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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People in Baghdad have been protesting to US troops regarding the breakdown of law and order in that city and elsewhere in Iraq. The solution is simple… when the protesters turn up, lead them to one of the large piles of abandoned small arms dotting Iraq, issue each one of them with a Kalashnikov, 30 rounds of ammunition and a fluorescent yellow armband with the letters INW (Iraqi Neighbourhood Watch) in Latin and Arabic letters, and then tell them “Scram… this is your city so take care of the problem yourself and only call us if things get really out of hand”.
At a stroke the Iraqis are given the means to stop the looters, they are empowered to take their post-Ba’athist future into their own hands and they are shown that the coalition is serious about Iraqis running Iraq.
Will this mean some weapons get into the hands of the wacko bad guys? Sure, but those guys are already armed. However the upside is that for every one of them, there will be many dozens of normal armed Iraqi people who just want to live a normal life and who then will be able to say “never will be suffer this nightmare again”… and say it with a Kalashnikov in their hands. Ba’athist or Islamist thugs swaggering around your neighbourhood? Now that the Iraqis have had a taste of freedom, let them cap those bastards.
All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one.
I was surfing our sidebar blog listing and came across an article on JoHo the Blog called Ambivalence.
A murderous tyrant has fallen. The symbolic money shot was carried live, and it was thrilling. So why isn’t my breast filled with naught but joy? For bad reasons and good.
Bad Reason: Because I hate seeing Bush win a bet that he should not have made. There are political reasons to hate this, but my real reasons are petty and small-minded.
My remarks are not really a criticism directed the author and to give credit where credit is due, he freely acknowledges that his feelings are petty and small-minded… and let he who has never been petty or small-minded cast the first stone.
Yet it seems amazing to me that people can be so caught up in the banalities of American domestic politics (as if the Reps and Dems were actually that different) that the liberation of an entire people leaves them indifferent. It would be like a Republican in 1945 being indifferent to the liberation of France, Belgium and Netherlands from Nazi occupation by the advancing Allied armies because they worried that Roosevelt was a Democrat and fretting that he tended to say things like “God is with us”. It is entirely reasonable to lament the cost in blood and treasure of this war but that some can look on with ambivalence at the liberation itself is sad.
Also on that blog was a commenter’s remarks to the effect that as the Bush propaganda machine was operating at ‘hallucinatory levels’ and thus they got their news from places like www.iraqwar.ru in Russia (note: they halted their English language analysis on April 8th but seem to be offering reports once again).
As a small-L libertarian I am at best indifferent to Elephant Party statists like Bush and his counterparts in the Donkey Party, but the objective facts of what is happening in Iraq are not that hard to pick out from the noise and I do not see why party political affinities (or lack of them) should colour the ability to discern that essential and quite obvious facts of what has happened.
People like that commenter must be heart broken to now discover that far from being a hallucination, the truth is that the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq is very real. The hilarious conspiracy ladened drivel to be found on iraqwar.ru treated the pronouncements of the deluded Iraqi Information Minister as having as much credibility as live video feeds from Iraq showing that the opposite of what he was saying.
If that is where people are getting their news from, the hallucination is their understanding of reality itself.
You know there are some downsides to this otherwise wonderful transatlantic relationship. I cannot help but suspect that the decision to ban smoking in restaurants by the Mayor of New York has, in turn, inspired some of own moral entrepreneurs:
A bill to make lighting up in restaurants and cafes illegal, cutting the number of deaths from passive smoking, is to appear before parliament.
MP for Harrow West Gareth Thomas says he hopes MPs will back the legislation on Monday to “protect both children and adults from a very serious health threat”.
Ah yes, Children. They’re doing it for the Children! Bless Mr.Thomas for he is the Guardian and Saviour of Our Children.
“Breathing other people’s tobacco smoke actually presents more of a risk than living or working in a building containing asbestos,” he said.
Yes but nowhere near the risk of living or working in a building containing busybodies with legislative powers.
Meanwhile a gaggle of the usual suspects are lining up eager to lend their support.
“[Restaurants] need to take action now if they’re not to lose customers fed up with breathing in the toxic fumes from other people’s cigarettes. Going smoke-free will almost certainly increase their trade,” said Judith Watt of SmokeFree London.
Well, then a legal prohibition is not necessary, is it. If smoking bans will improve trade then any restaurant owner left to his or her own devices would be mad not to ban smoking from their own premises.
At least 165 bar workers die each year from inhaling customers’ smoke, estimates a United States-based passive smoking expert James Repace.
More than 600 office workers and 145 manufacturing workers are also killed annually from passive smoking.
The total number of deaths exceeds those who died during the Great London smog in 1952.
We all know the old saying; there’s lies, then there’s damnable lies and then there’s completey bogus statistics fabricated in order to advance a political agenda.
But Simon Clark, the non-smoking director of Forest, the “voice and friend of the smoker”, says the decision to ban smoking should be made by restaurant owners and not by law.
He described the bill as the work of a “small group of fanatical anti-smokers – and I would put Gareth Thomas in that group – who basically want to interfere, not just with people’s lives, but people’s businesses”.
Brave resistance from a brave few but probably to no avail. After all this is Tony Blair’s shiny, new Britain and we must all be re-made in His image.
My thoughts turn to the British soldiers in the Gulf who have displayed their customary elan and professionalism in freeing the Iraqis from tyrrany. Perhaps they could come home now and perform a similar service for their increasingly beleaguered countrymen.
Britain’s Channel 4 has just wound up a superb documentary series of the type that Channel 4 does consistently well. The final instalment of ‘Do you believe in magic?’ was aired yesterday evening and dealt with faith in Britain today. If the programme-makers are to be believed (and they put their case together very credibly I must say) then Britain is not quite the country even I thought it to be.
When less than 1 out of every 10 people in this country regularly attend Church and where politicians and even Church leaders shy away from mentioning God for fear of being seen as a bit soft in the head, one can reasonably infer that Britain is the most ruggedly secular country in the Western world and a place where scientific rationalism has triumphed.
Well, not true. Running underneath the dominant current of default secularism and starkly juxtaposed against dwindling interest in traditional worship, Britain is positively teeming with wiccans, pagans, shamanists, holistic spiritualists, mediums, druids, tarot readers and cultists of just about every imaginable stripe and description. This includes a peculiarly English version of enviromentalism which is much more about nature-worship than anti-everything agitprop and which is a curiously arcane echo of pre-Christian Britain. The ‘Old Gods’, it seems, have been making something of a comeback. This is not so much post-modernism as pre-modernism. → Continue reading: The Enchanted Isle
Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, confesses to covering up torture and murder by the Saddam regime in the NYT (free registration required; link via The New Republic and Instapundit).
Jordan bleats that he had to protect CNN staffers who were also Iraqi citizens, even if this meant hiding terrible atrocities. If this is true, I fail to understand why CNN employed Iraqi citizens, rather than US citizens who could be brought back to safety. An organisation like CNN could readily train new translators if Iraqi-Americans would not have been granted visas. Failing to report these events, and failing to give a proper characterisation to the brutality of the regime, certainly risked prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people; either that, or CNN is merely in the light-entertainment business, in which case it should not have been in Iraq at all.
Two days after publication, this may be old news, but with no previous mention here I thought it was shocking (literally, shocking) enough to post belatedly.
That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of ‘progressive socialism’ it is hardly a surprise.
What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba’athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf.
To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba’athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light?
What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba’athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin’s good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services.
It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid.
… Realists are quite right to point to the centrality of the contest for power in international relations, and also to the dangers of imprudence and immoderation that can arise from the pursuit of intangible goals like honor. But dangers of a no lesser seriousness attend the competition for power itself, however rationally calculated. Moreover, power is never pursued for itself, but always for the sake of some value or values.
In modern democratic states, those values tend to be moral in nature, and to involve a peculiarly democratic conception of honor. To attempt to exclude them from consideration is the height of phantasy, and the opposite of realism.
– the concluding sentences of Donald Kagan on national honor (from a list of Iraq related readings supplied by
Oxblog and linked to by Instapundit)
One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:
DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ
coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues
And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:
“I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!”
→ Continue reading: Poetry
So the French, German and Russian leaders have had a summit meeting in St Petersburg. After having had an object lesson in the severe limits of their diplomatic and political influence on the world stage, it strikes me that these three leaders have decided that the only way to be taken seriously is to get together and take each other seriously.
When Jacques Chirac says:
It is good that the Saddam Hussein regime has fallen. The fall of a tyrannical regime is a positive thing. We said for a long time that he had to be brought down. We did not defend him, but said it should not be done by force.
He is, to put it bluntly, a liar.
France and Russia were major supplier of arms to Iraq (far greater than the US or UK ever were) and were major beneficiaries of Ba’athist rule there. The meeting in Russia is nothing more noble that a tactical huddle of debtors prior to going to the receivers (The US and UK) of a bankrupt company (Ba’athist Iraq).
Although I cannot resist mocking this triumvirate of gilded irrelevences, there is indeed a serious message emerging from this meeting.
It should be clear once and for all that Blairite fantasies about being both Euro-Fedarist and Atlanticist are just that… fantasies. Of course this is going to be spun as something other than an ‘anti Anglosphere summit’ but who are they fooling? Europe is dividing again and that should be clear to anyone not willfully blind.
Britain is on the side of history’s winners. However Tony Blair has the power to snatch strategic defeat from the jaws of victory if he does not get over his mindless attachment to ‘Old Europe’ and discredited bodies like the UN. After the last of the fighting dies down in Iraq, thing are not going to gradually return to the way they were antebellum.
I really do not know if Blair is psychologically able to grasp the fact that the paradigm has shifted (I hate that word ‘paradigm’ but for once it the most appropriate term). Although I dislike him intensely, I am not sure he will make the wrong move… I really do not know: the jury is still out on how capable he is of actually making a major meta-contextual shift.
The world has changed. Get used to it.
Is Saddam Hussain dead? It is looking increasingly likely that he was killed in a coalition air strike. On one hand it would have been nice to see him on trial for his life, or better yet, end up like Mussolini, hanging in a public square… but dead is dead and that is good enough.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Well, what do you expect? They’ve booked all the buses, printed all the placards, made all the sandwiches, they can’t possibly just call it all off. They’ve got momentum now and they just have to keep going:
Up to a quarter of a million protesters will march in London on Saturday despite the apparent success of coalition forces in Iraq, anti-war groups say.
The Stop the War coalition believes public opposition to the conflict is still strong – in spite of scenes of jubilation this week as American tanks entered Iraqi cities.
Jubilation in Baghdad, agitation in London.
But the police, who will have about 2,750 officers along the route, have said they expect fewer than 100,000 people to take part.
Flagrant fascist Bushista propoganda!!!
Speakers will include MPs Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, who face having the Labour whip withdrawn because of their anti-war stance.
Heroic martyrs!!
The group’s spokesman Chris Nineham said he believed “a great deal more problems” lay ahead for the British and US forces as they tried to take over Iraq’s administration.
Now this wouldn’t happen to be the same Chris Nineham who played such a prominent role in Marxism 2001? But I thought this march was supposed to be representative of ‘public opposition’, a great, spontaneous outburst of ordinary people’s sentiments?
The march is underway about now. I’d say 250,000 is probably a gross underestimation. Expect at least half a million. No, two million. No, twenty million….no, the entire population of the Northern hemisphere!!
Last night I saw pictures of the Iraqi Ministry of Economic Planning in Baghdad burning, set alight by ‘looters’.
Memo to the Iraqi People:
If you want liberty, prosperity and a rational economic future, you now have a golden opportunity that you must not squander… DO NOT REBUILD THAT BUILDING!.
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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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