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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Samizdata quote of the day There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. … They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
– Martin Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his City Journal review of America Alone
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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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As much as I usually applaud people giving in to urges, I think I’ll stick on the side of not reacting to terrorism by restraining freedom. I don’t want to die in this ‘war’, of course, but I’d much rather die as a citizen of a free, fair, and welcoming society (everything that political Islam detests) than feel that the only thing preserving my life is a tyranny.
Does he actually think that such an attitude would result in the Muslim community getting tough with their children?
It’s more likely to turn an irrational hatred into a rational one.
Ah, yes, collective punishment – effective and ethical.
The linked article is excellent, however.
Ham,
Irrational hatred? If only.
Careful. I was accused of advocating genocide for suggesting, (over on the AA NoGodBlog), only half that stuff.
Namely:
Closing our borders to all from violent mohammedan nations, just as we can close the doors of our homes to members of families that have aggressed against our family. If someone encourages their children to bully and beat up my children, guess what? They are not welcome in my home. Odd I know, but I can’t help feeling that way.
Deporting anyone from those countries already in our country, to the place of their choosing. If someone has kids that bully and beat up my kids while they are in my home, or who threaten to do so or applaud those that do so, guess what? They are not welcome in my home. Odd I know, but I can’t help feeling that way here either.
Keeping watch on mohammedan groups in the same way we keep watch on violent xtian hate groups like the church of the creator, aryan nations, etc.
If someone preaches from a pulpit that not just their kids, but all kids should bully and beat up my kids, and threaten to do so or applaud those that do so, guess what? I am going to keep a very wary eye on them. Odd I know, but I can’t help feeling that way.
Things I did NOT advocate were embargoes against them, stopping trade with them, or locking THIER borders. Yet closing our borders was equated with putting a fence around theirs border and locking them in, with isolationism and genocide.
How closing your door to someone equates to murder or imprisoning them escapes me.
How closing your borders to communities that contain and support those that attack you, evicting those same communities from where they have encamped themselves inside your own country, and watching those that identify and support those communities equates to genocide, escapes me as well.
But then, to the looney left that seems to make up most of the atheist communities I know, these equations make sense.
How is that going to help the problem of ‘home grown’ terrorists? I believe the 7/7 terrorists had British passports.
P.S. Deportation is a reasonable punishment to give someone who has been convicted of a crime against this country and its people, but you’ll have to convince me that ‘being Afghani’ is a dangerous enough condition to be considered criminal.
You seem to have a very easy disposition, almost a carefree attitude, when it comes to wielding the law; are you a NuLab minister?
Ham, The entire context of my remarks was dealing with those attacking and intending harm that are from other countries, either attacking from those places or from within our borders, or those influenced by them.
Further, note that I said watch mohammedan groups as we do xtian hate groups. That is one way to address home grown terrorism.
As well, does any proposed action need to address all possible aspects of a problem else be unworthy?
So far as deportation goes, so far as I am aware, any host can ask any guest to leave at any time. If someone is in our country and misbehaves, they can be asked to leave. If they are part of a community that supports, explicitly or implicitly, actions detrimental to the peace, then that community can be asked to leave.
Forced to if need be. They can choose to go wherever they wish that will accept them.
SO far a NuLab, I have no clue what you mean by that, but I am suspecting I am feeding a troll.
The islamicist utopian, or Caliphate, vision is not only a dangerous delusion for those in the West, who are the objects of jihad, but even more so for the Muslim world, whose continued survival is entirely dependent upon the self-restraint of the very Western culture they have demonized and continually attack.
It is a constant source of amazement to me that anyone could watch the utterly implacable nature of various western societies slaughtering millions of their own citizens in political purges, and millions more of their adversaries’ citizens during repeated wars, and then decide to antagonize those same societies with scattered, haphazard violent attacks which have little strategic value.
For a while, certainly, the liberal humanism prevalent in western culture will attempt to maintain a broad committment to basic rights, and to avoid or minimize profiling by racial group or religious affiliation, but if the attacks continue, and become even more destructive, a final dividing line will eventually be reached, and the response will begin with the “Japanese internment” model and move rapidly downhill from there.
Yes, reform from within Islam is imperative, but not for the survival of the west. In a debased, and morally agonized, form, the west will survive and eventually move past this period of conflict. Islam will not.
Those who doubt the capacity of western culture for such a terrible response had better take a tour of the gulag archipeligo, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, et al, and visit the Hiroshima memorial.
From uncounted mass graves, the spirits of millions are calling out to Islam, “Oh, thou fool!”
It does not. But it does need to be a net positive gain. Deporting all nationals of countries X, Y, and Z, when the majority of those people are being convicted of serious crimes by nothing more than association of nationality, outweighs the benefit of snaring the handful of potential attackers. What is it that you think you are defending? I like this culture because your individuality matters. I like being judged by my own behaviour and qualities. I would want to leave if it was acceptable for the law to judge a mass of people by their nationality. It is a disposition that leads nowhere good. Besides, if you think that nationality is a good indicator of one’s likelihood of being a terrorist, shouldn’t you be arguing for the deportation of British people as well as Africans? At least the African ones didn’t manage to finish the job.
I’m not arguing against deportation itself. I would support the removal (either to jail or out of the country) of people actively plotting to commit murder. Many here would not, you know. Many would consider it something of a thought-crime to jail someone for merely ‘intending to do something.’
It’s totally emotive and unnecessary to mention it, but I keep thinking of that Feminazi mantra, ‘dead men don’t rape; kill them in their cots’, at times like these. Well, by your logic, it’s hard to argue against them. A man is a rapist -> all men are potential rapists -> get rid of men. An African is a terrorist -> all Africans are potential terrorists -> get rid of all Africans. Deported Africans don’t explode; kick ’em out.
As ever, some of the most interesting thoughts are coming from veryretired.
Tom Wright’s posts are just very curious to me. You seem to think that mass expulsions of your fellow citizens is the same as asking “guests” to leave your home after being rude. I have to ask: Why is it your home any more than it is theirs? If they are full citizens, just like you, couldn’t they ostensibly ask you to leave with just as much justification?
You seem to be using this line of argument to get around what has been well identified in these comments, namely that we’ll forsake much of what is good about western society for you to have your way. Perhaps this is good for you, but what about the rest of us?
For a while, certainly, the liberal humanism prevalent in western culture will attempt to maintain a broad committment to basic rights, and to avoid or minimize profiling by racial group or religious affiliation, but if the attacks continue, and become even more destructive, a final dividing line will eventually be reached, and the response will begin with the “Japanese internment” model and move rapidly downhill from there.
I agree wholeheartedly. I predict that this process will begin when the Islamists strike a target whose primary victims are “eligible” for sympathy according to modern left-liberal standards. In other words: homosexuals, feminists, children, or minorities (but NOT Jews!). Once a splodeydope detonates at a Gay Pride convention in London or New York, or strikes a crowd at a Million-Man-March-like gathering, the wrath of the Left will finally be joined to the wrath of the Right.
Then our sense of restraint may go by the wayside – and it will become a very bad decade to be an Islamist.
Ham wrote:
And whether it is nationality, religion, or any similar grouping, I see well that argument.
The trouble is that old and common case: We’re under attack; let’s label the enemy, and then we’ll be able to do something about them: let’s make sure we have a big enemy to enhance our common purpose.
Best regards
veryretired,
I don’t think we’ve got the taste for it anymore. I think WWII so sickened people that large-scale mobilization for a really nasty war (i.e. a full-tilt paving of the entire Islamic world) is inconceivable in the West. Note that the Western countries (US & UK) that have been most gung-ho in the WoT were the ones that suffered relatively least in WWII.
Even then, by previous standards, we’ve been restrained and “proportionate”. If we’d really been prepared to visit on Iraq what we did to Japan and Germany don’t you think our problems there would have resolved by now? OK, I’m not suggesting that would have been right or even pragmatic in any case but the UK & US populace would simply not stand for us slaughtering Iraqis by the million and wrecking the entire country. It is therefore not even a conceivable tactic anymore.
The Russians did something similar to mass annihilation in Chechnya except they did it in a half-assed manner so it didn’t exactly succeed (although Russia has by now achieved more of its war-aims in Chechnya than the coalition has in Iraq or Afghanistan).
Now I suspect at this point there is a smart-arse at the back about to say, “Yeah but didn’t Russia suffer more than anybody in WWII so by your argument they should be even more war-averse than the West?” Well, yeah, they did suffer more but I would contend that this aversion to war, for good or ill (and it’s mainly for the good) as the result of WWII is a Western thing (perhaps the Japanese have it too) and Russia quite simply is not and never has been part of “The West” despite the best efforts of the likes of Peter the Great. Their culture reacted differently to the profound shock of WWII. We had the “Summer of Love” and they ramped defence spending up to 25% GDP. Perhaps this was partly due to Communism and perhaps it is more deeply grounded in “The Russian Soul” which the Russians go on about all the time.
Ever seen the film “The Big Lebowski”? Remember Walter knocking hells bells out of the Corvette while screaming “This is what happens Larry, this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass“. If you think The West will be pushed by Islam to a point up which it won’t put to an extent that we’ll do a collective Walter then I think for good or ill you are mistaken. We lack the fight and the capacity to mobilise. That scene is hilarious but also uncomfortable because it presents a controlled, organised rage which modern Westerners find deeply uncomfortable.
We find the idea of violence which is essentially random and indiscriminate much easier to cope with than the organised violence of Dachau and The Somme. Intellectually we are vastly more capable of understanding the inchoate rage of the football hooligan or suicide bomber than the organised, official, violence of trench warfare or the camp gauleiter. “Hug a hoody” said iDave but he would never in a million years attempt to rationalise the horrors of Auschwitz or Ypres yet they belong to the same continuum of violence. It is “only” the scale that is different. Yet, as a result of the horror (rightly felt) by Europeans about WWI & WWII we think of them as uniquely un-analyzable aberrations of pure evil.
Remember when Cherie Blair made her well publicised attempt to understand the pain of Palestinian suicide bombers? Can you ever begin to imagine her saying something as sympathetic about Rommel or Arthur Harris? Why do you think much of the MSM was vastly more sympathetic to Hezbollah and Hamas than to the IDF during the recent war? Is it not perhaps because our society at a visceral level has developed the idea that violence perpetrated by the uniformed is in some way worse?
So no, I don’t see the muslims as poking a sleeping tiger which will one day wake.
This crisis between Islam and the West will have to resolve (although that might be a very long time from now) eventually but I don’t see the resolution occurring through all-out war. Certainly not one started by Western nations that have simply had enough. Of course Iran is the wild card here…
Ham:
It has nothing to do with snaring anyone. It has to do with removing the support group and the population they hide in, by a means that does not include incarceration or worse. If more attacks occur, (not likely, IMHO, but possible), how do you think the population of the US will react? Or Britain? Or Spain?
By removing these populations in a manner that is relatively non-violent, it serves the purposes of hindering enemies, protecting innocents fromn being targetted in an even more unfair and violent manner, as well as reducing social unrest.
As do I, but unfortunately humans are NOT cats. They are apes and behave in a group, according to the morays and social and political rules of that group. Groups that isolate themselves will not behave according to the rules of a larger surrounding culture. That is usually not a problem, (In the US note: Many communities of Jews, Mennonites, Amish Hutterites and others), sometimes it is, (In the US again: fundamentalist Mormon communities and now a growing problem with mohammedan groups).
In most cases I would agree. But also, sometime, separation is the only way to keep things from getting worse.
Sorry, deportation from where and what job?
But to find those plotter, if they exist, would be ruinously expensive, both in wealth taxed from the citizenry, (including those targetted), and legal oppression, as we are already seeing in the US and even more so in the EU.
Nonsense. I am not advocation killing or imprisonment. So yes, it is easy to argue against them.
From what I see, men are not hiding rapists, or refusing to speak out against them, or aidind and abbetting them. At least in the US and EU. In mohammedan countries I understand that is different.
The same for Africans. But why bring race into this?
Michiganny:
Where did I say expell citizens? I thought it obvious I was speaking of non-citizens. If it was not, well I was. That is also why I made the distinction of stating : “Deporting anyone from those countries already in our country”. Seems clear to me.
Citizens can not be deported, except naturalized ones that lied to gain citizenship, as many former German Concentration Camp gaurds have learned.
But they can be watched as we do with other known hate groups, which I also mentioned.
For me to have my way? I do not understand this comment, even in the context of your misreading what I wrote.
There is a reply I made to Ham that has been smited, I hope it will appear shortly…
Nick,
I think you are right on many levels however, I think you also touched on something hidden when you said “Intellectually we are vastly more capable of understanding the inchoate rage of the football hooligan or suicide bomber than the organised, official, violence of trench warfare or the camp gauleiter.”
Much as I would like to believe you are right, I think VR is excavating something hidden, but very real. You are right. We have little to no capacity for calculated, premeditated violence. But, like you point out, we do have the sympathy, but also the capacity, for “inchoate rage”.
I even go beyond that and, I think in agreement with VR, state that there is something more than inchoate potential. I believe that at a deep enough level, and with a great enough provocation, our morality has an ‘off’ switch. If a comparatively small, say 1/2 of 1 percent (1.5 million), of our population were to fall in an act of terrorism, I could easily see a response greater than our present preconceptions have the reach to imagine. We may awake from that red fog with profound regrets, but I do not think that desolate future would bear on our responses as they happened.
For our sakes, not that of our provocateurs, I hope we never come to that place.
Nick—I appreciate your response, and I understand why you say it, truly I do. You, and most others in the west, value immensely our moral improvement from the days of drawing and quartering, slavery, racism and sexism as cultural standards, among many other developments.
There is a palpable belief that these advances are now deeply rooted, and will withstand any provocation.
I must confess my opinion of human nature is much darker than that. We are, after all, that “new” arrival on the world scene whose probable first significant contact with “the Other” resulted in the eradication of the Neandethals, a form of human society that had survived for over 100,000 years and several ice ages.
Mid can see what I am talking about. We often disagree, but we both fear this unrestrained savage, the normal man thrust into inhuman circumstances, whose response is a form of cold indifference to all but his own survival.
Notice the difference between the ferocity of the Asian cruelty of the Japanese in WW2, or the Islamicist of today. It is personal, fueled by a frenzy of faith-based zeal, and a desparate claim to superiority over all else.
The rape of Nanking was a volcano of death.
Compare that to the methodical, almost impersonal, creation, and then depopulation, of the Warsaw Ghetto. Read “Mila 18”. Try to comprehend such death and cruelty as a purely clerical exercise, as a bureaucratic process.
Don’t you understand—if such a day comes to the west again, those who question, who protest, who demur, will be the first in line to the ovens. The very varnish of humanity that you count on to protect us will be sanded off in the very first step of the process.
I have said this before, and will probably say it again, so forgive me—I do not fear the threat of islamicism except as it provokes the return of a savagery which will haunt the west’s dreams and torture our consciences for a century of self-loathing and recrimination.
I wish to see my great grandchildren walking proudly among the stars, not hiding from the light in an agony of guilt and shame, with the haunting memory of deaths beyond counting screaming through their nightmares.
Read “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead”.
We are who we are, and who we have come from— that 30,000 years since we were Cro-Magnon is but the blink of an eye.
With modern technology, we don’t need a “large-scale mobilization” to bring about “a full-tilt paving of the entire Islamic world”. All we need is for the President to issue some orders to people in submarines and missile silos. Mass mobilization is an unnecessary imposition on the personal freedom of people who are already exasperated at the disruption of their normal lives by this idiotic jihad. When whatever outrage occurs that joins “the wrath of the Left…..to the wrath of the Right” on a large enough scale, no one is going to want to be drafted and sent to fight when it’s so obviously unnecessary. Everyone knows that we can solve this problem very, very definitively without such inconveniences.
I think Nick M is touching on a key point when he notes that Russia is not part of the West. The Islamists have been jabbing repeatedly at Russia too — Beslan was just the best-known example. Russia has more nuclear missiles than anyone else nowadays, and more to the point, seems to be unencumbered with political correctness. Someday an “ultimate” provocation aimed at Russia may prove even stupider, and more suicidal, than one aimed at the West.
In addition to it not going well, one of the problems with the Iraq war is the western concept of Just War. As the weaknesses in the original case (WMD and “ability to make Iraq a better place”) have come home to more of us, we are re-evaluating what we are about.
And we just don’t like to fight when we are not convinved of our moral high ground.
It is, I suspect, one of the problems with higher forms of civilisation. It is also something that western government leaders should bear in mind, when they next feel the itch of destiny.
Best regards
In addition to it not going well, one of the problems with the Iraq war
Well that’s putting it mildly.
I didn’t express myself well. I didn’t mean large-scale mobilization as such, more something along the lines of what Infidel753 said.
Midwesterner, I really don’t think even a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city would provoke that sort of reaction any more. I thought 9/11 would have given the US carte-blanche and it didn’t. The left still hates America more than it hates anything else. The thing that worries me is that I suspect the jihadis know this now. I think it’s only a matter of time before Musharref is deposed and replaced by an Islamist regime which will have nukes. And then there is Iran. I would not be surprised if a nuclear device is detonated by state-backed terrorists in a major European capital city. I don’t even see that shutting up the moonbats.
Nick,
I do. There is nothing more vengeful than a liberal (American usage) that has been mugged. As an inherent feature, I believe the left is far more capable of extreme overreaction. Being basically of a collectivist mindset, they don’t have the individualist’s engrained reticence about punishing groups for the acts of a few.
Even their present opposition to the war in Iraq is only superficially humanitarian. At it’s root, it is abandoning them to their fate. Handwashing.
I’d have to agree with Mid and Veryretired. Immediately following 9/11, I knew many people, including leftists (some of them “peace loving hippies”) who were teetering on the urge to see someone pay for it with a mushroom cloud. I think if we, the population of the U.S., had had a more discreet target at the time to blame, many would have been pretty ok with the idea. By the time people were learning where Afiganistan was on the map, who Bin Laden was etc.. things had cold down. I’m not so sure another horrific attack wouldn’t demand a dramatic response from most.
Oh well, I guess my reply to Ham has been smothered in the deluge mentioned in a later main post.
NickM,
People said “never again” after WWptI, and the desire for “never again” was instrumental in how WWptII played out, though who knows how it would have ended up. WWptIII, the Cold War, did show that the West had the capacity to wage an ideological and almost non-contact technological campaign. Lots of drums, smoke, fireworks and whistles. Two peacocks strutting ever larger and brighter fans until one collapses through total exhaustion.
Unfortunately, the rise of Islamism, taking up the Totalitarian/Fascist cudgels, is an issue that would not normally matter quite as much had it not been for the demographic changes in Europe, which makes things very untidy for the everyman. If people are aware that we are threatened with yet another force for repression and control that must be resisted, I think the energy will exist. I really have no time for appeasers or defeatists who seek eagerly to prove themselves right with great energy – almost like someone so scared of death they kill themselves.
However, I feel Islamism cannot be seen in isolation from the rise of India and China, two nations who, I suspect, will have every intention of resisting a Caliphate. Alas, I suspect they will resist it on their own soil but will they trouble themselves about “far away countries they know little about”? Will they allow America to exhaust itself much as Britain was allowed to exhaust itself before, knowing that they may gain handsomely from that exhaustion?
China’s whacking of a satellite could be seen as a warning to the whole concept of global reach and forms of technology-driven warfare, in particular the remote projection made possible by long range guided weaponry. Will the US learn the lesson of Pearl Harbour (i.e. they should have noticed what happened at Taranto)? If another war kicks off, the US could be pole-axed if the GPS satellites were taken out bam-bim. I wonder if China will deploy its GPS systems with the ability to defend themselves. If I were building a GPS network today, I would. If, no, when they do build one, I suspect America will get totally bent out of shape but what can they do? Galilleo is already making the US have hissy-fits to no avail. The EU is not so easy to sabotage as the UK toadies have been since 1945 when competing technology was being developed (though I do wonder if the UK Government is being used as a proxy to sabotage Galilleo even now!). The French see their national interest. I often wonder if the UK Government loses sight of theirs in the Atlantic fog…or is that “accurs’ed English Fog?”
Where am I going? I suspect Islamism can be a massive problem if the West is too insecure to confront it robustly, as it was with National Socialism, but will not be such a calamity if it is confronted systematically and worn down as Communism was. I believe the US has already decided on the latter strategy, but that the dynamics are due to change for them sooner or later with the pressumption of GPS exclusivity and imperviousness being pulled from under much as the British experienced with the Fleet.
I saw it, but I’m not going to reply in full. Your argument is, in short, ‘there are some bad people -> the bad people live in communities that share a common nationality -> it would be cheaper to get rid of the whole lot of them than actually look for the bad ones.’ I am afraid that targeting individuals with the law is a principle that I am not willing to move on to any degree.