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]
|
Living in a seriously totalitarian country is an experience that someone who has never lived in a seriously totalitarian country inevitably finds it extremely hard to imagine accurately. As with today’s religious topic du jour, crucifixion, I can only guess at a tiny fraction of what it must have been like.
As I understand it, each person lives in his little personal, private pod (assuming he gets to live at all, that is). Totalitarianism creates a degree of individualism, if that is the right word, that people in a free country can never experience. This is because you simply cannot afford to allow strangers any glimpse of what is going on in your mind, let alone speak your mind to them. (As for telling the truth to visiting foreigners whom you do not know extremely well – that is absurd.) You can trust nobody out there. Intimate friends whom you do trust, and family of course, are everything in such a world.
Do the true feelings of the people ever express themselves? Well, when the lid is well and truly screwed down, no. But if things do loosen up a little, then there is one kind of event where truth can begin to make itself felt, namely at an artistic event of some kind. → Continue reading: Appassionata
Salam Pax has this to say about the al-Sadir militia.
Remember the days when every time you hear an Iraqi talk on TV you had to remember that they are talking with a Mukhabarat minder looking at them noting every word? We are back to that place.
You have to be careful about what you say about al-Sadir. Their hands reach every where and you don’t want to be on their shit list. Every body, even the GC is very careful how they formulate their sentences and how they describe Sadir’s Militias. They are thugs, thugs thugs. There you have it.
I was listening to a representative of al-sadir on TV saying that the officers at police stations come to offer their help and swear allegiance. Habibi, if they don’t they will get killed and their police station “liberated”. Have we forgotten the threat al-Sadir issued that Iraqi security forces should not attack their revolutionary brothers, or they will have to suffer the consequences.
I used to be a singer in a rock and roll band.
Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.
If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.
But, alas, this punk dream faded, as it did for a million others, and my brush with anarchy submerged itself for another twenty years. However, much to my surprise it resurfaced again last year, a little rusty but largely unscathed, when it experienced a depth charge blast from Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s mental mind bomb, Democracy: The God That Failed.
There are few in the world who dare promote the dissolution of all forms of government, especially in the hostile spitting face of a billion state-supporting rent seekers. And of those few brave men, only a tiny handful, mostly Austro-libertarians, possess the requisite economic theory, moral strength, and political knowledge to really frighten all of those state-loving horses. Foremost amongst them is Professor Hoppe, a man in the proper Austrian tradition of being a German speaker by birth, though also a man at odds with many inside proper libertarian circles, as opposed to those Christmas-voting leftist libertarian turkeys who believe the state is the ultimate guarantor of individual rights. Which makes about as much sense as taxman with genuine friends. → Continue reading: Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Defying Leviathan
The claim is being made (by various people) that the founder of the IKEA company, Ingvar Kamprad, is now the richest man in the world (supposedly Mr Kamprad has overtaken Mr Gates).
In the British media (both electronic and print) Mr Kamprad is described as ‘Swedish’. Now he may well still be a citizen of Sweden, but Mr Kamprad has been a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland since 1976.
Sweden is not doing badly economically at the moment, but I do find it interesting that the taxes of Sweden mean that its most successful businessman is unable to live there.
If there were ever an annual Ayn Rand award, here in the UK, for Britain’s most outstanding business leader, then a recent contender could easily have been Tim Martin, the founder and chairman of the JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs. He created this chain from virtually nothing, in 1979, and built it into one of the largest leisure businesses in the country. Which is remarkable.
But being a former law student he has fallen into the trap of believing that if a law is passed by a legislature then this automatically makes it a good thing. Because he has just called for a smoking ban to be imposed upon all the privately owned pubs and bars in Britain, following Ireland’s recent heavy-handed example.
Now I have no problem with Mr Martin banning smoking in all of his own pubs. But like all the best hypocrites Mr Martin has no intention of doing this, because he realises he will lose too much business to his competition. But this hypocrisy has failed to prevent him from wishing to inflict his own intolerant views upon every other private bar owner and pub smoker in the country.
Which does beg the following question: Are there any truly successful business people here in Britain who we libertarians could actually hold up and respect as role models for the future? Or is it simply impossible in Nanny State Britain for any big business leader to be successful without being mentally flexible enough to accommodate the sinuous and relentless needs of our slave controllers in government?
I need a hero to worship. Does anybody have one?
I am currently re-reading Are We At War?, a collection of letters to the Times 1939-1945. (Pub. Times Books 1989.) Here are some extracts from letters on the subject of identity cards:
From a letter from Antony Wells:
Sir, -While obtaining, recently, a National Registration identity card for my small daughter, I remarked that it was pleasant to think all this bothersome business would soon no longer be necessary. I was blandly informed by the clerk that my expectation was quite wrong, since registration was to continue after the war. On looking at the card in my hand, I discovered it was valid until 1960.
In happy fact, identity cards were seen off as a result of a court case soon after the war. But the fact that the government saw fit to plan for them to expire so many years after issue shows how purported “emergency measures” have a way of becoming permanent. The letter was written in December 1944 and the war was quite clearly nearing its end; the government could not have seriously believed it would go on until 1960.
This second extract comes from a letter from (Baron) Quickswood:
…Such cards may seem only a small inconvenience, but they are seriously dangerous to liberty in two ways: -First, they facilitate all sorts of further regimentation of citizens, and that is, of course, why it is desired to retain them; secondly, they have a most mischievous moral effect in treating the individual as a numbered item in the aggregate that makes up the State. There lie before us two alternative conceptions of the State: it may be thought an organization useful to individuals and essentially their servant, or it may be thought a pagan demigod for whom the individual exists, whose service is his greatest glory and whose supremacy is without limit.
…We have to fear an Anglicized totalitarianism, humane and benevolent but esentially destructive of personal liberty and initiative; and there will be a strong coalition of philanphropists and bureaucrats eager to regulate their fellow-citizens. We must be jealous for our liberties, and to begin with must resist being numbered by convicts in order to facilitate our servitude.
I have nothing to add to that.
Clearly a great deal of the anti-Americanism that now afflicts this world is stupid, malevolent, small-minded, cowardly, a mask behind which lurks Marxist or sub-Marxist cretinism, and generally ridiculous. But I want to suggest now that some of it may be rational, and even wise.
Consider the phenomenon of a classroom full of semi-unruly school children, who, when confronted with a new teacher, proceed to ‘test’ that teacher.
A common interpretation of such behaviour is that children “want” or “need” boundaries. That was not my experience. The fewer damn boundaries I faced when I was a child, the happier I was, and this was never more true than when I was stuck in a damn classroom, being made to attend to some stupid intellectual rigmarole that did not interest me or did confuse me or annoy me.
But what all children do want to know is simply, what kind of teacher is this? Like babies who find out how things are put together by trying to take them apart, children try to break a teacher, simply to find out what he is made of. If it turns out that he is indeed the sort of teacher who is going to put in place lots of those boundaries, well, this may be very bad news. But, whether they need such boundaries or not, most children want to know about them, so that they can then proceed with true assumptions in place in their minds about how things are going to be from now on, until this guys goes, and someone else shows up and there is another testing session.
Testing is even more necessary if a new teacher declares his desire to be nice, to allow freedom, to let children choose how they behave, what they will learn etc.. He will find himself being tested to destruction. Teachers get set upon like wounded deer being savaged by wolves.
Here the common explanation is that children behave like wolves because, basically, they are wolves.
Again, I dissent. A classroom full of children confronted by a new, liberal, nice, permissive teacher will, again, need to know where they truly stand with such a person. It is not that children do not like freedom, deciding what they will learn, how they will behave, etc. It is simply that children want very much to know, if such declarations are presented to them, whether they are in fact true, or just pious utopian drivel which will collapse in the face of the first serious challenge, or in the face of the first real decision made by a child which the permissive teacher actually does not approve of.
But there is another even more basic problem with permissive, nice teachers. The problem with a nice teacher is that there are other forces in play which threaten to destroy niceness besides nasty teachers who are only pretending to be nice. There are also the other nasties in the classroom, and a nice teacher is all too likely to be especiallyl bad at restraining these nasties. So why get your hopes up when Mr Nice Teacher makes his first nice speech? On the contrary, join the nasties and try to destroy him, again, to see what he is made of. If he then shows himself both willing and able to quell such a rebellion, good, then it looks like he might be trustworthy, a teacher whose protestations of niceness from now on might be worth betting on. If not, then best to find out now.
Here is a case where the children who are tempted to bet on the new regime do indeed need boundaries – boundaries to protect them.
There is nothing crueller for a child than having his hopes aroused, only to have them dashed by the feebleness of the very person who promised him all these wonders. Nothing is more cruel for a bottom-of-the-pecking-order child in a school to be presented with a utopian manifesto of niceness, to believe it, and then to find that actually it is not true.
Well, you can see where I am going with this, I am sure. To the point where I hardly need to spell it out. But I will anyway. → Continue reading: Anti-Americanism as teacher testing
But for the grace of God, are there any loathsome politicians out there who you sometimes feel you may have ended up like? I have one. His name is Alan Milburn, a man who I sometimes look like and sound like, which for those of you who know the difference really is quite a cross to bear.
Mr Milburn used to be the Secretary of State for Health, here in the UK, until his shock resignation in 2003. We may never know the real reason why he resigned. But when Alan visited me in a nightmare recently, in the guise of my former Marxist Dark Half, he told me he flounced out of government because Tony Blair had become incapable of protecting him from Gordon Brown’s prime ministerial ambition.
But it seems Alan is regretting his flounce and is trying to worm his way back into Tony’s ministerial cash box. This morning, on Radio4’s Today programme, he spent a lengthy chat with James Naughtie banging on about the glorious work-life balance achievements of Scandinavian-style socialism. → Continue reading: Return of the undead
Unpersons alerted us to the news that from today British police may legally and against the will of any law-abiding subject, take DNA samples and fingerprints from any arrested person without that person having even been charged with committing a criminal act.
We can but echo the good Unpersons concerns:
The law now leaves British police officers free to help Blunkett establish one of the most ambitious and truly disturbing elements of the British police state that he has slowly but surely been working to create over the last few years. In a country where the state can take over half of your income, charge you expenses when it wrongly imprisons you – yet fail to defend you after it has crushed the right to self-defence, send parents to jail for not sending their children to state day-care centres schools, steal your property because ‘you couldn’t possibly have earned that much money without selling illegal drugs’ whilst slowly handing over control to a foreign power, attempt to dictate what you eat ‘for your own good’ and generally treat its citizens as its troublesome children one has to wonder to what extent we already live in a police state.
This has not been a good week.
H-A-P-P-Y.
I am H-A-P-P-Y.
I know I am.
I am sure I am.
I am H-A-P-P-Y.
I’ve been dipping into a book called Churchill’s Generals, which was published in 1991, having been edited by the redoubtable John Keegan. I’m now reading the piece by Duncan Anderson about Field Marshall Slim. During the retreat from Burma in 1942, Slim did very well, no thanks to his superior, the nice but dim, and rattled and incoherent, Alexander.
Alexander’s responsibility as army commander now lay in maintaining the efficient functioning of the rear areas for as long as possible, supervising an orderly withdrawal, and ensuring the successful demolition of access routes. It was Slim’s task to keep the frontline forces intact and conduct rearguard operations. The conduct of these two aspects of the retreat is instructive. The rear areas rapidly fell apart, the administrative troops degenerating into bands of pillaging brigands. Confusion reigned supreme. Major Michael Calvert waited for days for Alexander’s order to demolish a vital railway bridge – an order which never came. Conversely, Major Tony Mains, acting under Alexander’s explicit orders, destroyed a stockpile of fuel outside Mandalay which was almost essential for the successful withdrawal of Slim’s 7 Armoured Brigade. Years later Slim had still not forgiven the unfortunate Mains.
The retreat of the frontline forces, however, proceeded with almost clockwork precision. A brilliant rearguard action at Kyaukse delayed the Japanese, and at Monywa and Shwegyin, Slim extricated his forces from near disaster with considerable skill. Once contact was broken with the Japanese at Shwegyin, the retreat became as much a race against the monsoon as against the advancing Japanese. Slim marched back with his exhausted and now disease-ridden columns up the Kebaw Valley to the relative safety of Tamu on the India – Burma border. Thin and ragged as they were, they still carried their weapons like soldiers.
By rights, Slim’s conduct of the two-month retreat should have earned him recognition in the highest quarters as a general of first-rate ability. Yet in the event it was Alexander as army commander whom the waiting press men interviewed, Alexander who was the hero of A Million Died [the first book written about the Burma campaign, published in 1943], Alexander whom the BBC extolled as ‘a bold and resourceful commander, [who] has fought one of the great defensive battles of the war’. Stilwell knew better. He had seen both generals under stress and knew that ‘good old Slim’ rather than ‘Alex [who] has the wind up’ was the real hero of the piece. ‘Vinegar Joe’ lived up to his name in his acerbic dismissal of Alexander’s BBC publicity as ‘crap’.
What? Biased BBC, in 1942? Yes. In those days the BBC was biased in favour of a previous, more aristocratic sort of establishment, the sort personified by Alexander, and then only being challenged by likes of the strictly meritocratic Slim, whose father was a Birmingham ironmonger.
Slim eventually got the recognition he deserved. His ‘forgotten army’ is not forgotten now, by anyone who knows much of the British military effort in World War Two.
A statue of Slim stands, eccentrically but proudly, outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, alongside Montgomery and Alanbrooke, no less.
Alexander is nowhere to be seen. Is there a statue of him in London, anywhere? There must be, but where?
Two news stories caught my eye today.
Firstly B.B.C. Radio 4’s Today show reported that the authorities in the People’s Republic of Scotland have noticed that sport is unfair – there are winners and losers and sometimes the winners win big.
To deal with this problem the local authority in Edinburgh has declared that if a team in a children’s football match are winning by 5 to 0 (or more) at half time the ref should be allowed and encouraged to declare the score to be 0 – 0.
In this way the losing children can have another chance – and their self esteem will be protected.
Soon the careful minds of the Scottish authorities will work out that a better way of ensuring equality would be to declare that all matches end in the score 0 – 0.
Oh well, whilst the English taxpayers continue to fund the Scottish government (latest example – a 400 milion plus Paliament building that was supposed to cost “a maximum of 40 million”) such sillyness will continue.
Also today I got to see this week’s Economist… and I spotted a report on Somalia that I think will be of interest.
As is well known most of the nation of Somalia does not have a formal government. Now opponents of anarchism (or perhaps “anarchocapitalism” as “anarchism” is a word that is sometimes used to refer to some forms of collectivism) have pointed at Somalia and said “see anarchy – it really is vile, bloodsoaked chaos” and defenders of anarchy have claimed “no – Somalia does have a government (indeed it has multiple governments), the Warlords are all statists acting as warring governments”.
The Economist report does not settle the dispute between anarchists and non-anarchists, but it does provide some information.
Firstly that paying the Warlords money to protect oneself and property does not work very well as (unlike the “protection agencies” of anarchist or anarcho-capitalist theory) the Warlords will take the money – but their men will tend to rob and murder you anyway. → Continue reading: Scotland and Somalia
|
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.
|
