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.
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Go and see just how idiotic a protest by an American pacificist group, Voices in the Wilderness, looks even to the Iraqis. A group of 12 activists lead by Kathy Kelly gathered on Saturday to bring the American style of protest to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And of course, they are protesting against President Bush and his threats of war against Iraq. What a shrewd choice of venue! Salam reports from Baghdad: Nothing in the news about it, and no one at work making any “look at those poor deluded souls going at it again” comments (which is one of two responses to this sort of thing, the other being “I wonder how much money are they getting as a ‘thank you’ gift from saddam”).”
And this is how he feels about it: Dear american friends, please stop sending her over here, she is not helping. Some people might think that this sort of thing I like to see happening. It is NOT. Kelly baby you have been used. They have put you on show for the westerners.”
I think he is too kind to those brain-disconnected idiots, trying to understand that everyone has to make a living…somehow.
And back in Enlgand, the home grown idiotarians tie themselves into knots over capitalism.
Michael Meacher, the environment minister, told BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions: “We do not believe in capitalism. Capitalism is something that threatens inequality across the whole of society1.”
The responses are fun to follow. Downing street refused to endorse his claims and referred the Sunday Telegraph reporter to the Labour Party spokesman who said: “Socialism or capitalism is a sterile argument. The world has moved on.”
The comments caused ideological confusion among MPs identified with New Labour giving rise to gems like these: “I think there is rather a philosophical black hole here. We really need an economist to sort his out.” and “Of course unbridled capitalism is very dangerous but we cannot deliver the advances that we want in equality outside the market economy.” (Barbara Follet, MP and Glenda Jackson, MP respectively.)
The Left-wing MPs were delighted: “The party is moving away from New Labour back to its roots…”
This may place Mr Blair under pressure to spell out his attitude. In the summer he claimed that “we are moving away from Thatcherism now”. Care to tell us where you are heading, Tony? We have seen the posters…
1 = Mr Meacher is, of course, right, capitalism does threaten inequality across the society. It threatens it with prosperity, property rights and individualism. Marvellous!
Collin May of Innocents Abroad writes:
Once again Europe demonstrates its superior sophistication in matters international. As the Telegraph reports, Europe’s foreign ministers have decided to move a meeting with the Southern African Development Community from Denmark to Mozambique. The reason for the move is simple: to accommodate the foreign minister from that pillar of humanitarianism, Zimbabwe.
EU foreign ministers were supposed to hold the meeting in Copenhagen on Nov 7 and 8. But several delegations from the 14-nation African bloc hinted that they would boycott the gathering unless the Zimbabwean government was included.
Rather inconveniently, the European Parliament passed a unanimous resolution last month demanding that Mr Mudenge, the Zimbabwe foreign minister, be banned from the meeting.
Geoffrey Van Orden, a Tory MEP and author of the resolution, called the move “an absolute affront”, saying it was yet another example of the EU’s “utter hopelessness” in sticking to a clear line in foreign policy.
“We’ve agreed to move a whole meeting to Africa to avoid an internal row within the EU over enforcement of our own sanctions policy. That’s what it amounts to”
Any chance of an explosive and fatal internal row about the whole EU? Please?!
If you still haven’t had enough of my postings on Iraq, here is one that describes just how the news we hear about Iraq is obtained, restricted and processed.
Having read Salam Pax blog and other ‘inside Iraq’ articles, I am now convinced of what has so far been a conjecture based on my experience of communism. Nightmares do not fade that easily and I recognise this is as the same stuff of which ‘the Evil Empire’ was made and 1984 written about. In its pervasiveness and destructiveness it is often beyond understanding of a free individual.
Please do as Lynn of Poet and Peasant, who posted this link, says: This deserves maximum exposure. Read it. Link to it. Forward it to your congressman. Print it out and give it to people who think they can get all the news they need from TV.
In the article, Farideh Tehrani, a 27-year old woman in Tehran, implores: Please tune out the biased and shallow works of journalists who use their pens to editorialize rather than report news. To us as Iranians, that is unfathomable. Don’t you realize that when we read your work, we ask what good is free press if it does not report the truth?
At this moment in our history, Iranians have limited means to voice our calls to the world beyond the rapidly crumbling walls of the clerical regime. We have a sense of urgency. Yet we feel left behind by the very champions of civil rights, human rights, and liberal reform who once dominated headlines. Don’t abandon us now, not at this junction in our history.
“…..in order to restore international peace and security”
Draft of the US-British Resolution on Iraq. Peace and Security. Ha.
Bomb us already, stop pussyfooting.
– Salam Pax
So Saddam is trying to show he cares. The amnesty was the most important gesture of a campaign aimed at presenting a softer face to his people and rallying them for war. Iraqis are being regaled with propaganda showing him as a caring and conciliatory leader.
He certainly has the means to do that – satellite television is banned, foreign radio stations are jammed and the internet is tightly controlled, with many websites blocked. Iraqis have no choice but to be overwhelmed by Saddam’s immensely powerful propaganda machine as the great majority encounter nothing but the state media’s relentless diet of indoctrination.
As part of the propaganda drive a mass wedding was held in Baghdad yesterday, paid for by the regime. More than 150 couples gathered at the headquarters of the Youth Wing of the ruling Ba’ath party to tie the knot, benefiting from the benign patronage of their leader.
The regime had supplied wedding dresses to the brides and suits to the grooms. None fitted. The grooms wore trousers that either flapped around their heels or barely covered their knees. Equally ill-fitting shoes condemned them to walking in a painful hobble. The brides, all clad in identical dresses, struggled to raise a smile.
After posing glumly for photographs, the couples left for a party organised by Saddam’s eldest son, Uday. Saddam had also paid for their honeymoon – a two-night stay in the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad. After this, the brides would be allowed to hand back the wedding dresses. But the grooms would have to keep the suits.
Isn’t that just wonderful? The problem is that I have heard of this kind of grotesque and absurd propaganda stunts. They are usually perpetrated by dictators who have completely lost touch with reality and live in the world of their own. It is a result of an evolutionary process based on survival instinct – the leader spends first few years shooting everyone who disagrees with him and voilà, all is well as everybody agrees with him! Remember Nicolae Ceausescu?
I suspect that we only hear about a small fraction of Saddam’s escapades. I hope that after Iraq is freed and the full horror of his regime revealed, it will become one of the examples of justified use of force.
Below is the story of the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty. It is as clear a warning to those within the EU reach (grasp, claws etc) about the nature of its objectives and procedures as it gets. Yet it seems that the public, both in the EU and in the Eastern European countries so keen to join, do not register the rising levels of undemocratic behaviour. Just like in the tired old ‘boil a live frog’ myth1. But in this case, not only there is a frog in a pot with hot water, there is another one waiting to jump in as soon as the cooked one shrinks…
First, the Irish Government disregarded last year’s clear referendum result. The Telegraph reported in September:
Mr Ahern has virtually promised his EU counterparts that the Irish will say “Yes”, unlike last time, when they rejected the deal, thus threatening to unravel plans to enlarge the EU in 2004. This is European democracy, Henry Ford style – you can reach any answer, as long as it is yes. In simply refusing to recognise the outcome of the first referendum, the government makes the point of the No campaigners more eloquently than a thousand speeches.
Second, the governement changed the rules and amended the law on the conduct of plebiscites. Ireland used to have admirably fair rules on referendum campaigns, providing for equal airtime on state media and for the distribution to each household of a pamphlet setting out the case for each side. The government scrapped this rule. The way was thus clear for the Yes side to exploit its massive financial advantage. It outspent the anti-treaty campaign by a factor of 10 and played heavily on fears of what Ireland could lose by turning its back on Europe’s ambitions.
Third, the Irish government changed the question. Mr Ahern also rigged the question. Voters were asked to ratify Nice and, in the same vote, to oppose Irish participation in the EU army. Thus, many supporters of neutrality – a natural anti-Nice constituency – felt obliged to vote Yes. Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP for South East England explains what has been done to the question:
To see how outrageous this is, imagine that in a British referendum, Tony Blair phrased the question: “Do you want to join the single European currency and preserve the supremacy of the UK Parliament?”
Fourth, the Irish were facing moral blackmail. They were told that if they voted No, they would deprive 70 million people of the benefits they have themselves reaped from EU membership, even if the money has now virtually dried up. The rejection of Nice Treaty for a second time would, apparently, have delayed for at least three years the plans to bring the new members – Hungary, Poland, Latvia and the Czech Republic into the EU. Every big gun from Lech Walesa to St John Hume was wheeled out. Ireland, they all argued, has done well out of Brussels; now let’s give eastern Europe the same opportunity.2
Daniel Hannan again ‘fastidiously’ points out that given the Irish voted for enlargement…
…[it] is something of a surprise, then, to read the Nice Treaty and find that enlargement is barely mentioned: it comes in a codicil tacked on at the end, and could easily have been agreed without a referendum. Nice is about deepening rather than widening the EU.
It provides, among other things, for the scrapping of 39 national vetoes, the harmonisation of justice and home affairs and the establishment of pan-European political parties. The Euro-elites were never going to allow mere public opinion to stop all this. Once again, they have got their way.
…and concludes that:
In order to ratify an essentially undemocratic treaty, Ireland has had to debase its own democratic procedures.
Makes sense to me. In order to cook the frog, you need to increase the temperature…
1 = In the experiment a frog was dropped into a pot of hot (not boiling) water. It immediately jumped out, as would any sensible frog. Then it was placed in a pot of cool water sitting on a stove. This was more to its liking, so it swam about and lounged comfortably. The heat was turned on and raised very gradually. Soon it was hotter than the water in the first experiment, but the frog didn’t jump out. This was because there was no dramatic difference, as there had been when it was taken from room temperature and dropped into hot water. The frog became accustomed to the increased temperature as it was raised little by little. Before long the temperature was so high that the frog was unable to jump out of the pot, and it died.
2= Polish prime minister Leszek Miller, keeping a pledge he made to a local television station, drank a glass of Guinness and sang the popular folk song “I love you, Ireland” when told the Irish had definitely voted Yes.
Dale is right, in their simplistic minds, the news anchors miss the real battle.
Finally, France appears favourably disposed to new U.S. proposals for a draft resolution that now drops any immediate authorisation for a military strike against Iraq unless Baghdad balks at U.N. weapons inspections.
Facing major opposition from everybody, except the trusty Brits who supported all the U.S. drafts, the United States radically changed key parts of its earlier draft resolution which authorised any U.N. member to “use all necessary means” if it decided Iraq violated a whole series of infractions. The new text also deletes earlier proposals explicitly threatening “serious consequences.”
It does sound pretty watered down, if you ask me, but after meeting chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that a new resolution would not prevent Washington from undertaking a military strike against Iraq:
“The United States does not need any additional authority even now, if we thought it was necessary to take action to defend ourselves.”
The new U.S. compromise has been labelled as a “one-and-a-half step.” Instead of two resolutions – one that would give Iraq an opportunity to comply and a second that would authorise force – if the Security council does not do so after reports by Blix of any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations, the United States could decide to strike Iraq anyway, and would probably get considerable support to do so.
What seems to be happening is that the French are backtracking whilst trying to preserve some diplomatic dignity. French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said France insisted on a “two-staged” approach but did not say if this meant a second resolution. Well, given that the U.S. envoys are going around making statements about the U.S. determination to use military force anyway, and in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the opposing Europeans are starting to look like complete twits. The only reason they can get away with it, is that they look quite reasonable next to the rest of the U.N. twits.
The Russian U.N. ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, sharply criticised any unilateral action and warned the United States not to use the Security Council as an excuse for a military strike or one that would lead to a “regime change.” I am surprised that the holier-than-thou Russian even understands the meaning of “regime change”!
Bangladesh Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury opined:
“Every possible effort should be made to avert war. These views are evidently shared by a preponderant majority of the membership of the United Nations. They must be heard, listened to and heeded.”
Yes, and your delusions of relevance must be exposed, dispelled and shown for what they are. An empty rhetoric with potentially dire consequences, endangering lives and safety of millions of innocent citizens whose governments, for once, are trying to have a go at protecting them. It is not often you will hear me support Tony Blair or George Bush as representatives of the state that, in case you missed it, is not your friend…
Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.
Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.
He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.
Nothing’s missed, we have it all here – Israel, oil, British imperialism – Brendan O’Neill should leap for joy… I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).
Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.
I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan ‘Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq’
Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation’s legislature, incite violence (as in inviting ‘demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region’) against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason? → Continue reading: What’s the punishment for treason nowadays?!
To add to the recent outburst of gun-related posting I think this will work a treat!
Unfortunately, it appears to be only an urban legend. But even the fact that such story has been coined is a good sign. We need more of those! Both, grannies and stories… 
What with the England – Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait’s visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours – the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian’s perception of himself up-side down:
For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world’s true sophisticates.
Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday1. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.
“We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn’t in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground… To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now.”
Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn’t yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day – Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.
→ Continue reading: Slovakia in the spotlight
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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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