Contents

The Starbucks’ Socialists’ Parlour
by David A. Noebel

Murderous Science
by M.D. Aeschliman

Evolution: A Historical Narrative
by Paul McHugh

The Crimes of Kim Jong Il
by Lt. Col. Gordon Cuculla

Socialism: Flawed in Theory and Practice
by Richard Rahn

The Starbucks’ Socialists’ Parlour
by David A. Noebel

Murderous Science
by M.D. Aeschliman

Note: This review by Boston University professor Aeschliman centers on the book by Richard Weikart entitled From Darwin to Hitler.

It is an open question whether civilization will survive Darwinism, whose inspiration for Nazism, militarism, racism, wars of extermination, eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia is amply documented in Richard Weikart’s excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable chapter of cultural and intellectual history that had tragic consequences: the growing ascendancy in Germany in the period 1860-1933 of Social Darwinist ideas that fostered a ruthless, amoral view of the human person and of the relations between individuals, groups, nations, and races. Though in this period all “advanced Western nations (and Japan) were affected by the Darwinian bacillus, whose revival in new and seductive forms we see today, for complex reasons Germany was the land in which it grew strongest and had the most tragic consequences. Bismark’s success in unifying Germany through warfare and Germany’s growing industrial power in competition with Britain and France gave prominence and prestige to “blood and iron” and ideas of ruthless realpolitik, which a century earlier had been articulated by the Machiavellian Frederick “the great.” Like distinguished earlier scholars such as Carlton J.H. Hayes and his student Jacques Barzum, Weikart has no doubt that “Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life.”

The key figures in German “Darwinismus” were Ernest Haekel and Nietzsche, but Weikart’s book is also largely concerned with a host of less well-known German biologists, medical doctors, and social scientists who promoted Darwinism to great effect. Much valuable documentation appears here in English for the first time. Darwin himself was very pleased at the growing influence of his thinking in Germany. In 1868 he wrote to a German scholar: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” Haeckel, his most important German disciple, praised Darwin in a letter a decade later for having “shown man his true place in nature…thereby overthrowing the anthropocentric fable.” The “anthropocentric fable” is the belief in the special character of human life, the sacredness of the human person, and the absolute warrant of conscience and Christian or Kantian ethics. Many contemporary Darwinists, such as Peter Singer and James Rachels, are exhilarated by the Darwiniam liberation from ethics, conveniently forgetting the 1914-1945 chapter of modern moral history that had so much to do with the “liberated” cynicism, fury, and cruelty of Social Darwinism.

On the first page of his book Weikart quotes from the same critical 1859 letter to Darwin from his Cambridge mentor, Adam Sedgwick, that Jacques Barzun quoted from in his magisterial 1941 book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage: “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.” To break the link between the material and the moral, Sedgwick went on, would “damage” and “brutalize” humanity and “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” The hysterical, obscene strife, carnage, and cruelty of the period 1914-1945 are here foreshadowed with prophetic power.

In fact Weikart’s book raises without treating—as being beyond his task—one of the most painful dilemmas of contemporary civilization, a dilemma of which most common citizens are often dimly aware but which many scientists, caught in the grip of curiosity (libido sciendi), the will to power (libido dominandi), and dangerously vague utilitarian idealism, resolutely wish to ignore or deny: the destructive threat an omnicompetent science poses to ethics. Even liberal commentators such as Richard Hofstadter and, more recently, Stephen Jay Gould (in Rock of Ages) have found themselves defending parts of William Jennings Bryan’s ethical critique of Darwinism, which was the product not only of Bryan’s Christian religious beliefs and democratic political loyalties but also of his revulsion at the German Social Darwinism and militarism that he believed had been a major cause of World War I. Though Bryan was no intellectual, Weikart, Hofstadter, and Gould credit him with powerful insight on this point. (Along the same lines, Albert Alschuler has recently documented—in his book Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes—the American Social Darwinist nihilism of the “mature” Oliver Wendell Holmes.)

One book on the widespread participation of German medical doctors in Nazi human experimentation, sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide is titled Murderous Science. Weikart’s book itself draws on Detlev J. K. Peukert’s important essay on the Holocaust with the haunting title, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science.” It was the lonely “knight of faith” Kierkegaard who, like his English Christian contemporary Adam Sedgwick, warned in the 19th century that “in the end, all corruption will come about as a consequence of the natural sciences.” The use of the words “nature” and “natural” in contemporary moral and educational discourse are utterly ambiguous, promiscuous, and obscurantist.

Weikart’s book displays in detail how “the survival of the fittest,” the purposeful extermination of the weak and vulnerable and of “racial enemies,” came to seem the obvious dictates of “natural law” and science to thousands of apparently well-educated German intellectuals in the period 1860-1933, a period in which the German university system was the envy of the world and the model for other nations (such as America). He notes that by and large only Catholics and some Socialists resisted that ascendant Darwinian picture and the political, social, and moral ideas that came with it. Yet they were easily and widely mocked as retrograde, superstitious, and sentimental “humanitarians,” a term connoting weakness and timidity.

Weikart notes Nietzsche’s role in promoting an alluring, amoral, post-Darwinian philosophy throughout Germany and the educated world, helping create what Carlton J. H. Hayes called “a generation of materialism.” Nietzsche’s brilliant rhetoric promoted “the higher breeding of humanity, including the unsparing destruction of all degenerates and parasites” (Ecce Homo). We are not far from Darwin and his eugenic cousin Galton here, or from the influential racist Gobineau, much admired in Germany, whom Tocqueville rebuked on Christian grounds. We are also not far from Hitler.

In conclusion, Weikart treats Hitler not as an anarchic criminal and madman, but as a charismatic but principled Social Darwinist with a racist, utilitarian worldview that was the fruit of the 70 years of Darwinist thinking in Germany that Weikart has documented. Hitler’s idolatry of the Germans as the “culture-bearing” people reminds us of the seductive temptations, not only in Germany or in the past, to replace traditional Christian religion and ethics with “culture” (often so much more exciting, bold, and novel) and science (apparently so much more certain). He also suggests that celebratory contemporary Darwinists such as Singer and Rachels—and all who believe in the omnicompetence of natural science—have learned nothing from the tragic 20th century.

—National Review, March 28, 2005, p. 49f.

Evolution: A Historical Narrative
by Paul McHugh

Eighty years ago this summer, the Scopes trial upheld the effort of the state of Tennessee to exclude the teaching of Darwinian evolution from Tennessee classrooms. The state claimed Darwinism contradicted orthodox religion. But times change, and recently a federal judge ruled that a three-sentence sticker stating that “evolution is a theory not a fact” must be removed from Georgia high school biology texts because it contradicts orthodox science and represents an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. Both legal mandates—no Darwin yesterday, nothing but Darwin today—look less like science than exercises in thought control.

Everyone agrees that the Scopes trial (viciously caricatured in the play and movie Inherit the Wind) was a setback for the teaching of scientific reasoning. But the same is true of the Georgia ruling, Darwinism being quite obviously a biological theory and open to dispute. To claim otherwise is to be woefully misinformed.

Science, as high school students need to know, is a logically articulated structure of beliefs about nature that are justified by methods of reasoning one can evaluate. It is whether the methods pass muster that counts for or against a scientific opinion, not how the opinion fits our preconceptions.

Charles Darwin proposed that random variation within life forms, working together with natural selection (“the preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations”) across the vast expanse of time since the earth was formed, explains “how the universe created intelligence,” as Francis Bacon had stated the problem a few centuries before. To judge whether the matter is now closed to all criticism, such that Darwinism stands with scientific facts like “the earth is a planet of the sun” or “the blood circulates in the body,” demands we consider Darwin’s method of reasoning.

The leading Darwinist in America, Ernst Mayr, describes the method. “Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.”

Darwin, Mayr goes on, “established a philosophy of biology…by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather than laws.”

After noting Mayr’s fearless use of the words “tentative,” “philosophy”, and “theory,” one surely is justified in responding: No wonder Darwinism, in contrast to other scientific theories, seems an argument without end! It’s history—indeed, history captured by that creative-writing-class concept narrative. If historical narrative—and the “philosophy” it propounds—are what justify the Darwinian opinions, the textbook writers of Georgia can legitimately claim that Darwin’s “tentative reconstruction” is not only a theory but a special kind of theory, one lacking the telling and persuasive power that theories built on hypothesis-generated experiment and public prediction can garner.

Darwin himself understood that questions raised about his narrative had substance. In Chapter IX of On the Origin of Species, he noted that the fossil record had failed to “reveal any…finely graduated organic chain” linking, as he proposed, existing species to predecessors. He called the record “imperfect” and went so far as to say, “This, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” Darwin presumed that the problem rested on the “poorness of our palaentological collections” and would be answered when more of “the surface of the earth has been geologically explored.”

In the same Chapter IX, Darwin also acknowledged that the fossil record does suggest the “sudden appearance of whole groups of allied species all at once.” He noted that if this fact were to stand, and “numerous species belonging to the same genera or families have really started into life all at once,…[it] would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.” He forestalled that fatal blow to his theory by asking his readers not to “over-rate the perfection of the geological record.”

Any sympathetic reader of Darwin’s history would readily allow him the point—that earlier life forms might have all come and gone elsewhere than where later forms emerged and might have done so without leaving a fossil record to demonstrate the smooth gradation between species. But such a reader should admit, as Darwin did, that the absence of the record is a serious matter—especially when it persists to this day, nearly a century and a half after Darwin’s book was published. This imperfection of the historical record was, after all, sufficiently embarrassing to provoke some evolutionary biologists nearly 100 years ago to try to improve on the record by manufacturing the counterfeit fossil Piltdown Man.

Even among committed Darwinists, the imperfection of the fossil record has been a source of huge argument. The Darwinian fundamentalist Richard Dawkins of Oxford believes in smooth and gradual evolutionary processes. He became a vicious antagonist to Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, who championed “punctuated equilibrium,” with abrupt species generation after millennia of stability. Dawkins attacked Gould in large part because Gould’s idea greatly shortened the time evolutionary processes had to generate species.

All the more reason, then, for our sympathetic reader to look for other means of supporting Darwin’s narrative. Perhaps the demonstrable variations that occur in species living under altered circumstances might answer objections.

With this in mind, Darwin devotes the very first chapter of On the Origin of Species to describing variations in plants and domestic animals produced over time by methodical selective breeding by farmers and fanciers. Plainly their practice of permitting only the most choice individuals to reproduce and so “enhance the breed” demonstrates how hereditary modification of members of a given species is possible—indeed, it displays the process.

Darwin, however, then makes an extrapolation. Beginning with the reasonable presumption that the hereditary mechanisms involved in producing these enhancements in the barnyard must be available and randomly active in nature, he proposed that from such random variation can spring new species. Variation—repeated ad infinitum down the ages, with its products culled by natural selection rather than by artful human breeding—is the process by which Darwin links up all of biologic creation. This is the Darwinian narrative in its clearest form—history by extrapolation—and it is not problem-free.

Many of us were taught these Darwinian extrapolatory links to the evolutionary narrative in high school, usually with photographs of the European peppered moth (Biston betularia), which became darker with environmental pollution and thus less conspicuous to bird predators in industrial areas. The same idea springs up in discussions of the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, or of the transformation of the beaks of finches under the pressure of drought. We were taught in high school that these observable biologic changes display evolution “in front of your eyes.”

But not everyone agreed with this conclusion. Many criticized the Darwinists for extrapolating too far, and now the Darwinists confess that actual, observable variation—whether in the barnyard or in nature—demonstrates only the capacity of a species population to vary within limits. The original species picture reappears when either the farmer’s selective enterprise or the natural environmental pressure on the species population stops and crossbreeding recurs. The finches’ beaks never turn into pelican pouches but revert to their original shape when the rains arrive.

No farmer or experimental scientist has ever produced a new species by cultivating variations. The peppered moth didn’t become a butterfly, and the closely and repeatedly studied fruit fly, despite gazillions of generations producing varieties in the laboratory, always remains a fruit fly. Again, Darwin himself was more honest than his followers have been. He knew the distinction between variations that could be observed and those posited according to the theoretical extrapolation that was key to his narrative. For this reason he repeatedly notes, as in Chapter IV of On the Origin of Species, that “natural selection will always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a few of the inhabitants.” In this way he puts the process of species generation outside the reach of experimental demonstration.

At this point, the sympathetic reader eager to secure Darwin’s narrative might resort to searching the “bio-chemical record.” Surely the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, and proteins contain the long-sought evidence. Again, though, molecular biology helps in some ways in that it shows commonalities across species—just as other aspects of anatomical structures show commonalities—but again it’s the distinctions—and the means by which they are generated—rather than the similarities that must be explained to support the theory.

If one turns to DNA to show how Homo sapiens gradually emerged by small and random variations from predecessors, one faces an immediate problem. At the level of DNA, humans and chimpanzees differ by a mere 1 percent, yet the chimpanzee is not 99 percent human in body, brain, or mental faculties—far from it. We need something more than the DNA record to support a narrative linking chimps and men.

Perhaps it’s enough for the friendly guardian of the Darwinian narrative to propose that the genes that control the switching on and off of other genes simply changed in some random way, allowing humans to branch off the primate line. And maybe they did. But again, notice, this is a molecular narrative, not a proposition demonstrable by experiment. It’s a story that fits the facts—but so might another.

Surely at this point that friendly reader might agree that, like any historical account, the Darwinian narrative can fairly be challenged—not to say that it must be wrong, only that it needs more supportive evidence. Perhaps there are statistical proofs or engineering concepts that could be found, or something else that might emerge that would be subject to verification by the scientific method.

But our would-be friend to evolution will soon discover that any questioning of the Darwinian narrative, no matter how sympathetic, is shouted down. If mathematicians try to say that even with the immense span of geological time available for random genetic variations to act, there is not time enough to produce the human eye, the response—typical for historians, who routinely argue backward from observation to their causes—is, Since the eye exists the math must be wrong.

If Michael J. Behe, the cellular biochemist who wrote Darwin’s Black Box, proposes that the complicated molecular mechanisms sustaining the integrity of the cell seem impossible to explain as the result of random variations, the president of the National Academy of Sciences counters by pronouncing, “Modern scientific views of the molecular organization of life are entirely consistent with spontaneous variation and natural selection driving a powerful evolutionary process.” That is, he affirms the Darwinian narrative by restating it, not by offering compelling proof that it is true. Lots of views are consistent with the cell’s complexity—including the view Behe explores, that an intelligent creator designed the cell to work. But cellular formation needs identified generative mechanisms, not simply a consistent narrative, to explain it—a problem both for those who call on Darwin and those who call on an “intelligent designer.”

Official science is too much at ease with the Darwinian narrative—primarily because it can’t come up with anything better. As a result, many scientists are driven by an ideological bias and by fear—the thought that any challenge to the narrative will plunge the republic back into some dark age. Richard Dawkins and his associate Niall Shanks predict that, as Shanks wrote, “discriminatory, conservative Christian values [will be imposed] on our educational, legal, social and political institutions” should the public schools permit any airing of questions about the Darwinian narrative. This fear is way over the top, but it’s of long standing, and in the past has provoked some loss of judgment among scientists.

When the most distinguished biological scientist of the 20th century, Francis Crick, saw the same complications as Michael Behe, he also concluded that time on Earth and random variation were not adequate to produce the viable cell. Crick resolved the dilemma, in a fascinating book called Life Itself published in 1981, by suggesting that living cells arrived on an unmanned spaceship from another planet, perhaps sent by intelligent beings facing extinction. He called his concept “directed panspermia” and this strange concept (I prefer to call it “life from Krypton”) received a respectful hearing from biologists. With this imaginative device Crick could keep the narrative alive. He explained life’s cellular origins without worrying about time, kept the God he hated out of the picture, and preserved the possibility of random variation and natural selection working their magic from these “seedlings” from a “galaxy far far away.”

By now, it would seem that a sympathetic reader of Darwin, if honest, could conclude the following. Darwinism is an imperfect theory, based as it is on a historical narrative, and carrying as it does the remarkable capacity to explain anything and exclude nothing. It has great strengths, and it has great evidential lacunae that seem no closer to resolution than when Darwin himself called attention to them 146 years ago.

The biological evidence—life rests on the cellular organization of nucleotides and proteins—compels the conclusion that all the various forms of life on Earth derive from a common source, as Darwin emphasized. Life is not recreated with every new species—this is now undeniable. The Darwinian concept of descent with modification seems the most plausible way to relate life and its varieties. Modifications within species are other responses to environmental challenges, and they sustain a species with the variety of expressions necessary for it to survive these challenges.

But when one tries to grasp how the distinct species, as against varieties, are generated—by what mechanism they separate—a pause to reflect is warranted. Darwin’s random variation and natural selection may well offer the best available narrative, the most compelling theory. Yet something seems missing—for example, any sense of what propels life’s forms toward a progressive complexity, rather than toward a simplicity of design that would guarantee survival come what may.

The discipline of evolutionary biology today resembles astrophysics when Galileo was attempting to explain the planetary orbits and the oceanic tides but lacked the concept of the force of gravity. His observations were accurate enough, but explanations awaited an Isaac Newton.

Evolutionary biology awaits its Newton. And until such a thinker emerges—to provide a fuller conception of the history of life and especially the forces at play that explain how things happened as they did—those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method.

Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts to close off the conversation by excessive claims for any privileged access to truth. Scientists should tell what they actually know and how they know it, as distinct from what they believe and are tying to advance. If all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, accepted that guiding principle, the 80-year history of attempts to use law to stifle the teaching of science—stretching as it does from the courtrooms of Dayton, Tennessee, to those of Cobb County, Georgia—could perhaps finally be brought to a close.

—The Weekly Standard, March 28, 2005, p. 23f.

The Crimes of Kim Jong Il
by Lt. Col. Gordon Cuculla

One of the most horrific aspects of the Nazi Holocaust that killed upwards of 6 million European Jews and 5 million others (including Gypsies, Poles, Russians, the infirm, mentally ill, aged, political undesirables, and anti-Nazis) was the industrialization aspect that Hitler’s regime used to impersonalize the most personal of crimes: murder. The mass extermination of human beings by the German Reich seemed to be a culmination of the dark aspects of ancient German mythology and the twisted misuse of modern industrial techniques resulting in unspeakable evil. So repelled was the civilized world that a major factor in founding the United Nations was to enforce the pledge of ‘never again’ when it came to genocide and crimes against humanity.

Tragically, the UN has failed dismally in that mission. We don’t have to look deep into it to see why. An organization composed of fatally flawed parts is incapable of rising above the worst of its members. The fault of the UN has been that abusive, criminal regimes have equal standing to free democracies. As a consequence, the metonymic beat of international horror continues unchecked, often unchallenged, even ignored, down through the decades into the new millennium. It is discouraging to look back on a catalogue of horrors that were overlooked, minimized, or rationalized. A short list includes millions of state-sanctioned murders in the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Vietnam, the Balkans, and Cuba. There are others. Incredibly, this list is not exhaustive.

One of the worse regimes operating against all commonly accepted humanitarian principles is that of communist North Korea. It is a small country. Population estimates range around 20-22 million; the government is so cloistered that real statistics are unattainable. But small size does not preclude gigantic abuse. Conservative estimates place the number of North Korean citizens killed by starvation in the past decade at 2-3 million. That is 10% or greater of the population. Apply that ratio to the US or European population base and the real horror sinks in. Paradoxically, this mass starvation occurred during a period when the North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il was the largest recipient of American food aid of any other country. But Kim and his communist party minions spread food aid where it would do their regime the most good: to prop up the military and to sell on the black market to line corrupt bureaucratic pockets. His people, the Dear Leader arrogantly said, could ‘eat bark.’

The expression that “one human death is a tragedy; a million, a statistic,” has been variously attributed to Stalin, Adolph Eichmann, and others of their ilk. Regardless of who said it, they all agreed with the core principle: the world will let a dictator get away with mass murderer. Kim Il Sung, the self-styled Great Leader and original dictator of North Korea, behaved accordingly. So does his son and successor, Kim Jong Il. The two imposed a grotesque personality cult upon the people of North Korea of such pervasiveness that even Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong would be envious. They emulated those mentors by constructing a gulag of political prison camps of the most awful sort throughout the remote areas of North Korea. The camps are a death machine into which alleged “enemies of the state,” criminals, and the “politically unreliable,” especially Christians, are condemned. Along with these “undesirables” typically go their families, often down to three generations because of the regime’s stated policy to “root out the poisonous ideologies.” Concentration camp inmates work under brutal conditions usually to their deaths, are kept barely alive by meager rations, denied medical attention, and routinely tortured and executed. Estimates are that 200,000-300,000 people at any given time are locked into these terrible prisons.

This is sufficient reason to indict Kim Jong Il for crimes against humanity. But there is more: Kim has pushed the envelope of abuse against his citizens much farther than starvation and imprisonment. Credible witnesses have given startling testimony about the Kim regime’s experimentation with use of poison gas and biological toxins on concentration camp inmates. These reports have been suppressed, ignored, or exculpated by regime apologists. They have not been acknowledged or investigated by any agency of the UN, including those charged with oversight of human rights violations. Worse, our own State Department and two successive South Korean governments have tried to sweep these allegations under the carpet. This action is odious and inexcusable and demands immediate rectification.

No longer is the issue of abuse in North Korea debatable. The evidence, preliminary but damning, is more than sufficient to warrant aggressive redress. Back from a recent investigative trip to South Korea, Abraham Cooper, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, wrote a piece for the Washington Post on North Korean poison gas experiments. Cooper interviewed North Korean defectors. He recounts in detail reports from Kim’s former scientists and guards, and from some of the prisoners who survived and escaped. It is a chilling account of the most brutal, inhumane experimentation. To the reader Cooper asks the key question: “So why no worldwide outrage?” He correctly answers: “realpolitik trumps distant horrors.” The world will have to answer its own conscience, but such an attitude of indifference is not acceptable from America and its allies, especially under the freedom policies stated by President Bush.

No longer may the business as usual attitude of some State Department professionals be permitted to continue. They wish—as does the South Korean government—to exclude discussion of human rights in the Six Party Talks and focus solely on nuclear weapons issues. In fact that has historically been a flawed policy: the North Koreans cheated on all previous agreements.

Meanwhile we propped up Kim’s decaying regime, and the North Korean people suffered another decade of abuse. We now have an administration committed to stand by oppressed peoples around the world who are struggling to be free. It is long overdue for the president to be supported in this worthy endeavor by his own bureaucracy. Kim’s crimes demand justice and the American people must insist it be served. The oppressed people of North Korea must be free now!

—FrontPageMagazine.com, March 29, 2005

Socialism: Flawed in Theory and Practice
by Richard Rahn

If someone advocates an ideology that has contempt for the individual and has caused untold economic misery and the deaths of hundreds of millions at the hands of their governments, what would you think of that person?

The ideology I refer to is, of course, socialism and its numerous variations, including the utopian socialists, the Fabian socialists, the National Socialists, and, naturally, the communists. Socialism is simply an economic system where the government (or collective) owns and controls the means of production. Given that the two centuries of socialists’ experiments, whether by utopians, Marxists, or Fabians, always ended in economic failure and a loss of personal liberty, why are people around the globe still proudly proclaiming themselves socialists? Socialist parties are still popular in parts of Europe, Latin American, and in much of Africa. Socialist parties have been elected to power in both Spain and Portugal in recent months. Many college professors and students on U.S. campuses claim to be socialists.

The “national socialist” caused the death of tens of millions of people. The communists in Russia, China, Cambodia and elsewhere caused the collective deaths of more than 100 million people and impoverished billions of others. (I happened to be at the Kremlin in Moscow in August 1992, when the Russia demographers announced they had determined there were 64 million “excess deaths” in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin’s reign—1923-53.)

The Third World socialists have kept their countries unnecessarily mired in poverty for a half-century. The democratic socialists gained control in England in 1945 under Clement Attlee. As a result, the British economy was run into the ground. Hence the British people voted to reprivitatize their economy under Margaret Thatcher beginning in 1979.

Other democratic socialist economies had the same types of failure, so by the 1980s privatization became the vogue as it was obviously necessary to reignite economic growth.

Yet, the socialists keep coming back. They deny or ignore previous failures and say the next time “we will do it right.” Socialism only fails and will continue to fail because its theory is as flawed as its practice.

Back in the 1920s, the eminent economist Ludwig von Mises showed socialism it could not work because it could not provide a functional alternative to the price system to properly allocate resources. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, F.A. Hayek, provided the definitive proof of why socialism could not work in his last book, The Fatal Conceit. The argument in essence is that if the whole world were socialist there would be no objective way to determine prices, thus no way to allocate resources efficiently.

If people knew the real history of all the socialist experiments and its flawed theory, very few (other than the delusional or mean-spirited) would be socialists. People do not know the history of socialist disasters because the educational establishment and much of the news media have engaged in a massive cover-up. The large majority of teachers throughout the world are government employees or depend on government grants. All too many are thus understandably hostile to the idea government enterprises do not work as advertised and, hence, reluctant to both teach and allow materials in the classroom that show the socialist model neither works in practice or theory. Surveys in the U.S. and elsewhere show the overwhelming majority of professors and public school teachers are on the left side of the political spectrum, so one should not be shocked they hesitate to teach history and theory that show their self-interested ideology is a failure.

Much of the electronic media in the world are either owned or controlled by governments. In the U.S., National Public Radio (NPR) provides a steady diet of the alleged failures of those in the private sector, with scant mention of the endless failures of socialist undertakings, let alone the reasons. Many NPR stations are now airing the BBC in part to further propagandize Americans in the socialist way of thinking. (Most Americans do not realize the government-owned BBC is increasingly monopolizing the broadcast media in Britain and, particularly, news to the benefit of the left.)

The employees of these socialist media are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them, and many do not know any better. The situation is not much improved in the print media. Most reporters have been fed a steady diet of leftist and socialist propaganda from both their schools and from government agencies, and too few are willing to do the independent study and research to discover and, in turn, report the truth.

Perhaps the Internet will be our salvation, because it enables good people of conscience to get out the facts about the human misery caused by 200 years of socialist experimentation, without first being filtered by left-leaning information controllers.

—The Washington Times, May 21, 2005, p. A 15