All Posts Tagged With: "totalitarianism"

Tyranny Afoot: Arthur Koestler’s Communist Chronicles

“You want to stifle the Republic in blood. How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones? Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she treads over our dead bodies.” —Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle [...]

21Sep2011 | Bruce Edward Walker | 2 comments | Continued

The Power of Freedom

WARNING: After reading this column, many of you will want to send me emails condemning me for my apostasy or telling me why I am mistaken. I welcome your feedback as I beg your indulgence. So, here goes: I don’t believe that the welfare state, or the regulatory state, inevitably leads to widespread poverty or [...]

22Oct2010 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 29 comments | Continued

The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia

Throughout the 1930s the propaganda machines of the Nazi and Soviet regimes did all in their power to insist that they were ideological enemies, diametrically opposed to each other in every conceivable way. There were critics of totalitarianism who emphasized the similarities in the two systems, but theirs was a minority view among many intellectuals, [...]

9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Gulag: A History

Siberia. The word has had a chilling connotation for people around the world for 200 years. Long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the tsarist regime had used the vast area that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as a place of exile and forced labor [...]

7Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Freedom and the Role of Government

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. What is the role of government? This has been and remains the most fundamental question in all political discussions and debates. Its answer will determine the nature of the social order and how people will be expected and allowed to interact with one another—on the basis of either [...]

1May2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

When Safety Nets Fail

An elderly woman sat on the stone steps of the St.
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral clutching a small
handful of wildflowers picked from a field
somewhere. She offered them up to any passerby, hoping
to earn just a few cents for them.The air in Sofia was
frigid, but at least the rain had finally stopped. I wondered
if she had sat there in the rain the day before. I suspected
she was there every day.

1Oct2005 | James Peron | 3 comments | Continued

Ludwig von Mises and the Vienna of His Time – Part II

From the time of World War I, Ludwig von Mises’s writings expressed the classical-liberal cosmopolitan conception of man, society, and freedom. Throughout the interwar period his works on the general principles of the liberal market order, the dangerous dead end to which socialist society would lead, and the contradictions and corrupting influences of economic interventionism [...]

1Apr2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Economic Causes of War

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the foremost Austrian economist of the twentieth century, an adviser to FEE from the time of its founding in 1946, and the author of Human Action, Socialism, and The Theory of Money and Credit. This is the major part of a lecture delivered in Orange County, California, in October 1944. [...]

1Apr2004 | Ludwig von Mises | 0 comments | Continued

Book Reviews – October 2003

The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I by Thomas Fleming Basic Books • 2003 • 543 pages • $30.00 Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling Imagine how different the twentieth century might have been if Lenin and the Bolsheviks had never come to power in Russia in 1917 and had not set in motion all the cruel crimes that were [...]

1Oct2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

The State’s Quest for Total Information Awareness

David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the second of two parts. Efforts to transform the United States into a surveillance regime on a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian model are currently underway. In addition to attempts to beef up and make uniform the state driver’s licenses-thereby blending them into either a de facto [...]

1May2003 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | Continued

The Pentagon Ramps Up the War on Privacy

David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the first of two parts. [Editor's Note: As we went to press the U.S. Congress had hampered the Defense Department's ability to carry out the threat to privacy discussed in the following article.  Under the provision adopted the Pentagon cannot proceed until it assesses for [...]

1Apr2003 | David M. Brown | 0 comments | Continued

California’s War on Homeschoolers

Steven Greenhut is a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, California. I’m routinely astounded by the degree to which Americans will be outraged by government abuses that take place in far-off lands, while remaining uninterested in similar abuses right here in their very midst. My newspaper, the Orange [...]

1Feb2003 | Steven Greenhut | 2 comments | Continued

Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook

Tyranny of Reason is an accessible work of Western intellectual history in the tradition of Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels, and Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. In this powerfully argued book, Yuval Levin, associate director at the Center for the Study of Technology and Society, traces the [...]

1Aug2002 | Edward W. Younkins | 0 comments | Continued

This Is America?

I have long had an uneasy relationship with airport security. Before September 11, I resisted the demand that I produce a government-issued ID, believing that it smacked too much of the “Papers, please” of the former Soviet Union that Hollywood movies used to mock and we free Americans used to laugh at. I also used [...]

1Jul2002 | James R. Otteson | 12 comments | Continued

Washington’s Inadvertent Support for Cuban Communism

Havana, Cuba—Roberto Alarcón, well-dressed but of unexceptional appearance, is thought to be the No. 3 man in Cuba, after only Fidel and Raúl Castro. He lazily sprawled in his chair before eight American journalists, fondling his cigar. Asked about Havana’s willingness to negotiate with the United States over its embargo against his country, Alarcón responded: [...]

1Jul2002 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | Continued

And the Winner Is . . .

Someone should give the New York Times the “Most Absurd Headline of the Year” award. On August 22 this appeared on Page One: “Workers’ Rights Suffering as China Goes Capitalist” The news article by Erik Eckholm “reported” that as China has undergone a transition toward markets, workers’ interests are not effectively represented. Apparently, workers’ organizations [...]

1Feb2002 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

National Gun Registration: The Road to Tyranny

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., is the editor-in-chief of Medical Sentinel, the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine: Historic Perspectives on the Battle Over Health Care Reform (1995) and Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (Hacienda Publishing Inc., 1997, www.haciendapub.com). Georg Hegel (1770-1831), [...]

1Mar2001 | Miguel A. Faria Jr. | 0 comments | Continued
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