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]
I am a busy person this weekend so I haven’t time to do much more than to link to this fascinating interview with a former CIA operative on his experiences of living in Iran. With all the troubles in the world right now, it pays to keep an eye on a country and a regime that continues to be a serious threat. More optimistically, though, if Iran ever did move towards genuine openness and democracy, the impact on the rest of the Middle East region would be immense.
This struck me:
“If the Iranian regime dared for one day, for even half a day, to allow Iranians to come into the streets and say what they really want, then you would see tens of millions of Iranians in the streets shouting “Death to the Islamic Republic!”
“If there were a free referendum today, “yes” or “no” to the Iranian Republic, more than 90 percent would say “no.” If there were a free referendum today saying “yes” or “no” to establishing ties with America, more than 90 percent would say “yes.””
I have a lot of time of Michael Totten. That does not mean I agree with everything he says but I rate his commentary and reportage more highly than 98% of the Fourth Estate’s professional ‘experts’ from megacorporate media land.
His latest work, Hanging with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an interview with Esam El-Erian and I commend this to you, not just for its informative content but because it may have the same effect on you as it did on me… some laugh-out-loud moments just visualising what the exchange of views must have been like for the exasperated but ever polite Totten and his redoubtable colleague Armin Rosen.
Read the whole thing and perhaps even drop your mouse on his ‘donate’ link as he is worth every penny.
… no, it was the highest institutions of the Netherlands who were on trial with their credibility and very legitimacy at stake.
Although I am delighted he was acquitted of all charges, frankly it is a disgrace that he was ever put on trial in the first place for simply stating his views about Islam and multiculturalism.
And the fact the BBC calls him ‘far right’ tells you nothing useful about Geert Wilders’ views but speaks volumes about the BBC.
Women in Saudi Arabia have been openly driving cars in defiance of an official ban on female drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
My thanks to Antoine Clarke for the h/t. Antoine’s Norlonto Review has been only occasional in recent months, but is now active. And Antoine adds this observation:
SAUDI ARABIA NEEDS A BURQA BAN. Women defy government ban on driving and post videos of themselves driving around town. Of course the veil makes it harder to identify them.
I guess those Islamic scholars who insisted that the burqa was a liberation have a point.
As a BBC news announcer gave out the round of story headlines this morning on the television, I heard this particular classic of its type connected to this story about extremism and universities:
“Government money is no longer going to be given to Islamic extremists”.
First of all, there is, as readers of this blog know, no such thing as “government money”. All money spent by government is, despite what some might believe, owned by you, the taxpayer, or lent to it, by other people. Second, it is not just appalling that money levied on pain of imprisonment (taxes) is then transferred to people who want to impose a particular worldview on their fellows; it would be just as bad if the money were to be given to the forces of sweetness and light. No such groups, whether it be Islamic Jihad, The Women’s Institute or the Worshipful Company of Bald People, should receive a penny from the taxpayer. End of subject.
In the post below, Jonathan quotes Theodore Dalrymple saying the following rather mind-boggling statement.
“[Journalists are taxed at lower rates than normal people] … this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors.”
He thinks this is a good thing? Seriously? Journalists have an incentive to cover up the wrongdoings of the powerful, and this is good?
Leaving aside the obvious corollary of this, that France effectively licenses journalists, I personally do not think that politicians and bureaucrats should have any right to privacy whatsoever. They choose to go into politics, and they are trusted with our money and are given considerable power over us. In return, everything they do up to and including going to the toilet should be subject to scrutiny. They should have some protection against being libelled (but even then a relatively weak right – the burden of proof should be on the politician and it should be necessary to prove both untruth and malice). In truth I am not that keen on extending much of a right to privacy to anyone else either. As long as you are telling the truth, you should generally be able to say it out loud, in any forum. This is one case where the Americans have it right with the First Amendment.
As for the vulgarisation of culture, London is the most culturally vibrant city in Europe. Culturally speaking, Paris today is about as interesting as English food circa 1955. At least, Paris inside the peripherique is. There are some interesting things going on in rap music, language and art in some of Paris’ suburbs, but I doubt that Dalrymple is much of a fan. The price of cultural interestingness may be some vulgarity, but who gets to decide what is vulgar and what is art? Old men decrying the tastes of yoof today, I guess. The Nazis were very keen on doing this, too. As are the Chinese communists.
China is a deeply authoritarian place. As a consequence of that, the country is culturally pretty dead. The Chinese watch imported movies, and encourage their children to learn to play western classical music. What is produced domestically and gets wide distribution is frighteningly bland, which is what happens under authoritarian regimes. Interesting things can be going on underneath, which can sometimes lead to cultural explosions when the authoritarian regimes are gone (see Spanish and South Korean post-dictatorship cinema, for instance), but China is a way from that.
Who do you compare China with, though? There is one obvious rival.
In late April, a couple of days after some unspeakable barbarians had exploded a bomb in a restaurant in Marrakesh, I was sitting in a cafe in Fez, in a more northern part of Morocco. As in many cafes worldwide, there was a television in the room. This was showing a soap opera of some kind on a pan-Arabic TV channel. (There are many, many, many pan-Arabic TV channels. They are run out of Qatar and Dubai. Moroccan roofs have more satellite dishes on them than I have seen anywhere else on earth). This particular pan-Arab channel was showing a soap opera or a popular movie of some kind.
In any event, the program in question contained some Islamic symbols. There were mosques in the background of a few scenes. The TV was showing subtitles in Arabic. I am not sure if that was because the program was originally in some other language or if these were just closed captions in the same language as the original material, turned on because there was a lot of background noise. (It may have been that the program was in fact Pakistani, and the original language was Urdu, but I am not sure). In any event, though, the program contained musical dance numbers of a form that were familiar to me. And there were slightly more bare female midriffs than one expects on TV in an Arab country. I expect there were more than one sees on domestic Moroccan TV, too, which partially explains the satellite dishes. Morocco is authoritarian enough to censor its own TV, but not authoritarian enough to attempt to ban the dishes.
The program was not made in India, but the grammar of the program was entirely that of Bollywood. In North-West Africa, in the Arab world, one of the leading cultural influences is clearly India. This is hardly surprising. Go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar and who does the actual work? People from South Asia; Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. Even when they are making programs for Arab markets, they use their own cultural reference points. Even when making programs for their own market, Pakistanis use Indian cultural reference points. However it happens, and however second or third hand it comes, the cultural influence of Bombay on the Middle East and North Africa is clearly immense
And is Bollywood vulgar? Oh Lord yes. More conservative Indians elsewhere in the country denounce its amoral wickedness as much as anyone in America has ever denounced Hollywood. The entertainment industries of India are run by gangsters at least as depraved as any who have ever run Hollywood or Las Vegas. It isn’t any great coincidence that the most savage terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists in recent years was on the city of Bombay. This is the heart of wickedness and vulgarity, and they know where the enemy is. Indian culture is vibrant and vulgar. On the surface and in the mass market at least, Chinese culture is dead. And Indian culture is the country’s greatest weapon against its enemies.
– Sam Solomon, twenty five minutes into a remarkable video interview of him by Ezra Levant.
Solomon, who was raised a Muslim but is now a Christian, explains, in particular, just what is so explosive about the threat to Islam of Christianity. Built into Islam, says Solomon, is a huge bundle of falsehood about what Christianity actually says. Simply learning about Christianity by reading the Bible, whether you accept in or not, will automatically undermine your Muslim faith.
“Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.”
The US Navy SEALs are a remarkable group of individuals, as events in the Middle East highlight. Here is a book about their training by an author I rate, Dick Couch.
In the end, given sufficient force and a pinch of luck, the US was able to get bin Laden. I think that is a very important message to get into the grey matter between the ears of jihadists.
I have been reading some comments over at Facebook and elsewhere about how vulgar and unseemly it is for people to celebrate the death of this man. Forgive me if I spare the tears. This won’t bring back all those people killed by his outfit, of course, but a sort of justice of sorts has been done.
I just returned from a night at the pub with a journalist friend and no sooner had I arrived home than I heard the news. Osama bin Laden is dead. May he rest in pieces and be fed to pigs. Maybe we could even put his head on a pike in front of the White House for a few days and spread bread crumbs around it so the pigeons will roost there… and we could encourage people to walk their dogs around the pike…
Am I sounding barbaric? Yep. He is very “special”.
Like a lot of libertarians who had to put up with abuse from his more “purist” minded fellows for my support for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime in Iraq, I had second, third and even fourth thoughts about the whole venture. And my views on the situation are still not really settled eight years on from the start of full combat operations in 2003, and so I am still trying to reach a conclusion.
With that sort of thought in mind, a few days ago I got hold of Douglas Feith’s War and Decision, a book by a former senior Bush administration policy man at the very centre of things. Feith’s book contains absolute dynamite: links between Saddam’s regime and various terrorist groups (established as a clear fact) including al-Quaeda, and also a fair, but in its way devastating critique of the politicking, deviousness and general uselessness of the CIA. And after reading this book it occurs to me, rather like it did to writers such as Mark Steyn, that the CIA had become riddled with bureaucratic do-nothingism around the time of 9/11. There is a very good case for shutting the CIA down and rethinking how to handle such issues from a clean sheet of paper.
The book is also fatal to the reputation and judgement of Colin Powell, former Secretary of State. It also rehabilitates that of Donald Rumsfeld in certain respects, while not sparing criticism where it is due. And the book certainly does fess up to the administration’s failure to predict the scale of the insurgency, although Feith argues that one major error – encouraged by the CIA and the likes of Paul Bremer – was not moving fast enough to get Iraqis, both “external” and internal, into the government of Iraq post-invasion. By acting as an “occupier”, Feith says, the US gave opponents valuable propaganda. He’s got a good a point: consider that one of the smart moves by Churchill et al in 1944 was to get the Free French involved in the invasion of Normandy and subsequent entry into Paris. Getting the Iraqis to have “ownership” of the liberation of that tormented country would have been a smart move. It never really happened. And part of the reason for that was an almost pathological distrust of expat Iraqis by Powell, the CIA and other anti-neocons. This is fascinating stuff I had not really been aware of before. Another big error is over the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction: Feith argues that Bush and others gave needless ammuntion to fairweather hawks by arguing that Saddam had large stockpiles of X or Y; rather, the problem was Saddam’s capacity and clearly proven willingness to produce such weapons and use them that was the core of the problem. The 1990s-era sanctions were fast eroding by the turn of the last century; given a few years, it is highly likely that Saddam would be able to re-start his WMD programmes and use such weapons to deter any regime from trying to make him behave, in much the same way that Iran is now dangerously close to the point where it can support terror groups with impunity.
Through it all, the central issues that remains – in terms of foreign policy and defence – is George W Bush’s “pre-emption” policy. And it is well to remember that as far as Feith and other wonks were concerned, this was not about spreading democracy at “the point of a gun”, or about some dastardly neocon project to completely reshape the Islamic world. Rather, it was about a more specific objective, and one which, in my view, is fully consistent with the libertarian principle that military force in self defence is justified. That objective is to throw jihadists and their state sponsors off-balance: by destroying their bases, cutting off funds, killing key operatives, etc. The more that jihadists have to hide, to run, and spend time playing defence, the less time they have to cause mischief.
It is pretty clear from the letters and information presented by Feith that terrorist groups were using Iraq as a haven, and with Saddam’s active blessing. It also nails the idea that because Saddam’s regime was, in some ways, a “secular” one, that meant he had no real incentive to support islamic terror against the West. As Feith says, this argument has been greatly overdone: there is plenty of reason to suppose that tactical, for-convenience-sake alliances between “secular” and religious groups can be as lethal as those between religious states and religious groups.
Anyway, having read the book, I can strongly recommend it. I leave with this quote, on page 523:
“But the largest benefit of success is avoiding the horrific costs of failure. Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with. After the Cold War, some commentators argued that the West’s victory was no big deal because the Soviet Union’s demise proved that the communist empire wasn’t much of a power after all. Likewise, because the United States has not suffered a large-scale terrorist attack since 9/11, some commentators have belittled the challenge of jihadist terrorism as overblown and ridiculed the description of it as “war”. And since Saddam has been overthrown, there are critics who speak dismissively of the danger he posed.”
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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