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A great article The new-look Harry’s Place carries this zinger of an article debunking a piece of revisionist tripe from the former editor of the New Statesman. The idea, essentially, is that Britain should have stayed out of WW2 so that the poor, put-upon Mr Hitler could then have shipped those pesky Jews off to some island in the Indian Ocean.
Unbelievable.
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However, there is certainly is a case for Britain to have stayed out of the WW1.
Wilby is a fuckwit. I heard him speak in the Oxford Union a few years back and, in a half-hearted, lily-livered piece of lame moral equivalence, he called Comrade Bob a “relatively benevolent dictator” and essentially blamed the West, “imperialism” etc., for the problems in Zim.
We might have done well (temporarily…) to “stay out of” WW1.
But Germany under the poor,sad, mad mentally-tortured Kaiser, would have inevitably trounced first Russia and then France – or vice-versa. Take in Austria, Turkey (and probably then Italy which might have joined the central Powers, on the side of the Kaiser.
The Anglosphere (which existed even then) which was the sole repository of limited-statism on earth – with or without Japan which was at least then slightly friendly, would have found itself faced with a global-continental/absolutist power, deploying resources from Portugal to Vladivostok, and including most of West and saharan Africa and dominating the Mediterranean.
I’m not sure how we would have coped with the inevitable absolutist demands emanating from such an outfit.
Sadly, I think that the reckoning personified by WW1 (improperly concluded, and with the wrong treaty and the wrong advice being taken – that is to say, not Haig’s!) and thus subsequently WW2, was going to happen anyway.
And if Mugabe is a “relatively benevolent dictator”, than I am the Queen of Romania.
Isn’t it marvelous !
You wait for ages for a ripe piece of bollocks to come along
Then two turn up at once.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-kurlansky9mar09,0,6763134.story
Personally, I have never found it difficult to find a good piece of bollocks. That is an excellent one though. (What the fuck is it with Marxists, anyway?)
Time passes, memories fade, idiots abound.
Twenty years ago, this guy Wilby would have had a hard time expounding on such BS — people would laugh to him down, and I’m sure war veterans would queue to give him a bloody nose.
Now, alas, such sensible reactions are much less likely.
That is happening at the times of great, collective confusion; all the most repulsive worms crawl out from under their muddy, slimy, little stones upon seing the chance that their venom will be absorbed by confused, ignoran minds. But this is also a sinister harbinger of what we can expect in the not so distant future…
RAB – now you know why I hate the book review sections of the “mainstream” American newspapers (and increasingly in British newspapers).
They are made up of crackbrained nonsense (in this case that Winston Churchill was pro Nazi and……), but if you complain the newspaper people will say “it was not an article – the person was just reviewing a book”.
Yes (before anyone points it out) I know this is a favourate Bill O’Reilly point – but just because O’Reilly is not a libertarian does not mean he is not correct about this.
As for J.P.s posting:
You mean that you do not believe that National Socialist Germany was an innocent victim of British and American Imperialism, with the American public being manipulated by evil Anglophile bankers into a criminal war?
How dare you not believe that J.P. – you will not be allowed into any more Murry Rothbard fan club meetings.
Yes I agree Paul.
And that review wasn’t even a proper review.
I heard the author pushing Human Smoke on radio 5 the other day.
It is mainly about the invicible power of Pacifisim!
Ghandi was mentioned once in the article.
Well Mr Nappies, and firm young virgins as hot water bottles fancier
was no fool. He knew the British Empire had just died.
He just had to bide his time.
This all brought to mind a book I read many years ago
called Wall St and the rise of Hitler.
Dang me it is out there on the net!
Here’s a quote.
Whatever you call the collectivist system — Soviet socialism, New Deal socialism, corporate socialism, or National socialism — it is the average citizen, the guy in the street, that ultimately loses out to the boys running the operation at the top. Each system in its own way is a system of plunder, an organizational device to get everyone living (or attempting to live) at the expense of everyone else, while the elitist leaders, the rulers and the politicians, scalp the cream off the top.
Well I was a bit more swivel eyed when I first read it, but that still holds true, if anyone saw Poly Toynbees apologee for NULab on Question Time this week.
These are exactly the people Orwell was referring to in “Notes On Nationalism” when he wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
What astonished me was that the Harry’s Place piece never mentioned the obvious about the whole Jews-to-Madagascar plan. There was critique on that score having to do with how many Jews would have died on the way, what living conditions would have been like on the island, etc…. but not a word about the staggering injustice of displacing and deporting a whole religio-ethnic group. What’s with that?? Am I supposed to think of it in the context of the ’30s? Would a plan like that have been considered reasonable (to say nothing of “just”) even back then?
Well remember Liberia Jamie?
That seemed like a good idea and actually happened
But look how it’s ultimately turned out…
To be really rooted, you need an attachment to your land and property.
That which you really feel to be yours.
Conquest seldom lasts
but the dirt of home
somehow get under the fingernails
Forever.
Jim C, indeed. Orwell saw through the Peter Wilbys of his time, and indeed the author of Human Smoke, which apart from anything else, libels Churchill and makes dishonest use of quotes.
Paul Marks: absolutely!
RAB – I believe that G. actually admitted that pacisfism would only work against a non ruthless opponent. But I can not cite a source for that.
J.P. – yes.
The author was on Andrew’s Marr’s B.B.C. Radio Four’s “Start the Week” today – but I missed the show. And I am also going to miss the repeat that starts in a few minutes.
“You should hear the other side Paul” – in case anyone says that I hear the other side quite enough.
I also object to paying the B.B.C. tax which is used to subsidize leftists going on “Start the Week” (and all the other shows) to sell their books and generally talk nonsense.
Churchill, a Nazi? You could make a better case that he was a stooge of Stalin- he declared war on Hitler after Poland, so Hitler didn’t go east for a while, he allied up with Stalin as soon as he decently could, and he stuck to the “gentlemen’s” agreement about spheres of influence after the war! I wonder if Stalin had something on him?