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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One of the most potent anti-liberty memes has been that simple phrase, the “Wild West”. Wild as in lawless, violent, murderous. And one of the most potent pro-liberty memes is therefore, if only because it negates the first meme, the fact that the Wild West was, in the words of a famous Journal of Libertarian Studies article by Terry Anderson, the Not So Wild Wild West.
Here is another article, The American West: A Heritage of Peace by Ryan McMaken, dealing with the history of the West, and with the history of its history, in the form of Western novels and of course “westerns”, that is to say movies set in that Wild Wild West. This makes similar points to those made by Terry Anderson, and the one link in McMaken’s article is to Anderson’s.
McMaken ends his article thus:
Unfortunately for novelists and filmmakers, the American West was far less exciting than we have long been led to believe. The frontiersmen knew this themselves. In his old age, Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the most flamboyant architects of our perceptions of the West, openly admitted to lying about his violent exploits to sell more dime novels. He was, after all, wounded in battle with Indians exactly once, not 137 times as he claimed. And such tales are no doubt popular with many Americans today who seem increasingly open to believing almost anything about the West as long as it is simultaneously exciting and violent and bleak.
As with so many success stories, however, the story of the West is primarily a story of hard work, trade, tedium, and peace. The original mythmakers would have us believe that the settlement of the West was some kind of crusade. A war of righteous American legions against everybody else. In reality, there were no legions, and there was certainly very little righteousness.
There were men and women trying to make a better life for themselves, acting under their own will, and pursuing their own ends. On the other end of the spectrum, the purveyors of the new Western victimology would have us believe that these individuals brought with them messiah complexes and violent tendencies which would never be brought under control until “civilization” caught up with them. Yet, the messiah complexes, the “Manifest Destiny,” and the raging violence have always mostly resided in the minds of politicians, pundits, novelists, and movie directors; none of whom ever tamed any land harsher then their own back yards.
As I say, this is a familiar theme among libertarians. I thank my fellow London libertarian Patrick Crozier for alerting me to this piece, and I also checked through the archives here just to make sure that no Samizdatistas had already commented on it. This is familiar stuff – but familiar because so persuasive and important, and for that reason, worth any amount of supportive comment.
Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (Ohlin Lectures)
Deepak Lal
MIT Press, 1998
I felt I had to read this book twice to fully appreciate its message, yet it is not difficult to read, indeed to do so is easy and a pleasure. It must have been equally a pleasure to attend the lectures on which it is based. But a large accumulation of facts, each one of which can be seen to be relevant to the thrust of the book, are difficult for the reader (or anyway, by me) to hold ready to slot into a logical structure to be reproduced in a satisfying synthesis in the memory when the book is finished.
As for the “unintended consequences” of the title, these are the results of social structures, political motives and individual actions which often have quite different aims: “We have known since Adam Smith that an unplanned but coherent and seemingly planned social system can emerge from the independent actions of many individuals and in which the final outcomes can be very different from those intended. All this, I hope, is uncontroversial,” writes the author (p. 7). Well, I hope so too – but “we” needed Hayek and the collapse of Communism to convince a lot of other people.
Lal seeks to find an answer to the question why the explosive development that characterised the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe, though he merely mentions Great Britain as its origin, without further analysis (p. 20). Why not in the other great areas of civilization – India, China or Islam? He proceeds to examine the civilizations that arose after the development of agriculture from about 10,000 BC; pastoralism as a parallel development is mentioned but left undiscussed, presumably because it is basically predatory on and if successful, assimilated into neighbouring agricultural civilizations.
Such civilizations typically reach an optimum through what Lal labels Smithian growth, where greater efficiency is generated by division of labour and by trade, capitalism being the result (according to the precepts of Adam Smith). They are, however, limited by having only human and animal power and organic, rather than mineral sources of fuel. The breakthrough to Industrial Civilization, technologically based with mechanical power and virtually unlimited energy from mineral resources, Lal calls Promethean growth and this was evolved only in Western Europe. The question is: why? → Continue reading: How did Europe reach Promethean growth?
Not long ago, our beloved David Carr did a characteristic posting here entitled The joys of pessimism.
Here is how David ended that posting:
I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.
As he constantly is, I am sure you would all agree.
I remembered this while I was dipping today into Hitler and Churchill – Secrets of Leadership by Andrew Roberts.
Here is what Roberts says, on p. 93 of my 2003 hardback edition, about Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership:
‘Long dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us,’ he warned in an especially bleak radio address. ‘Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted. We must be inflexible.’ One man who immediately recognised the strategy behind Churchill’s dismal honesty was Joseph Goebbels. ‘His slogan of blood, sweat and tears has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack,’ wrote the Nazi propaganda chief in a magazine article entitled ‘Churchill’s Tricks’. ‘He is like the doctor who prophesies that his patient will die and who, every time his patient’s condition worsens, smugly explains that he prophesied it.’ By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full propaganda value of their victories. They could not wreck national morale if Britons had already heard the worst from the Prime Minister himself.
So now we know. David is really trying to cheer us all up.
 
The bulldog breed
Here on Samizdata we seem to make a point of remembering things that happened on today’s date but in an earlier year.
So does the New York Times. Their “ON THIS DAY” section today contains this poignant and thought provoking item:
On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.
It’s a cruel thought, but suppose that if, instead of killing six people, this explosion had killed, say, three hundred and fifty. Given that it injured a thousand, it presumably might have killed many more. Had it done so, that actually might have saved quite a lot more lives, come a certain later date, in September 2001. Not that anyone would ever have known.
Which of course also gives rise to the even crueller thought that, when it comes to the actual body count on that later date, America might even then have got off quite lightly. Once again, we will never know.
Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.
One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970’s with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.
click for bigger image The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one’s hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.
Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson’s acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ
An American Jewish leader met with Vatican officials to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus’ crucifixion. Anti-Defamation League Chair Abraham Foxman says that Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” contradicts the Vatican’s repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. A top Vatican official who met with Foxman said no such statement is planned. Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Vatican’s social-communications office, instead praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.
The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews.
This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying “John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians”.
This is just history, guys! What is the big deal?
I do not know who David Butcher is, but I like him already on the strength of this, that he wrote in the latest Radio Times – which is published, be it noted, by the BBC. It is part of a plug for a programme to be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 8 pm:
Having enjoyably milked all the clichés about olden times in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Jones makes up for it here. The idea is to put the record straight by presenting portraits of how real life would have been for eight medieval archetypes, starting tonight with the dirty and downtrodden figure of the peasant.
The gist is that things weren’t nearly as bad for feudal serfs as received history and Monty Python films would have you believe. For a start, they had 80 days’ holiday a year, thanks to all those church feast days. And although they were forced to work 50 or so days in a year for their feudal lord, that’s rather less than most of us today work to pay our income tax. By the end of the programme, you may be feeling almost envious.
Well that may be going too far, but I do like that bit there about income tax, measured in days per year. And I bet these guys will be pleased about this kind of talk too.
In the early 1860’s the majority of the Prussian parliament refused to accept new taxes (to finance higher military spending) without parliamentary control of the government.
If the liberals in the parliament had been libertarian they would have opposed the new taxes whether or not the government was subject to the control of parliament (the extra military spending was certainly not needed – Prussia was not being threatened with invasion by anyone), but at least they opposed the tax increase.
The Prussian chief minister Otto Von Bismark collected the new taxes in defiance of the Prussian parliament. The liberals made speeches, they conducted votes, they signed petitions – and Bismark ignored them. The Prussian minister understood that government rests on force (‘blood and iron’) not opinion. If the liberals could not defeat the government in battle their opinions were not relevant.
Why does this bit of old history put me in mind of modern Iran? Well in Iran there is a parliament whose votes are often ignored by the unelected ‘Supreme Leader’ and ‘Council of Guardians’. And now the Leader and Council are trying to stop many people (including sitting members of the institution) even standing for election to the parliament. → Continue reading: Why modern Iran reminds me of Prussia in the early 1860’s
Small Earthquake in Chile: Allende’s South America
Alistair Horne
1990 edition
This paperback edition, published 1990, seems now to have been remaindered. It is very necessary to run through the history of this book. It was first published “towards the close of 1972” (p. 344), as “Allende stumbled from crisis to crisis, walking close to illegality”. What happened after that is given in a final chapter “The Deluge … and After”, pages 345 to 384, added in 1989.
It is a little difficult to assemble all the events of the book into a context so hazy in my memory, to say nothing of remembering the situation in a number of South American countries as it was 31 years ago, with a last chapter added 14 years ago. Although the book is mainly about Chile, as the title implies, there are substantial chapters on Colombia and Bolivia, Peru is more than mentioned in passing and there is something about Ecuador. This leaves Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela unvisited and undiscussed. A feature of the 1970s, much less one of today’s, is the emphasis throughout the book on the population explosion. It is interesting to find that Horne’s only mildly exasperating companion and one of the book’s dedicatees, was Bill Buckley then-editor (I think) and certainly founder of National Review; his right-wing conservative views don’t greatly intrude. The other dedicatee is the charming, ever-helpful Nena, clever enough to become Director of Chile’s National Art Gallery just before the coup, and still be there at the end of the book (p. 346).
What is important about Chile (and here everyone seems to agree) is that it was politically the most stable and perhaps the most prosperous South American state, not without its poverty-stricken peasants (like everywhere else) and marginalised Indians (like everywhere else bar Argentina, where they’d largely been exterminated), but with a functioning democracy, regular free elections (though only those literate could vote – not a bad idea), an enlarging middle class and a free, diversified press with a relatively large circulation. Perhaps its most unusual feature, for a Latin American country, was the fact that the armed forces (of which the army had the least chic) did not interfere in politics.
Under these circumstances, what could seem more reasonable than a spot of land reform? Unfortunately, the person who took this on was Allende. Like most revolutionaries (though a fairly conventional politician originally and minister of health in 1940) he came from the middle class, a fact which still seemed to surprise his egregious friend and confidant, the nut-case intellectual Regis Debray, ex-friend of the defunct martyr Che Guevara, to whom he’d given just as bad advice. Allende’s rhetoric and nationalisation plans scared the middle classes, who left the country in droves. He intended to carry out most of his program within the country’s legal framework, which seems to have been sufficiently elastic to enable him to do so. However he, and apparently everyone else, expected this to provoke a clumsy attempted right wing coup, which he could then crush with “revolutionary violence” (p. 149). As for his democratic credentials, it is worth pointing out that he won the presidential election in a three-cornered contest with only a slender majority over the second of two other candidates to the right (36% to 35%), a situation reflected in the composition of the Legislature. Yet the impression given is that he was an improvisatory bourgeois amateur; such was David Holden’s estimate, which I must have read in Encounter in January 1974, an actor in love with a revolutionary part, rather than a serious leader who knew where he was going” (p. 357). → Continue reading: The Chilean disaster
Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night’s episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the “Colossus” computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his “difference engine”. Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage’s machine, and it worked.
But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.
I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.
For many years now, I’ve been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage’s restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … “it worked”, which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.
So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.
There’s a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I’m not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.
Final two paragraphs:
Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.
That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan’s movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?
Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn’t, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.
I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.
This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.
I have been slightly ill for the last couple of days, and I still am. And one of the consequences of feeling ill is that if you are quite old, you also feel old. And one of the symptoms of advancing age is that you start to fret about how almost all the news seems to be bad. (Well, course it is bad. That is its nature.)
But today, not all. From today’s Independent:
The vast majority of people from ethnic minorities feel British even if they were not born in this country, according to a report from the National Statistics department.
Racial attacks and recent political gains by the British National Party are leading to long-established immigrants becoming increasingly determined to assert their right to be in this country, it is claimed.
The research by the department, formerly the Office of National Statistics, is the first time that ethnic minorities have been asked how they feel about their national identity, rather than about their actual origin. It revealed that both first generation immigrants and those who were British-born had a strong sense of identity with their adopted country.
It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.
I recall attending a meeting about five years ago, it must have been, at which we all talked about ethnic issues – issues meaning when people with different coloured skins fight with and shout at each other – and I was struck by the vehemence with which some of the least white people (both visually and sociologically, so to speak) present were most vehement about being British. Struck, and rather pleased. And it seems that my merely anecdotal research has been duplicated nationally, and has come up with the same answer. And I’m very glad.
After all, one of the nightmare futures for this country was that it would stop being one country at all, to the point where different fragments of it became identified not just with different bits of the ex-country, but with different bits of the world. Like the Balkans, in other words, where three different world religions (Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam) contend at one explosive meeting point. Was that the future my generation (the last “British” generation) had bequeathed to its descendants? Apparently not.
Of course this new Britain will be – already is – very different from the old one I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, in the leafy suburbs of the extreme west of Surrey (the bit where Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire meet, mostly peacefully). But since when was the deal ever that your country remained the same from one century to the next?
In many ways what this means is that Britain has become rather more like the USA, more a country of immigrants and less a country of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest (the Norman Conquest being the event that turned this country into an Anglo-French melting pot).
Many further questions remain unanswered by surveys like this. I wonder, how would the young son or grandson of a family recently arrived in Britain from India, say, have felt watching the brilliant production of Shakespeare’s Richard II that I watched last Monday evening on the television. And I wonder exactly what he would have made of the fact that the actor playing the Duke of Aumerle, one of the doomed Richard’s favourites, was played by a black (Afro-Caribbean) actor? (Maybe nothing at all.) Did that young man feel that this is his history he was watching, as well as mine? I don’t know, but I hope he did.
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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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