer in a democracy. In a dictatorship, it’s more likely to be a trap.

Trotsky as Cassandra: The End of the Marxist Dream

Trotsky was the best and brightest, and probably also the most readable, of the old Bolsheviks. He was also the Cassandra of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Here’s what he had to say about the historical fate of Communism in “In Defense of Marxism,” a collection of his letters and articles published shortly after he was murdered by Stalin in 1940.

“If, however, it is conceded that the present war (WWII) will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilisation.”

“Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting regime on an international scale.”

“If (this) prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous this perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia.”

Too bad Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, et.al., didn’t listen to him. It would have saved us all a lot of grief.

Milovan Djilas, one of the great political thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a postscript for Trotsky in his seminal work on Communism, “The New Class.” An excerpt:

“The movement of the new class toward power comes as a result of the efforts of the proletariat and the poor. These are the masses upon which the party or the new class must lean and with which its interests are most closely allied. This is true until the new class finally establishes its power and authority. Over and above this, the new class is interested in the proletariat and the poor only to the extent necessary for developing production and for maintaining in subjugation the most aggressive and rebellious social forces.”

Those who would elevate the likes of Chavez and Zelaya to the rank of great heroes of democracy should take note and think again.

Trotsky and Djilas are both well worth reading. Djilas, in particular, is one of the most brilliant and under-appreciated thinkers of the last hundred years. See, for example, in addition to “The New Class,” works such as “Land Without Justice” and “Wartime.” You can find them on eBay, Amazon, Barnesandnoble, etc.

More on Twittering the Revolution in Iran

The Wall Street Journal chimes in with another note of caution.

Perhaps the State will never be as agile and clever as individual expert hackers, but it’s unlikely most of the people Twittering Revolutions will be expert hackers. It’s more likely they will be people who leave behind silicon footprints, making them prime targets for retribution the day after.

Quote for the Day: Trotsky and the Twitter of 1905

Our pathetic clandestine hectographs, our homemade clandestine hand-presses were what we pitted against the rotary presses of lying officialdom and licensed liberalism. Was it not like fighting Krupp’s guns with a Stone-Age ax? They had laughed at us. And now, in the October days, the Stone-Age ax had won. The revolutionary word was out in the open, astonished and intoxicated by its own power.

Trotsky in “1905″.

Iran, Twitter, and Revolution

In looking through the first five blogs on my list of usual suspects for this evening, I noticed that all five of them had “Facebook Revolution” posts on Iran. Here’s tonight’s line-up, not necessarily in the order of their current favor at Court: Sullivan, Kos, Huffpo, Instapundit, and Little Miss Attila. The whole Twitter, Flickr, Facebook revolution of the future thing seems compelling, but I have my doubts. All of the above can be monitored and controlled, and despotic states will become increasingly likely to do just that every time another Ahmadinejad is caught flat footed. Back in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1917, there was no Internet, but the word still got around, and, occasionally, revolutions succeeded even without Tweets. Of course, they often succeeded because guys like Louis XVI and Nicholas II lacked the will and ruthlessness to resist. They also succeeded because the state in those days lacked anything like the means of controlling its citizens that are easily at the command of any ruler who wants to use them today. In the end, technology will favor the oppressors, and not the oppressed. Just as the proponents of torture on the right will have second thoughts as soon as they become the victims, the proponents of the unrestricted growth of state power on the left should be careful what they wish for. They assume they will always be the state, and that it will never turn on them, but only on their enemies. So did Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky.
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If state power cannot be limited and controlled, all the tweeting in the world won’t raise Liberty from the dead. Mankind’s brush with Naziism and, especially, Communism in the 20th century were near things. We may not be so lucky in the years to come.
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Update: Publius on the limits of Twitter.
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