Milton Friedman and the Destruction of Argentina

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

It is just as important to study Milton Friedman as Leo Strauss, in understanding Canada's neoconservative movement.

Friedman is one of the authors of the "shock therapy" economic system, where disasters are created or exploited, by the corporate sector. Free Marketeers will call it progress. Others see it as shocking and inhumane.

Because in order for the U.S. to control a foreign nation's economy, an authoritarian is needed, and that authoritarian is often a ruthless dictator. Case in point, Augustus Pinochet in Chile.

If you read Lawrence Martin's Harperland, or Christian Nadeau's Rogue in Power, you'll see how Stephen Harper took control, using ruthless means, and is now in a position to implement Friedman's policies. A bloodless coup.

Argentina's Shock Therapy

In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher says of Argentina:

Whatever the Argentineans thought about it at the time ... the Falklands War provided a shock which brought first democracy and more recently, under President Menem, the economic benefits of free-market policies. Inflation has been brought down and a far-reaching privatization programme has been undertaken. Subsidies, regulation and tariffs have all been cut. Economic growth has sharply accelerated.

A little "shock" was good for them, says the lady who once declared that there was "no such thing as society".

In their book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, provide a bit of insight into the pre-coup Argentina, and what Thatcher called a "black economy".

Argentina had long been an economic paradox. How did a country that was one of the world's richest in the first decades of the twentieth century, end up in such economic disorder? A good part of the answer rested with Juan Peron. He is now best remembered, of course, as the husband of Evita, but in the years after World War II he was the embodiment of populism with an almost fascist tinge. Building on the prewar popularity of fascist ideas, Peron turned Argentina into a corporatist country, with powerful organized interest groups, big business, labor unions, military, farmers—that negotiated with the state and with each other for position and resources. He incited nationalist passions, stoked pretensions of grandeur, and pursued stridently anti-American policies. He nationalized large parts of the economy and put up trade barriers to defend them. He cut Argentina's links to the world economy which had been one of its great sources of wealth—embedded inflation in the society, and destroyed the foundations of sound economic growth. (2)

Viewed through a free-market lens, Peron would have been a disaster. So many opportunities for profit going to waste.

Peron was no saint, but according to Namomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, life for Argentines was not as bad as suggested. Protectionism made many things unaffordable ($2000 just to install a phone), but the welfare state was alive and well. And like Chile, before their U.S. financed coup, the country had just undergone an intellectual revolution, where the arts thrived.

By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent. Juan Peron had introduced Keynesian style economics "pouring public money into infrastructure projects such as highways and steel plants, giving local businesses generous subsidies to build their new factories, churning out cars and washing machines, and keeping out foreign imports with forbiddingly high tariffs." (3)

Naturally, this was anathema to the free marketeers, and when Peron died and his widow Isabel named leader, they sprang into action. From Henry Kissinger's records, recently made public, we learn that the U.S. were behind the 1976 coup that initiated the Argentine shock therapy.

Wages fell to 40% of what they had been and poverty became the norm.

But worse, was the wave of terror, under the planted dictator, General Jorge Videla, that followed the Chilean blueprint, to the Milton Friedman letter. According to Klein's Shock Doctrine:

When someone was targeted to be eliminated, a fleet of military vehicles showed up at that person's home or workplace and cordoned off the block, often with a helicopter buzzing overhead. In broad daylight and in full view of the neighbours, police or soldiers battered down the door and dragged out the victim, who often shouted his or her name before disappearing into a waiting Ford Falcon, in the hope that news of the event would reach the family.

Some "covert" operations were even more brazen: police were known to board crowded city buses and drag passengers off by their hair. In the city of Santa Fe, a couple was kidnapped right at the altar on their wedding day in front of a church filled with people."

The public character of terror did not stop with the initial capture. Once in custody, prisoners in Argentina were taken to one of more than three hundred torture camps across the country. Many of them were located in densely populated residential areas; one of the most notorious in a former athletic club on a busy street in Buenos Aires, another in a schoolhouse in central Bahia Blanca and yet another in a wing of a working hospital. At these torture centres, military vehicles sped in and out at odd hours, screams could be heard through the badly insulated walls and strange, body-shaped parcels were spotted being carried in and out, all silently registered by the nearby residents.

The Argentine junta was particularly sloppy about disposing of its victims. A country walk could end in horror because mass graves were barely concealed. Bodies would show up in public garbage bins, missing fingers and teeth (much as they do today in Iraq), or they would wash ashore on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, sometimes half a dozen at a time, after one of the junta's "death flights." On occasion, they even rained down from helicopters into farmers' fields."

All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. (much like Nazi Germany). There is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: "We did not know what nobody could deny." (4)

As Canada is now in the throes of its own shock therapy, the need for torture chambers are not necessary.

We have our authoritarian leader in Stephen Harper, who allows no dissent. Witch hunts are now the norm, and while people don't disappear, their careers are ruined or threatened, if they dare to challenge.

The G-20 saw the worst human rights abuses and mass arrests in Canadian history; and police brutality at protests like the one over the Prison Farm closures, saw no age barrier. Those from 14 to 88 were victimized.

We are now part of the Shock Doctrine under the Harper regime, and what is happening in our country is just as shocking to many, as they were in places like Chile and Argentina.

And "the paradox of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror", was evident, when despite the horrors of the G-20, many Canadians simply shrugged and said "you should have stayed home".

Sources:

1. The Path to Power, By Margaret Thatcher, Harper Collins, 1995, ISBN: 0-06-017270-3, Pg. 583

2. The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, By Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, Touchstone, 2002, ISBN: 0-684-82975-4, Pg. 242

3. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein, Vintage Canada, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-676-97801-8, Pg. 63

4. Klein, 2007, Pg. 106-107

A Deceptive Democracy: Stephen Harper and the F-Word

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

"We stand for the maintenance of private property ... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order." - Adolph Hitler

In David McGowan's book; American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion, he claims:

The current political system in place in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century is fascism. Of course, we don't like to call it that. We like to call it democracy. Nonetheless, it looks an awful lot like fascism, though to understand how this is so requires an awareness of what fascism actually is.

We don't like to use the f-word at all. It tends to conjure up unpleasant images. Our perceptions of fascism are shaped both by the very real horrors of the Holocaust, and by the fictional worlds created by writers with British and American intelligence connections like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. These are the images that our schools and our media provide for us.

So when we think of fascism, we think of concentration camps filled with corpses and horribly decimated walking skeletons. We think of a stiflingly regimented society in which 'Big Brother' watches our every move. We think of brutal pogroms by jackbooted thugs, and violent repression of dissenting views.

These images are so far removed from the world that we live in that we cannot conceive that our system of governance could have the remotest resemblance to that which was in place in Nazi Germany. The problem is that fascism, viewed from the inside through a veil of propaganda, rarely looks the same as it does when viewed from the outside with the benefit of historical hindsight. (1)

So how will historians view this period in Canadian history from the outside, with the benefit of hindsight?

McGowan wrote when George W. Bush was in the White House, but he felt that his country had been drifting toward fascism for some time, under the guise of anti-Communism and 'Western Democracy'.

And as he suggests, to really understand you have to remember what fascism really is. Adolf Hitler was a fascist. But he was not deemed a fascist throughout most of his political career because of the Holocaust or any notion that such an atrocity was possible. He was a fascist because he was a capitalist who believed in an authoritarian style of government to prevent Germany from drifting into Communism or socialism, the two things he detested the most.

And he didn't feel that a Liberal Democracy was capable of fending off the threat.

He was not really anti-Semitic until he believed the claims that the Jews were working with the Communists. In his early life, his roommates were Jewish, including his best friend. Much of what was in Mein Kampf was fabricated to create a persona.

And in what McGowan calls the 'Politics of Illusion', Adolf Hitler the man did not have as much power as history has given him. Most of the major decisions were out of his hands.

In 1936, American columnist Heywood Broun wrote:

"Fascism is a dictatorship from the extreme Right, or to put it a little more closely into our local idiom, a government which is run by a small group of large industrialists and financial lords ... I am going to ask latitude to insist that we might have Fascism even though we maintained the pretense of democratic machinery. The mere presence of a Supreme Court, a House of Representatives, a Senate and a President would not be sufficient protection against the utter centralization of power in the hands of a few men who might hold no office at all. Even in the case of Hitler, many shrewd observers feel that he is no more than a front man and that his power is derived from the large munitions and steel barons of Germany."

Ian Kershaw in his book, Hitler: Profiles in Power (2), agrees. And he states that if you read articles of the day, especially coming from the Soviets, they refer to him as a 'Capitalist'. And all of the real power in Nazi Germany was in the hands of the boys in the backroom. "... in the hands of a few men who might hold no office at all."

Who Are You Calling a Fascist?

To prove his theory, McGowan points to several aspects of American politics that define fascism, and we have comparisons here under Stephen Harper. And remember, this is based on the definition of political fascism and has nothing to do with the Holocaust. And as McGowan says: "To most of those living in Germany during the reign of the Third Reich, fascism didn't look the way that we think it is supposed to look either."

We could argue that the two most common descriptions of fascism: one-party dictatorship and forcible suppression of opposition, are a bit difficult to prove. However, Harper has certainly blurred the lines between party and state, and has suppressed opposition by making Parliament toxic, and shutting it down when he's losing control.

But we can't argue the third point: 'Private economic enterprise under centralized government control'. Guy Giorno, the man with more power than Stephen Harper, is a lobbyist. In fact, he's one of the top lobbyists in Canada. And he is the one deciding who gets what. He has centralized power to the PMO and every decision made is based on what's good for "free enterprise", or what Hitler himself called "the sole possible economic order".

In theory, at least, there is supposed to be centralized control over private enterprise, to enforce such concepts as fair labor standards, environmental protections, and anti-trust legislation. In truth, however, the heads of corporate America are also its heads of state, and are essentially regulating themselves. Or, more accurately, failing to do so.

But the point is that the way the system is supposed to work is for private enterprise to be under federal regulation. The federal government is supposed to rein in monopoly corporate power and guarantee that workers and the environment get a fair shake, in addition to setting monetary policy. (3)

The latest Omnibus bill removes all environmental standards and our safety standards were already traded away at Montebello.

The next point validating fascism that McGowan points to is "belligerent nationalism". Leo Strauss, the father of neoconservatism, to which Stephen Harper prescribes, calls for three main components. Deception, Religious Fervour and unbridled patriotism through perpetual war.

The main deception, I suppose, is the illusion of democracy and the religious fervour was well outlined in Marci McDonald's Armageddon Factor. Frank Lutz, the Republican pollster who has helped Stephen Harper along the way, suggested that he tap into Canadian symbols, like hockey. You'll notice that he does that every chance he gets.

But belligerent nationalism, fuelled by unbridled patriotism, is what can bring a nation to accept extreme acts of inhumanity, when it's wrapped up in God and Country. As McGowan relates before the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When I think of belligerent nationalism, I think back to early 1991, a time when it was not possible to drive even a few blocks to the local video store without passing a stream of American flags and yellow ribbons flapping in the wind. A time when one couldn't turn on the television without seeing a mob of people in a field somewhere creating a giant human American flag. I think of the pompous theme music and 'Desert Storm' miniseries style graphics on CNN, and the relentless braying of military and government hacks as they barely contained their exuberance while discussing 'sorties,' 'air supremacy,' and 'smart bombs.' I think of a nation so inflated with its own sense of self-importance and self-righteousness that it openly cheered each airing of sanitized video footage of bombing attacks on largely defenseless civilian targets.

And then I think that while America was busy patting itself on the back and beating its chest, the conditions were being created that would result in the deaths of as many as 2,000,000 Iraqis, over 60% of them children under the age of ten. That's over a million children, for anyone who's counting. And not one of them had anything to do with the planning or execution of the annexation of Kuwait. Nor were any of them involved in the building of any 'weapons of mass destruction,' or the oppression of the Kurdish people of Iraq. But they're all dead now.

And then I think back to December of 1998, and recall how the press whipped the people into a frenzy by literally demanding the further mass bombing of Iraq. Saddam had not learned his lesson, we were told, and needed a further show of America's resolve to enforce 'humanitarian' standards and the 'rule of law.' And so a nation that had just a decade before been the most socially advanced in the Middle East, with the highest literacy rate and the best schools, the best healthcare and quality of life, and the most advanced civilian infrastructure—and which now was reduced to abject poverty and rampant disease—would once again be bombed.

Once again toxic agents such as depleted uranium would be rained down indiscriminately. And once again chemical sites on the ground would be targeted, poisoning the land and the air, threatening food and water supplies, and killing the hopes and dreams of the Iraqi people that their children wouldn't be joining their friends and classmates who had already perished. And, sadly, once again the American people would cheer. That, my friends, is what you would call belligerent nationalism. (5)

In Canada we have our own "yellow ribbon" campaign, which not surprisingly came from the same ad firm, Hill and Knowlton. And we have our own chest thumping and cheering, forgetting that most of the people killed are civilians, many of them children.

When Rick Hiller said that they were "not civil servants but were trained to kill people", Jack Layton said that he was offended. From that day on he has been dubbed "Taliban Jack", in a you're with us, or against us mentality. "That, my friends, is what you would call belligerent nationalism".

McGowan next mentions racism, including "immigrant bashing." The Reform Party was notorious for racist comments, but under their new name, the Conservative party of Canada, they've toned it down, though mainly because they've been completely muzzled. But we are starting to see the signs, especially recently, with Jason Kenney and Stockwell Day threatening to put an end to affirmative action.

But perhaps the most compelling of McGowan's arguments, that is now becoming the norm in a country not know for such tactics, is the "militarization of the police" and the accelerated use of "Paramilitary police squads."

That one should hit you right between the eyes. It started at Montebello, with the use of tear gas and rubber bullets, after police provocateurs provided reasons to use them. And they got away with it.

Now they no longer need a reason.

The security at the Vancouver Olympics was described as "one of the largest security operations taking place on Canadian soil." In fact, it ended up being the largest to date of any Olympics anywhere. It was said that there were so many police along the fence that they totally blocked the view. Total cost was 900 million dollars.

And then there was the G-20, where the police were told to leave vandals alone and instead targeted civilians, even in the designated protest zones. And they used provocateurs. Total cost 1.3 billion dollars.

And most recently in Kingston when protesters tried to block the sale of the cattle from the prison farms. We have never seen this many police officers in one place, since the prison riots, decades ago. Even an 87-year-old woman was hauled off by police.

There is a clear message here. This is not a government that allows dissent.

Now you might not want to call it the F-Word, but it sure as HELL IS NOT DEMOCRACY!!!!

Sources:

1. Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion, By David McGowan, Writers Club Press, 2001, ISBN: 0-595-18640-8, Pg. 3

2. Hitler: Profiles in Power, by: Ian Kershaw, Longman House UK, 1991, ISBN: 0-582-08053-3

3. McGowan, 2001, Pg. 8

4. McGowan, 2001, Pg. 10-11