Absurdist Thinker Albert Camus on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Author and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash on this day in 1960, on a straight country road with an unused train ticket in his pocket. How absurd. 

Camus wrote that there "is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." He told a sad & poignant story of a building manager who had killed himself because he had lost his daughter five years before, which greatly changed him and that the experience had “undermined” him. According to Camus "A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."

Though he once was a Communist, he dropped that ideology in favor of freedom.

"Because he was not a partisan in the Cold War between the U.S./NATO and the U.S.S.R, Albert Camus was an oddball.  As a result, he was criticized by the right, left, and center.  His allegiance was to truth, not ideologies.  He opposed state murder, terrorism, and warfare from all quarters.  An artistic anarchist with a passionate spiritual hunger, an austere and moral Don Juan, this sensual man of conscience and honor earned his reputation by a lifelong literary meditation on death in all its guises: disease (he was constantly threatened by tuberculosis), murder, suicide, capital punishment, war, etc.; deaths both 'happy' and absurd, sudden and slow.  His enemy was always injustice and those powerful ones who thought they had the right to make others suffer and die for their perverted purposes.  An artist compelled by history to enter the political arena, he spoke out in defense of the poor, oppressed, and powerless.  Among his enemies were liberal imperialism and Soviet Marxism, abstract ideologies used to enslave and murder people around the world." Edward Curtin

Some quotes from Camus:

"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude."

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money." 

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Political utopias justified in advance any enterprises whatever."

"The welfare of the people…has always been the alibi of tyrants…giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

"The tyrannies of today…no longer admit of silence or neutrality…I am against."

"The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the state. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action."

"Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but without law there is no freedom."

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State."

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration…It’s a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to get better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse."

"Liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals…the supreme good that governs all others."

"Is it possible…to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes."

"We have to live and let live in order to create what we are."

"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom."

"Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom."

"More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself."

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The USSR on This Day in History

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This day in history: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed on this day in 1922.

From Daniel Pryor, writing back in 2017

This November marked 100 years since the October Revolution and the beginning of the Soviet Union’s disastrous 69-year experiment with communism. While the horrors of Nazism are well-known, half of British 16- to 24-year-olds have never heard of Lenin, let alone the Holodomor terror-famine.

And although explicit apologists for the Soviet Union are no longer a significant intellectual force in Britain (except those who advise the Labour leadership), my generation is largely unaware of what life was like in the USSR. The once vibrant field of Sovietology is slowly dying, and the failures of central planning are fading from memory.

Compared to the US, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.

The Adam Smith Institute’s new book Back in the USSR, by José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente, aims to illustrate exactly what life was like in the Soviet Union. Were there queues to buy food? How good were Soviet appliances? How did the USSR industrialize so quickly? Was there poverty, unemployment, or inequality? In painstaking detail, Ricón assesses the historical evidence and the claims of leading scholars to provides answers to these questions. The resulting picture is grim.

Economic Stagnation and the Labor Force

At the root of the answer to these questions is the USSR’s productive capabilities. While Soviet GDP growth is sometimes considered to have been exemplary, one cannot look at such figures in isolation. Compared to the United States, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.

And even this growth came at a cost; with consumption intentionally sacrificed in the name of faster growth rates. Stalin may have managed to achieve a higher level of growth than a counterfactual Tsarist Russia, but this came at a huge price to its population in terms of economic welfare costs alone (without factoring in famine, repression, and terror).

It was also unsustainable, as later stagnation shows. Catch-up growth – adding more capital – is something that planned economies have been able to do. Eventually, however, they reach a point where they need to improve the quality of that capital. That means innovation, something with which they have struggled. Thanks to the inherent problems with central planning, low productivity plagued the USSR. Communism, it turns out, just isn’t very efficient.

Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.

At least everyone had a job, right? Well, sort of. Thanks to Soviet methods of allocating workers to different jobs, factories hoarded labor and created “fake jobs” in case more labor was needed in the future. This resulted in underemployment, with idle workers being underutilized. And working conditions in the USSR fell short of those in more capitalist countries. Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.

As for the idea that high female labor force participation was a feminist triumph for communism, this is difficult to square with Stalin’s abortion bans, legal barriers to divorce, and, by and large, the continuing role of women as homemakers and child-rearers in the Soviet Union. Women didn’t work because they were emancipated from gender norms: they did it because the unsustainable Soviet economic model required it.

Food, Clothing, and Health

These economic shortcomings made day-to-day life in the Soviet Union less than desirable. The average shirt you wear to work cost 10 percent of an average monthly wage: a bargain at just £170 when translated into present-day UK figures. A winter coat to protect you from the Russian cold? A whole month's salary, which might explain why almost a quarter of the Soviet population couldn’t afford one.

When it gets to your lunch break, you’ll only have to queue for a few hours before you enjoy twice as many potatoes as the equivalent American (although you’ll have to make do on half as much meat). Want to keep your leftovers in the fridge? You’ll only have to wait a few years for one. Don’t miss your one-hour collection slot though; you won’t get a second chance. If you want to drive home from work, rather than shiver in your £170 shirt because you can’t afford a winter coat, you’ll have to wait up to ten years for a car. There were only five million cars in the USSR in 1976; Americans owned nearly 100 million.

There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US.

At some point during your 10-year wait for a car, you might fall ill. Bad luck! The Soviet health system was atrocious. There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid, 20 times as many cases of measles, and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US. And when compared to other developing countries, the USSR failed to deliver better healthcare outcomes despite having the highest physician-patient ratio in the world (42 per 10,000 population). While you’d be able to see a “qualified” physician, the quality of healthcare left a lot to be desired. Many medical school graduates were not even able to read an electrocardiogram.

As Back in the USSR explores in full detail, the consequences of central planning are dire. Communism promised utopia, but delivered nastier, poorer, and shorter lives.

Reprinted from CapX.

Daniel Pryor

Daniel Pryor is a Young Voices Advocate. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin on This Day in History

 

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This Day in History: Socialist Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin was born on this day in 1878. This murderous tyrant who killed more people than Hitler was actually nicknamed "Uncle Joe" by leaders in the West. This started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt who went to great lengths to warm the image of Stalin and the Soviet Union in the eyes of the public. FDR purposefully claimed that the Katyn massacre was committed by Germans, despite knowing that Stalin was behind this mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers. 

I remember this quote from A.J. Jacob's 2005 book _The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World_: "If there’s one ironclad rule I’ve learned about government, it’s this: never trust a politician with the nickname 'Uncle.' You’ve got Uncle Joe Stalin … Ho Chi Minh, whose nickname was Uncle Ho. And for the trifecta, you’ve got [“Uncle”] Paul Kruger, the founder of South Africa’s nefarious Afrikaaner nation… So if you see an uncle on the ballot, do not be tempted to vote for him. He is not actually your uncle. He will not tell you funny jokes and pull nickels out of your ear. Instead, he may try to have you purged. Just to be safe, stay away from politicians named Papa as well."

Here are some quotes from Stalin to help you determine his character:

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

“Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem.”

“Gratitude is an illness suffered by dogs.”

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

“Education is a weapon, the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.”

“The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.”

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

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*FDR also admired Fascist Leader Benito Mussolini.

A Marxist Funeral on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Communist Leader Vladimir Lenin attended the funeral for Laura Marx (Lafargue) on this day in 1911, the daughter of Karl Marx, who died in a suicide pact with her husband.

Laura was not the only child of Karl Marx to commit suicide.

The man that Karl Marx was is summed up nicely by Connor Tomlinson:

"Marx was an alcoholic who never washed. Boils covered his body, preventing him from sitting down.

He refused to work, and drove his family to destitution -- causing the deaths of his two sons from exposure and illness.

He raped his unpaid maid, and had Engels subsidize their illegitimate child.

He wrote poetry romanticizing the ingesting of poison -- the method by which two of his daughters would later commit suicide.

One of those daughters Marx disowned for marrying a Cuban man, who Marx insulted as ‘Negrillo’ and ‘The Gorilla’.

Marx was also explicitly genocidal -- calling for ‘revolutionary terror’, theft, and murder against the ill-defined 'bourgeoisie'.

He said ‘the next attempt of the French revolution’ should be so bloody that ‘beside [it] the French Revolution [would be] child’s play’.

He forecast a dictatorship would inevitably arise from this bloody revolution, and require absolute power to collectivize and redistribute property to achieve communism.

He idolized Mephistopheles from Faust, insisting that ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish.’

No wonder every experiment with Marxism produces mass murder, privation, starvation, tyranny, and Hell on Earth.

Long after his death, Marx's specter of contempt for existence itself haunts our civilization.

We would do good to rid ourselves of it."

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Madalyn Murray O’Hair on This Day in History

 

This day in history: In a protest that would soon become famous, Baltimore housewife Madalyn Murray withdrew her 14-year-old son William from Woodbourne Junior High School rather than continue participation in a daily Bible reading on this day in 1960. Since 1905, the city school district had required Bible reading or prayer to open each school day. 

Mrs. Murray, later Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founded the American Atheists and continued challenging the relation of church and state. She was also a very unpleasant, obscene and foul-mouthed woman. As H. L. Mencken so aptly described liberal female political activists: “The kind of women who make you want to burn every bed in the world.”

Her life was filled with pornography. Her house had figures of mating animals, and she would often describe her trips to X-rated theaters, stating with some delight that she was the only female in the building.

She was also a Soviet sympathizer and member of the Socialist Labor Party. She twice sought to defect to the Soviet Union, applying first in 1959 through the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and again at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, travelling there for the express purpose in 1960; on both occasions, the Soviets denied her entry. Who would want her?

William, the son that she pulled from school would later convert to Christianity. He did write this about his mother: "My mother delighted in hiring unrepentant criminals to work in her atheist office. She particularly enjoyed hiring convicted murderers who had served their time but were unrepentant about what they had done. She got a sense of power out of having men in her employ who had taken human life." 

This would eventually lead to her violent death.

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John Lennon's IMAGINE on This Day in History

 

This day in history: "Imagine", the most popular of John Lennon's songs after the breakup of The Beatles, was released as a single in the United States on this day in 1971. Lennon himself says this about his song: "The song ‘Imagine,’ which says, Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics is virtually the communist manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement. You see, ‘Imagine’ was exactly the same message, but sugar-coated. Now ‘Imagine’ is a big hit almost everywhere; anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it is sugar-coated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do."

At FreedomFest 2009, they came out with a newer Libertarian version of Imagine:

Imagine there’s no taxation

It’s easy if you try

No IRS below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living to be free.

Imagine no politicians.

Telling us what to do.

No forms to fill out for.

And no inflation too

Imagine all the people

Living without Social Security.

You may say that I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday they’ll join us

And liberty will have won.

Imagine no regulations.

I wonder if you can

No need for laws to control us

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Competing in the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday they’ll join us

And liberty will have won. ~Source 

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The USSR Changes its Wage System on This Day in History

 

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This day in history: On this day in 1969, the USSR (Soviet Russia) made a partial change in its economic policy to allow employers the option to pay some workers more than others based on production. The move, which one British newspaper commented was "in effect, based on the capitalist policy of higher wages for better workers" and to allow managers to fire inefficient ones, was approved by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party following the recommendations of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.

This was a major departure from the radical egalitarian roots of Communism/Socialism.

Communism/Socialism has always had a problem with incentives. "In a communist society there are no incentives, and the idea of profit is absent. People work only for the collective good, which results in a lack of drive towards innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. There is no competition and there is no reward for going beyond the minimum requirements." Source

"Every communist philosophy comes down to some vague ideals and a lot of wishful thinking"  ~Jonathan Sher

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The Great Russian Purge on This Day in History

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This day in history: The Great Purge of the Soviet Union began on this day in 1936. 

From James Harris:  

Between the summer of 1936 and 1938, the regime of Joseph Stalin summarily executed 750,000 Soviet citizens without trial or any legal process. In the same period, more than a million others were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag, from where many would not return. In the history of a murderous regime, this was a period of exceptional state violence perpetrated against its own people.

The episode has always held a certain macabre fascination, but there are other more substantial reasons for drawing attention to it as we reach the 80th anniversary. In 1991, and then again in 2000, huge volumes of archival materials — millions of documents — were released to historians. It has taken years to digest this material and make sense of it, but new and striking findings have made it possible to rewrite the history of what has come to be known as the Terror, or the Great Purge. My recent book The Great Fear is one example of this. These findings help us better understand contemporary Russia, its current, authoritarian leader and the reverence many Russians continue to feel for Stalin.

Khrushchev wanted to insulate himself from blame.

In the West, the public perception of Stalin and the Terror lingers from the period immediately after the dictator’s death in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to limit the power of the fearsome Soviet political police. But he also wanted to communicate to the Soviet political elite that they would not be blamed for the violence of the Stalin era, though they had been deeply and directly involved. So Khrushchev blamed the Terror on Stalin and his “cult of personality”, and historians in the West followed his lead.

They – particularly following the lead of Robert Conquest in his 1967 book The Great Terror – presented Stalin as a bloodthirsty, paranoid, political opportunist determined to secure total power over all other considerations. The Terror of 1936-1938 was therefore understood as the culmination of a drive to create a personal dictatorship.

What Kept Stalin Awake at Night

Archival revelations have not, it must be said, established that Stalin was actually a nice guy. Quite the contrary. But they have poked rather large holes in the traditional story.

For example, it became clear rather early on that the majority of victims of the Terror were ordinary workers and peasants — people who presented no direct challenge to Stalin’s power. When Stalin’s private papers were released in 2000, historians initially expected to see a gap between them and Stalin’s public self-presentation as a loyal follower of Lenin and defender of the Revolution. But it wasn’t there. In public and in private, Stalin was committed to building socialism, not to building a personal dictatorship for its own sake.

The purges were motivated by a precise ideological goal.

So what was the motivation behind the Terror? The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. Most Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, believed that the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn’t adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary reaction from the establishment. They were determined not to make the same mistake.

So they created elaborate systems for gathering information on external and internal threats to their revolution. But those systems were far from perfect. They painted threats in far darker colours than was warranted. For example, the Bolsheviks spent much of the 1920s and 1930s anticipating invasion from coalitions of hostile capitalist states — coalitions that did not exist. Other perceived threats were also exaggerated beyond all proportion: scheming factions, disloyal officials, wreckers, saboteurs.

Stalin interpreted failure as treason.

Many of these “threats” were products of Stalin’s overambitious plans. He had demanded 100% fulfillment of production targets that could not be met, and he and his colleagues in the Kremlin misinterpreted the resultant dissent, resistance and breakdowns as evidence of counter-revolutionary conduct. And certain workers and peasants – who had reason to resent the regime – were viewed as dangerous potential recruits to this fictional counter-revolution.

The Preemptive War at Home

By the mid-1930s, the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the militarists in Japan, both stridently anti-communist, posed a very real threat to the USSR. War was then on the horizon, and Stalin felt he had no choice but to take preemptive action against what he saw as a potential fifth column – a group that would undermine the larger collective.

The resultant maelstrom of violence massively weakened the USSR rather than strengthening it, but the ultimate victory of Soviet forces in World War II appeared to justify the Terror. And the emergent Cold War seemed to justify the view that the capitalist world would stop at nothing to undermine Soviet power.

The KGB portrayed itself as the heroes.

The Soviet political police, renamed the KGB in 1954, never recognised the monstrous crimes that they had contributed to under Stalin’s direction. They perceived themselves as heroes of the story, brilliantly anticipating and intercepting the evil deeds of the regime’s enemies.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, rose from the ranks of the KGB in the 1970s. He was trained in its methods and steeped in its mentality. While one should not leap to the conclusion that he is a prisoner of his early career, the echoes of the KGB (and Stalin’s) thinking are present in the messages delivered relentlessly by the state-controlled media.

Putin is calling plays from Stalin's book.

The population is told that the US and EU want to reduce Russia to the status of a third-rate power, to take control over her resources and subvert her values. Putin does not propose officially to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin, but he does little to challenge the public presentation of his predecessor as someone who made Russia a great power, and who stood up to the West.

Today, we better understand the exaggerated fears that sparked the paroxysm of state violence that was the Great Terror. But in Russia, the echoes of those same fears prevent an open discussion of Stalin’s crimes, and serve to reinforce Putin’s authoritarianism.

---

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

James Harris

James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Contradictory World of Star Trek on This Day in History

Sally Kellerman and William Shatner in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"

On this day in history: Filming began on the second television pilot for Gene Roddenberry's proposed science fiction series, Star Trek, on this day in 1965. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" retained actor Leonard Nimoy as "Mr. Spock", who had played the same role in the first pilot, "The Cage", but now featured Canadian actor William Shatner in the lead role as the starship's captain.

I am a Star Trek fan, but I am a little at odds with the economics of the Star Trek universe.

From Ilya Somin:

"The Federation isn’t just socialist in the hyperbolic sense in which some conservatives like to denounce anyone to the left of them as socialist. It’s socialist in the literal sense that the government has near-total control over the economy and the means of production.

Especially by the period portrayed in The Next Generation, the government seems to control all major economic enterprises, and there do not seem to be any significant private businesses controlled by humans in Federation territory. Star Fleet characters, such as Captain Picard, boast that the Federation has no currency and that humans are no longer motivated by material gain and do not engage in capitalist economic transactions.

The supposed evils of free markets are exemplified by the Ferengi, an alien race who exemplify all the stereotypes socialists typically associate with “evil capitalists.” The Ferengi are unrelentingly greedy and exploitative. Their love of profit seems to be exceeded only by their sexism—they do not let females work outside the household, even when it would increase their profits to do so.

The problem here is not just that Star Trek embraces socialism: it’s that it does so without giving any serious consideration to the issue. For example, real-world socialist states have almost always resulted in poverty and massive political oppression, piling up body counts in the tens of millions.

But Star Trek gives no hint that this might be a danger, or any explanation of how the Federation avoided it. Unlike on many other issues, where the producers of the series recognize that there are multiple legitimate perspectives on a political issue, they seem almost totally oblivious to the downsides of socialism." Source

What makes this all strange is that Gene Roddenberry was a fan of one of the greatest defenders of Capitalism, Ayn Rand. "Roddenberry supposedly named Yeoman Janice Rand as a nod to Ayn Rand....In Gene Roddenberry's sci-fi series, Andromeda, there is a colony called 'The Ayn Rand Station' founded by a species of 'Nietzscheans.'" Source

J. Neil Schulman interviewed Ayn Rand for the New York Daily News. In that interview it was noted that "she watched Star Trek and Spock was her favorite character." Source

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Escaping East Germany on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: On this day in 1973, Ude Elke escaped East Germany. The winner of East Germany's gliding championship, Ude Elke, escaped across the fortified border to West Germany by piloting his government-owned competition glider plane from a hill at Neustadt-Glewe. After fleeing the German Democratic Republic, he landed well inside West Germany at a field in Soest.

Many people found creative ways to escape East Germany despite the 27-mile long Berlin Wall. "Train engineer Harry Deterling stole a steam train and drove it through the last station in East Berlin, bringing 25 passengers to the west and prompting big changes to the railroad lines. And Wolfgang Engels, an East German soldier who had helped build the barbed-wire fences that initially separated both Berlins, stole a tank and drove it through the wall itself. Despite getting caught in the barbed wire and shot twice, he managed to escape." Source 

In 1979 two families built a make-shift balloon and soared their way to freedom. 

"The most famous of these escapes was made by 19-year-old guard Conrad Schumann on August 15, 1961, just the third day of the wall’s construction. Since the “wall” was really just piles of barbed wire at that point, Schumann jumped over the wire in his uniform while toting his machine gun. A photographer caught Schumann’s flying leap, and the jump to freedom became an iconic Cold War image." Source 

In 1963 Heinz Meixner removed the windshield in his convertible and packed his mother in the trunk. He drove through the checkpoint and under the 3 foot high barrier.

Many others escaped in tunnels. 

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