Chicago Boyz

Val has an excellent post providing at length and even-handedly the facts on this topic. Like most liberal folk tales, the truth bears little resemblance to the mythology.

Update: Bernhardt Varenius at Anti-Socialist Tendencies has this post about Allende’s attempt to create a computer database to centrally manage the Chilean economy. What madness. This led me to flip through the chapters on socialist planning in Hayek’s best book Individualism and Economic Order. I thought I recalled a passage where he discusses how a central planner, even if he had every scrap of articulable knowledge that could be gathered, and even if he could digest it all in a timely fashion, would still be missing most of the essential knowledge which is required to carry on the daily business of life. I did not find a pithy one-liner, but I do recommend that you read those essays, written in the 1930s and not outdated one iota. In fact, the idiocy they rebut is still prescribed with a straight face routinely to this day.

Check out this post on Winds of Change, an email from a special operations soldier in Iraq. A sample:

Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters and generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah.

The only thing that frightens them more is hearing the word “Gitmo”. The word is out that a trip to Guantanimo Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they usually start squealing like the little mice they are, when an interrogator mentions “Gitmo”.

No wonder the International Red Cross, the National Council of Churches and the French keep protesting about the place. They know it has proven to be very effective in keeping several hundred real fanatical psychopaths in check and very frankly would rather see them cut loose to go kill some more GIs or innocent Americans, just to make W. look bad.

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a couple of Bradleys pointed their way, if they decide to riot. Maybe a few will get to Gitmo but most are human garbage that wouldn’t take on your five-year old grandson face-to-face. The more we go after them and not vice-versa I think we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah, they’ll get lucky now and then, but it’s showtime, fellows.

This ain’t no quagmire. It’s a rat hunt. And it smells like victory. Not fast, not pretty, not easy, but certain and permanent.

Read it all. (Via Donald Sensing)

Jonathan had this post linking to a review of The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which I’ll get when it comes out in the USA. This book was also reviewed in the Spectator, and described as a “spectacular” work. It is good to see the Soviet Union getting the scrutiny it merits. We know all about Hitler, not enough about Stalin and his entourage of drunken, murderous thugs, lickspittles, lackeys, toadies — a gang that mouthed the platitudes of communism while grabbing the goodies with both hands, and living in bowel-freezing terror of even a harsh glance from the homicidal maniac who was their master. “The horror of private property was such that some leaders did not own their own towels.” Perfect. (One of the timeless golden oldies on this subject is Conversations With Stalin by Milovan Djilas.) This deranged circus was the entity that American liberals made excuses for, lied for, spied for, compared favorably to their own country. Henry Wallace said, “we have political democracy, they have economic democracy.” Yeah, and they also had Genghis Khan with a telephone, and a death camp the size of Canada.

It appears that the time is now to snatch these scraps of history back out of the memory hole. I’m currently slowly wending my way through a sterling example of this revived interest, Anne Applebaum’s recent book GULAG: A History. At about page 150, I can say that it is very good. When I’m done I’ll have a few words to say about it here. For some reason I was put off by reviews I read of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million, which is also about Stalin. I got the sense it was flippant and really about the author, so who needs it. So I didn’t read it. But if it helped to raise consciousness about the horrors of Soviet communism, well and good.

Finally, as an aside, I’ll note that the book review section in the Spectator is always good, and it is a weekly. It is one of my regular stops in my ambles through cyberspace, and I have found out about several interesting books there which I might not otherwise have heard of.

Steven Den Beste is back in form with a monster post summarizing the case for our being in Iraq as part of a reasonable long-term strategy for protecting ourselves by reforming the Arab world. He also effectively slaps down (not that it’s difficult to do) the “Bush lied!” idiots.