Lessons in Freedom: Looking Back to Gain Perspective!

by Tibor R. Machan (http://www.weblogbahamas.com)

As one who tasted both a bit of Nazism and Communism, today's economic fiasco strikes me as relatively mild as human disasters go.  For starters many in America remember the Great Depression and the Second World War, both of which had devastated millions of lives, destroying the bulk and arresting even more. The concentration camps, the gulags, the bombings and the wreckage left in their wake across the globe simply aren't anything like what we are experiencing now, economically, mostly, but not exclusively. And the fallout from the loss of all the wealth is yet to be counted up.

Yet, what we are in the midst of and is likely to follow just doesn't compare to the disasters and catastrophes people have known throughout and especially fairly recent history.  Perhaps Darfur comes close but even that isn't quite in the league of Dachau, for example.  And in some cases a goodly portion of the world's population has actually witnessed drastic improvements.  It is a bit of that I'd like to recount here.

On a train ride I recently took from Budapest to Salzburg, Austria, so as to visit my 90 year old and amazingly lucid mother--who has lived through the majority of Europe's recent calamities--I happen to have passed by each town I went through back in October 1953, on my escape from communism. I had been smuggled out because my parents thought I would never survive there, being the outspoken kid I was and adult I would likely become.  I was then 14 but I remember it all very well and even the little I witnessed on my recent journey revealed a most amazing difference between the two journeys!

Back during the escape, with four adults, me, and our guide--the likes of whom Time magazine would later label a "flesh peddler" because they took money for their troubles--we had to sneak about, sleep in hay stacks during the day and walk on freshly tilled ground under cover of dark, dodge everyone especially cops and national border guards and discard nearly all our baggage for fear it would impede our progress. Finally we made it across the barb wired Iron Curtain separating Hungary and Austria, although the latter was still partly under Soviet occupation.

In contrast to all that, this time when I crossed from Hungary into Austria via train, no one even asked me anything, not even for my passport. Unbelievable changes have taken place, mostly for the batter for most people--though, as with all such transitional periods there have been many disappointments and troubles (not the least because most of the old guard is still there trying to muck things up). Still, if one considers how dangerous it used to be to speak out about the regime and its policies, the current economic fiasco is nothing like what people went through in those days. And, of course, there have been even worse times elsewhere and in earlier times, which puts the current fiasco in a different light.

Hungarians have a saying, harking back to when forty thousand some were murdered in the south of the country by turkish invaders--who meant to send a message to the Austro-Hungarian regime concerning the danger of resisting them, namely, "Tobb is veszet Mohacson" ("More was lost at Mohach"). Nothing quite compares to what happened back then and Americans, as well as the rest who are going through current hardships, might well remember that history is replete with real catastrophes compared to which our mess is small potatoes. They would all do well to keep some watch over recent as well as older history, as well as other regions of the globe today, and realize that there are far worse things that can happen to people than an economic downturn, one that is mostly the result of malpractice throughout the political as well as the commercial system of the country. But this malpractice is nowhere near as awful as were the horrors of the 20th century and those of many eras of human history when people were brutalized by their rulers and by empire builders in their neighborhoods.

We should, I believe, put our current economic wows in perspective and not panic about them but make the proper adjustments and not make the same mistakes again.

March 21, 2009

We are delighted to present Lessons in Freedom, essays by Dr. Tibor Machan, for your pleasure.

Dr. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University's Argyros School of B&E.

Visit his web site here...