Bring 'Em On

My reviews on Amazon began as a way to keep track of the books I was reading, the books I had begun reading in an attempt to understand and counter the bad-boy neo-con rhetoric that was flooding the media and that has now sadly, infected and weakened the heart of this great nation.

I soon discovered my criticisms of books like "How Capitalism Saved America" would call forth attacks from a roving pack of right wing enforcers, a gang of ideologues who patrol the Amazon site pouncing on anything that calls into question their farrago of free market fabulism, and unChristian Christianity.

Amazon contends that it owns my reviews. I'm curious to know what that means. With these re-postings, I hope to find out.
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How Capitalism Saved America : The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas Dilorenzo

15 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
When The Saints Go Marching In, January 19, 2005

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" said cultural historian Walter Benjamin in "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Benjamin knew something of barbarism -- fleeing Germany in World War II, trapped at the border, he preferred to end his life himself rather than allow the Nazis the opportunity of taking it.

The National Socialism project promised a prosperous society based on the American model. The promise shrewdly spoke to two groups necessary to the party's success: 1) the money power of German and other capitalists (such as Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker) who would stand to profit from the contracts for the manufacture of Volkswagens, dive bombers and gas pellets, and 2) the German Volk, who would prosper not only materially but also spiritually, ensconced at the center of a nationalist mythology proclaiming their imminent resurrection within a pure and virtuous community retrieved from an heroic past.

The mythic materialist paradise, although alluring, was not sufficient to motivate the invasion of Europe and the destruction of the fascists' internal enemies. So, in addition, this ideology promised an end to the humiliations suffered in the defeat of the First World War, presented a checklist of villains responsible for the current national calamity, and an action plan for dealing with various evil-doers. The first bullet point on the plan was the formation into paramilitary units murderers who would mercilessly terminate those vermin who would dare to smother the realm of revelation that was struggling to be born into world. It was from this demonic underside that the ideology derived its true power.

The same revanchist program is everywhere evident in HOW CAPITALISM SAVED AMERICA. Fueled by a resentment of anyone who might question the omnibenevolent energies of capitalism [...], DiLorenzo offers a vision of a coming consumer society blessed with do-gooder capitalists -- economic angels -- who, once hellish government restraints are removed, will give birth to a similar materialist heaven on earth. Yea, once those regulating liberals stand aside and allow the eternal laws of supply and demand to properly engage -- under the gentle but irresistible pressure of Mr. Smith's Invisible Hand -- the mystical machine will inexorably and (inexplicably) guide capital in such ways as to bring forth, well, the millenium. (It's not surprising that a free marketeer like DiLorenzo cavils about the interference of the state in capitalism but that he is insensible to the interference of his free market religion into what he believes is a work about capitalism.)

Capitalism, in its popular neo-liberal form, employs a somewhat subtler ideology than did National Socialism. Its barbarity is submerged beneath the slick surface of a state which offers a checklist of individual rights, e.g., the freedom of speech, religion, the right to a jury trial, etc. Of course, these rights have never been well defended in the public sphere, and in the private sphere, contested at every turn. Mr. DiLorenzo would probably be unwilling or unable given his prejudices to admit that the liberal state in actual fact identifies its interests as congruent with the money power and that both work strenuously to suppress or discredit alternative views or organizations. The suppression of such views in Germany was violent; in the neo-liberal state where the press is "free," opposing views are typically not treated at all, or treated with incredulity, disdain or mockery. (Think of the many neo-con shills, who, in their interchangeability, belie their Darwinist defense of capitalism that it raises up rugged individualists -- never was a party line so slavishly followed as by these appparatchiks).

There is one good thing about this tendentious tissue of half-truths and outright lies, however. In one volume is distilled the pandering creed of the so-called Austrian School and their Chicago School followers. Like his idols, DiLorenzo fails to respond to the fundamental observation about how neo-liberal capitalism really functions: that the state and business work as partners in plunder. Instead, like his idols he believes that because there is a word for "business" and another word for the "state" that these are separate entities with separate endpoints. He clearly believes that if so-called free market capitalism could be granted its infantile wish of a night watchman state that the cabalistic prophecies of consumption everlasting will finally be made flesh.

Readers will have to make up their own minds about whether America has been truly saved, and whether this book is yet another brutal document of barbarism.