Podcast: Play in new window | Download (22.7MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 107.

This lecture is from the 2013 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Eugen-Maria Schulak (Austria), Friedrich Nietzsche—Right Wing Anarchist? PFS 2013 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (33.7MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 106.

This panel discussion is from the 2013 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: David Howden (Spain), Mateusz Machaj (Poland), Nikolay Gertchev (France), Thorsten Polleit (Germany), Paul Cantor† (USA), Discussion, Q&A. PFS 2013 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (24.7MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 105.

This lecture is from the 2013 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Paul Cantor† (USA), What Literature Can Teach Economics. PFS 2013 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.9MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 104.

This lecture is from the 2013 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Thorsten Polleit (Germany), Organized Crime and the Progression Towards a Single World Fiat Currency. PFS 2013 Playlist.

See also Hoppe, Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order (Vol. 4 Num. 1) (also in EEPP); Kinsella, The Prophetic Dr. Hoppe on the Rise of the Phoenix.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 103.

This lecture is from the 2013 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Nikolay Gertchev, Entrepreneurship and Betting: What, if anything, can Businessmen learn from Betting Odds? PFS 2013 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (26.3MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 102.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), Jeffrey Tucker (USA),

This panel discussion is from the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) (England), Stephan Kinsella (USA), Benjamin Marks, Discussion, Q&A. PFS 2012 Playlist.

Topics discussed include the issue of preemptive attacks and standing threats, spanking and libertarianism, Gresham’s law and law and legislation, strategies for liberty in life and how to avoid corruption in an unfree world. On the latter topic, I talked about the power of attraction and also vocally objecting, speaking out, when hearing statist sentiments from friends, co-workers, etc. There were also questions about how victims of aggression can achieve restitution from the aggressor, what does he have the right to do to the aggressor—issues such as proportionality, punishment, ostracism, and so on.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 101.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), The Hayek Myth. PFS 2012 Playlist. Loosely based (?) on F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)

English transcript below.

For the panel discussion with Q&A, see PFP102 | Daniels, Kinsella, Marks, Hoppe, Tucker, Discussion, Q&A (PFS 2012).

TRANSCRIPT

The Hayek Myth

2012 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey, Sept. 30, 2012
Hans-Hermann Hoppe

00:00:18

HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I will start with my speech. I want to talk about the Hayek myths. As most of you know, I was, once upon a time, during my final high school years and my early student years, also a lefty. And when I gradually discovered the errors of the leftist creed, I looked around for alternatives, and I found, based on their frequent mention in the press, as the principal antagonists and alternatives to everything socialist, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. And, in fact, I found many good arguments in their writings to combat the predominant left at that time, and it was through the gateway of Friedman and Hayek that I eventually then also discovered Mises and, finally, Rothbard.

00:01:19

So I have to say that I owe something intellectually to both Friedman and Hayek. But that is not my topic. Instead, I want to pursue the question why it is that both Friedman and Hayek were presented then, almost 40 years ago, and still and even more so today, especially in Europe but also in the United States, as the most radical opponents of all things left, while, as I came to realize very quickly and will show shortly, Friedman and Hayek are actually part of the left, not of the traditional, hardcore, Marxist version of course, but in any case, of the softcore social democratic welfare state variety of socialism, and because of this, in my view, offer anything but a principled alternative to socialism and the leftwing.

00:02:25

Now, one might call this the Friedman-Hayek myth. Now, here I want to confine myself only to half of this myth, to the Hayek myth. Friedman, in fact, is far better known than Hayek. If you Google, he has about 30 million mentions, and Hayek has close to 7 million. Friedman, I think, is hardly better known than Hayek because he’s really the better, clearer writer of the two and in part because he’s American, which always helps in this day and age. But I want to concentrate on Hayek. And why do I want to concentrate on Hayek? Because, in my estimation, Hayek is the more important thinker, and he and his fame will last longer than Friedman’s. For one, he is a better economist because, while Friedman was still, until his death in 2006, singing the praises of Greenspan and Bernanke.

00:03:38

Many people inspired by Hayek and by the Mises-Hayek business cycle theory, already foresaw the coming and still ongoing Great Recession. But more importantly, because Hayek, as an old-world European, is plainly the better-educated and intellectually well-rounded man. Whereas Friedman is essentially an economist’s economist, Hayek is a true intellectual, well-read, not just in economics but in intellectual history, in psychology, philosophy, sociology, and law. But it is not their technical economics that made both of them famous but their excursions into the field of political theory.

00:04:29

Accordingly, I will concentrate here on Hayek as a political theorist and more specifically on his Constitution of Liberty and his three-volume, Law, Legislation and Liberty, which are generally regarded as Hayek’s most important contributions to the field of political theory. First, I want to show that, despite many interesting things, he might have to say Hayek is fundamentally a muddled and confused thinker. This comes out most clearly when we examine his definitions and elaborations on the concept of freedom and coercion.

00:05:14

Now, Hayek defines freedom as the absence of coercion, so far so good. However, contrary to a long tradition of classical liberal thought, he does not define coercion as the initiation of threat of physical violence against property and person. He does not define it as attack against legitimately via original appropriation, production, or voluntary exchange-acquired property. Instead, he offers a definition whose only merit is its elusiveness and fogginess.

00:06:01

By coercion, quote, “We mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act, not to a coherent plan of his own, but to serve the ends of another. Or coercion occurs when one man’s actions are made to serve another man’s will, not for his own but for the other’s purpose.” And freedom is a state in which each agent can use his own knowledge for his own purposes.

00:06:50

Now, what you immediately note in this definition of freedom of coercion is this. This definition does not contain anything regarding actions, scarce goods, and property. Rather, coercion refers to a specific configuration of subjective wills or plans or conflicting plans or thoughts or conflicting thoughts and expectations. Yet, then, with these subjective descriptions, subjective terms, then it is useless for the following reason. First, it is entirely useless as a guideline for actions. That is, it is useless to answer the question, what am I allowed to do here and now if I do not want to commit a coercive act? Because, in general, I do not know the will or the plans of others, and in any case, to know all other wills would be absolutely impossible.

00:07:58

Even if I wanted to, I could never be sure from the outside that what I was planning to do would not coerce anyone. Yet, individuals obviously must be permitted to act correctly prior to knowing anything about the plans of other people. And for this to be possible, the criterion employed to distinguish between freedom on the one hand and coercion on the other hand must be some objective criteria. It must refer to an event or a non-event that possesses a physical description and over whose outcome an actor must possess physical control.

00:08:42

Second, Hayek’s definition is also useless as a retrospective criterion of justice. That is, it cannot answer the question, is the accusation of A against B justified? Or who is guilty and who isn’t guilty? And what sort of compensation or punishment is appropriate? Since Hayek’s definition does not contain any physical intersubjectively ascertainable criteria, his judgments are entirely arbitrary. As mental predicates, Hayek’s categories of freedom and coercion are compatible with every real, physical state of affairs. They possess no power whatsoever to make real distinctions in the real world.

00:09:34

Correspondingly confused and contradictory then are Hayek’s attempts to apply his definitions. In applying his definition, Hayek, on the one hand, reaches a conclusion that the initiation and threat of physical violence constitutes coercion, good enough. The threat of force or violence occurs when armed bands of conquerors make the subject people toil for them when organized gangsters extort a levy for protection and so on, good and fine.

00:10:11

On the other hand—and I’ll give you a detailed quotation on that in a minute—on the other hand, he classifies acts of the initiation or threat of physical violence such as compulsory military services or taxes as non-coercive provided only that the victim of such aggression could have reliably expected and adjusted to it. I mean, this is an outrageous thing to say, and I’ll give you the quote a little bit later.

00:10:44

Moreover, on the one hand, Hayek identifies physical violence with coercion. On the other hand, he does not accept the absence of physical violence or damage as a criterion for non-coercion. Quote: “The threat of physical force is not the only way in which coercion can be exercised.” Even if A has committed no physical aggression against B or his property, he may nonetheless be guilty of coercion.

00:11:23

According to Hayek, this is the case whenever A is guilty of omitted help, vis-à-vis, B. Whenever he has not provided B with goods or services that B had expected from him and regarded as “crucial to my existence or preservation of what I most value.” Now, Hayek claims that only a small number of cases actually fit this criterion. He gives two examples: the owner of a mine in a mining town who decides to dismiss a worker, allegedly coerces. And likewise, it is supposed to be coercive if the owner of the sole water supply in a desert is unwilling to sell his water, or if he refuses to sell it at the price that the others deemed fair.

00:12:28

Now, it should be obvious it requires little imagination to recognize that Hayek’s criterion is, in fact, all-encompassing. Any peaceful action a person may perform can be interpreted by others, indeed, by any number of others, as constituting coercion because every activity is at the same time always the omission of innumerable alternative activities that he could have performed. And every omission becomes coercion if a single person claims that the execution of what he has not done, the execution of the omission was “crucial to the preservation of what I most value.”

00:13:19

Whenever cases of both omitted help and physical violence are categorically defined as coercion however, then obviously inescapable contradictions must arise. If A’s omission constitutes coercion toward B, then obviously B must possess the right to defend himself against A’s coercion. Yet, B’s only defense would be that he could employ physical violence against A who has omitted doing certain things. But then acts of physical violence could no longer be classified as coercion. Rather, physical violence would then be defense, and in this case, coercion would be the peaceful refusal to engage in an exchange. And it would be also coercion if somebody attempted to defend himself against an enforced, violently imposed exchange on him.

00:14:38

On the other hand, if physical violence were defined as coercion, then B would, of course, not be allowed to defend himself against an omissive A. And if B nonetheless attempted to do so, then the right to defense would rest with A. But in this case, of course, omissions would not constitute coercion, blatant contradictions.

00:15:08

Now, from these conceptual confusions stems Hayek’s absurd thesis of the unavoidability of coercion and his corresponding, equally absurd justification of government. Quote: “Coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion. Free society has met this problem by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state and by attempting to limit this power of the state to instances where it is required to prevent coercion by private persons,” end of quote.

00:15:55

Now, according to both of Hayek’s definitions of coercion, this thesis is nonsensical. If omitted help represents coercion, then coercion in the sense of physical violence becomes necessary and not just unavoidable. Otherwise, if the initiation and the threat of physical violence is defined as coercion, it can be avoided, first, because each person possesses control over whether or not he will physically attack another.

00:16:32

And second, because every person is entitled to defend himself with all his means against another’s physical attack. It is only unavoidable that, so long as physical aggression exists, there will also be a need for physical defense. Yet, the unavoidability of defensive violence has nothing to do with the alleged unavoidability of coercion unless one confuses the categorical difference between attack and defense.

00:17:07

And a third, that the threat of defending oneself in the event of an attack is the same kind of thing as the threat of attacking. Now, if physical violence is forbidden, then it follows that one is allowed to defend oneself against it. It is thus absurd to classify attack and defense under the same rubric of coercion. Defense is to coercion as day is to night. Yet, from the unavoidability of defense, no justification for a government monopoly of coercion follows.

00:17:49

On the contrary, a government is by no means merely a monopoly of defense that helps private individuals avoid otherwise unavoidable defense expenditures because the government must obviously tax people in order to have the means to defend other people. And the government’s monopoly of coercion thus includes in particular also the right of the state to commit violence against private citizens and their complementary obligation on the part of the citizens not to defend themselves against government attacks. Now, but what sort of justification for a government is this? That if a person surrenders unconditionally to an attacker, he may save himself otherwise unavoidable defense expenditures.

00:18:53

Now onto the theme of government and its functions. Now, according to Hayek, government is necessary to fulfill the following tasks, not merely law enforcement and defense against external enemies,. but in an advanced society, government ought to use its power of raising funds by taxation to provide a number of services, which for various reasons, cannot be provided or cannot be provided adequately by the market.

00:19:28

Now, since at all times an infinite number of goods and services that exist, which the market does not provide, Hayek hands government here essentially a blank check. Among these are protection against violence, epidemics, or such natural forces as floods and avalanches, but also many of the amenities which make life in modern cities tolerable: most roads, the provisions of standards of measure, and many kinds of information ranging from land registers, maps, and statistics to the certification of the quality of some goods or services offered in the market.

00:20:12

Additional government functions are the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone. Government should distribute its expenditures over time in such a manner that it will step in when private investment flags. It should finance schools and research as well as enforce building regulations, pure food laws, the certification of certain professions, the restrictions on the sale of certain dangerous goods such as arms, explosives, poisons, and drugs as well as some safety and health regulations for the processes of production and the provision of such institutions such as theaters, sports grounds, and so on. There’s hardly anything left. And it should make use of the power of eminent domain, that is, of expropriation, to enhance the public good.

00:21:07

Moreover, it generally holds that there is some reason to believe that, with the increase in general wealth and of the density of population, the share of all needs that can be satisfied only by collective action will continue to grow. Further, government should implement an extensive system of compulsory insurance, allegedly coercion intended to forestall greater coercion. Public subsidized housing is a possible government task, and likewise, city planning and zoning are considered appropriate government functions provided that the sum of the gains exceeds the sum of the losses. Only Hayek knows how he can calculate this.

00:22:00

And, lastly, the provision of amenities of or opportunities for recreation or the preservation of natural beauty or of historical sites or scientific interest, natural parks, nature reservations, and so on, are also legitimate government tasks. In addition, Hayek insists that we recognize that it is irrelevant how big government is or if and how fast it grows. What alone is important is that the government actions fulfill certain formal requirements. Quote: “It is the character rather than the volume of government activity that is important.”

00:22:45

Taxes as such and the absolute height of taxation are not a problem for Hayek. Taxes and likewise military—compulsory military service lose their character as coercive measures, and now the quote: “if they are at least predictable and are enforced irrespective of how the individual would otherwise employ his energies.” This deprives them largely of the evil nature of coercion. If the known necessity of paying a certain amount of taxes because a basis of all my plans, if the period of military service is a foreseeable part of my career, then I can follow a general plan of life of my own making and am as independent of the will of any other person as men have learned to be in society. So if you know you will be enslaved for 20 years, you can adjust to this. If you know that the taxation imposed to you is 90% and you can adjust to it, then this is not coercion. I mean, how ridiculous can you be?

00:24:01

Now, it should be abundantly clear at this point that the claim that Hayek is a radical libertarian, a radical liberal and a principled opponent of the left is plain ridiculous. Then the question arises of course: How come that this myth exists that he is such a person? I must speculate of course. The most obvious answer is that the journalists and media that propagate this myth simply do not know what they are talking about and that one simply copies what another one has pronounced before. But this, although there is certainly some truth in it, does not explain how this myth could arise in the first place and why it is so persistent. Someone must be interested in this myth and its persistence.

00:24:58

Now, let me suggest another more plausible explanation. Put yourself into the shoes of the dominant egalitarian left of all parties, and there are no non-left parties left in the meantime. What would you do in order to maintain your own dominant position or even improve it in light of the fact that you cannot possibly hope to achieve a complete and total uniformity of an in-public opinion? Now, what I would do is something like this. First, I would want to identify the most dangerous opponents of the prevailing leftist sentiments and exclude them as good as I can from public discourse by ignoring them, not mentioning them, and barring them from entrance into any position of influence.

00:25:57

Before the age of the internet, this was comparatively easy to do. Mises and Rothbard, for instance, who are such dangerous individuals, were, in fact, hardly ever mentioned, and it was extremely difficult to find their books in any libraries or even know of their very existence. Second, I would want to delineate the range of legitimate, polite, and civilized discourse by identifying some prominent individuals that I can present as dangerous foes but that are, in fact, muddled and unprincipled enough to easily debate them and have them entangled in constant contradictions and concessions to my own leftist, programmatic goals.

00:26:52

This makes me appear tolerant, and I can always—and open-minded, of course, and I can always win the debate by pointing out that even these enemies agree with my own fundamental premises. You all know this strategy. It typically takes a form of saying, you know, but even Hayek and Friedman admit this and do not deny this.

00:27:21

What can you then say? They are already the dangerous foes out there. War is absolutely impossible. And as for these so-called enemies themselves, all the while they are appointed by the predominant left as the officially approved opponents of the ruling left, as the enemies the left loves to hate. They themselves gain tremendously in prominence and respectability and become themselves part of the establishment with access not only to the mainstream media but to the highest ranks of state power.

00:28:09

These are just some keywords: Hayek and Friedman and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and another keyword, Helmut Schmidt at Hayek’s 80ths birthday. Helmut Schmidt, social democratic chancellor of Germany at the time, wrote him a telegram saying we are all Hayekians now, and he meant it. He was. Now, these people then become welcome guests at all sorts of official meetings and conferences, and indeed, if you look at meetings of Hayekians and Friedmans nowadays, they are regularly sponsored or co-sponsored by various governmental organs and functionaries.

00:29:00

They are government organizations that feature these people. And they and their followers repay the favor done them by the left in participating in the exclusionary practice vis-à-vis the real, genuine, dangerous enemies of the prevailing leftist public opinion. They—certainly Hayek and Friedman themselves—but also many of their followers know these people. They know people like Mises and Rothbard. But if they mention them at all, they typically say a few complimentary words to be quickly followed by a lot of deprecating remarks.

00:29:45

Hayek, for instance, mentioned Rothbard only in a couple of footnotes in his entire body of work. And in the preface to Mises’ book on socialism and to Mises’ memoirs, his erinnerungen, Hayek claimed that Mises had actually changed his mind and given up on his earlier excessive rationalism even though they are absolutely no indications whatsoever on such a change of mind in Mises’ case.

00:30:17

And Friedman obviously dismissed and tried to make fun of Mises who had referred to him and his ilk at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting as nothing but a bunch of socialists. The same sort of assessment you can also find of the leaders of the German Hayek Foundation. Hayek is hailed as the greatest philosopher and economist of freedom in the 20^th century if not in all of human history. And Murray Rothbard, a few complimentary remarks, a good economist, but everything that he does ends in absurdity, no explanation what that absurdity is. So the style is always the same. You recognize them. You say one nice word when the next sentence you utter is, but they are basically nutcases.

00:31:18

In any case, what these people do, the Friedmanites and the Hayekians nowadays, rather than with nutty extremists and anarchists such as Mises and Rothbard and their associates, they—and even more so their present-day followers prefer to associate with high-ranking politicians, central bankers, and warmongers.

00:31:44

Just look at Mont Pelerin Society meetings. There, you see the assembly of these types of people. Or another conference recently took place on Hayek in Obergurgl. The main speaker was Vaclav Klaus who is in the favor of the Benes Decrees, which expropriated all Germans in former Czechoslovakia. And the other two main speakers were people working for the European Investment Bank and the head of some Austrian government-connected bank. That’s the conference that Hayekians put on.

00:32:22

Now, what to do then? I think we should say it the way it is. And in the age of the internet, it is no longer possible to entirely ignore us. We would thereby explode this unholy alliance between the ruling left and its officially designated and approved radical free market opposition. Now, no doubt this would bring us the enmity of the leaders of the Hayekians and the Friedmanite movement, but it also makes it possible to win over many confused and searching souls of this movement that found Hayek and Friedman first but also see that there are problems in it and look for a way out.

00:33:17

And what should we say? Now, in this connection, I want to give you some quotes from Rothbard. Before The Constitution of Liberty was published, the manuscript was sent to Rothbard. And Rothbard wrote two memos on the manuscript. One was a page-by-page criticism that was sent back to Hayek himself. I don’t think Hayek adopted any of that stuff.

00:33:49

The second was an internal memo sent to the Volker Fund, which had funded Hayek’s salary at this time. It basically calls for defunding Hayek after this memo. So I want to quote from this informal memo that Rothbard sent to the Volker Fund. I quote the first sentence of this memo and then the last paragraph.

00:34:16

The first sentence, and this refers to The Constitution of Liberty—the first sentence is: F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty is surprisingly and distrustingly an extremely bad, and I would even say evil, book. That’s the first sentence.

00:34:41

Now, the last paragraph. There, he says: This this is the face that F.A. Hayek will present to the world in his Constitution of Liberty. It is a face such that, if I were a young man first getting interested in political questions, and I should read this as the very best product of the extreme right—Murray always refers to the libertarian movement as extreme right here—of the extreme right, I would become a roaring leftist in no time and so I believe would almost anyone.

00:35:17

That is why I consider this such a dangerous book and why I believe that right-wingers should attack this book with great vigor when it appears instead of what I’m sure they will do—applaud it like so many trained seals. For first Hayek attacks laissez-faire. It attacks or ignores the true libertarians, thus setting up the even-Hayek-admits line.

00:35:47

And second, his argument is based on a deprecation or a dismissal of both reason and justice so that anyone interested in reason or justice would tend to oppose the whole book. And because of Hayek’s great prominence in the intellectual world, any failure by extreme right-wingers to attack the book with the implacable vigor which it deserves will inordinately harm the right-wing cause that we all hold dear. And the same also applies to Friedman. I have spared my time. I think Friedman’s case is even worse than the case of Hayek’s. Thank you very much.

00:36:28

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 100.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Jeffrey Tucker (USA), One Million Tiny Miseries. Government Policy in Our Time. PFS 2012 Playlist. Recorded Sept. 28–30, 2012.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.7MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 099.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) (England), The Ultimate “Freedom”: Choice without Consequences. PFS 2012 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:53 — 23.3MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 098.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Stephan Kinsella (USA), The (State’s) Corruption of (Private) Law. PFS 2012 Playlist. Youtube and powerpoint slides below.

[continue reading…]

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 097.

This panel discussion is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Joseph Salerno (USA), Jörg Guido Hülsmann (Germany/France), Thorsten Polleit (Germany), Doug French (USA), Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), Discussion, Q&A. PFS 2012 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 096.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Doug French (USA), More on “What Bankers Do and Do Not Know”. PFS 2012 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (15.6MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 095.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Thorsten Polleit (Germany), What Do Bankers Know about Money and Banking? PFS 2012 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (24.8MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 094.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Jörg Guido Hülsmann (Germany/France), The State and the Gold Market. PFS 2012 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 093.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Joseph Salerno (USA), Money: Sound and Unsound. PFS 2012 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 092.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Rahim Taghizadegan (Austria), Understanding Iran and the Iranians. PFS 2012 Playlist.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.8MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 091.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Hunt Tooley (USA), Engineering Tragedy: The Meaning of the CIA Coup d’Etat in Iran, 1953. PFS 2012 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 090.

By Norman Stone^†.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Norman Stone† (UK/Turkey), Comparative History: Turkey and Spain. PFS 2012 Playlist. Transcript and shownotes below.

See also

• • Norman Stone on Turkey: World War I, Ottoman Legacy, and Lessons from Spain
  • PFP055 | Norman Stone, World War I—the Eastern Front: Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Making of Turkey and the Modern Middle East (PFS 2010)

Shownotes/Summary (Grok)

Lecture Introduction and Comparative Approach 0:17

Norman Stone compares Turkey and Spain to place Turkey in a European context. He notes that Turkey appears unfamiliar to outsiders but is not like landing on Mars. The lecture highlights positive everyday experiences in Turkey where something nice or interesting often happens.

Personal Bubble and Historical Anecdote 1:44

As a professor in a pioneering private university following an American model, Stone lives in a bubble. He recalls a Russian prince who was a parasite under feudalism, a professor under capitalism, and a journalist under communism, using it to frame his observations on Turkey.

Foreign Perceptions and Turkish Progress Since 1923 2:47

Foreign views of Turks are often picturesque and favorable. Stone advises starting talks positively with Turkish audiences, noting Turkey has moved beyond needing compliments due to growing self-confidence. Turks are now global, with businessmen active worldwide. From the Republic’s founding in 1923 after massive population losses, Turkey advanced despite lacking skills initially.

Economic and Health Achievements 4:01

Stone avoids calling it an economic miracle but praises commendable progress, unlike South Korea’s early exports. Health services function well for him at age 71, though strained by rural patients arriving with families demanding pills. Turkey performs better than Russia on infant mortality statistics.

Language Reform Challenges and Successes 5:22

Major problems began with language fragmentation and unsuitable Arabic script. Low literacy in 1878 Kars example showed only 1% literate Muslims with many religious sites. Atatürk’s reforms abolished the old script, adopting a new one in 1928 on a clean slate of refugees. It succeeded remarkably, with Turkey producing far more translations annually than the Arab world. Concerns remain about declining vocabulary among students.

Focus on Modern Problems in European Context 8:31

Stone discusses Turkey’s current problems from a European rather than Middle Eastern perspective, using Spain for comparison. Geographical position brings neighbor issues.

Relations with Greece and Regional Neighbors 9:04

Greeks are the easiest neighbors but create complications. Greek islands near Turkey are well-maintained but costly to sustain with tourism reliance, water and electricity imports, and boycotts of prosperous Turkish areas. Forest fires highlight dependencies. Deeper issues involve Middle East rivalries dating to the 16th century with Iran.

Ottoman Historical Mistakes and Syrian Crisis 11:50

Sultan Murat IV’s bans on alcohol and conquest of Baghdad strained the empire. Turkey’s involvement in Syria led to massive refugee inflows, with absurd camp rules prompting returns to danger.

Shia-Sunni Tensions, Kurdish Issues, and US Relations 13:52

21st-century Shia-Sunni conflicts seem surreal alongside other religious tensions. Kurds comprise a quarter of Turkey’s population; Syrian autonomy offers sparked PKK terror campaigns. American help is limited due to election years.

EU Candidacy, Cyprus, and Rising Nationalism 16:08

Turkish EU membership should be straightforward for a free trade zone with common values, especially western and central regions. Visa humiliations contrast with easy US visas. Greek Cyprus issue blocks progress despite Northern Cyprus independence precedents like Kosovo. This fuels Turkish self-consciousness, Ottoman history interest, and soap operas.

Economic Developments and Urban Changes 19:08

Government achieved success replacing shanties with modern flats amid rural migration, common in places like Mexico City. Trade became serious but boom slows with debt and insufficient foreign investment, including Arab property buys raising tensions. Serious problems persist since 1995.

Rise of Religious Politics and Government Crackdowns 20:48

Religious party grew from 1960s, noted for low corruption. Quranic education and prizes raise concerns about rote learning without understanding. Past Erbakan government aligned with controversial figures, leading to military intervention. Current Prime Minister, former Istanbul mayor imprisoned earlier, took revenge with mass journalist imprisonments and sentences related to 2002 events, exceeding Iran or China. Stone critiques jailing journalists but sees some humor in writers. Atmosphere is tense without Arab Spring risk, though southeast has Middle East-like issues.

Spain Comparison: Geography, Minorities, and Infrastructure 27:58

Spain parallels Turkey with Galicia like Black Sea, Basques like Kurds, Catalans like Greeks or Armenians. Both faced railway modernization failures resolved later with better roads.

Spanish History, Civil War, and Atrocities 30:30

Spain’s catastrophic modern history includes 1936-1939 civil war killing millions, called Spanish Holocaust. Roots in 18th-19th century divisions, Peninsular War infighting, reactionary monarchy, and empire loss. Franco overdid repression, executing figures like Catalan leader Companys despite favors. His death in 1975 led to amnesty and reckoning with Republic’s fall.

Nationality and Autonomy Problems 34:02

Autonomy is expensive with duplicated offices and minority languages. Basque and Kurdish dialects complicate standardization. Assimilation occurs but nationality issues remain intractable, balancing language rights with future utility. Stone bitterly compares to potential Scottish independence.

Role of Religion in Declines 36:34

Religion lies at the heart: Counter-Reformation Catholicism declined Spain, with Salamanca University reduced to absurd questions like angels’ language. Bans on foreign literature and outdated ships led to Trafalgar disasters. Ottoman parallels include rejecting telescopes after earthquake and closing mathematics school as devil’s work. Religion divides both nations.

Optimistic Conclusion and Recommendations 40:50

Stone ends optimistically, believing Turkey avoids Spanish-style civil war. He urges learning from Spain: wipe the slate clean on the past and release imprisoned journalists.

Transcript (Grok)

Lecture Introduction and Choice of Topic 0:17

I’ve taken the subject of Turkey and Spain because you know for people who come from abroad Turkey looks obviously rather unfamiliar. And a splendid American woman in my first years here said look when you land here is like being on Mars. The language looks as if a Scrabble board had been kicked by a baby and all that sort of thing. And it’s not really like that at all. And what I want to do is to try to put Turkey in a European context and compare it with the country which I think she most resembles which is Spain.

Positive Impressions of Turkey 1:03

I’ll say one or two things to start off with. It’s some this country you enjoy waking up in it. You know something nice will happen or something interesting and people tend to be very serious. Most foreigners have that sort of reaction. Now it is true of course that as a university professor in a go ahead private university it’s the first that was ever set up in the what we can call the European space and it followed an American model with intelligent adaptations. And I live in a sort of bubble.

Personal Context and Russian Prince Anecdote 1:44

And sometimes I’m reminded of the immortal remark of a Russian prince Kropotkin who had been very rich before the Revolution emigrated to England became top Russian literature at the School of Slavonic Studies in London and then started writing your life of Lenin and got and fell in love with the man and went back to Russia where he became where he wrote in the newspapers it all went wrong he ended up in a camp. But he made this remark I have been three times the parasite a prince under feudalism a professor under capitalism and a journalist under communism. But still it is I think true that you know if I hear foreigners talking we tend to be you know the what’s said about the Turks is picturesque but it’s on the whole in favor very much so sometimes.

Advice on Addressing Turkish Audiences 2:47

And know when I first a better explained that beginning when I first came to Turkey I said how should you talk to a Turkish audience and they said we’ll look so long as you start off with something nice you can say what you like. And we moved beyond that stage. I’m not making silly compliments just to be nice. We would be on that stage because the Turks have now got self-confidence and they’re all over the world. You bump into Turkish businessmen selling pharmaceuticals in Venezuela this kind of thing. And you know for all the problems that Turkey has and I’m good to talk about them frankly we moved a long long way from 1923 when the Republic was established.

Post-1923 Challenges and Progress 3:34

It was established you know having lost a quarter of the population through epidemics war explosions all that and the Turks didn’t have skills. If you wanted a table made you had to go and ask an Armenian carpenter because he would understand how to stop the legs from wobbling.

Economic Progress and Health Services 4:01

You know it’s true the Turkish I don’t like the expression economic miracle. That progress is not the same as say South Korea the principal export of which in 1960 was wigs. But it’s still done you know pretty commendably. And the health works so if if if I am 71 now and if I have problems with my health I’ve no difficulty at all in going down to a Turkish hospital. I sometimes think that health is something which represents like television and a sort of general will. The health service in England doesn’t work because everybody’s drunk on Saturday night. The Health Service in Turkey is under terrible strain because anytime some old peasant has a pain anywhere he arrives with his entire family at the best Hospital in Ankara and demands huge amounts of pills. However if they keep on top of it and that sort of thing as you can judge from the statistics of infant mortality anything like that works better than it does in Russia. Still the problems Turkey had to face were enormous.

Language Reform and Literacy Issues 5:22

They began I think with the language. You know the just let me example I was reading a book about the Russian occupation of Kars in eastern Anatolia in 1878 and they took us to took statistics for the first time in that place and they discovered that 1% of the Muslim population was literate and they had 57 religious establishments big and small in a city of perhaps 25,000 people. And that problem of illiteracy was something that came up partly because the language had fragmented and partly because the script was just unsuited to the sort of noises that the Turks make which are not Arabic or Persian. And that was the script and that’s a measure of the problem.

You can see in the statue of the great man Atatürk which is about hundred yards away you’ll see it reads yurtta sulh cihanda sulh peace at home peace in the world. Now the word sulh nobody uses it it’s now banished for peace and the world cihan I don’t think anybody people might not even understand it world you say dunya. And they had to do a thoroughgoing language reform beginning with the abolition of the script and the substitution of today’s script. It was something that divided people and it still divides like my students they say we could have made adaptations to the old script to accommodate Turkish noises and other people more radical said no no scrap the whole thing. And they could get away with it in 1928 because the urban population consisted often of refugees and they were a clean slate waiting to be written on. And it’s been remarkably successful. One example which is ten years ago god knows what it is now but it’s just a statistic I happen to remember and in Turkey there are eleven thousand translations made every year in the entire Arab world three hundred. I guess you were measuring that we’ve now got literacy things wrong with it yes. If I listen to my students talking I fear that they are going down the Anglo-Saxon path. And here I might boast that in England we have come down to a hundred and twenty words whereas in the United States Unitedly I gather it’s 80 now.

Focus on Current Problems in European Perspective 8:31

My purpose in all of this is not to do a fanfare for modern Turkey that would be easy whatever you take. What I’d rather do is talk about the problems which Turkey faces nowadays. And I’ll try and put them in a European perspective rather than a Middle East perspective because I think that is the right way to look at it. And the country I’m going to talk about of course is Spain. But I’ll come on to that now.

Geographical Challenges and Neighbors 9:04

Turkey’s problems come obviously from a geographical situation with neighbors like that you’ve got to get problems. And I do not understand the world Greeks for a start. You know if you go down to the port you’ll see Greek islands about Kos I suppose about ten minutes away they’re wonderful islands. And I will say this for the Greeks that if you go to Kos but you look across to Mytilene it’s a great mass of concrete which should never have been allowed. And this is true also of Spain knows the Spanish wrecked their coastline building hotels in each other’s back gardens. And the Turks lost control of that process as well in parts. And here in Bodrum if you look at the Greek islands they’ve been quite well wooded the nice little sparkling white houses white churches they look you know classical museums on Kos anyway which which I know are really well looked after all that sort of thing.

Issues with Greek Islands and Regional Tensions 10:21

But what does it cost there was a forest fire on Kos the last month and they had to get the Turks offer to help but the Greeks have to bring in all the water by tanker from the mainland. They get their electricity from the mainland and there is no possibility of keeping those fabulous islands going except for tourism. Now what does it cost the Greek treasury to maintain those islands in this state with more or less a boycott of the Turkish which is quite prosperous nearby. It’s crazy. And you know but still you argue with the Greeks this let professional class Turks in without a visa to those islands you run into complications of resentments of a frankly silly kind. And know that Greece is the easiest of the neighbors there well the part perhaps from Bulgaria and Georgia but if you deal with the Middle East that’s always been Turkey’s Turkey’s problem really from the 16th century onwards when a long war developed long rivalry developed partly on religious lines with Iran. It’s always been a takes and problems for the Turks.

Historical Ottoman Mistakes and Syrian Involvement 11:50

And sometimes I say to them you know that the man who was really responsible for the decline of the Ottoman Empire was a 17th century Sultan called Murat the fourth. And he made I think two mistakes. The first was to say in all our mighty empire no alcohol is to be served. Now try running an empire that without alcohol doesn’t work. And the second mistake he made was to take Baghdad. There’s a historical rule to Cairo zone you’re out one bank and yet one Baghdad in year out. And the strain of maintaining these Arab provinces is a not often appreciated problem of Ottoman history.

Now that all this is coming back. Turkey in my view not very sensibly allowed herself to be sucked into this Syrian imbroglio. They ought to have known that Syria is not something it’s not going to be Libya wasn’t easy getting rid of Gaddafi took seven months. Getting rid of Assad is a much tougher job because he’s got support from Iran and also from Iraq which who doesn’t want to see him go. And the Turks have got themselves into a situation where they have a hundred thousand refugees flooding into Anatolia it’s deadly. And the in the refugee camps run by the Red Cross or the Red Crescent there’s a notice reading strictly no smoking in this camp 50,000 Syrians immediately returned to Syria to be bombed. That’s the first one.

Shia-Sunni Tensions and Kurdish Issues 13:52

Now there are tensions between the two branches of Islam and it sounds almost absurd to say this it’s you know for us nowadays there are well I was in Ireland last weekend and there are obviously Protestant Catholic troubles here and there but to say you know to have a conflict between Shia and Sunni versions of Islam at this stage of the 21st century is surreal.

But that’s come up. Then another one that is I’m good to talk about a bit is the Kurds. There a quarter of the population in Turkey just about not all of them speak Kurdish. Syria when the tensions happened and the Syrians said we will cease to treat our Kurds who are often nomadic as second-class citizens they can have an autonomous area. Now surprise surprise the terrorist movement in Turkey the PKK which are a horrible outfit has started a campaign of terror the like of which we haven’t seen since 1993 and not even then this is a very bad one. The Kurdish question comes up in Iraq as well and a question mark really comes over boundaries in the whole area. So much for the great man saying peace in the world the formula with which Turkey was launched. She’s got a bad one.

American Response and European Union Candidacy 15:40

The Americans nowadays if you ask them help help help as the Turks have been doing get the answer surprise surprise sorry it’s election year and so the Americans aren’t being much help in all of this. And the Turks have found themselves in the Syria in seriously difficult situation arguing for a no-fly zone which no one will enforce.

Well look the candidacy of Turkey for the European Union ought to be a matter straightforward matter if Europe were what it was originally you know a free trade zone with with a few you know common common common values. The admission of Turkey would not really be a problem certainly not Western or central Turkey they’re not all good to get up and flood to they to stay in Germany nothing like it. But still Europe makes difficulties. It’s terribly humiliating for an educated Turk to try to get a visa for European countries forms this size to fill in the exact specifications of photographs. The Americans are much better you go to the American Embassy in Ankara you wait a day and you get a 10-year visa if you’re an educated Turk. And the Europeans should do that because a matter of course they’re simply offending everybody. And then the idea that the Turkish membership of Europe should be dependent on a pipsqueak little problem like Greek Cyprus. A Turkish Cyprus has been in effect independent since 1974 when the Turkish army protected it. President Denktaş bless his soul said if I hadn’t behaved as I did we would have been in a sort of Gaza Strip and he’s absolutely right about that. But why not go the whole hog and simply say independence for Northern Cyprus. It’s a simple matter. And if it’s done for East Timor or in the name of God if it’s done for Kosovo or Montenegro or dare I say it Scotland where it which is where I come from if Scotland becomes independent I’m becoming a Turk is a ridiculous idea if these things are done and why not North Cyprus. And so the Europeans find themselves in this standoff situation with Turkey. And the Turks have given up hope of joining Europeans and I think it’s reflected in you know drive back if you like to the main springs of Turkish Islam Turkish nationalism. The wave of Turkish self-consciousness in the last 10 years has been quite remarkable. There are some some very good actually Turkish soap operas about the Ottoman Empire and even taxi drivers have become considerable experts on Ottoman history. I enjoyed talking to them about these things. And that I think is a consequence of the Europeans attitude.

Economic Developments and Challenges 19:08

Now the last thing of course is the economy. It’s Turkey said that this government done very well. People grumble about it especially if they’re professional class but it’s been remarkably successful in all sorts of ways. But they when I arrived in Ankara you would you would move past not exactly shanty towns though not people weren’t living in boxes but they were clapboard structures put up in 24 hours which meant that they were quasi legal and they dotted the hillsides all around the main cities of Turkey as rural migration happened. And it’s a phenomenon everywhere Bogota Mexico City and so on. No they’ve all gone they’ve been replaced by ugly tower blocks but still modern flats with all that goes with it and a good thing. Turkish trade becomes it’s become a serious economy. I won’t go on about this because it’s obvious quite successful. But it’s the economic boom coming to an end there’s a bit of debt and probably too much foreign investment is not coming in quite the amounts that they should do. And it mainly consists of Arabs buying property in Istanbul and driving property prices up which in itself is something which makes for obvious tensions. We’ll have to see about that. But Turkey is now facing quite serious problems more so I think than I known since I came here in 1995.

Religious Politics and Government Actions 20:48

And the final thing is that the government has been cracking its whip. It’s its background is religious. They the there was a religious party which started off in the 1960s from small beginnings and it grew in the 70s as people looked for electoral alliances with it. And it had this to be said for it that it wasn’t corrupt in the main. The Islamic politician the religious politicians were not corrupt. They offered things which most Turks don’t want didn’t wanted that from them at that time. For instance there’s an institution for training clerics a school for training clerics there were very few of them in old days no there are thousands. And people are school children are taught in Quranic schools. They there are prizes for correct me if I’m wrong Mustafa there are prizes for learning the Quran off by heart. Now that is a teacher who doesn’t know Arabic let alone sixth century or seventh century Arabic who is administering noises to school children who will absorb these noises without understanding them. And whether this is a proper way of education a lot of people seem to do remarkably well out of it but you can see that this sort of thing is going to be a problem.

Now the the previous Islamic government there was a an Islamic Prime Minister Erbakan and he came in as a result of an electoral pact with one of the conservative parties. And his idea was to say let’s have an Islamic free trade area and then an Islamic foreign policy whatever that’s supposed to be. And he lined himself up in Libya with Gaddafi with some a couple of plug uglies from Nigeria and Chad with some maniac from Iran and you get the general picture of the Prime Minister of Turkey lining up with people like that. And he wasn’t well received because Gaddafi said what about the Kurds then and started ranting at him to treat the Kurds properly so the conference broke up in uproar. And Erbakan’s deputy Tansu Çiller turned round said what is that bare arse Bedouin doing telling us what to do. And the the army got into the act and and put them out of power.

Now the present Prime Minister started off from that background and he he went to eastern Turkey and made a what was said to be an inflammatory address and he was put in prison for 11 months. He had been a very successful mayor of Istanbul which is a terribly difficult city to run. The rubbish is picked up twice a day you don’t see rats anywhere. It’s got hideous problems but it’s not Cairo by a long long chalk. They’re building an underground railway all this sort of thing. It’s a the show keeps on the road and that man deserves some respect for that. And he was in prison for 11 months. Now if you do that to somebody he’s going to take some kind of revenge. I remember seeing him on one of my journeys back to England the poor man was clutching he was on his own he was clutching an teach yourself English book it was and going to England obviously to try to learn English. It didn’t work but the poor man was standing there just out of prison lonely feeling defeated you know I felt awfully sorry for him. But he has gone on to take pretty serious revenge just recently coming out for 400 sentenced to up to 20 in prison for holding exercises back in 2002 for a military push against a possibly reactionary Islamic government. 20 years. The evidence is there are coming on for 400 journalists in prison for similar reasons. And they’ve been held there often without charge I think for three four years. And the word going around is that Turkey now has more journalists in prison than Iran or China. No I think it’s a matter of course that you you you don’t put journalists in prison for doing their job certainly not for that length of time. Oddly enough I think it’s probably a good idea to put writers in prison you know if you it stops from making such a mess of their private lives and taking themselves too seriously. You know if Orhan Pamuk had had a dose of prison perhaps his prose would become a little less muggy. And then and you know the famous remark about American writers they there have been six American Nobel Prizes for literature five were drunks and the sixth was Pearl S. Buck. That compared that with Russia it’s a discussable point. However we are in a difficult situation. And know the atmosphere in Turkey is I have to say really you know it’s quite tense. We’re not in for any kind of Arab Spring. It’s true that in eastern Turkey there are certain there are conditions not unlike the Middle East too many children dirt poor tribal politics honor killings this kind of thing but it is really a local phenomenon in the southeast however intractable it is.

Comparative Analysis with Spain 27:58

I think we’ve got to look to another situation this is where I come in with Spain. Yes Spain I don’t need to tell you was Islamic for 7th century. It’s a world empire. The Praxis if you look into the different elements of Spain the Galicia in the northwest quite like the Black Sea in Turkey the Basques very like the Kurds seven languages very divided partly industrial and modern partly very backward the Catalans the Greeks and the Armenians of the past to some extent even the present or secularized Turks if you like. There’s a curious comparison I could make with with railways. Spain in the 19th century said we must modernize and build railways and they got the French to do it a lot of money. Now the bull land red is eroded and hammering nails into that kind of thing is very difficult and they had to do it on the cheap and the railways kept breaking down. And in the end they didn’t have much traffic they didn’t actually promote an organisation at all they just carried market you know peasants wise carrying chickens. So they they didn’t have the money to pay for themselves. And by the 1890s they were in the grotesque position if I think to build factories to make obsolete spare parts from the Spanish railways and it took 12 hours to go from Madrid to Barcelona. The same problem occurred in Turkey and as in as in Spain once they had the money from proper roads built to American specifications they then had the money to plow into the railways. And who pray is now reforming the Turkish railways. Engineers know Spain’s his modern history is pretty catastrophic.

Spanish Civil War and Historical Context 30:30

That devastating civil war between 1936 and 1939 seems to have carried off something like 3 million of the Spanish population. The recent book about it by the one of the best Spanish historians in England and it’s called the Spanish Holocaust and that’s right it was an orgy of killing. Its origins I think go long way back. Spain in the 18th century part of it looked to enlightenment in Europe and part of it looked to Spanish traditions themselves. Obscure the Basques were at that time ferociously religious and loyal to old Spain. And a civil war of a sort broke out with the Peninsular war. When I was a boy I thought of the Peninsular war as a heroic British set of British victories. It’s not really like that the Spanish were busy fighting each other and continued to do so in theory in forms. They got a reactionary monarchy in the 1830s Ferdinand the seventh when the Catholics went to town and ensured that they would have purity of blood. What that meant was that three brothers married their three nieces and the children of those marriages also got intermarried. And you know with until Queen Isabella seems to have jumped the gun and had an affair with an army officer the quality of the Spanish industry was going right down. Until you know you come to the sad business of the Cuban war the loss of empire and then Primo de Rivera. In that vicious Civil War Franco in 1940 was he was you know however much sympathy one might have for somebody having to deal with Spanish communists Franco overdid it by a long long way. He did things which Atatürk would never have done. For instance the the old prime minister of Catalonia Lluís Companys took refuge in Paris in 1939 he had been instrumental in saving the life of Franco’s brother swapping him for somebody and had been otherwise very distressed about everything. Franco got the Gestapo to arrest him bring him back to Spain and put him up against the wall and shot him. He used to pride himself as he went in from the Pardo Palace to his office in Madrid and the number of death warrants he could sign in the back of the car his record was 3,000. Now this old monster died finally in 1975 and the Spanish did something obviously sensible which was to say amnesty let’s not go over this this vicious period. People sometimes try to raise it but on the whole not. And they’ve tried to come to terms with the problems that overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1936.

Nationality Problems and Autonomy Challenges 34:02

So you have an attempt to deal with nationality problems if you want with autonomy. Now the problem with there are two problems with this. Sometimes in Turkey they say let’s give autonomy to the Kurds. The first thing is it’s very expensive. The Spanish economy is being raked by decentralization duplication of endless offices whether it’s in this bogus language of Valencian or Galician or Catalan or Basque it’s a terrible strain on the Spanish budget is all that. And the second thing is how do you deal with these nationality problems they are hideously intractable. The you know I will go on too long about it but what is the point in having people speak Basque especially when it divides into endless dialects which have to be artificially standardised. And I’m afraid the same is true of the Kurds there are about seven Kurdish languages. The two main ones spoken here are Kurmanji and Zaza which and people don’t understand each other if they’re talking them. Any obviously any Kurd and I know an awful lot once they get on in Turkey and an awful lot of them do as I speak assimilation is going on in what probably next door with them with all these things. But you’re still left with an intractable Nationality problem that is hideously difficult to know what to do about it. It’s all very well saying it’s a human right to talk your own language but it’s also a children’s right to have a language that is useful to you for the future. And as you can see I feel fairly bitterly about this because I can imagine all too easily an independent Scotland it will be run by the most ineffable soft professions second-raters. It will be you know it’s a day this idea but still these things seem to be somehow unstoppable. And I don’t know what to do about it in Turkey no one seems to do the government says one thing one time another thing another.

Role of Religion in Historical Declines 36:34

Now I have a really to deal with one final point in all this orange overshadowed my time slightly and the there’s one thing at the heart of it all which I think needs to be talked about and it is religion. The central point of the civil war in Spain the long civil war in Spain was the rule of the Catholic Church Counter Reformation Catholicism. It started off as an obviously brilliant idea as you can see from its monuments everywhere but something went wrong with it. Just to give you an example the the University of Salamanca used to be a very great place I think the circulation of the blood that sort of thing came up there rather than in Harvey’s England it was a great place. Now the decline of Spain or the incline of the Spanish church meant that in the year of grace 1776 when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations and the United States made some little local difficulties and the University of Salamanca was reduced to one Faculty of Canon Law and the academics were all lazy and couldn’t be bothered doing exams so they had one examination for the entire university and it contained one question to be answered in Latin what language do the Angels talk. That is the University of Salamanca. Another example the in the 17th century the Spanish banned all literature coming from foreign countries and countries including Holland. Now the Dutch knew how to build the Spanish went on making the same ships decade and decade out until it came to the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the ninth about 90 of a hundred Spanish ships were sunk and the king of Spain struck a medal to reward them the captains of the ships which had not been sunk. That’s the measure of things going wrong.

No compare that I could go on on that theme I don’t want dessert to process and triumphalist but I can’t help it. And there’s a counterpart in Turkey which is quite well documented. The Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century very go ahead please they needed to know about navigation and they had telescopes on a tower in Galata in Istanbul and which were plotted the stars. And the some of the religious did not like this I think possibly because the Sultans were using them for purposes of astrology. And the ulema the religious judges said no no and they were given their chance because there was an earthquake and they they went up to they Mehmet the third and said them this is you this is a punishment on us for trying to probe the secrets of God with telescopes. So they threw the telescopes down from the tower and Ottoman astrology astronomy was not heard of ever again. Another example 1739 they began to realize that if you wanted proper artillery you needed mathematics so they had a school of mathematics set up which again the religious judges didn’t like at all. They said very properly in my opinion that mathematics was the work of the devil and they therefore closed that school down. So you find things like the religion getting in the way in the Ottoman Empire and in 18th centuries 18 19th century Spain. And it is something which divides the country even now.

Optimistic Closing and Call for Amnesty 40:50

I would like to end a bit on a optimistic note because I don’t think this country is going to get anything like the Spanish Civil War it’s never had that kind of thing in the past. It’s a tense situation but I think this is a moment when Turkey should learn from Spain and just say look let’s wipe a slate over the past and let those journalists out of prison. Thank you.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 089.

This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Andy Duncan (England/Hong Kong), Liberty Through Literature. PFS 2012 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 088.

This panel discussion is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Yuri Maltsev (USA), Roman Skaskiw (USA/Ukraine), Nicola Iannello (Italy), Sean Gabb (England), Paul Gottfried (USA), Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) (England), Discussion, Q&A. PFS 2011 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 087.

This lecture is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Yuri Maltsev (USA), Of Customs and Condoms: Moving from One Empire to Another. PFS 2011 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 086.

This lecture is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Nicola Iannello (Italy), Of Producers and Parasites. PFS 2011 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 085.

This lecture is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) (England), The Mirage of “Equal Opportunity”. PFS 2011 Playlist.

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 084.

This lecture is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Paul Gottfried (USA), How the Left Conquered the Right. PFS 2011 Playlist.

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 083.

This lecture is from the 2011 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Sean Gabb (England), The Case Against the American War of Independence. PFS 2011 Playlist.