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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This by Greg Burch, about the differences between Marxism and Islam, linked to by Instapundit, strikes me as shrewd. And the posting is also, unlike other blog postings I have found myself reading recently, mercifully brief, saying a great deal in a few pithy paragraphs.
Marxism, Burch reminds us, promises heaven on earth, and in time, this promise will prove wrong. So, to defeat Marxism all you have to do is quarantine it, and then wait for it to defeat itself. But Islam makes no verifiable and hence self-defeating real world promises.
This difference makes the nature of the protracted struggles faced by the West against these two fundamental challenges very different. In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.
I do not claim that this is in any way a new insight, but it is an important meme, well stated. It also feeds in to what Johnathan said yesterday, about us “setting an example” to Islam rather than barging in and re-arranging it.
Another good Islam-related meme emerged from a not-that-recent (but it deserves to be placed on the Samizdata record, I think) conversation between me and Perry de Havilland. Perry perpetrated that widespread meme-that-ain’t-so, to the effect that Islam needs a Reformation. The muddle here is that it confuses Reformation in the sense of reform in the direction of sanity and niceness with reformation in the direction of more devoted adherence to the original texts, which of course means the exact opposite of sanity and niceness.
My so far rather limited reading of the Koran causes me to agree with Islamic fundamentalists about what the Koran says and what it demands of Muslims. Reformation, in the sense of what happened historically in Europe with Christianity – believers reading the stuff for themselves and not allowing the message to be bent out of shape by priests before it gets to them – is what Islam has for many decades now been busily engaged in, and that, from the point of view of Western Civilisation, is the problem, not the solution.
Perry quickly rephrased what he was all along trying to say. Islam, he said, needs a New Testament. I.e. something fundamentally different for the fundamentalist true believers to read. Again, I am sure that this is not an original notion, but it is still a meme to conjure with, I think. It is a lot to ask, but that is the point. Islam has to change a lot before it can hope to rub along contentedly with the rest of us.
I suspect that lots of people benignly raised within the Muslim religious tradition, but appalled by what Islam actually says, have many times attempted such a project, but that Original Islam 1.0 contains not only the contradiction of all such niceness memes, but also other memes which have the effect of preventing the niceness memes from ever catching on and becoming more than historical footnotes.
However, the world is a very different place now to what it has been throughout most of Muslim history, and I remain optimistic that Islam may eventually reform itself, in the sense that Perry and I and everyone else who is civilised would all like. Such a benign transformation would be unprecedented and utterly out of character with almost everything that went before in Muslim history. But, so are mobile phones.
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003
One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that’s what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.
Reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.
After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a “Latin verse” exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome’s subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.
At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal’s defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal’s elephants to charge uselessly through.
Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina’s exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don’t know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey’s career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?
For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn’t going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped. → Continue reading: Tom Holland fills in my ancient Roman blanks
Not long ago I did a posting here about material progress, as illuminated by a book about the past which described a time before many of our modern comforts had been devised. A commenter commented, as at least one commenter always will during discussions of this sort: dentistry!
He was right of course. And it so happens that I have been reading another work of history, by Charles Spencer, this time about the Battle of Blenheim, in which the primitive dentistry of earlier times gets a particularly memorable mention.
The Battle of Blenheim was fought in 1704 between a coalition of allies under the command of the Duke of Marlborough and various French armies of Louis XIV. Louis XIV is of course the villain of the story, who gets his just comeuppance at Blenheim. However, it turns out that finding all his grand plans of European conquest thwarted by a supreme commander of genius, who, in the words of Sir Edward Creasy, “never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take”, was not Louis XIV’s only bit of bad luck. We learn, from an early paragraph in Blenheim (pp. 20-21 of my paperback edition), that Louis had another huge misfortune to contend with towards the end of his life:
In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of post-operative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout this procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion – cauterised with red-hot coals.
I almost feel sorry for the man. But having got this sad story out of the way, Spencer then goes on to describe what Louis XIV’s soldiers did to the people of the United Dutch Provinces – genocide, basically, to all of them that they could get their murdering hands on – and any sympathy you may feel for this abominable man immediately disappears.
But the point about dentistry remains. The average citizen of an average country now enjoys vastly less painful and more knowedgeable dental care than even the grandest of kings had to endure in earlier times.
Never knock progress.
Some wonderful photos and informative writeup here about the lost, and now found, treasures of Alexandria, which at one point ranked as one of the wonders of the world, boasting the world’s tallest lighthouse.
The photographs are outstanding. Enjoy. (Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. Stephen has written a fine book debunking that steaming pile of intellectual hocus known as post-modernism, incidentally.)
Tom Evslin tells a story on Fractals of Change that illustrates exactly why we need to throw over our quaint, industrial-era notions of what constitutes work (aka labor, aka toil). Here’s his take on why a great programmer is worth fifty good ones:
I was consulting to a development manager at a tech company. He told me that the CEO, his boss, wouldn’t give him the salary and option freedom he needed to close a great programmer he’d found. Salary would have been 20% above what he had approval to offer; and, thanks to the new accounting standards for stock options, he didn’t have the authority to offer options. He lost the potential new hire and had to settle for someone merely “good”. Ironic thing is that he had several open positions so, once he gets through hiring several people, he’ll end up paying more in the aggregate than he would have paid for the superstar – and probably won’t get as much productivity.
Why do we persist in evaluating productivity as if the only model for productivity is the assembly line? In particular, creative work of any kind is anything but incremental; it is in fact inherently exponential. If Einstein could accomplish a civilization’s worth of ‘work’ in a single calendar year (1905, while he was ‘working,’ incidentally, as a patent examiner), why don’t we recognize the folly of measuring human endeavor by counting man hours?
‘Human resources’ is an unfortnuate misnomer, containing the implication that humans are to be mined or exploited like other natural resources. What humans are is entrepreneurs, wealth-creation machines designed to create capital. It is about time that companies with the means to ‘fund’ human effort figured this out. If more employees were treated like capitalists, the world would be a better place to work in.
In his classic demolition of Big Government, Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Rourke explains that one of the keys to explaining how govermment can spread its tentacles and prove so hard to roll back is that its very size makes it hard for anyone, even a smart reformer, to understand. The bafflement that one experiences when looking at the extent of the state is part of why it stays big, he argues.
I was reminded of this by the sheer contrast with what used to be the case. As William Hague points out in his excellent biography of 18th Century UK statesman Pitt the Younger (now out in paperback), Pitt had hardly any resources at all in his brief spell as Chancellor of the Exchequer. There were no civil servants or secretaries, no armies of bureaucrats. Nothing. Nada. Zip. And when Pitt entered 10 Downing Street, the actual size of the state engine at his command was just as meagre, even though this was a government that was to wage war against Bonaparte, deal with the growth of an empire in India and the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
Ponder on that, Gordon Brown.
Life is far more fun when you have a really good book on the go, and the only thing wrong with mine just now is that it weighs too much to be lugged about comfortably on my pedestrian journeyings around London. It is The Lives & Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen. For me, this book is perfect. I know what most of the music that the great composers composed sounds like. But I am enjoying hugely learning more about the circumstances in which this wonderful music was composed and first listened to.
After an Italian prelude, the first big name composer Steen deals with is Handel, the German who ended up living in London for most of his life.
Handel’s London was an exciting place (p. 39 of my unwieldy paperback):
The year before Handel arrived, Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral had been completed at a cost of £1,167,474 paid for largely by the import duty on coal. Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist was still at work. London, with its sounds of wheels rumbling on cobbles and cries from the street vendors, was well into a century of commercial and cultural prosperity: the country’s population grew by 71 per cent over the century; its merchant fleet more than doubled in tonnage between 1702 and 1776.
London, in other words, then as now, was making lots of progress. Perhaps because music itself can be such an otherworldy thing, even when composed by such a worldly figure as the energetically entrepreneurial Handel, Steen chooses in this book to emphasise the material aspect of things when describing the world in which this music was created.
The kind of people who enjoy the fruits of material progress, but who enjoy them more than they think about how they were first devised and are now cultivated, often dismiss progress as a small thing, perhaps because they dislike the kind of people who are needed to make it, and the methods they must be allowed to use. (Basically: commerce. And insofar as “public spending” is involved, someone has to make that money first before it can be spent.) Such people should ponder pieces of writing such as what Michael Steen says next about Handel’s London:
Behind its superficial prosperity and elegance, London was overcrowded, squalid and full of beggars. People had fleas, lice and few teeth. Most people defecated in nooks and crannies, or used public lavatories built over rivers such as the Fleet. For the more refined, with a small fee, the ‘human lavatory’ would provide a pail and extend its large cape as a screen. Lavatory paper did not exist, the alternatives ranged from a sponge on a stick in a container of salt water, to stones, shells and bunches of herbs.
Delightful.
But the most chilling observation Steen makes about the trials and tribulations of material life in the early eighteenth century – instead of the early twenty-first, say – is this, a couple of paragraphs later:
The political outlook was uncertain.
So? When was it not? But now, hear the reason:
Queen Anne, who was in her late 40s, had borne seventeen children; mostly still-born, none had survived.
Let an anti-progress person of now read that, and then try telling us that material progress of is no great importance, or of no “spiritual” significance, that it is merely a matter of brute, animal comfort. The Queen of England, no less – who presumably enjoyed, if that is the word, the very best medical attention then available – scored zero out of seventeen in the deadly game of childbirth and child-rearing; which meant that there was no obvious royal heir, which meant that the political outlook was uncertain. Poor, poor woman.
Later (p. 54), Michael Steen throws light on another kind of material progress, of a sort that is far more widely and deliberately scorned than progress in things like plumbing or medicine (which is often merely forgotten about), namely cosmetics. Steen has this to tell us about the way that the sort of women Handel often had dealings with – such as the highly paid and outrageously indulged and pampered opera singers whom he supplied tunes for, the crazy rock stars of their day – tried to beautify themselves:
Their faces were painted with compounds of white lead, rice and flour, with washes of quicksilver boiled in water with bismuth.
Suddenly, the progress made in female adornment, which has put incomparably more convenient and healthy – to say nothing of far more visually appealing – methods of adornment into the hands of any modern woman with a few quid to spare who wants them, appears almost as impressive as progress in plumbing, medicine, nutrition, travel, civil engineering, electronic entertainment, or even the wondrous progress that was about to be made in the two centuries after Handel, in music.
Having previously written a post on Alfred the Great (who I still think was the greatest Englishman who ever lived) and his family, I think it would be nice to present a pro-Viking post (or at least pro-Norse: not quite the same thing).
To go a Viking is to ‘raid’ in the language of old Norse and most Norse people were not raiders – they were farmers, craftsmen and traders (although someone might be any of these three things and still be a raider at some time in their life) like most non-Norse people in the period (from the late 8th to the early 12th centuries).
Raiding is not a libertarian activity (robbery, slave taking, rape and murder are violations of the non-aggression principle) and (as stated above) non-raiding occupations were much the same among Norse folk as among non Norse folk. So why do many libertarians (and non-libertarians) have a soft spot for the ‘Vikings’ (if we must call the Norse Vikings)?
Well a case can be made for the Norse as the freedom loving folk of pro-Viking popular legend.
It starts with Charlemagne (768-814). Charles the Great King of the Franks and later first Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s grandfather was the great general Charles Martel who defeated the Arab invasion of France, and his father was Pepin who deposed King Childeric and made himself King of the Franks (rather than just the “Vicar of the Palace” and real power behind the throne that Charles Martel had been). Charlemagne had some trouble imposing his rule (over other claimants to the throne) and had to beg the aid of Tassilo the ruler of Bavaria.
However, the internal politics of the Franks would not be a great concern if it were not for the policies of Charlemagne. Most rulers of this period raided (the later Vikings were not breaking totally new ground here) – loot was a good way of winning the loyalty of the hard men one need to be able to count on to preserve one’s rule. But Charlemagne raided more than any other ruler of his time.
Sometimes Charlemagne waged war with an ideological justification, for example the long wars against the Saxons in order to impose Christianity (more on this later). Other times it was to eliminate a potential rival (such as when Charlemagne betrayed Tassilo by the conquest of Christian Bavaria) and sometimes it was just in search of loot and ‘glory’ (such as the long distance raiding against the Avars). Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons and his pressure on the Frisians (part of centuries of pressure on these folk of what is now the coast of north west Germany and north east Holland) and Denmark caused considerable interest in the Northern world.
Serfdom (the semi-slavery of the peasants – and idea that went back, in various forms, to the late Roman Empire) was never successfully imposed on the Frisians or the Saxons, but the spreading of religion by the sword was not Charlemagne’s only intent – the spreading of the Frankish social system (a military elite, loyal to a great warlord, living off the forced labour of others) was certainly part of the story. And in order to imposer this vast numbers of people were killed in Charlemagne’s campaign of terror.
It is hard to be sure (and it is contested) but some claim that there were great councils of the North – and that the ‘Viking Age’ (at least at first) was a response to the activities of Charlemagne. Certainly (even if we keep to the idea of the Vikings as independent raiders) the pressure on the Frisians meant that their sea power could no longer control the North Sea – leaving the area free for others.
Charlemagne also favoured the power of the Church – not just the worship of the Christian God. This meant the rise of what came to be called tithes and other forms of church taxes. But even after the Norse became Christians they tended to resist such taxes. For example in Iceland they were not imposed till the 1080’s and in Norway to the early 1100’s.
Serfdom as also strongly resisted by the Norse. In won out in Denmark – but never in Sweden or Norway (even after these areas became nation states). The case of Norway is interesting. As late as the early 1100’s there were still four different peasant assemblies that elected Kings (who did not have to be the same person) – such ideas were outside the mainstream of European thought (as expressed by Charlemagne and those who came after him). Slavery did exist in the Norse world – but it tended to decline. For example, in Iceland it died out completely in the 11th century. And (of course) Charlemagne was just a greater slave trader than the Vikings ever were.
Lastly there is the matter of price control. There were (broadly speaking) two views of the concept of the ‘just price’ in legal-theological thinking of the time. There was the view that the just price was a price that was freely decided between buyer and seller (this view is reflected in the laws of Bavaria in the 8th century) and there was the view that the ‘just price’ was the price established by custom or law.
Charlemagne favoured the latter view – and his officials (and those of later Kings) tried to impose detailed price controls (and other regulations). The Church was never united behind Charlemagne and his officials – but Charlemagne had saved the Pope from the power of the Lombards and the Pope did declare him Holy Roman Emperor, so the view of the dream of extensive state power (itself a dream of re-establishing the controls of the late Roman Empire) was a respectable one within the Church – and cast a long shadow over the Middle Ages and beyond.
The Norse however rejected the very notion of Imperial power in such matter (indeed in all matters). So perhaps people are not totally foolish to remember some aspects of the ‘Vikings’ with certain warmth.
In the years following the First Opium War and the (forced) Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and the consequent establishment of Shanghai as a treaty port, areas of Shanghai were conceded to the Britain, the United States, and France between 1846 and 1849. Extraterritoriality applied, and foreigners were not subject to Chinese law. The French Concession (which never contained all that many French people – there were actually more Russians) was ruled essentially as a French colony – officials were appointed in Paris to adminster it. On the other hand, the British and American concessions were merged in 1863 to form something called the “International Settlement”, which elected the “Shanghai Municipal Council” to govern the city. On this basis, Shanghai was close to being an independent city state (albeit with some use of the Brtish and American legal systems and military) until the second world war.
This peculiar status still remained somewhat intact even after it was controlled by the Japanese from 1937 (who had started trading in Shanghai along with the Europeans in the first half of the twentieth century, and had gradually taken control of the city and other parts of China by force), and as a consequence Shanghai was the only port in the world unconditionally open to Jewish refugees from Europe. By 1941 over twenty thousand mostly German and Austrian but also Polish and Lithuanian Jews had arrived in Shanghai, creating a new Jewish area in the Hongkou area of Shanghai, which had once been the American concession but in the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Chinese area of the International Settlement. As I wrote last month, I went for a wander around this area when I was in Shanghai last month.
The Japanese had nothing against Jews (Japanese brutality being largely reserved for the Chinese), and the Jews in this area built what of a community they could, including the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, schools, theatre and newspapers, and they received some aid from the existing (very weallthy) Jewish community in Shanghai and from (largely American) Jewish philanthropic organisations. If you look very carefully, you can still see one or two handwritten signs which date from that era.
After 1941, partly under pressure from their new German allies, the Japanese confined the “stateless refugees” in Shanghai to one relatively small area of Hongkow. Conditions in this “Shanghai Ghetto” were not good, and the area was somewhat disease ridden. In 1945, thirty odd Jews were killed by an American bombing that was attempting to destroy a Japanese radio station.
But the vast majority of the Jews in Shanghai were still alive when the Americans liberated the city shortly afterwards. Joy at the arrival of the Americans was followed by news of the Holocaust and that virtually all Jewish friends and relatives back in Europe had been murdered, so it must have been a strange liberations. Over the next few years the Jews in Shanghai were dispersed to Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, the United States and Palestine, and relatively few were there when the communists took over in 1949.
Still, visiting the former Shanghai ghetto is a far less depressing thing than visiting almost anywhere described as a former ghetto in Europe. In Warsaw a couple of months ago I reflected that half a million Jews had once been confined to a small area there, and that basically all of them were subsequently murdered, something just too depressing for words. The ghetto in Shanghai is a place where at least twenty thousand were saved, and the memorials commemorate that. The Ohel Moishe Synagogue is a museum to the events of the time, and if you go there a nice Chinese gentleman welcomes you, shows you a film about the events, and shows you around the exhibits of photographs and documents of the time. (He also gave me a parish bulletin from a local (modern) Jewish community, inviting me to join them for shul and other events, but I am alas not Jewish so it didn’t really apply).
Other memorials nearby suggest much the same thing. There is a certain amount of pride in the fact that this is a place where people were saved.
Patrick Porter, a recent reinforcment for Oxblog, noted the other day that writing history is not as easy as it looks. He was referring to the recent practices of US historians, writing about US social practices of the past that have political implications for today.
Cynics have long known that ‘history is written by the winners’, but the 20th century showed that history could be used and abused to fight political battles that are in dispute. Unlike more traditional readers, I myself have no objection to writers of history using their works to advance an agenda, so long as they are upfront about what that agenda is. Much value can be gained by looking at an old question with the different view that a blatently political or social agenda can provide, regardless of whether or not I agree with that agenda. As a blogger writing for Samizdata.net, it should be obvious that I do have an agenda of my own- the advancement of liberty and against statist values. Given the nature of this blog, that hardly requries disclosure on every post.
The benefits of this are obvious- the reader knows exactly what the intellectual meta-context I am operating from, and can read into what I write to take from my writing what they will. I think that is far more honest then pretending an objectivity that I can not in all honesty claim.
I was moved to remark on this subject not by any historical event, but by a series of historical novels, Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. For those that are not familiar with these six novels, Colleen McCullogh has novellised the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar, based on the best historical information that she possesses, and uses her writer’s talent to ‘fill in the gaps’. While not to everyone’s taste, I have enjoyed the series and they have sparked in me a great deal of curiousity about classical history. However, I must raise the objection that McCullogh seems far too partisan towards Julius Caesar then seems to be reasonable. At times in the later novels, one is left wondering if this is not hagiography. What is the agenda here? Or is it just that with my libertarian meta-context, I have too much objection to someone who was ‘Dictator’?
Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)
Quote:
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by “Socialism”. That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill’s team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.
And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.
Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.
Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.
I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of “totalitarian democracy” and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.
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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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