We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Editors note: On December 15, David Deutsch observed that the same people howling that the ‘Osama bin Laden Tape’ was a CIA produced fake designed to blame him for the September 11 atrocities, were the same people taking to the streets in his support because…he they believed he was behind the September 11th attrocities…presenting an interesting logical dilemma.
Dr. Deutsch, I believe, makes eminent sense. I had also been thinking about why there is such widespread scepticism in the Muslim world with regard to the authenticity of the tape, but now I think it’s a symptom of a thought process of exactly the type Dr. Deutsch suggests.
It’s a good question, because this is what I have been wondering about. The belief of the myth of the doctored bin Laden tape, for these people, is natural because it is part of a whole bigger outlook, a bigger myth, which includes the common elements of oppression and redemption. These kinds of superstitious notions tend to be produced quite commonly in history wherever people somehow perceive themselves, rightly or wrongly, as being oppressed. As far as I can tell in the case of the pan-Islamists, it seems to be a product of what they perceive to be “oppressive” behaviour from others. They have been led to believe – to the level of certainty – that they are subject to the oppression of the ‘west’, which has closed all doors for their progress, prosperity and even freedom to lead a life. You may have seen an article from memri.com entitled Why I Hate America, by a Palestinian journalist, and it includes these titbits:
America is the tormentor of my people. It is to me, as a Palestinian, what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. America is the all-powerful devil that spreads oppression and death in my neighborhood…”
America is the author of 53 years of suffering, death, bereavement, occupation, oppression, homelessness and victimization… the usurper of my people’s right to human rights, democracy, civil liberties, development and a dignified life…
You get the idea, he’s not exactly a happy bunny. He has a similar beef with the Jews, as well. (As you know, these rants are typical of beliefs that serve their leaders hidden agendas by deflecting popular frustration with such autocratic regimes, by feeding a mass frenzy by allowing, and even encouraging, clerics and the media circus to promote anti-Western, anti-modern and anti-Jewish propaganda.) So when social conditions include an oppression of people, then virtually all become vulnerable by seeking what they regard as reassuring certainties.
Oppression lends itself to credulity, and under such conditions the critical faculties of people break down, and adopt the first voice of dissent they hear. They seek a solution wherever they can find one. So when they are vulnerable and afraid, the leaders only have to offer the flimsiest of proofs, and human credulity does the rest. Through all of this, the masses suffer and end up pointing the fingers at the “west” or Israel, who then come to be regarded as the root of their problems. Not only that, the helplessness that comes with such long-term oppression lends itself to a myth of some sort of belief in a future rescue intervention.
This is why I agree with Dr. Deutsch when he says that there is a “psychological incentive” in these Muslim areas, which expresses a “deep admiration” for bin Laden. For bin Laden is widely considered by pan-Islamists to be an embodiment of redemption, through his unbelievably dramatic attacks on the U.S., and what he represents to many Muslims. They rejoice as what they come to see as a “slap in the face” of America, the crown of the west. Extremists especially, and virtually all pan-Islamists now see their messiah in the form of a universal caliphate, a common leadership for Muslims, which they see as rescuing them from what they perceive to be the injustice of the “west”. For them, this harkens back to the “glorious golden age” of their past, which they believe was cruelly taken from them by outsiders, notably the “West” and the Jews. This is why bin Laden makes extensive use of history, and generally speaking, pan-Islamists tend to be quite conscious about it and, even though the history that they preach is almost always inaccurate, they remain quite jealous of their version of events. Their belief in their ultimate redemption is extremely strong. They find it very difficult to condemn this man, thereby giving rise to excuses such as inadequate proof.
In my time, I have come face to face with a multitude of pan-Islamic protagonists, including the relatively zealous down to the somewhat milder breeds, and in all cases it becomes obvious that they share a particular outlook upon life. It’s a very emotional philosophy, and for them life is recast as a morality play, a tale of hubris and downfall. The attack on America was an unavoidable event for them, something that was effectively divinely sanctioned, and therefore deserved. The astonishing thing I found, was that these type of Muslims find it perversely seductive – not because it offers an easy way out, but because it doesn’t. Because for them it offers gratification, some kind of pleasure when it comes to dispensing painful “advice” with a clear conscience, safe and secure in the belief that they are not being heartless but merely practising tough love. This would explain the “far leftist” stance that many have adopted especially in the aftermath of September 11.
So, the West is hated a lot, and it is not surprising that the relatively extremist folk would go into denial over the authenticity of the tape. To admit shamefacedly that the West was right, and that their hero is guilty, would not be in their interests. Thus, they are not about to admit that they are wrong. However, some really do believe that bin Laden is innocent, as they are far more incredulous of the West’s honesty in any case. Indeed, their newspapers have peddled lie after lie, and focused so much upon exaggerated accounts of Muslims being brutally treated in the “West”, along with other unfavourable commentary on the war in Afghanistan, which supposedly vindicate such anti-western beliefs. Many of these people don’t have any issue with ascribing to morally relativistic beliefs, and therefore they will not even have an issue with the hypocrisy of their situation over the tape.
by Adil Farooq
Adil Farooq runs the highly recommended muslimpundit blogsite and is struggling to drive contemporary Muslim thought kicking and screaming back to Aristotelean traditions of rationality and intellectual enquiry in the spirit of ibn-Rushd.
I was trying to post an article to the Samizdata last night but I was having dreadful technical problems. I was cursing so loud that my friends came to see what was wrong.
Eventually we all decided that the problem must be the terrible Bosnian telephones lines, or perhaps the horrible ISP here in Sarajevo was resulting in bitdrop corrupting my post requests. I was so annoyed… how can I get fan mail/offers of marriage mail/free-plane-tickets-for-a-romantic-week-in-Cancun mail if I cannot post my Samizdata articles?
But now I discover that is was not the poor old battered and abused Bosnian infrastructure that was to blame at all. It seems that our good friend Mister Blogger.com had a bad case of ebola for a few days but he is feeling better.
So now I am happy because I can post again!
Unfortunately I have forgotten what I was going to say. Damn.
No doubt fearful that having Al Qaeda members floating around their country is going to result in US military action against Yeman, it seems that the government of Yeman has decided to not be the next ‘Taliban’ on the US hit list. Pravda reports (As usual in Pravda the English in the article is a bit bizarre)
Today, in Yemen a wide-ranging operation started to annihilate Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad’s structures in the country. The operation is being carried out by units of an anti-terrorist special subdivision leaded Ahmed Ali, the president’s older son. The operation is simultaneously carried out in Marib, Al-Jauf, Shabva and Hadramaut provinces, where training camps and bases of the terrorists are supposed to be situated. Spiritual leader of Yemenite extremists is sheikh Abdelmajid Az-Zindani regarded by FBI as a very dangerous. He is the leader of the opposition Reform Party and of illegal organization Islamic Jihad, connected with Al-Qaeda.
It may well be that the best thing to come out of the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, due to the presence of Al Qaeda, is a message has been heard loud and clear throughout the Islamic world: playing host to third parties who engage in the mass murder of Americans can be extremely hazardous to your government’s health.
A tip of the turban to Charles Tupper Jr for pointing out the Pravda article
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
– Cicero
or
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a blog.
-What Cicero would have said if he was alive today
It is good to hear that Dmitry is finally free to return to Russia. What puzzles me about this case is how did a US court even feel they had the appropriate jurisdiction to try him?
The way I understand it, he wrote the decryption software in Russia, for a Russian company, ElcomSoft. The software is entirely legal in Russia and yet somehow because the program can crack codes in ways prohibited by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Sklyarov was arrested when he visited a conference in the USA.
Imagine for a moment that a US citizen, living the USA, writes an article in the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper which is sold world wide). Say that in this article, the US journalist makes remarks that are illegal in Russia (a nation not known for its free press) but in the USA are protected by the First Amendment and hence entirely legal.
How would the USA react if, when that journalist makes the mistake of going to Russia to attend some conference, he gets arrested by the Russian police, thrown in jail and charged with a crime because the Wall Street Journal with the offending remarks was also available in Moscow hotels? Would some US lawyer care to explain how that works?
Back when I was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, I remember a blue neon sign across the Allegheny River from the downtown. Mostly I remember it from winters, because that was when it would already be dark when mom and I were on the bus home after one of her shopping expeditions. I don’t think it is there anymore, what with all the Northside development that has come to pass over the years, but it was a series of circled W’s: the Westinghouse emblem. Now Westinghouse was a local Pittsburgh company and absolutely anyone who grew up there knows “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse”.
One can apply the same phrase to other companies. Many companies really do have products with features you can always depend on, always be sure of.
That is why I was not terribly surprised while I was having difficulties posting stories to blogspot all day long and kept seeing this message:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
/blog_form-action.pyra, line 53
Yes, you really can be sure of some things in this life.
There have been quite a few retrospective’s recently about how badly wrong some September pundit prognostications were. Unfortuneately Samizdata was not then in existence so my thoughts were spread amongst numerous private email groups and private “conversations”. I looked at some of these this evening as I was doing some system admin and came to the conclusion that I did much better than most. The essay below is one I mailed to a small private policy discussion that sprang up shortly after September 11th and lasted only a week or two. I won’t specifiy any names but there were some interesting people on it. I also know it circulated a bit in amongst some policy types but whether anyone “in high places” read it I do not know.
I’ll leave it to you the reader to judge, but I think I deserve at least a B grade.
Wed, 19 Sep 2001 00:28:09 +0100
Comments to a small group of friends.
I’ve a few thoughts on the prosecution of this war, and although I’ve stated a number of them in assorted public lists, some may be of interest to this small selection of what appears to be rather more than average in terms of policy analysis.
One issue that is paramount to me is that we do not give an inch on the liberties we value. There is no sense prosecuting a war against a potential oppressor if we are willing to do to ourselves what he would do to us if victorious. I hear all to many calls for invasions of privacy, restrictions on civil liberties and the like. If such are indeed required for the prosecution of the war, they should be carefully limited to what is needed only for the prosecution of that war and sunsetted so that they must either be re-enacted at a specific time and unconditionally terminated with the end of the war, regardless of how much time there is left in the sunset clause.
The country has a significant libertarian and libertarian leaning component now, and if those (myself included) are to give wholehearted backing, we must know that by so doing we are not driving a stake into the heart of our liberties.
If we are to prosecut a war, we must have a clearly defined target and a clearly defined end point. The information supplied on bin Laden shows that we do indeed face a foe who is effectively one of the new nonterritorially based states. His is based on hatred and violence whereas as most of the others which are developing are not. The concept of a nation as a place with borders is blurring and will continue to blur. I, for instance, am an american by birth living in the UK/Ireland and dealing real time with a peer group that spans the globe.
So we have a new form of warfare as well. bin Laden is the first virtual state to declare war on another state. Defeating his virtual state will require application of force that is independant of borders. To do that there will have to be strong international acquiesance. And to retain support at home it will have to be clear that we are not creating a tool that will be turned to other, highly undesirable uses.
On the home front there are several battles:
* ongoing public support
* classical law enforcement and security
* the average citizen as a soldier
* dealing with the 5th column
I’ve touched on the first issue. We have to be sure we are fighting for our liberty.
The second issue is the one the press and most policy types seem to be focusing on. I probably cannot add a great deal to what has been said there.
The third issue is one that has been almost ignored. What is new about this war over others is that there are no lines. The battlefield is anywhere at any time. The enemy will attempt to chose those times and places such that miniscule force will be overwhelming force. That is what they did on Tuesday. However if we learned no other lesson on that day, we have better have learned this one;
Terrorists will always be victorious when surrounded by sheep.
That was the force multiplier that allowed them to capture an airliner despite being outnumbered 10:1 and most likely in fact *outarmed* at least 5:1 as well. Most guys carry small knives just as dangerous as the mattknives carried by the enemy; additionally, large numbers of americans are trained in martial arts.
The only reason that they succeeded in the first two cases was that what they planned to do had never been done. All previous hijackings ended in extended negotiations. The vast majority of all passengers hijacked sat quietly and eventually returned to friends and family.
But that all changed. The second flight may have found out about the WTC; the news has not told us, but I would suspect that at least one of the known cellphone calls passed the info on. However there was simply no time to react for them.
But the time line for the 4th plane was enough for the fact to be communicated and discussed. There in lies the flaw in the enemies logic. Americans are rational; but they are not sheep. The terrorists in aircraft number for died for their mistake.
This is what I would call the “citizen as soldier”. In this kind of war, the enemy will strike when and where they want, and they will not go where either military or police are in abundance. Neither will security measures at airports or elsewhere stop them from hijacking if they can get on board at all. Remember the dictum:
“There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous people”
Trained enemy can kill with their bare hands. Or with a bit of string for a garrot, or a pen through the eye into the brain, or…
If there is a single guard on the plane, he will be taken out first and then they will proceed. However the citizen is now aware that they are a soldier. Perhaps the average american is not thinking in those terms, but it is almost certainly that case that if a plane is hijacked, the passengers will assume that no matter what the hijackers say, their intent is to kill thousands. Americans will make the rational decision and they will kill the hijackers with their bare hands, even if they all die.
This is a fact proven by the new crater in Somerset.
Next on our agenda. There is a 5th column in place in American and it has had years to bury itself in the flesh of the american islamic community. It will have to be dug out.
I have suggested to some friends that moslems who are truly citizens of the US or UK or where ever should back a Fatwah against bin Laden and his organization.
If they do not do so, they prove they are either unreliable, traitorous or afraid of retribution. A movement by patriotic american moslems to make such a declaration would drive a wedge between moslems. The moslem community must be split into the part which belongs in a modern society like America, and the part which is the enemy to be defeated.
Like others before them, american Japonese, Germans and Italians, they should be offered the chance to stand up and be counted. After WTC there can be no mixed loyalties on the issue of bin Laden. Either you is with us or you ain’t.
Now to move to the international side of things. While bombs and technology and push button warfare have their place… they will only be a backup part of this war. I suggest an air cavalry able to insert divisions onto a target anywhere in the world, with whatever other assets are necessary.
They should be prepared to operate without the permission of the harboring state; they should be intended not for holding ground but for reaching, confirming and destroying (or killing) a specific objective. It also avoids many disastrous mistakes. And if the target has moved or dug in, you will know it and can act on that knowledge immediately. A cruise missile is a hell of lot dumber than the lowliest grunt, and I for one hope that it stays that way.
It does look like there is a great deal of common cause with Russia on this; there have also been been news that the Northern Alliance is willing to back us wholeheartedly; and that Turkmenistan has offered support because it would like a peaceful environment in which to develop it’s (alleged) massive oil and other resources in peace. US investment to extract those resources could change it from dirt poor to one of the wealthiest per-capita countries over night if what I have heard is indeed true.
We may also turn the Taliban’s threats of invasion to our own advantage. They may do very well in their own mountains, but the mathematics of offense are very different from those of defense. If they can be taunted into acting, they can be made to take massive casualties.
Afghanistan is a nation held captive by a (relatively) small number of fanatics. Our goal should be to work with the Russians, the NA and such to get the civil war there going against the Taliban. With the Iranian border closed to them, they have their backs to Pakistan.
So ideally we assist existing forces to install a moderate government that is sufficiently friendly to Russia to give them a stake in this, and under ideal circumstances, friendly enough to us to allow continued hit and run operations against any bin Laden or similar groups who attempt to operate in those fearsome mountains.
In other nations the battles might be entered by working with the local government, as perhaps in the Phillipines; to inserting a commando squad without that government’s knowledge to take out the bin Laden organization members manu a manu.
Just a few gems from Tim Blair‘s unmissable idiosyncratic daily round up of who is declaiming about what on which blog.
Hammer the stupid, Moira!… Fisked by the demented…Unspooling of intestines praised… Steyn rocks, albeit at a slower beat than bloggers … Rand Simberg and the Burqa of Death … Solent child thrills to notorious book… HTML abuse… Spears version 2.0 … Goldberg-bashing links… Reuters a major piece of crap… Drunken Australian linkage flaw… blog humor/tedium ratio explored… reason apparently not linked to suicide attacks
To make sense of it all, visit Tim Blair’s blog and receive your free can of Fosters. Excellent.
A big meeting of the 15 EU heads of state in Laeken has ended today in a Billy Wilder-style farce of childish squabbling about who gets which brand, spanking new taxpayer-funded lavish office in Brussels. Just how precursive is this going to prove, I wonder?
The meeting itself was supposed to address the problem boldly identified by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt that the ‘EU is out of touch with the people’. (No kidding, Guy??!!) Cue, huge conflab in Laeken to discuss ways in which the EU ‘can be made to be more relevent to people’s lives’ (or similar).
Of course, what all this euphemistic twaddle translates into is the bold fact that nobody loves the Eurocrats and the Eurocrats know it. They know it and don’t like it because, like all potentates they require not just our lives but our hearts and minds as well. Without the latter they can never quite feel secure. So they want us to love them, to hang their pictures on our walls, to quote their speeches and fill our bookshelves with their ghosted biographies. That way we need them, they need us, we’re all in this together and we march forward to a happy fEUture
But it won’t happen. Governments, all governments, have been a stick-and-carrot operation but the EU has no carrots and using the stick will bring them down more quickly than us. They can still bully and threaten but what precious little ability our political masters had to inspire loyalty or devotion bit the dust long ago and that kind of thing is impossible to resurrect. They can always try the singles columns
“German technocrat, 53, cuddly and sincere. Hobbies include drafting pointless laws and constructing vast bureaucracies. Seeks willing and compliant polity for mutual dependence leading to full union”
More likely though they will have left Laeken with instructions to their minions to draw up a convoluted brobdignanian set of regulations designed to ‘bring the people closer to the EU’. Expect them to be trumpeted joyously through the usual channels within a month or two – and then promptly forgotten about
The EU is now like some old dowager empress, seized with money and power but repulsive and unloved. How long can they live without it until they die of a collective broken heart?
Vini Vedi Visa
(I came I saw I shopped)
You may be wondering ‘which Federation is that?’ Russia? Mexico? No. Star Trek’s Federation. What is more, my problem is more with the Star Trek shows than their fictional interstellar political entity.
It is not the stories I object to, which are adequate though often highly derivative. It is not the acting, which is generally satisfactory and occasionally quite good. It is not the dialogue, which is adequate for the most part with only intermittent trips into the creative quicksand. It is not the special effects, which are seamless and superior (no, not the first series). All these things are okay for the various Star Trek shows such as Next Generation, DS-9, Voyager (I have not seen Enterprise yet), which are collectively the Sci-Fi ‘franchise’ that more or less defines the qualitative median line through the genre.
Like any long running series, the Star Trek shows have had their ups and downs: The first few Next Generation were embarrassingly badly acted but they eventually pulled together as a company of actors. Voyager was for quite a while the ‘lemon’ of the franchise (Trek Fan One: “You wanna hear a Star Trek joke?” Trek Fan Two: “Sure” Trek Fan One: “Voyager”). Yet once they added the sublime Jeri Ryan and gave their script writers a firm kick up the arse, it belatedly became quite a good show (yes, I admit it: Jeri Ryan’s unusually named ‘7 of 9’ pushed pretty much all my buttons in all the right ways).
Other shows do the genre better for sure (Stargate absolutely, Babylon 5 for the most part, Farscape & Earth: Final Conflict intermittently) whilst still others do it worse (Andromeda) or far worse (SeaQuest DSV)…and of course there is the demented Lexx (imagine Voyager, but while stoned on peyote) which is in a class all its own that transcends mere notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
So what do I have against the Federation? Well simply put, it is an authoritarian collectivist quasi-communist society (the government is clearly paramilitary) with a totally non-monetary command economy. That they have invented a state like that is not my grouse. I do not doubt there will be authoritarian states in the future just as there are now and so why not posit them? Fine… my problem is that somehow the Federation are held up to be the good guys!
There is little sign of any counter-culture within the Federation and what there is are mostly shown as being violent unreasonable terrorists (the Maquis, who in reality are just fighting to prevent their land being occupied as a result of a Federation sell-out). Also, aspects of their military culture are frankly beyond belief (particularly when compared to shows like Stargate or Babylon 5, which actually understand the essential logic underpinning the military mindset). Do these guys ever fire first? And how often has Jean Luc Picard surrendered his ship in various episodes? That is the Star Fleet Flagship we are talking about! Likewise it seems that insubordination, even under fire, is almost the norm! Sorry but with a culture like that, the Klingons, the Romulans , hell, the Tellytubbies, would have smashed the Federation long ago.
Yet it is clear that the Federation’s agents are the very essence of violent interaction under other conditions. Most striking was one episode of Next Generation called Unification, Part II. Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) enters a saloon seeking information. He encounters a female piano player whom he suspects might know what he needs to discover. She suggests he might like to ‘make it worth her while’. In a voice dripping with disdain, he says “I don’t carry money”. He then falls back on sweet talking her and eventually she reveals a Fenegi merchant nearby may actually have the information (the Ferengi are little arch-capitalist gargoyles with large ears. Good little Von Mises fans that they are, they insist on payment in ‘gold-pressed latinum’, none of this fiat money crap for them!) . As charm is not going to work on a Fenegi merchant, Riker roughs the puny unarmed merchant up and threatens him in order to extract the information. Now keep in mind that we are being told to regard Riker as the good guy. A Feregi will sell anything yet rather than even try to buy or barter for the information, Star Fleet’s armed uniformed thug just resorts to violence. This is just one of the more stark examples of why it really bugs me to hear Sci-Fi fans hold Star Trek’s Federation up as some sort of ‘better society’ in the future.
And yes, I really do always cheer for the Klingons.
Matthew Edgar is taking part in a secret program designed to confuse enemies, misdirect attacks and generally spread chaos and confusion. His well written morphoblog radically changes appearance every time I visit it (or so it seems). His change to microdot sized typeface is also no doubt part of the plan to throw the forces of BigGovernment(tm) off the trail.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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