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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The next Archbishop of Canterbury tells us that without a new UN resolution authorizing the United States and its allies (meaning Britain) to attack the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain:
…any US-led invasion of Iraq [would be] “immoral and illegal.” Yesterday he softened his stance to say that he would support only a UN-sanctioned invasion of Iraq.
Firstly, Rowan Williams is not a lawyer and his legal opinions are about as meaningful as those of David Beckham or Mariah Carey or Joe Blogs who works flipping burgers in a fast food joint near you. The Nazi race laws were passed by the duly constituted judiciary and therefore ‘legal’, Pol Pot murdered a third of Cambodia under the duly constituted law of the land, slaves were ‘legally’ owned in the USA and Jesus Christ was not lynched but rather was crucified perfectly ‘legally’ by the Imperial Roman and Jewish authorities. Since when has the utterances of churchmen been relevant to an act’s legality as opposed to its morality? Legality and morality are only passing acquaintances.
Secondly, as for moralitry, the majority of member states of the UN are, by ‘western’ standards, abusers of human rights. A substantial minority of those states are out and out tyrannies, such as Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, Belarus and Burma to name but five. How does this body somehow become a font of moral authority? By what logic does this parliament of thieves and murderers become transformed into a source of moral authority whose imprimatur transforms a act from illegal and immoral to one he can support? Are there no objective moral reasons involved in making a choice here, merely the machinations of a corrupt transnational bureaucracy?
In his usual, sweetly controversial way Brendan O’Neill spells out his opposition to the planned US bombing of Baghdad rejecting the West’s right and its responsibility to intervene in Iraq or anywhere abroad.
He sees the world in realpolitik terms where the only ‘right’ of the West to do as they please comes from competing rights – i.e. the West’s right against the sovereign right of smaller nations. Apparently, given that is not the case now as almost everybody accepts that
Western powers should ‘do something, anything!’ about corrupt, victimised and poor states, instead all we hear is the word ‘responsibility’.
Brendan finds curious the implicit notion that ‘we’, the West, have some kind of responsibility to do something about Iraq. And by extension anywhere else, even if the regimes are repressive. At least he is consistent in his position which is a rare virtue in today’s muddled-up musings on individual and collective morality, rights and responsibilities.
Let’s have it out then, Brendan.
Round 1: The West is not a uniform block. It is a collection of nation states, governments, or as we, Samizdatistas, like to think of them, a bunch of bureaucratic and oppressive collectivist entities, and as such it cannot be assigned rights or responsibilities. There may be unifying or common features characteristic to the Western world and there may be some moral force vested in those.
Round 2: Freedom is what makes us, the ‘West’, better. I find curious Brendan’s implicit notion that Western values are on a moral par with those of the non-Western regimes whether it be ex-communists or the Third World. Therefore there can be no ‘moral’ right or responsibility to intervene. Given Brendan’s scepticism of the state and governments, perhaps his notion is based on something like: Those who live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones…
However, there is such as thing as relative comparison. I may not like the Western states and governments but they are a damn sight better than the communist regimes of old and the oppressive regimes of the present. However flawed the Western moral, political and social fabric may be, it got there by way of choice and freedom! I say it was thanks to progress based on freedom, rights of an individual and other visions and aspirations of the kind I recall Brendan calling for:
It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. (10th July 2002)
Round 3: Monopoly on power. The problem is not assignment of rights or responsibilities to the international players but the fact that only governments currently have monopoly on power and force of the kind needed to bring freedom to those living under totalitarian regimes. This has not always been the case and so people did not need to look for moral guidance in international affairs in the press releases of their politicians and defense officials. Individuals with convictions could fight for their vision regardless of the official position. Take Lord Byron in Greece, Tom Paine in the French Revolution and George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish civil war.
Round 4: If it’s evil, fight it. Brendan says:
They [the left and liberal opponents to war] seem to have forgotten two important points: democratic governments, by their nature, cannot be imposed from without – and to those on the receiving end, choosing between diplomacy and war is a bit like choosing between a rock and a hard place or between having a gun pointed at your head and having somebody pull the trigger. It’s no choice at all.
Speaking as someone with experience of being on the receiving end, the Soviet empire was evil and repressive and there has never been a chance of achieving democracy from within. The only hope for those trapped inside was pressure from without combined with the inevitable but oh so slow decay of the system. My parents’ generation is a ‘lost’ generation – the best years of their lives wasted by communism. Why? Because the West didn’t have enough balls in 1948, 1956 and 1968 to kick the communist arse. Iraq is a variation on the same theme. Therefore, I say, if force is needed to defend freedom, use it.
So do we have any right or responsibility towards those who do not enjoy the same degree of freedom as us? Perhaps not collectively, in the form of state intervention but as individuals we do. Otherwise how can we passionately call for freedom and progress for ourselves and then calmly insist that others will just have to put up with whatever kind of oppression they find themselves subjected to?!
Victor Davis Hanson has written a truly bizarre and confused article in National Review in which he attempts to define the widening gulf between the ‘Europeans’ and the United States (he does not really explain which Europeans he has in mind… Greeks? Germans? Portuguese? Finns?).
He suggests that one reason for ‘European’ disdain for the United States, not just amongst some poisoned social elite ruling class but the man in the street, comes from dislike of the middle and lower class orientation of American culture.
[America is] the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically and have fully taken control of the popular culture to create strange institutions from Sunday cookouts and do-it-yourself home improvement to tasteless appurtenances such as Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs.
Ah yes, I frequently hear ‘European’ taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other… oh pleeeease. I don’t know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to ‘Europe’ (I guess ‘Europe’ is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs… and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like ‘Big Brother’ on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class ‘cultural empowerment’. The reality of what common people in ‘Europe’ think about the United States is that for the most part they don’t really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.
As for me, describing the United States as ‘the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically’ causes a wry smile. I wish it was more generally true. Unfortunately the USA is just as much in the grip of statist corporatism as Europe, only unlike Europe, the opposition to it is better organised. I wish Hanson’s rose tinted view of the USA was correct because I see much in American enterprise culture to admire but there are two Americas… one of which twice elected President Clinton on a platform not of economic empowerment but of welfare dependency and statism. Unfortunately it is not too hard to find the views Hanson thinks particularly ‘European’ being aired in Los Angeles and Boston.
On this day in 1704, British Admiral George Rooke took Gibraltar from Spain by force of arms. British control of the Rock was later permanently granted to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht on 13th July, 1713.
Britain has controlled Gibraltar for almost 300 years, i.e. longer that the United States has even existed, and what is more, unlike the goats and scorpions of Perejil Island off Morocco, the people of Gibraltar refuse to submit to Spanish sovereignty or be bartered away against their will like livestock.
Paul Staines has pointed me at a great article in The Spectator by Bruce Anderson:
The Americans will not be deflected by the absence of support from continental Europe. A few months ago, William Hague asked George Bush how he would deal with European objections to ballistic missile defence. “I’ve got a secret plan,” Mr Bush replied. “What is it?” “I’ll go ahead anyway.” So he will on Iraq.
Anderson explains that Continental European hostility to Bush’s approach to, well, pretty much everything, is rooted in moral relativism and the taint of a Marxist meta-context
They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon.
The leaders of Europe preside over powerful modern economies and complex societies, all of which are rendered impotent by fundamental philosophical flaws in the very epistemology of their ruling classes.
Three cheers and bloody hurrah for Iain Duncan Smith for having some backbone and standing up to both our government and Spain’s over the latters petulant and childish demands on Gibraltar
It’s been an awful long time since any mainstream politician of any stripe stood up to the demands of Europeans over anything but such feathers has he ruffled that:
“Iain Duncan Smith suffered a diplomatic rebuff prior to his three-day European tour, starting today, when Spain’s prime minister cancelled plans to meet him.
And it looks like IDS is not going to back down. Good. Now if he can stand the carpetting he is assuredly going to get in the press (“xenophobe, anti-Europe, intransigent, extreme right-winger…yadda…yadda…yadda”) then we’ll know that whether he’s actually got a brass set or not.
I am not entirely sure what to make of this admission from Donald Rumsfeld to the effect that it is ‘inevitable’ that terrorists are going to get their grubby paws on WMD sooner or later and bloody well use them.
I don’t think anybody is blogland is surprised by this admission. After all, isn’t this something we have all speculated about? A nuclear weapon is not exactly available at any retail outlet (yet!) but it seems that constructing just a rudimentary one is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as it used to be. Given that, all that is required is the will to use it and we all witnessed an unambiguous demonstration of that will last September.
No, what is arousing my curiosity is the Official Stamp that these suspicions have now been given by Mr.Rumsfeld. Even the most gauche among us have been alerted in no uncertain terms. So is Mr.Rumsfeld trying to soften us all up? Does he know something we don’t? Or is it a case of expecting the worse but hoping for the best?
I couple this with the appearance yesterday of a dire warning on the front page of a popular British tabloid (sorry, can’t find link) that suicide bombers were on their way to Britain. It may or may not be true, of course. British tabloids are somewhat notorious for issuing dire warnings that turn out to be nothing more than, well, dire warnings.
Things are a tad less dramatic over on the actual battlefront in Afghanistan where British Royal Marine Commandos trudge around disconsolately seeking engagement with an enemy that either cannot be found or no longer exists. Meanwhile, back in the West, we are fighting a war of catastrophic expectations and that ratchet has just been cranked up another notch or two.
As a citizen-journalist who lives five time zones west of GMT, I am often the last Samizdatan to get a crack at the day’s news. I read Fukuyama’s lame remarks in the WSJ this morning, but by the time I got home to write about it, everyone from Virginia Postrel to the sage of Knoxville to our own Perry de Havilland had already taken the time to thoroughly refute Prof. Fukuyama’s anti-libertarian screed.
But I am going to join the scrum anyway. Fukuyama criticizes the Cato Institute, accusing them of “propound[ing] isolationism in the ’90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive.” He points to a Cato analysis from 1991 that rejected the Gulf War on a cost-benefit basis and extrapolates from this one (1) data point that Cato is anti-war. Check out this excerpt from the Cato Handbook for the 105th Congress, which was written well in advance of 9/11. The authors criticize the lackluster response to previous state-sponsored terrorist attacks against the US (Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, etc.) and argue that state sponsored terrorism against the US should be treated as a matter of war and not as a criminal justice / extradition matter.
While Harry Browne and some other libertarians have elevated their antiwar rhetoric since 9/11, the Cato Institute has done no such thing. Consider these words from longtime Cato analyst (now their VP) Ted Galen Carpenter, posted to the site on 9/11:
The first order of business must be to determine who is responsible for these terrible acts and to order appropriate retaliation. Terrorist assaults of this magnitude should be treated as an act of war against the United States, not merely as a criminal justice matter. The President should immediately seek the full authorization of Congress to use whatever military force is necessary against the guilty parties. If the perpetrator is a government, the objective of the United States should be nothing less than the removal of that government. If the perpetrator is a terrorist organization without government sponsorship, the objective of the United States should be to track down and eliminate the members of that organization.
Fukuyama would have us believe that Cato thinks we ought to hold hands in a big circle and sing “Come on people now, smile on your brother” by Jessie Collin Young and the Youngbloods. Pacifism and isolationism are not the mainstream libertarian opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes a convenient straw-man for Fukuyama to direct his puffery.
And unfortunately probably not the end of the unerringly off-target Frances Fukuyama. He is one of the more dependably incorrect pundits currently putting quill to parchment, and his ‘The End of History’, coming as it did in the middle of history’s violent resumption in the Balkans in 1992, may go down as the most ludicrous analysis of the world since 1848.
In his latest prognostication he argues that September 11th has undermined the entire thesis of libertarianism.
Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.
There is something almost endearing about Fukuyama’s unerring ability to get it wrong. Fire departments in many places are not ‘government’ at all, but rather local volunteers who need no cohesion or coercion from the state to put their lives on the line for their jobs. In most of the western world, it is not ‘government’ who provides the airport security but private business, and does anyone really think that nationalisation of this function in the USA has actually made airports safer? If you have an incompetent screener, who do you think finds it easier to fire him, a private company or the US government? If emergency services can only exist when set up by the state, then how does ‘historian’ Frances Fukuyama explain the fact that for the last 175 years, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution has provided that service for Britain not just privately manned but privately funded?
Likewise, Fukuyama might like to hold up the Cato Institute‘s dafter remarks about Saddam Hussain as the totality of libertarian foreign policy ideas but it just ain’t so and there is indeed libertarian thought which does not take the strict ‘anti-war’ line, seeing that as being in fact anti-survival. I have huge respect for the Cato Institute and regard it as a superb organisation, but when it comes to matters of defence and co-existing in the real world with psychopathic tyrants who are trying to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, well sorry, the dollar amounts expended in the Gulf War is really not the sensible starting point for analysis. Yet the fact is not all libertarians are full blown anarcho-libertarians, even if we are indeed much informed by anarcho-libertarian ideas… there is in fact libertarian life beyond Murray Rothbard. Many of us support the concept of a nightwatchman ‘state’ in some form or other. Minarchists like me see dropping bombs on the Saddam Hussain’s of this world as being one of the very few legitimate functions of the state and the reality is that my views on that sort of thing are actually those of the majority of ‘small L’ libertarians (and more than a few American Libertarian Party activists as well if the truth be known. I can think of one who contributes to this blog).
Yes, I like the idea of getting the state out of 90% of what it does but the only time I turn the other cheek when my community is threatened is when I need to shoot my rifle off my left shoulder because I am taking cover in a doorway. As I mentioned in several earlier articles, the de facto pacifist libertarian ‘ostrich’ faction is by no means a distinguishing feature of libertarianism, just a faction of it.
Of course as a general rule, if Frances Fukuyama says something, you can safely assume the contrary is in fact the case.
According to the founders of the International Criminal Court in Rome have delcared that ‘it marks the turning of a new page in human history’. Setting aside, for a moment, the rather pompous tone, they might well be right. But the question is, exactly what ‘page’ is being turned?
The intention of the Court is to bring perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and other ‘crimes against humanity’ to justice regardless of where they are in the world. Their jurisdiction will apply where the domestic courts in question fail to act and they can only act in countries which are signatories to the Rome Treaty establishing the Court.
Certainly these are noble ideals. Who wants to see a world where homicidal regimes can get away with it? Certainly not me but my disquiet is borne from the feeling that it is not quite as simple as that.
Bureaucracies, once established, tend not only to grow but also actively seek reasons for their continued existence and expansion. Just now, it is only the above-mentioned type of activities which are under the ICC’s remit but how long will it be thus circumscribed? A brief to tackle ‘crimes against humanity’ can be interpreted in all manner of ways to cover all manner of policy decisions. A tough anti-immigration policy? A lack of welfare benefits? No nationalised ‘free’ health care? No state education programme? There are no end of people who earnestly believe that such things constitute ‘crimes’.. The ICC may be benign but how long will it stay that way?
This is not just theoretical. Within the last few years the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (a welfare-state cartel) launched a war against ‘money-laundering’ and ‘drug-running’ that morphed almost seamlessly into a campaign (led particularly by France and Sweden) against what they laughably referred to as ‘unfair tax competition’. The justification for this neo-imperialism was that small countries providing tax havens were ‘undermining the democracy’ of countries such as France and Sweden. The result of this was that little countries like Malta, Leichtenstein, the Cayman Islands and Monaco were threatened with everything short of war in order to comply with the demands of the OECD for banking transparency and other domestic changes of law. They had no choice but to toe the line.
Thus the ‘quest for global justice’ becomes the imposition of agendas.
There are even greater dangers than this, though. No criminal code is enforceable without armed agents to act in its name. This leaves the ICC reliant on the military muscle of big powers to act as its appointed ‘police force’. But, as we have seen, in a world of complex alliances and interests, that is rarely going to be available. In time the ICC will demand it’s own ‘police force’ to act independently of nation-state interests. And that is a recipe for war without end.
I say this because, does anybody imagine that Slobodan Milosevic would be facing a War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague today had he had a nuclear arsenal at his disposal? At the risk of upsetting some people, the answer has to be no. It is for that same reason that Vladimir Putin will never have to answer for the Russian Army’s activities in Chechnya and Ariel Sharon remains impervious to the plaintiff cries of the ‘international community’.
This is a lesson which will not have been lost on other nations. The message is, if you want to retain your independence, sovereignty and autonomy of action then you better get yourself heavily armed and, preferably, nuclear armed. When you possess both the ability and the will to vaporise a big chunk of the planet, the ‘international community’ is left grumbling and impotent.
I have no doubt that the formation of the ICC was driven by good intentions, by the best of intentions. Unfortunately, they are exactly the kind of intentions that so often pave the road to hell.
The ’38th Annual Munich Conference on Security Policy’ (will there be a 39th?) seems to be…shall we say, in a little difficulty. When the German press accuses the US of being on an ‘ego-trip’ one can safely infer that things are not exactly getting off on the right foot.
All the more so when you read accusations like this:
“The Americans call on the Europeans to spend more money on defence, while the Europeans accuse the Americans of being too self-willed and not interested in a real partnership”
For the benefit of non-British readers, allow me to translate the above phrase into English:
“The Americans are wicked for not sharing our crippling moral relativism and post-colonial guilt and selfish because they refuse to subsidise our defence costs while we pour all our resources into our bloated welfare sectors”
There is a wealth of analysis in the linked article but, for me, the most telling lines are in the conclusion:
“But the disquiet in Europe is not only about differences on security issues, or the war on terror, or the shift in the Middle East peace process. There’s another, deeper, perhaps existential (to use a favourite European word) element: all this is happening as the Europeans are trying to redefine exactly who they themselves are, concludes Newsweek”
‘Defining’ oneself is more usually about defining what your are against rather than what you are for. It’s a lot easier. It looks like the European elite is already well down the road to defning itself as against the US.
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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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