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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At 2p.m. British time on Monday the 12th of February, I turned on Sky News. I was greeted by the sight and sound of various people (including a bearded person in Washington DC – who I think I remember watching on the BBC some years ago) going on about how the “legislators and media” in America doubted the “claims” that Iran has been arming and training the terrorists in Iraq (O.K. “the resistance” to you ‘progressive’ people out there).
Supposedly the evil Bush and his henchmen are cooking up stories to justify plans to attack the peace loving Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course the Iranians (and their friends ‘The Party of God’ in Lebanon) have been arming and training people in Iraq for years. Many Americans and British soldiers and Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians have been killed by these Iranian actions.
Indeed the Iranian regime has even armed Sunni groups in Iraq – even though it knows that some of these groups kill large numbers of Shia. Causing blood soaked chaos (in order to undermine the Western will to fight) is the main aim – even if very large numbers of Shia are killed.
The Iranian regime has been in a de facto state of war with the United States (really with the West generally) for 28 years – even since the Iranian Revolution which occurred after President Carter betrayed the Shah.
To give a example, the Iranian regime was behind the suicide bombings against the Americans and French in Lebanon in 1983. Bombings that killed hundreds and mutilated many others.
The President of Iran is one of the people who invaded the American embassy in Iran and held the Americans there hostage (in various places) for a year, he holds that Israel should and will be wiped off the map and that the ‘hidden Iman’ will soon lead the Faithful to world conquest. The ‘Supreme Leader’ of Iran and the ‘Council of Guardians’ agree with this theology and they wish us all dead (or enslaved). → Continue reading: What is the point of Sky News
I have just made the mistake of reading the Sunday Telegraph. As is too often the case the only really good thing in the newspaper was Mr Booker’s half page – and it is not worth getting a whole newspaper for half a page.
Looking through the rest of the Sunday Telegraph I came upon an article by Mr David Cameron (the leader of the British ‘Conservative’ party) the main business of the article was not important. It was just another absurd claim that we can “reform” the European Union in order to make it a ‘force for good’ – an excuse for Mr Cameron had his friends to not even promise to get the United Kingdom out of ‘the Union’ which is now the source of about 75% of all new regulations.
However, it was the rewriting of history that caught my eye. Mr Cameron correctly points out that we are coming up to the 50th anniversary of what was in 1957 called the European Economic Community. But Mr Cameron also states that this time (1957) was a time when the European Economic Community (EEC, now the EU) had to deal with a Europe that had been devastated by war, that was under the threat of Soviet attack, and was on the point of economic collapse.
In reality…
War damage had (in most of Western Europe) been to a great extent repaired by 1957, partly by the efforts of Europeans and partly by American aid. The EEC was not the thing that rebuilt the towns and cities of Europe. The Soviet threat was not kept at bay by the EEC – it was kept at bay by NATO (i.e. in reality the American military) and it is NATO, not the EEC/EU, that was responsible for the peace of post war Western Europe, which may well be why so many Europeans hate the United States – people often hate those they have long depended on.
As for on the point of economic collapse. In fact in 1957 Western Europe was in the middle of great period of advance.
Here American aid was not really the driving force. What was the driving force of economic progress was deregulation and the reduction of taxation. This movement is best remembered, if it is remembered at all, by the weekend bonfire of price controls (weekend because the allied occupiers would not be in their offices to block it) and other economic regulations by Ludwig Erhard in the soon to be West Germany in 1948 (the Federal Republic coming into being in 1949).
However, there were similar movements in other Western European nations. Even Britain had its ‘Set the People Free’ and its ‘Bonfire of Controls’ under Churchill and Eden.
Also (again even in Britain) there was a policy in the 1950’s of the reduction of taxation.
Neither the deregulation or the tax reductions had anything to do with the EEC which (as Mr Cameron correctly states) was created in 1957. And I hope that no one will claim that such things as the Iron and Steel Community or ‘Euro Atom’ were behind the deregulation or the tax reductions (in various nations) either.
In short, Mr Cameron’s view of history (which might be best described as “at first there was darkness and then the European Economic Community moved in the darkness…”) has no connection to the truth.
No doubt I will be attacked (again) for writing critically about this ‘free market’, ‘pro-American’ journal. However, I will proceed.
The Economist magazine (or newspaper, as it chooses to describe itself) last week had a weird racialist rant against Secretary of State Rice. A whole page devoted to claiming (amongst other things) that Condi Rice went along with the evil Bush on Iraq (that the Economist supported the judgement to go into Iraq was somehow forgotten) because she was black and,. therefore, had learned that the way to get ahead was to conform to the will of powerful white men (Rice as Aunt Thomisina?).
There was also a claim that Secretary of State Rice was a poor administrator who ran the State Department badly – this claim rather pleased me, as it can only have come from State Department staff and anyone who is unpopular with the death-to-America fanatics who have tried to dominate Foggy Bottom for decades can not be all bad.
This week the Economist ran a little article on the trial of Lewis Libby. The article claimed that the defence of Mr Libby (against the claim that he obstructed justice in the inquiry into the exposure of CIA agent – the fact that the person was a CIA staff member, not a secret agent, was of course not mentioned in the article) would be that it was all Karl Rove’s fault. But (the Economist article explained) the guilt of Mr Rove does not mean that Mr Libby is innocent.
In fact the ‘exposure’ of the CIA ‘agent’ was nothing to do with Mr Libby or Mr Rove – the person responsible was Richard Armitage.This is common knowledge and Mr Armitage has himself has admitted it.
The whole thing goes back to the effort of the husband of the CIA employee (an ex-State Department person and donor to the 2000 Gore and 2004 Kerry campaign) to discredit American and British claims about Saddam Hussian efforts to buy materials for his atomic weapons program, specifically from the nation of Niger. Elements in the State Department and the CIA opposed British and American policy on Iraq and so tried to discredit the claims made in support of that policy. Richard Armitage, then working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, tried to fight back by pointing out to the media that the supposedly independent people attacking the Administration were part of these factions in the State Department and the CIA who had an agenda of their own. All perfectly normal in the cat fight that is politics.
I am no expert in these matters, but my understanding is that Saddam was after such material. But the Economist article did not cover any of the basic matters – or even that it was Richard Armitage (not Mr Libby or Mr Rove) who ‘leaked’ the fact that the ex Ambassador’s wife was part of a certain faction at the CIA.
All the Economist was concerned with was the ‘lies’ of Mr Libby and Mr Rove. The fact that, whether or not there should be a court case, the whole thing is directed at the wrong person, Mr Libby not being Mr Armitage, escaped them.
In fact the prosecutor involved is politically motivated (no surprise there, we are dealing with the United States after all) and has attacked Mr Libby in order to attack the Vice President and, through him, the President. The jury is of course stacked with Iraq war critics. I did not think highly of the judgement to go to war myself – but I do not like political show trials either.
As for the Economist’s level of knowledge: It was as if an American journal had run an article about British politics and had talked of ‘Prime Minister Cameron’ and ‘Queen Diana’.
I do not know where the Economist gets its staff from (some ‘school of journalism’ perhaps), but I rather resent that they get paid money for writing about things they know nothing about.
Still, as I am careful never to pay for reading bits of the Economist, at least they are not spending my money.
Other people who know far more about military and security affairs than I do will judge what President Bush had to say about Iraq. I was more interested in what the President had to say about domestic policy.
There were some of the contradictions I have come to expect. For example, the words about local control of schools and the words in support of the No Child Left Behind Act (as if the Federal government can keep spending more money on schools without control of those schools ending up more-and-more in Federal hands). How such things as the no-child-left-behind Act are supposed to be consistent with the pledge to ‘balance the budget’ was also unexplained.
There was also the odd use of language. For example, although libertarians tend to favour ‘free migration’ it is irritating for the President to say ‘no amnesty’ for illegal immigrants when an amnesty is exactly what he is planning (although he may use some other form of words for it). Still, I suppose, this type of language use is not that odd among politicians.
On health care it was good to hear the return of President Reagan’s suggestion that income used by an individual to pay for health cover should not be subject to either income tax or social security (pay roll) tax. Linking tax relief to a particular job (via only employer provided health cover being covered) is silly. It was also interesting to see that the tax relief would be limited to a certain level of spending – so that in this (and other ways) people would have an incentive to shop around for health cover that controlled costs (the one good bit of the Medicare Part D. extension of some years ago).
There was nothing on how the existence of Medicare and Medicaid (which started out at five billion Dollars in 1965 and now cost hundreds of billions of Dollars) have had a knock on effect of increasing costs of private health cover – but I did not expect this (Medicare and Medicaid are sacred these days). → Continue reading: The worst part of the State of the Union Address
I sometimes look at the statistics on the back pages of the Economist. Although I am not generally interested in mathematics and (as a student of the Austrian school) do not regard mathematics as a vital part of the study of economics, I have long had a mild fondness for statistics (I know that to many people that seems a dark perversion to admit, but there we are).
Last week I noticed that the Economist had altered its presentation, whether this is a first issue of the year thing, or will be carried on the next issue I do not know, and I had the feeling that something had been left out.
However, it was only after looking again today that my tired old brain finally worked out was missing. There were no money supply figures.
Nothing for either M0 or MB (basically notes and coins, plus a few Treasury instruments) growth, and nothing for any of the broader measures of credit money (M3 and so on). Certainly measuring credit money growth is not easy (there are lots of arguments) – but no money supply stats at all? At least not in the paper version of the Economist, and it is the paper version that most people, who look at the Economist at all, look at.
Perhaps the young people who now dominate the staff of the Economist believe that inflation, which they may think of as rising prices in the shops, if they are not aware that a rising money supply may also cause asset price rises in such things as the stock market and the property market, comes about by union power: for example, obstructing a entrance of an enterprise by ‘picketing’, or government bans on replacing workers who do not turn up to work – or some other non market means, raising wages which, if the money supply is not increased to pay for wages being pushed higher than supply and demand would have done, really leads to higher unemployment – not to greatly rising prices in the shops or in the asset markets. Or perhaps they believe that it is caused by exchange rates – and that governments, via central banks, should set interest rates to influence these exchange rates (no matter how many times efforts to manipulate exchange rates blow up in peoples faces there is never any shortage of folk advising yet more manipulation).
It is hard to know. After all I am not an economist, I am only a student (in the old sense of the word) of this subject so my level of knowledge of the subject should be well below the standard of economists in Britain. But this is not the case, most economists in Britain seem to know very little about economics. Perhaps this is because there are few economics departments in British universities where even Chicago school (let alone Austrian school economics) is taught – so young ‘trained economists’ get hired by the Economist ‘newspaper’ (as the magazine calls itself) but do not know much about economics.
This would explain, why the Economist supports things like ‘land reform’ (i.e. land theft) in Latin America, the absurdity of government ‘anti-trust’ or ‘anti-monopoly’ policy all over the world (a policy based on the treating the ‘perfect competition’ model of neoclassical economics, with everyone having the same level of knowledge and all enterprises being much alike, as something ‘fair’ that governments should try and create in the real world), and supporting ever more taxpayers money for the ‘public services’ (in most of the countries of the world).
Of course it would not explain why the Economist supports the European Union (although not all its activities), but I can not think of anything that could explain that level of perversity.
Still… I should return to statistics.
The vanishing of money supply stats put me in mind of something that used to annoy me about the United States Annual Abstract of Statistics.
There was no simple presentation of the size of State and local government spending or taxation.
The stats for government spending and tax were given only ‘per capita’, which of course takes no account of the fact that in some States of the United States people have higher incomes than in other States.
Later on on found that till the mid 1970’s the Annual Abstract had also given State and local government spending and taxation per thousand Dollars of income – which (again of course) made it very easy to see what percentage of the economy was going to State and local government in a given State of the United States (if you are interested the private Tax Foundation still provides such information).
Was it all a dark plot to disguise the real size of government in different States? Much as some people have suggested that the liking of the statistical office for the ‘median’ (the number in the middle of a group of stats – for example with “1, 3, 4, 5, 7,” the median would be “4”) rather than the ‘mean’ (get all the amounts and divide by “number of numbers” – what the layman thinks of as an “average”) as its measure of average, is due to a hated of inequality (which using the mean for such things as “average income” is supposed to ignore). I do not think so – I think it is more the fashions of the world of statistics which I, as a non-mathematician, should not expect to understand, although I do not expect the ‘mode’ to become a popular measure of average any time soon.
However, it is irritating that the Statistical Office stopped publishing a useful number, such as total State and local taxes per thousand Dollars of income, but continued to publish a useless number, such as total State and local taxes per capita.
Just as it is irritating that the Economist published inflation numbers (the staff there, like most modern people, perhaps think of ‘inflation’ as price rises in the shops), while not publishing money supply growth figures – as if the money supply could explode and there be no consequences ever.
President Bush faces two tests on Social Security (the US government pension scheme).
The first test is whether he agrees to the deal US government officials have made with Mexico. This deal would allow Mexican illegal immigrants to the United States to collect Social Security benefits whilst having only paid 18 months worth of Social Security tax to the United States government – as long as they had paid at least eight years two months worth of Mexican payroll tax to the Mexican government (the Mexican government would keep this money, not hand it over). As this is an ‘equal’ deal should any American sneak into Mexico and pay Mexican payroll tax for 18 months, having paid Social Security tax to the United States government for at least 18 months, they will get a Mexican government pension, unlike Mexican citizens who have to pay far longer to get anything like a full pension – even a full pension paid at the Mexican rate.
Libertarians might object to illegal immigrants being deported as Eisenhower did in the un-PC named ‘Operation Wetback’ in the 1950’s, but paying them a government pension seems a bit odd to start with. Even ten years of ‘contributions’ is not sustainable… a illegal immigrant with documents claiming he is 55 years of age comes illegally into the United States, pays the payroll tax for ten years and then gets a government pension till he dies. Indeed government pensions are part of the reason that free migration just does not work in a Welfare State, and make no mistake, that is what the United States has evolved into.
If a poor person can enter the country and say “I have children, pay for their education”, “I am sick give me health care – Medicaid or emergency State and local medical care” and, after a while, “I am old, give me a pension and …” then tens of millions of come and indeed about 12 million already have come illegally, and the system will collapse a lot quicker than it would otherwise. → Continue reading: Social Security: two tests for President Bush
The last American President (indeed, I believe, the last American politician) to really remember what the United States was like before the Hoover-Roosevelt Depression and the New Deal died on December 26th..
From now on every one talks or writes of the time when, for example, American farmers got their income from their customers, rather than the government, will be drawing on second hand information from books and so on rather than their own memories.
The same is true for when people talk of the time when men either did not expect to ‘retire’ (i.e. stop working because they had reached a certain age) or looked to their families and to private investments and fraternities (in the 1920’s ‘fraternity’ did not mean ‘student society’ for most people – it meant a group of adult people in a social and mutual aid society) to finance their retirement.
Was it a better time? Well technology was much more primitive and the capital base much less developed – so living standards were a lot lower. At least the statistics tell me so, although whenever I see film of the time (even socialist propaganda films) the people of the 1920’s look better dressed and more clean cut (or just more clean) than people today. And I do not think that the fact that most people were a lot slimmer was due to them not having enough money to eat themselves fat.
However, I am thinking of what is sometimes (after the actor) called the ‘Harold Lloyd’ America of scientific, economic and social progress (the America that Ford’s Grand Rapids Michigan was very much a part of in the 1920’s). Not the ‘Jim Crow’ (compulsory discrimination against blacks) South where corruption and poverty were much bigger factors.
On race: It was legal to discriminate against blacks in Michigan in the 1920’s (although, as stated above, it was not compulsory), but one of things about being a libertarian that shocks people is that we do not hold that someone should be prevented from discriminating by law. Who one chooses to trade with should be just that – a choice. If a bigot chooses not to take the money from black people (for example by not allowing them to rent rooms in his hotel), or chooses to employ a white idiot over an intelligent black person – that is their loss.
As for the general question of “race relations”. Did people of different races really tend to hate each other more in 1920’s Michigan (and the North generally) than they do now? Or did they just lie less? Judging things Henry Ford’s anti-semitic Dearborn Independent will not do. Henry Ford really did believe that ‘the Jews’ had sabotaged his efforts to make peace in Europe during World War I, but Henry Ford did not speak for all of Michigan, let alone all of the North. Michigan was and is also the State of Hillsdale University , the first college in the nation to let in blacks in on equals terms way back in the 1850’s and a strong supporter of equal treatment of people from all ethnic groups and of women. They were also a stern opponent of government statutes to force people act in ways favourable to blacks or to women or to anyone). With the death of Gerald Ford there is virtually no one left who knows what ordinary people really felt in their hearts in the 1920’s.
As for Prohibition: now there is the ‘War on Drugs’ which produces even more crime and corruption. At least there was a Constitutional basis for Prohibition (the 18th Amendment).
On politics: I confess I do not even know how Gerald Ford voted in 1936 (even if voted at all). I know he worked in the Republican campaign in 1940, but that might have been a protest against FDR going for a third term (which even George Washington had rejected) rather than out of a desire to fight the New Deal.
Certainly Gerald Ford (then an ‘America First’ type person as most Republicans from the midwest were) was against the underhand way that President Roosevelt was trying to get the United States into World War II (and contrary to the myth being against war in 1940 did not mean being ‘pro Nazi’ most, although not all, people who were against war in the United States despised Hitler and the National Socialists), and FDR was certainly violating the law – for example by sending aid to Britain, occupying Iceland, and ordering American forces to destroy German naval forces and dishonestly claiming that the Germans fired first.
On Japan, President Roosevelt’s policy of seizing Japanese assets and cutting off supplies of raw materials to Japan successfully led to war. But the Japanese did not have to be so stupid as to lauch the suicidal war on the United States in 1941 (they should either have just accepted their losses – or helped the Germans against the Soviet Union) and nor did they have to wage the war in the way they did (for example the vile treatment of allied prisoners of war did not benefit Japan in any great way).
Nor did the Germans have to declare war on the United States after the 1941 attack by Japan any more than the Japanese had declared war on the Soviet Union after the German attack on it in June – indeed the failure of Japan to help allowed the Soviets to move vast forces from Siberia to the defence of Moscow.
Whatever the details the actions of both Japan and Germany and the threat of international communism led Gerald Ford to reject the view that America could stay out of the wars of the world – and he became an ‘internationalist’, running against the ‘isolationist’ Republican Congressman in Grand Rapids and supporting Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower faction of the Republican party who wished to keep American power actively involved overseas.
How does this fit with wanting to keep government limited at home?
Certainly it is possible to support an ‘active’ foreign policy and limited government at the same time as a lot of people have – going right back to Pitt the Elder in Britain, but there is a tension in allowing government to spend a lot and do a lot in terms of defence and foreign policy and trying to keep it otherwise limited – however much writers such William Buckley Jr tried to paper over the cracks.
Oddly enough, I think that Gerald Ford went full circle (or something close to it) in foreign policy. As President he still tried to prevent the betrayal of Laos, Cambodia and the Republic of Vietnam, when Congress cut off support and allowed the Communists to take over in contempt for the peace agreements they had signed, murdering millions of people and enslaving tens of millions more.
However, President Ford’s heart never seemed to be it. He said clearly that Congress was breaking the promises that America had made – but he never made a great campaign of it. It was not that Ford was a pacifist as when the Cambodian Communists captured an American ship, his response was swift and hard, it was that in his heart he did not really believe in great President Wilson style wars for the alleged benefit of foreigners. If the foreigners were too unwilling or too corrupt to defend themselves after almost 60,000 Americans had died for them, perhaps it was time to say “enough is enough” and leave them to their fate (although President Ford did make sure that hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Indochina were allowed into the United States – and they have proved to be good citizens). → Continue reading: President Gerald Ford…and the end of an era
A couple of years after the University of Cambridge rejected government (in the shape of one of its agencies plus the recently ‘reformed’ charity commission) ‘guidelines’ for the control of universities (i.e. giving great power for the Chief Executive and a board of management with a majority of non-academics upon it) the University of Oxford has now done the same: first by a meeting of the academics and then by postal ballot.
Oddly enough many ‘conservatives’ think this is a bad thing. Lord Butler (a former civil servant who now, for some reason, is master of University College at Oxford), John Redwood MP and the Daily Telegraph newspaper have all campaigned in favour of the “reforms”.
Their arguments are two fold.
Firstly they say that universities should carry out the changes or the government will force them to. This is clearly the argument of cowards “bend over or the bully will just make you do so”.
However, there is a second line of argument. It is claimed that the changes will help the university be run “like a business”.
Either something is a business or it is not. If it is a business its objective should be to make money and it should be under the control of its owners (or those they appoint).
Claiming to “run something like a business” is one of the great fallacies of our time. Bringing in people who have worked in private companies into government departments or charitable activities does not make these things run better – it just inflates the administration bill. → Continue reading: Good news from Oxford
I was recently asked why people believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ saved the United States from the Great Depression.
The answer is that people are told so – by television and radio shows, films, and (of course) at school. A more difficult question would be why do some people not believe this, indeed why are some people anti-statist generally, in spite of the ‘education system’ and the mainstream media.
Perhaps the leftists (using the modern definition of ‘left’ – I know that Bastiat sat on the left hand side of the French Assembly and so on) have some variation of their ‘authoritarian personality’ fraud (the theory that purported to explain away conservative opinions as a personality disorder). to explain away libertarian opinions. Or perhaps there is some genetic characteristic (although leftists prefer environmental explanations) that could be claimed to ‘explain’ why libertarians believe the things we do.
Of course the above ‘explanations’ (as with older Marxist doctrines of ‘class interest’ and ‘ruling class ideology’) are efforts to avoid having to deal with the facts and arguments presented by non-leftists.
As for the ‘New Deal’ itself, some background is in order… → Continue reading: President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’
Frank Johnson (journalist, editor, columnist and all round newspaper man) has died at the age of 63.
Mr Johnson was of working class origins in the East End of London and left school at 16. However, he never viewed any of this as a reason why he should be hostile to high culture and from his boyhood was a great admirer of opera and ballet. Indeed Frank Johnson was fond of pointing out that many individuals among the working classes were once a lot more cultured than their self declared friends of more fortunate birth gave them credit for, with (for example) the biggest sales among early recordings of music being for serious works, and many men whose hands were hard often being also very well read.
Mr Johnson was no friend of the left – either in the Labour party, or of those in the Conservative party who were patronising statists (always out to ‘help’ the poor with more government spending, taxes and regulations).
Nor was Mr Johnson afraid to write unpopular things. For example he pointed out that for working men in the south of England and in the Midlands, the 1930’s were not a time of collapse, indeed that Britain did better in terms of the rise of real incomes in the 1930’s than National Socialist Germany – and vastly better than FDR’s vaunted ‘New Deal’ United States.
As for the sacred cow of British politics – the Welfare State, Frank Johnson pointed out that it is not a matter of it being “something designed in the 1940’s which must be adapted for changing times” (as cowardly people on the conservative side of British politics used to like to put it), but something that had a powerful negative side from day one, both collectivising hospitals that had been provided free for the poor by charitable effort and helping to destroy the tradition of self help and mutual aid that had once been the greatest aspect of the working classes (of course such things as the Friendly Society movement had been undermined by government activities all the way back to the early schemes of the ‘New Liberal’ government that was elected in 1906).
Even the supposed higher living standards of the 1940’s being an illusion – the war time “prosperity” (boasted of by upper class leftists like A.W. Benn) being a matter of American aid and eating our overseas investments. And the post war time being a matter of rigged stats (claiming that wages were higher than the 1930’s whilst ignoring real inflation – i.e. the black market price of rationed goods) and neglecting future investment. Although it is worth remembering that government spending on the Welfare State started off in a very small way (the real economic harm of the late 1940’s being nationalization, general high taxes and high government spending and the vast web of regulations by which the “educated” men in Whitehall told everyone else what to do and what to do). The real growth of the Welfare State and, more imporantly the changes it was making in the British character (as opposed to such things as the decline of the Friendly Societies and other voluntary associations), did not really even start to be seen till the 1960’s
Mr Johnson remembered the “stoicism of the London working class” (of course he accepted it was more than the London working class – but he was a Londoner), as to what there is now it is best to say nothing.
I will miss Frank Johnson.
Other people will debate whether Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday, was a wicked man who led a regime that killed three thousand people, or whether he should have killed rather more than three thousand as his communists foes have never had much of a moral problem with killing their enemies. My own opinion is that one should never kill an unarmed enemy – no matter what he or she might have been planning to do.
In the interests of honesty I should note that was not my opinion at the time. Many other communists regarded the independent Marxist President Allende as too rash and it is worth noting he was never a member of the official Communist party of Chile. Indeed when I heard the story about a group of communists mostly from outside Chile had been building forces from all over Latin America and beyond, had been told that President was about to deliver a speech and that they should come (leaving their firearms behind) and, when they got to the place the speech was supposed to take place, they were greeted with 50 calibre machine guns – well I laughed. But I was a child when I heard that story and children tend to be cruel.
Everyone has different levels of being shocked. For example, Pinochet either did not care (or did not want to know) about torture and summary execution. But when he got to hear of a rape of a prisoner he went through the roof (I heard this story from the prisoner via a BBC radio interview years ago) – the ‘holy army’ of Chile, based on the army of pre World War I Prussia – with joining up to the officer corps at the age of 15 and a monk like existence to one’s early 20’s, must not behave like ‘Argentines’, the prisoner must be released – and whoever was responsible must be…
On the democracy issue: It is true that Allende got more votes than any other candidate for President in the 1970 election (he got about a third of the vote), but he had violated the Constitution so much since then that the Congress had voted to outlaw him. Of course Pinochet did not turn over power to the Congress – he dissolved it (whatever it thought of Allende, the Congress with its majority of socialists and Christian Democrats would not have favoured someone who had just killed a lot of people – that it a problem with picking up a gun and doing some killing, how do you put it down again and not get punished?). By the way it was not, as is often claimed, the “first military coup in the history of Chile” as there was the coup of 1924 (but perhaps that does not count, as it was a leftist coup). → Continue reading: Augusto Pinochet
I do not buy the Financial Times because, whilst there are some decent people on its staff, its employees are mostly European Union supporting New Labour types.
However, I do make a point of checking it from time to time. I have been amused by its relative lack of coverage of the KGB/FSB activities in London and Italy (in connection to the recent murder in London). It celebrated the sacking of three top Italian intelligence chiefs (in the same issue that it demanded that Donald Rumsfeld be put on trial for the “torture” of poor innocent Muslim head hackers) as these men were too close to the evil CIA and had made charges against the noble Italian Prime Minister (and ex-head of the European Union) Mr Prodi.
What these charges were was not mentioned, the Financial Times (due to some of its staff over the years – the old Soviet Union liked to have links with the newspaper of ‘Finance Capital’) tends to get a bit nervous when KGB links are mentioned.
The Financial Times did invite an expert on Russia to write an article for them – Mr Putin himself (it was like “a word from our sponsor”… as Richard Littlejohn would say “you could not make it up”).
However, there was a Russian story right on the front page of the weekend edition of the Financial Times: The Russian state gas company has ordered new offices to be built – there was an artists impression of the new offices all over the page.
No doubt for its next Russian story the Financial Times will inform its readers that the PLAN has been over-fulfilled by X per cent.
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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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