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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As you can probably tell, Samizdata is undergoing a phase of collective preoccupation with Other Things just now, not least the difficulties associated with the programme Perry uses to run the thing. And to adapt Groucho Marx, any enterprise that relies on me might as well give up now and save itself the bother. The point being, I’m busy too, even if it may not look it. I’ll tell you all about it in due course, but not until I’ve done it thank you. A man’s got to know his limitations, failing to stick to public promises being one of my worst.
So let guest writer P.G. Wodehouse take up the slack. I swear on a stack of Jeeves paperbacks that I picked this paragraph, which is from The Code of the Woosters, completely at random. The only qualification I looked for was that it lacked inverted commas, because I especially like Wodehouse when he alone is doing the talking. Here is the random paragraph:
The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking – and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs’ worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
Now I know what you’re thinking. What is this whole situation? Well to echo Clint Eastwood just once more, this time from the closing moments of Two Mules For Sister Sarah: I haven’t got time for that.
Bloody Antoine. You spend half your life trying to get him to do things, and then he does something just when you don’t want him to (see below), and makes nonsense of everything in this post so far, which you might as well have anyway.
I know that individual Muslims can be the salt of the earth. I too regret the passing of the kebab shop in Tachbrook Street. Some of my best friends are Muslims. The trouble is that when one of these Islam-versus-the-rest horrors erupts, it swallows up individual salt-of-the-earth Muslims along with everyone else. In Yugoslavia for example, happily married city folks who hardly even realised that their marriage was “mixed” suddenly got shot to hell.
Plus, I’m not in favour of a war for heaven’s sakes. I’m just frightened there might be one.
An “individualist” approach doesn’t cut it, because individuals ain’t the problem. But I’ll supply a more thoughtful response when I’ve more time. (Damn, another public promise.)
Brian Micklethwait should try applying an individualist approach to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Is Mohammed Al Fayed a viper in the nest of free-market(ish) Europe? Perhaps, but he’s not a threat to Western Civilization because of his religious beliefs. The Turkish kebab shop in Tachbrook Street (now demolished by predatory developers  ) with the Galatasaray and Arsenal football fan may be included on census forms as a “non-white European” to terrify drawing room society, but I was less frightened of his political opinions than I am by some of Sean Gabb’s, and his cooking was a lot less threatening than Brian’s.
Go to an Italian restaurant in central London. Many of the raven haired waitresses are no more Italian than I am, and no more Catholic than Osama bin Laden. They’re wine drinking economic migrants from Kosovo whose parents had “Moslem” on their communist era identity cards. Sure, add them up and you get 40 per cent of the population of a grotty flat in Finchley or Norwood. The other 60 per cent are as likely to be Serbs, Croats or Slovaks all with their nominal ethnic or religious hatreds. How come they aren’t slaughtering each other in Ballards Lane or West Norwood High Street? As individuals, Moslems are no worse than Glaswegians. It’s when a mob looking for a fight at a football match run into you that they’re a nuisance.
The problem isn’t immigration… Its immigration and a welfare state. We have to choose one or the other. I make no bones in saying that the NHS, comprehensive education, state benefits, council housing, free abortions (no charge to the user) all have to go. All that immigration has done is accelarate the process of creating an underclass. If we’d had the welfare state in the seventeenth century the Jews and Dutch would have a reputation in Britain for being alcoholics, single mothers, violent etc. No doubt Jewish fundamentalist groups attacking the decadence of the West would be scaring Gabb and Micklethwait with demands for shop closures on Saturday, modest clothing for women and demands for apologies for anti-semitic persecutions. Instead some of them went into banking.
Launching an air strikes on Harrods and rounding up all Moslem males over the age of five for an unstated purpose is not the answer, it seems more likely to worsen matters and destroy the moral meaning of the West. Actually the libertarians got it right who said that the best way to prevent another Oklahoma bombing would be to get Clinton out of the White House, and a relatively non-interventionist government in her place.
The best way to improve race relations in the UK is for the state to get out of welfare and stop appearing to spend white taxpayers money on layabouts who happen to be black. The state should however either get out of policing, or vigourously enforce laws against violent crime and crimes against property. Islamic sentences for property crimes would seem to me preferable to the present lunacy in Western Europe.
Fundamentalist terrorism is not uniquely Islamic. The shopkeeping Moslems are as afraid of a nuke in London as anyone, they are also pretty worried that they might become scapegoats for Brian’s fears. War on Moslems because of Bin Laden is like having a war on Californian hippies because of Charles Manson.
Between the two rounds of voting in France the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off had a curious effect. David Carr asked if this had reduced attacks on synagogues. I don’t know, because the French media don’t report these attacks and I haven’t got round to checking.
However a French police officer did comment how wonderful it was: all the no-go areas saw a massive drop in crime, as if the underclass figured that a Le Pen presidency might not be the best place to be a petty criminal. This incidentally suggests that free-will is not entirely absent, even from compulsive criminals and supposedly rabid Islamic fundamentalists. The logical conclusion is that the president should face re-election every month, with a really nasty opponent guaranteed a chance of winning.
Small Tyrants, threatened by big,
Sincerely believe
They love Liberty.
-W.H.Auden, ‘Marginalia’, City Without Walls, 1969
No doubt anti-market commentators will be using the current troubles of U.S. broking giant Merrill Lynch to bash the capitalist system. But they would be wrong, just as wrong, in fact, as to say that the demise of U.S. energy titan Enron was a slap in the face for we free-market types.
Not so. What I think the Merrill saga shows is that in a dynamic marketplace where more and more wealth is attached to the realm of ideas rather than physical capital, it is crucial to ensure good behaviour. Merrill has suffered over doubts about the impartiality of the analyst advice given to clients. It shows how the brutal forces sweeping global capitalism can chasten the brashest of Wall Street players.
And it ought to show investors in stocks and bonds something else – let the buyer beware!
I am not entirely sure what to make of this admission from Donald Rumsfeld to the effect that it is ‘inevitable’ that terrorists are going to get their grubby paws on WMD sooner or later and bloody well use them.
I don’t think anybody is blogland is surprised by this admission. After all, isn’t this something we have all speculated about? A nuclear weapon is not exactly available at any retail outlet (yet!) but it seems that constructing just a rudimentary one is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as it used to be. Given that, all that is required is the will to use it and we all witnessed an unambiguous demonstration of that will last September.
No, what is arousing my curiosity is the Official Stamp that these suspicions have now been given by Mr.Rumsfeld. Even the most gauche among us have been alerted in no uncertain terms. So is Mr.Rumsfeld trying to soften us all up? Does he know something we don’t? Or is it a case of expecting the worse but hoping for the best?
I couple this with the appearance yesterday of a dire warning on the front page of a popular British tabloid (sorry, can’t find link) that suicide bombers were on their way to Britain. It may or may not be true, of course. British tabloids are somewhat notorious for issuing dire warnings that turn out to be nothing more than, well, dire warnings.
Things are a tad less dramatic over on the actual battlefront in Afghanistan where British Royal Marine Commandos trudge around disconsolately seeking engagement with an enemy that either cannot be found or no longer exists. Meanwhile, back in the West, we are fighting a war of catastrophic expectations and that ratchet has just been cranked up another notch or two.
Natalie Solent links (Monday May 20) to a Guardian piece about blogging. That “fact checking your ass” meme is never going to die is it? They mention Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit by name and by blog. Do they know his meta-context?
I’m sure mostly they do. I’ve always rated the (what it now, just about, still, makes sense to call) “left” at least as good a bet in the long run for libertarianism as the (ditto) “right”. Most Guardian-readers love idea-based radicalism (making trouble for the high and mighty, such as many current Guardian-writers) more than they love socialism, if forced to choose. Many British (at any rate) onservatives, if forced to choose, love the high and mighty more than they love trouble-making (i.e. idea-based radicalism). (This is one of the meta-contextual reasons for the spat between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. The LA suspects betrayal as the old establishment welcomes the new. The Daily Telegraph regards the LA as politically insignificant and out of the power loop, and hence socially inferior. Both have a point.)
Will there soon be lots of left wing blogs for us to link to and quarrel with? That would be something. Or will they all just be spoiler or defensive salaried offshoots of the mainstream media, like – and no offence is intended here, I’m just being descriptive – the Guardian’s web operations. (Mixed metaphor warning: can a mainstream have an offshoot? Make that journalistic treetrunk.)
It has been of extreme concern to me for several years now that the sinister person who does the voice-overs for the sinister BBC “children’s television” show, The Teletubbies, at any rate in the version shown here in London, sounds exactly like Britain’s sinister Prime Minister, Tony Blair. What can this mean? Or am I dreaming this?
“I’m 48 years old and I’ve been taxed to pay for America’s nuclear arsenal my whole life. Now I want to get my money’s worth.”
-An American on the Rush Limbaugh show, explaining why he wants, as Orrin Judd reports (May 20 – 1.20 pm), “the bombing of every dictatorship in the Middle East” (with thanks also to Instapundit)
Guardian’s Weblog links to an interesting article about how repressive regimes suppress the Internet, Censorship Wins Out by Andrew Stroehlein. (It was posted on April 4, so this is another of my better-late-than-never reading suggestions.) If your taste runs to reading only a few intelligent paragraphs rather than half a dozen intelligent pages (I know the feeling), try these:
In many ways, the Internet seems to fulfil the same role as samizdat did in Communist Czechoslovakia. Like that old dissident literature, the Internet in authoritarian regimes offers the only place for critical voices, but, sadly, it has little effect on the ground. Remember, despite the international fame of writers like Vaclav Havel, outside of a small circle of intellectuals in Prague, hardly anyone ever read samizdat within Communist Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution emerged from direct action within a changed geo-political atmosphere; decades of dissident carping had nothing to do with real change when the regime finally fell.
As it was with samizdat, most people in authoritarian regimes never get a chance to see Internet publications, and the whole enterprise, both the publishing of banned information and official attempts to stop it, is more a game for elites: elite dissident intellectuals criticize elite rulers, and they argue back and forth in a virtual space. The opponents can score a few victories in that virtual space, but meanwhile, back in reality, little changes for the people on the ground.
Some may find such a conclusion a bit pessimistic, especially coming from someone who works in the field of online journalism in these countries. But it is important to keep one’s feet on the ground and neither underestimate the scope of the problem nor overestimate the ability of the medium.
And there is some reason for cautious optimism. CPJ’s A Lin Neumann, for example, reminded me that “elites, generally, tend to lead the movement toward change so the fact that the Internet is somewhat confined to elite communication in some places does not disqualify it as a change agent.” Neumann points to China, saying that the Internet has had an effect on the ground there, leading, for instance, to greater impact of stories on corruption.
CPJ stands for something called the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Stroehlein goes on to mention a website called the the Three Gorges Probe, which reports negatively on a dam scheme in China about which locals are willing to complain out loud.
In general, Stroehlein, in a manner appropriate to a Guardian linkee, tends to neglect the importance of economic influences. To suppress the Internet is to impose upon one’s country severe economic damage, and not just political harm. It isn’t just reportage and opinion that is spread on the Internet. There is also all that other boring stuff that regular people like to have, like … stuff.
Thus, suppressing the Internet will eventually erode the will to power of the elite, both by de-glamorising their own elite lifestyle, and by ruining or perpetuating the already ruined state of the economy upon which they prey. Eventually it becomes impossible for them to pretend even to themselves that their rule is in anyone’s interest except their own, and in due course not even that. By suppressing the Internet – not just because of what it is and what it symbolises, but because of what it does (and what the Internet can do now is only the beginning of that story) – they lose the future. And once you lose the future in politics, you lose period.
Please, God, strike down my enemies – but make sure I’ve got an alibi when you do it.
-Anthony Bourdain, in his short story “Chef’s night out” (Prospect Aug/Sept 2001)
In the early hours of Sunday morning (the 19th – last night as I finish this) I watched BBC News 24, although following that link will probably only get you the operation as a whole, not the story I’m about to refer to. Which was: John Simpson talking, in Holland, with a Dutch journalist, who interestingly had just returned to Holland after spending a decade in South Africa. I didn’t see the beginning of the interview and I therefore didn’t catch the name of the Dutchman. Peter something, I think. It was on just before 3 am.
For the time being anyway, democracy is doing its job. There was mass unease in Holland, and the ballot boxes had registered it. In Pim Fortuyn, Holland – indeed I would go further and say Europe – found a major politician who knew how to talk about “multiculturalism” and all that, in a way that does justice to the fears that regular people (by which I mean non-Muslim people) have about it, without being blatantly racist in the manner of the BNP (British National Party), or, if I understand him and his followers correctly, Jean Marie Le Pen.
Simpson mentioned that interview he did with Fortuyn a few days before Fortuyn’s death. He recalled that when he had said that something that Fortuyn had said to him “sounded very like racism”, Fortuyn had got extremely angry, for this was a distinction Fortuyn (unlike Simpson, it would seem) well understood. Islam is not a race, and being hostile to it, as Fortuyn was (and as I – a convinced atheist – also am), is not racism. Islam is a body of ideas, predominantly false and – insofar as Islam has anything to say about the likes of me – aggressively nasty ideas, in my opinion. It is a culture, political as well as religious. I congratulate John Simpson for reporting his conversation with Fortuyn accurately. His own opinions about “racism” are silly, and hit the nail squarely in its surrounding timber. But when Fortuyn told him this he reported Fortuyn’s reaction for the important fact that it is.
Maybe Fortuyn’s answer – stop immigration now – isn’t yet very appealing, and may never be workable in a way that is remotely humane, but his question cannot now be funked. There is, as Fortuyn insisted, a clash of civilisations going on within Europe, never mind between Europe and other places. Muslims now make up forty per cent of the population of the big cities of Holland, and will soon be in a majority in them, or so the Dutch journalist said. If some Muslims then start taking the idea of majority rule seriously, the bad times could begin. At that point democracy may stop working, and become the justification of and provocation of major conflict instead of the means of avoiding it.
For the last few decades, the idea in the West has been that the severe conflicts that have erupted between Islam and the West over the centuries could be made to go away by us all pretending that there was no problem and refusing to talk or even think about it. Since 9-11, and now since the shooting star that was Pim Fortuyn’s political career, that notion is in the process of being junked. Ever since 9-11, the internet has pulsated with infidels analysing Islam, explaining its doctrines, describing its foundation ideas, reflecting upon the career and example of Mohammed himself (not good news in my opinion), gasping with horror at the virulently anti-Semitic grotesqueries of the Middle Eastern press.
Personally I am extremely pessimistic, and see no lower limit to how nasty things may eventually get, down to and including genocide. I further believe that looking such horrors in the face makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to happen, which is why I believe in trading these moderately insulting insults now.
What makes the situation particularly horrible is that there is little that “individual decent Muslims”, of which there are huge numbers, can do about all this. Islam itself, as Fortuyn insisted, is the problem. Individual Muslims, however genuinely decent, and however desperate they may be to escape from the economic stagnation and political nastiness of the Mulsim heartlands and hence desperate to live instead in a country like Holland, are nevertheless the carriers of an inherently antagonistic culture. They seem doomed eventually to destroy the very havens they are now moving to in such numbers, by their very presence in such numbers. Until Islam undergoes fundamental changes, there’ll always be trouble between it and its neighbours.
Or, of course, Western culture could be profoundly altered. We could accept Islam. Let me give a passing nod to political correctness, and temper the savageries in the previous paragraphs by saying that there is, of course, a quite different way of alluding to these same notions. Instead of Islam being blamed, it could equally well be said that we infidels are the basic cause of all the trouble between ourselves and Islam, because of our stubborn refusal to submit to it. Either way, as far as the formerly or still Christian West is concerned, we are talking about two fundamentalisms here, not just one. Something very big has to give between us and Islam if these two now utterly distinct and antagonistic cultures are ever to learn to get along in a state of prolonged and intermingled amicability.
This is the problem that Holland is now squaring up to. Should Muslim newcomers be forced to learn the Dutch language? Should there be some kind of oath of allegiance which all, of all cultures, must swear? Or what?
All this stuff should be and will be of intense interest to us in Britain, because our demographics are heading in a similar direction.
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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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