Earlier this month, the LDS Newsroom published a reprint of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson’s visit to Moscow’s Central Baptist Church in the midst of the cold war. According to an office memo from Grant Salisbury and Warren K. Leffler, the writer-reporter team who reported on this event:
THE NIGHT we left Moscow to fly down to Kiev, Secretary Benson literally took us to church.
Many of the reporters laughed about it on the way, because Mr. Benson, who is a leading Mormon, had arranged for us earlier to attend a service at the Latter-Day Saints Church in West Berlin, but all the newsmen found one excuse or another for not going. In Moscow, we had no choice because the cars picked us up at the hotel and stopped at the church on the way to the airport. It was around 7:30 o’clock on the chill, rainy evening of October 1.
As the cavalcade of cars arrived at the Central Baptist Church, on a narrow side street not far from Red Square, somebody wisecracked, “Well, boys, you’re going to get to church whether you like it or not.”
It turned out to be one of the most moving experiences in the lifetime of many of us. One newsman, a former marine, ranked it with the sight of the American flag rising over the old American compound in Tientsin, China, at the end of World War II.
Hugh W. Nibley spoke about the controversial German conglomerate I.G. Farben with his son Alex Nibley in Sergeant Nibley PhD, a book about the elder’s experience in World War II. Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG earned much-needed foreign exchange to help finance the Nazi war machine, helped build and maintain Auschwitz for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi party of Germany, and held ties with key U.S. counterparts before and during the war including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Dow Chemical, and Ford Motor Company.
Apparently as the war neared an end, a few friends of Sergeant Nibley went looking for a place to hold an NCO club in Heidelberg. While searching for a suitable location among many fraternity houses they came upon Germania House, a frat house that had concealed records linking the U.S. corporation Standard Oil to Germany’s I.G. Farben. Here is what Alex Nibley wrote about his father’s experience:
I ended up in Heidelberg at the headquarters for General Dever and the 6th Army Group. That’s where all the fancy people were, and they kept giving each other medals every Thursday and this, that, and the other. General Devers liked comfort, and he wanted everybody to be comfortable. We enjoyed ourselves in Heidelberg. This was the center of German education, and when I had been a missionary in that region I had seriously considered returning to go to school in Heidelberg. Also, the city had not been touched by the war and stood all intact. The first thing after we got there, some old friends of mine from Ritchie went to look for a good respectable frat house for the non-coms, because we wanted our own club. Heidelberg is of course where the tradition of university fraternities reached its zenith and the city was full of wonderful mansions used by the fraternities, so our guys went to this very elegant one, the Germania House. I wasn’t there, but they told me about it. They said, “We went up and knocked on the door and a butler in full-dress livery – everything but a powdered wig – came to the door and looked at us in surprise and said, ‘Well, you people were here yesterday. We don’t have any of the records any more. They’re all gone.’
“What records? What happened? we said.
“Well, they had these big trucks, and we took all the records out and put them in the trucks and they took them away.’
“We said, ‘What records?’
“Your Standard Oil records. We had all your Standard Oil Company records here,’ the butler said.”
John Maynard Keynes held communism in high regard. In June 1936, on a BBC radio program entitled “Books and Authors”, Keynes commented on Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. Here is what he said:
Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible. But the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage.
There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one-sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got.1
Keynes also hoped for the same social experiment to be conducted in Britain:
It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.2
By 1936, it was clear that these Soviet “administrators” had achieved something spectacular. According to Ralph Raico:
By 1936 no one had to depend on the Webbs’ deceitful propaganda for information on the Stalinist system. Eugene Lyons, William Henry Chamberlin, Malcolm Muggeridge himself, and others had revealed the grim truth about the charnel-house presided over by Keynes’s “disinterested administrators.”
Anyone willing to listen could learn the facts regarding the terror-famine of the early 1930s, the vast system of slave-labor camps, and the near-universal misery that followed on the abolition of private property. For those not blinded by “love,” it was not hard to discern that Stalin was erecting the model killer-state of the twentieth century.3
As I’ve studied John Maynard Keynes, I think it interesting that he was promoted as an independent thinker and a believer in “free society” even though it is more than evident that he was clearly a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Perhaps I should have titled this post – “What I Wasn’t Taught in Business School”! What’s your take on Keynes’ apparent political leanings towards socialism and communism?
Sources:
Keynes, John Maynard. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, eds. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 28:333-334.↩
Is laissez faire truly responsible for the financial crisis? George Reisman, Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, today wrote:
The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.
The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:
“The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”
“Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
“‘America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,’ chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
“Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis….”
“It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”
Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus, one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….” Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.” Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”1
THE NIGHT we left Moscow to fly down to Kiev, Secretary Benson literally took us to church.
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