Laissez-Faire Institute - Freedom Without Compromise

Hans Ziegler: world hunger won’t end thanks to him

In 1952, 18-year-old Bernese Hans Ziegler arrived in Paris. There he joined the Stalinist French Communist Party1 and began a long series of bad associations, meeting Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir:

So verfasste ich den ersten Artikel meines Lebens. Als ich fertig war, redigierte ihn Simone de Beauvoir. Sie war eine strenge Frau. Bevor sie ihn an Les Temps Modernes weitergab, hatte sie noch meinen Vornamen gestrichen und durch Jean ersetzt. „Hans“, sagte sie, „das ist doch kein Name!“

So I wrote the first article of my life. When I had finished, Simone de Beauvoir edited it. She was a strict woman. Before passing it on to Les Temps Modernes, she had removed my first name and replaced it with Jean. “Hans,” she said, “that’s not a name!”

– “Interview mit Jean Ziegler”, Die Zeit, Nr. 1, 2011 (archive)

His first article written, baptized by the communist Simone de Beauvoir herself, little Hans’s loathsome career – now under the name Jean – could start: a whole life dedicated to the most murderous of all ideologies, socialism.

Socialist obedience and infiltration

“Communist at heart”, after the Stalinist PCF, he joins the same sinister party as Lenin – the Swiss Socialist Party. Of course he would. Fittingly, he also published a book whose title is a quote from Lenin, Retournez les fusils ! Choisir son camp.

Born in 1934, he is 30 when his next communist mentor, Che Guevera, orders him to remain in Switzerland:

In 1964 Jean Ziegler chauffeured the then legendary Che Guevara at a conference in Geneva. Enthusiastically, he wants to set off for Cuba with the revolutionary. But Guevara refuses. Jean Ziegler should fight against the “head of the capitalist monster” here in Switzerland, where he was born.

The very same year that Che Guevara was proudly defending his regime’s executions of opponents before the General Assembly of the United Nations – Ziegler’s future employer.

In a 2022 interview2, Ziegler himself recounted the encounter:

I was his driver for a while, in Geneva. The day before he left, I mustered up my courage and said to him, “Comandante, I want to go with you!” He then showed me the illuminated buildings in the center of Geneva and said: “The brain of the monster is here. This is where you have to fight.” Che told me the strategy of the fight to lead: subversive integration. The goal was to break into the institutions and use their power for my purposes. This is how I became a university professor, parliamentarian and even special rapporteur for the United Nations.

Surprisingly candid interview…

And yet, in forty years, capitalism has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in China, mainly after the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. Isn’t this proof of the effectiveness of capitalism?

The capitalist mode of production is certainly the most vital and creative that humanity has ever known, but it escapes the control of the state and the unions.

Of course: It was never about feeding the hungry. It was all about control: power, it’s always about power. That is what socialism is all about:

Si, en définitive, j’avais à trouver une formule générale pour exprimer ce que m’apparaît le socialisme dans son ensemble, je dirais que c’est une nouvelle formule de la servitude.

[If, in the end, I had to express what socialism is overall, I would say that it is simply a new form of serfdom.]

– Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, IX, p. 541 [ Tocqueville’s Critique of Socialism ], 1848

Socialist famines and dictatorships

Another interview, in Swiss German this time (Hans’s mother tongue), in which he is asked whether he likes Lenin:

Aber den Lenin, den findest du gut, oder?

Far from denying it, he jumps to the Marxian monstrosity of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”(“Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!”).

Lenin, who, in 1921, decided that the “needs” of millions of Ukrainians did not include the need to eat; a communist logic which was repeated a decade later by his successor, Stalin: the Holodomor, in which perished 13% of the Ukrainian population, deliberately murdered by the famine of the Great Stalin.

Given that, of course, knowing the “needs” and “abilities” of others is impossible, the only remaining possibility is, as the socialist Oskar Lange suggested when claiming to address the demonstration of Ludwig von Mises of the impossibility of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth, to “[establish] [them] by the judgment of the authorities administering the economic system”. Which is exactly what Lenin and Stalin did, and certainly no Ziegler ever offered any other solution, any answer to Kołakowski’s Enigma. Let us bear that in mind as we cover his career. Speaking of Stalin:

Bei der Wahl seiner Bündnisgenossen war der Schweizer Kapitalismusgegner Jean Ziegler noch nie wählerisch. So hat er – offenbar ahnungslos – auch eine deutsche Politsekte unterstützt, die bis heute Stalin und Mao Zedong verehrt.

Kim Il Sung, Muammar Ghadhafi, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe: Die Liste der Diktatoren, die Jean Ziegler in seiner schillernden Karriere als Autor, Kapitalismusgegner und SP-Politiker allzu eifrig verklärt hat, ist lang – und sie wird immer länger. So steht der 84-Jährige derzeit ebenso stur wie standesgemäss zu den linkspopulistischen, venezolanischen Despoten Hugo Chávez und Nicolás Maduro, die ihr Land innerhalb von wenigen Jahren heruntergewirtschaftet und die Demokratie faktisch abgeschafft haben.

The Swiss anti-capitalist Jean Ziegler has never been choosy when picking his allies. He also supported a German political sect that still worships Stalin and Mao Zedong, apparently without knowing it.

Kim Il Sung, Muammar Ghadhafi, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe: The list of dictators that Jean Ziegler has glorified all too eagerly in his dazzling career as an author, opponent of capitalism and Socialist Party politician is long – and it’s getting longer. The 84-year-old is currently as stubborn as is befitting of the left-wing populist Venezuelan despots Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who have run down their country within a few years and effectively abolished democracy.

– Lucien Scherrer, “Jean Zieglers Stalinisten-Connection”, NZZ, February 4, 2019

Ziegler, who supported the worst regimes his whole life, often condemning their crimes only very belatedly, naturally never offered the slightest outline of a solution to Kołakowski’s Enigma, his whole career being marked by this contradiction:

Mais Dieu se rit des prières qu’on lui fait pour détourner les malheurs publics, quand on ne s’oppose pas à ce qui se fait pour les attirer.

God laughs at the prayers we make to him to avert public misfortunes, when we are not opposed to what is being done to attract them.3

– Bossuet

Indeed, he supported them all, the worst famine-generating regimes, “de la Corée du Nord de Kim Il-sung à l’Ethiopie de Mengitsu, du Zimbabwe de Mugabe au Cuba de Castro [from Kim Il-sung’s North Korea to Mengitsu’s Ethiopia, from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe to Castro’s Cuba]”:

Now imagine the irony in having someone like that hired by the United Nations as… Special Rapporteur on the right to food. A classic instance of the antonym fallacy, and a good example of how fake rights only serve to trample on real rights: as with any socialist proposal, such as the “right to housing” discourages construction, therefore reducing housing opportunities, or as “public services” consist precisely in exempting nationalized companies from actually having to serve the public in order to survive. Perhaps the biggest sad joke on hunger since the Ministry of Food of National Socialist Germany, was, like the Ministry of Plenty in the novel 1984, responsible for organizing famines.

In both interviews, Ziegler refers to the Paris Commune as the only example of “real” communism. He forgets the Taborites, obviously, but never mind.

Relevant here is that there’s a reason these primitive systems never held for long: they can work in a tiny, close community, for some time, producing specific basic goods (such as the kibbutzim – but even these were not that successful, see Johan Norberg: “The rise – and disastrous fall – of the kibbutz”). But feeding billions of people by coordinating the actions of billions of individual actors with no relationship to each other? (I “need” chocolate today, let’s hope someone on the other side of the world had the “ability” to plant cocoa 5 years ago, and someone else had the “ability” to design and operate a cargo ship to get it to me, etc, etc. See Leonard E. Read’s classic: “I, Pencil”.) Only global capitalism can achieve that.

Incidentally, if only the Paris Commune was real communism, and all those other socialist regimes were not, why did he support them nevertheless? Why was he not busy building real communism, perhaps on a small, voluntary scale to actually, finally, prove the world it works? Instead of wasting time visiting the bloodthirsty dictators of the alleged pseudo-communists or pseudo-socialists of Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, etc? You can’t have it both ways, Hans: we reach, as usual with socialism, Kołakowski’s enigma (which, so far, only libertarianism has answered).

In the same candid interview:4

We fight hunger. We fight against the omnipotence of multinationals. We fight global warming. But what will be born from the ruins of this system? Nobody knows, because that’s how history works.

Revolution for Revolution’s sake, as usual. Pretending to fight against hunger, by destroying a system that feeds billions, with no guarantee it would be replaced by a system that feeds more, or even as many (and every historical and logical indication it would not) – or that indeed, billions would not die through the revolutionary process itself.

Socialist lies and dubious friendships (terrorists, islamists, Holocaust-deniers)

But would that really have been an issue for Ziegler?

So, in 1970, thanks to Ziegler, a secret and despicable deal with terrorists:

Un accord oral que l’ancien conseiller fédéral Pierre Graber, socialiste lui aussi [quelle coïncidence !], a passé à l’automne 1970 à Genève et à l’insu du Conseil fédéral avec le chef de la politique étrangère de l’OLP, Farouk Kaddoumi. Marcel Gyr révèle qu’au travers de ce moratoire officieux, l’OLP s’engageait à épargner la Suisse d’actes terroristes et à contrôler en ce sens ses factions les plus virulentes. En échange, Pierre Graber s’engageait à faire tout son possible pour que l’OLP puisse avoir pignon sur rue à Genève, siège des Nations-Unies.

An oral agreement that the former Federal Councilor Pierre Graber, also a socialist [what a coincidence!], made in the fall of 1970 in Geneva and without the knowledge of the Federal Council with the head of foreign policy of the PLO, Farouk Kaddoumi. Marcel Gyr reveals that through this unofficial moratorium, the PLO undertook to spare Switzerland from terrorist acts and to control its most virulent factions in this sense. In exchange, Pierre Graber undertook to do everything possible so that the PLO’s voice could be heard in Geneva, at the seat of the United Nations.

– “Jean Ziegler a facilité un accord secret entre la Suisse et l’OLP”

In 1970, therefore, as a reward for the murder of 47 people, by these same terrorists, in Switzerland. Graber, what a fitting name for a grave digger.

Now, who claimed responsibility for the attack?

Marxist–Leninist and revolutionary socialist organization… the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest being Fatah

– Wikipedia, “PFLP”(Like for Fatah, a glance at its logo is enough to know what exactly they stand for, and that everything else are just lies and deceptions)

So! Yet another bunch of socialists... What a coincidence!

And since we mentioned 1984, let’s remember this other scene: do it to her, not me. Except that Ziegler was not tortured: it was of his own free will that he helped the terrorists.

By the way. Among the infamous dictators supported by Ziegler, let us not forget Muammar Gaddafi, of the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”. Special mention for his “International Prize for Human Rights”, founded and received by Ziegler:

“Le prix Kadhafi ? Comment pourrais-je l’avoir créé ? C’est absurde !”

“The Khadafi Prize? How could I have created it? It is absurd!”

– Jean Ziegler, quoted in Michel Jeanneret, “Nations Unies: Jean Ziegler au cœur d’une nouvelle polémique”, Le Matin, April 24, 2006

The same Ziegler who supported the PLO terrorists, and who, in totally unrelated news, has since been regularly spitting on Israel at every chance5; it is in the company of Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy that he received the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights6. A member of the nefarious French Communist Party, like him. And a friend he just had to support, of course:

Ziegler has also helped to promote and protect the careers of several European intellectuals with questionable if not disturbing reputations. In April 1996, for instance, he came to the defense of Roger Garaudy, a former French Stalinist and convert to Islam whose book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel denies the Holocaust. In response to the public controversy provoked by the book, Ziegler wrote a letter of support to Garaudy, which the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH)—a group dedicated to the promotion of Holocaust denial—published in full on its website:

“I am outraged at the legal case they are making against you…. All your work as a writer and philosopher attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time…. It is for all these reasons that I express here my solidarity and my admiring friendship.”

– Hillel Neuer, “Ziegler’s Follies”

Why this preposterous prize?

Most striking, however, is Ziegler’s role in co-founding, co-managing, and eventually winning the Muammar al-Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. In April 1989, just a few months after Pan Am flight 103 was blown up by Libyan intelligence agents, killing all 259 people on board, Ziegler announced the prize’s creation. It was widely believed to be a transparent attempt to change Libya’s damaged international image as a terrorist state.

– Hillel Neuer, “Ziegler’s Follies”

Co-founded by Ziegler in 1989, the prize will be received among others by Castro and Chavez, other friends of Ziegler... The list of his friendships with dubious characters – whenever they are, like him, socialists (or at least anti-capitalism, anti-Western, anti-Israel, anti-US, etc.) – is long7:

Besides being one of Europe’s most successful celebrity activists, Ziegler is also one of the continent’s most industrious anti-American and anti-Israel ideologues as well as a prominent apologist for a rogues’ gallery of Tird World dictators, including Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. During Ziegler’s tenure as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, the cause of world hunger consistently took a backseat to the promotion of his anti-Western ideology. At a time when the UN is heralding the reform of its human rights apparatus, replacing the discredited Commission on Human Rights with a new council which it has described as the “dawn of a new era,” the case of Jean Ziegler casts grave doubt on the possible success of this reform and reveals the precipitous and accelerating decline of the UN human rights system and the international human rights movement as a whole.

– Hillel Neuer, “Ziegler’s Follies”

Socialist death

Socialism is the single major cause of the slowdown of progress. No one should ever die, but also, as a precondition, no one should ever be socialist. It is thanks to socialists like Ziegler that people, including himself, still die needlessly today: in famines, in political purges, in terrorist attacks, or, simply, of old age or possibly curable diseases, because of the slowdown of economic growth which their idiotic policies cause.

It is why we refer to them as useful (or useless, the void has no use for them) idiots of the void: the ideology they think they serve is devoid of morality, of meaning and of purpose, it is mere nihilism. Their only real master, whether consciously or not, is therefore destruction (including their own), evil, death, nothingness. And now Ziegler met his end, the ultimate cause he so diligently served his entire life.

Your room in hell is ready, Mr Ziegler. Well heated, it has been awaiting you for a long time already. You’ll be in good company, most of your great friends and mentors, with their socialist hands still dripping from the blood of their victims, are already there, expecting you.

Meanwhile, we, the capitalists you fought so resolutely, will keep on building a better world, with you, against you, or, henceforth, without you.