Eric Margolis’s article today on how today’s establishment largely ignores Soviet crimes reminded me of a comical bit of ignorance and hysteria among the Koch-funded “beltway libertarians” in the mid ’90s.  It involves a book review in The Freeman by Hans Hoppe of a book of essays on war edited by Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling.  Hoppe mentioned in passing (p. 776) that, before WWII, Stalin had murdered some 20 million people, including 6 million Ukrainians who were largely intentionally starved to death.  This is an undisputed fact.  Well.  All hell broke loose in Kochland.  Hoppe was widely denounced far and wide (within the D.C.-Fairfax corridor, anyway); Israel Kirzner resigned from the board of the Foundation for Economic Education; and Hoppe was banished from The Freeman forevermore.  A former GMU student who was still bouncing around in the Koch Foundation orbit (aka “the Kochtopus”) snarled at me that “Your friend Hoppe is a Holocaust denier.”  Not because he denied the Holocaust, but because he pointed out that Stalin, like Hitler, was also a psychotic mass-murdering socialist.

Hoppe’s great sin of course was to point out that the Holocaust was not the only horrific example of state-sponsored mass murder in history, not even in early twentieth-century history.  The article by Margolis shows that it is still not acceptable to mention that the European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century were not the only ones to suffer greatly at the hands of socialist tyrants and mass murderers.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo