Read it and weep -- then do not ever read "Newsweek" again.
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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/niall-ferguson-advocates-fascism-and-newsweek-legitmates-it.html
Niall Ferguson Advocates Fascism and Newsweek Legitmates His Views
Well, if you had any doubts about where this country is headed,
this should seal it. Fascism is now being pushed by legitimate news
venues as sound economic policy.
And please, don’t try the argument that the article is not as awful as the cover. That image will be in grocery stores all over America for a full week. How many people will read that headline? This is powerful messaging, a PR wet dream. No matter what you think of Ferguson’s sophistry in the article proper, the choice of Newsweek to dignify it by placing it on its cover and depicting a failed authoritarian experiment as a success is telling.
Students of the 1930s know that English and European aristocrats were typically pro-Hitler because he brought stability to Germany and looked to be a bulwark against the advance of Communism. Il Duce was seen as more grandiose and buffoon-like but similarly useful. As William Manchester wrote at the close of the second volume of his biography of Churchill:
In ECONNED, we noted:
>Mack Smith is also the author of seminal biographies of Cavour, and Mazzini, as well as the author of a leading textbook on modern Italy. No other biographer of the man possesses his knowledge. His bibliography contains more than a thousand items of memoirs, biographies, newspapers, articles, diaries and monographs. He has sixty-eight pages of tiny notes. On every page there is someting damning and disreputable. Mussolini was not as vicious and cruel a man as Hitler: he was more of a thug than a psychopath. Yet he was capable of being very cruel, and half the population of Cyraenica, Libya were killed in the course of suppressing a rebellion. When the rebel leader was captured and executed, “Italians were told that this heroic and noble man was a cruel, cowardly and corrupt barbarian whose death brought joy to the whole Arab population.”
This is chillingly similar to what took place in Pinochet’s Chile, where “free market” reforms led to a debt fueled boom and a plutocratic land grab, yet was widely and falsely presented as a success in the US as neoliberals pushed their deregulation ideology. Again, from ECONNED:
And please, don’t try the argument that the article is not as awful as the cover. That image will be in grocery stores all over America for a full week. How many people will read that headline? This is powerful messaging, a PR wet dream. No matter what you think of Ferguson’s sophistry in the article proper, the choice of Newsweek to dignify it by placing it on its cover and depicting a failed authoritarian experiment as a success is telling.
Students of the 1930s know that English and European aristocrats were typically pro-Hitler because he brought stability to Germany and looked to be a bulwark against the advance of Communism. Il Duce was seen as more grandiose and buffoon-like but similarly useful. As William Manchester wrote at the close of the second volume of his biography of Churchill:
Because their possessions were great, the appeasers has much to lose should the red flag fly over Westiminster. That is why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driver of their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against Bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up with the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich’s dark underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So with their eyes opened, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its inequities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, and having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, led England herself into the cold, damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel.It is a sick irony that Ferguson, a long-time enthusiast for English and American imperialism, and in particular, the need for America to be a more aggressive empire to promote democracy, is now praising an authoritarian regime that helped bring Britain to its knees.
In ECONNED, we noted:
In other words, “free markets” ideology, with its libertarian idealism, has in fact produced Mussolini-style corporatism. And until we learn to call the resulting looting by its proper name, it is certain to continue.But rather than see the crisis and the resulting high unemployment as a failure of “free markets” ideology, its boosters are recommending more of the same. And the worst is that Mussolini was an abject failure. Dennis Mack Smith’s Mussolini is a high regarded account. One Amazon reviewer provides a terse summary of his conclusions:
>Mack Smith is also the author of seminal biographies of Cavour, and Mazzini, as well as the author of a leading textbook on modern Italy. No other biographer of the man possesses his knowledge. His bibliography contains more than a thousand items of memoirs, biographies, newspapers, articles, diaries and monographs. He has sixty-eight pages of tiny notes. On every page there is someting damning and disreputable. Mussolini was not as vicious and cruel a man as Hitler: he was more of a thug than a psychopath. Yet he was capable of being very cruel, and half the population of Cyraenica, Libya were killed in the course of suppressing a rebellion. When the rebel leader was captured and executed, “Italians were told that this heroic and noble man was a cruel, cowardly and corrupt barbarian whose death brought joy to the whole Arab population.”
This is chillingly similar to what took place in Pinochet’s Chile, where “free market” reforms led to a debt fueled boom and a plutocratic land grab, yet was widely and falsely presented as a success in the US as neoliberals pushed their deregulation ideology. Again, from ECONNED:
The bubble worsened as banks gave low-interest-rate foreign currency loans, knowing full well the borrowers in their own industrial group would default. when the peso fell. But it permitted them to use the proceeds to seize more assets at preferential prices, thanks to artificially cheap borrowing and the eventual subsidy of default.And most troubling was the authoritariasm. ECONNED again:
And the export boom, the other engine of growth, was, contrary to stateside propaganda, not the result of “free market” reforms either. The Pinochet regime did not reverse the Allende land reforms and return farms to their former owners. Instead, it practiced what amounted to industrial policy and gave the farms to middle-class entrepreneurs, who built fruit and wine businesses that became successful exporters. The other major export was copper, which remained in government hands.
And even in this growth period, the gains were concentrated among the wealthy. Unemployment rose to 16% and the distribution of income became
more regressive. The Catholic Church’s soup kitchens became a vital stopgap.32 The bust came in late 1981. Banks, on the verge of collapse thanks to dodgy loans, cut lending. GDP contracted sharply in 1982 and 1983. Manufacturing output fell by 28% and unemployment rose to 20%.
The neoliberal regime suddenly resorted to Keynesian backpedaling to quell violent protests. The state seized a majority of the banks and implemented
tougher banking laws. Pinochet restored the minimum wage, the rights of unions to bargain, and launched a program to create 500,000 jobs.
Given a choice, most people would put civil liberties—freedom of speech, the right to vote and belong to political organizations, the right to due process with an independent judiciary— at a higher priority than economic prerogatives. Not being at risk of being seized in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag, or worse, is worth quite a lot to most people. Pinochet shuttered the congress, eliminated political parties, unions, and professional groups. He also implemented a curfew, with everyone required to stay at home after 8:00 P.M. Roughly 4,000 citizens were murdered,The propaganda barrage is moving from boosting the incoherent and internally contradictory “free market” paradigm to open advocacy of brutal authoritarianism as the remedy to its failure. I have always thought it would be terrible to live in, say, France in the 1930s, to see the march of Fascism, and be unable to stop it. Ferguson and his allies are advocating a repeat of that dark period.
with more driven into exile. Methods of torture included gang rape, the pulling out of nails and teeth, and electrical shocks to the genitals.
Yet Friedman and his followers put their vaunted “free markets” over personal liberty in claiming Pinochet as their own. As historian Eduardo Galeano
described neoliberal reforms, “People went to prison so prices could be free.”
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