Unforeseen Contingencies

The Rockwellites had been doing decent work of late denouncing Fed, Treasury, and their various four-letter programs for turning the world over to Goldman-Sachs. Add to this some on target criticism of Obamacare, and the site was starting to look fairly reasonable. I was hoping that they would limit themselves to such things, the sorts of things we here at Unforeseen Contingencies endorse: the consistent promotion of reason and liberty.

However, (to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I guess)...

They are now promoting a three part "analysis" of the coming World War III. It turns out that the "colour[sic] coded revolutions" are part of a secret U.S. conspiracy to impose a new world order. Part 2 "analyzes" the overthrow of Milosevic in Serbia, and the Rose and Orange Revolutions of Georgia and Ukraine. According to this "analysis," the western media (active participants in the NWO, of course) create the illusion that these are instances of people "demand[ing] democratic accountability and governance from their despotic leaders and archaic political systems." But in fact, "it is the people who lose out, as their genuine hope for change and accountability is denied..." The piece goes on to point out the odd coincidence that the revolutions "just happened" to be on behalf of pro-western viewpoints, rather than Milosevic, Shevardnadze, and Yanukovych.

Hard to believe that this could be coincidence...must be conspiracy! Promoted by the West!

OK, I confess. I, your correspondent and host at Unforeseen Contingencies, worked for two and one half years in Ukraine, helping in my own small way to lay the groundwork for the Orange Revolution. I was paid a handsome sum to do so, too... paid by The Eurasia Foundation, no less, one of the nefarious organizations exposed in the article.

In my capacity as a shill for the New World Order, I promoted... umm... Ludwig von Mises' theory of why socialism cannot calculate and must fail, Ludwig von Mises' theory of why interventionism leads to socialism, Friedrich Hayek's theory of how free markets communicate knowledge and create general prosperity, Ronald Coase's theory of why property rights are crucial underpinnings for a free market economy, and similar NWO ideas. As one of my studentsvictims put it after the re-election of President Kuchma in 1999, "If we could only make these ideas more widely known, things would turn out very different here."

And I must confess, too, I knew many other people who were working in similar capacities. I met people who were conducting classes or otherwise promoting ideas like how commercial law works, what an impartial court is and how it functions, why a court should rule according to law and facts rather than orders from politicians, how to conduct an honest election, how to ensure ballot boxes weren't stuffed, etc. etc. etc. You get the picture, all those insidious NWO principles that prevent democratic accountability and ensure despotic rule. I met USAID people who were going to Ukrainian mayors and explaining how if they stopped municipal bureaucrats from oppressing local entrepreneurs, their cities would begin to grow. I even met World Bank officials who had successfully convinced the local central bankers to stop running the printing presses and destroying the monetary system!

So there it is, exposed, the NWO conspiracy that the Rockwellians are warning us about: the world no longer safe for the likes of communist mass murderer Milosevic, corrupt communist Shevardnadze, or the thuggish puppet of Putin, Yanukovych. Oh, how insidious!

Keep in mind how insidious this really was. In Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych was President Kuchma's confidant and handpicked successor. Kuchma beheaded a journalist who criticized him. Kuchma had masses of students beaten for the "crime" of peacefully protesting his regime... but not during the demonstration, of course. This wasn't about preserving law and order, but rather a warning that you don't oppose the regime. The students were ambushed and beaten by police after the protests, while they waited on train platforms. For the 2004 presidential election, Vladimir Putin supported Yanukovych, spent a fortune trying to directly affect the election results, and put his right-hand-man, Dmitri Medvedev, in charge of running the Russian operation to "help" with the elections...which included, among other things, the printing of fake ballots, and most likely the attempted assassination of opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko.

Yushchenko was the pro-western former central bank head who had stopped the printing presses, and who advocated private property and free markets -- apparently sins in the Rockwellians' eyes. He's no anarcho-capitalist, but his ideas are generally pro-market. And keep in mind that Ukraine was still in the clutches of its old communist bureaucracy. Yushchenko opposed this system.

Yushchenko won the elections, but Kuchma and Yanukovych altered the vote count. The fraud was detected and contested, with massive popular outrage -- the Orange Revolution (this was the campaign color of the pro-Yushchenko coalition... for some reason the Rockwellites find it sinister that the campaign issued orange items to supporters)(we're also assured that orange is "sickly"). Many of my Ukrainian students and friends participated, at great personal peril. Yanukovych urged Kuchma to set Interior Ministry troops on the demonstrators, a la Tianamen, but Kuchma ultimately refused. Meanwhile, Ukraine's Supreme Court, having been brainwashed by western indoctrination into thinking that courts should render verdicts based on evidence and law rather than orders from political leaders, listened to charges of election rigging and ruled that indeed the results were tainted, and ordered a new election, which Yushchenko won.

Insidious, no? Soon after Yushchenko took office, a journalist suggested, to his face, that Yushchenko's son had received various illicit payments. And this journalist's head...remains on his shoulders. Yushchenko furiously denounced him, and sent him packing back to his office to write up the scandal. This is what Rockwell & co. call "genuine change denied."

I regret I missed the Orange Revolution -- I had tried to find a way to get back to Ukraine as an election observer but couldn't swing it. But I returned to Kyiv in 2006 and was astounded by the obvious economic growth. Imagine that! It turns out that pursuing market reforms actually creates wealth and raises peoples' incomes, even if the reforms aren't the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist full monty.

I make light of all this, but it really is not funny. Ludwig von Mises was a thoroughly consistent advocate of liberty, of private property, and of free markets. He was a fierce opponent of communism, and a supporter of the pro-capitalist West, despite the fact that capitalism in the West isn't pure.

Rockwell & co. abuse this great man's name. Ludwig von MisesLew Rockwell Institute: shills for dictators, murderers, and communists.