The cyber-uglies take on Finland: Part III
Part III: Schwarzmann thinks the Cold War is still on!
NB: Part I can be read here. Part II is here)
In addition to his website Finland for Thought, Schwarzmann has hosted since September 2005 a Sunday night podcast entitled Radio Free Finland. (Programme archives here.)
The name of Schwarzmann's show offers, I feel, a fundamental insight into the nature of his political imagination. Can you think of anything more patronizing than an American going to Finland and setting up a radio programme called 'Radio Free Finland'? With its echoes of the Cold War era's 'Radio Free Europe,' the name suggests that Schwarzmann thinks of Finland as some kind of oppressed country whose people need Americans like himself to liberate them.
In my previous post, I suggested that Schwarzmann represents the latest manifestation of the 'Ugly American.' What I mean by this is that, whether he's entirely conscious of the fact or not, there seems to be a layer of the American imagination which cannot fully accept that non-Americans experience anything that can legitimately be called 'freedom.' Because they are excluded from real freedom by not being American, it would seem Finns can only experience freedom vicariously for the duration of his one-hour programme.
At this point, you could well object that the name of the show is just a joke. Yet, there seems to be a little more to it than that. Sounding like he's imbibed too much Cold War mythology, Schwarzmann reinforces the show's ersatz underground character when, at the beginning of each show, while soliciting phone calls and emails from listeners, he promises his audience that he will not identify anyone who contacts him by name, that it's OK for them to use pseudonyms.
This declaration of a willingness to preserve anonymity strikes me as rather odd. What kind of place does Schwarzmann think Finland is, exactly? Does he think that the Finnish government's intelligence agents are on red alert, ready to arrest all callers to his underground radio show as fast as they can identify them? Is Schwarzmann under the impression that the Finnish state maintains a gulag for its libertarian critics in some remote corner of the country?
In short, like the writings on his blog, Schwarzmann betrays in his radio show numerous indications of a deepseated psychological need for the welfare state as a device for preserving intact a simplistic (let's call a spade a spade and say 'moronic') Cold War worldview in which the planet is neatly divided between friends and enemies of freedom. Could it be that the welfare state has become the principle target to libertarians because, with communism gone, they desperately need a substitute for the vanished Soviet Union, and Europe's advanced welfare states are the next best thing to hate?
Schwarzmann's implicit assumption that Finland lacks freedom is a bit hard to take, when you consider that in virtually every meaningful sense of the word 'freedom' Finns are a great deal freer than most people living on the planet today. At the very least, according to Reporters Without Borders, Finland is one of seven countries with top ranking for press freedom; no English-speaking country - with the exception of non-Anglo-Saxon Ireland, which is also in first place - even comes close. (Australia's ranking on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index is a poor #31, and that of the U.S. is a dire #44.)
Then, as I pointed out in my previous post, Finns are free to educate themselves for most any profession they choose - without being crippled for years afterwards by debt, free to receive medical care when they need it, and the young, at least those of them who have to work for a living, are free to, well, pay the rent and eat and maybe even go out from time to time. None of these freedoms exist for very large proportions of the population in countries with relatively undeveloped welfare states like those of the English-speaking countries, and in many such countries it usually comes down to a difficult choice between them, which at the very least involves saying goodbye to anything even vaguely resembling a healthy diet.
If you attack the welfare state, as Schwarzmann and rightwing libertarians do persistently - do they really have any other target? - then you have to wonder what sort of 'freedom' it is they are talking about. What meaningful definition of freedom wouldn't include social freedoms such as the right to an education? Or the right to pursue a vocation of one's own choosing? Or economic freedoms, such as the right to an income that guarantees a minimum standard of living? What Schwarzmann and the rightwing libertarians don't tell you is that there's no place in their worldview for economic and social freedom. But if you take away the welfare state, all the freedom that's left is the freedom of the rich and powerful to tyrannize over the rest of us.
Conclusion: march of the cyber-uglies
'A man without education is not a complete person.' - Simon Bolivar.
'We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.' - Gerald W. Bracey, contemporary American education policy expert.
In this series of three posts you've been introduced to a contemporary manifestation of the Ugly American - the 'cyber-ugly' frothing and foaming at the mouth about the evils of the European welfare state and how oppressive countries are which have the fairest distribution of income and life opportunity in the history of capitalism. For some obscure reason, American libertarians are leaving their own country and heading to Scandinavia - normally Sweden, where there are now a considerable number of institutions funded by Swedish business groups co-ordinating their activities - apparently for the purpose of catapulting anti-welfare state propaganda.
The drift to Scandinavia strikes me as a curious development because I tend to wonder why, if you hate the welfare state as much as people like Schwarzmann explicitly say they do, would you want to go and live in one of the world's most advanced welfare states? Why not go somewhere where you can have more 'freedom'? Why not head for, say, Estonia, which despite a poverty rate of at least 20 percent (some say nearer 30 percent) seems to be the libertarian movement's current notion of a socialism-free paradise?
Maybe one day the exodus of Americans to Scandinavia will be revealed to have been a CIA project - in the light of the proliferation of rightwing thinktanks in Europe staffed very largely by Americans, it would seem that there is some sort of sub rosa co-operation going on between European conservatives and their allies in Washington - the possibility cannot be ruled out that all or most of the people referred to here are receiving paychecks from Langley for their efforts - but for now we will assume that the motivation is purely ideological. But what's behind this ideology?
Freerider Phil in Washington. Is this where his paychecks really come from?
Explaining the spreading mildew of American libertarianism over the far north means, first of all, understanding that its roots are in a country suffering from a near total collapse of the intellect. As Paul Craig Roberts - who back in the 80s held the office of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, which would presumably make it difficult to dismiss what he says as 'anti-American' - pointed out recently, 'Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate ... [that] half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information. ... half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts.' [My italics] (SOURCE)
Even top members of the Bush administration cannot get their most elementary historical facts straight. Rumsfeld, for example, said at the National Press Club on February 2, 2006 that the rise of Hugo Chavez concerned him: 'Rumsfeld ... sought to portray Chavez as leading some sort of Axis-like alliance in Latin America, saying "He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally, and then consolidated power, and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales [the new populist President of Bolivia] and others. It concerns me".' (SOURCE)
However, as anyone who has looked into the subject of the rise of the Third Reich knows, Hitler was not 'elected legally' - he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, and all the steps he subsequently took to consolidate his power took the form of exploiting vulnerabilities in the Weimar constitution - in fact, he used more or less the same methods that another unelected leader, Supreme Court appointee George W. Bush, used to consolidate his presidency after 9-11. In Venezuela, on the other hand, the rise of Chavez has coincided with a process of constitutional reform which has strengthened democracy rather than Chavez's hold on power. (He is simply the first beneficiary of the strengthened democratization process, and in due course there will be others.) But Rumsfeld can get away with such erroneous statements because the general population, including much of the Washington press corps, has been so dumbed down that they are incapable of noticing when someone has told them a bald-faced lie.
You don't get a population that stupid by accident. The inability of so many Americans to absorb and process information is an intentional result of the American system for propagandizing its own population. As John Taylor Gatto shows at length in his remarkable book, The Underground History of American Education, which can be read online for free here, the [U.S.] educational system was designed to keep Americans 'uneducated and docile.' (For a brief introduction to this book, one of the most important historical contributions of recent times, follow this link.)
Gatto shows how, beginning a little over a century ago, elites intervened in American mass education for the purpose of ensuring that the country produced not intellectually-alert citizens, but worker drones. What worried them, firstly, was the possibility that a good education system would produce too many people capable of working in the better-paid and more fulfilling jobs; there were 'enough' lawyers, academics, journalists and novelists already. The need was therefore to ensure that the overwhelming majority of people restricted their ambitions to menial occupations. The elites' second worry was the growing socialist agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. They did not want their precious work of creating the world's first corporation-controlled society stymied by demands for such things as eight-hour days and minimum wages.
The educational dumbing down of America was therefore partly a strategy to inoculate American workers against the threat (to elites) posed by socialism; mass education was to bring about the artificial prolongation of childhood and perpetuate a permanent condition of political illiteracy. It is because the education system shaped by these principles has been in place for almost a century now that America has become the fountainhead for lunatic ideologies such as conservatism, libertarianism, Christian Zionism, fundamentalism and dominionism that virtually anywhere else wouldn't stand a chance of percolating into the mainstream.
The immense popularity enjoyed by such ideological movements in the U.S. is therefore best understood as a product of an educational system that has been designed to suppress freedom by keeping Americans 'corporate friendly.' No system, perhaps, can eliminate dissent entirely, but by this means America's elites were able to ensure that when dissent arose, it was a superficial kind of dissent that only served their ultimate purposes.
Recall how Finnpundit actually suggests that social democracy may be worse than communism because it's 'so benign'? Nothing could suit America's corporate elites better than the kind of convoluted thinking that condemns the use of government as a means of strengthening the freedoms of the many. (If Finland were run on the same quasi-totalitarian lines as Singapore, does anyone think Finnpundit or Schwarzmann would have the slightest complaint?)
Unfortunately, we don't know anything about Finnpundit's educational background - although if he really did migrate from Finland to the US when he was a child the process of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture would certainly have disrupted his educational development - Schwarzmann's CV, shows a purely vocational education. He's a Computer Science major. While that doesn't mean that his computer science studies are the only studies he's ever had, his mental horizons seem to consist almost exclusively of choice tidbits from rightwing websites.
What I tend to worry about is that people like Finnpundit and Schwarzmann who cherry pick the bits of information that prop up their ideologies and ignore everything else might begin to be taken seriously when they purport to evaluate complex social, political and economic systems. Libertarianism has a certain attraction to people in Scandinavia who (like 'TA' - see Part I on Finnpundit) are generally broadminded enough that they enjoy having their views challenged. (If they didn't, would Finland for Thought get 48,000 hits a week?)
On the one hand, all of us need our ideas challenged from time to time and it is a hallmark of an educated person, I think, to actively seek out challenging ideas as a means of keeping our brains alive and functioning. Unfortunately, though, there are too many cases when a well-intentioned, broadminded receptivity to outre ideas has gone well beyond a flirtation, and actually helped bring about their triumph, good examples being the rise of asceticism in the later Roman empire and the witch craze in early modern Europe. It would be little short of a tragedy if a similar fascination with the contrary and the perverse led to the demise of the Nordic welfare states - this would be a tragedy not just for the Nordic peoples, but also for those of us living in the ramshackle liberal economies who at present have no other beacon.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: FinnSense: The libertarian website Finland For Thought 'is run through with lots of poorly understood libertarian claptrap. Together with the possibly defunct Finnpundit, they seem to be members of the "find a problem in Finland from whichever news source and use it as proof that the Nordic model cannot work and that even if the US model sucks, so does the Nordic model but at least the US is really rich so there," school of propaganda.'
NB: Part I can be read here. Part II is here)
In addition to his website Finland for Thought, Schwarzmann has hosted since September 2005 a Sunday night podcast entitled Radio Free Finland. (Programme archives here.)
The name of Schwarzmann's show offers, I feel, a fundamental insight into the nature of his political imagination. Can you think of anything more patronizing than an American going to Finland and setting up a radio programme called 'Radio Free Finland'? With its echoes of the Cold War era's 'Radio Free Europe,' the name suggests that Schwarzmann thinks of Finland as some kind of oppressed country whose people need Americans like himself to liberate them.
In my previous post, I suggested that Schwarzmann represents the latest manifestation of the 'Ugly American.' What I mean by this is that, whether he's entirely conscious of the fact or not, there seems to be a layer of the American imagination which cannot fully accept that non-Americans experience anything that can legitimately be called 'freedom.' Because they are excluded from real freedom by not being American, it would seem Finns can only experience freedom vicariously for the duration of his one-hour programme.
At this point, you could well object that the name of the show is just a joke. Yet, there seems to be a little more to it than that. Sounding like he's imbibed too much Cold War mythology, Schwarzmann reinforces the show's ersatz underground character when, at the beginning of each show, while soliciting phone calls and emails from listeners, he promises his audience that he will not identify anyone who contacts him by name, that it's OK for them to use pseudonyms.
This declaration of a willingness to preserve anonymity strikes me as rather odd. What kind of place does Schwarzmann think Finland is, exactly? Does he think that the Finnish government's intelligence agents are on red alert, ready to arrest all callers to his underground radio show as fast as they can identify them? Is Schwarzmann under the impression that the Finnish state maintains a gulag for its libertarian critics in some remote corner of the country?
In short, like the writings on his blog, Schwarzmann betrays in his radio show numerous indications of a deepseated psychological need for the welfare state as a device for preserving intact a simplistic (let's call a spade a spade and say 'moronic') Cold War worldview in which the planet is neatly divided between friends and enemies of freedom. Could it be that the welfare state has become the principle target to libertarians because, with communism gone, they desperately need a substitute for the vanished Soviet Union, and Europe's advanced welfare states are the next best thing to hate?
Schwarzmann's implicit assumption that Finland lacks freedom is a bit hard to take, when you consider that in virtually every meaningful sense of the word 'freedom' Finns are a great deal freer than most people living on the planet today. At the very least, according to Reporters Without Borders, Finland is one of seven countries with top ranking for press freedom; no English-speaking country - with the exception of non-Anglo-Saxon Ireland, which is also in first place - even comes close. (Australia's ranking on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index is a poor #31, and that of the U.S. is a dire #44.)
Then, as I pointed out in my previous post, Finns are free to educate themselves for most any profession they choose - without being crippled for years afterwards by debt, free to receive medical care when they need it, and the young, at least those of them who have to work for a living, are free to, well, pay the rent and eat and maybe even go out from time to time. None of these freedoms exist for very large proportions of the population in countries with relatively undeveloped welfare states like those of the English-speaking countries, and in many such countries it usually comes down to a difficult choice between them, which at the very least involves saying goodbye to anything even vaguely resembling a healthy diet.
If you attack the welfare state, as Schwarzmann and rightwing libertarians do persistently - do they really have any other target? - then you have to wonder what sort of 'freedom' it is they are talking about. What meaningful definition of freedom wouldn't include social freedoms such as the right to an education? Or the right to pursue a vocation of one's own choosing? Or economic freedoms, such as the right to an income that guarantees a minimum standard of living? What Schwarzmann and the rightwing libertarians don't tell you is that there's no place in their worldview for economic and social freedom. But if you take away the welfare state, all the freedom that's left is the freedom of the rich and powerful to tyrannize over the rest of us.
Conclusion: march of the cyber-uglies
'A man without education is not a complete person.' - Simon Bolivar.
'We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.' - Gerald W. Bracey, contemporary American education policy expert.
In this series of three posts you've been introduced to a contemporary manifestation of the Ugly American - the 'cyber-ugly' frothing and foaming at the mouth about the evils of the European welfare state and how oppressive countries are which have the fairest distribution of income and life opportunity in the history of capitalism. For some obscure reason, American libertarians are leaving their own country and heading to Scandinavia - normally Sweden, where there are now a considerable number of institutions funded by Swedish business groups co-ordinating their activities - apparently for the purpose of catapulting anti-welfare state propaganda.
The drift to Scandinavia strikes me as a curious development because I tend to wonder why, if you hate the welfare state as much as people like Schwarzmann explicitly say they do, would you want to go and live in one of the world's most advanced welfare states? Why not go somewhere where you can have more 'freedom'? Why not head for, say, Estonia, which despite a poverty rate of at least 20 percent (some say nearer 30 percent) seems to be the libertarian movement's current notion of a socialism-free paradise?
Maybe one day the exodus of Americans to Scandinavia will be revealed to have been a CIA project - in the light of the proliferation of rightwing thinktanks in Europe staffed very largely by Americans, it would seem that there is some sort of sub rosa co-operation going on between European conservatives and their allies in Washington - the possibility cannot be ruled out that all or most of the people referred to here are receiving paychecks from Langley for their efforts - but for now we will assume that the motivation is purely ideological. But what's behind this ideology?
Freerider Phil in Washington. Is this where his paychecks really come from?
Explaining the spreading mildew of American libertarianism over the far north means, first of all, understanding that its roots are in a country suffering from a near total collapse of the intellect. As Paul Craig Roberts - who back in the 80s held the office of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, which would presumably make it difficult to dismiss what he says as 'anti-American' - pointed out recently, 'Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate ... [that] half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information. ... half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts.' [My italics] (SOURCE)
Even top members of the Bush administration cannot get their most elementary historical facts straight. Rumsfeld, for example, said at the National Press Club on February 2, 2006 that the rise of Hugo Chavez concerned him: 'Rumsfeld ... sought to portray Chavez as leading some sort of Axis-like alliance in Latin America, saying "He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally, and then consolidated power, and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales [the new populist President of Bolivia] and others. It concerns me".' (SOURCE)
However, as anyone who has looked into the subject of the rise of the Third Reich knows, Hitler was not 'elected legally' - he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, and all the steps he subsequently took to consolidate his power took the form of exploiting vulnerabilities in the Weimar constitution - in fact, he used more or less the same methods that another unelected leader, Supreme Court appointee George W. Bush, used to consolidate his presidency after 9-11. In Venezuela, on the other hand, the rise of Chavez has coincided with a process of constitutional reform which has strengthened democracy rather than Chavez's hold on power. (He is simply the first beneficiary of the strengthened democratization process, and in due course there will be others.) But Rumsfeld can get away with such erroneous statements because the general population, including much of the Washington press corps, has been so dumbed down that they are incapable of noticing when someone has told them a bald-faced lie.
You don't get a population that stupid by accident. The inability of so many Americans to absorb and process information is an intentional result of the American system for propagandizing its own population. As John Taylor Gatto shows at length in his remarkable book, The Underground History of American Education, which can be read online for free here, the [U.S.] educational system was designed to keep Americans 'uneducated and docile.' (For a brief introduction to this book, one of the most important historical contributions of recent times, follow this link.)
Gatto shows how, beginning a little over a century ago, elites intervened in American mass education for the purpose of ensuring that the country produced not intellectually-alert citizens, but worker drones. What worried them, firstly, was the possibility that a good education system would produce too many people capable of working in the better-paid and more fulfilling jobs; there were 'enough' lawyers, academics, journalists and novelists already. The need was therefore to ensure that the overwhelming majority of people restricted their ambitions to menial occupations. The elites' second worry was the growing socialist agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. They did not want their precious work of creating the world's first corporation-controlled society stymied by demands for such things as eight-hour days and minimum wages.
The educational dumbing down of America was therefore partly a strategy to inoculate American workers against the threat (to elites) posed by socialism; mass education was to bring about the artificial prolongation of childhood and perpetuate a permanent condition of political illiteracy. It is because the education system shaped by these principles has been in place for almost a century now that America has become the fountainhead for lunatic ideologies such as conservatism, libertarianism, Christian Zionism, fundamentalism and dominionism that virtually anywhere else wouldn't stand a chance of percolating into the mainstream.
The immense popularity enjoyed by such ideological movements in the U.S. is therefore best understood as a product of an educational system that has been designed to suppress freedom by keeping Americans 'corporate friendly.' No system, perhaps, can eliminate dissent entirely, but by this means America's elites were able to ensure that when dissent arose, it was a superficial kind of dissent that only served their ultimate purposes.
Recall how Finnpundit actually suggests that social democracy may be worse than communism because it's 'so benign'? Nothing could suit America's corporate elites better than the kind of convoluted thinking that condemns the use of government as a means of strengthening the freedoms of the many. (If Finland were run on the same quasi-totalitarian lines as Singapore, does anyone think Finnpundit or Schwarzmann would have the slightest complaint?)
Unfortunately, we don't know anything about Finnpundit's educational background - although if he really did migrate from Finland to the US when he was a child the process of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture would certainly have disrupted his educational development - Schwarzmann's CV, shows a purely vocational education. He's a Computer Science major. While that doesn't mean that his computer science studies are the only studies he's ever had, his mental horizons seem to consist almost exclusively of choice tidbits from rightwing websites.
What I tend to worry about is that people like Finnpundit and Schwarzmann who cherry pick the bits of information that prop up their ideologies and ignore everything else might begin to be taken seriously when they purport to evaluate complex social, political and economic systems. Libertarianism has a certain attraction to people in Scandinavia who (like 'TA' - see Part I on Finnpundit) are generally broadminded enough that they enjoy having their views challenged. (If they didn't, would Finland for Thought get 48,000 hits a week?)
On the one hand, all of us need our ideas challenged from time to time and it is a hallmark of an educated person, I think, to actively seek out challenging ideas as a means of keeping our brains alive and functioning. Unfortunately, though, there are too many cases when a well-intentioned, broadminded receptivity to outre ideas has gone well beyond a flirtation, and actually helped bring about their triumph, good examples being the rise of asceticism in the later Roman empire and the witch craze in early modern Europe. It would be little short of a tragedy if a similar fascination with the contrary and the perverse led to the demise of the Nordic welfare states - this would be a tragedy not just for the Nordic peoples, but also for those of us living in the ramshackle liberal economies who at present have no other beacon.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: FinnSense: The libertarian website Finland For Thought 'is run through with lots of poorly understood libertarian claptrap. Together with the possibly defunct Finnpundit, they seem to be members of the "find a problem in Finland from whichever news source and use it as proof that the Nordic model cannot work and that even if the US model sucks, so does the Nordic model but at least the US is really rich so there," school of propaganda.'
