Ελληνική Ιθαγένεια

Ελληνική Ένωση για τα Δικαιώματα του Ανθρώπου
30 Ιανουαρίου 2013

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Φιλελεύθερα δαιμόνια

του Αριστείδη Χατζή

Τα Νέα
30 Ιανουαρίου 2013

Το τελευταίο διάστημα παρακολουθούμε την προσπάθεια του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ να μετασχηματιστεί σε κόμμα εξουσίας. Η προσπάθεια αυτή έχει ενδιαφέρον καθώς αποτελεί προς το παρόν συνονθύλευμα που χωρά όχι μόνο τη ριζοσπαστική πτέρυγα της ανανεωτικής Αριστεράς αλλά και σταλινικά σταγονίδια, τα ορφανά του λαϊκιστικού ΠΑΣΟΚ, καθώς και πολλούς που (για να το πω διακριτικά) αντιμετωπίζουν τη βία με δύο μέτρα και δύο σταθμά, ανάλογα με το χρώμα της. Βέβαια τα στελέχη του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ που συνδέονται με ομάδες που ήταν πάντα περιθωριακές και ολιγάριθμες δεν μπόρεσαν να αντισταθούν στον πειρασμό της πρωτόγνωρης δημοσιότητας. Η έκθεσή τους όμως εξέθεσε τον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, όπως επιβεβαιώνουν οι τελευταίες δημοσκοπήσεις. Αυτό κάνει το έργο της ηγετικής ομάδας του δυσκολότερο εφόσον ο μετασχηματισμός είναι βέβαιο ότι θα προκαλέσει τριβές, και μάλιστα σε μια περίοδο που δεν υπάρχει η πολυτέλεια της εσωστρέφειας.

Όσα γράφω στη συνέχεια δεν έχουν σκοπό να ενισχύσουν ή να υπονομεύσουν τον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Δεδομένου ότι ο συγγραφέας αυτού του άρθρου είναι φιλελεύθερος βρίσκεται υποτίθεται απέναντι στον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Άρα οι απόψεις του μπορούν να θεωρηθούν εκ των προτέρων προβοκατόρικες. Εάν ο αναγνώστης το θεωρεί δεδομένο ας σταματήσει να διαβάζει - θα έχει χάσει μόνο τρία λεπτά από τη ζωή του. Εάν όμως ο αναγνώστης θεωρεί ότι είναι δυνατόν κάποιος καλόπιστα να απευθυνθεί στους ιδεολογικούς του αντιπάλους, ας συνεχίσει να διαβάζει.

Δεν θα επαναλάβω εδώ τις υποδείξεις προς τον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Προφανώς συμφωνώ ότι ένα κόμμα που ισχυρίζεται ότι είναι δημοκρατικό και ευρωπαϊκό πρέπει να λάβει απέναντι στη βία τη θέση που παραδοσιακά έλαβε η δημοκρατική Αριστερά στην Ευρώπη. Προφανώς τα στελέχη του πρέπει να μάθουν να μην αναπαράγουν, από κεκτημένη ταχύτητα, ιδέες, προτάσεις και πολιτικές που έχουν απαξιωθεί εδώ και τουλάχιστον 25 χρόνια. Προφανώς πρέπει να αποκαθαρθεί από τη δημαγωγία, τον λαϊκισμό, τον κρατισμό, την αμετροέπεια και τη συνωμοσιολογία.

Κανείς όμως δεν δίνει την έμφαση που χρειάζεται σε αυτά που πρέπει να διατηρήσει ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Στην προσπάθεια άμβλυνσης των αιχμηρών άκρων του υπάρχει κίνδυνος να εξασθενήσουν όλα όσα κάνει καλά ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ - κι αυτά είναι αρκετά.

Διαβάστε τη συνέχεια του άρθρου

Κατεβάστε το άρθρο σε PDF (όπως δημοσιεύθηκε στα Νέα)

Διαβάστε επίσης σχετικά κείμενα των Ηλία Κανέλλη, Πάσχου Μανδραβέλη και Θωμά Τσάτση και την ανακοίνωση της Ελληνικής Ένωσης για τα Δικαιώματα του Ανθρώπου.

Ανδρέας Πετρουλάκης (Protagon, 30/1/2013)

Beacon of Liberty Amid Depression

by Jeremy Jennings

Standpoint
February 2009

Think of Paris and think of intellectuals and one is almost inevitably reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For good or ill, they established what it meant to be an intellectual in France. It was to embrace the myth of the Left: to be against capitalism, soft on communism and the Soviet Union, hostile towards the United States, to support the struggle against colonialism, to believe in the proletariat and in revolution. Above all, it was to display "commitment".

If this posturing exercised a near monopoly during the Cold War, its roots were clearly discernible during the interwar years. In 1927, Julien Benda published what was to become one of the most famous books of this time, La Trahison des Clercs. Benda's complaint was that intellectuals had subordinated their lofty mission "to the service of their political passions", abasing the abstract values of truth and justice before those of action. By doing nothing to resist the passions of race, class and nation, he argued, modern intellectuals had proclaimed that the intellectual function was respectable only to the extent that it pursued concrete advantage and that an intelligence disinterested in these ends was to be scorned.

The response to this plea for intellectuals to recover their vocation came in the form of Les Chiens de Garde, published by Paul Nizan, a Marxist, in 1932. "Every philosopher," Nizan wrote, "though he may consider that he does not, participates in the impure realities of the age." Thus Benda's talk of abstract verities was less a choice made by eternal man than the decision of a partisan. For Nizan, the alternative facing the intellectual was a simple one. He was either for the oppressed or for the oppressors. "If we are to betray the bourgeoisie for the sake of mankind," he wrote, "let us not be ashamed to admit that we are traitors."

As the economic depression of the 1930s worsened and the political extremes of totalitarianism came to the fore, it was this doctrine of commitment that was to prevail. A generation of young French intellectuals sought to escape from what they regarded as a crisis of civilisation. Often undecided about the relative merits of communism and fascism, they were nevertheless almost universally anti-liberal, against capitalism and critical of parliamentary democracy. Disillusionment and self-doubt were combined with an illiberal radicalism and ideological blindness. However, this was not the only response to be articulated in these troubled times. Indeed, as we ourselves face a year of mounting economic uncertainty and escalating international tension, it might be worth pausing and reflecting upon how one group of intellectuals provided a different answer to the economic crisis and moral dramas of their day.

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Taming Leviathan

by Michael Boskin

Project Syndicate
January 27, 2013

A successful society needs effective, affordable government to perform its necessary functions well, and that includes sufficient revenue to fund those functions. But a government that grows too large, centralized, bureaucratic, and expensive substantially impairs the private economy by eroding individual initiative and responsibility; crowding out private investment, consumption, and charity; and damaging incentives with high tax rates. It also risks crowding out necessary government functions such as defense. That is today’s Europe in a nutshell, with America not far behind.

The recent death of James M. Buchanan, the father of public-choice economics, is reason to reflect on his sage warnings. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986 for bringing to the study of government and the behavior of government officials the same rigorous analysis that economists had long applied to private economic decision-making. Buchanan concluded that politicians’ pursuit of self-interest inevitably leads to poor outcomes.

Buchanan’s analysis stood in marked contrast not only to Adam Smith’s dictum that the pursuit of self-interest leads, as if “by an invisible hand,” to desirable social outcomes, but also to the prevailing approach to policy analysis, which views government as a benevolent planner, implementing textbook “solutions” to market failures.

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How Free-Market Thought Succeeded By Getting More Radical

by Brian Doherty

Reason
January 26, 2013

Angus Burgin, an historian at Johns Hopkins University, has produced a well-researched, well-written, and largely well-thought-out study. The Great Persuasion chronicles the intellectual adventures of F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the other market-supporting academics, think tankers, and businessmen who comprised the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947. It also offers Burgin’s accounts of who he thinks were Pelerin's most important intellectual predecessors. The book’s only overarching flaw is that Burgin at times seems confused about what ideology his book is a history of, conflating conservatism with libertarianism. It’s a mistake I strove to correct with my 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, which reports on many of the same characters and stories as Burgin.

Burgin knows there is a distinction between the two ideologies—he mentions libertarianism a few times—but he misses the importance of the distinction in ways that complicate his efforts to link post-Pelerin developments to pre-Pelerin forebears. In many respects Hayek and especially Friedman represented something new, or at least long missing in action, under the intellectual sun. So Burgin talks about evolutions in a body of thought that are more fruitfully explained by imagining a new species inhabiting fresh ideological space. When Burgin writes of a “they”—the free-market advocates he traces from the ‘30s to now—who saw “their assumptions and arguments discreetly but decisively transformed” in the direction of greater acceptance of untramelled free markets, I’d argue that there is no “they” there; that Burgin is really telling the story of the rise of libertarianism from its ur-roots, without crediting it as such or widening out its story from Hayek and Friedman.

Burgin starts with the king of 20th century interventionist economists, John Maynard Keynes, lamenting in 1924 that the popular mind had embraced a vulgar simplification of economists’ thinking and thus believed in unrestricted free markets. (Those were the days: laissez-faire, allegedly the unconsidered prejudice of the masses.) Keynes declared laissez-faire intellectually dead among the more educated class and the economics profession, and by the end of World War II that death sentence seemed so obviously true that an international group of economists, philosophers, and businessmen who still believed in the competitive market (though even they tended to reject pure 19th-century laissez-faire) felt so embattled and lonely they create a brotherhood, the Mont Pelerin Society, to keep the flame of those ideas guttering in their professions and countries. While in and of itself the group, which met regularly to discuss and hash out ideas related to markets and liberty, did no persuading and produced no branded work, its members—especially Friedman—often identified the sense of fellowship, intellectual exchange, and connections it provided with helping cement their ideas and strengthen their intellectual work.

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The Neoliberal Revolution

by Scott Sumner

Reason
February 2013

The 20th century saw two great economic revolutions: socialism and neoliberalism.

Socialist ideas were already floating around the democratic West in the early 1900s, but they gained much greater popularity after the Great Depression, which was widely seen as a failure of capitalism. One part of this shift entailed a greater role for the government in regulating or owning business enterprises. The second part involved a major expansion of social insurance programs.

Beginning in the late 1970s, there was a backlash against excessive government intervention in the economy. This neoliberal revolution involved privatization, deregulation, and cuts in marginal tax rates, but it left most social insurance programs in place.

Daniel Stedman Jones, an independent historian (and barrister) in London, has written a balanced and informative study of neoliberal thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, exploring their impact on policy making, particularly during Margaret Thatcher’s administration in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan’s in the United States. Jones suggests a policy revolution that began in the 1970s drew on 30 years of neoliberal research and advocacy, partly financed by businessmen hostile to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Although Jones is skeptical of the more radical elements of neoliberalism, he is mostly respectful of the major neoliberal figures, despite the fact that his own politics are clearly left of center.

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The voice of public choice

Economist
January 19, 2013

A list of things that Americans judge more favourably than Congress, according to Public Policy Polling, a survey firm, includes colonoscopies, root canals, lice and France. America seems to have stumbled from economic crisis to political paralysis. That would have come as little surprise to James Buchanan, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the architect of “public-choice theory”, who died on January 9th, aged 93.

Mr Buchanan was an outlier in his field. He eschewed the profession’s embrace of complex models and maths in favour of serious reflection on political philosophy (leading some to dismiss him, wrongly, as a lightweight). A Tennessean by birth, he mistrusted north-eastern elites and spent most of his career at universities in Virginia. He challenged his profession’s casual treatment of variables such as economic cost, which he considered to be a deeply subjective matter. He adopted heterodoxies such as a 100% inheritance tax, on egalitarian grounds. Yet his greatest contribution was in the realm of political economy.

His interest in the workings of the state reflected its growing importance. From having only a minimal role in pre-industrial days, Leviathan came to control swathes of economic activity as the 20th century progressed. National-security demands were partly responsible. Government responses to market failures, from unscrupulous business practices to the trauma of the Depression, also played their part. As demands on the state grew, so too did the need to understand its behaviour.

Mr Buchanan was one of a small group of economists wondering whether the state was up to the task. Untrammelled markets may fail—by producing more pollution than society as a whole would prefer, for example. That creates the potential for welfare-improving government intervention, such as a tax on pollution. Yet there is no guarantee a state will get it right. Whether interventions are justified, Buchanan pointed out, depends on whether government officials are motivated by self-interest as well as a sense of public duty. Weighing up the pros and cons of policy choices requires an unsentimental view of government actions, a position he called “politics without romance”. In exploring this he helped create public-choice theory.

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Η Δικαιοσύνη τυφλή, όχι γκαβή

του Αντώνη Παπαγιαννίδη

Protagon.gr
14 Ιανουαρίου 2013

Θα ακουστεί η διατύπωση κάπως πανηγυρική, αλλά την εννοούμε μέχρι κεραίας: την αμφιλεγόμενη τιμή της Ελλάδας του 2013 – της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας, των Ελλήνων, όχι της Ελληνικής Κυβέρνησης ή των οποιωνδήποτε αρχόντων … - ήρθε και έσωσε η απόφαση εκείνου του Δικαστηρίου που αθώωσε τους ξένους μετανάστες οι οποίοι απέδρασαν από κρατητήριο (της Ηγουμενίτσας, αλλά δεν έχει σημασία το συγκεκριμένο).

Γιατί; Επειδή οι συνθήκες κράτησης ήταν τόσο άθλιες, η υγιεινή απούσα, ο υπερπληθυσμός αφόρητος, οι τουαλέτες άσε καλύτερα, ώστε το Δικαστήριο έκρινε πως η ντουζίνα συνανθρώπων μας – άνθρωποι πριν από μετανάστες, ξένοι, λαθρομετανάστες ή ο,τιδήποτε! – που σηκώθηκαν και την έκαναν, είχαν επιχειρήσει απλώς να ασκήσουν ένα απλό, στοιχειώδες ανθρώπινο δικαίωμα. Την διαφυγή από τον εξευτελισμό. Την διεκδίκηση της ανθρώπινης οντότητάς τους.

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Δες επίσης

Η Δικαιοσύνη αποδρά από τα καθιερωμένα

της Κατερίνας Κατή

Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών
13 Ιανουαρίου 2013

Απόφαση-σταθμό για την προάσπιση των δικαιωμάτων των «απόκληρων» των μεσαιωνικών μας κρατητηρίων εξέδωσε δικαστής επαρχιακής πόλης.

Απονέμοντας ουσιαστική δικαιοσύνη, ο πρόεδρος Μονομελούς Πλημμελειοδικείου της Ηγουμενίτσας «έγραψε» νομολογία απαλλάσσοντας δεκαεφτά αλλοδαπούς που είχαν αποδράσει από τα κρατητήρια της Αστυνομικής Διεύθυνσης Ηγουμενίτσας μην αντέχοντας τις απάνθρωπες, εξευτελιστικές και άκρως επικίνδυνες για ανθρώπινα όντα συνθήκες τους.

Οπως έκρινε ο πλημμελειοδίκης Αθ.Τερζούδης, οι δεκαεφτά αυτοί άνθρωποι δεν έπρεπε να κριθούν ένοχοι για «απόδραση κρατουμένου» γιατί διέπραξαν το αδίκημα ενώ βρίσκονταν σε κατάσταση ανάγκης που αποκλείει τον καταλογισμό. Ποια ήταν η κατάσταση ανάγκης; Οι συνθήκες ντροπής που εκθέτουν ανεπανόρθωτα τη σύγχρονη Ελλάδα της ευνομούμενης Δημοκρατίας μας, καθώς όχι απλώς παραβιάζουν, αλλά «τσαλαπατούν» τη Σύμβαση για τα Δικαιώματα του Ανθρώπου, η οποία απαγορεύει την εξευτελιστική μεταχείριση ανθρώπων.

Οι δεκαεφτά μετανάστες -όπως αναφέρεται στη δικαστική απόφαση- είχαν στοιβαχθεί μαζί με τουλάχιστον άλλους 13 κρατούμενους σε έναν χώρο 15 τετραγωνικών μέτρων. Παρέμεναν εκεί, «ψυχές» πεταμένες στο πάτωμα, η μια πάνω στον άλλη, επί 24 ώρες το 24ωρο, καθώς οι δεσμοφύλακές τους δεν τους επέτρεπαν τον αυλισμό. Δεν είχαν νερό να πιουν ή να πλυθούν, ούτε καν ένα βρόμικο στρώμα να ξαπλώσουν πάνω του.

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Φωτιά και γκαζάκι στους προσκυνημένους;

του Στέλιου Ν. Κάνδια

Σκάι.gr
12 Ιανουαρίου 2013

Κρούσμα 1ο: “Είσαι συντηρητικός”· με βλέμμα αυστηρό και ύφος Κωνσταντόπουλειο, η γνωστή μου με κατακεραύνωσε, εξέδωσε ετυμηγορία εντός δευτερολέπτων και έπειτα έριξε το πτωχό μου σαρκίο στην πυρά. Επρόκειτο για ανάθεμα ανάλογο αυτού που υπέστη ο Βενιζέλος (ο Ελευθέριος, όχι ο Λαγκαρντόπληκτος) από τον Αρχιεπίσκοπο Θεόκλητο το 1916... Αφορμή, το προηγούμενο άρθρο μου για την ΑΣΟΕΕ και τη βίλα Αμαλία (πραγματικός πνεύμονας πολιτισμού, αν συνυπολογίσεις τους μπάφους).

Κρούσμα 2ο: Συνάδελφοι και φίλοι (δε θα τολμήσω να πω σύντροφοι...) από την “προοδευτική” πλευρά του Ρουβίκωνα εκφράζουν την οργή τους στο πεδίο των αγώνων (το Facebook) αφότου στο Βαρόμετρο της Public Issue η πλειοψηφία των ερωτηθέντων είχε το... θράσος να μην προτιμήσει το ΣΥΡΙΖΑ αλλά άλλα αντιδραστικά κόμματα με απευκταίο αποκορύφωμα τη ΝΔ. Με σεβασμό στη διαφορετική άποψη πάντα, οι εν λόγω εκτοξεύουν ένα σκασμό κοσμητικά επίθετα κατά όλων όσων είχαν την αποκοτιά να δηλώσουν ότι διαφωνούν με τον Αλέξη τον Τσίπρα και υποδειγματικά μοντέλα οργάνωσης τύπου ΑΣΟΕΕ. Και έτσι αρχίζει το στόλισμα: τι “συντηρητικούς” τους αποκαλούν, τι νοικοκυραίους (με την έννοια του μπουρζουά φιλήσυχου βλακέντιου) τους λένε, τι νενέκους τους χαρακτηρίζουν ενώ συνάμα διεκτραγωδούν τη μοίρα της Ελλάδας που (της αξίζει) να είναι αποικία, τουλάχιστον έως την... επόμενη δημοσκόπηση. “Δε θα αλλάξει ποτέ αυτός ο γ...τοπος” αποφαίνεται θυμόσοφα μέσω Facebook ένας αγανακτισμένος επαναστάτης του πληκτρολογίου και σκληρός αγωνιστής του βιντεοπαιχνιδιού Ρro Evolution Soccer (το FIFA είναι το κατεστημένο).

Και άλλα κρούσματα: “Είσαι παπαγαλάκι”, “μην κάνεις το παπαγαλάκι”, “είσαι μαριονέτα”, “σε κατευθύνουν”. Τα παραπάνω... αρκούντως αποστομωτικά, υπερεπαναστατικά και λίαν αφοριστικά επιχειρήματα εκφράζονται πολλάκις όταν κάποιοι επιχειρούν να πατρονάρουν εξ αριστερών, χωρίς να απαντούν στις δύσκολες αιτιάσεις. Εντάξει, εγώ είμαι παπαγαλάκι, κορμοράνος, δεκαοχτούρα της υποσαχάριας Αφρικής ο Τουίτι ή οποιοδήποτε άλλο πτηνό του ζωικού βασιλείου, εσύ θα μού απαντήσεις με πειστικότητα πού θα βρει το κόμμα σου τα λεφτά για να τηρήσει τις υποσχέσεις του όταν με το καλό έρθει στην εξουσία;

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The tourists held by Greek police as illegal migrants

by Chloe Hadjimatheou

BBC News
January 10, 2013

Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps - and at least two have been badly beaten.

When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.

A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.

Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he'd often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.

Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face.

Within seconds, the uniformed man and his plainclothes partner - the man who had first approached Jung - had him down on the ground and were kicking him, according to the Korean.

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Καταδίκη της Ελλάδας για παραβίαση του δικαιώματος στη θρησκευτική ελευθερία

Καθημερινή
8 Ιανουαρίου 2013

Για παραβίαση του δικαιώματος στη θρησκευτική ελευθερία, καταδικάστηκε η Ελλάδα από το Δικαστήριο Ανθρωπίνων Δικαιωμάτων, επειδή την περίοδο 2009-2010 οι μάρτυρες των δικαστηρίων υποχρεώνονταν να ορκίζονται στο Ευαγγέλιο.

Ανακοινώνοντας προειλημμένη του απόφαση, στην υπόθεση «Δημητράς και άλλοι κατά Ελλάδος», το Δικαστήριο Ανθρωπίνων Δικαιωμάτων καταδίκασε την Ελλάδα, για παραβίαση των άρθρων 9 (θρησκευτική ελευθερία) και 13 (αποτελεσματικό ένδικο μέσο) της Ευρωπαϊκής Σύμβασης Δικαιωμάτων του Ανθρώπου, λόγω της διαδικασίας καταγραφής προσωπικών στοιχείων και υποχρέωσης θρησκευτικού όρκου, κατά τα έτη 2009-2010, που καθιστούσαν υποχρεωτική για τους μάρτυρες των ελληνικών δικαστηρίων, τη δήλωση του θρησκεύματος.

Το θέμα της κατάργησης του υποχρεωτικού θρησκευτικού όρκου στα δικαστήρια, είχαν θέσει, με την προσφυγή τους, οι Παναγιώτης Δημητράς, Αντρέα Τζίλμπερτ, Νικόλαος Μυλωνάς, Γρηγόρης Βαλλιανάτος, Ευαγγελία Βλάμη, Αντωνία Παπαδοπούλου, Ναυσικά Παπανικολάτου και Δημήτρης Τσαμπρούνης, μέλη της Μη Κυβερνητικής Οργάνωσης «Ελληνικό Παρατηρητήριο του Ελσίνκι».

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When the Iron Curtain Fell

by Frank Dikötter

Reason
January 5, 2013

Time's 1956 Man of the Year, chosen at the last minute, was an anonymous Hungarian freedom fighter. Nobody had anticipated the explosive events that saw student protesters battle Russian tanks with Molotov cocktails in the narrow, cobbled streets of Budapest. The CIA, despite its vaunted reputation for espionage, had been caught off guard. Even Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was taken aback when insurgents began to smash the hallowed symbols of communism, burning books, stripping red stars from buildings, and tearing down memorials from their pedestals, including the large bronze statue of Stalin in the city's main park. The KGB and the CIA were not alone in failing to read the popular mood in Eastern Europe. Hannah Arendt, who had suggested in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1949) that the victims of dictatorships acquired a "totalitarian personality," later conceded that the Hungarian Revolution had been "totally unexpected and took everybody by surprise." Arendt had come mistakenly to believe that totalitarian regimes held their populations permanently enthralled.

In Iron Curtain, the American journalist Anne Applebaum tells how the spell was shattered. She shows how Stalin and his agents set out to destroy every form of freedom in Eastern Europe after World War II yet failed to create a new Homo sovieticus. "Human beings do not acquire 'totalitarian personalities' with ease," she writes. "Even when they seem bewitched by the cult of the Leader or of the party, appearances can be deceiving. And even when it seems as if they are in full agreement with the most absurd propaganda—even if they are marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right—the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken."

Told with great narrative verve and backed by meticulous archival research, Applebaum begins her account with the Red Army's triumphant march to Berlin in 1945. Rape and plunder followed in its wake. Some 70,000 Soviet experts supervised the removal of what amounted to between a third and a half of eastern Germany's industrial capacity. Even bits of salvaged piping and wrecked machines were hauled off, together with works of art and antique furniture. (Marshal Zhukov was rumoured to have furnished several Moscow apartments with his personal booty.)

But the Russians were there to stay. Across Eastern Europe, future leaders known as "little Stalins" were trained in Moscow and flown in to oversee the colonization of their respective countries—Walter Ulbricht in East Germany, Bolesław Bierut in Poland, Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary. The founders of Eastern Europe's "little KGBs" disembarked from the same planes. As the Czech communist leader Klement Gottwald put it, Stalin loyalists assiduously sought how "to best make use of the experience of the Soviet Union."

With the exception of Germany, where the occupation was open for all to see, Soviet influence was carefully camouflaged. So was the pretense of democracy, as sham coalition governments were set up across the bloc. "It's quite clear—it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control," Ulbricht told a young communist.

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Have We Lost the War on Drugs?

by Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy

Wall Street Journal
January 4, 2012

President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.

These costs don't include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.

The total number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S. has grown from 330,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million today. Much of the increase in this population is directly due to the war on drugs and the severe punishment for persons convicted of drug trafficking. About 50% of the inmates in federal prisons and 20% of those in state prisons have been convicted of either selling or using drugs. The many minor drug traffickers and drug users who spend time in jail find fewer opportunities for legal employment after they get out of prison, and they develop better skills at criminal activities.

Prices of illegal drugs are pushed up whenever many drug traffickers are caught and punished harshly. The higher prices they get for drugs help compensate traffickers for the risks of being apprehended. Higher prices can discourage the demand for drugs, but they also enable some traffickers to make a lot of money if they avoid being caught, if they operate on a large enough scale, and if they can reduce competition from other traffickers. This explains why large-scale drug gangs and cartels are so profitable in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and other countries.

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