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]
|
In Pakistan they are having ‘interesting times’, in the Chinese sense of the term. Violent protests in Karachi have killed dozens of people as the authority of President Musharraf has been challenged by the Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court.
Sooner or later, the rule of General Musharraf will come to an end, regardless of how much help the Americans give to prop up his regime. It is anyone’s guess who takes over when he does leave the scene – it could be a weak democratic government, another Army commander, or a more sinister Islamic style government. Whatever sort takes over, they
will have a hard time keeping the country in one piece.
These musings on the future of Pakistan would be idle chatter though except that Pakistan is right on the fault line of many of the conflicts in the world today, and it also happens to have nuclear weapons. Quietly, India must be watching with some concern as General Musharraf loses his grip on power. The fastest way for a new regime in Islamabad to gain some legitimacy is to ratchet the tension with India. Given that both are now nuclear armed, it could be interesting times all round.
I enjoy the seafaring fiction of writers like CS Forester, creator of Horatio Hornblower, the Jack Aubrey stories of Patrick O’Brien and similar fare. Over the years of reading such books, I realised of course that much of this fiction was based on the real characters who fought in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic war. There are number of them worth mentioning, such as Edward Pellew, the brilliant west countryman; William Sydney Smith, Philip Broke, and many more. And of course there is Lord Nelson himself, a man who has been much written about, with a fresh flurry of books written in 2005 to mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and his destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cadiz.
If there is one character, however, who comes close to being the main inspiration for the fiction writers, it has to be Thomas Cochrane. Neglected as a biographical subject for many years, he has become a talking-point again, and Robert Harvey’s biography of the man, written a few years ago, is a cracking read. I have finally found the time to read it and have rarely been so enthralled by the brilliance, bravery and sheer daring of a real-life character. The son of a hard-up Scottish aristocrat, Cochrane went to sea at what was then the relatively late age of 17 (it was common for young boys to join much earlier). Within a few years, his promise became apparent and he was promoted. By his early 20s, Cochrane was a commander of flair, commanding his little ship, Speedy, in a series of engagements, frequently taking on much larger vessels and using his skill and trickery to beat them.
A few years after Trafalgar – in which he did not take part – Cochrane, who was not a popular man with his jealous and pompous Admiralty governors, led a fireship raid on the west coast of France. Although the raid was a general success, several ships that could and should have been destroyed were left intact because the admiral in overall charge of the operation, Lord Gambier, was over-cautious to the point, arguably, of cowardice. Cochrane later made harsh comments about Gambier and the whole affair ended up in a very unpleasant courts martial. Cochrane’s public career went into freefall; he was framed in a fraud case and sent to jail. He had a political career as a radical MP; and later, in an astonishing revival of his naval career, Cochrane went south to help form the Chilean navy, and played a full part in the overthrow of the old Spanish empire. He lived to a ripe and contented old age.
If Cochrane had his weaknesses to balance his many good points – he was a humane leader and loathed the barbaric naval practice of flogging – they were a large measure of vanity, a hot temper and inability to suffer fools gladly. Harvey’s biography of Cochrane very fairly draws out these points, but at no point does Harvey succumb to the tedious modern mania for showing that any extraordinary person has feet of clay. Cochrane was treated appallingly by many people, who were frequently ungrateful and uncomprehending of the skills needed to guide sailing ships in conditions of war. (One of his trademarks was sailing raids at night, often in treacherous condtions without modern navigation aids like radar).
When, back in 2005, I walked about HMS Victory at Portsmouth, and imagined what it must have been like to sail such wooden ships into battle, with all the discomforts, brutal discipline and harshness of such life, it made me feel very humble indeed. The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane’s age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.
There is an excellent article in the Telegraph by Boris Berezovsky, the exiled anti-Putin Russian politician and businessman, called Why modern Russia is a state of denial.
First, Yeltsin lacked the will (or, maybe, the courage) to indict the communist regime as a criminal one – no less so than the Nazi regime, with all the resulting consequences for the communists themselves, and for their vanguard, the Soviet secret police. Second, Yeltsin also failed to lead Russia to repentance, to make every Russian acknowledge his own responsibility for the crimes of the communist regime. Without repentance, however, those who were oppressed and raped by Russia, such as Estonia and the other Baltic states, will never trust it again.
Great stuff and much the same point I have been making on the issue of former communist countries. Read the whole thing.
Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s decision to “ban” the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself “Cricket Australia”) begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.
In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.
In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined “later”. However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC’s rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety – tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat – and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.
Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from “decent, but not world beating”, to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.
However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been “temporarily suspended” from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.
The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a “third world” versus “first world” divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former “colonial” powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the “first world” bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.
Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would “set a bad example” to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the “We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country” argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation’s cricket board too (although not through the army). As for “Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit”, well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that “Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles” might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)
Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead. → Continue reading: On cricket, Zimbabwe, John Howard, the ICC, Pakistan and Bob Woolmer
This news makes me happy that I have no hopes for ‘victory’ in Iraq, beyond having a battlefield for European Islamists to go and die on far away from European and American cities.
Banning your own side from telling your side of a war is pretty dim, especially when the MSM is effectively scouting for the other side. It does not seem beyond the competency of the US armed forces to issue its bloggers with a “Do Tell” and “Don’t Tell” list.
As for the pretext that bandwidth is the problem, it reminds me of the British grocery store in the 1960s that stopped stocking up on a certain brand of bread “because we keep running out…”
The tyrant of Baghdad is dead. His successors are dead. That’s all that can be hoped for under the existing rules of engagement.
“Vote Blue” the Tories say, “Go Green”
You think the promise unforeseen?
Have you forgotten when instead
We voted Blue and still went Red?
– Sean Gabb. To see him on 18 Doughty Street discussing the Resignation of Tony Blair, go here.
I am quite fond of the Scots Nats, but then, I am English. The BBC has/had a headline today (which, because of the unique way the BBC is … interpreting web conventions… may disappear without warning) that for a moment made me love them:
SNP planning to cut down cabinet
Wouldn’t that make politics a bit more exciting? Sad to say, it is an administrative detail in Holyrood, not a plot to draw claymores in Whitehall.
John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister, is quite rightly critical of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, and does not like the idea of the Australian cricket side touring there. He has had to struggle with his conscience:
“I am jammed between my distaste for the government getting involved in something like this and my even greater distaste for giving a propaganda victory to Robert Mugabe.
But not that much of a struggle. The next sentence:
Obviously if there is a way legitimately that the tour can be cancelled and there not be an exposure by Cricket Australia to any fine, then we’ll go down that path.”
Later in the week this was backed by threatening to withdraw the players’ passports, and the federal government undertaking to pay any ICC fine.
What a pity. Mr Howard plainly understands that the administration of sport is not the government’s business; but he feels bound in the pursuit of maintaining Australia’s national image to intervene in private sphere. Talk of the tour being a victory for Mugabe is just justifying cant: a ban is a much bigger target for racialised anti-colonial rhetoric. The quasi-ban – notably exercised by bullying and bribery rather than any lawful power – is a lurch of Zimbabwe-style arbitrary government and propagandising state action.
Western politics is not so far from the world of Comrade Bob, and we forget that at our peril.
One of the more interesting additions to the invasion narrative, that school of imagination which dreams a world of Britain conquered, invaded and changed, has been D C Alden’s self-published book, Invasion. The interest lies in the confused concoction that forms a fictionalisation of the Eurabian nightmare, the creation of a West Islam. As the blurb indicates, the imagined consequences are radical:
Britain is no more, reduced to a mere satellite state at the far western fringes of the Arabian empire, a vast domain that stretches from the dark borders of Scotland to the Chinese frontier where war still rages. London is a walled city again, its war-damaged historical buildings demolished and replaced with bronze statues, marbled mosques and landscaped memorial gardens, all celebrating the overthrow of western civilization in Europe. The city is a hub of Islamic power, a power that enslaves the British people to a life of servitude and confines them to crumbling, weed-choked suburbs outside the city.
The author acknowledges in his foreword that the script was originally written for film, and the novelisation is kitted out for adaptation to the screen. We have all of the props of the disaster novel but not of the disaster movie: an ensemble caste, cut and paste following different characters, and no protagonist to focus upon. The rag-bag conceptualisation, the overwhelming infodumps, the lack of an editor (weighing in at 641 pages) detract from the interesting kernel of a better novel. Alden can write and he can probably write better than this.
The major problem of the novel is the lack of plausibility. Whereas the invasion narrative is described as the juxtaposition of an ideologically unified Islam, politically united in a militarised and jihadist Arabia following its imperialist path, invading a supine, decadent and pacifistic Europe, the development of such a power would have caused some geopolitical concern, and downplays the Shi’a Sunni division. The United States gains energy security through the use of alien technology from Roswell. Hence, the thriller enters the realm of the unreal.
Such implausibility may reflect the sources of this cultural anxiety, of which Eurabia is a political extension. If we consider the stories told about Islamic invasion, the two most recent examples stem from chiliastic Christian fundamentalism or representations of other prophecies such as Nostradamus. These have often pictured a united Islam invading Europe with the final Pope dying in France, fulfilling Malachy’s prophecy, another fateful addition to the brew.
In the wake of Pakistan going nuclear in May, 1998, Muslim countries have, now, an easy access to the “Islamic Bomb”. And the communist China’s support to Pakistan is no secret. Could it, therefore, be that China, and a group of Muslim countries would pact up to launch an attack on Europe the next year, some time before the month of July? According to quatrain 72, Century X, “the war shall reign before and after that month”.
Mercifully, however, there is no mention of India to be involved in the nuclear conflagration, as per the prophecies of Nostradamus.
The political, the cultural and the prophetic representations of the Islamic invasion narrative all play a part in Alden’s novel. No doubt, this will eventually become a more fruitful vein of fictional endeavour, as thriller writers respond to the changes taking place around them in Europe. Thankfully, the future is more complex, more fractured and more optimistic than Alden’s take portrays.
There is an old and wise saying that ‘an armed society is a polite society’. It is also the case that a private society remains a private society as well. That is, the importance and respect paid by governments to a citizen’s right to privacy flows on to the rest of society. In contrast, when a government disregards the right of its citizens to keep matters private, other organisations in society will take their cue from the government’s lead.
Take gambling for example. The online sports betting industry in Australia has sprung up like mushrooms after autumn rain in Australia since the advent of the Internet. People used to like to have a wager on a football or cricket game in the friendly environment of a pub, but since the online bookmakers have opened, the betting habits of Australians have increased markedly.
It is not only Australians that have been bitten by the sports betting bug either. But it is illegal in many parts of the world, and that has created more problems then it has solved. When a market is not allowed to be filled by honest business folk, it is instead filled by organised crime figures and all the baggage that this brings. One of the biggest items of luggage is the curse of match-fixing in popular sports.
→ Continue reading: People go where governments lead
The only substantive issue on which David Cameron declaimed that made him in any way preferable (or to be more accurate, distinguishable) from the Blairite Labour Party was the issue of ID cards.
Cameron (eventually) came down against them once he realised just how unpopular the scheme was. Well it seems that the impending Brown government is also going to give ID cards the heave-ho, which if true is indeed a good thing.
So, no excuse left for actual conservatives not abandon the Tories and vote UKIP then.
In Poland a court has ruled that the governments attempts at de-communisation are unconstitutional.
The law required some 700,000 people, including school directors and board members of public companies, to submit statements declaring any contact they had had with the communist secret services.
The court rejected key aspects of the law including the requirement for journalists to submit declarations. […] “A state based on the rule of law should not fulfill a craving for revenge instead of fulfilling justice,” he said. “Screening must not be used for meting out punishment.”
But surely justice cannot be served by allowing the communist era and above all, the role of the people who made it all possible, to vanish down the memory hole. If people did despicable things during the communist era, why should they escape punishment? I cannot imagine a German court being allowed to stop the process of de-nazification in German, so why tolerate something similar in Poland in the aftermath of communism?
Forgiveness can not come before repentance and a lot of people have yet to repent. I wonder if there are any senior judges who might have an embarrassing file on their communist era activities that they would rather not see the light of day? Just wondering.
|
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.
|
