China, Russia, and Fascism

Last week, I came across a couple of articles on China, Russia, and Fascism. I thought each one was well-written and important enough to add a short note to our blog.

China and Russia’s View of the United States

The first excerpt comes from The Richter Report and is reminiscent of Neal A. Maxwell’s statement that someday there will come a “gigantic, global collapse” as quoted in Pride and Selfishness:

The reckless expansion of credit and debt has been at the heart of all great depressions throughout history. However, our American politicians and “mainstream” economists believe that debt-spending is the key to economic recovery. That is why the perspective of  outside observers can be very helpful.

A recent article published in the China Business News sent yet another warning shot in the direction  of the United States. The article would not have seen the light of day had it not been approved for publication by the Chinese government. The author, Xiang Songruo, a professor at Central China University, said that America  must “repay its debts” and “lead a more frugal life.” In the event that the United States asked China to buy more of its debts, the professor suggested that China should demand the following conditions:

1) The U.S. should cancel the limits on high-tech exports to China and allow China to acquire advanced technology and high-tech companies from the U.S.; 2) The U.S. needs to open its financial system to Chinese financial institutions, allowing all Chinese firms to open branches and develop business in the U.S.; 3) The U.S. should not prevent Europe from cancelling the ban against selling weapons to China; 4) The U.S. should stop selling military weapons to Taiwan; 5) The U.S. should loosen its limits on numbers of Chinese tourists and allow them to travel freely in the U.S.; and, 6) The U.S. should never restrain China’s exports to the U.S. and force renminbi appreciation in the name of domestic protectionism and employment.

And if we don’t do what China wants us to do? “Then China’s choice is quite simple: rationally adjust the structure of its foreign currency reserve assets and avoid the risk of U.S. national debt according to market rules.” Translation? You people are broke. We are going to make the rules from now on. If you don’t do what we want, we will dump all our US dollar foreign currency reserves and crash your economy even worse than it has already crashed.

Izvestia, a Russian newspaper, recently published an interview with Igor Panarin, a political analyst.  He stated that the current financial crisis might cause the United States to cease to exist in its present form.  He said,”The dollar isn’t secured by anything. The country’s foreign debt has grown like an avalanche. This is a pyramid, which has to collapse.”  He also commented  that the American voters are hoping that President Barack Obama can “…work miracles, but when the spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles.”

In November, another Russian publication, Komsomolskaya Pravda,  published an interview with Mikhail Khazin, a prominent Russian economist. A number of years ago, Mr. Khazin wrote a book entitled, “Sunset of the Dollar Empire and the End of the Pax Americana.” At the time the book was published in 2003, most mainstream economists and financial writers would have scoffed at the title of the book. These days, it is no longer a laughing matter.

During the 1990s, Mr. Khazin worked in the Presidential Economic Unit of the Boris Yeltsin administration. In 1997, he had predicted in a written report that the Russian economy was going to face an economic collapse at some point in 1998.  He recommended that the Yeltsin administration change its policies. His report got him fired. The Russian collapse came in 1998. In his recent interview, Mr. Khazin was quoted as follows:

“After becoming seriously consumed in our studies of the U.S. financial system, we found an unprecedented parallel. Just as our T-bill market had sucked all the juices out of the Russian economy, the U.S. financial market was sucking the resources out of the entire planet. We realized a similar fate awaited the U.S. financial system. Our article was published in the summer of 2000 in the “Ekspert” magazine, titled, “Is the U.S. Digging for an Apocalypse.” We concluded that it was just as impossible to avoid an economic crisis in the U.S. as the financial collapse in Russia.”

Mr. Khazin went on to say that the problem lies in the fact that, since the 1970s, the United States has attempted to issue new currency in an effort to stimulate aggregate demand. In other words, the U.S. has switched on the printing press.¹

As previously alluded to in China and the Bailout and Keynesian Economics and Savings, it would appear that the effort to bankrupt the United States continues to be a successful endeavor.

What is Fascism?

The next excerpt comes from Jimmy Smith’s What is Fascism? and his review of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. In Participatory Fascism, it was mentioned that “the essence of fascism is nationalistic collectivism, the affirmation that the ‘national interest’ should take precedence over the rights of individuals.” Here’s what Mr. Smith wrote along these lines:

. . . According to Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism, fascism is alive and well today and is in fact thriving in one of America’s major political movements.

Fascism Difficult to Define

The first step in demonstrating that fascist policies are thriving in America is to define fascism, a harder step than you might think. Most people tend to equate fascism with Hitler and Nazi Germany, and consequently equate fascism with evil, racist, barbaric, capable of executing the Holocaust, and bent on World domination. Most people, even politicians and pundits, put little further thought into it. But fascism was fascism long before the Holocaust, and though Hitler’s Nazi Germany may have been all of those evil things, such a simplistic definition of fascism prevents us from fully examining its rise and from preventing its future domination of the political landscape.

George Orwell noted in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, “The word fascism has now no meaning except so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Stanley G.Payne, considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism, wrote in 1995, “fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.”²

And like Robert Higgs, Mr. Smith points out how the fascist label has been misappropriated:

Fascism Dubbed Right-Wing by the Far Left

Fascism is only right-wing in the sense that it is right of far left socialism and communism. Jonah Goldberg says, “From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy.” You see, Nazism and Fascism was right-wing socialism, but still socialism. Goldberg further states, “What I am mainly trying to do is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism…Many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition [progressivism] that led directly to fascism.”

This last point is something that Ludwig von Mises also said in Intellectuals Mold Public Opinion. In any case, the rest of the article is an interesting perspective given today’s political climate, although I disagree in a few particulars. Overall, I find striking the history of the fascist label.

Both articles are worth the time to review.

Sources:

1. Richter, Jim. “As Others See Us”. December 2008. The Richter Report. 24 January 2009.↩
2. Smith, Jimmy. “What is Fascism?”. 8 January 2009. Analytical Insights. 25 January 2009.↩