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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Here, reproduced as it was sent to us, is an open letter to the international mass media by a very worthy website in Spain regarding the horrific and vile attrocity carried out by Marxist terrorists in Madrid yesterday that has resulted in the murder of at least 190 civilian commuters and the injury 1,200 more. The only comment of mine that I will add to what follows is that I share the author’s outrage completely
To the international mass media, ETA is not a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group but a “Basque separatist group”. The magnitude of the 3-11 attack has not changed their narrow sighted style. This is particularly poignant in the case of the US media. After Spain’s support of the American war in Iraq, the coverage by American media is still worthy of a band of ignorants who keep scorning this Spanish bleeding tragedy.
Thus, to try to stop such indecency, I have sent the following brief email to Fox News and CNN. Let’s fill their inboxes with our anti-collaborationist clamour!
I want to express you my most strongest complaint for your horrible coverage of the massacre in Madrid. You name ETA “Basque separatists group”. That’s awfull and infamous. ETA is a terrorist group, as it is recognized as such by all international institutions and developed nations, among them, the USA.
Do you think we should call Al-Qaeda “the resistance”? Has Spain been with the USA and UK in its struggle against international terrorism to deserve that kind of insult?
I am very disappointed by this dishonest style. It is just miserable.
Juan Ramón Rallo
From Spain
Mass media where to send the mail
CNN
Foxnews
BBC
WallStreetJournal
New York Times
Reuters
Associated Press
Washington Post
Amidst all the partying I did in Brussels last weekend, I somehow managed to find the time to actually learn a thing or two.
The first thing I learned was not everyone takes the Euro terribly seriously (while fiddling around for correct change to pay for a taxi, I let the words ‘Mickey Mouse money’ slip from my mouth whereupon the taxi driver began laughing and said “oui, Monsieur, oui”).
Secondly, and rather less anecdotally, I also learned of something called the Stockholm Network. Before last weekend I had no idea that this organisation even existed and, in this case, ignorance was not bliss.
I think it fair to say that there is a widespread impression in the Anglosphere (especially the American bit) that the continent of Europe has fallen under the unbreakable spell of the Grand Wizards of Schtoopidity. Sadly, this is mostly true. But it is not completely true and the difference between ‘mostly’ and ‘completely’ can be found at the website of the Stockholm Network.
Billing themselves as ‘Europe’s only dedicated service organisation for market-oriented think tanks and thinkers’, the website is contains a treasure trove of links to well-organised, well-funded and highly active free-market and libertarian think-tanks and organisation in Britain, Ireland, Albania, Finland, Turkey, Macedonia, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Serbia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Spain, Russia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Rumania, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere.
The idiots and the kleptocrats may be running the show for now but, pleasingly, there are pockets of determined guerilla resistance. Even more pleasingly, these pockets seem to be growing in number.
And that is all I am going to say on the matter. Otherwise there is a danger that I might start sounding optimistic and, as everybody knows, that is strictly against my religion.
The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804–1999
Misha Glenny
Granta Books, 1999
Though well-written and well-organised, its length (662 pages +) and the nature of its subject make this a book to be ploughed through, as one switches from one depressing topic to another. Yet Glenny’s attitude to it all is a little difficult to fathom. On the last page he complains of the “long periods of neglect [when] the Balkan countries have badly needed the engagement of the great powers. Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest … was Nazi Germany during the 1930s.” Some model!
Certainly, left to themselves, every ethnic group (Jews excepted?) behaved badly, both internally and externally. Just how badly the book is disgustingly, though not exactly surprisingly, informative. Yet this does not seem to arouse in Glenny any doubts as to the desirability of mixed-ethnic communities. Contrast this with Spain, where the essence of the reconquest there was the homogenising of the population, with the separation of Portugal, and the imperfect assimilation of the Basques exceptions tending to prove the rule that this uniformity was ultimately beneficial. Neither the Ottoman conquest, nor its liberation homogenised the Balkans. Much of it was Slav, the exceptions being Romanian, Albanian and Greek speakers, with a good deal of intermingling, a large Jewish community in Salonica, descended from Spanish expellees, the whole top-dressed with a Turkish ruling class and military. Not that being Slav in any way prevented mutual hatred between Serb, Croat, Bulgar and Macedonian.
Glenny has chosen 1804 as the date when, with the Serbian revolt, the Ottoman Empire started to disintegrate territorially. Attempts to halt this by progressive” well-meaning Sultans failed because any liberalisation encouraged it, while the economic levers were not in Turkish hands. After relatively discrete parts of the Empire had achieved independence or autonomy – Serbia, Greece, the Rumanian principalities and Bulgaria – the rest of the peninsula was land to be squabbled over. The impression is that the Turks were not major contributors to the turmoil, nor the Islamicised Bosnians and Albanians they left behind.
It is difficult to imagine how the great powers could have intervened more effectively than they did. After all, they brought about the independence of Greece (in nuclear form) in 1830, and a settlement of the Bulgarian border at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after Russia had done most of the fighting. Not that Glenny seems very pleased with the Congress, loading it rather heavily with responsibility for future events in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Sudan and for the scramble for Africa (p. 150). Admittedly either Austria or Russia could have tried to establish a Balkan protectorate, but why, except to keep the other out? And Britain would never allow Russia control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. There was nothing to be gained from a political occupation of a region where all the natives would turn hostile. Economically there were no resources to be exploited or with which to set up an industrial base. Building infrastructure, such as railways, could be, and was, seen as a strategic threat, by the Ottomans or the successor states, or both.
In each of his eight Chapter-Periods, Glenny makes a repeat visit to each separate area, discovering depression and despair in every one, with assassinations for the prominent and massacres for the common people unlucky to live on the wrong side of an ethnic line or be a minority in a particular place. The only exception seems to be Slovenia, which managed to break away from Yugoslavia without much fuss. As man on the spot, Glenny must be regarded as an authority on Yugoslav disintegration and great power intervention, yet there is something contrary-minded about his castigation of America for not intervening sooner in Bosnia and trying to do so just by bombing “without risking the lives of their service men and women” (p. 640). As with recent responses to its intervention in Iraq, the US position seems to be damned if you don’t, damned if you do. Leaving aside the idea that the Americans might consider the bombing option (as also followed in Kosovo) a reasonable preference,surely the facts are that the initial EU reaction was that this was a European dispute and as such should be left to Europeans to take care of. Yet he makes no mention of the inactivity of the Dutch UN “peacekeepers” which preceded, if it did not permit, the massacre of Muslims by Serbs in the so-called “safe haven” of Srebrenica (p. 650). As for the Serbs rallying round Milosevic when he got them bombed, it must be a sign of the times that it is NATO and the Americans that Glenny seems to blame for the irrational behaviour of the Serbs (p. 658).
This is not a very gracious review for a massive, painstaking and brilliant historical survey, but it is a tribute to the fact that its judgements provoke thought and, to some extent, dissent. Incidentally, Glenny uses the presumably Slavic spelling and lettering with the appropriate diacritical marks, but gives no indication as to their pronunciation.
In a Reuters interview (not available yet on the Web) with Luigi Spaventa, the former head of the Italian stock market watchdog, Consob, he says stock markets should refuse to list firms such as stricken food group Parmalat whose ownership structure spreads into murky offshore centres, such as the Cayman Islands.
If a stock market is allowed to run its own affairs, then of course there is nothing wrong in it banning a would-be listed firm on the grounds of its ownership structure. But it is surely a different matter when it comes to a government regulator telling investors that a firm is so dodgy that they cannot put their own wealth into it via an exchange. Surely caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) applies here.
In any event, I wonder if crossed the mind of this old regulator that one key reason why so many firms domicile their business affairs in offshore centres is to avoid the crushing taxes imposed by European nation states?
I think Samizdata’s readership is ahead of me already on that one.
It sounds as if brows all over Europe are being furrowed, heads are being shaken and hands being heavily wrung. What to do? What to do?
Via Instapundit:
Europe’s apparently doomed attempt to overtake the US as the world’s leading economy by 2010 will today be laid bare in a strongly worded critique by the European Commission.
The Commission’s spring report, the focal point of the March European Union economic summit, sets out in stark terms the reasons for the widening economic gap between Europe and the US.
It cites Europe’s low investment, low productivity, weak public finances and low employment rates as among the many reasons for its sluggish performance.
Mama Mia, Ai Caramba, Gott in Himmel and Merde! Does this mean that the European ‘social model’ is not working?
The Professor himself points the way:
Hmm. Bloated public sectors, high taxes, excessive regulation, and inflexible hiring rules probably have something to do with it.
Well, yes. They do have something to do with it. In fact, they have everything to do with it. But just because this is slap-in-the-face obvious, it would be unwise to assume any public (or even private) recognition of this obviousness in the halls of European power. → Continue reading: We’re in a hole! Keep digging
Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:
A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.
The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.
Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let’s all move to Finland!
He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful – and procedures would have to be reviewed.
From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.
The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive.
The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe’s demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years.
Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe.
There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace.
It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st.
The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow.
I suppose it had to happen. Italian legislators, no doubt hoping to look useful in the wake of the near-collapse of Italian food group Parmalat, say they need new laws to prevent the kind of abuses that have dragged the firm into the mire.
Yep, that’s the spirit. What we need is a “overhaul”, a “sweeping new set of powers”, a new super-agency with “wide-ranging” powers to prevent such things happening again.
They never learn, do they? If the public authorities had been doing their job in the first place, ie, enforce the laws preventing fraud and theft, then Parmalat would be chiefly known for its milk cartons, and not as a firm which is doomed to be known as Europe’s Enron. But I guess where there’s muck, there’s brass, as we Brits say. The firm may be teetering on the brink, but at least politicians can see the bright side and pass some impressive new laws and bolster their wonderful reputations.
I am a bit surprised there has not been more attention paid in the blogworld to the recent demise of Italian food group Parmalat, one of the country’s largest businesses employing more than 35,000 people. The firm, due to problems centering around its debt and some allegedly dodgy investment decisions, is on the brink of falling down a deep black hole.
Now, there are certain specific features of the story that pertain only to Italy and Italians. But more broadly, this saga also reminds us of how, in the higher reaches of the corporate world, accounting standards are falling short. In fact, there appear to be no standards at all.
I am sure readers will recall how the American model of capitalism was mocked for its supposedly laissez-faire nature at the time of the Enron, WoldCom and other collapses. A certain smug tone was detected in the pages of European newspapers. Well, now we have a prime example of Enronitis in Europe. Of course, European business shenanigans have been legion – witness the Byzantine affairs of French banking group Credit Lyonnais, for example. And the accounting practises of the European Commission are also a wonder to behold.
Maybe Parmalat will, however, instill a little humility among editors of European business news channels. There’s always hope.
I made a very brief trip to Belgium at the end of a trip to Amsterdam last year. On that occasion I spent a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. My great discovery on that trip was the extraordinary quality of Belgian beer. I spent a tremendous evening in ‘t Brugs Beertje in Bruges, sometimes referred to as “the best bar in Belgium”, which on that occasion was filled with English beer buffs. (The best kind, quite possibly). On that trip, I passed Antwerp in a train, and from my guide book and what people told me, I got the impression I had missed somewhere good.
And, as it happens, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Ashford opened recently, giving me the chance to travel through Kent at over 200 km/h. I was able to both try this out and see Antwerp last weekend. I had an evening in Bruges and then a day and a half in Antwerp. The drinking in Bruges section of the trip I have documented already.
But the next day I did get to Antwerp.
 → Continue reading: Thoughts on a trip to Antwerp, and legacies of the villainy of King Leopold II
Back to Brussels for the first time since 1990 (and the first time since 1988 for more than 24 hours).
The racism is worse than I expected, especially on the part of Flemish speakers against French speakers (not just Walloons). The little things like shop opening hours, the lack of intelligence of policemen, the incompetence or unhelpfulness of bus drivers, trigger my French prejudices about Belgium being a sort of Franco-Dutch nation of retards. Partly it’s the accent and the slow-paced speech. A Belgian professor of mathematics with an IQ of 180 describing integrated calculus would sound like a dimwit to a French person.
It is all the more strange for the attractiveness of the central districts of the town. Belgium is an ancient centre of capitalism: at one time Antwerp was the world’s largest trading centre and either Ghent or Brussels (I forget which) is supposed to have the oldest stock exchange in the world. There is architectural evidence of this: the older houses of Brussels are very individually designed, there was clearly a lot of wealth around in the 17th century, and there are more statues per square mile than any other city I can think of (and most of them look pretty good).
White beggars in Belgium speak at least three languages: French, Flemish and English, they often also speak at least a smattering of a couple of either Dutch, German, Turkish or Arabic. The non-white beggars didn’t speak to me (is this an indication that whites don’t give them money willingly?). As usual in Europe, the East Europeans doing the low-status jobs are ridiculously overqualified: engineering school graduates working as garbage collectors or cleaners, bar staff with medical qualifications.
In one respect Brussels is far superior to Paris: there are street kiosks in the town centre where one can buy snails, as well as the gauffre (waffle) and crèpe sellers that have been exported to other cities. One nastier thing is that in France I can go to a hotel, pay cash, give a false name and show no ID, whereas Belgium seems to have the old surveillance society trick of requiring all visitors to register their ID (this used to include staying at private addresses, but I don’t know if that still formally applies). Another bad thing is the police sirens are the same as in London: the stupid loud whooping noises designed for a grid road city that are confusing in cramped city streets. Parisian sirens are less noisy, don’t pump the adrenalin of police drivers as much (I would love to know if there are fewer fatal road accidents caused by Paris police responding to emergency calls than London), and you can tell where they’re coming from.
I made a walk-in visit to an Emergency Room to arrange for a prescription and found a compromise between the British National Health Service (queue, grubby surroundings) and France (helpful, competent and much, much, much faster, but one pays). The price of the medication was cheaper than in the UK. I shall make enquiries about gun laws and taxes. The disturbing evidence so far is the number of notices about taxes. It is easier to find information about registering for taxes than finding a decent street map of Brussels.
In the midst of a vast, arid desert of small-minded envy and zero-sum culture, there emerges a little oasis of cool, clear refreshing sanity:
The Swiss economy has faced hard times in the past few years. One canton, Schaffhausen, is doing something about it by changing its tax law to attract wealthy people. Beginning in January 2004, Schaffhausen will replace its system of increasing marginal tax rates on income with a system of degressive marginal rates. The cantonal tax rate will be set at just under 8 percent for income of SFr 100,000. It will rise to a peak of 11.5 percent for income between SFr 600,000 and SFr 800,000. Thereafter, the marginal rate declines with each incremental chunk of income: 10 percent at SFr 1,300,000; 8 percent at SFr 3,000,000; and just over 6 percent for income more than SFr 10,000,000. This is a true incentive-based tax system—the larger one’s income, the lower one’s marginal rate.
Seems that the penny (or the Franc) has dropped in one small corner of one small country. They have realised that penalising success is a pretty good way of guaranteeing failure.
Schaffhausen has its own legislative parliament, which contains eighty deputies representing all regions within the canton. Eight political parties compete for these seats. Evidently Schaffhausen’s voters support a tax cut that gives the greatest benefits to the richest people. They believe that attracting wealthy individuals to reside in their midst is good for everyone.
And they are right.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the link.]
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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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