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Brownstone Institute

Cold War Nostalgia Explained

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BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week unleashed a wave of nostalgia for simpler and better times. That’s odd, isn’t it?

Not so much. The freedom revolution that followed his reforms in the old Soviet Union did not turn out as planned. The world never became normal and peaceful as promised. And today, we can only look back on the 1980s with affection for better times.

Back in the day, in the midst of the Cold War, we had an overwhelming sense of the world being held hostage and on the verge of a global nuclear war that could wipe out humanity as we knew it. One wrong move, one bad piece of intelligence, one emotional outburst by a frustrated commander-in-chief, and boom, the world would go up in fire and smoke.

The stakes were so high! It was not just about stopping the end of life on the planet. It was about an epic struggle between freedom (the U.S.) and tyrannical communism (the Soviet Union). That’s what we were told in any case. In our political landscape, much of American politics turned on whether it was wise to risk peace alongside a Soviet victory or go for a full vanquishing of evil from the planet.

The battle over communism defined the lives of many generations. Everything seemed so clear in those days. This was really about systems and ideology: whether society would consist of individuals and communities making their own choices or whether an elite class of intellectuals would override individual plans with some centralized vision of utopia.

In those days, there was no question that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. We had to spy, fight, build up the military, fund the freedom fighters, and generally be strong in the face of godless evil.

Ronald Reagan was just the champion that freedom needed in those days. He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It drove the left nuts and cheered the base. He also attempted to shore up the American system: limited government (at least in some areas), lower taxes, sounder money, freer trade, and more rule of law rather than rule by administrative bureaucrats.

Then one odd day in 1987, late in Reagan’s second term, he and Gorbachev met and decided that they would together rid the world of nuclear weapons. They were giddy about the idea and the whole world went into shock and amazement, especially their respective advisors who rather liked the status quo. As a result, Gorbachev gained a victory at home – he ruled a poor and restless population sick of the nonsense – that encouraged him to seek more reforms, which only fed the appetite for more reform.

Reagan served his two terms and left office. Then dramatic change hit the world from 1989-90. The Soviet Empire fell apart, gradually at first and then all at once. Gorbachev became the country’s last leader as Soviet communism became plain-old Russian autocracy over time. The world could now be free! And the US could go back to normal.

About ten years later, I met Israeli historian Martin van Creveld. He was a scholar on war and terrorism. He held a unusual view. He believed that the end of the Cold War was a disaster and that the evidence was all around us. He said the world would never be as peaceful as it was when two superpowers faced off with nuclear arsenals. He described it as the perfect game for peace and prosperity. Neither would ever risk using the weapons but the prospect alone made states more cautious than they otherwise would be.

In fact, in his view, this nuclear standoff made the world as good as it could be given the circumstances. He admitted that he dreaded what might happen once one of the two powers disappeared. He believed that he was proven right: the world was headed toward chaos and disaster.

This was before 9-11 unleashed US imperial ambitions as never before. So even ten years later, I simply could not accept van Creveld’s position. That’s because I bought the line that the end of the Cold War was really about a victory for peace and freedom. Russia was free. And with the Soviet Union gone, the US could now safely return to its natural and constitutional status as a peaceful commercial republic, friendship with all and entangling alliances with none.

I was all in on the idea that we had finally reached the end of history: we would have freedom and democracy forever now that we knew that those systems were the best systems. And history would adapt to the evidence.

In those days, many on the left and right in American politics were screaming for normalcy. But there was a huge problem. The US had built up a massive intelligence/military/industrial machinery that had no intention of just closing up shop. It needed a new rationale. It needed a new enemy. It needed some new scary thing.

If the US could not find an enemy, it needed to make one.

China in those days wasn’t quite right for enemization, so the US looked to old allies that could be betrayed and demonized. Early in 1990, George H.W. Bush decided that Manuel Noriega was a bad money launderer and drug dealer and had to go. The US military made it happen.

Good show! What else? In the Middle East, Iraq was becoming annoying. So in 1990, Bush seized on a border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, portraying the tiny country as a victim of the big oppressor next door. He would have to intervene militarily. The US won that one too.

Now, to be sure, this was not about the US going on some wild new imperial crusade. No no. It was really about punishing aggression just this one time so that the entire world would learn forevermore never to disturb borders again. It was a brief war for peace. It was two weeks to flatten the curve…wait, wrong war. It was two weeks to make the world safe for democracy.

Thus began what became a 25-year occupation. Also wrecked in the meantime were Libya and Syria. Just this week, the palace in Baghdad was ransacked yet again. This once civilized country that attracted the best and brightest students and artists from the whole region is in utter shambles. This is what the US did.

And that was just the start. The US, incredibly, replicated Soviet-style occupation in Afghanistan and ended up staying even longer. This was following the 9/11 attacks carried out as a retaliation against US actions in Iraq in the disputed borders in the Middle East. The Department of Homeland Security came into being and Americans lost vast freedoms though the vast expanse of the security state.

As for NATO itself, it never went away following the end of the Cold War but rather became another tool of provocation that the US could use to poke its enemies. It was too much for Russia, which decided to settle scores in Ukraine, thus provoking US and European sanctions that are driving the price of energy up for everyone but Russia.

All the while, China was on the rise with its new system of communism with Chinese characteristics, which really means a one-party state with no competition and complete control of industry and private life. China showed the world how to lock down to control a virus, and the US copied the idea, unleashing forms of despotism that the US as a whole had never known. Today we suffer the consequences of this fateful choice for control over freedom.

Looking back, the US victory in the Cold War was massively and tragically misspent. Instead of doing a victory lap for freedom and constitutional government — that’s what we believe was the whole damn point — the US used its monopoly on power to go on a global crusade. Whole peoples suffered but for decades we hardly felt it at all here at home. Life was good. The carnage abroad was all abstract.

The pandemic did for state power what not even the Cold War or the War on Terror could accomplish: terrified the population into a level of compliance that meant giving up even the right to educate, buy and sell, associate, worship, and even speak. Not even private homes were safe from the virus police. Not even weddings, funerals, and visits to the hospital were untouched. The Bill of Rights became a dead letter nearly overnight.

With lockdowns and the current political and economic chaos, the global empire has come home to oppress us all in the most personal possible way. We now read tales of life in the Soviet Union and we recognize it all too well. We read 1984 by George Orwell and recognize it in our own experience. This is not what winning the Cold War was supposed to mean.

From 1948 through 1989, the US and Russia were locked in a nuclear standoff. Children were trained to duck and cover should a nuclear bomb go off. People built shelters in their backyards. The enemy was always over there. It was a fight for freedom of tyranny. And yet today, we can only look back with nostalgia for a simpler time.

I’m not nostalgic for the Cold War and I would never want it back. Its end gave rise to a new hope, albeit one that came to be dashed over time.

I am nostalgic for a normal life with a primacy put on freedom, rights, and thriving. A transnational ruling class in government, media, medicine, and technology seem determined to forestall that world from ever coming about again. So yes, I long for the days of a smiling Reagan and Gorby! Together they decided to end the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War. We had no idea just how good we had it.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Kid Lab Rats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas BuckleyTHOMAS BUCKLEY 

” (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.” “

Mommy, can I be a Covid lab rat?”

That is a request most parents will never hear and it is a request that very few parents would ever want to hear.

But, unlike the more typical “Can I have a pony?” request, letting your child be a Covid shot test subject is a request that can actually be granted around the nation.

Right now, for example, Pfizer/BioNTech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids.

Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects; this is how they describe the study on their “Enrolling Children 6 to 23 months old for a COVID-19 Vaccine Study” website:

This study will help us learn how well our updated COVID-19 vaccine works in babies and toddlers who have not been previously vaccinated and see if the number of recommended doses can potentially be reduced for children under the age of 5. The study vaccine has been authorized by the United States Food and Drug Administration for children at least 6 months of age. It is designed to protect against the newer COVID-19 variant called XBB.1.5.

The company is also running similar trials for older kids and, of course, adults.

Clinical trials for drugs and procedures involving children are not inherently wrong and they are conducted safely around the world almost daily.

But this Covid trial stands out for a number of reasons.

First, the trial only involves kids who have never had a Covid shot before. The likelihood that a parent who has declined to get the shot for their kids in the first place will say “We chose not to get the shots for our kids, but feel free to experiment on them with the stuff we previously declined” is minimal.

In other words, if a parent didn’t feed their kid aluminum foil-flavored ice cream before it is highly unlikely they would feed their kid an experimental version of aluminum foil-flavored ice cream, even if you paid them (the trial comes with certain compensation enticements – Pfizer did not respond to a request for exactly what they are in this trial, though industry averages would indicate the pay would be between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).

Second, there is the matter of “informed consent.” A trial subject must give permission freely, be told of any risks, and understand the entire situation. Clearly, nine-month-olds cannot do that.

It is perfectly legal for parents to give their “informed consent,” but here we get into the third problem: the risk/benefit question.

For example, during the pandemic (early 2020 to May 2023) there were 41 Covid deaths in California of kids under five. That number does not differentiate between “died with Covid” or “died from Covid;” that is a debate that continues to rage across the country and shall be put aside for the time being.

Every death of a child is a tragedy and this article is not intended to lessen that fact. However, children in general were not at all likely to get, let alone die from, Covid during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were about (rolling average) 2.4 million (about 6% of the total population) under-fives in California and there were about 385,000 cases of Covid reported in that age group.

Currently, about 3.2% of California’s under-fives have had the latest shot. That’s on par with the national average. What is interesting is that of the 70,817 kids who have received the shot in the state, 41,224 live in the Bay Area. In other words, the Bay Area has 20% of the state’s population, but 57% of the state’s “vaccinated” toddlers and babies. But do not ever think that politics has had nothing to do with Covid protocols.

During the pandemic, the overall likelihood of a child dying from/with Covid was about 1 in 60,000; for those over 75 – about 6.5% of the population or 2.7 million – there were about 51,000 with/from Covid deaths, or about 1 in 50.

The risk, clearly, is extremely different depending upon age and general state of health.

With a relative risk of being harmed by Covid, the risks of the Covid shot itself must be considered carefully – note: no kid in the study will get a placebo for comparison purposes.

The Covid shots, in the general population, did have significant side-effects and did cause a number of deaths. While these numbers are not broken out by age, in the same time period there were 640 deaths and 89,000 “adverse effects” experienced (much much more than just a sore arm) by Californians.

Also during the same time period, all other vaccines combined caused 66 people to die and 14,000 to have a reportable “adverse effect.” (Note – the numbers are taken from the CDC’s “vaccine adverse event reporting system,” a tool it stood by as an early warning device for decades…that is, until the Covid problem numbers got too high.)

That puts the general odds of something bad happening to a person after they get a Covid shot at about 1 in a 1,000 and some studies have shown it to be 1 in 800. In other words, the risk from the shot appears to outweigh the risk of Covid itself by a factor of 60 times.

Citing the uncertainty of benefit, it should also be noted that the European Union has not cleared the shot at all (with minor exceptions) for the under-fives and were hesitant in allowing them for the under 18s.

Clearly, the risk outweighs the reward, as it were, and it is unclear – because Pfizer did not answer any request for information/comment (see questions below) – if parents are given those figures when making the decision to enroll their kid in an experimental drug program.

Adults calculate risk and reward constantly – from “Can I make that light before it turns red?” to “Should I tease that lion?” But a seven-month old is simply not capable of doing so and while certain clinical trials do hold out serious hope and are important for society at large, a trial such as this for such a limited reward – kids very very very rarely get, let alone suffer seriously, from Covid – seems dubious.

In other words, if you wanted to test a new malaria drug you would not do so on Santa’s elves at the North Pole because there are no mosquitoes there to infect anyone.

According to the Belmont Report, which set baseline standards for human-involved clinical trials in the late 1970s (it was a government reaction to the horror of the CDC’s own “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) one of the three core standards for justifying clinical trial testing is “beneficence.”

In other words, there is an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risk and harm.

That risk/benefit calculation obviously changes in regard to other far more common childhood maladies, making participation in those studies potentially far more “beneficent.”

But in the case of Covid, the question is how are maximal, as it were, are the anticipated benefits?

Very very minimal and that is the problem, said Dr. Clayton Baker, former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

“Given the real and well-established risks of harm (including myocarditis and death), and given the functionally zero potential for benefit (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.”

Come to think of it, maybe just get the kid the pony instead.

Here’s a link to an on-going kids Covid study with a handy map so you can find a location near you (mostly Bay Area): A Study to Learn About Variant-Adapted COVID-19 RNA Vaccine Candidate(s) in Healthy Children

For clinical trials in general, you can look here for one that you might be interested in taking part in:

For clinical trials just about Covid, you can look here

As noted above, here are the questions Pfizer did not reply to:

-Exactly how is informed consent handled? I assume a parent/guardian can provide said consent?

-Do (or have) you run trials with previously vaccinated children?

-What child/youth trials have been run in the past and what have been their results?

-What is the compensation amount?

-Have any previous trials shown conclusively that the vaccine ameliorates Covid severity in children?

-When and in what manner did the FDA approve this trial?

-When do you expect to conclude the trial?

-Is this trial aimed at testing a “booster” shot or to cover a new variant?

-Has any child in any trial conducted had a significant and serious reaction requiring hospitalization and/or led to death?

-It appears one of the points of the study is to figure out how to cut the number of doses as well as check effectiveness. Is that correct?

-How many children – nationwide and in California specifically – have signed up for/been through the trial so far?

-What are the differences between trials involving children and those involving adults?

-Will Pfizer conduct trials each time it comes out with new variant vaccine shot?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Thomas Buckley

    Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

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