“Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.”
Get your Free
financial review
Communists and the natural world make for uncomfortable bedfellows, perhaps because the belief systems of the former are about as far as you can physically get from anything remotely ‘natural’. Two of the most disastrous interventions in the history of farming – both under Communist regimes – led to unimaginable human suffering. Thomas Benjamin for The Lotus Eaters:
“The Holodomor is widely accepted as the deadliest famine in European history. At least three million people in the Ukraine perished. As part of The Soviet Union’s ‘Five-Year Plan’, farm collectivisation had begun in earnest. Just as quickly, that collectivisation began to fail, leading to a series of famines in the east of Russia and the Eastern soviet states.
“Because major economies refused to accept Russian Rubles for payment due to the new Bolshevik government’s failure to honour the debts of the previous Tsarist regime, the Soviets required a valuable and plentiful commodity to fund their plans for industrialization: grain. Apart from longstanding Tsarist cultural attitudes of Russians considering Ukraine ‘belonging’ to their empire, it was – and remains – ‘The Breadbasket of Europe’. It is a huge stretch of incredibly fertile and topographically suitable land for farming. Thus, it was crucial to The Five-Year Plan that collectivized state farms seized Ukrainian land, and that the smallholders who remained resistant to collectivisation were set strict and exacting targets for grain requisitioned by the state.
“When the failures began, Stalin’s government invented a scapegoat class. Known as ‘Kulaks’, these were predominantly landowners who resisted collectivisation, but this broadened into a smear against anyone who opposed the soviet agenda in Ukraine. They were accused of ‘grain-hoarding,’ burning crops, and sabotaging industrial equipment to stifle the socialist utopia. It was all a lie. However, in the ensuing process of ‘Dekulakisation’, well over a million Ukrainians were sent to gulags, and hundreds of thousands died.
“Thus, when the Holodomor began, there was no one plausibly left to blame. Stalin was made aware of the famine by his officials in Ukraine and was told that the harsh requisitions of grain and excessive targets were the cause. His response was to threaten the officials, blame the Ukrainians, and close the borders, preventing them from fleeing the famine. He used the resulting mass deaths to crush dissent from the Ukrainian Nationalist movement and anti-Soviets more generally.
“The facts are now well-established by the historical record: at least three million, and possibly as many as five million Ukrainians were deliberately exterminated by Stalin’s USSR.”
The Holodomor gets the Hollywood treatment in Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film, ‘Mr. Jones’, the true life story of the British journalist Gareth Jones, who travelled to the Ukraine in 1933 to learn first-hand the nature of the tragedy. In one particularly grim sequence, he is hosted to supper by two impoverished children and their older sister, who feed him some meat. But what has happened to their brother, who is notable by his absence at the meal ..?
The second (but by no means last) of these man-made Communist disasters was China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ programme from 19581-1962. Under Mao Zedong, the authorities targeted four “pests” for elimination from the agricultural community: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Mao’s slogan: “ren ding sheng tian”; “Man must conquer nature”. The extermination of sparrows alone provoked severe ecological imbalance, resulting in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. As Wikipedia puts it,
“When the campaign against sparrows was eventually halted in April 1960, the unchecked proliferation of insects in the fields resulted in significant crop damage due to the absence of natural predators.. The propaganda posters offered no scientific explanation for why the campaign was necessary.. While the campaign achieved its immediate goal of reducing disease transmission, the mass extermination of sparrows disrupted the delicate ecological balance. With the sparrow population devastated, locust populations soared uncontrollably, leading to devastating crop losses..
“The ecological repercussions translated into a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions. The absence of sparrows, which traditionally kept locust populations in check, allowed swarms to ravage fields of grain and rice. The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached a staggering 20 to 30 million people, underscoring the high human cost of the ecological mismanagement inherent in the “Four Pests” campaign.”
Our political ‘leaders’ no longer require us to declare war on sparrows. At least, not yet. But in most other respects, many of the environmental and social policies now being foisted on a sceptical electorate without any obvious political mandate – the ‘war’ on carbon and ‘fossil fuels’ and gas boilers and traditional farming, the inglorious and ill-disciplined dash for ‘net zero’, ‘twenty minute cities’, the unthinking obeisance to climate change, gender hustling or race hustling – have much in common with these prior Communistic triumphs: a bold programme, bereft of scientific underpinning, flaunting a fundamental ignorance of the workings of either the natural world or of basic human nature. Worse still, they reveal a grotesque belief in the superiority and efficacy of the State as opposed to the invisible hand of the free market.
Starmer is certainly not to be trusted. Asked publicly whether he favours Westminster or Davos, he answers Davos. As a former Director of Public Prosecutions he is presumably aware that it is high treason “if a man be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere.” But nor are the Conservatives to be trusted, given their own obsessions with carbon, or their own willingness to impose Covid-era lockdowns on what can now be seen as the most spurious of foundations. The same holds for ‘Democrat’ politicians on the other side of the pond. And for the entire institution of the EU itself.
So, why is the Holodomor, for example, so little known and so little lamented in the West relative to the crimes of Hitler and the Holocaust of the 1940s ? Thomas Benjamin, again:
“Quite simply, decades of propaganda from the Soviets, suppression of information within the USSR, and a broad unspoken consensus of left-wing sympathisers and useful idiots in government, media, and academia in the West. By the time the whole truth came out after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was little appetite for outrage, and few were left to be outraged..
“The first person to name the famine for what it truly was was a Welshman named Gareth Jones. A journalist, adviser to Labour Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the first British journalist to Interview Adolf Hitler, he made several trips to Russia and Ukraine without permission from the Soviets and filed several anonymous reports for The Times, each increasingly graphic in their nature.
“Upon returning to Berlin, he penned a press release with graphic depictions of the starvation and death he had witnessed upon his travels, which achieved the first real media outcry in the West about food shortages in the Soviet Union, republished by major publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Muggeridge’s Guardian and The New York Evening Post.
“The backlash was immediate and, as depicted in the 2019 film, Mr Jones, scathing. This was particularly pronounced in the most effusive Soviet apologists, including, most significantly, Moscow-based Anglo-American journalist Walter Duranty. Of Jones’s report, Duranty wrote in The New York Times, “It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country, but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.”
“Duranty was far from the only villain among Western journalists, particularly the Moscow press corps, who routinely accepted the Soviet line to retain their media privileges. However, he is unique both in the level of his duplicity – he knew about the Holodomor and its causes and routinely joked about it with Western colleagues in private – and in his status as a Pulitzer Prize winner. He had accepted the award one year prior, and to much adulation from his colleagues. Why? For his reporting on the ‘successes’ of farm collectivisation in the USSR.
“Other ‘useful idiots’ parroted similar lines. The playwright George Bernard Shaw visited the USSR and denounced allegations of famine as ‘slanderous’ in a letter to The Manchester Guardian. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, founders of The Fabian Society and the London School of Economics, returned encouraged by a two-month expedition to Russia, declaring, ‘the early difficulties of collectivisation had been overcome.’
“These myths of the cultural elite persisted in some left-wing circles and, in some cases, beyond the fall of the USSR. Those who repudiated them were either ignored or denigrated – particularly after WWII – as ‘fascists’, ‘Nazis’, and ‘Hitlerites’. The tactics of the leftist elite remain strikingly similar to this day..”
How to resist the relentless drive towards a globalist future ? As a starting point, you may wish to consider joining the Together Declaration. Our company is proud to be a corporate member.
Another recommendation would be to use and encourage sound money and real assets. One of our favourite economists has long been Ludwig von Mises, a key hard money advocate and proponent of the so-called Austrian school. Mises’ lifelong motto was from Virgil (Aeneid, Book VI): “tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito”; “do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.”
The economic stakes are now getting higher – perhaps even unpayable. You can vote your way into Communism – but if history is any guide, you have to shoot your way back out.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
“Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.”
Get your Free
financial review
Communists and the natural world make for uncomfortable bedfellows, perhaps because the belief systems of the former are about as far as you can physically get from anything remotely ‘natural’. Two of the most disastrous interventions in the history of farming – both under Communist regimes – led to unimaginable human suffering. Thomas Benjamin for The Lotus Eaters:
“The Holodomor is widely accepted as the deadliest famine in European history. At least three million people in the Ukraine perished. As part of The Soviet Union’s ‘Five-Year Plan’, farm collectivisation had begun in earnest. Just as quickly, that collectivisation began to fail, leading to a series of famines in the east of Russia and the Eastern soviet states.
“Because major economies refused to accept Russian Rubles for payment due to the new Bolshevik government’s failure to honour the debts of the previous Tsarist regime, the Soviets required a valuable and plentiful commodity to fund their plans for industrialization: grain. Apart from longstanding Tsarist cultural attitudes of Russians considering Ukraine ‘belonging’ to their empire, it was – and remains – ‘The Breadbasket of Europe’. It is a huge stretch of incredibly fertile and topographically suitable land for farming. Thus, it was crucial to The Five-Year Plan that collectivized state farms seized Ukrainian land, and that the smallholders who remained resistant to collectivisation were set strict and exacting targets for grain requisitioned by the state.
“When the failures began, Stalin’s government invented a scapegoat class. Known as ‘Kulaks’, these were predominantly landowners who resisted collectivisation, but this broadened into a smear against anyone who opposed the soviet agenda in Ukraine. They were accused of ‘grain-hoarding,’ burning crops, and sabotaging industrial equipment to stifle the socialist utopia. It was all a lie. However, in the ensuing process of ‘Dekulakisation’, well over a million Ukrainians were sent to gulags, and hundreds of thousands died.
“Thus, when the Holodomor began, there was no one plausibly left to blame. Stalin was made aware of the famine by his officials in Ukraine and was told that the harsh requisitions of grain and excessive targets were the cause. His response was to threaten the officials, blame the Ukrainians, and close the borders, preventing them from fleeing the famine. He used the resulting mass deaths to crush dissent from the Ukrainian Nationalist movement and anti-Soviets more generally.
“The facts are now well-established by the historical record: at least three million, and possibly as many as five million Ukrainians were deliberately exterminated by Stalin’s USSR.”
The Holodomor gets the Hollywood treatment in Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film, ‘Mr. Jones’, the true life story of the British journalist Gareth Jones, who travelled to the Ukraine in 1933 to learn first-hand the nature of the tragedy. In one particularly grim sequence, he is hosted to supper by two impoverished children and their older sister, who feed him some meat. But what has happened to their brother, who is notable by his absence at the meal ..?
The second (but by no means last) of these man-made Communist disasters was China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ programme from 19581-1962. Under Mao Zedong, the authorities targeted four “pests” for elimination from the agricultural community: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Mao’s slogan: “ren ding sheng tian”; “Man must conquer nature”. The extermination of sparrows alone provoked severe ecological imbalance, resulting in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. As Wikipedia puts it,
“When the campaign against sparrows was eventually halted in April 1960, the unchecked proliferation of insects in the fields resulted in significant crop damage due to the absence of natural predators.. The propaganda posters offered no scientific explanation for why the campaign was necessary.. While the campaign achieved its immediate goal of reducing disease transmission, the mass extermination of sparrows disrupted the delicate ecological balance. With the sparrow population devastated, locust populations soared uncontrollably, leading to devastating crop losses..
“The ecological repercussions translated into a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions. The absence of sparrows, which traditionally kept locust populations in check, allowed swarms to ravage fields of grain and rice. The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached a staggering 20 to 30 million people, underscoring the high human cost of the ecological mismanagement inherent in the “Four Pests” campaign.”
Our political ‘leaders’ no longer require us to declare war on sparrows. At least, not yet. But in most other respects, many of the environmental and social policies now being foisted on a sceptical electorate without any obvious political mandate – the ‘war’ on carbon and ‘fossil fuels’ and gas boilers and traditional farming, the inglorious and ill-disciplined dash for ‘net zero’, ‘twenty minute cities’, the unthinking obeisance to climate change, gender hustling or race hustling – have much in common with these prior Communistic triumphs: a bold programme, bereft of scientific underpinning, flaunting a fundamental ignorance of the workings of either the natural world or of basic human nature. Worse still, they reveal a grotesque belief in the superiority and efficacy of the State as opposed to the invisible hand of the free market.
Starmer is certainly not to be trusted. Asked publicly whether he favours Westminster or Davos, he answers Davos. As a former Director of Public Prosecutions he is presumably aware that it is high treason “if a man be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere.” But nor are the Conservatives to be trusted, given their own obsessions with carbon, or their own willingness to impose Covid-era lockdowns on what can now be seen as the most spurious of foundations. The same holds for ‘Democrat’ politicians on the other side of the pond. And for the entire institution of the EU itself.
So, why is the Holodomor, for example, so little known and so little lamented in the West relative to the crimes of Hitler and the Holocaust of the 1940s ? Thomas Benjamin, again:
“Quite simply, decades of propaganda from the Soviets, suppression of information within the USSR, and a broad unspoken consensus of left-wing sympathisers and useful idiots in government, media, and academia in the West. By the time the whole truth came out after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was little appetite for outrage, and few were left to be outraged..
“The first person to name the famine for what it truly was was a Welshman named Gareth Jones. A journalist, adviser to Labour Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the first British journalist to Interview Adolf Hitler, he made several trips to Russia and Ukraine without permission from the Soviets and filed several anonymous reports for The Times, each increasingly graphic in their nature.
“Upon returning to Berlin, he penned a press release with graphic depictions of the starvation and death he had witnessed upon his travels, which achieved the first real media outcry in the West about food shortages in the Soviet Union, republished by major publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Muggeridge’s Guardian and The New York Evening Post.
“The backlash was immediate and, as depicted in the 2019 film, Mr Jones, scathing. This was particularly pronounced in the most effusive Soviet apologists, including, most significantly, Moscow-based Anglo-American journalist Walter Duranty. Of Jones’s report, Duranty wrote in The New York Times, “It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country, but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.”
“Duranty was far from the only villain among Western journalists, particularly the Moscow press corps, who routinely accepted the Soviet line to retain their media privileges. However, he is unique both in the level of his duplicity – he knew about the Holodomor and its causes and routinely joked about it with Western colleagues in private – and in his status as a Pulitzer Prize winner. He had accepted the award one year prior, and to much adulation from his colleagues. Why? For his reporting on the ‘successes’ of farm collectivisation in the USSR.
“Other ‘useful idiots’ parroted similar lines. The playwright George Bernard Shaw visited the USSR and denounced allegations of famine as ‘slanderous’ in a letter to The Manchester Guardian. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, founders of The Fabian Society and the London School of Economics, returned encouraged by a two-month expedition to Russia, declaring, ‘the early difficulties of collectivisation had been overcome.’
“These myths of the cultural elite persisted in some left-wing circles and, in some cases, beyond the fall of the USSR. Those who repudiated them were either ignored or denigrated – particularly after WWII – as ‘fascists’, ‘Nazis’, and ‘Hitlerites’. The tactics of the leftist elite remain strikingly similar to this day..”
How to resist the relentless drive towards a globalist future ? As a starting point, you may wish to consider joining the Together Declaration. Our company is proud to be a corporate member.
Another recommendation would be to use and encourage sound money and real assets. One of our favourite economists has long been Ludwig von Mises, a key hard money advocate and proponent of the so-called Austrian school. Mises’ lifelong motto was from Virgil (Aeneid, Book VI): “tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito”; “do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.”
The economic stakes are now getting higher – perhaps even unpayable. You can vote your way into Communism – but if history is any guide, you have to shoot your way back out.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
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