This article is part of the Honesty Litmus Test series which test if, how and why the five most famous Jewish libertarians used libertarianism to serve Jewish group interests.
Milton Friedman has already been tested in two articles.
This article will study another famous Jewish libertarian, Ludwig von Mises.
Honesty Litmus Test: Ludwig von Mises
Table of contents:
- Mystery Man
- Fatal Embrace
- Secret Jews
- Serving the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers
- Culture of Critique
- Pan-Europa
- Master Plan
Introduction
Ludwg von Mises was a Jew. To see whether he served Jewish group interests it is necessary to first gather the main biographical sources (Chapter 1), then check if he ever mentioned the Jewish Problem of assimilation and the Jewish attempt to capture the state with the Fatal Embrace (Chapter 2). The next step is to research in detail if Mises tried to actively lie or hide the role of Jews in general (Ch. 3), in his own life (Ch. 4) in Culture of Critique (Ch. 5) and political centralization and globalism (Ch. 6). After this it is possible to understand his life and master plan (Ch. 7).
Part I
Mystery man
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881-1973) was a famous Jewish economist and one of the most important developers of classical liberal (libertarian) ideology. In 1922 he defeated socialism intellectually with his book Socialism by showing how economic calculation is impossible in socialism. Therefore pure socialism simply cannot work. It either crashes the economy or adopts some market mechanisms and gives up pure socialism.
Then in 1927 Mises developed a detailed radical libertarian program in his book Liberalism. During the Second World War Mises immigrated to America and together with his students, Friedrich von Hayek and Murray Rothbard helped the libertarian movement develop into an international movement.
Milton Friedman considered Ludwig von Mises a very important supporter of the free market:
“there is no doubt in my mind that Ludwig von Mises has done more to spread the fundamental ideas of free markets than any other individual” (Milton Friedman, 1991. “Say ‘No’ to Intolerance.” Liberty, 4 (6): pp. 17–19.)
Mises had not only a powerful impact intellectually but also in practical politics. After First World War he single-handedly saved Austria from communism with the help of his Jewish socialist friend Otto Bauer. Mises almost managed to save Austria also from Nazism with the help of his Fascist friend, dictator Engelbert Dollfuss. Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains:
Mises was also a close political adviser to the Austrian government, and to future statesmen and finance ministers. To gain an idea into the political importance of this period, consider this passage from Mises’s Notes and Recollections: “My activity from 1918 to 1934 can be divided into four parts: Prevention of Bolshevist Takeover. Halting the Inflation. Avoidance of Banking Crisis. Struggle Against Takeover by Germany.”
And Mises was being modest. His actual contributions to events of his time are more dramatic and sweeping than even this list would suggest. …. Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor who tried to prevent the Nazis from taking over Austria. During this period Mises was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. Before Dollfuss was murdered for his politics, Mises was one of his closest advisers. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Meaning of the Mises Papers.)
It would be very interesting to know more details about the life of Mises. But he did not keep a diary and even in his correspondence was very secretive of his life. Professor Richard M. Ebeling explains:
He did not keep a diary, and his letters to people were more often short essays on political and economic affairs than correspondence in which he shared with others the circumstances of his life. (Richard M. Ebeling. The Life and Works of Ludwig von Mises.)
As so often happens with powerful men they periodically burn or otherwise destroy their papers. This made the work of Mises’ biographer, professor Guido Hulsmann very difficult.
He took great care to destroy any evidence—from receipts to love letters—anything that could have been useful to potential opponents. (Jörg Guido Hülsmann: Mises, The Last Knight of Liberalism. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007. Preface by Jörg Guido Hulsmann, p. 13. Hereafter Biography.)
We have Nazis to thank that Mises was not able to destroy all his papers. When they occupied Austria in 1938 the Gestapo immediately went to Mises’ apartment and confiscated all his papers and belongings. Later the Red Army transferred these papers to Moscow archives. Mises biographer Guido Hulsmann has studied them and explains:
Yes. I was fortunate that this prewar material existed. I’m sure if Mises had had a hand on this — if he could have determined what survives into the mix and not — most of the stuff that is interesting that sheds light on Mises as a person, would have been destroyed. I’m absolutely certain about this because you wouldn’t find similar writings in his postwar material. He was very discreet about these social relations.
And having that sort of material, it’s not much, but certainly, his correspondence with his mother, his correspondence with Margit, whom he later married, then some exchanges with other people that shed a little light on Mises the person would probably have vanished if he had a choice in this. (Hulsmann interview.)
This prewar material is useful but does not contain any big secrets. Obviously Mises realized that Nazis might occupy Austria and therefore did not leave very confidential papers in his Vienna apartment. He especially made sure that Nazis would not find anything about his large Jewish network. So how then to study this network? How can we know if Mises served Jewish group interests? There are two ways to research this subject: The first method is biographical. Start from his ancestry and then go through his personal, professional, intellectual and political life with a comb. Even if he did try to cover his tracks he must have left some proof of his Jewish network and activities. The second method is to use the Honesty Litmus Test. Just find out what Mises said or wrote publicly (or was selectively silent) about the five big sensitive topics collectively also known as the Jewish Cuckoo Story:
- Jewish problem: Failing to assimilate
- Fatal embrace: Capturing the state and creating the money machine
- Culture of Critique: Demonizing Europeans
- U$Srael: Dominating the world
- Cover-up: Jewish libertarians covering up these four problems
Optimally the litmus test and the biographical method should be used at the same time. In this article we do look at biographical sources but emphasize the use of the second method by studying how Mises reacted to the five crucial problems in his speeches and writings. Thanks to the Ludwig von Mises Institute all his 25 books and dozens of articles are now online. Most of them are listed in a bibliography edited by Bettina Bien Greaves and Robert W. McGee. It also includes a short timeline of Mises’ intellectual life.
One is struck how rarely Mises mentions Jews. Even in his memoirs he speaks nothing about his Jewish family, friends or networks. In fact, he does not even mention his own Jewishness and avoids talking about his private life. In the preface of Mises’ Memoirs his biographer Jörg Guido Hulsmann notes:
What do the memoirs tell us about their author? What does Mises reveal about himself? Not much. He essentially confines himself to a narration of his intellectual development and public life. There is no word on the following pages about his dreams and feelings, love affairs, personal income and wealth, passions, and temptations; no word about daily family life or his attitudes toward parents, brothers, house personnel, cousins, teachers, or neighbors; no word about car accidents or broken legs.
This is fully in line with his other writings and personal records. Even in his letters he handled such private matters with great discretion. All through his life he studiously avoided writing and publishing about himself, even though he played a rather remarkable personal role as we have already noticed. (Ludwig von Mises. Memoirs. p. 3 of the Preface by Jörg Guido Hulsmann.)
After Mises’s death in 1973 his wife, Margit wrote a memoir about their life together. She too noted his secretiveness. Imagine not trusting your wife enough to tell her about your ancestors, family and life plans!
When Ludwig von Mises died on October 10, 1973, newspapers and magazines all over the world published articles, memoirs, quotations, evaluations and reviews of his work and life. But no journalist, no economist wrote about him as a man, as a human being. Many people drew my attention to this. They could not understand the reason.
The explanation is simple. My husband was a very reserved person. While he was kind and friendly to all, he was extremely self-restrained and uncommunicative about his own life and affairs. He never talked about himself or his family. …
[1940] he started working on an “autobiography,” [which would become Memoirs] as he first called it. It is not an autobiography in the usual sense of the word. It contains nothing of his personal life, tells almost nothing about his family. He speaks about his schooling, his intellectual development, his work, and his ideas for future books. … In later years I often urged Lu to write a real autobiography. I even suggested he dictate it to me. His answer was: “You have my notes, that’s all people need to know about me.” (Margit von Mises. My Years With Ludwig von Mises. Arlington House 1976. p. 7, 68. Hereafter My Years.)
Margit was kept in the dark but her book is still very useful because she loves to tell dramatic anecdotes and is continually dropping names! She cannot help it so she reveals many things Mises tried to desperately keep a secret.
Again and again many pleaded Mises to write an autobiography of his amazing life but he always refused. Fortunately there are now two biographies of Mises. They are written by his followers, the famous Jewish libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and the economist Jörg Guido Hulsmann. Unfortunately these biographies are hagiographical, i.e. they practically worship Mises and avoid telling negative things about him. However, they still contain much revealing information.
In 1988 professor Murray Rothbard published a small biography of 83 pages, Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero. The first chapter introduces Mises and tells about his ancestors and family. However, Rothbard does not mention that Mises and his family are Jews. This is highly curious especially since Rothbard was himself a Jew and certainly knew about the Jewishness of Mises and his family. Only in the third chapter is it suddenly revealed that Mises is a Jew and even then only in the context of alleged anti-Semitism.
After interviewing Mises’s friends and former students, Earlene Craver indicates that Mises was not appointed to a professorial chair because he had three strikes against him: (1) he was an unreconstructed laissez-faire liberal in a world of opinion that was rapidly being captured by socialism of either the Marxian left or of the corporatist-fascist right; (2) he was Jewish, in a country that was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic;17 (3) he was personally intransigent and unwilling ever to compromise his principles. (Murray Rothbard. Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator and Hero. Ludwig von Mises Institute. p. 20. Hereafter Scholar.)
Besides this professorial appointment problem Rothbard never ever notes who is a Jew. Neither Jewish bankers nor revolutionary communists are identified as Jews. Not even when they are obvious Jewish refugees. For example, Rothbard does not even tell us that the famous Marxist Franz Neumann is a Jew. He is only a “German refugee”.
“Columbia University Professor and German refugee Franz Neumann..” (p. 46)
In 2005 professor Richard M. Ebeling published a long biographical essay on Mises. Ebeling covers Mises’ Jewish background and circle in much more detailed manner than Rothbard but continually portrays Jews as eternal victims of anti-Semitic persecution. Ebeling is also confused in genealogy research. He even thinks Ludwig von Mises’ granduncle Abraham is his grandfather. However, the essay is still very useful because often it reveals Mises’ secret Jewish side.
In 2007 the Ludwig von Mises Institute helped professor Jörg Guido Hulsmann research and publish a 1143 page biography, Mises, The Last Knight of Liberalism. It was 10 years in the making. All over the world private and public archives were researched to find information about Mises. Despite this the book is not so much a biography of his private or even public life but an intellectual biography. About 90% of the book deals with Mises’ ideas and scientific theories though strangely there is no chronology of his works or even a bibliographical essay.
Hulsmann does brilliantly explain the scientific theories in layman terms but tells us very little about Mises the man. There is not even a timeline and very little is told of his family and friends. However, in footnotes there are still some very interesting revelations.
Luckily Liberty Fund has created a basic timeline of Mises’ life.
Since Mises biographies are quite hagiographical it is important to find more critical but still knowledgeable sources. Luckily Mises’ friend and most famous disciple, professor Friedrich August von Hayek does often tell us about Mises the man. Hayek had a lot of Jewish friends but was non-Jewish with a fully Christian, Gentile and aristocratic background. At the age of 85 Hayek gave a remarkably frank interview where he first time revealed his thoughts on the Jews. He even said that there had been a Jewish problem in Vienna. The interview was published in a collection of interviews Hayek on Hayek edited by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar.
Part II
Fatal Embrace
Ludwig von Mises, his ancestors and his whole family were Jews. Unfortunately the consequences of this fact are very much downplayed and hidden throughout his writings and biographies. So is the historical background of his family despite the crucially important fact that Mises, his parents and all his ancestors were Ostjuden, Eastern Jews. In fact, they all grew up at the heart of Jewish history: Eastern European Galicia. For centuries it had been part of Poland, the Promised Land of the Jews.
Galicia has always had an important strategic position at the foot of Carpathian mountains between Eastern and Western Europe. It also has a very important role in the history of Judaism. There seems to have been more Jews in Galicia alone than in the whole Western Europe. But now it is the forgotten land. Even Jewish historians have been curiously silent about it. This despite the fact that many world famous socialist and libertarian Jews came from Galicia. Why the silence? Is the history of Galician Jews too embarrassing for the Jews?
Scholarly works on Jewish Galicia are, however, mostly outdated and relatively short.1 Consequently, scholars who use information on Galicia only as supplementary data often make numerous errors, and even for an educated American or West European Galicia remains a land of mystery.2
Marsha Rozenblit is absolutely right when she concludes a review essay, “The Jews of the Dual Monarchy,” with the observation: “Indeed, it would be nice to know more about the traditional Jewish population of Moravia, Galicia and Hungary.”3 (Piotr Wrobel. Jews of Galicia Under Austrian-Polish Rule 1867-1918. P. 1. Download pdf.)
History books do note the important economic position of Jews in Galicia. But for some reason Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann downplay this fact. Instead Jews are portrayed as victims of anti-Semitic regulations and persecution. Hulsmann writes:
In the cities that did tolerate Jewish residents, such as Lemberg, Jews were forced to live within special areas, the Judenviertel. They were generally prohibited from trading in the “forbidden districts” of the empire, and even those who had permission to trade there on business days could not stay overnight. So it remained, from her [Maria Theresa] reign well into the nineteenth century. Despicable as the system of regulations was, it allowed for exceptions. (Biography, p. 12)
It is the old story: The Jewish Problem does not exist. It never existed except in the feverish minds of the anti-Semites. Mises and his biographers totally accept the old canard that Jews were just innocent victims of mad persecution. But what about the Jewish capture of the state that led to the Fatal Embrace? Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann are all economists and libertarians so they certainly know how unassimilable Jews made an alliance with rulers against the native local people. Jews bought the right to collect taxes and tariffs which created terrible incentives to extort and exploit the peasantry. As if this was not bad enough Jews also bought cartel and monopoly privileges to run everything from mills to inns.
Again and again Jews helped both themselves and the state to become more exploitative and powerful. For centuries Jews run in Eastern Europe one of the most exploitative systems the world has ever seen: A monopoly economy with Jews as the exploiting hostile elite. History of Galicia is the best or rather the worst example of the Fatal Embrace. A true horror story for Europeans.
Mises knew full well about the Fatal Embrace. In fact, in 1902 he wrote his first book about it: Die Entwicklung des Gutsherrlich-Bäyerlichen Verhältnisses in Galizien: 1772-1848. (The Development of the Relationship between Peasant and Lord of the Manor in Galicia: 1772-1848.) Mises wrote it when he was a student under the Jewish professor Carl Grunberg. The book largely whitewashed Jewish history and put all the blame on the Poles. In this way Mises also helped cement not only the new Jewish alliance with the Austrians but also to demonize Slavs whom the Jews often considered “anti-Semitic”. This is another example of the switching Jewish alliances that through centuries have enraged so many European nations. First Jews are your best friends but then they ally with your enemy and brand you as a terrible inhuman anti-Semite.
Like Mises also Rothbard and Hulsmann are economics professors so they certainly know about regulatory capture and state capture. Despite this they ignore Mises’ obvious whitewashing of the monopolist practices of the Jews. Nor do they reveal the fact that Mises’ professor Grunberg was a Jew who became one of the leaders of Austro-Marxism. Together with the Jewish friends of Mises such as Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding, Grunberg would help Jews take over the Social Democratic Party. Then after First World War they planned a communist coup but Mises managed to talk them out of it. In 1924 Grunberg became the first director of the Institute for Social Research, later known as the Frankfurt School which was at the heart of the cultural revolution of the Culture of Critique.
Mises literally knew all the leading Jewish socialists and Marxists because at the beginning of his studies he was part of their Jewish group. They were his Jewish teachers, fellow Jewish students and Jewish friends! This is why he also published his Jewish propaganda book on Galician history. Curiously it is the only one of his books that has not been translated into English. Perhaps it would generate too much interest into the forbidden subject of Fatal Embrace. It is available on the Mises Institute website as a scanned version in original German but has no intro or any kind of comment. It has been literally silenced to death.
The book shrewdly starts from the year 1772 when Austria annexed Galicia. In this way Mises does not have to dwell too deeply into the monopoly economy run by Jews during Polish rule. However, many of these monopolies continued decades after the Austrian annexation of Galicia. Mises does mention the propination laws which monopolized alcohol production. Of course, he did not go too much into details but the fact is that many Jews periodically bought these alcohol monopolies. Thus these Jews had an enormous incentive to sell as much alcohol to the peasantry as possible. And often on credit. This was probably the biggest reason why alcoholism was such a serious problem among the Poles, Ukrainians and Russians. Wikipedia has a surprisingly honest description of this outrageous alcohol monopoly that was such an important part of regulatory capture and the Fatal Embrace:
Propination laws were a privilege granted to Polish szlachta [aristocracy] that gave landowners a monopoly over profits from alcohol consumed by their peasants. Propination is a historical right to distill spirits. In many cases, profits from propination exceeded those from agricultural production or other sources. These laws usually included:
- peasants were not allowed to purchase any alcohol not produced in their owner’s distillery
- alternatively, they could be allowed to brew their own drinks but had to pay a fee according to the amount produced
- peasants had to buy at least a given quota of vodka or okovita. Those who didn’t comply had the remaining amount dumped in front of their houses and had to pay the costs.
These laws first appeared in the 16th and were widespread by the 17th century. They lasted until 1845 (Prussian partition), 1889 (Galicia) and 1898 (Russian Partition).
Propination was the main cause for massive alcoholism in Poland; also, because taverns in rural region were leased nearly exclusively to Jews who took part in enforcing these privileges, it was also a major reason for anti-semitism among peasants.[1] (Wikipedia, emphasis added)
At the turn of the century when Mises was a young man Jews still controlled alcohol and many other monopolies and cartels. The peasants were not anymore forced to buy alcohol but they still had to go to the Jews to get it.
Rothbard is very quiet about the contents of Mises’ first book. Hulsmann does explain the contents of the book but does not even mention the propination laws. This despite the fact that in many places the leasing of alcohol monopolies to Jews was continued until 1918. Hulsmann even claims that there was a harmony between the Jews and the peasants. He quotes the white-washer of Jewish history, William Johnston:
In contrast to German cities like Frankfurt and Berlin, which had long had a Jewish settlement, Vienna first attracted Jews in large numbers after 1848. They came from small villages in Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia, where Jewish culture had been preserved in relative isolation for hundreds of years. … They had been small merchants, often trading between towns or providing financial services to gentile landowners. Anti-Semitism had been rare in these regions because the Jews provided services that the gentile lords and peasants wanted but would not perform themselves. The economic complementarity of the countryside had guaranteed the Jews security and modest prosperity.15 (Biography, p. 29. Emphasis added.)
In other words, anti-Semitism was rare because peasants did not mind being exploited by Jews. This created economic “complementarity” which made Jews “modestly prosperous”. Hulsmann buys this extremely Philo-Semitic interpretation of history hook, line and sinker. He spends several pages explaining the history of Galicia but does not say a word about the Jews as enforcers of the exploitation economy. Jews were just totally innocent bystanders. Or maybe the Poles made them do it.
Mises and Hulsmann even whitewash the 1846 Galician Slaughter by demonizing the Polish independence rebellion against the imperialist Austrians.
When in February 1846 the [Polish] aristocrats rebelled against Austria in an attempt to restore their ancient privileges, they confronted a united rural peasantry, which smashed this rebellion without any assistance from the Austrian army.18 Mises gave a detailed account of this failed aristocratic rebellion and of its consequences in his fourth chapter. He had many things to say on the issue. After all, his great-grandfather [Mayer von Mises 1800-91] had been an eyewitness to the event and had welcomed the peasants’ success. (Biography, p. 71. Emphasis added.)
This sounds like Mayer – who helped to raise Ludwig and died when he was 10 years old – might have helped to instigate and finance the peasant uprising against the Polish aristocracy. Wikipedia is more objective on the Galician Slaughter than Mises and Hulsmann though it is also silent on the role of the Jews.
Most sources agree that the Austrians encouraged the peasants to revolt.[2][12][13][15] A number of sources point to the actions of the Austrian Tarnów administration, in particular an official identified as the District Officer of Tarnów, Johann Breindl von Wallerstein.[2][12][14][16] Wallerstein offered help to peasant leader Jakub Szela.[2][16] Serfs were promised the end of their feudal duties if they helped to put down the insurgent Polish noblemen, and were also paid in money and salt for the heads of nobles.[2][16]
Hahn notes “it is generally accepted as proven that the Austrian authorities deliberately exploited peasant dissatisfaction in order to suppress the national uprising”.[8][11] Magosci et al. write that “most contemporaries condemned the Austrian authorities for their perfidious use of the peasantry for counter-revolutionary aims”.[14] It was ironic, as historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, that the peasants turned their anger on the revolutionaries, whose ideals also included improvement of the peasants’ situation.[17] (Wikipedia, emphasis added.)
Galician Jews led by the Mises family were now Emperor’s men. But not too blindly, of course. Mayer could now play Gentiles against each other. During the “Mad Year” of Europe in 1848 revolutions raged. Many have speculated that it was the Jews who largely organized and especially financed the revolutions. Mises and Rothbard never reveal the role Jews and especially the Mises family played in these revolutions. However, Hulsmann gives us an interesting hint:
[When] revolutionary insurrections broke out in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, Meyer [Mises] helped bring the fight to Galicia. He was one of four Jewish signers of a March 1848 Galician petition to the emperor, demanding among other things legal equality for all social classes, emancipation of the Jews, the creation of a Galician militia and of a Galician parliament.23 …
In the same year, Meyer Rachmiel Mises was elected to the Galician parliament. He had now become a visible member of the unofficial “Jewish nobility” and was actively involved in major political reforms in this easternmost province of the Habsburg Empire. He may even have been one of the “democratic agitators” who caused such headaches for the defenders of the monarchy. (Biography, p. 14. Emphasis added.)
The Galician Jews led by the Mises family now had a very beneficial position strategically. No wonder the emperor wanted them on his side. Jews were 10% of the population of Galicia but soon totally dominated the economy and the local government. Even Wikipedia makes this clear:
Almost 80 percent of all tailors in Galicia were Jewish. The main occupation of Jews in towns and villages was trade: wholesale, stationery and retail. Of 1,700 physicians in Galicia, 1,150 were Jewish; 41 percent of workers in culture, theaters and cinema, over 65 percent of barbers, 43 percent of dentists, 45 percent of senior nurses in Galicia were Jewish and 2,200 Jews were lawyers. For comparison, there were only 450 Ruthenian (Ukrainian) lawyers. …
The Jews constituted one third of the population of many cities and came to dominate parts of the local economy such as retail sales and trade.[3] They were also successful in the government; by 1897, Jews constituted 58 percent of Galicia’s civil servants and judges.[4] [Wikipedia]
Jews also totally dominated the crucially important Austrian export trade. Hulsmann explains:
The starting point for his [Mises’] considerations was that Austria could feed its population of 6.5 million people only as an industrialized nation, which requires entrepreneurs who know how to produce for the world market. In old Austria there had been about a thousand such men. .. At least two-thirds of them were Jews. (Biography, p. 742)
Jewish dominance was even greater in banking. This is at the heart of the Fatal Embrace of regulatory and state capture. For centuries Jews financed kings and in return received various banking privileges. However, this was only the start. Jews helped to create fractional reserve banking system which created money out of nothing. Also in Austria and especially in Galicia banking was largely in the hands of the Jewish Rothschilds. Mises must have known all this but he never said a word about the Jewish role in the development of fractional reserve banking. This despite the fact that he considered it a grave danger to Western civilization.
Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann are not only silent about the economic dominance of the Jews but they also downplay Jewish political history. They do not mention Zionism at all despite the fact that Galicia and its neighboring Moldavia were in many was the birth place of Zionism. Certainly the Mises family must have played a role in its development. An expert of Jewish studies, Yosef Salmon has noted how Galicia was one of the three areas where Zionism developed fastest:
David Gordon, the acting editor of Ha-Maggid, Samuel Joseph Fuenn, the editor of Ha-Karmel in Vilna, and Joseph Kohen-Zedek, the editor of Ha-Mevaser in Galicia. All of these groups were able to find common ground in the Hibbat Zion movement. (Istor)
Also Jewish cultural history is downplayed by Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann. They are especially quiet about the horrific Jewish culture of Talmudism. This despite the fact that especially in Galicia Jewish culture was permeated by Talmudism. And not only that but in its most extremist version! Even Wikipedia notes this:
In the popular perception, Galitzianers were considered to be more emotional and prayerful than their rivals, the Litvaks [Jews in Northern Polish areas], who thought of them as irrational and uneducated. They, in turn, held the Litvaks in disdain, derogatively referring to them as tseylem-kop (“cross heads”),[21] or Jews assimilated to the point of being Christian.[22] (Wikipedia)
Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann are also surprisingly quiet about the development of the Jewish enlightenment, Haskalah in Galicia. However, Hulsmann does note that Mises family was on the side of the reformist Rabbi Abraham Kohn:
The main stumbling block for these [modernizing] projects was the local rabbi, a leader of the orthodox Ashkenazi. After the death of this man in the early 1840s, the Mises faction brought in Rabbi Abraham Kohn, who was well known for his progressive views. Once in Lemberg, Kohn was adamant in pursuing his agenda and must have driven his opponents to despair. In September 1848 he was murdered. (Biography, p. 12)
After this interesting fact about the “Mises faction” Hulsmann drops the subject altogether. This despite the fact that the murder started a long Jewish civil war between the Orthodox and the Reformist Jews. In many ways it was a turning point of Jewish (and world) history. The Mises family seems to have been at the very center of it! But Mises was silent on the subject and so have Rothbard and Hulsmann.
Michael Stanislawski has written a book about the civil war between the Orthodox and the Reformist Jews that centered at Mises’ home town, Lemberg.
Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case.
On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn’s murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg’s Orthodox leaders? (Princeton Press. Emphasis added.)
One reason why historians do not dare to study this period more closely is that the reformist Jews were “moderate” only in the relative sense. All Galician Jews at the time were deeply influenced by the Talmudic culture. The various ludicrous taboos, extreme racism, sexual exploitation of children and the unspeakably cruel treatment of animals is something historians do not dare to research after a century of Philo-Semitic propaganda.
Needless to say Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann do not say a word about “blood libel” accusations. This despite the fact that Galicia was the center of a very conservative Talmudic culture. There were often fears that some Jews might kidnap and sacrifice Gentile children in their religious rituals. Even Jewish sources admit this:
During this period a Jewish community with all its institutions was established in Drohobycz. Kabala scholars, supporters and opponents of the Shabtai Zvi messianic movement as well as hassidic rabbis and their opponents became part of the growing community. The first synagogue was built in the beginning of the 1700s.
In 1718 the body of a murdered Gentile child was discovered. An affluent Jewish woman, Adela Kikenis, was accused of murder and using human blood for Passover matzah. Although her gentile maid eventually admitted to the murder as part of a conspiracy, Mrs. Adela (who had been secretly offered conversion as a condition for freedom, but refused) was executed. The effect of these difficult events left its mark on the community for many years after. (Drohobycz-Boryslaw.org)
The relations between the Jews and the peasants remained strained well into the twentieth century. When Mises was 17 years of age there erupted in Galicia an uprising against the Jews. Mises, Rothabard and Hulsmann do not say a word about it even if it must greatly affected the Mises family.
In the spring of 1898, thousands of peasants and townspeople in western Galicia rioted against their Jewish neighbors. Attacks took place in more than 400 communities in this northeastern province of the Habsburg Monarchy, in present-day Poland and Ukraine. Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked and looted, and Jews were assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, though not killed.
Emperor Franz Joseph signed off on a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and declared martial law in two. Over five thousand individuals―peasants, day-laborers, city council members, teachers, shopkeepers―were charged with myriad offenses. (Daniel Unovsky. The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia.)
Why would thousands of people attack Jews in Galicia where the Mises-Landau families had dominated the economy hundreds of years? It’s a total mystery and not even worth mentioning.
Part III
The Secret Jews
It is not only the background history of Galicia and the Mises family that is censored but so is also their personal history. Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann have a strange aversion to timelines and family trees. This makes it virtually impossible for the reader to understand the large Mises family and its dynastic alliances. Hulsmann too gets confused when he tries to explain the complicated family relations without the help of a family tree. For example, he claims that Ludwig von Mises was Hermann von Mises’ nephew when that is obviously not the case. (Biography, p. 10. Also see family tree below.)
Why is it that there are no family trees of the leading Jewish libertarians? Milton and Rose Friedman refused to reveal the names of their ancestors. So did Murray Rothbard. And now also Mises’ family tree is missing. Fortunately Geni.com has some information so we can create a small preliminary family tree.
[Create a better family tree.]
Unfortunately this family tree based on public information covers only the 1800’s and therefore does not extend to the time when Galicia belonged to Poland and the exploitation of the local population by Jews was at its most horrendous level. However, Fischel Mises was born in 1700’s and already by then the Mises family was the leading family of the capital of Galicia, Lemberg. In fact, Fischel was the president of the local Jewish community. It is therefore safe to assume that the Mises family probably had been one of the chief exploiters of the peasantry in the 1700’s if not earlier.
The family tree also reveals a mighty alliance of Jewish dynasties of the two most important towns of Galicia: Lemberg and Brody. Lemberg was the capital of Galicia but Brody was a rich border town. It was almost totally a Jewish town and had long enjoyed the status of a free economic zone. It was one of the most important Jewish town in the world.
Mises and Nirenstein families dominated Lemberg and the Landau and Kallir families dominated Brody. The marriage of Adele Landau and Arthur Mises sealed the alliance between these four highly intelligent and successful dynasties. Ludwig von Mises was the eugenistic product of these dynasties that was planned for decades if not centuries between the Jewish dynasties of Lemberg and Brody.
Ludwig was bred and trained for great intelligence and power. However, traditional Jewish eugenics was very risky because it often involved inbreeding which easily resulted in various absurd quirks and mental illnesses. It could produce highly intelligent offspring but at the same time could make them very one-sided, moody and in some cases – worst of all – reluctant to have a normal marriage with children. Perhaps this is why Mises and his brother had no children. Hundreds of years of tremendous dynastic effort and they refused to continue the line. No wonder their mother, Adele Mises was apoplectic in her desperation.
In her memoirs Margit wrote that Ludwig had many very strange behavioral quirks. For example, he could totally loose himself in his thoughts.
I took care to have Lu’s room cleaned while he was in the bathroom. He hated any disturbance while he worked, and I would say he started working in the bathroom. More than once he was so deeply in his thoughts that he forgot to turn the faucet off, and only when his feet were deep in water did he realize what was happening around him. Then I had to rush in and help him and assure him again and again that it really did not matter, for he was unhappy that he caused extra work for me. (My Years, p. 71)
Ludwig’s mother Adele seems to have been an intelligent woman but she did not seem to understand the dangers of inbreeding. This can be seen in her memoirs of which suspiciously only one chapter has been published.
If the door to our dining room was occasionally locked so we could enjoy a quiet lunch, as soon as we heard the bell one of us would run to the door to find out who was the supplicant (as was usually the case). I remember my aunt Halberstam angrily remarking to her sister (my dear mother-in-law): “You heartless Lembergers” (there was always an antagonism between Brody and Lemberg) “you sit behind closed door and care about nothing at all!” Actually, my mother-in-law also came from Brody and was compassionate and charitable. The accusation was most unjust. (Adele Mises. A Day in the House of My Parents. Chapter of an otherwise unpublished manuscript written in 1929.)
So Adele’s mother-in-law was her aunt? Adele’s husband Arthur was her cousin? Were the parents of Ludwig cousins? Or did Adele just use the word aunt loosely? How inbred was the Mises family? Geni.com does not include all relatives so only a detailed biographical research would reveal the truth.
The preliminary family tree does reveal how both the maternal and paternal side of Ludwig von Mises’ family had bankers and members of parliament. But were there also rabbis among the ancestors of Ludwig? Mises does not tell us and also Rothbard and Hulsmann are silent on the issue. However, British visitors to Brody noted in 1839 that at least one famous rabbi was a Landau though that does not prove a family connection to Adele.
Standing with us among the tombs, our Jewish guide gave us an affecting account of the death of Rabbi Landau, whose picture we had often seen in Jewish houses. He came from Lemberg when the cholera was raging and visited this burying ground, where he prayed very earnestly over the graves of the rabbis, asking of them forgiveness and promising to be with them soon. He returned to town, sickened and died, and the next day was buried. (Mission of Inquiry. Emphasis added.)
Jewish Encyclopedia states that there were four main branches of Landaus one of which lived in Brody. It seems the British visitors were talking about rabbi Eleazar ben Israel Landau because he died of cholera:
Eleazar ben Israel Landau: Rabbi of Brody, where he died of cholera in 1831. He was the author of a work entitled “Yad ha-Melek,” novella on Maimonides’ “Yad” and notes to the Talmud (parts i. and iv., Lemberg, 1829; part ii. ib. 1810). (Jewish Encyclopedia 1906. Landau family name.)
In her memoirs Adele does tell us that her mother’s cousin was the rabbi of Brody. This must have been rabbi Meier Kristianpoller whose father had been a rabbi of Brody after Eleazar died childless. Probably Kristianpollers were hand picked by the Landaus. Naturally Meier Kristianpoller’s sister then married the banker Nathan Kallir who was also Adele’s relative.
No wonder the Laundaus, Kallirs and Kristianpollers had created a dynastic alliance. They joined together the economic and religious power in Brody. This is why it was easy for them to make Nathan Kallir a member of parliament. Adele came from a very powerful family and was naturally proud of this fact.
On Sunday morning, my mother’s cousin, Brandele Kallir, distributed these gifts in the hospital. The wife of the parliamentary deputy Nathan Kallir, Brandele was the sister of the present, and daughter of the former, rabbi of Brody. She had no children of her own and was a warmhearted, deeply religious woman. They say people in Brody still regard her grave as that of a saint and pray there for her intercession. During a period of 50 years, my granduncle Mayer Kallir was honorary chairman of the hospital. (Adele Mises. A Day in the House of My Parents.)
Rothbard and Hulsmann also do not tell us much about the three paternal uncles of Ludwig. For example, what happened to Heinrich Mises’ oldest son, Max? Why did he not marry? Did he continue the family tradition in banking? And why is it that Heinrich’s fourth and youngest son, Arthur took the dynastic responsibility on his shoulders from which it later passed on to his son, Ludwig? In fact, Ludwig von Mises seems to have become the absolute leader of these dynasties especially since his cousins produced very few children and even less sons.
Ludwig’s wife Margit seems not to have understood any of this. She did not even understand how powerful was her husband’s father, Arthur Mises.
Lu greatly admired his father, who had been a prominent railroad construction engineer in the Austrian government and who died tragically, after a gall bladder operation at the age of fortysix. (My Years, p. 23)
Rothbard must have understood everything but still called Arthur a mere construction engineer.
His father, Arthur Edler von Mises, a Viennese construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was stationed in Lemberg at the time. (Ludwig von Mises, Scholar, Creator, Hero. p. 5)
Hulsmann gives more information:
The Mises family was strongly involved in both of the two major Galician railroad ventures, serving as board members and bankers. A generation later, in the 1870s and 1880s, Ludwig’s father, Arthur Edler von Mises (born on September 6, 1854) worked for the Czernowitz railroad company while his uncle Emil was an engineer for the Carl-Ludwig company. (Biography, p. 9)
Later Hulsmann passingly notes:
“Arthur von Mises was accepted into the civil service as a construction counselor to the railroad ministry in Vienna. In those days, joining the civil service in Vienna was a big improvement in any man’s career: employment in public administration was comparatively rare and far more prestigious than any other field of activity. “(P. 17.)
In other words, it seems that the Mises family was so powerful and so connected with the railroads that despite being a Jew, Arthur was allowed into a high position in imperial administration to look after his family interests in railroads. And not only family but dynastic Jewish interests including the interests of the Rothschilds. Was this part of the regulatory capture that libertarians often complain about?
Mises, Rothabard or Hulsmann do not tell us when Arthur joined the railroad ministry nor even when the family moved to Vienna. Hulsmann explains:
The Mises family moved to Vienna some time between 1883 (when Ludwig’s brother Richard was born) and 1891. The move probably occurred before the fall of 1887, when six-year-old Ludwig began the mandatory four years of elementary schooling. The family settled in a suburban apartment in close proximity to what was then the city of Vienna and today is its first district. From his home at Friedrichstrasse 4, young Mises set out for many excursions and became acquainted with the city, its history, and its people.
Friedrichstrasse 4 was in a very expensive area right in the center of Vienna just one block from the famous boulevard, Ringstrasse. This was the heart of the empire that gradually turned Jewish both metaphorically and literally. Hulsmann does not tell us that the Ringstrasse was called the Judenstrasse, the Jewish Boulevard.
Enter the Jewish Museum Vienna, which uses its new exhibit to remind us that the Ringstrasse boasts a Jewish history that isn’t yet well known. With almost half of the privately held lots owned by Jews, the boulevard was a symbol of Jewish economic success, patronage — and assimilation. Along with much of the bustling, Austrian Jewish life, it ended abruptly in 1938. Aptly titled “Ringstrasse. A Jewish Boulevard,” the exhibit, which runs until October 4, does a great job of showing the basics of the story. ..
Of the privately held lots on the Ring, Jews soon owned 44%. A map in the museum shows around 20 Jewish palais, or mansions, at or near the Ringstrasse; they were named after the families — such as Todesco, Ephrussi, Lieben and Auspitz — that lived there. (Anna Goldenberg. Vienna’s Most Jewish Street. Forward.com. Emphasis added.)
This enormous dominance of a foreign element naturally created a response from the Austrians.
This influx of Jews to Vienna and the rise of a new Jewish upper middle class were not welcomed by non-Jews in Vienna. Already around 1869 one anti-Semitic journalist wrote of “A brand new Jerusalem of the East”. In 1870 Franz Friedrich Masaidek wrote of “The Ringstrasse – the Zion Street of new-Jerusalem”. (Vienna’s Jews and the Ringstrasse. Jewishreneissance.com)
Richard M. Ebeling notes the Jewish part of the city.
With the freedoms of the 1867 constitution, Austrian and especially Galician Jews began a cultural as well as a geographical migration. In 1869 Jews made up about 6 percent of the population of Vienna. By the 1890s, when the young Ludwig von Mises moved to Vienna with his family, Jews made up 12 percent of the city’s population. In District I, the center of the city where the Mises family lived, Jews made up over 20 percent of the population. In the neighboring District II, the portion was over 30 percent.16
But in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there was a stark contrast between these two districts of the city. In District I the vast majority of the Jewish population had attempted to assimilate with their non-Jewish neighbors in dress, manners, and cultural outlook. On the other hand, in District II, bordering on the Danube, the Jewish residents were more likely to have retained their Hasidic practices and orthodox manners, including their traditional dress. It was the visible difference of these Jews, who often had more recently arrived from Galicia, which so revolted the young Adolf Hitler–who was shocked and wondered how people acting and appearing as they did could ever be considered “real Germans.” They seemed such an obviously alien element in Hitler’s eyes.(Richard M. Ebeling. Ludwig von Mises and the Vienna of His Time. Part 1.)
Mises, Margit, Rothbard and Hulsmann tell us little about the Jewish domination of Vienna but even less about the relations between Mises and his Jewish relatives. We get also very little information about Mises’ relationships with bankers, businessmen and politicians. This despite the fact that they all do note that Mises was the chief economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Mises even called himself the “economist of the country”. Hulsmann explains:
He was hired on the spot and began work on the first of April [1909]. After three years of wandering, Mises had finally found an agreeable occupation that would support his afterhours scholarship. He remained in this position for the next twenty-five years.
The Kammer offered me the only field in which I could work in Austria. . . . I have created a position for myself. Officially I was never more than an officer (Beamter) in the Kammer’s executive office . . . ; I always had a nominal superior and colleagues. [But:] My position was incomparably greater than that of any other Kammer official or of any Austrian who did not preside over one of the big political parties. I was the economist of the country. (Biography, 189-190. Emphasis added.)
Why was Mises hired on the spot and why did he almost immediately become de facto representative of Big Business? Perhaps because he represented the Jewish businesses which dominated the Austrian economy?
Mises was now at the heart of the Austrian and even European economy. He not only understood how the banks and businesses worked on a theoretical but also on a practical level. Thus he soon noticed much corruption. But he said nothing. Hulsmann tries to explain this with the supposed high moral attitude of Mises:
Should he unmask his opponents and uncover their corrupt scheme? After much thought, he decided to do nothing of the sort. His mission as an economist was to unmask fallacious economic arguments. If he also discussed the corruption of his opponents, the mission would lose focus. He later summarized his new personal maxim as follows:
An economist must face his opponents with the fictitious assumption that they are guided by objective considerations only. It is irrelevant whether the advocate of a fallacious opinion acts in good or bad faith; it matters only whether the stated opinion is correct or fallacious. It is the task of other people to reveal corruption and inform the public about it. (Biography p. 186-187. Emphasis added.)
So as an economist he could not reveal corruption? But what about as a representative of the Chamber of Commerce? Surely he should reveal actual concrete corruption that is stealing money from the government or consumers? Hulsmann drops the subject. However, he lets Mises continue in a footnote:
Footnote 25. Mises, Erinnerungen, p. 31; Notes and Recollections, pp. 51f. He added: Throughout my life I have held to these principles. I knew a great deal, if not all, about the corruption of interventionists and socialists with which I had to cope. But I never made use of this knowledge, which was not always properly understood by others. . . . It was often held against me that I politely rejected offers to supply me with proof, admissible in courts of law, of embezzlement and frauds by my opponents. (Biography p. 187. Emphasis added.)
Rothbard considers Mises’s attitude “nobel” but still laments it:
Mises came to a decision, which he pursued for the rest of his career in Austria, not to reveal such corruption on the part of his enemies, and to confine himself to rebutting fallacious doctrine without revealing their sources. But in taking this noble and self-abnegating position, by acting as if his opponents were all worthy men and objective scholars, it might be argued that Mises was legitimating them and granting them far higher stature in the public debate than they deserved.
Perhaps, if the public had been informed of the corruption that almost always accompanies government intervention, the activities of the statists and inflationists might have been desanctified, and Mises’s heroic and lifelong struggle against statism might have been more successful. In short, perhaps a one-two punch was needed: refuting the economic fallacies of Mises’s statist enemies, and also showing the public their self-interested stake in government privilege. (Scholar, p. 14. Emphasis added.)
What was the real reason why Mises refused to expose corruption? There were probably at least two reasons: First, he could hardly have stayed as the chief economist of the Chamber of Commerce if he had started to expose extensive corruption. Second, the culprits were often his relatives or the Jewish friends of his extended family. Mises himself often emphasized that Jews dominated the economy of Austria. If he started exposing all the corruption that would make Jews look very bad.
This is also the reason why Mises refused to identify Jewish politicians in his writings. He would not point out that many of the leading socialist and communist revolutionaries were Jews. Also Rothbard and Hulsmann often refuse to identify Jews except when they suffer from alleged “anti-Semitism”. This naturally creates a curious double-standard. When Jews are doing powerful or especially bad things they are not Jews but when they allegedly suffer from “anti-Semitism” they are suddenly Jews. Never the cause and consequence shall meet.
This double standard obviously distorts history and makes it impossible to fully understand the many central events of Mises’ life. Hulsmann seems to realize this and tries to settle for a compromise by adding one very revealing paragraph into his Mises biography:
Socialism and capitalism were but two faces of the same radical and rapid transformation of the economy, society, and politics. For this very reason, both of them lent themselves to the integration of Jewish elites into leadership positions. Just as capitalism enabled a great number of Jewish entrepreneurs, statesmen, and intellectuals such as David Ricardo, Disraeli, and Ludwig Bamberger to rise to wealth and influence, so the socialist movement was a predominantly Jewish movement at the leadership level. Lassalle and Luxemburg in Germany, as well as Kautsky, Bauer, and the Adlers in Austria were all of Jewish origin. In short, liberalism had paved the way for freely experimenting with new modes of production and thus led to the emergence of the factory system. With the large factories came many Jewish capitalists and a proletariat with a Jewish leadership. (Biography, p. 56. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann curiously leaves out the first names of these Jewish socialist leaders but a perceptive reader might remember the surnames and later put two and two together. For example, in 1919 Mises persuaded his good Jewish friend Otto Bauer from a communist coup attempt. As noted, this Jewish connection of Mises probably saved Austria from a communist dictatorship.
Unfortunately adding is not always possible because Hulsmann leaves out from his Jewish list many other important surnames such as the Jewish communist dictator Bela Kuhn of Hungary and Jewish communist dictator Kurt Eisner of Bavaria. These were the neighboring countries of Austria so Mises had connections with them too as we will see. Apparently noticing how many leading communist revolutionaries were Jews would not have been in the interest of the Jews.
Practically all these Jewish Communists were Ostjudes just like Mises. They all came from the same Eastern European Jewish network. Since the Mises-Landau family was most probably running the Galician-Russian intelligence network many of the Jewish Communists were probably part of it. Many even came from Galicia like the hero of the Spartacus and Russian revolutions, Karl Radek (Karol Sobelshon) who was born in Lemberg.
In a footnote Hulsmann notes that also the classical liberal movement was heavily influenced by Jews but does not provide any names.
Footnote 57: Georg Franz has argued that the rising Austro-Jewish establishment was instrumental in promoting a homegrown brand of classical-liberal doctrine. See Franz, Liberalismus—Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der habsburgischen Monarchie (Munich: Callwey, 1955), pp. 145–220, 439.
When listing the attendees of economist Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar Hulsmann does not notice the obvious Jewish domination.
But this was not just any seminar. The group that flocked around Böhm-Bawerk might well have been among the most brilliant crowd of young intellectuals ever gathered in a regular university function. Their names could be taken from any twentieth-century Who’s Who of social scientists: Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Richard von Strigl, Franz Weiss, Felix Somary, Emil Lederer, Rudolf Hilferding, Nicolai Bukharin, Otto Neurath, and Otto Bauer. The members of the seminar would come to be known as either great economists or great Marxists. For better or worse, they would leave their mark on the decades to come. (Biography p. 145. Emphasis added to Jewish names.)
Most of these names are certainly Jewish. Felix Somary would became a classical liberal supporter of Mises and a banker for the Rothschilds. Emil Lederer would publish the social democratic magazine “Die Neue Zeit” while Rudolf Hilferding would become the chief theoretician for the revolutionary Social-Democratic Party. In 1919 Otto Neurath would run the economic planning bureau for the communist dictator Kurt Eisner in Bavaria while Otto Bauer was thinking of starting a communist revolution in Austria. It was a small Jewish circle and Mises must have known all of them quite well.
Perhaps Mises knew personally also another participant of the seminar: Nikolai Bukharin. He was the leading communist theoretician and a close ally of Stalin and Lenin. Rothbard and Hulsmann do not say or wonder if Mises met Bukharin. Or Stalin for that matter. Meeting was quite possible considering that Stalin also stayed and studied in Vienna together with Bukharin and the Jewish friends of Mises. After all, the Bolsheviks were also a Jewish dominated movement. Austro-Marxists and leading Bolsheviks were part of the same powerful Jewish circle. Wikipedia notes that Stalin wrote his most famous work in Vienna with the help of Mises’ Jewish friends.
In January 1913, Stalin travelled to Vienna, where he stayed with the wealthy Bolshevik sympathiser Alexander Troyanovsky.[243] .. There, he devoted himself to examining the ‘national question’ of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the various national and ethnic minorities living in the Russian Empire.[245] …
Stalin had not been able to read German, but had been assisted in studying German texts by writers like Karl Kautsky and Otto Bauer by fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin.[247] He finished the article, which was titled Marxism and the National Question.[248]
Lenin was very happy with it,[249] and in a private letter to Maxim Gorky he referred to Stalin as the “wonderful Georgian”.[250] According to Montefiore, this was “Stalin’s most famous work”.[246] (Wikipedia. Emphasis added.)
All this is not surprising because also Stalin worked for the Rothschilds. He was employed by them at their refinery storehouse in the strategically important Baku oil fields. Stalin was also very useful as a union man and the representative of the Bolsheviks. It was important for the Rothschilds to finance communists because they could create revolutions and especially topple their arch-enemy, the Tsar.
He [Stalin] first lived with Simhovich, a Jewish watchmaker … “Guess why I got up so early this morning?” asked Stalin exuberantly. ” Today I got a job with the Rothschilds at their refinery storehouse. I’ll be earning 6 abaz daily [1 rouble 20 kopecks].” … Stalin started laughing, almost singing: “I’m working for the Rothschilds!”
“I hope,” joked Kandelaki, “the Rothschilds will start to prosper from this moment onwards!” Stalin said nothing, but the understood one another: he would do what he could to ensure that the Rothschilds prospered. (Simon Sebag Montefiore. Young Stalin. p. 90)
Another Böhm-Bawerk seminar participant and friend of Mises, Felix Somary was sometimes handling the contact between Rothschilds and Stalin. So did David Landau whose ancestors seem to have come from Galicia and so might even have been part of the Mises-Landau network.
The Rothschild managing director, David Landau, regularly contributed to Bolshevik funds, as recorded by the Okhrana – whose agents noted how, when Stalin was running the Baku Party, a Bolshevik clerk in one of the oil companies “was not active in operations but concentrated on collecting donations and got money from Landau of the Rothschilds”. It is likely that Landau met Stalin personally.
Another Rothschild executive, Dr. Felix Somary, a banker with the Austrian branch of the family and later a distinguished academic, claims he was sent to Baku to settle a strike. He paid Stalin the money. The strike ended. (Simon Sebag Montefiore. Young Stalin. Emphasis added.)
Identifying Jews is obviously very important in understanding their networks and influence on historical events. Usually book indexes help to clarify the matter. However, Rothbard’s Mises biography does not have an index though he does not identify Jews anyway. Hulsmann’s much more extensive Mises biography does have an index but it does not identify anyone as a Jew. In fact, the word Jew does not appear in the index at all except in the religious Judaic sense and in the context of “Jewish cultural community” and “Jewish tax” (p. 728). Finding Jews with the help of the index is impossible.
In his Mises biography Hulsmann regularly fails to mention who is a Jew but there are also exceptions. For example, Hulsmann reveals an interesting secret: Mises’ wife Margit von Mises (nee Herzfeld) was a secret Jewess!
One would like to hear an explanation why Margit von Mises (1890-1993) hid her Jewishness till the end. Were there many crypto-Jews in her family? And why no one revealed this secret until 2007? Hulsmann does not give any explanation. This is all he has to offer:
They took adjacent hotel rooms in Berchtesgaden. Concerned about appearances, Mises presented Margit as his sister. They enjoyed a wonderful training period for marriage, as he would say. They talked about the problems facing their potential union: she could not fulfill his wish to have a child together; she would have to become Jewish again to appease his mother; his mother would have to be kept out of all marriage preparations because she might jeopardize everything, as she had done on an earlier occasion.79 (Biography, p. 607. Emphasis added.)
Become “Jewish again”? So only now on page 607 we find out that Margit is ethnically Jewish. So who are her family and ancestors? Hulsmann does not tell us. Neither does Rothbard in his Mises biography or in short biographical obituary of Margit. It certainly would be relatively simple to find out about her ancestry. That is what biographers do. Even in the footnote Hulsmann gives us very little information and then drops the subject permanently.
Footnote 79. We are still paraphrasing Margit von Mises’s rather vague record of the events (document in Mises Archive 105). From the phrase “she would have to become Jewish again” one must infer that she had been Jewish before getting married to Ferdinand Serény, a protestant. (Biography, p. 607)
Then during World War II (and 200 pages later) we suddenly hear about Margit’s mother. Hulsmann passingly notes that she has also immigrated to New York. But he does not tell us anything else. Not even her name nor if Margit’s father is also alive. Was part of the paragraph cut out?
There was still no news from Margit’s daughter, Gitta, and the Miseses went through months of apprehension about her fate. By April 1941, however, they knew that she was secure in the company of Louis Rougier’s stepson and on her way to America. By that time, Margit’s mother too resided in New York. (Biography p. 797. Emphasis added.)
What about Margit’s famous daughter, Gitta Sereny (1921-2012)? She must be at least part-Jewish too. But she denies it!
Gitta Sereny read Mein Kampf at 11, heard Hitler address the Viennese at 15 and briefly attended the Nuremberg trials in 1945. A Hungarian, born in Vienna into a landowning family, she is not Jewish. (Independent)
The famous historian David Irving does not seem to know if her nemesis was Jewish. However, Amazon owned IMDb movie database claims that Gitta Sereny was indeed Jewish:
Sereny had Jewish heritage and was the daughter of a Hungarian father and a German mother. Her father died in 1923. She was raised by her mother, an actress. She studied in England and then in Vienna, Austria, at the drama school founded by Max Reinhardt. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, she was physically removed from the drama school by fellow students wearing swastika armbands.
Sereny had to leave for France, where she became a volunteer nurse for displaced children from German occupation. She later immigrated to the USA. When Sereny returned to Europe after the war in 1945, she claimed to be a Catholic. Later, she continued to publicly deny her Jewish heritage, probably because of security reasons and out of fear of prejudice.
The database also notes how Gitta admitted she has not been wholly truthful about her age either.
I am so ashamed. When I was young I wanted to be younger and so shaved two years off my age.
The problem is that Jewish can mean two things: Religion or ethnicity. The problem is compounded by the fact that often Jews (or biographers) change the definition on the fly. So a Jewish communist can claim not to be a Jew because he is an atheist. However, when he is criticized then he is suddenly a Jewish victim of anti-Semitism.
This definitional “flexibility” probably helped Margit, Gitta and many other Jews get away with lies and obfuscations. But why obfuscate in a Mises biography? And possibly cut out paragraphs? Perhaps because Gitta was still alive when Hulsmann’s Mises biography was published in 2007. Hopefully we get more information in the second edition.
The definition of Jewishness plagues Mises’ writings and also his biographies from the beginning to the end. Rothbard tried to solve the problem by keeping almost totally silent about Jews. Hulsmann did not want to do that but he cannot make up his mind how to define a Jew. We are faced with the problem again when Hulsmann tells about Mises’ friend, the famous author Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum) and her group, The Collective. It included many famous people such as the future Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. But Hulsmann does not tell us that they were all Jews. Why? Because they were atheists! But their ethnic Jewishness would certainly help to understand how the group degenerated into a guru or rather rabbi worshiping cult. Hulsmann seems to consider this explanation anti-Semitic. He has another explanation: Religiousness.
In other words, Hulsmann equates Christian church with rabbi worshipping cults so prevalent in Talmudic culture! This despite the fact that Rothbard does not make the same mistake but instead hints at Jewish Trotskyite cells. Rothbard seems to understand that a church has a fixed creed while a cult follows every whim of the guru. Whites usually do not have a tendency to create cults while many Jews do.
Hulsmann explains his curious comparison of Randianism with Christianity:
In the original Rand circle in Manhattan, and in many of the later Randian groups throughout the United States, many members cultivated a religious reverence for the writings and opinions of Ayn Rand. Their attitude to Rand’s writings did not differ essentially from the attitude that Christians hold toward the Bible, and consequently they were in more than one respect the acolytes of a Randian church.
Rothbard, who had personally attended the meetings of Rand’s group for several months, stated that “the fanaticism with which they worship Rand and Branden has to be seen to be believed, the whole atmosphere being a kind of combination of a religious cult and a Trotskyite cell.”14 They demanded unconditional allegiance to their creed and harassed and ousted anyone who would not go along with the party line. (Biography, p. 997. Added emphasis.)
Only at the very end of Hulsmann’s Mises biography can a naive reader infer that Rand was a Jew. How? Because she suffered from anti-Semitism.
In any case, Russell Kirk, a notorious critic of Randianism who had witnessed the discussion, was later reported to have said in his lectures before student audiences that Mises had called Ayn Rand “a silly little Jew girl.”
When the report was brought to Mises’s attention, he immediately wrote to Kirk: “I never called Mrs. Ayn Rand—or for that matter, anyone else—‘a silly little Jew girl.’ I should be obliged if you would not repeat this false story in the future.” Kirk denied it all. (Biography, p. 1002)
The reluctance of Rothbard, Hulsmann and Margit to identify Jews is not surprising considering that neither did Mises himself identify Jews. He wrote many books and articles but hardly ever mentioned Jews. This proves at least one thing: Mises never ever criticized Jewish economic and political activities. Not even when writing about the history of banking. This is like writing about the history of the navies and never mentioning the British.
Part IV
Serving the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers
One additional reason why Mises never liked to identify Jews and especially Jewish bankers could be the fact that the Mises family included many prominent bankers. In fact, they seemed to be allies and fronts of the Rothschilds. Hulsmann downplays this but unlike Mises and Rothbard still reveals the basic facts:
The deal must have gone well, for in 1860, Abraham [Mises’ granduncle] accepted a position as director of Credit-Anstalt’s [Rothschild bank] new Lemberg branch office. (Biography, p. 15)
Mises was obviously bred and educated to become a banker, an ally and front for the Rothschilds like his ancestors. Therefore it is not surprising that the Rothschilds offered Mises an important position in their flag ship bank Credit Anstalt. However, Mises had realized that fractional reserve banking was about to crash. Even the biggest banks were not safe. So Mises refused the position. Margit explains:
One day Lu told me he had been offered a high position at the Credit Anstalt, the foremost banking institution in Vienna, but that he had decided not to accept it. When I asked him the reason for his refusal, he told me that a great “crash” would be coming and that he did not want his name in any· way connected with it.
He preferred to write and teach. “If you want a rich man, he told me, don’t marry me. I am not interested in earning money. I am writing about money, but will never have much of my own.”
I did not need to assure him how I felt. When the stock market crashed in New York in October, 1929, the effect was worldwide. An international depression followed, world trade was seriously affected, and in 1931, on May 11, the Austrian Credit Anstalt went into bankruptcy, exactly as Lu had told me beforehand. (My years, p. 30)
Mises’ refusal to help Rothschilds and the Jewish bankers in general must have enraged not only his family but also the Rothschilds. But Mises was determined not to help the inherently fraudulent banking system. On the other hand he would not reveal the utterly weak state of the Jewish banks either. Mises was still loyal to the Jews but he would not be the fall guy.
Neither would he be the pawn of dynastic alliances. He hated the idea of arranged marriages. This naturally shocked his whole family who expected Mises to marry well and take the dynastic alliance into the next level. The dream, of course, was to some day make a direct family alliance with the Rothschilds. Mises’ mother Adele was busy trying to find as suitable candidates as possible for her two sons. Margit tells us a revealing story:
Once he [Mises] chided me: “If you would not have been, I could have married a very rich heiress.” “Why didn’t you?” I asked him. “We both would have lived happily ever after.” He rejected both my flippancy and my proposal. (My years, p. 27. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann gives us a further hint:
Mises’s own private seminar started on November 26, 1919 with a talk by Elisabeth Ephrussi on Carver’s theory of interest. (Biography, p. 365)
Starting his own seminar was a very important event for Mises. Letting a woman give the very first talk was in those days was very strange especially since the 20-year old Elisabeth Ephrussi was no great intellectual. But it was a great honor. For Mises. It signaled that not only one of the greatest heiresses of all Europe but also the mighty Rothschild-Ephrussi family was hands-on supporting Mises.
The Ephrussi family was truly legendary. They were the Rothschilds of the East who had started their trading and banking empire in Odessa, Russia and then expanded into Paris and Vienna. They intermarried with the Rothschilds and built many palaces the most famous of which is Palais Ephrussi in Vienna. It was located on the most expensive location of the famous boulevard Ringstrasse. In fact, opposite to the Vienna university where Mises was teaching.
Hulsmann downplays these dynastic connections and buries the clincher in a footnote.
Footnote 61: See Mises Archive 17:37. Ephrussi was probably the heiress to the Ephrussi Bank. Margit von Mises mentions Ludwig’s occasional joking remark that he could have married a rich heiress had he not met Margit. He was probably referring to Elisabeth Ephrussi. See Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises, p. 19. (Biography, p. 365. Emphasis added.)
The way Margit told the story it was no joke. And Elisabeth Ephrussi giving the first talk is also revealing. Elisabeth was probably very infatuated with the handsome and highly intelligent Mises who had returned from the First World War as a captain. Not only an officer and a gentleman but also a young professor. And from a good Jewish family.
The Ephrussi and Mises family might even have been related. The patriarch of the Ephrussi family, Charles (Chaim) Joachim Ephrussi had married Henriette Halperson from Lemberg, the home town of the Mises family. Probably the patriarchs, Mayer Mises and Charles Ephrussi knew each other personally. Moreover, Charles’ oldest son Leon Ephrussi married Minna Lindau from Brody. At the time in the 1840’s Adele’s Landau family was one of the leading families of Brody so probably they too had connections with the Ephrussi family. This is all the more likely since both Brody and Odessa were major free trade towns and there had long been extensive business connections between the towns. In fact, many Jewish businessmen had moved from Brody to Odessa.
Galician enthusiasts of Haskalah spread its principles into Russia. A tsarist ukase of 1803 permitted merchants to store imported goods in Odessa without paying taxes and tolls. About 300 Jewish merchants from Brody transferred their main offices to Odessa and established there a big community of Galician, progressive Jews. In 1841, they founded in Odessa their Brody Synagogue, the first in Russia “maintained according to the model of German temples.”56 (Piotr Wrobel. Jews of Galicia Under Austrian-Polish Rule 1867-1918. P. 10)
Arranging the marriage of Ludwig and Elisabeth would have been the perfect Jewish dynastic alliance. Adele’s dream was finally coming true. But then something happened. It must have been the talk of the town. Or at least the Jewish part of the town. We do not know the details but we do know Mises had no desire to marry and even less to be a father. Tidy axiomatic theories were much more interesting than messy home life with children. Adele was exasperated. His son was not only throwing away the perfect dynastic alliance but refusing to continue the line!
There was probably also one other reason why Mises was not that enthusiastic about Elisabeth. She wasn’t exactly a great beauty and she had a temperament. She would probably have been the boss of the family.
But Adele was not going to give up. Elisabeth was still very young. She might wait for Mises to come to his senses. Indeed, Elisabeth remained single despite many very enthusiastic suitors. For years she continued to take part in Mises’ seminar and finished her doctorate in economics. Maybe she waited for Mises. There was still hope. But then Mises met the petite and stunningly beautiful Margit Herzfeld. Even better, she had a pleasant disposition. They hardly ever had any fights. She understood absolutely nothing about science and economics but it didn’t matter. First time in his life Mises was truly in love.
Adele would not have it. Margit turned out to be a Jewess but a crypto who had deserted her family religion and traditions. Even worse – if possible – she was an actress. And she was a widow who did not want (or could not have) more children! A true nightmare for Adele.
Probably Adele soon found out that Margit was also bending the truth. A lot. She claimed to be 29 but was really 35 years old. Hulsmann explains:
[Margit] lied about her age, claiming to be six years younger than she really was. Even on her gravestone, the birth year is incorrectly given as 1896. Her correct birth year is stated, in her marriage certificate as well as in U.S. immigration paperwork, as 1890 (see the 1941 U.S. “Affidavit of Identity and Nationality;” a copy is in Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files). (Biography, p. 518)
Not only Adele but the whole family seems to have forbidden Mises to marry Margit. Hulsmann only notes “the shadow” of the mother.
He [Mises] often came to the Austrian capital in the middle of the week, for one or two days. Whenever he was in Vienna, he visited with Margit. She was still waiting for him; he could not make his mind up about proposing. For another three years, their love could not get out from under the shadow of his mother. (Biography, p.684)
Obviously Adele had forbid Mises to marry Margit but despite this Mises still lived with her mother another 15 years well into his fifties. During all this time Mises continuously wrote love letters to Margit emphasizing how he longed to be with her. Rothbard and Hulsmann do not attempt to explain this strange behavior but Margit mentions how perplexed she was about all this:
I never really understood why Lu stayed with his mother until he left for Geneva. There was no financial reason for it. The only explanation I could find was that his mother’s household was running smoothly-their two maids had been with them for about twenty years-and Lu could come and go whenever it pleased him and could concentrate on his work without being disturbed. There certainly was no inner need for him to stay with her. (My Years, p. 25)
Evidently, Adele refused to even meet Margit. But Mises would not criticize his mother. Margit explains:
Lu lived with his mother, whom I never met, but he rarely mentioned her. However, he never had a word of criticism for her. I soon realized that this silence was the result of a long and bitter struggle with himself. (My Years, p. 23)
Margit tells us what she heard from others about Adele.
People who knew Lu’s mother well told me she was a highly intelligent woman, but with the attitude of a general and a will of iron, showing little warmth or affection for anyone. But I know she did many good things. She was president of the Institute for the Blind and gave much of her time to it.
Professor Hayek told me that while he was attending Lu’s seminar in Vienna, Lu sometimes invited him to his house for lunch or dinner. The long table was always set immaculately, Lu sitting at one side and opposite him, Mrs. von Mises. “She never spoke a word,” said Professor Hayek. “She never participated in the conversation, but one always felt she was there. When the coffee was served she quietly got up and left the dining room.” (My Years, p. 24)
Margit had to wait well over 10 years until Adele died.
Adele von Mises suffered only for a few days. She died on April 18, 1937 and was buried four days later in the presence of her sons. Ludwig had been very close to her—so close that she was an obstacle to marriage with Margit. Now the gates were open for this union. (Biography, p. 708)
Mises married Margit in 1938 and one year later Elisabeth Ephrussi married her first and only husband, Hendrik de Waal.
Margit notes that the over 10 year waiting period seems to have been so painful for Ludwig that he could never talk about it. In fact, Ludwig totally refused to talk about their past together.
But there was one thing about him that I never understood and still don’t understand. From the day of our marriage he never talked about our past. If I reminded him now and then of something, he cut me short. It was as if he had put the past in a trunk, stored it in the attic, and thrown away the key.
In thirty-five years of marriage he never, never-not with a single word-referred to our life together during the thirteen years before our marriage. As the past was part of my life, part of the person I became, I could not forget. His silence about the past remains in my mind like a crossword puzzle that one cannot solve because one needed letter is missing. (My Years, p. 43)
Perhaps the missing letter is J as Jews. Mises had been under tremendous pressure to fulfill his dynastic duties. But he would not budge. He would not directly work for the Rothschilds nor would he marry into their network. He was his own man. But he was not disloyal. He obeyed his mother while she was alive and neither would he ever criticize the Rothschilds.
But what about the Rockefellers? They are not Jews so Mises must at least have criticised their cartellistic business and banking network? No. Not a word. Why not? Because there seems to have been also a strong connection between Mises family and the Rockefellers: Oil. Galicia was the third biggest oil producer in the world! The historian Alison Fleig explains this now forgotten fact:
Thanks to its Galician oil fields, Austria-Hungary was the third-largest oil-producing region in the world in 1909, accounting for 5 percent of world production. (Alison Fleig. Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2005. p. 4)
The production of Galician oil skyrocketed. Most was exported thus disrupting the oil export markets dominated by the Rockefellers.
Since the Jews had the capital it is not surprising that they also had a major role in the new oil companies. Alison Frank notes that most well owners and managers were Jews but does not go into details. Luckily Julien Hirszhaut fills out the blanks. In his book The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia he chronicles the role of the Jews in the Galician “California” and how it created a frenzy in oil shares.
Mises and Rothbard say nothing about the oil. Hulsmann mentions it but downplays its significance for the fortunes of the Mises family:
After directing a branch office for a large insurance company and exploring for petroleum in Galicia, Hermann [Mises] moved to Vienna in the early 1870s to work for a major newspaper, the Morgenpost. In 1873 he became a one term member of the Reichsrat (the Austrian parliament) for the Galician district of Sambor-Stryj-Drohobycz, then returned to journalism, writing for another major paper, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, where he was a tireless advocate for the industrialization of Galicia. (Biography, p. 10)
It sounds like Hermann was a man of many talents. First he tried some oil drilling but then changed his mind and became a journalist. He became so popular that he was elected to the parliament but then failed to get in the second time. After this he continued journalism and became “tireless advocate” of industrialization of Galicia. That is a very anachronistic interpretation. In reality dynasties rule. Luckily we can try to deduce the real story from the facts buried in the footnote.
[Footnote 17:] There seems to have been an oil boom in what came to be called the “Galician Pennsylvania”—Hermann’s election district around Drohobycz, an area southwest of Lemberg. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Galicia was the number four producer of petroleum worldwide, after Russia, the United States, and the Dutch East Indies. See Balduin Winter, “Die Rückkehr zum Kind. Wirklichkeit ist mehr als Realität. Drohobycz, die Heimat des Dichters und Traumtänzers Bruno Schulz im vergessenen Europa,” Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung (literature section; March 30, 2001). (Biography, p. 11. Emphasis added.)
In other words Galicia was one of the biggest oil producing areas in the world and the Mises family was intimately connected with it. Alison Fleig notes that Drohobycz had the biggest oil refinery in Europe. (p. 237) Probably Mises family was involved in it too. After all, the Mises family was the leading Jewish family in Galicia. They not only financed and insured the local oil companies through their banks and insurance companies but drilled oil themselves. The Drohobycz-Boryslaw oil fields were located almost next to Lemberg.
It seems all this business made very much money for the Mises family. No wonder Hermann Mises soon moved to Vienna and was almost immediately elected to parliament from that oil boom region the Mises family had helped to create. In parliament Hermann probably made sure that the interests of Mises family were protected. After one term in the parliament Hermann retired and made sure Galicia sent to parliament only those politicians who were fronts for the Mises family. To ensure this the alliance between two leading Galician Jewish dynasties was cemented by arranging the marriage between Arthur Mises and Adele Landau. The product of this dynastic alliance was Mises himself.
Rothbard and Hulsmann seem oblivious to all these dynastic aspects. Hulsmann even repeatedly claims that the Mises family was not wealthy:
His [Mises’] family had not been wealthy but they had always been comfortable, had always had help in the household. (Biography p. 801. Emphasis added.)
The power of the Mises family really boggles the mind. For generations they had been the leading family of Galicia. Rothbard and Hulsmann downplay this by emphasizing that Galicia was the poorest province of Austria. Yes, but that only increased the power of the Mises family. Both the Ukrainian peasants and the Jews saw the rich Mises-Landau family as masters. Furthermore, Galicia was the crown jewel of the Empire. In many ways it was the most important province. First, it was the biggest Austrian province in both geographically (78,550 km2) and in population (8 million). Second, it was the bread basket of Austria. Third, it was not only the third biggest producer of oil in the world but also the only oil production area in Austria and the Germanic world. The Germanic armies were totally dependent on Galician oil. Fourth, it had the most Jews anywhere in Europe outside Russia. Fifth, it was strategically and militarily the key area between Austria and Russia.
The strategic position of the Mises-Landau family was so central that they most certainly were also running a Jewish intelligence and terrorist network on the Russian side. This network probably also included the family of Rose Friedman as noted in the article on Milton Friedman. It probably linked with the network of the Ephrussi family who together with the Rothschilds were financing Stalin and other terrorists in Russia. The network might have also included Trotsky’s banker family in Odessa. Murray Rothbard’s maternal family might also have been part of this Jewish Rothschild-Ephrussi-Mises network. In fact, Rothbard might have been Ephrussi himself!
The fact is that Rothbard refused to tell the name of his maternal ancestors. But two years ago the Mises Institute came into possession of an autobiographical essay written by Rothbard while he was still a high school student. He tells about his mother’s family but curiously fails to name names. For some reason he took them to his grave and nobody seems to have studied the subject.
My mother’s background, though different, is just as colorful. Her family abounded in the traditions and characteristics of the old Russian aristocracy. My grandmother’s family, especially, had reached the highest pinnacle that the Jews in Czarist Russia could have achieved, One ancestor founded the railroads in Russia, one was a brilliant lawyer, another was a prominent international banker; in short, my mother’s family was raised in luxury and wealth. (Emphasis added.)
The Ephrussis had reached the highest pinnacle that the Jews in Czarist Russia could have achieved. They helped found the railroads in Russia and they were prominent international bankers. It is difficult to find any other Jewish family that would fit Rothbard’s description. Was Rothbard an Ephrussi? Or was he just exaggerating? Maybe her mother just told him made-up stories about her life in Russia? Or maybe she told the truth?
Perhaps revealingly Rothbard never wrote a word about the Ephrussis. Even in his Mises biography he went out of his way to avoid mentioning Ephrussis in general and Elisabeth Ephrussi in particular. Even when telling about the female participants of the Mises seminar Rothbard left out Elisabeth Ephrussi.
The number of devoted women members of the Mises seminar was remarkable for that era in Europe. Helene Lieser, later for many years Secretary of the International Economic Association in Paris, was the first woman to attain a doctorate in the social sciences in Austria. Ilse Mintz was the daughter of economist Richard Schüller, a student of Menger’s and permanent Undersecretary of Trade (later at the New School for Social Research.) Ilse Mintz later emigrated to America and worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and taught at Columbia University. Other leading women members were Marianne von Herzfeld and Martha Stephanie Braun (Browne), who later taught at Brooklyn College and New York University. (Scholar, p. 39-40. Emphasis added.)
Why was not Elisabeth a “leading woman member” or “a devoted woman member” of the Mises’ seminar? Did Rothbard just forget the most famous female member of the Mises seminar?
If Rothbard really was related to the Ephrussi family it would certainly have created many interesting discussions between Mises and Rothbard. They could even have been in-laws if Mises had married Elisabeth. World is a small place. Or at least the world of the Jewish intellectuals born out of age-old Jewish eugenics.
[WRITE AND LINK ARTICLE: ROTHBARD AND EPHRUSSI]
Mises-Landau dynasty was so powerful and their position so strategically important that it is no wonder that the Rothschilds offered them leading positions in their banks. For the same reason it seems certain that also the Rockefellers were very interested in the Mises family. And the interest only grew because at the turn of the century an oil war started between the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. Rothbard says nothing about the Mises family but does note the oil war:
After the turn of the century, …. Also, at about the same time, a long-lasting and world-wide financial and political “oil war” broke out between Standard Oil, previously a monopolist in both the crude and export markets outside of the U.S., and the burgeoning British Royal Dutch Shell–Rothschild combine.
And since the Morgans and Rothschilds were longtime allies, it is certainly sensible to conclude – though there are no hard facts to prove it – that Teddy Roosevelt launched his savage anti-trust assault to break Standard Oil as a Morgan contribution to the worldwide struggle. Furthermore, Mellon-owned Gulf Oil was allied to the Shell combine, and this might well explain the fact that former Morgan-and-Mellon lawyer Philander Knox, TR’s Attorney-General, was happy to file the suit against Standard Oil. (Murray Rothbard. Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy. 1984. p. 14. Read online. Emphasis added.)
Did Rockefellers offer the Mises family an alliance? Unlikely, since the Mises family were Jews squarely in the Rothschild camp and thus probably allied with the Shell combine. But why fight if you can make a deal? As noted previously even Stalin was working for the Rothschilds as a union man and a gangster terrorist. Could it be that the deal was for the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers together destroy the Tsar or at least the oil exports of Russia? It seems that precisely this was done in 1904 by pushing the Japanese to attack Russia from outside and the socialist terrorists from the inside. Certainly Mises had to understand all this since his family had an important role in running the Jewish spy and terrorist network.
[WRITE AND LINK TO ARTICLE: ROTHSCHILDS AND ROCKEFELLERS UNITE AGAINST THE TSAR]
Some libertarians have wondered why Mises did not seem to be aware of the fact that communists and especially the Bolsheviks were dominated by Jews. In fact, he knew more than they could imagine. But he never said a word.
Mises must also have realized that in 1916 there was the deal of the century. The First World War had entered into a stalemate and peace negotiations had started. When peace was breaking out suddenly the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers offered the Entente powers a deal: Topple the Czar and and give Jews Palestine and America will enter the war on the side of the Entente. So the British and the French joined forces with the Rothschild financed Russian liberals and socialists. In February 1917 they together stabbed the Czar in the back. Soon he was toppled and replaced with Lenin’s friend, Philo-Semitic Alexander Kerensky who continued the Russian participation in the war.
But the continuation of the war was pointless for the non-Zionist Jews. They had already toppled the Czar and won. Perhaps this is why Mises seems to have totally lost his enthusiasm for the war. First his family helped him get off the front. Then together with his Jewish friends Mises started to help Jews skirt front duty. Hulsmann calls this “missions of mercy”.
Mises was known to be responsive to calls for getting people out of the death zone and into an administrative position in Vienna or elsewhere. He was often helped in these missions of mercy by his friends Victor Graetz and Ludwig Bettelheim-Gabillon. (Biography, p. 289)
Jews helping other Jews get off the front definitely didn’t look good. In fact, it helped to create the stab in the back theory. But Mises did not care since he was now almost openly against the continuation of the war. Plus he had the support of most Jews including the Rothschilds who wanted it all: Russia, Palestine and the continuation of the Philo-Semitic Austrian Empire.
Mises’s success in placing others was at least in part due to his increased notoriety. His courageous public opposition to the war party and its claims for the economic benefits of military expansion had not changed policy, but it had attracted interest to him and his work. (Biography, p. 289)
As a consequence Mises’ relations with the Germans worsened. They wanted to continue the war much more than the Austrians who feared for the disintegration of their empire. The German attitude enraged Mises and for the rest of his life he blamed German imperialism for everything. But the Germans were at least half right. The war in the Eastern Front went better than expected. Bolsheviks were destroying Russia from inside and the Russian army was collapsing. In February 1918 the German and Austrian armies occupied Ukraine. No more Black Hundreds and other anti-Semitism in Ukraine! The Mises family was overjoyed.
Naturally the Jews now wanted to have a big role in ruling Ukraine. Hulsmann notes that Mises was offered a position as the chief banker and monetary lord of occupied Ukraine!
In June 1918, Otto Katz, director of the Union Bank in Vienna, approached Mises on behalf of a financial policy mission to solve the currency problems in the Ukraine. Mises would be charged with monetary policy in this important occupied territory. (Biography, p. 294)
Already in 1915 Mises had realized that the Russian army could collapse and so he started to learn Ukrainian. Apparently Mises and his parents had never previously considered the language important enough even if the vast majority of the population of Eastern Galicia was Ukrainian. But since now Jews and Germans could rule Ukraine the language would be very useful. Hulsmann passingly notes:
Apparently, Ludwig even found time now to study the Ruthenian language, possibly to prepare for the establishment of a new local administration.20 (Biography, p. 264)
Naturally Mises would have represented the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers as the monetary lord of Ukraine. The offer again shows the high strategic position of the Mises family. One wonders if other members of the Mises-Landau families took prominent positions in the occupied Ukraine. After all, they had close relations with the Ukrainian Jews and run the intelligence network together with the Austrian military. Perhaps Murray Rothbard’s and Rose Friedman’s families were also involved in this.
But the American entry into the war had started to change the situation on the Western front especially since the German Jews were now against the war. Suddenly in November 1918 the Central powers capitulated. Austria broke up into small countries. Also Galicia became independent when in November 1918 West Ukrainian Republic was proclaimed. It had the support of the Galician Jews. This certainly included the Mises-Landau dynasties but Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann have not said a word about this independent Galician state. This despite the fact that it was financed by the oil exports. Probably the Mises-Landau family was supporting the government and helping to run the oil companies.
Independent Galicia was a dream come true for the Mises family. But the Ukrainian peasants were not enthusiastic in supporting and defending a Jewish dominated country. In the summer of 1919 Eastern Galicia was invaded and annexed by Poland which lusted after the Galician oil. The power of the Mises family was greatly reduced since the Poles were now totally hostile towards the Jews.
The First World War had hit Mises family very badly. They had lost their Galicia. Then Mises made the situation of his family even more difficult by refusing to be the fall guy for the Rothschilds. However, he did adjust his opinions somewhat. In the 1924 second edition of Money and Credit Mises suddenly started to defend the undermining of the gold standard! Obviously, the Rothschilds were talking when Mises wrote:
The gold-exchange standard has not been recommended or adopted with the object of dethroning gold. (p. 393)
It is probably not a coincidence that after downplaying the efforts of both the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers in undermining the gold standard Mises received enormous grants to establish a research institute.
The year 1926 brought another improvement in Mises’s good fortune. He started cooperating with the Rockefeller Foundation and established an Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, which allowed his young political allies—most notably Friedrich Hayek—to earn a living in economic research. (Biography. p. 566)
In the 30s Nazis drove Mises out of Austria altogether. It was then that the Rockefellers came to the rescue again and financed much of Mises’ later career. Hulsmann tries to downplay this fact:
Mises’s long-standing and close association with the Rockefeller Foundation proved to be beneficial once again. He himself had been very active in helping colleagues from Germany find new jobs abroad after Hitler rose to power in January 1933, and at least some of these new positions were likely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. It was natural therefore that he himself receive support once the political situation in Austria became untenable for him. This was certainly the case after the violence of February 1934 and its aftermath.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that Mises was on the payroll of the Rockefeller Foundation (this was effectively precluded both by Rappard’s insistence that funds be received with no strings attached and by the co-financing of the Institute from Swiss sources) the fact remains that during the Geneva years Mises’s salary was paid to a large extent out of Rockefeller money, and so things would remain for the next decade.13 (Biography, p. 689. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann does note that the Rockefellers kept financing many kinds of economists but the biggest money went to the economists who developed quantitative economics.
The most immediate common bond among these groups was that they all depended on funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which in those very years launched a massive international program of business-cycle research with a special focus on economic stabilization. The Foundation not only funded the economists working at the League of Nations and at Rappard’s Graduate School, but also business cycle institutes in Louvain, New York, Paris, Sofia, Vienna, and Warsaw. Its officers were careful not to impose any research agenda, but their wishes could not be ignored.
Thus a group of financially endowed laymen had a decisive impact on the path that business-cycle research would follow over the course of the coming decades. The League’s authority and Rockefeller’s money gave leadership to people such as Alexander Loveday and Alvin Hansen; business-cycle research would henceforth be conducted with an increasingly quantitative orientation.16 By the time Mises moved to Geneva, he was already an anachronism—a vestige of the early Rockefeller involvement in the social sciences. (Biography, p. 691. Emphasis added.)
Why would Rockefellers push for quantitative economics such as the Chicago School of Milton Friedman? Because it would be more easy to turn that into interventionist economics. Rockefellers needed economists who would and could help them to manipulate banking and the economy in general in favor of Big Business. But why then still finance Mises too? Because that is how you buy loyalty or at least silence. Mises often criticized the direction economics was taking but he never ever hinted whose money was talking.
Mises kept silent but hated being manipulated. Even more he hated that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers had been able to steer the economic science toward relativism, interventionism and paper money. During the 30s Mises tried to desperately find some other source of significant financial support but failed. Only after moving to America did Mises find another benefactor, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). In other words, Big Business again. However, NAM was at the time controlled by anti-New Deal businessmen who saw in Mises an important intellectual ally. Just when the Rockefellers were ditching the stubborn Mises the NAM came to the rescue. Hulsmann explains:
The second year’s bonus was a not-so-subtle good-bye. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Willits made it clear, and NBER’s Carson made it even more stark, that this extension would be the last one.
Fortunately for Mises, he had found a more amenable source of support independent of the Rockefeller Foundation: the National Association of Manufacturers. NAM leadership opposed the New Deal and other statist projects. These men were determined to prepare a counterattack, starting a largescale campaign to educate the American public about the benefits of what they called the free enterprise system. NAM needed intellectual leadership from people who were conversant both in the world of business and in the world of ideas. By February 1943, they had discovered what they were looking for in the person of Ludwig von Mises. (Biography, p. 822)
Now financially secure Mises did something he had never done before. In his 1949 magnum opus, Human Action he admitted he had made an intellectual mistake though he claimed it was caused by his naivete:
In dealing with the problems of the gold exchange standard all economists — including the author of this book — failed to realize the fact that it places in the hands of governments the power to manipulate their nations’ currency easily. Economists blithely assumed that no government of a civilized nation would use the gold exchange standard intentionally as an instrument of inflationary policy. (Human Action, 1949, p. 786. Emphasis added.)
Mises went independent. He would not be a stooge. But he would never directly criticize the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds either.
Part V
Culture of Critique
One reason why Mises did not like to identify Jews must have been that he did not like to remind people how Jews dominated the cultural revolution that was sweeping the West. Mises never liked to talk about the Jewish Culture of Critique and neither did Margit or Rothbard. However, Hulsmann tries to grapple with the subject. But only by denying that the problem exists. After all, the Jewish Culture of Critique is valuable and glorious.
Having so many people in so small a city contributed to making Vienna—from the 1870s to the 1930s—a cultural hothouse that would shape much of what was most valuable in twentieth-century civilization. In those years Vienna became the birthplace of phenomenology, medicine, psychoanalysis, Zionism, and Jugendstil (art nouveau). It was one of the cradles of modern analytical philosophy … (Biography, p. 24. Emphasis added.)
The period between 1870 and 1930 was precisely the time Jews dominated the culture of Vienna and Europe until Nazis shut down all the relativist movements including the degenerative arts. Hulsmann again quotes Johnston who considers all that degeneration a Jewish “achievement”.
By the 1890s, the Jewish impact on Viennese culture could not be overlooked. William Johnston remarks that at the turn of the century, when the Jewish population represented less than 9 percent of Vienna, it was responsible for almost half of the overall artistic and scientific achievement. .. Their rugged individualism transformed Vienna and western culture in the course of a few glorious decades. (Biography, p. 29, 32. Emphasis added.)
Various degeneration theories tried to explain how Fin de siecle and especially the turn of the century Vienna became a hothouse of ideas that brewed many relativist and even nihilist ideas and values. Nobody denies the hothouse or the prominent role of Jews but the interpretations differ. Some saw it as destructive while others saw it as glorious. The different interpretations are especially clear in modern art which some saw liberating while others degenerate.
The Jewish Culture of Critique has now won so thoroughly in the West that historians do not anymore try to cover it up. Instead they laud it. Some modern historians such as Steven Beller even admit that so called anti-Semitism is not an irrational disease but a rational reaction to Jewish refusal to assimilate. But the calls for assimilation are now seen as morally repugnant intolerance and racism. Jews are openly lauded for their dominating role in counter-culture that created the modern relativist and multiculturalist society. Beller also makes it clear that for the Viennese Jews the modernist counter-culture was a means to gain power.
In Vienna especially the Jewish role was predominant. Some of the major figures of Viennese modern culture mentioned above, such as Adolf Loos and Georg Trakl, Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, were not Jewish, but the vast majority were. The Jewish presence among creative figures in the plastic arts was not that large, although Jews were prominent as patrons, art critics and propagandists, and eventually as art historians. In most other modern cultural fields, especially the movements and circles mentioned above, such as psychoanalysis, the Vienna Circle, Austro-Marxism and literary Young Vienna, the people involved were in a large majority Jewish or of Jewish descent. The liberal professions – lawyers, physicians and journalists – also had a majority Jewish presence, and it has often been claimed that the public for Viennese modern culture was also heavily Jewish. ..
The fall of Vienna to political antisemitism in the 1890s left Jews threatened with social ostracization, politically alienated and faced with the atavistic return of Vienna’s Catholic Baroque culture, albeit in modern disguise. Many of the more educated and articulate members of emancipated Viennese Jewry responded by further committing themselves to the emerging modern culture, as both beyond mere ethnicity and politics, but also as a means to liberation and eventual power. What emerged in Vienna 1900 as a result was a powerful re-examination of contemporary assumptions about progress and modernity, and a searing critique of the very foundations of modern thought and society. (Steven Beller. A Concise History of Austria. Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 194-196.)
It was one thing for degenerates to invent new shockingly immoral or absurd relativist ideas but quite another to spread them to the masses through salons, theaters, newspapers and universities. Somebody had to be paying for all that. It is probably safe to say that these relativist Jewish dominated movements would never have escaped the asylum and taken over Western culture without the support of very rich Jewish bankers and businessmen such as Charles Ephrussi.
In about 1880, Charles Ephrussi became interested in the art of the Impressionists and, within the next few years, purchased some 40 works by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Pissarro, among others. He has been identified as the man in a top hat standing with his back to us in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).
An account of the collection hanging in his study appears in a letter written in 1881 by the Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue (later published in La Revue blanche). But, to the distress of some of the Impressionists, he continued to buy other types of art, including pictures by his friends Gustave Moreau and Paul Baudry. (Wikipedia)
It was the rich Jews who financed modernist movements and spread them especially through the newspapers, Judenpress. Or the Lugenpress (fake news) as the conservatives called it. Hulsmann proudly notes the role of the Rothschilds.
The leading organ of this liberal Jewish immigrant community was the Neue Freie Presse, which relied on the financial backing of the CreditAnstalt bank, the Austrian flagship of the house of Rothschild. (Biography, p. 30)
Hulsmann claims that the readers of the Neue Freie Presse has exquisite taste in culture but were naive in politics.
[T]he paper took an increasingly pro-German and anti-Slav stand. Under its mentor and editor Moritz Benedikt (1849–1920), it fanned anti-Slav feelings among Austro-Germans. It lauded the post-1880 alliance with Germany, and in 1914 positively welcomed war as an ally of Wilhelm II. . . . The Neue Freie Presse resembled the liberal bourgeoisie who read it: exquisite taste in culture accompanied by naivete in politics. (Biography, p. 30)
Perhaps the readers had neither exquisite taste nor naivety. What many of them had was a Jewish agenda. They wanted to undermine Gentile power both in culture and politics. This is why they supported relativist modernist movements in art and imperialism in foreign policy. The Jewish editor Moritz Benedikt and his Jewish backers knew what they were doing. They hated the “anti-Semitic” Slavs and wanted Austria to ally with Germany to destroy the protector of the Slavs, the Russian Czar. It is the Jews who were most enthusiastic supporters of German imperialism. It was good for the Jews.
Mises seems to have personally known many of the editors of the Neue Freie Presse. Hulsmann notes that the wife of the economics editor of the Neue Freie Presse took part in Mises’ lecture seminars.
The presence of Strigl and of Helene Dub, wife of the economics editor of the Neue Freie Presse, … (Biography, p. 288)
Richard M. Ebeling notes that Mises wrote for the Neue Freie Presse. Ebeling also notes the dominant position of Jews in journalism and many other fields.
By the beginning of the twentieth century more than 50 percent of the lawyers and medical doctors in Vienna were Jewish. The leading liberal and socialist newspapers in the capital were either owned or edited by those of Jewish descent, including the New Free Press, the Viennese newspaper for which Mises often wrote in the 1920s and 1930s.
The membership of the journalists’ association in Vienna was more than 50 percent Jewish. At the University of Vienna in 1910, professors of Jewish descent constituted 37 percent of the law faculty, 51 percent of the medical faculty, and 21 percent of the philosophical faculty. At the time Mises attended the university in the first decade of the twentieth century, almost 21 percent of the student body was Jewish. The high proportion of Jews in literature, theatre, music and the arts was equally pronounced.22 (Richard M. Ebeling. Ludwig von Mises and the Vienna of His Time)
Even conservative newspapers such as Neue Wiener Journal were dominated by Jews.
Even newspapers which were conservative in profile, clerical or antisemitic, could be staffed by Jews. [. . .] Tietze [a historian] gives the example of the Neue Wiener Journal, but his was not the only case. (Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 39.)
Mises’ wife Margit had very close connection with Neue Wiener Journal. Its Jewish owner was a great admirer of Margit.
Not that I could not have married again. There was Oscar Loewenstein, the always cheerful, elegant owner and publisher of the Neue Wiener Journal, whose sister-in-law was Gitta’s godmother and who was in love with me for years. (My Years, p. 29)
Incredibly Jews were even more over-represented in cultural journalism.
The history of Jewish journalism and of the Viennese press in general, it has been said, almost amount to the same thing. Especially noteworthy is the fact that the three main cultural journals of the turn of the century were run primarily by Jews: Die Zeit by Heinrich Kanner and Isidor Singer, along with Hermann Bahr (not of Jewish descent), Die Wager, edited by Rudolf Lothar, and Die Fackel, by Karl Kraus. At the editorial level of the liberal press the Jewish presence was dominant. (Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Ibid. p. 39.)
Jewish writers and artists were not shy to use their Jewish networks to promote their work.
In Vienna especially the feuilleton review was one of the arbiters of taste. When Arthur Schnitzler wanted to prove the worth of his play Liebelei so that Burckhard would perform it (against the advice of Hermann Bahr), he persuaded Theodor Gomperz to ask Ludwig Speidel, the Burgtheater feuilletoniste for the Neue Freie Presse, to give his opinion. Speidel’s praise meant that the performance went ahead.
Hanslick, Speidel’s colleague for the music review, is well known to have ruled the musical taste of the whole city. His successor was Julius Korngold. After 1918, the feuilleton staff of the Neue Freie Presse consisted of five of Vienna’s best critics: Raoul Auernheimer, Felix Salten, Ernst Lothar, Korngold and A. F. Seligmann. All five were of at least partly Jewish descent. (Ibid. P. 39-40.)
It is no coincidence that when Jews started to dominate journalism and universities relativism gradually increased and the Culture of Critique developed. But did Mises personally support it? To answer this question we have to divide Culture of Critique into smaller parts and logical stages.
- Relativist science
- Freudian psychology
- Anti-Christian morality
- Subjective ethics
- Modernist aesthetics
- Boazian multiculturalism
- Cosmopolitanism
- Open borders
- Frankfurt School
- Globalism
1. Relativist science
When Mises started his studies in the University of Vienna the prevailing philosophy of science was historicism. In Germany it was propagated by the Historical School and in America by the Institutional School. It claimed that there are only laws of natural science but no universal social laws. In human sciences there is only history. Economics and sociology are just part of history and especially the study of institutions.
Mises also noticed how the extreme empiricists, the logical positivists challenged historicism by claiming that only the methods of natural sciences are scientific. Even history and economics can be studied with the methods of natural sciences. Utilities of individual actions can be summed up or at least predicted with mathematical formulas and equilibrium models.
Then in 1903 Mises read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics and realized that there is a third alternative: Rationalism, which is the original Western philosophy developed by the Stoics, Scholastics and Kantians. Rationalist philosophy proves the existence of realistic axioms and social laws such as the laws of economics. Soon Mises became a hard-core Austrian School rationalist who considered both historicism and empiricism totally unsuited for economics. They poisoned economics with relativism and scientism which inevitably leads to interventionism or full-blown socialism. In fact, governments tend to support relativist philosophies and scientism because they give rulers and bureaucrats a free hand.
For the rest of his life Mises would not budge. First he fought against the historicists and then later empiricists who were gradually taking over economics. He not only defended rationalism but also further developed it by creating an axiomatic method in economics: The logic of action, praxeology. So in economics Mises certainly was against the relativist tide. However, curiously he did still greatly respect the relativists like the extreme empiricist Ernst Mach and the extreme historicist Edmund Husserl. Mises even believed they should gain prestigious university positions.
In this soil, Bolzano’s epistemology, Mach’s empiricism, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Breuer’s and Freud’s psychoanalysis reached maturity. .. It would be a mistake to assume that the Austrian government promoted all of these great movements. On the contrary, it withdrew the teaching assignments of Bolzano and Brentano; it isolated Mach, and did not bother at all with Husserl, Breuer, and Freud. (Ludwig von Mises. Memoirs, p. 31)
There are two explanations for Mises’ attitude. First, he might have believed that all significant intellectual movements should be represented at the universities. There should be a free market place of ideas. Then students would be free to choose. Gradually the best ideas would then win in this free competition. Needles to say this kind of attitude is quite naive especially in government universities. Rothbard notes that this intellectual laissez faire attitude was prevalent among the leaders of the Austrian School and thus hurt the movement dearly:
But there is, I believe, another important reason for this shameful treatment [of Mises not getting full professorship] that Craver does not mention and that Mises hints at in his memoir, although perhaps without seeing the significance. Unlike their successful enemies, such as Schmoller and Lujo Brentano, and even Wieser, neither Menger nor Böhm-Bawerk saw the academic arena as a political battlefield to be conquered. Hence, in contrast to their opponents, they refused to promote their own disciples or followers, or to block the appointment of their enemies. In fact, Böhm-Bawerk leaned even further backward to urge the appointments of sworn enemies of himself and of the Austrian School.
This curious form of self-abnegation helped to torpedo Mises’s or any similar academic appointment. Menger and Böhm apparently insisted on the naive view that truth will always win out, unaided, not realizing that this is hardly the way truth ever wins out in the academic or any other arena. Truth must be promoted, organized, and fought for as against error.
Even if we can hold the faith that truth, unaided by strategy or tactics, will win out in the long run, it is unfortunately an excruciatingly long run in which all too many of us—certainly including Mises—will be dead. Yet, Menger adopted the ruinous strategic view that “there is only one sure method for the final victory of a scientific idea, by letting every contrary proposition run a free and full course.” (Scholar, p. 20-21)
But there is an another explanation. Mises did not mind relativist philosophies and ideologies because he believed they all have a place in science. Historicism was useful in history, empiricism in natural science and rationalism in economic science. But he went even further: Historicism and empiricism could be useful also in certain human sciences such as psychology and ethics. Mises defended rationalism in economics but otherwise he was not afraid of relativism. He also realized that for thousands of years rationalism had been the backbone of Western science and culture. It produced many good scientific theories but also “intolerant” Western culture and the discrimination of Jews. This is probably why he left the backdoor open for relativism and the Culture of Critique. After all, many of the relativists were Jews who increased “tolerance” by undermining traditional Western ideas and values.
2. Freudian psychology
As noted Mises also defended psychoanalysis. From the very beginning he seems to have been very enthusiastic about Freudianism. This despite the fact that it was originally a Jewish movement that resembled a rabbinic cult. It not only relativized and pathologized individual responsibility and self-restraint but at the same time weaponized psychology against Gentiles. Despite all this Mises called it a “great movement” worthy of university appointments.
Mises defended Freud and seemed to give the impression that he was so discriminated against that he could not teach at the university. However, Freud was an associate professor and did have the right to teach at the university. Friedrich von Hayek explains:
Both Mises and Freud had the title “professor,” but it was purely a title. They were Privatdozenten, had a license to teach, and they were called “professor,” but never received a penny from the university. (Hayek on Hayek, p. 60)
What Mises seemed to be saying is that Freud should have received a payed position as a professor. Mises must have valued psychoanalysis. Did he also participate in Freud’s private seminar? Mises, Rothbard and Hulsmann do not tell us though Hulsmann does mention the Freud seminar:
Many such private circles existed in Vienna, and their characters differed widely depending on those involved. Some pioneers of various disciplines had instituted private seminars to train their followers in small-group sessions; this was the case, for example, with Sigmund Freud, who had already started a group before World War I .. (Biography, p. 364)
Mises must also have known that Freud was quite hostile towards Christianity and Western culture in general. Freud saw Jews more rational and moral people who were also more in touch with their feelings and sexuality. Freud did not like to interact with Gentiles and kept to his Jewish circle. Mises’ non-Jewish student, Friedrich von Hayek notes how Freud’s circle was almost totally Jewish.
But the Vienna of the 1920’s and 1930’s is not intelligible without the Jewish problem. Which was not a problem simply of Christians and Jews but a very large middle group in between the two, partly of babtized Jews, partly of Christians who had made friends with the Jews; and there was close contact between the purely Christian group and the mixed group, and again between the mixed group and the Jewish group, but not between the two extremes. I became very much aware of this quite recently, when I was asked whom of the great figures of Vienna I’d known at the time. For instance, Schorödinger, yes, of course; Wittgenstein, yes, of course; and so on.
Then he came to Freud, and I couldn’t possibly have known of Freud. Why? Because he belonged to the really Jewish group, and that was beyond my ranger of acquaintances. I had a great many very close acquaintances in the mixed group, I constantly moved in it, but to have met somebody in the purely Jewish group was so unlikely that being told that because I was a Viennese, I ought to have known Freud, seemed to me absurd. (Hayek on Hayek. p. 59-60. Emphasis added.)
Mises seems to have known Freud well. They even had correspondence. However, the letters have never been published. Gestapo confiscated at least part of them. In a footnote Hulsmann passingly notes the correspondence.
Footnote 84: By 1956, Mises knew that some of his books had “turned up in German second hand bookshops” and opined that some of his letters— two letters he had received from Sigmund Freud, for example—would “be found one day in the possession of an autograph dealer.” (Biography, p. 728)
Freud’s parents came from Galicia. In fact, Both Freud’s mother Amalia Nathansohn and Mises’s mother Adele Landau came from Brody. So they might even have been relatives. At least their families probably knew each other. Amalia worshipped his son and seems to have encouraged him to develop his sex crazed psychological theories. Perhaps the Talmudic culture was a contributing factor.
It seems certain that Mises greatly admired Freud and might even have understood his mother issues. Mises seems to have called Freud a “genius”. He never went into details but we can safely assume that he really did take Freud’s pseudo scientific theories very seriously. This despite the fact the Freud was well known to have a troubled relationship with both children and women. He tried to excuse the sexual exploitation of children by claiming it was the child who lusted after the adult. Freud’s de facto defense of pedophilia is not surprising considering that it was considered relatively normal in Talmudic culture. Freud might even have systematically covered up sexual abuse of little girls.
The sex craze of Freud and many other Jews was certainly also a reflection of the highly sexed Talmudic culture. It was the Jews who most pushed for sexual revolution and especially the creation of pornographic subculture in the West. Mises must certainly have known all this but he said nothing. In this sense he defended the Freudian part of the Culture of Critique.
Freud’s relationship with women is also highly troubling. He seemed to consider them vastly inferior and natural hysterics. Mises seems to have somewhat shared these views. He even presented some strange views of women in his book Socialism. Mises believed that a woman can never be a genius.
Extraordinarily gifted women may achieve fine things in spite of motherhood; but because the functions of sex have the first claim upon woman, genius and the greatest achievements have been denied her. (Biography, p. 417. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann explains that Mises shared the theories of his close Jewish friend and student of Freud, Otto Weininger who stated in his book Sex and Character:
Thus, whereas F is totally fulfilled and taken by sexuality, M knows a dozen of other things: fight and play, sociability and [Gelage], discussion and science, business and politics, religion and art. . . . F is nothing but sexuality, M is sexual and also something above. (Biography, p. 416. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann does not tell us that Weininger went even further in his book. He believed that Jews have a female soul. This is why they cannot uphold a civilization but tend to destroy it. Wikipedia explains:
In a separate chapter [of Sex and Character], Weininger, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1902, analyzes the archetypal Jew as feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality (soul), and without a sense of good and evil. Christianity is described as “the highest expression of the highest faith”, while Judaism is called “the extreme of cowardliness”.
Weininger decries the decay of modern times, and attributes much of it to feminine (or identically, “Jewish”) character. By Weininger’s reckoning everyone shows some femininity, and what he calls “Jewishness”.[15] (Wikipedia)
Hitler was impressed by Weininger’s theories.
In his private conversations, Hitler recalled a remark his mentor Dietrich Eckart made about Weininger: “I only knew one decent Jew and he committed suicide on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples…”.[21] (Wikipedia)
Weininger’s book and his consequent 1903 suicide must have shocked his close friend, Mises. It also made him think deeply about Jewishness. But he decided to be as quiet about the subject as possible. By keeping silent and by promoting Freudianism he was supporting one of the most important aspects of the Culture of Critique.
3. Anti-Christian morality
Mises was not only a psychological relativist but was also very critical of religions. He did not believe in absolute moral values. There is no good and bad because they are just relative concepts. Mises was especially critical of Christianity. That is not surprising considering his Talmudic Jewish background. Mises came from the most conservative Jewish area, Galicia. The influence of Talmudism was very strong there. The Mises family was very conservative and thus they did not have much personal relations with Gentiles. Hulsmann notes this but tries to turn it into a story of discrimination.
[T]he Miseses were more conservative than most other Jewish families in Vienna (Arthur was a board member of the Vienna Jewish Cultural Community, and Adele was very religious 17) … Summer vacations were spent in the countryside with the Nirensteins and other cousins. Social contacts outside the network of Jewish families must have been rare. The old Viennese establishment remained closed to newcomers, and even the noble pedigree of the Mises family was too recent to be taken seriously by them. (Biography, p. 30, 27)
At university Mises soon became an atheist. He opposed all religions. He even saw Judaism as an empty ritualistic religion. Rothbard notes:
Neither does Mises find any more hope in religions other than Christianity; to the contrary, they are dismissed brusquely and with contempt. Eastern religions are hopelessly anti-capitalist; the Greek Church “has been dead for over a thousand years”; and the “Islamic and Jewish religions are dead.” Islam and Judaism “offer their adherents nothing more than a ritual”; they “suppress the soul, instead of elevating and saving it.” They maintain themselves by “rejecting everything foreign and ‘different’, by traditionalism and conservatism. Only their hatred of everything foreign rouses them to great deeds from time to time.” (Murray Rothbard. Ludwig von Mises: Laissez-Faire Radical)
Mises never criticized the Talmudist culture but he was militantly anti-Christian in many of his writings. This was surprising since traditionally classical liberals saw both the teachings of the Church and its organization as important contributing factors for the emergence of liberty in Europe. The natural law tradition of the Church emphasized the rights of individuals against the state. The organization of the Church also created a balance of power which stopped the state from becoming all-powerful as it had done in all other cultures. However, Mises disagreed. He had a completely different view. Mises saw the Church as a socialist organization that destroyed the liberty of the West. Mises explained his theory in detail in his 1922 book, Socialism. Mises starts by complaining that Christianity hates the rich.
Later revisers have tried to soften the words of Christ against the rich … but there is quite enough left to support those who incite the world to hatred of the rich, revenge, murder and arson…. This is a case in which the Redeemer’s words bore evil seed. More harm has been done, and more blood shed, on account of them than by the persecution of heretics and the burning of witches. They have always rendered the Church defenceless against all movements which aim at destroying human society.
The church as an organization has certainly always stood on the side of those who tried to ward off communistic attack. But it … was continually disarmed by the words: “Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the Kingdom of God.” (Socialism. pp. 419-20.)
In fact it was the Church that made socialism possible.
it is the resistance which the Church has offered to the spread of liberal ideas which has prepared the soil for the destructive resentment of modern socialist thought. (Socialism, p. 420)
The Church is a statist organization that destroyed liberty.
As long as rationalism and the spiritual freedom of the individual are maintained in economic life, the Church will never succeed in fettering thought and shepherding the intellect in the desired direction. To do this it would first have to obtain supremacy over all human activity. Therefore it cannot rest content to live as a free Church in a free state; it must seek to dominate that state. .. A living Christianity cannot, it seems, exist side by side with Capitalism.” (Socialism p. 427, 429)
In this very same book on Socialism Mises is silent about the fact that Bolshevism was a Jewish dominated movement. Instead he claimed that Bolshevism and Christianity are two sides of the same coin!
The clearest modern parallel to the attitude of complete negation of primitive Christianity is Bolshevism. The Bolshevists, too, wish to destroy everything that exists because they regard it as hopelessly bad. But they have in mind ideas, indefinite and contradictory though they may be, of the future social order…. Jesus’s teaching in this respect, on the other hand, is merely negation. (Socialism p. 413, 416)
Not only the relativist morality but also the double standard is clear. The Christians and their culture are to blame but never the Jews and their Talmudic culture. Thus Mises supported the relativist morality of the Culture of Critique.
4. Subjective ethics
Mises was not only a psychological and a moral relativist but also an ethical relativist. He was an extreme utilitarian who did not believe that there exists ethical right and wrong. This is quite surprising since most classical liberals followed or at least respected the natural law tradition. Mises does admit that it gave birth to Western liberty:
Now it is true that the liberal and democratic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew a great part of its strength from the doctrine of natural law and the innate imprescriptible rights of the individual. These ideas, first developed by ancient philosophy and Jewish theology, permeated Christian thinking. Some anti-Catholic sects made them the focal point of their political programs. A long line of eminent philosophers substantiated them. They became popular and were the most powerful moving force in the prodemocratic evolution. (Ludwig von Mises. Human Action, p. 174)
But Mises was very much against natural law tradition and considered it nonsensical.
There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong. (Human Action, p. 716)
Mises believed that ethics was subjective. Right and wrong are just personal opinions.
The notion of right and wrong is a human device. … All moral rules and human laws are means for the realization of definite ends. There is no method available for the appreciation of their goodness or badness other than to scrutinize their usefulness for the attainment of the ends chosen and aimed at. (Ludwig von Mises. Human Action, Chp. 27, Sec. 3)
Mises emphasized that most people want peace and prosperity. Therefore they would logically have to be classical liberals and support peaceful coexistence and liberty. Ethics is not only a matter of taste but also logic.
But what if people do not behave logically? And what about jealousy, envy, impatience, greed, lust, malice and pure evil? Sure, one might even agree that in the long run classical liberalism would make everybody economically more prosperous. But for some economic prosperity is not the highest value. For many prosperity is also relative. Some are even happy to be poor if others are even more poor. Revenge is often sweet and so is dominance. Even more importantly: Often people do not care about the long run. They do not have the patience to wait for years. They want their way now. So they cheat, lie and support aggression. Mises cannot blame them since that is evidently what they value and want.
Moral relativism is often also good for the Jews. After all, Diaspora Jews are in an impossible situation. They live in foreign lands and refuse to assimilate. This could make many of them into liars and cheaters. A relativist utilitarian world view would be very helpful to excuse all that. No wonder Mises supported the ethical relativist aspects of the Culture of Critique.
5. Modernist aesthetics
Mises was a psychological, moral and ethical relativist so it is not surprising that he seems to have been a relativist also in art and literature. He was a utilitarian who believed that beauty and sentiments are subjective anyway. They are all a matter of taste. Mises seems to have denied that there even exists degenerate art. He himself preferred high culture with classical music and operas but considered that only as a matter of his own individual subjective taste. This is probably why he was not actively opposed to the effects of modern art and literature on Western civilization.
Mises must have been fully aware that many modern art forms were dominated by Jews. In fact, his own relatives were leading the modern art movement! For some reason Rothbard and Hulsmann have been silent about this even if Otto Kallir (originally Nirenstein) in 1923 founded the famous expressionist gallery, Neue Galerie in Vienna.
Hulsmann passingly notes that Otto Kallir was Mises’ cousin but fails to note that he was one of the most important exponents of modernist art. Hulsmann:
On October 20, 1962, Mises received the Austrian Medal of Honor (Ehrenzeichen) at the Austrian embassy in Washington. He had the embassy invite Otto Kallir for the luncheon. (Biography, p. 1034. Curiously this is not noted in the index.)
Why invite Kallir? Hulsmann gives no explanation. Perhaps because Kallir was a relative. Perhaps also because Mises had a high opinion of Kallir despite the fact that he was one of the leading proponents of expressionist art. Wikipedia explains:
In 1923 Nirenstein established the Neue Galerie (still operating, under different ownership, as the Galerie nächst St. Stephan), which opened with the first major posthumous exhibition of Schiele’s work. Eventually, Nirenstein became an internationally recognized art dealer, representing Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Alfred Kubin. …
In 1933 Otto Nirenstein legally changed his name to Kallir, adopting a name that had been in his family for many generations. …
Because the modern artists represented by the Neue Galerie were not subject to Austria’s export laws in 1938, and most were in any case considered “degenerate” by the Nazis, Kallir was able to bring a significant inventory with him into exile. …
In 1939, they emigrated to the United States, bringing a significant portion of his inventory.[5] In the same year, Kallir established the New York Galerie St. Etienne, where he introduced Austrian and German expressionist art to the United States. (Wikipedia)
Margit explains that Otto Kallir was a second cousin of Ludwig and they were good friends. Margit also lauds Kallir’s modernist gallery.
Very good friends of ours were Dr. and Mrs. Otto Kallir. He is a second cousin of Lu’s, and he, as well as his wife Fanny, were not only very interesting and cultivated people, but-what should count more-they were, and are, good and kind. He owns the Gallery of St. Etienne in New York City and-among others-he introduced the now famous Egon Schiele to this country.
Dr. Kallir has always been interested in folk art. When, in 1939, he was shown some primitive American paintings, he was attracted to some done by an old lady named Anna Mary Robertson Moses. The paintings were uneven in quality, but in some of them Kallir found an original and fresh approach to painting. He gave her a “one man” show at his gallery, calling the exhibition “What a Farmwife Painted.” This was the beginning of the fabulous career of the artist who has since then become known all over the “world as “Grandma Moses.” (My Years, p. 67)
Since Margit says nothing about Ludwig’s disapproval or doubts we can conclude that he too was enthusiastic supporter of the modernist art gallery. Here again Mises was a supporter of the Culture of Critique.
6. Boazian multiculturalism
The Culture of Critique was not only limited to the relativization of psychology, morality, ethics and aesthetics but tried to also change and relativize hard sciences. Professor Franz Boaz was the original Jewish race denier. He denied that there exists clear average psychological and intellectual differences between races. Mises seems to have agreed with Boaz. For example, Mises was not impressed by IQ tests developed in 1905 and successful utilized in schools and armies. Mises seems to even had a dismissive attitude towards the standard Stanford-Binet IQ tests even if they show clear average differences between races, nations and classes. Mises was totally against “race experts” in his 1922 book Socialism:
It is impossible to condemn too emphatically the procedure of the “race experts.” They set up criteria of race in an entirely uncritical spirit. More anxious to coin catchwords than to advance knowledge, they scoff at all the standards demanded by scientific thought. But the critics of such dilettantism take their job too lightly in directing their attention solely to the concrete form which individual writers give their theories and to the content of their statements about particular races, their physical characteristics and psychic qualities.” (p. 325)
Despite the further development of the IQ tests and racial studies in general Mises still in 1940’s and 50’s seems to have had a very egalitarian view of different races.
Further efforts have been made to coordinate certain bodily features—racial characteristics—with certain mental and moral characteristics. All these endeavors have also failed. (Omnipotent Government, 1944, p. 170)
The fundamental discrepancies in worldview and patterns of behavior do not correspond to differences in race, nationality or class affiliation. (Human Action, 1949. p. 87)
A prediction about the future behavior of those races which today are considered culturally backward could only be made by biological science. If biology were to discover some anatomical characteristics of the members of the non-Caucasian races which necessarily curb their mental faculties, one could venture such a prediction. But so far biology has not discovered any such characteristics. (Theory and History, 1957, p. 336)
Mises was at a loss to understand how Whites could create a high civilization while the Negroes invented hardly anything.
Why did not the Negroes of Africa discover means to fight the germs which menace their lives and health and why did European scholars discover efficient methods to fight these diseases? No [Marxian (or any other)] materialism can answer such questions satisfactorily. (Ludwig von Mises. The Role of Doctrines in Human History.)
Mises was a very intelligent man. It is hardly possible that he did not believe at all in IQ tests and racial differences. Surely he could not have believed that African Negroes and Australian Aborigines have the same genotypic average IQ than Germanics and Jews? So why did he refuse to listen to hard sciences? Perhaps because race science gives too much credence to nationalist and other “Nazi” ideas. One could also start to wonder about the qualities of the Jews as a group. And that would not be good for the Jews. Clearly Mises supported the multiculturalist aspects of the Culture of Critique.
7. Cosmopolitanism
Mises considered himself a a citizen of the world. Rothbard notes:
[Mises] was proud to call himself a “citizen of the world, a cosmopolite,” in contrast to chauvinist nationalism .. (Murray Rothbard. Laissez-Faire Radical.)
Mises was not only a cosmopolite but he also strongly opposed nationalism. In fact, he denied that nations even exist except as language communities. However, at the same time he demonized Germans. He even claimed that since the 1870’s over 90% of the German people had lusted after world conquest. He blamed the German people for starting both the First and Second World War.
It is very rare for a classical liberal to blame Germany for the First World War. It is even more rare for a Jewish classical liberal to blame the whole German people for the war. After all, Germans fought the Russians whom Jews considered anti-Semitic. During the First World War Jews were very much on the side of the Germans and Austrians against the Russians. But Mises seems to have considered both Germans and Russians anti-Semitic. Why? Perhaps one reason was that in the German army Jews were not allowed to become officers. Richard M. Ebeling explains:
Habsburg [Austrian] enlightenment was more advanced in many ways over that of the German government. For example, before the First World War it was virtually impossible for a Jew to be commissioned as an officer in the German Army, no matter his qualifications and merit.
On the other hand, Jews were accepted as officers in the Austrian Army with no similar prejudice, which enabled Ludwig von Mises to be commissioned as a reserve officer in the Austrian Army as a young man, and serve with distinction in the First World War on the Russian front. (Richard M. Ebeling. Ludwig von Mises and the Vienna of His Time)
During the First World War the Austrian army almost collapsed and the German army had to save them from Russian attacks. During this time Mises probably had to deal with German officers who were not pleased to be dealing with a Jewish officer.
The problem was that the German Army was at least as arrogant as it was efficient. Even its regular soldiers had the tendency to treat foreign allies as incompetent junior partners. On at least one occasion, Mises himself had to confront pretentious German officers claiming jurisdiction over k.u.k. troops;74 and after the war, when in a high-profile paper he analyzed the problems of the proposed Austro-German monetary unification, he mentioned “the tendency of the North Germans to consider anything South German and in particular anything Austrian to be inferior and alien.” (Biography, p. 282)
Moreover Mises was very frustrated that Germany wanted to continue the war even after the Tsar had been toppled. All this might partly explain why Mises’ hatred toward Germans was so intense that he considered virtually all of them Nazis. Mises made this startling claim in his book Omnipotent Government.
It is probable that today about 80 per cent of all German-speaking Europeans are Nazis. If we leave out the Jews, the Austrians, and the German-speaking Swiss, we might say that more than 90 per cent of the Germans support Hitler’s fight for world hegemony. (Omnipotent Government, p. 233)
All this is also why after First World War Mises defended the Versailles Peace Treaty and after Second World War wanted a total occupation of Germany by the allies and the United Nations. Germany should be totally demilitarized. Germans should not even own and fly airplanes.
The alliance of the victorious nations must be made lasting. Germany, Italy, and Japan must be totally disarmed. They must be deprived of the right to maintain armies, navies, or air fleets. A small police force, armed with rifles only, can be permitted to them. No kind of armament production should be tolerated. The guns and the ammunition for their policemen should be given to them by the United Nations. They should not be permitted to fly or build any planes. Commercial aviation in their countries should be operated by foreign companies using foreign planes and employing foreign pilots. (p. 258)
Mises seems to have hated Germans so much that after the Second World War he refused to visit Germany and Austria. In fact, Mises even refused to visit his own home town, Vienna. Hulsmann notes that in 1948 Mises refused to visit Vienna even when all expenses would have been paid. However, Hulsmann does not tell us that during the rest of his life he never returned to Vienna. Now he preferred New York, also known as Jew York. It was not only dominated by Jews but so full of immigrants that the same what happened in Vienna could never happen in New York.
Europe lay in shambles; even Paris was in rags. He did not even wish to think about traveling to Austria. All that was good and memorable about Europe was in the past. No need for him to return to the old continent just to witness the misery induced by those very statist follies he had spent a lifetime fighting. When he was invited to the next Mont Pèlerin Society meeting, scheduled for July 1949 in the Swiss town of Seelisberg, he declined.75 Apparently he also declined an invitation to lecture at the University of Vienna in a U.S.-sponsored program in 1948. Fritz Machlup took part. (Biography, p. 874)
While demonizing Germans Mises at the same time was totally quiet about the Jews and especially the Zionists. They could do no wrong. His Zionism seems to also have made him hate the Soviet Union even more. It was not only communist but Stalin had made it anti-Semite and anti-Zionist. Mises was especially upset that the Soviets suppressed the 1956 Hungarian uprising. As David Irving has noted one important reason why the uprising failed was that it was led by Jews who were not trusted by the Hungarians. Mises must have known many of these Jews.
Mises also seems to have been upset that the Soviet Union was supporting Arab states in the Middle East. Rothbard and Hulsmann say nothing about this obvious Zionist attitude but Hulsmann does passingly note:
Mises deplored the pro-socialist leanings of public opinion on the western side of the Iron Curtain, which “paralyzes all political actions of the West and makes it possible for the Russians to do what they want in Hungary, Poland and the Near-East.” (Biography, p. 909. Emphasis added.)
Mises lived until 1973 so he saw the creation and expansion of Israel. He heard about the massacre of Palestinians, the Lavon Affair and the Six Day War. He never criticized Zionists in any way even when they invaded and ethnically cleansed many parts of Palestine. Mises clearly had a double standard. In this he again supported Culture of Critique.
8. Open borders
In 1981 Rothbard published a short intellectual biography of Mises where he explained that Mises was even ready to go to war against countries that had immigration restrictions.
Mises’ laissez-faire radicalism was marked by uncompromising attachment to freedom of immigration. Not only that, so bitter was he at any immigration laws that at times he came close to calling for war against those nations, such as the United States and Australia, who persisted in locking up parts of the earth and keeping out other peoples. (Emphasis added.)
Rothbard continues his summary of Mises’ position:
In Liberalism, Mises confined himself to pointing out that immigration barriers will only be able to be removed in a classical liberal world. In a world of minimal States, what difference would it make for Americans or Australians which ethnic or racial groups were in a majority in their country?[18]
At other times, however, Mises was not so gentle. In Nation, State and Economy he called Australia “the imperialistic state par excellence in its immigration legislation,” and linked this policy with its greater closeness to socialism than any of the other Anglo-Saxon states (in 1919). [19]
What is more, he chastised the League of Nations for not doing something about the U.S./Australian policy of immigration restrictions:
It is still more serious that the League of Nations does not recognize the freedom of movement of the person, that the United States and Australia are still allowed to block themselves off from unwanted immigrants…. Never can Germans, Italians, Czechs, Japanese, Chinese, and others regard it as just that the immeasurable landed wealth of North America, Australia, and East India should remain the exclusive property of the Anglo-Saxon nation and that the French be allowed to hedge in millions of square kilometers of the best land like a private park. [20]
.. In fact, after pointing out that European workers suffer from these immigration barriers, he warns darkly that
it may be that one day they will reach the conclusion that only weapons can change this unsatisfactory situation. Thus, we may face a great coalition of the lands of would-be emigrants standing in opposition to the lands that erect barricades to shut out would-be immigrants.[24]
But some believe that Rothbard exaggerated. After all, Mises admitted that a Black or Chinese invasion of the West would be terrible. Mises warned about this threat already in his 1927 book Liberalism:
In the absence of any migration barriers whatsoever, vast hordes of immigrants from the comparatively overpopulated areas of Europe would, it is maintained, inundate Australia and America. They would come in such great numbers that it would no longer be possible to count on their assimilation. ..
[T]here is real danger that the ascendancy—or more correctly, the exclusive dominion—of the AngloSaxons in the United States would be destroyed. This is especially to be feared in the case of heavy immigration on the part of the Mongolian peoples of Asia. These fears may perhaps be exaggerated in regard to the United States. As regards Australia, they certainly are not. Australia has approximately the same number of inhabitants as Austria; its area, however, is a hundred times greater than Austria’s, and its natural resources are certainly incomparably richer. If Australia were thrown open to immigration, it can be assumed with great probability that its population would in a few years consist mostly of Japanese, Chinese, and Malayans. ..
The entire nation, however, is unanimous in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans are today exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland. It cannot be denied that these fears are justified. Because of the enormous power that today stands at the command of the state, a national minority must expect the worst from a majority of a different nationality. ..
But after all this common sense Mises makes a U-turn:
It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of the interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state. Only the adoption of the liberal program could make the problem of immigration, which today seems insoluble, completely disappear. In an Australia governed according to liberal principles, what difficulties could arise from the fact that in some parts of the continent Japanese and in other parts Englishmen were in the majority? (Liberalism, p. 139-141. Emphasis added.)
Mises believed in the melting pot. Not only America but also Europe was and should be a melting plot. After all, they had always been melting pots.
Europe too is a melting pot, or rather a collection of melting pots. (Omnipotent Government, p. 88)
Mises was an utopian multiculturalist. If tens of millions of Japanese, Chinese, Malayans and Africans would move to Australia under a liberal regime what stops them from taking over in the future? Mises obviously understood the risks but did not care. He considered free movement an absolute civil right:
The liberal demands that every person have the right to live wherever he wants. (Liberalism, p. 137.)
Mises went so far that he blamed Australia for the Japanese aggression against China and America. The Australian desire to stay independent helped cause the Rape of Nanking.
Those who are under the illusion that segregation could solve the international problems of our day are blind to reality. The very fact that the Australians succeeded in maintaining linguistic and racial homogeneity in their country helped to push the Japanese into aggression. The closed-door policy is one of the root causes of our wars. (Omnipotent Government, p. 263)
It is quite clear that Mises was an open borders fanatic. He really did believe that Africans, Indians and the Chinese have the right to populate Australia, America and even Europe. Mises must have understood that would have soon ended White Australia and later even White America and White Europe. Why would Mises support such a recipe for total disaster? Perhaps because open borders are good for Jews.
Jews don’t care what the masses look like because Jews would be an economic elite anyway. In a multicultural society Jews would also not have to be afraid to be singled out like they have been so many times in homogeneous White European countries. Multiracial society would have so many races and nationalities that Jews could even play them against each other. Jews would rule with the help of the Culture of Critique.
9. The Frankfurt School
We already noticed how in 1924 Mises’ first teacher, the Jew Carl Grunberg became the director of the Social Research Institute which evolved into the Frankfurt School. It created a general theory that brought all the elements of the Culture of Critique together into a theory of anti-Semitism. If you believed in rationalist philosophy and science, individual psychological responsibility, traditional Christian morality, natural law ethics, traditional aesthetics and values, racial theories, nationalism and immigration restrictions there was something very wrong with you. You clearly suffered from an authoritarian personality that gave rise to irrational anti-Semitism. No wonder if you hallucinated that Jews were undermining Western civilization. You were in need of counseling and perhaps also hands-on psychiatric treatment.
Did Mises support the Frankfurt school’s mission? Of course. We already have seen that Mises was a Freudian and a Boazian who fully shared modernist relativist morality and ethics. He hated racial theories and nationalism. He was fanatically in favor of open borders. Mises disliked the socialist economic ideas of the Frankfurt school but he mostly supported the cultural revolution.
Mises seems to also have agreed with the Frankfurt school that anti-Semitism was mostly the result of a psychopathology. Gentiles were paranoid when they saw the Jewish group as powerful and devious. In fact, Mises outright denied that Jews had caused anti-Semitism with their own behavior.
The truth is that while the Jews are the objects of anti‑Semitism, their conduct and qualities did not play a decisive role in inciting and spreading its modern version. (Omnipotent Government, p. 185)
Mises even denied the large role Jews had in creating modern culture:
The anti-Semites grossly exaggerate when they see in the Jews the foremost representatives of modern culture .. (Ibid, p. 185)
Mises did not explain why is it an exaggeration to point out the dominant role of Jews in many modern cultural movements. He simply refused to discuss the subject. But then he said something very strange:
We are dealing here with conditions in Central and Western Europe and in America. In many parts of Eastern Europe things were different. There modern civilization was really predominantly an achievement of Jews. (Ibid, p. 185)
How so? Mises does not explain. Obviously Mises is again cherry picking. He thinks it self-evident that Jews have done great things in Eastern Europe. But he thinks it anti-Semitic to mention the bad things they have done.
Mises certainly knew that in Eastern Europe peasants had been exploited for centuries by a hostile Jewish elite. First Jews run an exploitative monopoly economy that reduced the people into serfdom. Then when people managed to gradually free themselves many Jews came back as communists and exploited them even more savagely with massacres, torture and Gulags.
No wonder many people were very suspicious of the Jews. But Mises and the Frankfurt School considered these common sense people evil and sick anti-Semites! Mises really supported the Culture of Critique.
Part VI
Pan-Europa
Mises was obviously bred and trained to serve the Rothschilds and their allies, the Rockefellers. He was also fanatically Philo-Semitic and helped demonize not only Germans and Russians but also the traditional Western culture. All this raises an important question: Did Mises’ dynastic loyalties and Philo-Semitism affect his libertarian theories and political activism? Did he try to transform libertarianism into a Philo-Semitic political program? This can be researched by checking possible suspicious illogicalities in his libertarian writings and policy proposals. After all, Mises was in practice also a politician. He not only developed economics and spread classical liberal ideas but also tried to create a free classical liberal state in practice.
What would this free state look like? Suspiciously, it would be a strongly centralized multinational state! So it would not be a loose confederation of nation states like the European Union or a confederation like Switzerland or even a federation like the USA but even more centralized multinational state. Hulsmann explains:
In this 43-page memorandum, Mises restated the political and economic case for the establishment of an East-European Union with a strong central government: growth through free trade and laissez-faire, response to the problems of linguistic minorities, and protection against the three mighty neighbors.36 In another paper that he had finished writing by the end of May, he pointed out that his plan for an Eastern Union would complement similar ideas for the establishment of a Western Union.
[Footnote 36:] .. The proposed new [Eastern European] political entity would thus cover 700,000 square miles with about 120,000,000 residents using 17 different languages. .. (Biography, p. 805)
So Mises supported both a Western and Eastern European Union! What did he mean by a Western Union? Apparently it included Western Europe, North America and possibly even Australia and New Zealand. And why have separate Western and Eastern Union? Mises seems to have wanted to join them together into a huge political union once Eastern Europe had become economically more developed.
All this sounds a lot like the Pan-Europa plan of the the German-Japanese Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. He wanted to unite most European nation states into one big United States of Europe. Furthermore, he also promoted an American Union and an Asian Union.
The plans of Coudenhove-Kalergi and Mises were quite similar. However, Rothbard and Hulsmann are dead silent about this obvious connection. In fact, they do not even tell us if Mises and Coudenhove-Kalergi ever met. Fortunately Margit von Mises tells about the meetings in her memoirs:
Just as between 1938 and 1940 every political refugee at one time or another came through Geneva or stayed there for a while, now Lisbon [in 1940] had become a haven for people without a home, without a country. All sorts of nationalities were gathered here, and every day we met more people and heard more sad stories. We frequently met Count Coudenhoven, the fighter for Pan-Europe, who had a Japanese mother and was rather exotic and good looking.
He was married to a famous Viennese actress, Ida Roland, who was much older than he and had a daughter, already in her thirties, whom the countess always spoke of as “the child.” It sounded more tragic than funny to Lu and me. …
In 1943, besides the numerous meetings and sessions with the NAM on monetary reform and economic principles, he was a member of a commission to study the organization of peace, and he participated in Count Coudenhoven’s Pan-Europe Conference in March 1943. (My Years, p. 61, 88. Emphasis added.)
Wikipedia uses Coudenhove-Kalergi’s own book as a source so the information seems accurate:
From 1942 until his return to France in 1945, he [Coudenhove-Kalergi] taught at the New York University, which appointed him professor of history in 1944. At the same university Professor Ludwig von Mises studied currency problems for Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement.[36] (Wikipedia)
For part of this period, Mises studied currency issues for the Pan-Europa movement, which was led by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a fellow New York University faculty member and Austrian exile.[18] (Wikipedia. Emphasis added)
So Mises and Coudenhove-Kalergi had already met in Europe and were both Austrian exiles teaching in the same American university. It certainly looks likely they often met and even worked together. However, this does not mean they completely agreed on the Union. Mises had already in his 1927 book Liberalism criticized the Pan-Europa plan as protectionist and militarist.
The champions of Pan-Europe and of the United States of Europe, however, have other ends in view. They do not plan on establishing a new kind of state different in its policies from the imperialistic and militaristic states that have existed up to now, but on a reconstitution of the old imperialistic and militaristic idea of the state. (Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition. p. 145)
But would Mises have backed Pan-Europa plan if it had included economic freedom? Most probably. In the 40’s he was even more enthusiastic about big political unions. Furthermore, Pan-Europa plan had the backing of the biggest Jewish bankers including the Rothschilds and the Warburgs. Perhaps not coincidentally the very same Jews who had managed to centralize American banking by creating their own money machine, the FED. Now they wanted also political centralization. Coudenhove-Kalergi was overjoyed and called Jews “the spiritual nobility of Europe”.
The super-union proposal of Mises is so embarrassing for a supposed classical liberal that Hulsmann tries to desperately downplay it. He implies that Mises was only speaking about Nato style military blocs:
This approach—the formation of political blocs, as they in fact eventually came to be established after World War II (NATO in the West and Warsaw Pact in the East)—was more promising than the approach of the League of Nations in the interwar period, which consisted in providing “for the lack of a peace ideology by the establishment of a bureau and a bureaucracy.”37 (Biography, p. 805. Emphasis added.)
However, in footnotes Hulsmann admits that Mises was not speaking about a military alliance but a true political union. There we also learn that America must join the International Union. Why? Because also America was too small to be independent! Mises:
[Footnote 37:] It is the general belief today that the sovereignty of the small nation has proved its impracticability and that they have to disappear as independent states. This is true under present conditions . . . even the United States must be reckoned among these “small” nations . . . I believe that the only thing which the Western democracies can do is to form a Union for . . . defense. . . . I do not see any other reasonable solution for the postwar problem than a closer political and military union between the menaced democracies. (Biography, p. 806. Emphasis added.)
This was too much even for Hulsmann, who now finally starts to criticize his hero. Hulsmann continues in footnote 37:
The great weakness of his own [Mises’] plan was that it, too, was mute on the question of the “peace ideology” that could provide for the political and economic integration of Eastern Europe. … Mises seems to have fallen back into what in more sober moments he called the dictatorship complex. He blithely assumed that the institutions entrusted with the “new order” would use their enormous power only for those purposes of which he, Mises, approved. (Biography, p. 806, 810. Emphasis added.)
In his 1944 book Omnipotent Government Mises made it very clear that all small states must give up their independence and join an international or “supernational” political union.
Unless they choose effective solidarity, the democracies are doomed. They cannot safeguard their way of life if they seek to preserve what the terminology of diplomacy calls “national sovereignty.”∗ They must choose between vesting all power in a new supernational authority or being enslaved by nations not prepared to treat them on an equal footing. The alternative to incorporation into a new democratic supernational system is not unrestricted sovereignty but ultimate subjugation by the totalitarian powers. This is obvious in the case of small nations like the Dutch, the Danes, the Norwegians … (Omnipotent Government, p. 265)
Hulsmann tries to save his hero by claiming that later Mises “implicitly” changed his mind when corresponding with the president of the Liberal International, Salvador de Madariaga. But where, when and how did Mises change his mind even implicitly? Hulsmann does not give us a quote. Instead he states that somewhere in Grove City archive there is a correspondence that proves it all. Hulsmann continues in footnote 37 right after the above quote:
Some ten years later Mises implicitly confessed this [the great weakness of his own Union plan] in private correspondence with Salvador de Madariaga (see Grove City Archive: Madariaga file). (Biography, p. 806. Emphasis added.)
Already in his 1927 book Liberalism Mises had supported the creation of a highly centralized multinational Eastern European Union. But at least he did seem to say that “administrative units” (but not individuals or small groups) and “territories” (but not “bad” ones, like the Southern Confederacy, see p. 1026) have a right to secede from the union state. But even then it was highly unrealistic to except that secession would be allowed in a centralist multinational political union. And now for some reason Mises turned to an even more statist and unrealistic position by demanding ever bigger multinational unions.
Why not have many small independent states as classical liberalism has always recommended? Competition between small states tends to decrease economic interventionism and lead to peace, free trade and economic freedom. They are also more likely to accept autonomous areas, free cities and secession. Small states easily become prosperous and thus can have a strong defensive military like Switzerland. And why would anyone attack a peaceful, neutral free trading state? Even if some aggressive state would start attacking neutral countries would it not be very difficult to attack numerous Switzerland style states? Especially if they would band together in the face of an unprovoked attack?
Moreover, from the classical liberal perspective it is clearly ludicrous to build a large super-centralized multinational state and then except it to allow secession and freedom. Mises was oxymoronic classical liberal arch-centralist. His classical liberalism was a contradiction in terms. But that is not all. It was also full of double standards. Germans and Russians were evil anti-Semites but the Zionists and the British could do no wrong. In fact, Mises even considered British the good master race.
Master race
Mises repeatedly warned about the Germans and their supposed desire to rule the world as a master race. However, at the same time Mises lauded the British as a “good” master race that had to rule Indians and other “less civilized” countries for their own good.
In the last fifty years British administration of Indian and colonial affairs has been by and large government for the people. However, it has not been government by the people. It has been government by an alien master race. Its justification lay in the assumption that the natives are not qualified for self-government and that, left alone, they would fall victim to ruthless oppression by conquerors less civilized and less benevolent than the English.
It further implied that Western civilization, with which the British wanted to make the subdued natives happy, was welcome to them. We may take it for granted that this was really the case. The proof is that all these colored races were and are anxious not only to adopt the technical methods of Western civilization but also to learn Western political doctrines and ideologies. It was precisely this acceptance of Western thought that finally led them to cry out against the absolute rule of the invaders. The demands for liberty and self-determination on the part of the Asiatic peoples are a result of their Westernization. (Ludwig von Mises. Omnipotent Government, p. 278)
The Asians should not complain about past massacres and colonial exploitation.
The Asiatic peoples are not justified in blaming the invaders for atrocities committed in previous years. Indefensible as these excesses were from the point of view of liberal tenets and principles, they were nothing extraordinary when measured by the standards of oriental customs and habits. (Ibid. p. 278)
Does this mean that Jews should rule the world through multinational unions because they too have the nobility of a good master race? And if many African and Asian nations are so uncivilised that they cannot be independent why is it a good idea to let millions of them to immigrate and eventually take over Australia and other White countries?
No problem. They just have to be civilized. Just like it is necessary for the British master race to civilize the Indians so must United Nations civilize other uncivilized nations. In fact, all nations must become part of the United Nations so that they can be dragged into modernity.
After all, a nation cannot remain isolated no matter how peaceful it is. Peaceful isolationism is a passive-aggressive attack against the welfare of other nations. This is obvious for every utilitarian. Thus less civilized nations must be civilized by force if necessary.
In the face of the inequality of natural resources there are today no such things as internal affairs of a country which do not concern the rest of mankind. It is to the vital interests of every nation that all over the earth the most efficient methods of production should be applied. It hurts the well-being of everybody if, for instance, those countries which have the most favorable conditions for the production of rubber do not make the most efficient use of their resources. One country’s economic backwardness may injure everybody else. (Ibid. p. 279.)
Mises emphasizes that Gunboat diplomacy (like the Jewish instigated Opium Wars?) were necessary to make the Chinese and the Japanese more civilized.
Autarky in one country may lower the standard of living in every other country. If a nation says: “Let us alone; we do not want to interfere with your affairs, and we will not permit you to mind our business,” it may wrong every other people. It was these considerations that led the Western nations to force China and Japan to abandon their age-old isolation and to open their ports to foreign trade. The blessings of this policy were mutual. (Ibid. p. 279)
The problem is that the less civilized nations like the Hindus are too stupid and proud to understand economics and utilitarian philosophy. Even the Brahmins are too stupid. Belief in karma makes Hindus inefficient.
No German nationalist ever admitted that the German Army was defeated at the Marne both in 1914 and 1918. If such things are possible with the Germans, how can we expect that the Hindus, the worshipers of the cow, should grasp the theories of Ricardo and of Bentham? (Ibid. p. 283)
Therefore, all uncivilised nations must enter the United Nations which will then make sure they become civilized.
A defeat of the United Nations would spell the doom of the Chinese, of the Hindus, of the Moslems of Western Asia, and of all the smaller nations of Asia and of Africa. The victory of the United Nations will bring them political autonomy. They will get the opportunity to demonstrate whether they have absorbed more from the West than the modern methods of total war and total destruction. (Ibid. p. 279)
Many shocked and bewildered libertarians asked Mises about his political centralism and double standards but he just gave evasive answers. Why? Perhaps because Jewish group interests were important for him. In practice Jews could not have their own nation state in Europe. In a Swiss style decentralized Europe Jews would be eternal and visible outsiders. Small independent nation states would limit Jewish religious activities such as torturing of babies (circumcision) and animals (kosher slaughter). They would not accept multiculturalism and Jewish dominated relativist movements but would demand assimilation. Some countries could even stop Jewish immigration or just kick the Jews out. Even the Swiss have always been weary of the Jews. Obviously Mises supported political centralization and multinational unions because that was in the Jewish group interest.
Philo-Semitism would also explain why Mises started supporting conscription despite the fact that classical liberals and libertarians have always considered it slavery. But Americans must go to war against anti-Semites. World must be made safe for democracy and especially for the Jews. Of course, Mises could not tell this openly to Gentiles so he just evaded the subject with his correspondents. Perhaps for the same reason Hulsmann does not dwell on the subject either. However, in footnotes he does passingly note that there were several instances when Mises refused to continue correspondence when it touched on the necessity of coercion. But all Hulsmann does is to again refer to the Grove City Archive:
And a Mrs. Powell Moffit complained about his [Mises’] endorsement of conscription in the 2nd edition of Human Action. See Virginia Powell Moffit to Mises, letter dated February 21, 1964; Grove City Archive: “M” files. (Biography. p. 1029)
In Europe Mises used to accuse everybody as being socialists. But now American libertarians started to call him a socialist. Mises was shocked to learn how strong the anti-statist tradition was in America. He also noticed that hardly any of these libertarians were Jews. Hulsmann notes the difference between Europe and America:
The new radical environment contrasted sharply with the mentality of Mises’s old associates, who had been libertarians by central European standards, but were moderate interventionists in an American context. (Biography, p. 860)
Gradually many American libertarians had come to understand that Mises did not support pure liberty. Hulsmann notes again and again how Mises would not continue discussions which turned to non-aggression axiom, insurance financed private arbitration systems, private protection agencies, Southern secession, isolationism, culture of critique, tyranny of conscription, dangers of democracy and many other topics dear to radical libertarians. The libertarian Rose Wilder Lane immediately saw through Mises. Hulsmann explains:
According to Lane, Mises had fallen prey to the confusion of egalitarianism. She quotes Mises: “It is obvious that every constitutional system can be made to work satisfactorily when the rulers are equal to their task.” Thereupon she comments: “Stuff and nonsense! . . . The basic fallacy [of Germany] was in the lack of a rational political thought, and this book admirably displays that lack.” ..
Mises did not even bother to address the issue, but observed that he never addressed people who called his writings “stuff” and “nonsense”—as Lane had done in a book review. (Biography, p. 859-860)
Even Rothbard and Hulsmann admit that Mises had a dictator complex. He believed in state capitalism. The state should force “tolerant” form of capitalism on the people. The multinational Union state should prevent “antisocial” behavior and force “social” behavior by making people and nations more “civilized”. American libertarians were horrified by such logic. But there was a method in Mises’ tyranny. He violated his own theory that divided the systems of social order into three alternatives: Propertarian liberty (competition), interventionism (cartels) and communism (monopoly). He tried to mix liberty with interventionism. He tried to square the circle. Why?
Mises realized that if private property rights are fully protected and there is full liberty then all localities would become practically independent parts of free confederations. But what would such free societies mean for the Jews? Virtually everywhere Jews are just small unassimilable minorities. Many localities could discriminate against Jews or even throw them out. Pure freedom could easily lead to anti-Semitism especially if people learn what Jews have been doing throughout history with the Fatal Embrace and the Culture of Critique. Most localities would probably demand the assimilation of Jews. That would not be in the interest of the Jews. The “minimal state” should stop anti-Semitic economic and personal discrimination and especially immigration restrictions. Only state can uphold true civilized freedom.
Mises accepted the ancient tradition of Jewish Fatal Embrace but with a twist. He believed that the Jews should capture or at least strongly influence the state. This is why he supported political centralism. However, he totally opposed economic centralism. He realized that economic and especially banking interventionism always creates economic depressions and therefore also anti-Semitism. This is why it was imperative that the Western Union and Eastern European Union would have economic freedom and the gold standard. However, he must also have understood that political centralization easily leads to economic centralism and thus destroys economic freedom. But he was ready to take the risk for the good of the Jews.
Part VII
The Secret Plan
Mises had a plan. Jews should continue their Fatal Embrace alliance with the state but only politically and not economically. It was imperative to develop a philosemitic classical liberal/libertarian ideology and enforce it through a super-centralist multinational Union state. Mises believed that he could personally orchestrate all this. Why? Because he was an ultra-elitist who believed that history is always directed by a vanguard, a small group of few men. The world can be made safe for the Jews in three steps:
The most amazing thing concerning the unprecedented change in earthly conditions brought about by capitalism is the fact that it was accomplished by a small number of authors and a hardly greater number of statesmen who had assimilated their teachings. Not only the sluggish masses but also most of the businessmen who, by their trading, made the laissez faire principles effective failed to comprehend the essential features of their operation.
Even in the heyday of liberalism only a few people had a full grasp of the functioning of the market economy. Western civilization adopted capitalism upon recommendation on the part of a small élite. (Biography, p. 963. Emphasis added.)
In other words:
1. A few intellectuals develop a Philo-Semitic classical liberal ideology
2. Spread the Philo-Semitic classical liberal ideas to the dull masses
3. Few Philo-Semitic statesmen create a huge super-centralized state with economic freedom
Mises believed that Jews were intelligent and powerful enough to do all this. He knew how the Jews had so often been able to direct the Gentile states and masses. Jews could easily create a free classical liberal multinational Union state if they just really wanted to do that. First, they had the classical liberal intellectuals and economists many of which were disciples of Mises. Second, they had the money and intelligence to dominate the universities and the media. It would be easy for Jews to spread liberal ideas to the masses. Mises himself knew many Jewish newspaper owners and Jewish big businessmen who could finance them. Third, Mises knew many Jewish or Philo-Semitic Gentile statesmen who had the political skills to create both a Western and an Eastern European Union.
If anyone could make this plan happen it was Mises. He created Philo-Semitic liberalism in his books and he had the necessary university, media, business and political connections through his Jewish network. However, there were a few obstacles. First he had to intellectually destroy interventionism and especially Jewish led socialism. He did this in 1922 with the publication of his book, Socialism. Second, he had to personally stop the Jewish communist revolutions at least in Austria. He also did this in the early 20s when he dissuaded his Jewish friends such as Otto Bauer from a coup attempt.
No wonder Mises saw everything from the Jewish perspective. After all, Jews largely dominated Austrian intellectual, business and political life. Moreover, he came from a leading Galician Jewish family. He was part of the highest Jewish elite. He was close with the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. He was also the representative of Big Business through his work in the Chamber of Commerce. Hulsmann explains how Mises was extremely well connected:
He not only knew the intellectuals of his day, he had almost daily interaction with the political leaders of his country, with the higher echelons of the civil service, and with the executives of Austrian firms and business corporations. (Jorg Guido Hulsmann. Preface. Ludwig von Mises. Memoirs. p. vii)
Mises literally knew everybody who mattered. He had a good chance of orchestrating big political changes. However, at the same time he had to hide negative facts about Jews. He had to keep silent about the Fatal Embrace. This doomed his plan.
Many intelligent men did not trust Mises because they realized that for the Jews their own interests were often more important than truth and liberty. Even a close friend of Mises like the famous libertarian Nobel economist Friedrich von Hayek was always suspicious of Jews. He was especially enraged that they refused to talk about Jews even with him. Hayek finally revealed his frustration in 1984 when he was already 85 years old. Not directly, of course, but when answering a question about his famous Jewish cousin, Ludwig von Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein was three-quarters Jewish. But the family was completely established in Vienna society, as in general you know. The Jewish problem in Vienna became acute only as a result of emigration from Poland. … my family is on the purely Christian group; but in the university context I entered the mixed group.
And there were several things which I must confess I resented among our Jewish friends. The worst was that I was not allowed to speak about Jewish things; they did that all the time. Even the theme of “Has he any Jewish accent?” was constantly discussed among them; if I would have a said a word about it, it would have been bitterly resented. (Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar. Hayek on Hayek. An Autobiographical dialogue. Bartley Institute 1994. p. 60-61. Emphasis added.)
Just imagine how much more support Mises would have received from the masses if he had revealed the corruption of both Gentiles and Jews. But Mises was adamant. He would not reveal corruption. Ever.
Mises knew that fractional reserve banking was not only inherently unstable but also highly corrupt. In fact, banks were bribing government officials, fleecing the economy and pushing the whole world into abyss. Why did Mises absolutely refuse to reveal corruption? Because he and his family were from the start the fronts of the Rothschilds. However, Mises was no slave. He kept quiet of the crimes of the Rothschilds and other bankers but he would not be their fall guy. Again and again the Rothschilds offered Mises a high position in their banks but he refused. He would not be their pawn.
Naturally this made Mises a very lonely man. One by one his Jewish friends and disciples abandoned him. They all went to the dark side. They all believed that there was another alternative besides creating the economically free Western and Eastern European Union. Just take over the West altogether and develop a Jewish dominated New World Order with Jewish led Fed and U$Srael. This they proceeded to do by supporting not only Keynesian-Samuelsonian economic interventionism but also Zionism and neoconservatism.
Mises was furious. His disciples were now accelerating the Jewish Fatal Embrace both politically and economically. In the long run this could only lead to both economic destruction of the West and deadly anti-Semitism. Mises refused to speak to some of his best Jewish disciples because “they knew what they were doing”, as Mises put it. Only the non-Jewish Friedrich von Hayek stayed mostly by his side and at really wanted to destroy the fraudulent fractional reserve banking system.
Mises was so frustrated that at a meeting of classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society he accused all other members of being socialists. Almost 50 years later Milton Friedman was still upset and complained in his memoirs how Mises had accused him and others of being “a bunch of socialists”. Hulsmann explains:
He [Mises] reacted with great determination and defended his laissez-faire position so vigorously that many years later his friend Lawrence Fertig still recalled the debate. Milton Friedman eventually concurred:
our sessions were marked by vigorous controversy over such issues as the role of religion and moral values in making possible and preserving a free society; the role of trade unions and the appropriateness of government action to affect the distribution of income. I particularly recall a discussion of this issue, in the middle of which Ludwig von Mises stood up, announced to the assembly “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” and stomped out of the room, an assembly that contained not a single person who, by even the lowest standards, could be called a socialist. (Biography, p. 871)
Even Mises’ own brother, Richard Mises went to the dark side. The conflict seems to have started at an early age. Ludwig was the big brother in more ways than one. He was not only two years older but also stronger, smarter and more dominating. However, Richard would not give up. All his life he rebelled against his big brother. When Mises fought against empiricism, interventionism and fraudulent banking his brother embraced them. Thus he was rewarded with an impressive university career that eluded Ludwig. Already at the age of 26 Richard became a full professor first at Strassburg and later at Harvard.
Richard von Mises started his attacks against his brother by joining the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. This was a great betrayal because Ludwig considered logical positivism not only intellectually flawed but also methodological poison. It treated the society as a machine that intellectuals and the state could manipulate at will with their mathematical equations. Soon Richard became one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle. Rothbard explains:
Mises saw the economic methodology that had been habitually employed by Austrians and by many classical economists such as Say and Senior, attacked on different grounds by a new group, logical positivists, spawned in his native Vienna. Indeed, Ludwig’s own younger brother, by two years, Richard von Mises, a mathematician and aeronautical engineer, became a leading member of this “Vienna Circle.” (Scholar, p. 33)
The disagreement was also very practical because Richard despised Ludwig’s free market economics and classical liberalism. For a long time the brothers would not even talk to each other. Only with the intervention of Margit did the brothers start talking again but never became close. Rothbard notes:
The two Mises brothers seem to have been estranged from an early age. They formally reconciled after Ludwig’s marriage in 1938, but were never close. One time, when Richard’s book Positivism was published, I asked Ludwig von Mises what he thought of his brother’s book. Mises drew himself up into an uncharacteristically stern pose, eyes flashing: “I disagreed with that book,” he stated in no uncertain terms, “from the first sentence until the last.” It was not a tone that invited further inquiry. (Scholar, p. 34)
To emphasize the importance of rationalist philosophy and methodology Ludwig chose a fitting title to his own magnum opus: Human Action. He wanted to make clear that humans are active and not reactive. Humans have a free will. Instead of researching human group reactions with mathematical equations and the methods of the natural sciences one should study human actions with the logic of choice, praxeology.
In Human Action Ludwig wanted to rub it in and once again started to criticize his brother’s mathematical theories. Without naming names, of course. Hulsmann explains:
He added an entirely new chapter—the only chapter with no counterpart in Nationalökonomie—to discuss the basic problems of probability theory, which was at the heart of the quantitative approach that dominated economic analysis in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In this chapter, Mises seized the opportunity to build on and elaborate the works of his brother Richard, who had pioneered the so-called relative-frequency theory of probability. Mises considerably simplified the axiomatic exposition of the theory and argued, without mentioning his brother by name, that the standard account was redundant.
Beyond the scholarly aspect of this contribution, the correction of his brother was a sequence in a typical “Austrian” literary squabble. Twelve years earlier, Richard had ventured into the field of his elder sibling, and claimed in one of his books that laissez-faire policies had no scientific merit.72 Now Ludwig struck back by demonstrating what an elegant exposition of the relative-frequency theory looked like. (Biography, p. 874. Emphasis added.)
Mises knew to expect the betrayal of his brother. But he could not expect that his best Jewish disciple and best friend, the economist Fritz Machlup suddenly turned against the gold standard. Mises considered this the ultimate betrayal since for centuries the undermining of the gold standard and the consequent manipulation of the money supply had been at the heart of Jewish Fatal Embrace. Thus the Jews had a big role in creating economic depressions which not only caused anti-Semitism but made people switch their allegiance from classical liberalism/libertarianism to interventionism and socialism. Machlup certainly knew all this but still wanted to manipulate the money supply even more! Mises became apoplectic. Hulsmann explains:
.. the French press had quoted Fritz Machlup’s testimony before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C., in which Machlup had pronounced himself against a return to the gold standard.
This must have come as a shock for Mises. In the fall of the same year, he met Machlup at the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Stresa, only to witness him reiterating his new views. He got very upset and told [his wife] Margit not to talk to Machlup any more. (Biography, p. 1032)
Poor Margit. Mises never told her what was really at stake. Margit was often afraid of her husband because she did not understand the cause of his sudden meltdowns. First Margit thought that Mises had bad nerves and just needed love and support. Only much later did she realize the enormous weight Mises had carried on his shoulders.
I gradually realized that these outbursts had nothing to do with me. I was just there, I was the outlet which gave him the opportunity to relieve himself. And I learned to understand that these terrible attacks were really a sign of depression, a hidden dissatisfaction and the sign of a great, great need for love.
Sometimes I could not help myself, I cried when I was alone. But it never took long, and he followed me to my room or wherever I was. He could not bear to see me crying. He took me in his arms; he kissed me again and again and started to apologize. I stopped him. I could not be angry with him. I pitied him too much.
These occurrences became less frequent after we were married, and after a few years they disappeared completely. In retrospect I judge these attacks differently, and I believe I understand the reason for them. Lu wrote some notes in 1940, and I read them again and again. He wrote of Austria and of Carl Menger, who as early as 1910 recognized that not only Austria but the whole world was getting nearer to a catastrophe. Lu, thinking alike, tried to fight this with all the means he had at his disposal. But he recognized the fight would be hopeless, and he got depressed-as were all the best minds in Europe in the twenties and thirties. He knew that if the world would turn its back to capitalism and liberalism (in the old sense of the word) it would tumble into wars and destruction that would mean the end of civilization.
This terrible fight against corruption, against the foes of liberty and the free market had broken the spirit of Menger, had thrown a dark shadow over the life of Lu’s teacher and friend Max Weber, and had destroyed the vitality and the will to live of his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Rosenberg. Theirs was a fight for a world that did not want to be helped.
Few people recognized the danger, and even fewer were ready to fight alongside Lu. It was like being on a sinking ship on which people were dancing though the end was near. Lu recognized the danger. He knew how to help his fellow passengers. He tried to lead them to the right exit, but they did not follow him-and now doom knocked at the door. (Margit von Mises. My Years With Ludwig von Mises. Arlington House 1976. p. 44-45)
Mises was becoming ever more desperate. He realized that the Jews were at it again. And even more greedily this time. But still he kept quiet. Mises never revealed and warned the people about the Jewish Fatal Embrace and the Culture of Critique. He never criticized the Jews, their kings, the Rothschilds or even their country Israel. It would not have been in the interest of the Jews.
Read more:
