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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Libby Purves, the Times columnist, has a nice appreciation of the Cutty Sark, which was partly destroyed by fire yesterday. The burning of the Cutty Sark clipper ship appears, judging by some reports, to have been started deliberately. I have long since given up trying to fathom what goes through the minds – for want of a better word – of the pondlife who get a buzz out of torching old monuments like this 19th century vessel. An active hatred or pranksterish contempt for the past soon spills over into a defilement of the present and eventually, lack of interest in the future (very Burkean, ed).
Some time ago, I reflected on how the clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were a demonstration of how globalised the 19th Century was in terms of trade. Anyway, let’s hope the vessel can be restored. It is certainly one of the finest sights in Greenwhich, in the eastern part of London and a major tourist attraction.
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.
I thought this is one of the cases where technology is nothing but good news…
German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.
Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.
Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps
Until I read the final paragraph.
Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany’s tax authorities.
But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to…
No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.
via Dropsafe
“The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened. The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened.”
– former General Michael Rose, urging a retreat from Iraq.
Ok, so the defeat in North America in 1782 did not result in catastrophe (unless you happened to be an American Tory of course) and that somehow tells us something about Iraq circa 2007 according to the former General. But Vietnam? Thirty years of communist totalitarianism are not a catastrophe? Presumably the Boat People were just Vietnamese tourists looking for Disneyland and everything was really just peachy after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
What would constitute a catastrophe, I wonder?. A couple Croatian chums of mine had the dubious pleasure of meeting Michael Rose in Bosnia (which is a story I would love to tell but do not feel I can) and they told me some rather uncomplimentary things about him and they certainly felt they got the better of him ‘professionally’. If that is his ‘take’ on Vietnam, he does not sound like someone whose judgement I would much care to rely on, that is for sure.
I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers’ reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.
Clive has a picture taken from I’m All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove – the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick – as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United’s Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.
In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing – “Set the People Free” – while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).
And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show’s brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I’m All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas (“what a fwightful shower!”), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.
The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the ‘enlightened classes’ at the time, which was that Britain was not ‘modern’ or ‘efficient’ enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain’s industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘fix’ was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions’ privileges, starting with the closed shop.
I have heard it said that Sellers’ portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers’ genius to send up the intrusive state of today.
My inestimable thanks to the commenter who linked to this exquisitely germane wiki in the comments section of my post below:
Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and were usually used for social discrimination. This frequently meant preventing commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities.
I was wrong about Cameron. He is not trying to drag us back into the 19th Century, he is making a bid for the 14th Century!! I suppose it may be to some advantage that we know exactly what is driving him and his ilk. Of even more advantage is to accept that the struggle for freedom, prosperity and progress is necessarily going to encompass some degree of class war.
225 years ago today Parliament voted a resolution to end the war and grant the colonies independence. A month later Lord North faced a vote of no confidence and stepped down.
It seems to me any old place can declare independence, it is when your would-be rulers accept it that matters.
Everything I have heard and read tells me that this kind of thing used to be true in Britain.
I live in a very small street with only eight houses, but delivery vans come down here at least twice a day. Fed Ex and that other company. People have a lot of parcels delivered by not the Post Office these days. The internet brings us gifts every day.
They bash on the door a few times, then put the parcel down and walk off. One time, a delivery man hid the parcel under our doormat. I guess he thought it was more valuable-looking than usual (true- it was Lego/s). Nobody expects parcels to be stolen from doorsteps. Everywhere I’ve lived in England, that would be insane. I never minded about crime when I lived in the UK, but that was before experiencing life in a place that feels this safe. It’s wonderful.
I heard a story from my brother-in-law about Nottingham in the thirties. Apparently, in a very poor part of town and at a very poor time, as was the practice in such places in those times, a man used to come round with a big leather bag, collecting rent, in cash. This man was not liked. People went hungry to ensure that he got his cash. But it never occurred to him or to anyone that this was a stupid thing for him to do, because it was not stupid. Anyway, one day, he left his bag in the middle of the street for some reason, full of cash, unattended. A while later he came back and collected it, untouched, all the money still there. Those were the rules.
But stories like that about long-ago Nottingham are far easier to dismiss than the contrast that Alice Bachini-Smith describes from her own direct and hugely contrasting experiences. To tell me that I am wrong about 1930s Nottingham only involves saying that the story has become exaggerated over the years, as maybe it has. To tell Alice that she is wrong means telling her that she is wrong about her own experiences. It means calling her a liar, pretty much.
As to why things worked like this in most or even all of Britain in the past and still do work like this in the more law abiding parts of America, well, that is another argument. The reasons are quite complicated, I would say. (For instance, I have long believed architectural design to be part of the story.)
I recall publishing an interesting piece for the Libertarian Alliance by the historian Stephen Davies entitled Towards the Remoralisation of Society about these kinds of arguments. This was published in 1991 but since then the story in Britain has surely changed rather little and if anything has got somewhat worse. (Here and here are some more recent writings by the same author, the former being a book that you have to buy, but the latter being a blog posting that you can actually read.)
There is a pull-out supplement in the latest Spectator, entitled “The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Cricket World Cup 2007”. Peter Oborne is very gung-ho about cricket just now (no link because the bit I am about to quote is stuck behind a registration wall – I read it on paper):
Never have there been so many outstanding international teams. Go back to the previous ‘golden age’ before the first world war and there were just three Test-playing nations: England, Australia and South Africa.
So far so routine, this being from a piece by Oborne entitled “A new golden age”, which he does explain. Basically, not only are there more good national teams now, and more excellent players, but they also play cricket that is entertaining to watch, unlike what was played a generation ago. But then comes this kicker, and in brackets if you please:
(Actually there should have been four: until 1914 the United States was well capable of competing at the highest level, and a cricket tour of the United States formed the background to Psmith Journalist, one of P. G. Wodehouse’s best novels. Unfortunately, the Imperial Cricket Conference, which governed international cricket, excluded America because it was not part of the British empire, so it went off and played baseball instead. This snub to the US at such a promising stage of its cricketing development, is one of the tragedies of history.)
I did not know that (more about this sad story here). I am not used to feeling spasms of hatred toward those who presided over the British Empire, although I often learn about things that make others understandably angry about these people. But I did when I read that. We have talked here before about cricket in the USA, but I do not recall this particular circumstance being mentioned by anyone. Apologies if someone did and I missed it. For while I would not put this particular tragedy of history down there with the Slave Trade and the Holocaust and the depredations of King Leopold, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of them, this certainly does seem like a definite pity to me.
Talking of cricket, and what with cricket’s World Cup fast approaching, Samizdata’s travel correspondent Michael Jennings has been, well, talking of cricket. He has done a podcast with Patrick Crozier, about Australian sport in general, and Australian cricket in particular, what with cricket being the biggest sport in Australia. Did you know that Aussie pace ace Brett Lee (who will sadly be missing the World Cup because of injury) does commercials on Indian telly, and has had a pop hit in India? You do now.
And for more about how sport and politics intersect, do not miss this sports report by Guido Fawkes.
Here is a website for the film Amazing Grace, due for release soon. It centres on the life of William Wilberforce, friend of great British Prime Minister William Pitt, and the man most people will associate with the abolitionist movement. The campaign to end slavery lasted for years before eventually succeeding in the first decade of the 19th Century, although it lingered as an institution in the colonies for many years before ending in the conflagration of the US civil war. I have no idea whether this new film will be any good and what sort of “point” it will make, but if there is a point worth making on a libertarian blog like this, it is that slavery in all its forms is an abomination, a stain on humanity and should be resisted. Furthermore, man since ancient times has known that slavery is an evil but for many centuries was either resigned to the institution, or was cowed into thinking that it was part of the natural order of things. I have read comments on this blog – by an individual who thankfully no longer bothers us – that slavery was a product of its economic times and it would be quite wrong for us to “lord it over” our ancestors by condemning the practice. This is moral relativism, pure and simple.
Some people have tried to argue that the British slave trade proves the wickedness possible through capitalism, although I think it demonstrates a quite different point. Kidnapping people from their homes and then forcing them to work in conditions as appalling as a plantation has not, as far as I know, got anything to do with consensual acts of commerce as classical liberals might understand it. Quite the reverse. What slavery shows is that trade without respect for the rights of individuals is in fact a form of thuggery.
Here is an article I wrote over a year ago about a less well known opponent of slavery, Thomas Clarkson. On the 200th anniversary of Britain’s outlawing the slave trade, let’s celebrate what these men achieved.
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.
In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.
The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.
and…
Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.
and…
… and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?
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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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