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One of the fables that socialists like to tell is how wonderful life is in their peoples' paradises. From risible stories about how the Cuban people have world-class health care freely available to all and are 100% literate, to more plausible, but equally erroneous, tales about how our Scandinavian brethren manage to have a high standard of living, short work weeks, a benevolent welfare state, etc., these tales are inevitably spun by statists seeking to cast dust in the eyes of their more plebeian subjects the better to hide the failure of their grand schemes.

The received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state.

Not so fast. Even in the notoriously socialist-freindly confines of the New York Times, hard economic truths have a way of making themselves felt eventually. What the Times has belatedly discovered about its beloved third way socialist-lite economies is that they are falling behind, shackled to the dead weight of the welfare state, the enervation it breeds, and the taxes it imposes.

All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)

After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.

The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi.

While the private-consumption figure for the United States was $32,900 per person, the countries of Western Europe (again excepting Luxembourg, at $29,450) ranged between $13,850 and $23,500, with Norway at $18,350.

Faced with the undeniable economic reality that they have almost eaten their way through the economic seed corn laid up by their frugal ancestors, what do the current panjandrums of the welfare state do? Why, they lie, of course.

Meanwhile, the references to Norway as "the world's richest country" keep on coming. An April 2 article in Dagsavisen, a major Oslo daily, asked: How is it that "in the world's richest country we're tearing down social services that were built up when Norway was much poorer?"

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Being a casual and undisciplined surfer of the net means that I often get guided towards stories right in front of me, and very late, by somewhat circuitous routes. For instance, I only got to this as a result of Harry Hutton linking to a James Lileks piece in the Washington Times. But never mind, I got there:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

This is as classic a case of an ( I presume) unintended consequences as I have ever encountered, and it is an unintended consequence of two opinions both of which I hold myself. First, I do think that prostitution should indeed not be illegal, and second, in the absence of the abolition of state welfare, I do think that persistent welfare claimants should be obliged to lower their sights about what work they are willing to accept. Very unemployed information technology professionals should not lounge around watching day time television for year after year until such time as someone finally offers them a job in the information technology profession.

So, add to all of the above a tiny pepper shake of that Germanic manic logic of the sort that we all know about from our history books, and you get: be a prostitute, or lose your benefits. Amy Alkon, commenting on this post, explained why being a prostitute can be a fine and noble thing and can have very good consequences for society, but she surely did not mean this

That is the trouble with micro-managerially interventionist welfare (or attempted welfare) states. Arguments have a tendency to degenerate into whether any and every imaginable sort of human behaviour or employment or enjoyment should be either (a) illegal or (b) compulsory. (c) Take it or leave it/your choice/we do not care/enjoy it - shun it - it makes no difference to us/you decide . . . has a way of getting squeezed out.

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With all the understandable attention being focused on the dreadful situation in the lands skirting the Indian Ocean, there is always a danger that disasters of a different, more Man-made kind, get overlooked. Well this week the German statistics office reported a dreadful set of unemployment figures, showing the number of jobless in Europe's biggest economy to be at the highest level for seven years

A Bloomberg report on the story contains the following passage:

New measures cutting benefits for the long-term unemployed took effect on Jan. 1. Those without a job, including people previously registered as social-welfare recipients rather than as jobless, will also face increased pressure to accept job offers or risk losing benefits. The changes will add an as yet undetermined number of people to the January jobless total.

But it is clear that the German authorities are still tinkering with the issue. That 10.8 percent of the working age population of such an important country should be out of a job is a disgrace. What I find odd though is how little outraged commentary in the economics part of the press there is about this. It is almost as if the European chattering classes have come regard this problem in Germany, and also France, with an air of sullen resignation. Of course, dealing with it will involve lots of vulgar, Reaganite actions such as deregulation, tax cuts to spur business formation and the like, which of course goes against the grain of Germany's 'managed' form of business so beloved of leftist commentators like Britain's own Will Hutton.

Germany needs to get its act together. Some 15 years since reunification with the eastern part of the country, Germany has failed to live up its early promise. With so many young people, including those from immigrant backgrounds, on the dole, no wonder commentators wonder about the social fabric of that country. They should.

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Governments are now peddling myths to cover up their own inaction during the first few days of the catastrophe. They are stating that the magnitude of the catastrophe was unknown and, therefore, they did not feel compelled to set up the emergency infrastructure to supply information to distraught relatives. One of the first countries to feel the angry wind is Sweden, where the Foreign Minister attended the theatre on Boxing Day night, with appalling lack of judgement.

Der Spiegel's article highlights the comparison between government confusion and private sector organisation:

Swedes are fuming. Partly, they are unleashing their rage, horror and sense of utter helplessness in the face of a disaster felt by almost every family, directly or indirectly, in this tightly knit nation of 9 million. But they are also launching some very sharp criticism at a government that failed to absorb the magnitude of the Asian tsunami and took too long to respond. As many as 4,000 Swedes were swept into the tsunami's watery folds.

An editorial in the mass-circulation Aftonbladet lambasted Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds for not showing up to work until more than a day after she learned about the disaster. Even worse, said the paper, Freivalds did not sit worriedly at home like so many Swedes on Sunday night. Instead, she went to the theater in Stockholm. She did so knowing full well that, at that point, 10,000 people were already believed dead on Southeast Asia's beaches, which draw Swedes in droves each winter. And she didn't exactly rush to get to the office. "At nine o'clock the next day their chairs at the foreign office were still empty," hissed the paper. "Not until 10.30 a.m., 31.5 hours after the death wave, did the foreign minister arrive at work."

Is this grounds for Freivalds and Prime Minister Goeran Persson to resign? The paper thinks so, as, it seems do many Swedes. Since Wednesday, the Swedish Ministry has been deluged with thousands of nasty e-mails accusing the government of indecision, failure to act and not doing enough to help stranded and wounded Swedes get home. "You and your government's incompetence shines like a beacon in the night," wrote one Swede. "Today, Dec. 28, the government's weakness and indecisiveness surpassed my wildest and most terrifying fantasies," wrote another. Commentators, too, are lashing out. "I am ashamed of being Swedish when I have a prime minister who says that he can't get more people answering telephones because it is Boxing Day (Dec.26) and people have the day off," wrote Claes Thilander in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

This contrasts with the role of Lottie Knutsson, the information director at Fritidsresor, a travel company.

In fact, one of Sweden's unlikely new stars is Lottie Knutsson, director of information for the travel company Fritidsresor. Since Sunday, Knutsson has been working tirelessly to arrange flights home for Swedes and to get the government to ship more medicine and send more airlifts to get the injured home. "Let Lottie Knutsson from Fritidsresor change places with Göran Persson," one reader wrote to the Foreign Ministry. On Thursday, the headline of the daily Svenska Dagbladet screamed "Bring them home now," referring to Swedes still stranded in Thailand.

It takes a disaster to bring home to many that their political elites, having sold their mess of pottage to Brussels, no longer subscribe to the notion that they are servants rather than masters.

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London celebrated the arrival of the New Year in what was under the circumstances rather too flamboyant style last night, with a firework display in, over and around the Wheel. The trouble with a firework display celebration at a time like this is that you can either do them, or cancel them. You cannot tone them down.

I have more photos of how this looked on my telly here.

Huge firework displays fit very snugly into the Way We Live Now, and in particular into the Way We Are Governed Now. More and more fireworks shows are now collectively staged, and collectively viewed, including on TV of course. Meanwhile, free enterprise firework enjoyment is discouraged, allegedly because of safety, but probably also simply because it is free enterprise.

I wonder if there is an EU dimension to this? There usually is, after all. The EU is all about centralised power and the suppression of freelance activity. It is also all mixed up with Roman Catholicism. As is November 5th, otherwise known as Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night. Are our continental rulers now discouraging us from celebrating the burning of a Roman Catholic terrorist, who was, like them, hell bent on reversing the defeat of the Spanish Armada?

Whatever the reason, and however much I hate what the new arrangements may or may not symbolise, I prefer the new firework dispensation. I recall being in Germany over the New Year some time in the eighties, and seeing the entire sky of Germany lit up at midnight on the dot. I thought to myself, we should do that, instead of the sputtering, long -drawn-out, chaotic, dog-scaring mess that our November 5th celebrations have degenerated into. (This year's, to my ears, were particularly feeble and pointless.) Having them all at one means that we can all enjoy them all at once, and then go back indoors and get stuck into the New Year. Which I hope is a happy one for all who read and write here.

None of which means that the inconsolable unhappinesses of many in the world just now, which for me have been most vividly and most gruesomely evoked by Amit Varma, should be ignored.

Who would have thought that the eastern coastal parts of India would, following the tsunami devastation, be afflicted by a shortage of kerosene, of all things and among many other things? Yet it is all perfectly logical. Burying the bodies is taking a long, long time, and by the time many are reached they have decayed and cannot be dragged. Grab hold of a leg, and you end up holding only a leg. Yet the bodies must be disposed of, to prevent disease. So, they must be burned. But for that you need... kerosene.

For the link to that piece I thank Instapundit, who I think has been outstanding in recent days, both with his abundant tsunami linkage – what is happening, what needs to be done, how to help, etc. - and for his abundant postings about and linkings to other matters. Update: as Instapundit again notes, there is now more Amit Varma reportage.

So a very unhappy New Year for many. If any of those reading this are personally afflicted in any way by these terrible events, please know that you have the deepest sympathy of all of us here and of all the other readers of this.

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On Saturday I found myself (as one does) in the "Freetown" of Christiana, an "alternative community" in Copenhagen in Denmark. An abandoned military barracks quite close to the centre of the city was inhabited by a large number of squatters in the early 1970s, and arfter decades of sometimes hostile, sometimes violent clashes between inhabitants and the authorities (often over drug use), the people of Christiana and the Danish authorities these days basically tolerate one another.

These days Christiana has become a major venue for such things as live music and other entertainment, and it contains an assortment of bars, cafes, art galleries, workshops selling a variety of craft goods, music related items, and a vast amount of cannabis also seems to be consumed in the area. Clearly the economy of Christiana is very largely funded by selling stuff to visiting people like me, but that is fine. (I am all in favour of people who want to sell stuff, and I am all for people being able to smoke or ingest anything they want). And like anywhere else, Christiana has a fair bit of municipal pride, with clearly demarcated signs indicating city limits.

(It is actually relatively difficult to document this post with pictures, as photography is discouraged in all of Christiana, and is prohibited entirely in the entertainingly named Pusherstreet, partly because of the questionable legality of some of the things being sold, and partly I suspect because this is a way of preventing Christiana from degenerating completely into a tourist circus, which is always a danger).

But clearly the local promoters of certain iconic pop-cultural properties believe that nearby walls are a good place to advertise.

But in a cultural or pop-cultural sense, there are certain issues that are clearly in dispute. For one thing, quite a few of the buildings in Christiana have satellite dishes on their roofs. Despite this, there are clearly theological issues about whether television is a good thing or a bad thing, and as someone who these days watches little television other than the occasional cricket or football match, I did find this graffiti and counter-graffiti amusing.

However. it was perhjaps most interesting to walk out of Christiana, and to look at the other side of that entry gate. Walking back into Copenhagen proper, I had my chance to Interesting though to see just which organisation the Freetown of Christiana most wants to be free of.

Fancy that.

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Last night I attended a fascinating talk about the libertarian movement in Spain, hosted by Tim Evans in Putney, and given by Gabriel Calzada, who had been known to me before last night only as the author (maybe – I was unsure) of this essay.

The message Gabriel delivered to a small but very attentive group of London libertarians can be briefly summarised as follows: the Spanish libertarian movement is extraordinarily big and is doing extraordinarily well.

Gabriel started his talk with some history, concerning the Salamanca school of Natural Law theorists, mentioning the names of Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco de Suarez, and Juan de Mariana. Here is a famous Mariana quote:

Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much.

But that was a very long time ago, and that kind of thing only influenced modern Spain indirectly, via its influence on the Austrian school.

It became very clear as the evening went on that the enormous Spanish anarchist movement that flourished about a century ago is crucial to any understanding of the current Spanish libertarian movement. Anarchism as a political force in Spain was eventually decapitated by the supposed allies of the anarchists, the Communists, for being insufficiently obedient to Stalin, but the climate of opinion – what we here at Samizdata call the meta-context – of anarchism lived on in Spain. Whereas the typical political question in other countries is something like: How shall we govern ourselves?, in Spain the question is: How shall we be free? How, as it were, do you do freedom? With a question like that, it makes sense that the libertarian answer to that question (one word summary: property) would attract a mountain of enthusiastic attention, and it has.

Perhaps another reason for the dramatic impact of libertarianism in Spain is that Spain has, until challenged by the libertarians, been intellectually dominated by Communism. Anarchism having been wiped out, and anti-Communism having become so tainted by Francoism, that left the lefties ruling the media roost in Spain, in the form of such mass media giants as El Pais, the biggest national newspaper in Spain, which makes the Guardian seem to Gabriel like a centrist/liberal kitten by comparison. Lots of libertarians are converts from leftism, and Spain is very full of people who have been raised in a leftist manner but who are looking for different answers.

It may also have helped the rise of libertarianism, although this was not mentioned by Gabriel or in discussion, that Spain is now economically so vibrant, compared to earlier times.

Gabriel, interestingly, preferred to focus on the achievements of two individuals: Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Federico Jimenez Losantos. Huerta is the key scholar, and Jimenez is a key media performer, and both are men of "contageous enthusiasm", a phrase Gabriel used several times.

He also mentioned the vital role that the Internet has played in this story. Again, summarising brutally, whereas the Communists owned the old media, the libertarians own the Internet, to the point where the Communists are getting seriously worried.

Gabriel mentioned two internet sites in particular, liberalismo.org (scholarship) and Libertad Digital (current affairs). Both have astronomical hit rates, of the order of a million a month (sorry but I am bad at numbers). When those Communists type any Spanish 'issue' into their search engines, time and time again, the first few hits are libertarian analyses. No wonder they are so anxious, and have been saying that something ought to be done about controlling the Internet.

Jimenez is also doing extraordinarily well on the radio.

I could attempt to go on, on the basis of my scribbled and inadequate notes, but I will leave it at that for now, hoping that Gabriel will regard this report as better than nothing. (Antoine Clarke, also present, might like to comment about all the things I missed, and maybe clarify some of the numbers involved in this story, people, hit rates, etc.) I will add only that whereas there are now no Spanish libertarian sites which also present themselves to the English speaking world in English, this is apparently about to change. There will soon be an English language site devoted to Spanish affairs, written by Spanish libertarians. Gabriel has promised to inform us as soon as it gets going.

Altogether a fascinating, and most encouraging evening.

Afterwards we had a late supper at Tim and Helen's, which is where I took this photo of Gabriel.

Hayek (on the left in black and white) is saying: what is that greenery doing in front of me? Gabriel is a great enemy of greenery, having recently penned a denunciation of the Kyoto Treaty, so particular apologies for that blemish.

Oh, and did I mention that Gabriel Calzada has also just been made a Professor at the University of Madrid?

If ideas have consequences, and they definitely do, then Spanish libertarianism is going to have some very big consequences indeed.

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This is a very odd piece of reportage, from Spiegel Online:

Finally some news out of Holland that doesn't have to do with the religious violence that has gripped the country for the last 10 days: The Dutch cabinet has decided on a March 2005 withdrawal of the country's 1,350 troops in Iraq. Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp made the announcement on Friday afternoon.

What, not anything to do with it? Surely the Dutch cabinet at least hopes that Dutch Muslims will be slightly less angry about everything now, even if the actual decision to bring the boys home was made either before all the domestic rowing, or during it but for genuinely unrelated reasons.

And some will certainly argue that there is a connection, so there is your connection right there.

I do not say that the religious violence was the sole cause of the withdrawal, merely that these are definitely inter-woven news stories.

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The Vlaams Blok is the largest political party in Flanders, the Flemish speaking half of Belgium... and the Belgian high court has just in effect required it to disband. Now I hold no brief for an ethnic nationalist political party (though they are the closest thing to a free market party in Belgium, which I certainly approve of), but it is hard to see how the nation which hosts the key institutions of the EU can now claim to be democratic in any meaningful way.

To ban the Vlaams Blok because it is allegedly racist, and yet not ban communists or socialists from running for office, means that only certain types of enforced collectivism will be tolerated, namely the type which is imposed equally on all, but not any form which is only imposed on immigrants. Repression is only acceptable if everyone is repressed. Keep in mind that the Vlaams Blok is not some tiny lunatic fringe of neo-fascist moonbats like the BNP in Britain but are a major political party. Yet the political establishment have just used the courts to put there opponents out of business.

I eagerly await a series of fierce denunciations of the wholesale disenfranchisement of a significant proportion of the Flemish electorate. Given the importance attached to democracy by the Guardian and Independent, I expect at least a week of outraged headlines and calls to action to defend democracy in Europe by Robert Fisk and George Monbiot.

Ok, I am waiting .

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Blogger, film scriptwriter and novelist Roger Simon notes that there have not been many sounds of disgust from his Hollywood backyard at the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo Van Gogh (a descendant of the artist) on November 2nd.

I must say there has not been a huge amount of noise from our own British film-makers, documentary producers and big shot journalists, either. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of folk in the artistic community are simply scared or uninterested that a man who made a film about the treatment of women in Islamic culture was shot in broad daylight in Holland, that most laid-back of nations.

I find that there is something rather shabby about this silence. I hope to be proven wrong and that all those who have cause to value freedom of speech and the right to challenge certain ideas will speak out at the brutal murder of Mr Van Gogh.

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Amidst all the kerfuffle over the US elections, I urge you to spare a charitable thought for all those American writers, actors, singers, poets, puppeteers, directors and musicians whose right to dissent will continue to be crushed in George Bush's Amerikkka - a country where it is dangerous to speak out.

Mind you, they can always decamp to tolerant, liberal Europe where they will be free to express themselves:

An outspoken Dutch film-maker was shot and stabbed to death yesterday by a Dutch-Moroccan man in apparent reprisal for his campaign against Islam, sending shock waves through a country that exalts freedom of speech.

Theo van Gogh, 47, a provocateur and enfant terrible of Dutch cinema, was ambushed by a bearded man in Arab clothing as he cycled through the heart of Amsterdam.

The Dutch media immediately linked the attack to the director's latest film, Submission, which highlights the repression of women in some Islamic cultures.

Well, after a fashion.

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Avant-Garde French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, has finally been deconstructed:

Jacques Derrida, one of France's most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.

Though to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.

Er...or something.

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Alert readers will have noted that I often write here about education. What happens is that I dash off a piece for my Education Blog, and then say to myself: this will just about do for Samizdata. And since I now find writing adequately for Samizdata harder than for my private blogs, and since Samizdata has many more readers, here is another such piece which I hope will suffice for here, provoked by an essay I am in the middle of reading, by Paul Graham. (Thank you Arts & Letters Daily, a daily resource without which I could not now do.) The first few paragraphs of this esssay grabbed my attention, and I am now about half way through it.

In that previous reaction to Graham's essay, I made much of the idea of an essay being "persuasive".

I am right, and wrong, says Paul Graham. Yes, a lot of education is rooted in legal education, but, he says, too much. An essay, he says, is not – or should not be – lawyering:

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion – uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay", you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

As I often find myself saying, to justify my enthusiasm for argument: my dad was a trial lawyer, and so were both my grandfathers. My family's basic activity when dining, when we weren't eating or listening to classical music on the Third Programme or Family Fun Chat on the Home Service, was arguing. And if no one was disagreeing with a dominant consensus, someone would, just for the fun of it. "Defending a position" is, I think, a pretty good way to get at the truth, provided more than one position is being defended, which is exactly what is happening when a jury is involved. The adversarial principle is, I would say, a whole hell of a lot better than a "necessary evil".

Think only of the clash of conclusions – of, in Dan Rather's words, "political agendas" – that recently got the truth of the Rather documents fracas out into the light of day in the space of a few hours.

In our legal world, the advocates start with their rival conclusions and defend them, and attack them, while the judge listens, occasionally asking a question, or insisting that a question already asked be answered. ("The witness will answer the question.") Also, the judge occasionally, sports umpire style, restrains the advocates if they get too rude, or if they use arguments that are too sneaky. ("I object your honour!" – "Objection sustained.") In the blogosphere, the 'judge' is other bloggers and other journalists, and the 'jury' is the people reading it all and buying things and voting for things on the strength of all that arguing and counter-arguing.

On the Continent of Europe their legal tradition is very different from the one shared by Paul Graham and me, and by most of you reading this. There, the judge takes the initiative. He does not merely endure the clash of the advocates and help the jury to decide. He decides, by doing just what Graham says an essayist should do. He searches disinterestedly for the truth. He walks, to use Graham's excellent metaphor, through the open door into the room where the truth of the matter is to be found, and he finds whatever he finds. Then he announces it, and that is what is true and what is to be done.

These contrasting traditions have a profound effect on the different ways in which education is done in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Continental Europe, or so I am persuasively informed by my continental friends). (By the way, in Scotland, they also have a 'Continental' legal system. They do not have judges. They have 'intendants' in Scottish courts. I think that is what they are called. That is, active investigators, as in 'super-intendant'.)

Anglo-Saxon schools are often experienced by their congregations as boring churches in which the God Almighty Preacher says what is what and they, the congregation, just have to suck it up. But it is the very things that these Preachers often say in these churches, to say nothing of all the things said outside of them, that do much to make the congregation so restive. On the Continent, the Teacher/Professeur (the Judge substitute) finds The Truth, and then announces it. Your job as a mere pupil is to learn it, not to argue about it. Anglo-Saxon schools are anarchic dog-fights compared to the average secondary school on the Continent of Europe.

The weakness of the Anglo-Saxon system is that the truth gets lost in the mayhem and din of battle. Juries emerge from trials wondering what the f*** that was all about and having chosen their verdict with a coin toss or because the prosecuting lawyer had a cute smile. We tune into the Internet, and retreat in confusion from the hubbub. School pupils just become confused and give up, steamrollered by their more confident and louder rivals. Or they do not know which is the right answer and hate having to decide it for themselves.

But the weakness of the Continental system is that the actual truth of this or that particular matter may be forbidden or ignored, with only lies or obsolete platitudes about it being taught by the Man At The Front, and these lies and platitudes may not be contested by the peasantry.

It is in the nature of educated people brought up in either tradition, but aware of the existence of the other tradition, that they often perceive only the vices of their own system and cast envious eyes over the fence, or in this case over the English Channel (known over there as 'La Manche').

No accident, then, that 'essay' is a French word.

So. On with Paul Graham's essay...

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An acquaintance sent me a link to an article about the future of Europe and asked me for my opinions in response. As someone with a reputation for having an opinion (usually a fairly inflammatory one) about everything, I find myself untypically, and perhaps rather annoyingly, equivocal. But this is entirely due to the fact that I am unsure whether or not this kind of thing can or should be taken seriously:

How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."

Or maybe sooner.

I have heard such sweeping assessments before, courtesy (mostly) of some of the more intemperate conservative blogs and websites. But is there any substance to the claim?

On the face of it, it appears both alarmist and far-fetched. Just taking the EU countries alone, I believe that there are, at most, some 20 million Muslim people out of a total population in the region of 470 million. Less than 5%.

But, let us suppose that some profound demographic shifts over the next few decades result in Muslims outnumbering non-Muslims. Does it automatically follow that Europe will then be 'Islamic'? And, if so, what type of Islamic? Are we talking about the arid, monochromatic, repressive Saudi 'Wahabbi' version or the more secular and easy-going Turkish variety? Or could it be some newly-manifest and unique 'European' version of Islam?

Also, and given much of Europe's descent into post-modernist torpor, would any of these scenarios (assuming they came to pass) necessarily be a bad thing?

So many questions with no answers. Or no satisfactory answers at any rate. My own inclination is to regard the article with a high degree of skepticism. Human affairs are sufficiently fluid to make predictions about the next week seem foolhardy, let alone the next century. However, it is worth bearing in mind that North Africa (the Maghreb) was once as European as France or Italy is now and that fully two-thirds of what was once the Roman Empire is now a part of the Islamic world.

But the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, so that just leaves me back where I started. In short, I just do not know and I am hesitant to venture any sort of opinion more definite than that.

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Gibraltar remains a British colony to the overwhelming relief of its 27,833 inhabitants. Yet they are well aware that the reason Geoff Hoon, Britain's dismal defence minister, yesterday attended the 300th anniversary of Britain's capture of The Rock has little to do with any great enthusiasm for the people on The Rock or a deep commitment for retaining Gibraltar, but rather a disinclination to 'make nice' with Spain due to its policies regarding Islamic terrorism and Iraq.

In fact members of both the 'tranzi left' and 'paleo right' see Gibraltar as a weird anachronism and despite those groups fetishising their minor differences, both have a shared collectivist meta-context and think nothing of what the inhabitants of The Rock wish for themselves.

If the Gibraltarians were wise, they would let it be known that they are prepared to go all the way and exercise a 'dooms day' option of Unilateral Declaration of Independence if the political class in Britain ever decide to 'give' Gibraltar away: the battalion sized Gibraltar Regiment should simply take up arms with whoever will rally to the red and white flag, and man their border with bayonets fixed. Of course it is unlikely a militia army in Gibraltar could hold off a serious military move by Spain, though success against the odds is not without precedent, but would Spain actually be prepared to fight for 27,833 people who simply do not want to be Spanish?

I realise that is indeed what the Spanish state is doing in the Basque parts of Spain but this is a rather different proposition and unlike in the Basque country, there is no friendly constituency in Gibraltar who sees Spanish sovereignty as in any way tolerable. A Spanish takeover would be nothing less that a colonial occupation of an unwilling population.

People have to be prepared to literally fight for the things they value and if the people of Gibraltar made it clear that in the final analysis they would be willing to do exactly that, perhaps the chattering classes in both Spain and Islington Britain would stop thinking those people's fate is something that can be lightly signed away by people in a ministry building in London or Madrid.

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One of Spain's top banks, Santander, is making a bid to buy the British banking firm Abbey plc, the mortgage lending firm which used to be a building society (what Americans would know as a Savings and Loan).

I do not have much to say about the specifics of the deal. It is all a part of the merger, acquision and disposal process which is a healthy part of capitalism and the efficient allocation of scarce capital. Maybe the shareholders of either firm have strong views on the matter but I do not. However, what is interesting to me is what this deal says about Spain's development as an economic power.

Spain is one of the success stories of the past few years. When I went to the glorious city of Barcelona last year I was struck by how prosperous and dynamic the place was. I hear and read similar impressions from other sources. Much of this has to do with the determination of Spanish entrepreneurs to throw off the shackles of former failed socialist policies and embrace a more liberal economic culture, which former centre-right premier Aznar helped spawn. Let us hope the new socialist government elected earlier this year in rather shameful circumstances after the Madrid bombings does not mess it up.

It would be a grave error to infer too much from the acquisitive activities of a Spanish bank in Britain. But I get the feeling that this grand old nation is flexing its economic muscles again, and who knows, making a distinct improvement to the quality of Britain's economy while getting richer as well. Good. It feels appropriate somehow. There are hundreds of thousands of British expatriates living in Spain so it perhaps fitting that Spain's biggest companies are trying to get a piece of the action in the UK.

(As an aside, I would like to know what the Spanish-based blog Iberian Notes makes of this).

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There are many myths about Sweden and they go back a long time.

For example, in the 1930's various supporters of the 'Middle Way' (such as the future Conservative party leader Harold Macmillian) suggested that if Britain followed a policy of greater statism, Britain would be more prosperous - and they pointed at Sweden as an example of greater statism. Such folk did not tend to stress such things as Swedish levels of taxation being about half British levels at the time.

Sweden's great success was avoiding both world wars (and the capital consumption these wars involved), but this is not often talked about (the record of Sweden, in relation to Germany, in the 1930's and during WWII is especially not something people like to talk about).

Of course these days Sweden does indeed have very high taxes (although I doubt they really are the "highest in the world", as is often claimed - after all the stats for levels of taxation in many nations in the world are fantasy as they do not include the endless bribes one must pay and extortion one is subject to in these countries).

However, at least in recent years the Swedish government has at least managed to control its (very high) levels of government welfare-state spending (unlike the United States - see the Cato Institute for the Bush Administration's latest lies about the cost of the Medicare extension), and whilst not as well off as Americans ("Sweden most prosperous nation in the world" is an absurd myth one still finds being talked of from time to time) the Swedish people are not doing too badly.

Apart from the control of government spending (yes it is still very high - but at least it's growth has been controlled in recent years so government spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen - although, I repeat, it is still very high) which has led to a balanced budget, Sweden has also followed a policy of one of the lowest money supply growth rates in the world.

Now why is this? Fiscal and monetary conservatism is hardly what Sweden is supposed to be about - this is supposed to be a nation that has long worshipped the doctrines of Lord Keynes.

However, a theory does occur to me. The Swedish government has long wished to get the nation to join the European Union's system of money (the "Euro"). How would the people of Sweden be convinced to vote to join the EU currency?

According to the doctrines of Lord Keynes (at least as they are popularly understood) if a government follows a policy of balanced budget and tight control of the money supply then (at least at some points of the "economic cycle") such lines of policy will produce recession.

Could the intention of the government of Sweden have been to produce recession and get people to vote for the Euro as a possible "way out"? In short could the rising levels of GDP and industrial output in Sweden be not just unintentional, but the opposite of what the government wanted?

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Everyone is aware by this time that al Qaeda's attack on Madrid led to the election of the candidate who promised immediate withdrawal of Spanish forces from the coalition in Iraq. The Spanish electorate are acting like the child who, after getting knocked down by a schoolyard bully, cowers in the hope said bully will stop hitting them and just go away.

Based on this thought, I was going to do a cute 'appropriate' modification of the Spanish flag.

To my chagrin, I have discovered the Spanish flag already has a yellow stripe down the middle.

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The forthcoming Olympic Games which are to be held in the birthplace of this event, Greece, promise to cause a few headaches. In particular, security services around the world must be wondering what level of risk is being run in holding an event relatively close to the Middle East, and in which lots of Americans, Brits, Israelis and other parts of Dubya's great Zionist/Halliburton conspiracy are taking part.

So while I was chatting to a work colleague about Greeks' own views of the situation, I came across a corker of a quote from an unnamed Olympic official:

Greece hasn't hit the panic button yet. That is because it hasn't even installed the necessary wiring.

Brilliant.

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Just who are these people going around saying that a decadent, post-historic, senescent Europe is no longer capable of galvanising in response to dangerous threats?

Nothing could be further from the truth:

Jelly mini-cup sweets have been banned by the European Commission because of a risk of children choking.

The sweets are packaged in plastic cups and designed to be swallowed in one.

The commission said they were a risk because of their "consistency, shape and form" and that warnings alone were not enough to protect children.

Though I do think that diplomacy and negotiation should have been tried before embarking on such unilateralist and aggressive actions.

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The claim is being made (by various people) that the founder of the IKEA company, Ingvar Kamprad, is now the richest man in the world (supposedly Mr Kamprad has overtaken Mr Gates).

In the British media (both electronic and print) Mr Kamprad is described as 'Swedish'. Now he may well still be a citizen of Sweden, but Mr Kamprad has been a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland since 1976.

Sweden is not doing badly economically at the moment, but I do find it interesting that the taxes of Sweden mean that its most successful businessman is unable to live there.

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Fifteen suspected Islamic extremists linked to the Casablanca bombings of 16 May 2003 have been arrested this morning, according to the Europe 1 radio station which broke the news.

The bomb attacks last year killed 45 people, including 3 French citizens.

The arrests were made by the DST (French equivalent of MI5) and the RAID (elite Police unit) in two Paris suburbs, Aulay-sous-Bois and Mantes-la-Jolie. They come as Queen Elizabeth II makes an official visit to Paris, to coincide with the centenary of the 'Entente Cordiale' between the United Kingdom and France.

Over the week-end French police made a number of arrests of Basque ETA terrorists, including Felix Ignacio Esparza Luri, alias "Navarro", at Saint-Paul-lès-Dax in the Landes département.

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One of the very many arguments in which I was embroiled while I was a student in the 1980's involved one of my house-mates who steadfastly held that the government should pay students a handsome monthly salary in return for all the hard studying they did. Now this was at a time when, in fact, the government did pay most students an annual grant which covered the costs of their education and left them with a bit of spending money to boot.

But that was not enough for my protagonist. As far as he was concerned this was 'mere crumbs'; a demeaning insult from a skinflint Tory government. No, students were so precious and valuable that they deserved an 'executive' style pay package so that they would not be subjected to the indignities of having to buy second-hand clothes from charity shops.

When I explained (in some detail) why the government (Tory or otherwise) could not possibly afford such magnanimity, he responded by trying to convince me that arithmetic was but a political 'mind-trick' constructed to oppress the masses (and students, of course).

And, by jove, he was right. Well, after a fashion:

Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe, many of them elderly, have marched in protest at plans to reform welfare systems. In Rome, pensioners arrived on buses, special trains and even boats from the island of Sardinia to demonstrate against the rising cost of living.

Various German cities saw people march against welfare cuts introduced to combat economic stagnation.

And in Paris they demanded more jobs and social justice.

Across Europe governments are trying to find ways to pay pensions to ageing populations, or to cut back on expensive social provision.

It is always tempting to sneer at people who think that the dried-up wells of government money can be refreshed by the act of marching up and down waving self-pitying slogans. Mind you, that has generally been the means of opening up the state spigots in the past so I suppose I cannot really blame them for giving it another try. That is the thing about street protests: they are the modern equivalent of rain dances.

There is also an extent to which I feel quite sorry for these people. They have been took, they have been had, they have been sold a pup. They have been 'mind-tricked' by a post-war political class that has mesmerised them into believing that a river of easy largesse could be conjured out of nothing and made to flow forever by sleight-of-hand. Yes, you can vote to abolish the iron laws of economics and two plus two can equal sixteen thousand four hundred and thirty five if only you are willing to let your 'intellectuals' handle the mathematics for you.

But now the dwindling numbers of producers have been taxed down to the bone and there are simply no more sweeties to hand out. That was not supposed to happen but it has happended and it heralds an end to the days of milk and honey.

These trains of irate Italian pensioners may appear slightly pathetic. Comical, even. But they are part of a generation (and maybe the front-line of two or even three generations) that is not so much 'hitting the streets' as hurtling towards a big brick wall into which they will eventually crash with sickening thud. When that day comes, a lot of dazed and angry people are going to be looking for something or someone to blame for their pain and, given Europe's track record on these matters, I have little confidence that they will assign that blame correctly.

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According to the ABC website (Spanish conservative daily newspaper), the Islamists blew themselves up rather than face capture. My Spanish is not great so any better linguists can check this out. (not permanent link). Three suspects implicated in the Madrid railway station bombing were pursued to the residential building where the explosion occured this evening.

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Following yesterday's find of an explosive device along the Madrid-Seville railway, an energetic series of police actions in Spain and France against both ETA and the Islamic terrorists.

According to the Spanish government two leading members of ETA have been arrested in South-West France and other suspects detained over the past two days. Four explosive devices were found, two of them ready for immediate use. The French government, whilst confirming that arrests have been made has not been forthcoming with any details.

Meanwhile in Madrid, an explosion was heard today and small arms fire during a police raid on an appartment complex in the Leganes suburb (my thanks to Susan for the link to Jihad Watch ). Official sources say the explosion was a controlled detonation.

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French TV is running a story about explosives found along the high-speed railway link between Madrid and Seville today.

The explosives with copper wiring similar to that used in the 11 March attacks on Madrid appear to have been abandoned when a routine track patrol was made near Toledo.

N.B. Toledo was the site of two decisive battles: the first confirmed the Moorish conquest of Spain in 712, and the second was the launchpad of the Spanish Reconquistada with the Moorish defeat there in 1212. If this is the work of an Islamist cell, we have an answer to the question: "Did voting for the PSOE appease Al-Qaeda?"

The report adds that the new (Socialist) Interior Minister - responsible for law enforcement and internal security - is having a meeting today with the outgoing (conservative) Defence Minister. Bi-partisanship in Spain is about as frequent as Bible rallies in Riyadh. Nice one!

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Gloomy prognostications about the future of Europe seem to be flying thick and fast these days. It seems that everybody who is anybody, especially on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, is quite convinced that the whole European continent is riding on a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Speaking for myself, I am not entirely persuaded. Certainly the combination of demographic decline and economic and political sclerosis means that Europeans have some very difficult choices galloping over the horizon towards them. But that is not the same as saying that they are all doomed and done for. Who is to say that they will not make the right choices?

Well, British historian Niall Ferguson for one. In his reading of the entrails, choice does not even come into it:

The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49.

There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to a better standard of living. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, indeed, significantly more than twice. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim.

So far, so what? There is nothing here that is not being editorialised about in much of the press. But Ferguson takes matters a little further.

The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in England than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque on a weekly basis than Anglicans attend church. In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but also downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.

They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.

I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. I quote: "Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower." It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said.

At the risk of grossly misrepresenting him, Ferguson appears to be of the view that faith matters. Or, if nor 'faith' as such, then perhaps 'spirit'.

Few serious analysts of my acquaintaince make any attempt to examine the role of religion in civilisation and, as a wholly secular individual, I must admit that I do not give it a great deal of thought either. But maybe that is to overlook the importance of religion as a sort of civilisation catalyst.

Ferguson clearly indicates that Islam is poised to rush into the vacuum left by the soon-to-be-departed Christianity but even he does not suggest that this means the 'end' of Europe as a civilisation. Merely that the Europe of a hundred years from now will be an altogether diffierent place from the Europe of a hundred years ago.

If faith plays a key role in bolstering a successful civilisation then could Islam give Europe that new lease of life? Or will it simply be North Africa with pine trees?

[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link.]

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Far be it from me to find anything hopeful about the PSOE election victory in Spain last weekend. After two election terms of relative fiscal sanity and an end to the grotesque corruption of the Felipe Gonzalez era, a return to PSOE government is bad news for Spain. It is also extremely bad news for the rest of the European Union, as this represents a shift away from pragmatism towards an (even more) collectivist EU agenda.

It is not however, necessarily good news for terrorism. Among the multitude of scandals faced down by the previous Spanish Socialist government the 'GAL affair' looms large.

GAL was the name assumed by a anti-ETA terror group in the 1980s that entered France and murdered ETA members and supporters. I no longer have the details but there was a spate of terrorist attacks on Basques living in the Bordeaux area, as well as closer to the Spanish border.

Following the arrest of several GAL members it transpired that they were all either members of law-enforcement agencies and the armed forces, or recently had been. It later emerged that the money to finance GAL came from the Ministry of the Interior and was signed off ultimately by the Minister. Whilst the Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez himself was never proven by documentary evidence to have sanctioned the GAL death squad, let me just say that if he ever wins a libel action on the issue, I will be amazed.

Two things are worth noting, firstly that both the French and Spanish governments were under Socialist control at the time, second that Spanish public opinion was firmly on the side of the death squads: the only non-Basque critics of the policy tended to shut up because it was their own party that was doing the dirty deeds.

In France the President from 1981 to 1995 was François Mitterrand, the former far-right youth organisation member turned founder of the modern French Socialist Party. It is worth noting his record as an Interior Minister in the 1950s.

In 2001, one of the big political scandals was the publication of Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-1957, by the retired General Paul Aussaresses. The French Left went beserk and managed to get the retired former leader of the Action Service to have his Légion d'honneur withdrawn. They also tried to get his pension removed. The ostensible reason was that General Aussaresses had exposed and admitted the use of torture against Algerian terrorists during the Battle of Algiers.

In my copy of this extremely interesting book I find on page 12:

De son côté, François Mitterrand, le ministre de l'Intérieur chargé des départements français de l'Algérie, considérant que la police était impuissante à maintenir l'ordre républicain, envoya son directeur de cabinet au ministère de la Défense nationale pour y requérir la troupe et déclara sans ambiguité ce même 12 novembre, devant les députés: "Je n'admets pas de négotiations avec les enemis de la Patrie. La seule négotiation, c'est la guerre!"

My translation: For his part, François Mitterrand, the Minister of the Interior responsible for the French administrative districts of Algeria, believing that the police was powerless to maintain the Republic's peace, sent his chief advisor to the Ministry of National Defense to resquest the use of troops [including the 11th Shock Paras, better known as the Action Service]. He also declared without ambiguity on the 12th November, before the Chamber of Deputies [French House of Representatives]: "I will not tolerate negotiations with the enemies of the Fatherland. The only negotiation, is war!"

It took the removal of the French Socialists and the introduction of the General de Gaulle to bring about appeasement of the Algerian terrorists. There is a strand of Western Socialist thought that takes the secular State seriously. I seriously doubt if there will be any safe-haven for Islamist terrorists in Spain for the forseeable future. Jacobins ain't soft on Terror.

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In the wake of the massacre in Madrid, and the subsequent election result, it has become the conventional wisdom that the election went according to al-Qaeda's design. Robert Clayton Dean expressed this view concisely here at Samizdata a few days ago:

Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror.

However, there is in fact little direct evidence that such was the goal of al-Qaeda. It does sound rather logical, of course, but there may well be other factors at work. And it is not clear that logic is a useful tool in analysing the methods and aims of this enemy.

What follows is a purely speculative guess to make the case that the political goal of al-Qaeda was in fact the direct opposite- their goal may well have been to ensure the re-election of the Popular Party.

al-Qaeda as an organisation has been going through a rough couple of years, and it has not achieved much in terms of murder and mayhem in the West. If we consider al-Qaeda as a company, it would aim to market itself as the organisation of choice to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Islamic marketplace.

However to gather revenue and recruits, it needs to demonstrate that it is still alive and kicking after having its Afghan strongholds destroyed by the US and it's allies in the wake of the September 11 attack. No Saudi princeling is going to waste his oil money on a spent force. And no disaffected Muslim intellectual with a personality disorder is going to join an outfit that doesn't actually create murder and mayhem.

Joining al-Qaeda requires a willingness to risk facing very hostile treatment from enraged law enforcement operatives and prison warders; and indeed, other prisoners.

Of course, al-Qaeda has been creating murder and mayhem, but over the last couple of years, that has taken place in the less developed and Muslim parts of the world. This does not really impress people in its target market very much - to get noticed, al-Qaeda needs to be seen to be active in the West.

One other point to take note of was that no terrorist blew himself up in the Madrid attack. This could indicate that the Moroccan suspected of doing this deed lacked the zeal of the September 11 maniacs, but it could also reflect an instruction from al-Qaeda bosses to avoid martyrdom operations, due to a shortage of operatives.

It takes more then that though for al-Qaeda to thrive as an organization. It's goal in life is to take the battle up to the West and bring about some Muslim utopia. However, it needs the West to give battle, as it were. al-Qaeda wants the West to fight back, so it can present the West as a 'threat' to the Islamic world. This allows it to play on the paranoia evident in many Muslim societies, again with the aim of gaining funding and recruits.

To get the West to fight back, it needs to stir things up. The massacre in Madrid was expected to cause support to rally to the government - that was the view of bloggers in the West, as evidenced by the surprise at the victory of the Socialist Party. The enormous rally that Spanish people flocked to in their millions, surely, pointed that way; to the anger of the people, and a desire to strike back. However they voted for the Socialists.

Let us not give too much credit to the enemy; they scorn democracy, so let us not assume that they understand it. If bloggers who study politics all the time didn't see this coming (and I certainly did not) then why should we credit al-Qaeda with such skills. No, I think that they calculated that the bombing would help the Popular Party win the election, and intensify the war on Terror.

Why would they do this? By presenting forceful countermeasures against terrorism as a 'threat' to Islam, they can gather for themselves more funding and recruits. If this doesn't make sense to you, then consider this-

al-Qaeda think they can win the war on Terror.

That is not to say that al-Qaeda will not make gains from the Spanish elections. I think the election results will generate more election time terror (and some key players have elections in 2004, Australia, the US, India, Indonesia, all of which will have repercussions on the war.)

But I do not think al-Qaeda foresaw this.

I think their goal in the Madrid Massacre was, first, to kill as many people as possible, second, to promote the al-Qaeda organisation to Saudi fundraisers, and to assist in recruiting, and then only to influence the Spanish elections. And I think they wanted to see the Popular Party re-elected.

By electing the Socialists, the Spanish people have chosen a government that will take a soft line on terrorists. We ca not assume that is what the enemy wanted. They might have wanted to intensify the war; the political aim of the Madrid Massacre might have been to provoke the Spanish government into direct military action.

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Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror. Electing a Socialist is bad at any time, of course, and the invisible hand will undoubtedly spank the Spanish in due time as the inevitably increased taxes, regulation, and rent-seeking drag down their economy.

However, this particular election rewards the terrorists by demonstrating to them that European voters can be bullied into doing what the terrorists want. As ever in human affairs, you get more of what you reward, and so the Europeans can expect to see more election eve bombings as time goes on. For this, they can thank the Spanish.

I don't buy the line that voters punished Aznar for inept post-bomb spinning. Aznar jumped to the conclusion that it was Basque killers, when it was most likely an Islamist or Islamist/Basque joint op. Spanish voters mad at Aznar for not going after the Islamist connection early enough would not vote for the Socialist, who ran on a platform of Spanish disengagement from one of the main fronts in the war on Islamist terror.

No, the Spanish public has, by all accounts, never wanted to pull its weight in the war on terror. They were big backers of the Save Saddam strategy last year, and Aznar showed considerable courage by joining the coalition. Voting for the Socialist is of a piece with the overall appeasement apparently favored by many Spanish, so the bombings represent a timely push by the terrorists in the direction the electorate wanted to go anyway. The bombings made the war the top shelf issue again, and thus paved the way for Aznar's defeat.

In the US, I have no doubt that election eve bombings like this would guarantee a Bush landslide, as the American public's instictive reaction to being attacked is to elect the guy most likely to kick the shit out of our enemies. In Spain, apparently, the instinctive reaction of the majority to being attacked is something else.

Sad, really. And sure to be a sterling exhibit for the Law of Unintended Consequences. By electing a Socialist who promised to pull Spain back from the war on terror, the Spanish, by rewarding the terrorists, have guaranteed more bombings and other terrorist activity. After all, the Spanish election represents the first victory for the Islamists since 9/11. It will undoubtedly be taken as a model for many future operations.

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Notwithstanding the result of the Spanish election that David so poignantly blogged about yesterday, one thing that the commentators note is the turnout. Apparently, the extra 3 million voters who turned out to vote were spurred by the terrorist attacks and disgruntled by the Aznar government's handling of the information in the aftermath. It transpires that the popular opinion in Spain was against supporting the US in the conflict with Iraq and the country's participation in the 'Coalition of the Willing'.

The BBC commentators have a field day - the 'power of democracy' has been demonstrated and the Spanish voters have chosen a socialist government. It don't get better than that. It is a dream come true.

Oh, wait. The Russians have elected its President. In an extraordinary and widely predicted result, the former KGB agent crushed his closest rivals by securing 70 per cent plus of the vote, according to preliminary exit polls:

Russians overwhelmingly turned their backs on western-style democracy yesterday, voting for stability and a strong hand at the helm by giving four more years in office to President Vladimir Putin.

Although there was a small chance of under 50 per cent turn out, the Russians were forcefully encouraged to exercise their democratic rights, or else:

Officials are trying to bolster interest with patriotic advertisements showing Soviet-era rockets blasting off and glossy pictures of model Siberian mines. Others exhort parents to vote for the sake of their children.

Some officials have used bribes, threats and other schemes. Last week hospitals in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk put up notices saying they would refuse to treat patients who could not prove they had registered to vote in hospital.

So in one country we have a socialist government taking over as a result of democratic elections that were influenced by terrorist attack whose horror is still fresh in the people's mind. In another, an overt authoritarian has cemented his already powerful position for another four years. I doubt very much that either election was determined by anything resembling rational discourse. No, I am not naive and do not expect every single voting decision to be rational or even sensible, however, the events of yesterday point to the other extreme.

[Retiring back to his cave, mumbling something about "emotionally incontinent" times...]

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The Conservative government of Spain has conceded defeat to the opposition Socialists following today's election:

Opposition Socialists have claimed victory in Spain's general election as voters apparently punished the government over Madrid bombings that may have been retaliation by al Qaeda for the Iraq war.

"It's a victory," senior Socialist official Jose Blanco told cheering supporters in Madrid on Sunday. "The Spanish Socialist Working Party is ready to take charge of government in Spain."

Official results showed the Socialists leading the ruling centre-right Popular Party by 43 percent to 37.5 percent with 85 percent of votes counted.

So disaster follows hot on the heels of tragedy. For Spain this probably means a reversal of some or maybe even all of the tentative reforms that the Aznar government managed to institute over the last few years and which enabled that country to enrich itself considerably.

But the implications are not just domestic:

The Socialists have pledged to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq if the U.N. does not take control by June 30 when Washington plans to hand power back to Iraqis. Opinion polls showed as many as 90 percent of Spaniards opposed the Iraq war.

It sounds as if the 'Coalition of the Willing' is about to lose one of its members.

Having no knowledge whatsoever of the Spanish political landscape, I cannot say whether the result of this election was on the cards or whether it was influenced by the Madrid train bombing. Maybe the Socialists were on course for victory today regardless. Maybe it was all about domestic issues. Who knows?

But in one sense, it may not matter why Aznar and his centre-right government lost. If Al-Qaeda did orchestrate the Madrid attack (and it appears increasingly likely that they did) then they will chalk this up as a major success. In their own minds, they have successfully terrorised the Spanish electorate into installing a government that was more to Islamicist liking.

That may not actually be true, but the danger lies in these maniacs believing it to be true.

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Although it is more or less a policy of mine to not write directly about comments made regarding Samizdata.net articles, it is a policy occasionally worth ignoring.

Many commenters have reacted poorly to David Carr's article AZNAR KNEW!!!. Whilst it is the readers prerogative to judge articles here as they see fit, I must disagree with some of the views put forward that it was an inappropriate article at a time of such truly hideous moment. I do not say so out of an urge to 'circle the wagons' but rather because many of the commenters are fine people whose opinions are of value to me. And because I think they are quite wrong, I feel I must say why, as Chief Editor of Samizdata.net, that I am delighted David wrote such a piece and published it now.

It is a 'humorous' article in so far as satire is an appeal to humour, but that does not mean David is laughing at what happened. Just as Jonathan Swift was not laughing at the Irish famine when he penned A modest proposal, so too is David drawing attention to something deadly serious.

It is at times like this when we most need to pour scorn on the people who are, by virtue of their world views, indirectly part of the problem. This hideous and evil act must be met with force and implacable resistance... and it is that sort of response that the people who are the targets of David's satire will work tirelessly to prevent.

All David is doing is shining a light on them and now, not later, is the time to do that. The fact that what David wrote is close to the bone is what makes it effective. Why? Because it is only a few degrees off the non-satirical screeds we will actually be reading in a few days.

Now of all times, while the stench of death and horror are fresh in Madrid, it is right to point out that some well meaning people's views, and some not so well meaning, are nothing less than an apologia for mass murderer. Ideas have consequences and that it what David was writing about.

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I made a brief visit to the Spanish Embassy in Belgravia this afternoon. At about 4pm there were no queues, but a trickle of people were going in and out. There was a large pile of wreaths of flowers outside the door. There were two thick condolence books, which contained the signatures of many people from many places. I signed one of the books. A Spanish official thanked me as I walked out the door. There was not really anything to be said. I was last in Spain about six weeks ago, and I had a wonderful time, as I always do.

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Every decent and right-thinking person must surely condemn today's tragic events in Madrid.

BUT...while our thoughts go out to the families of the innocent victims this must not cause us to forget that horrible incidents such as we have witnessed today are the wholly predictable result of the Spanish government's wrong-headed, meddling foreign policy and their continued brutal occupation of the Basque homeland.

Of course, no one can ever condone such senseless acts of bloody violence but that does not mean we cannot sympathise with the plight of the ruthlessly oppressed Basques who are struggling for dignity and nationhood beneath the jackboot of Spanish domination. Such people, who are condemned to a future without hope or self-worth, can hardly be blamed for the state of desperation that may have forced some of them to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of people on public transport. What choice do they have?

While the rash and the thoughtless among us may seek scapegoats here, a more mature and nuanced analysis is required. The truth is that there are no perpetrators here, just different types of victim. The real culprit is Spain's ultra right-wing fundamentalist Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar whose lunatic extremist policies are the root causes of today's shocking violence.

This dangerous demagogue (who some have compared to Hitler) has surrounded himself with a sinister, shadowy cabal of Neo-Conquistadores and, together, they have hijacked this country and brought the shame and opprobrium of the world upon it with their wicked plan to establish a Global Iberian Empire. It is the policies of Aznar and his government that are driving Spain, and maybe the whole world, into catastrophe. Until they are stopped, there will be more horrific carnage of the type unleashed on Madrid today.

The Spanish people would do well not to squander the sympathy they have earned as a result of this attack. They must immediately distance themselves from their own deranged leaders and join in with the efforts of the rest of concerned humanity in ending the occupation and bringing Spain back into the fold of civilised, peaceful nations.

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Here, reproduced as it was sent to us, is an open letter to the international mass media by a very worthy website in Spain regarding the horrific and vile attrocity carried out by Marxist terrorists in Madrid yesterday that has resulted in the murder of at least 190 civilian commuters and the injury 1,200 more. The only comment of mine that I will add to what follows is that I share the author's outrage completely

To the international mass media, ETA is not a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group but a "Basque separatist group". The magnitude of the 3-11 attack has not changed their narrow sighted style. This is particularly poignant in the case of the US media. After Spain's support of the American war in Iraq, the coverage by American media is still worthy of a band of ignorants who keep scorning this Spanish bleeding tragedy.

Thus, to try to stop such indecency, I have sent the following brief email to Fox News and CNN. Let's fill their inboxes with our anti-collaborationist clamour!

I want to express you my most strongest complaint for your horrible coverage of the massacre in Madrid. You name ETA "Basque separatists group". That's awfull and infamous. ETA is a terrorist group, as it is recognized as such by all international institutions and developed nations, among them, the USA.

Do you think we should call Al-Qaeda "the resistance"? Has Spain been with the USA and UK in its struggle against international terrorism to deserve that kind of insult?

I am very disappointed by this dishonest style. It is just miserable.

Juan Ramón Rallo
From Spain

Mass media where to send the mail

CNN
Foxnews
BBC
WallStreetJournal
New York Times
Reuters
Associated Press
Washington Post

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Amidst all the partying I did in Brussels last weekend, I somehow managed to find the time to actually learn a thing or two.

The first thing I learned was not everyone takes the Euro terribly seriously (while fiddling around for correct change to pay for a taxi, I let the words 'Mickey Mouse money' slip from my mouth whereupon the taxi driver began laughing and said "oui, Monsieur, oui").

Secondly, and rather less anecdotally, I also learned of something called the Stockholm Network. Before last weekend I had no idea that this organisation even existed and, in this case, ignorance was not bliss.

I think it fair to say that there is a widespread impression in the Anglosphere (especially the American bit) that the continent of Europe has fallen under the unbreakable spell of the Grand Wizards of Schtoopidity. Sadly, this is mostly true. But it is not completely true and the difference between 'mostly' and 'completely' can be found at the website of the Stockholm Network.

Billing themselves as 'Europe's only dedicated service organisation for market-oriented think tanks and thinkers', the website is contains a treasure trove of links to well-organised, well-funded and highly active free-market and libertarian think-tanks and organisation in Britain, Ireland, Albania, Finland, Turkey, Macedonia, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Serbia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Spain, Russia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Rumania, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere.

The idiots and the kleptocrats may be running the show for now but, pleasingly, there are pockets of determined guerilla resistance. Even more pleasingly, these pockets seem to be growing in number.

And that is all I am going to say on the matter. Otherwise there is a danger that I might start sounding optimistic and, as everybody knows, that is strictly against my religion.

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The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804–1999
Misha Glenny
Granta Books, 1999

Though well-written and well-organised, its length (662 pages +) and the nature of its subject make this a book to be ploughed through, as one switches from one depressing topic to another. Yet Glenny's attitude to it all is a little difficult to fathom. On the last page he complains of the "long periods of neglect [when] the Balkan countries have badly needed the engagement of the great powers. Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest ... was Nazi Germany during the 1930s." Some model!

Certainly, left to themselves, every ethnic group (Jews excepted?) behaved badly, both internally and externally. Just how badly the book is disgustingly, though not exactly surprisingly, informative. Yet this does not seem to arouse in Glenny any doubts as to the desirability of mixed-ethnic communities. Contrast this with Spain, where the essence of the reconquest there was the homogenising of the population, with the separation of Portugal, and the imperfect assimilation of the Basques exceptions tending to prove the rule that this uniformity was ultimately beneficial. Neither the Ottoman conquest, nor its liberation homogenised the Balkans. Much of it was Slav, the exceptions being Romanian, Albanian and Greek speakers, with a good deal of intermingling, a large Jewish community in Salonica, descended from Spanish expellees, the whole top-dressed with a Turkish ruling class and military. Not that being Slav in any way prevented mutual hatred between Serb, Croat, Bulgar and Macedonian.

Glenny has chosen 1804 as the date when, with the Serbian revolt, the Ottoman Empire started to disintegrate territorially. Attempts to halt this by progressive" well-meaning Sultans failed because any liberalisation encouraged it, while the economic levers were not in Turkish hands. After relatively discrete parts of the Empire had achieved independence or autonomy - Serbia, Greece, the Rumanian principalities and Bulgaria - the rest of the peninsula was land to be squabbled over. The impression is that the Turks were not major contributors to the turmoil, nor the Islamicised Bosnians and Albanians they left behind.

It is difficult to imagine how the great powers could have intervened more effectively than they did. After all, they brought about the independence of Greece (in nuclear form) in 1830, and a settlement of the Bulgarian border at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after Russia had done most of the fighting. Not that Glenny seems very pleased with the Congress, loading it rather heavily with responsibility for future events in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Sudan and for the scramble for Africa (p. 150). Admittedly either Austria or Russia could have tried to establish a Balkan protectorate, but why, except to keep the other out? And Britain would never allow Russia control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. There was nothing to be gained from a political occupation of a region where all the natives would turn hostile. Economically there were no resources to be exploited or with which to set up an industrial base. Building infrastructure, such as railways, could be, and was, seen as a strategic threat, by the Ottomans or the successor states, or both.

In each of his eight Chapter-Periods, Glenny makes a repeat visit to each separate area, discovering depression and despair in every one, with assassinations for the prominent and massacres for the common people unlucky to live on the wrong side of an ethnic line or be a minority in a particular place. The only exception seems to be Slovenia, which managed to break away from Yugoslavia without much fuss. As man on the spot, Glenny must be regarded as an authority on Yugoslav disintegration and great power intervention, yet there is something contrary-minded about his castigation of America for not intervening sooner in Bosnia and trying to do so just by bombing "without risking the lives of their service men and women" (p. 640). As with recent responses to its intervention in Iraq, the US position seems to be damned if you don't, damned if you do. Leaving aside the idea that the Americans might consider the bombing option (as also followed in Kosovo) a reasonable preference,surely the facts are that the initial EU reaction was that this was a European dispute and as such should be left to Europeans to take care of. Yet he makes no mention of the inactivity of the Dutch UN "peacekeepers" which preceded, if it did not permit, the massacre of Muslims by Serbs in the so-called "safe haven" of Srebrenica (p. 650). As for the Serbs rallying round Milosevic when he got them bombed, it must be a sign of the times that it is NATO and the Americans that Glenny seems to blame for the irrational behaviour of the Serbs (p. 658).

This is not a very gracious review for a massive, painstaking and brilliant historical survey, but it is a tribute to the fact that its judgements provoke thought and, to some extent, dissent. Incidentally, Glenny uses the presumably Slavic spelling and lettering with the appropriate diacritical marks, but gives no indication as to their pronunciation.

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In a Reuters interview (not available yet on the Web) with Luigi Spaventa, the former head of the Italian stock market watchdog, Consob, he says stock markets should refuse to list firms such as stricken food group Parmalat whose ownership structure spreads into murky offshore centres, such as the Cayman Islands.

If a stock market is allowed to run its own affairs, then of course there is nothing wrong in it banning a would-be listed firm on the grounds of its ownership structure. But it is surely a different matter when it comes to a government regulator telling investors that a firm is so dodgy that they cannot put their own wealth into it via an exchange. Surely caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware") applies here.

In any event, I wonder if crossed the mind of this old regulator that one key reason why so many firms domicile their business affairs in offshore centres is to avoid the crushing taxes imposed by European nation states?

I think Samizdata's readership is ahead of me already on that one.

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It sounds as if brows all over Europe are being furrowed, heads are being shaken and hands being heavily wrung. What to do? What to do?

Via Instapundit:

Europe's apparently doomed attempt to overtake the US as the world's leading economy by 2010 will today be laid bare in a strongly worded critique by the European Commission.

The Commission's spring report, the focal point of the March European Union economic summit, sets out in stark terms the reasons for the widening economic gap between Europe and the US.

It cites Europe's low investment, low productivity, weak public finances and low employment rates as among the many reasons for its sluggish performance.

Mama Mia, Ai Caramba, Gott in Himmel and Merde! Does this mean that the European 'social model' is not working?

The Professor himself points the way:

Hmm. Bloated public sectors, high taxes, excessive regulation, and inflexible hiring rules probably have something to do with it.

Well, yes. They do have something to do with it. In fact, they have everything to do with it. But just because this is slap-in-the-face obvious, it would be unwise to assume any public (or even private) recognition of this obviousness in the halls of European power.

For, all this dovetails very satisfactorily with an article, via Stephen Pollard, which illustrates the excrutiating difficulties faced by political rulers in trying to institute reforms in circumstances of long-term petrification:

Make no mistake: Tony Bair's proposal for university "top-up" fees, Silvio Berlusconi's nip-and-tuck pension reform, Gerhard Schroeder's welfare and tax cuts, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin's reforms to tax and labor market policies are all, to varying degrees, departures from the social market consensus that has dominated European politics for much of the postwar period. It's progress. Possibly, they are the thin edge of the wedge, if we're being optimistic.

But if we're honest, we'll admit that as reforms go, these are mostly wimp-outs. What is really remarkable here is not that they are happening at all, but rather how ultimately skimpy they are.

In short, the reformation of long-cherished (but failing) economic models is simply too agonising for politicians to even contemplate let alone execute. From an electoral point of view they may consider it safer to leave the ship floundering and rely on future generations to try to salvage something from the wreckage. Utter madness of course but don't bet against them making exactly those calculations.

Despite that fact that there does appear to be something approaching a consensus on the nature of the disease, that is no guarantee that there will anything like a similar consenses on the course of treatment required. Given their track record the decision-makers could just as easily apply altogether different remedies. Low investment? We need more public spending. Low productivity? We need more workplace regulations. Weak public finances? The answer is higher taxes. Low employment rates? More labour laws.

Sweet-tasting medicine, yes, but the harsh kind rarely wins elections over there.

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Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:

A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.

The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.

Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let's all move to Finland!

He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful - and procedures would have to be reviewed.

From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.

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The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive.

The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe's demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years.

Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe.

There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace.

It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st.

The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow.

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I suppose it had to happen. Italian legislators, no doubt hoping to look useful in the wake of the near-collapse of Italian food group Parmalat, say they need new laws to prevent the kind of abuses that have dragged the firm into the mire.

Yep, that's the spirit. What we need is a "overhaul", a "sweeping new set of powers", a new super-agency with "wide-ranging" powers to prevent such things happening again.

They never learn, do they? If the public authorities had been doing their job in the first place, ie, enforce the laws preventing fraud and theft, then Parmalat would be chiefly known for its milk cartons, and not as a firm which is doomed to be known as Europe's Enron. But I guess where there's muck, there's brass, as we Brits say. The firm may be teetering on the brink, but at least politicians can see the bright side and pass some impressive new laws and bolster their wonderful reputations.

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I am a bit surprised there has not been more attention paid in the blogworld to the recent demise of Italian food group Parmalat, one of the country's largest businesses employing more than 35,000 people. The firm, due to problems centering around its debt and some allegedly dodgy investment decisions, is on the brink of falling down a deep black hole.

Now, there are certain specific features of the story that pertain only to Italy and Italians. But more broadly, this saga also reminds us of how, in the higher reaches of the corporate world, accounting standards are falling short. In fact, there appear to be no standards at all.

I am sure readers will recall how the American model of capitalism was mocked for its supposedly laissez-faire nature at the time of the Enron, WoldCom and other collapses. A certain smug tone was detected in the pages of European newspapers. Well, now we have a prime example of Enronitis in Europe. Of course, European business shenanigans have been legion - witness the Byzantine affairs of French banking group Credit Lyonnais, for example. And the accounting practises of the European Commission are also a wonder to behold.

Maybe Parmalat will, however, instill a little humility among editors of European business news channels. There's always hope.

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I made a very brief trip to Belgium at the end of a trip to Amsterdam last year. On that occasion I spent a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. My great discovery on that trip was the extraordinary quality of Belgian beer. I spent a tremendous evening in 't Brugs Beertje in Bruges, sometimes referred to as "the best bar in Belgium", which on that occasion was filled with English beer buffs. (The best kind, quite possibly). On that trip, I passed Antwerp in a train, and from my guide book and what people told me, I got the impression I had missed somewhere good.

And, as it happens, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Ashford opened recently, giving me the chance to travel through Kent at over 200 km/h. I was able to both try this out and see Antwerp last weekend. I had an evening in Bruges and then a day and a half in Antwerp. The drinking in Bruges section of the trip I have documented already.

But the next day I did get to Antwerp.

The first thing I discovered is that the city has one of the more beautiful railway stations I have encountered. It is a single arch train shed, not quite London St Pancras but beautiful just the same, and for similar reasons. Brussels is essentially a French city, Bruges is a medieval Hanseatic League anachronism that was sort of stranded in time when the estuary of the river Zwin silted up in the 16th century, and Antwerp is the Dutch (Flemish) city where all the traders went when this happened.

One problem though is that Antwerp Central is a terminal station, rather than an intermediate stop on a line. Trains from Brussels to Amsterdam do not come into the centre of Antwerp but stop at a station on the edge of the city. (It was apparently not properly appreciated in the 19th century that however important the city was, it was essentially an intermediate stop, or at least would become one). This is being fixed, as a rail tunnel is being built under Antwerp to take TGV trains. Through trains will stop at new platforms underneath the existing ones. Heaven knows what this is costing to build, but it will certainly improve transport to and from Antwerp. (Brussels once had the same problem, but a tunnel under the city was completed around 50 years ago).

Anyway, Antwerp itself. For historical regions I do not fully understand, the Dutch speaking world is full of Argentinian steak houses.

Antwerp Cathedral is one of the most beautiful I have seen, especially on the inside. (There are four original Rubens paintings - Antwerp was his home city). This photo doesn't come close to doing the building justice.

It feels more planned than many great cathedrals, some of which tend to be a hodge podge of styles, with the key thing being to make the building as large as possible. Not so much this one. It is pretty large, however.

Like any major port, the city has lots of ethnic colour. I wasn't careful and thus had lunch in an Egyptian restaurant rather than the Turkish restaurant I had intended. The food was good though.

The Belgian Congo (initially the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had ironically managed to get control of it in the first place by presenting himself as a great humanitarian) was perhaps the most brutal colonial enterprise of them all. Essentially, at the end of the 19th century the colony was turned into a slave labour rubber plantation by King Leopold and his men. Over a thirty year period the population of the colony was reduced from 20 million to 10 million. The level of brutality is hard to imagine. People who are interested in the story should read this or (for the same story told in the broader context of African colonialism) this. The ships bringing back rubber and other extraordinary bounty from the Congo sailed into the port of Antwerp, up the river Scheldt. There are raised promendes on the sides of the river which were erected at the time, so that people could watch ships arriving with African bounty.

The brutality was exposed by a passionate English advocate of free trade named Henry Morel, who founded the Congo Reform Movement after observing that the ships sailing into Antwerp were full of rubber and other things of great value. The ships going out contained nothing of value, except for some firearms and ammunition. From this Morel (correctly) deduced that the only explanation was slave labour. (The practice in the Congo was truly mindblowingly barbaric. One of its more notable practices was to demand that the men enforcing the collection of rubber from Africans bring back a severed human hand for every bullet they were issued with, to demonstrate that the bullet had not been "wasted").

You can see remnants of the Congo trade today.

There are no bridges across the river at Antwerp, perhaps because of all the shipping. As I said, Antwerp is one of the busiest ports in Europe. Most of the port is downstream from the city, but a little is upstream. No doubt a larger proportion of it was once upstream. If anything, the city is a touch like Hamburg in layout.

And of course at least some of the Congo bounty (at least that portion that did not end up in the hands of Leopold's mistress' pimp) was used to build ornate public works throughout Belgium - museums, opera houses, and other monuments to King Leopold.

Like at most major ports, containerisation has moved the ships downstream from the city. Unfortunately I did not see most of it. But, if anything, the city is a touch like Hamburg in layout, because the river is navigable upstream further than is often the case. There is even a little container port just upstream from the main city.

I do love a container port in the evening.

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Back to Brussels for the first time since 1990 (and the first time since 1988 for more than 24 hours).

The racism is worse than I expected, especially on the part of Flemish speakers against French speakers (not just Walloons). The little things like shop opening hours, the lack of intelligence of policemen, the incompetence or unhelpfulness of bus drivers, trigger my French prejudices about Belgium being a sort of Franco-Dutch nation of retards. Partly it's the accent and the slow-paced speech. A Belgian professor of mathematics with an IQ of 180 describing integrated calculus would sound like a dimwit to a French person.

It is all the more strange for the attractiveness of the central districts of the town. Belgium is an ancient centre of capitalism: at one time Antwerp was the world's largest trading centre and either Ghent or Brussels (I forget which) is supposed to have the oldest stock exchange in the world. There is architectural evidence of this: the older houses of Brussels are very individually designed, there was clearly a lot of wealth around in the 17th century, and there are more statues per square mile than any other city I can think of (and most of them look pretty good).

White beggars in Belgium speak at least three languages: French, Flemish and English, they often also speak at least a smattering of a couple of either Dutch, German, Turkish or Arabic. The non-white beggars didn't speak to me (is this an indication that whites don't give them money willingly?). As usual in Europe, the East Europeans doing the low-status jobs are ridiculously overqualified: engineering school graduates working as garbage collectors or cleaners, bar staff with medical qualifications.

In one respect Brussels is far superior to Paris: there are street kiosks in the town centre where one can buy snails, as well as the gauffre (waffle) and crèpe sellers that have been exported to other cities. One nastier thing is that in France I can go to a hotel, pay cash, give a false name and show no ID, whereas Belgium seems to have the old surveillance society trick of requiring all visitors to register their ID (this used to include staying at private addresses, but I don't know if that still formally applies). Another bad thing is the police sirens are the same as in London: the stupid loud whooping noises designed for a grid road city that are confusing in cramped city streets. Parisian sirens are less noisy, don't pump the adrenalin of police drivers as much (I would love to know if there are fewer fatal road accidents caused by Paris police responding to emergency calls than London), and you can tell where they're coming from.

I made a walk-in visit to an Emergency Room to arrange for a prescription and found a compromise between the British National Health Service (queue, grubby surroundings) and France (helpful, competent and much, much, much faster, but one pays). The price of the medication was cheaper than in the UK. I shall make enquiries about gun laws and taxes. The disturbing evidence so far is the number of notices about taxes. It is easier to find information about registering for taxes than finding a decent street map of Brussels.

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In the midst of a vast, arid desert of small-minded envy and zero-sum culture, there emerges a little oasis of cool, clear refreshing sanity:

The Swiss economy has faced hard times in the past few years. One canton, Schaffhausen, is doing something about it by changing its tax law to attract wealthy people. Beginning in January 2004, Schaffhausen will replace its system of increasing marginal tax rates on income with a system of degressive marginal rates. The cantonal tax rate will be set at just under 8 percent for income of SFr 100,000. It will rise to a peak of 11.5 percent for income between SFr 600,000 and SFr 800,000. Thereafter, the marginal rate declines with each incremental chunk of income: 10 percent at SFr 1,300,000; 8 percent at SFr 3,000,000; and just over 6 percent for income more than SFr 10,000,000. This is a true incentive-based tax system—the larger one's income, the lower one's marginal rate.

Seems that the penny (or the Franc) has dropped in one small corner of one small country. They have realised that penalising success is a pretty good way of guaranteeing failure.

Schaffhausen has its own legislative parliament, which contains eighty deputies representing all regions within the canton. Eight political parties compete for these seats. Evidently Schaffhausen's voters support a tax cut that gives the greatest benefits to the richest people. They believe that attracting wealthy individuals to reside in their midst is good for everyone.

And they are right.

[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the link.]

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Brave, crusading, iconoclastic Guardian correspondent Matthew Tempest is striking out against the evil, right-wing, corporate-media conspiracy that is actively suppressing the truth:

It's an unthinking, immutable truth for the mainstream media that young people are not interested in politics.

So, if they were permitted to read about it, many of that media's consumers/readers would be surprised to learn that today something like 60,000 mostly twentysomething people from all over Europe will gather in Paris, unpaid, in their own time...

No-one is permitted to read about this. It is unclean. It is seditious. It is dangerous propoganda and, I swear, if you even cast your eyes over so much as a single sentence of it, your door will be knocked down and you will be dragged away by the jackbooted goons of the Bushista-Berlusconi-Murdoch Mind-Control Reich and subjected to continuous loops of Fox News until your eyeballs explode.

...to sit through four days, 10 hours a day, of..

Nose-picking, navel-gazing and self-abuse.

...lectures, seminars and talks on politics.

Same thing.

And it's not just any old politics. The topics are largely esoteric, complex and abstract...

Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.

Until today, the ESF had almost no coverage in the mainstream British media.

Well, what do you expect? Nobody dare speak of such things, lest they be 'eliminated' by the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent Zionist-Corporate-Illuminati World Control Machine.

The event is the European Social Forum...

No kidding?!!

The ESF (slogan: A Europe of Rights and a World Without War) is, admittedly, a tricky topic to cover. Fascinating as the planned speeches and seminars may be, it doesn't translate easily into "hold the front page" breaking news.

Oh I don't know. Surely all it takes is a little imagination. Let's see, here is the itinerary which includes "Sustainable methods of production and consumption, ecology and preservation of the ecosystem". Need to translate that into a tabloid headline? Easy. "Save the Bamboo Forests, Start Eating Pandas."

No (immediate) changes to the world will be visible by Sunday, when it closes.

And no changes to underwear will be visible any time this decade.

With that in mind, this reporter will be filing a daily weblog, chronicling the events as they happen, who I talk to, bump in to, and, not least, how well I sleep at the "crash accommodation" - a so far undisclosed gymnasium floor somewhere in Paris.

Er, Matthew, I get this distinct feeling that you're going to be bedding down in a 'so far undisclosed' shop doorway.

First of all, though, is the Eurostar, and a train journey I'm looking forward to.

At least he will be able to get some sleep.

Instead, there will be 300 of us commandeering a carriage or two, with political theorist and global justice guru George "Moonbat" Monbiot (that's the nickname his rightwing critics give him) giving a lecture on the train...

CONDUCTOR: "Tickets, please?"

MONBIOT: "Do you realise that, by demanding a ticket from me, you are, in fact, acting as the unwitting pawn of the global capitalist conspiracy to exploit the underprivileged and suppress the democratic rights of the world's native peoples?"

CONDUCTOR: "Oh they're right. You are a Moonbat."

...before a hip-hop act takes over for an impromptu gig under the Channel.

So 'impromptu' that it has been meticulously planned in advance.

Revealing that I'm reporting on the event for the Guardian is on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis, for fear of being lynched for the sins of my colleagues. That's a slight exaggeration, but for the reasons just stated, many of the activists regard the mainstream media, even (or especially) the Guardian and Independent, according to the Noam Chomsky doctrine - as a safety valve by which the state-corporate nexus maintains its stranglehold on information through the existence of a fringe "liberal" media.

Oh my gosh, the Guardian and the Independent are both in on it, too. They are mere tools of the Right-wing-Bush-Hitler-Corporate-Nazi Programme of Social Control and Dissent Crushing.

STOP. DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE. DO NOT FOLLOW ANY OF THE LINKS. IT IS ILLEGAL. YOU WILL BE CAUGHT AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED.

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The 'fraudster' meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac. The new president of the European Central Bank is M. Jean-Claude Trichet and buried away at the foot of an old news report is this gem:

Mr Trichet's nomination was made possible earlier this week when he was cleared of involvement in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in the 1990s. He was one of nine men on trial for their part in the affair, which culminated in a €31bn ($33.7bn) bailout by the government.

That is more than £21,000,000,000! For one bank. Nine people. I can just hear them: "Bah! Nick Leeson! "Betsygate" indeed! You English drive your minis with your Benny Hill and your Michael Caine, stealing a few gold bars in Milan and think you're so marvellous! Hah!"

The Crédit Lyonnais bank 'affair' included a massive fraud including loans being made to friends of the late president François Mitterand. At least one of them got a few months in jail to my knowledge. A concerted effort was made to delay the appointment of a new ECB president until M. Trichet's problems could be dealt with. Ironically, the French verb for to cheat is tricher which is pronounced exactly the same as our new Euro bank president's name. A very suitable friend for M. Jacques Chirac. The president whose unofficial re-election campaign slogan was Vote for the fraudster, not the fascist! but who has avoided judicial processes by virtue of presidential immunity from prosecution. So much in common for them to talk about.

Now let us assume that M. Trichet were the innocent victim of devious bank subordinates who stole £21,000 million. Personally, I find such a degree of stupidity fantastic: the guy could scarcely have enough brain cells to know how to breathe. Is this really the calibre of executive to put in charge of an EU institution?

A couple of other things worry me. What did the other European leaders think they were doing when none of then vetoed the appointment of Trichet? Perhaps Mr Blair really is a closet hater of the euro - I hope so. And if the currency markets are not dumping euros for US dollars before M. Chirac's friends get their pillaging underway... what do they know about what the Federal Reserve guys are up to?

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Italy has just had a major blackout.

Let's see now... USA, UK, Italy... I wonder if Spain has had one yet? Each blackout has a prosaic explanation, but taken all at once this rash of failures flags these blackouts unusual in a statistical sense if nought else.

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At the risk of inviting opprobrium, I must admit that the murder of Anna Lindh did have me reaching for the tin-foil to wrap around my head.

Even with the solid support of the entire Swedish political class, the 'yes' camp was still trailing the 'no' camp in every single opinion poll and it did briefly cross my mind that a 'heroic sacrifice' might have been arranged to swing the vote. The stakes here are certainly high enough.

But, on balance, probably not. Political assassination is common enough in Europe not to have to ascribe a conspiracy to this one. Even if there was more to her murder than meets the eye, it didn't work. The Swedes voted 'no' to the Euro.

On any reading this is a blow for the EU project and the coming weeks will see a deluge of federast seething, threatening and whining. Their will has been thwarted and that it just intolerable. They will even try to float the notion that the result of the Swedish referendum was 'undemocratic'. I also expect the Swedish government to begin agitating for another referendum to get the desired result but, given the margin of the 'no' victory, they may not get away with that.

Quite aside from all the furore and recriminations that are bound to follow, I wonder if this could be the catalyst which leads to the unravelling of the whole project. It isn't very likely but neither is it altogether impossible. In fact, I quite like the idea of a 'Euro-Watch' sweepstake: who will be the first to bail out of the Euro?

For the record, my money (sterling!) is on the French. The Germans will stick with it because they have always had an emotional investment in the European project. It enables them to be 'Europeans' and thus serves to expiate their guilt about being German. They will endure a lot more economic pain before they begin to think the unthinkable.

But not the French. For them, the EU has always been about advancing their national interests. All the kumbaya mummery about a united Europe is just window-dressing to disguise the self-serving reality. If it looks like wrecking their economy (or, more particularly, it begins biting into the privileges of the political class) the French will simply dump the Euro and swan off to look for another boondoggle.

Not inevitable by any means, but possible. In anticipation, I would like to extend my thanks to the Swedish electorate. They may just have done us a great favour.

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The Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, has died from stab wounds inflicted while she was shopping in the centre of Stockholm. This rather macabre and brutal incident, the murder of a prominent Pro-Euro politician by attacker unknown, reminds us, as in the case of Pim Fortuyn, that the ideas we discuss on blogs like Samizdata, can often go far beyond mere words. Anna Lindh's death will have repercussions on the future of Europe, which will also go far beyond mere words. Whatever they are, I can only offer my heartfelt sympathy to her family, her friends, and her colleagues, and hope the perpetrator of this appalling crime is brought to justice swiftly. It should never come to this.

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Yesterday the Telegraph published an interesting account of life in Italy, namely Rome. The author opens his article with the following paragraph:

"How lucky you are to be living in Italy." "That must be heaven." "I do envy you." If you live in Rome, as I do, you get used to comments like these. But you soon realise that the idyllic vision of Italy suffers from just one drawback: it is almost complete rubbish.

I must admit this caught my attention since Rome has long been my favourite place of escape for a long weekend. The scenery, food, wine, weather, shopping... Indeed, what's there not to like?

For the first few months after you move here, all is indeed perfect. The sun is warm, the people are welcoming, the language is a joy, the food is delicious, the wine is cheap, and everyone is a pleasure to look at. You congratulate yourself on your wisdom and you pity your friends who are still locked up in their grey, northern offices.

The enchantment, however, does not last long:

But then you begin to realise that in this new paradise you face a major problem: it is virtually impossible to earn a living. Take Rome. To live here with a minimum of dignity (renting a small flat, eating out occasionally, but no car and no proper holidays), you need a good 3,000 euros a month pre-tax, say 1,800 euros post-tax (roughly £2,100 and £1,250 respectively). However modest this seems, it is not what you will get. While in the Anglo-Saxon world most adults expect to be able to live independently off their salaries, in Italy most don't. They stay with their families. Indeed, a staggering 70 per cent of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live in subsidised comfort at home, where their meagre earnings do very nicely as pocket money. And when they do move out to the stability of marriage or cohabitation, it is generally into a flat that is provided by the family.

...after a while, you begin to appreciate the true cost of the many undoubted joys of living in Italy. You realise, for example, that the flip-side of the cheerful noise and chaos is the mind-boggling complication of life here, the Italian inability - no, refusal - to organise anything or to think ahead.

How does the EU fit into the picture?

In other words, Italy is, in many ways, a banana republic. That is why, until recently - until they realised what a forlorn hope it was - the Italians were so mightily keen on the EU: they were praying that Brussels would save them from themselves. As a British ambassador once said to me: "Italy? No one takes it seriously. The place is a joke."

And finally, there is the conclusion that Luigi Barzini came to 40 years ago at the end of The Italians, his classic portrait of the nation:

The Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse. It would be a success of sorts if at least it made Italians happy. It does not. Its effects are costly, flimsy and short-range. The people enjoy its temporary advantages, to be sure, without which they could not endure life, but are constantly tormented by discontent The unsolved problems pile up and inevitably produce catastrophes at regular intervals. The Italians always see the next one approaching with a clear eye but cannot do anything to ward it off. They can only play their amusing games and delude themselves for a while.

Interesting... Any comments, insights or opinions?

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I recently returned from an extremely relaxing weekend in the fine Spanish city of Barcelona with my girlfriend. I have fallen for the great Catalan metropolis, the home of the weird and wonderful architecture of Gaudi.

During a stroll around the old city centre, I came across one of the most astonishing shops I have ever seen. It was a shop selling just about every kind of sword, knife and gun. Samurai swords nestled among racks of old Winchester repeater rifles, copies of 15th century broadswords, cutlasses, calvalry sabres, hunting knives, old pistols. Amazing.

I do not speak Spanish very well, so I wasn't able to discover from the shop owner as to what kind of laws exist in Spain regulating the sale of such weapons, but it was clear that laws in Spain are far, far more liberal than is the case in Britain. And on the basis of trips to other parts of Continental Europe, it would appear that the law is also more liberal than in the UK.

Why this is so is something on which I don't have an easy answer. Spain is a country less infected, so it seems to me, by political correctness and the culture of 'victimhood'. Whatever else you think of it as an activity, a country that embraces bullfighting as one of its most popular 'sports' clearly has not fallen under the rule of Guardianistas (although I find bullfighting pretty revolting).

We often slip into the comforting notion that we in the free Anglosphere are so much less regulated than our European peers, and in the realm of business and finance, this is true, on the whole. But let's give credit where credit is due. It appears that in certain aspects of life, Europe is actually more liberal.

Oh, and the tapas tasted fantastic.

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Just over a decade ago, the US and the EU conspired to conduct what has proved to be a very successful war against low-tax jurisdictions and banking secrecy. Under a fig-leaf of a campaign to eradicate 'drug-dealing' and 'terrorism' (but truthfully to maintain the integrity of their various state-welfare arranagements) they employed a combination of legislation, diplomacy and outright bullying to effectively hobble (and, in some cases, shut down) the Western offshore-investment industry.

As expected, the EU went further in this war than the US where the 'anti-money laundering' regime metastasised into a ludicrous campaign against what they called 'unfair tax competition'.

Well, now the chicks are coming home to roost. Or, more accurately, they are flying the nest:

The world's major private banks are beefing up operations in Singapore, anticipating that up to a trillion US dollars worth of offshore assets in Europe may be looking for a new home in the next couple of years.

Changes in banking secrecy and tax laws due to take effect in the European Union from 2005 are expected to encourage offshore investors in traditional havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg to start moving their money to other centres.

Singapore, with its stable political system and excellent infrastructure, is seen getting a big share of this money.

"We have estimated that from Europe about a trillion plus could be highly movable without too much difficulty," said Roman Scott, vice-president at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). "Some of those guys are going to say; 'I need an offshore centre that's not going to be squeezed down'.

All the European places are being squeezed. You can't go into the US, so you suddenly start to look at Asia as attractive," he said.

Western political elites are rather like heroin-addicts. No amount of argument, persuasion or reason will do anything to deter them from their narcotic fix.

Lessons generally have to be learned the hard way.

[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

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I defy anybody to refer to this guy as a chickenhawk:

A Danish pizzeria owner who refused to sell pizzas to Germans or Frenchmen because of their governments' stance on the war in Iraq is to go to prison.

An appeal court upheld the conviction yesterday of Niels-Aage Bjerre for discrimination and his fine of £500. He said he would refuse to pay and will instead spend eight days in jail.

"I will not pay the fine but I'll do the time instead," said Bjerre. "It is a matter of principle."

Now, speaking personally, I regard the boycotting of individuals as rather unfair and petty. Having said that, Mr.Bjerre should not be prosecuted for doing so.

Mind you, I bet if look the word 'defiant' up in the dictionary you'll find this guy's photograph underneath.

He said yesterday that both the courts and those who had reported him to the authorities were "traitors".

"The judges have chosen to support those who do not support the official Danish position on the war against Iraq."

His boycott would end only "if the governments of France and Germany change their attitude toward the United States and support Washington wholeheartedly," he added.

He's not just a restaurateur, he's a neo-restaurateur.

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After nearly a decade in which many Big Government restrictions have been lifted from Ireland, helping turn it into the Celtic Tiger, it seems Big G is back again.

Irish pub landlords will now be fined up to thousands of pounds if they allow their customers to become drunk (no, I'm not kidding). Happy hours are also banned, when landlords can decide what prices to charge for their drinks, at any particular time of day.

This should raise another nice little line of regulation for another bunch of twerpish bureaucrats to supervise, rather than working for a living, interfering once again in the market trade process of exchanged goods.

Pub landlords will also be deemed responsible for anyone who is drunk, after they have left their premises. Which is nice. It seems even Ireland, for millennia a land of little or no government, is getting Big G back with a vengeance.

If we dug a little further would you suspect the EU is under this somewhere? I wonder...

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I just did a little talk spot on the radio, jabbering away about politics with a guy called Mike Dickin, who, in addition to doing his fare share of sport talk, takes care of the political chat on Talk Sport Radio. I'm doing little spots with Mike Dickin quite often at the moment, although usually at very short notice. When I typed "Mike Dickin" and "Talk Sport Radio" into google, this came up as entry number two, out of just ten. I don't know what that proves exactly. Perhaps that most of the people who listen to Mike Dickin are too old or too poor to be bothering with the internet.

Mike Dickin is what we here would call a Carr-ite. The world's going to hell but what the hell can we do about it? "I don't trust the police. I don't trust social workers. I don't trust any of the people to whom I pay such vast sums of money to take care of things" - that's what he was saying today in his intro. In among agreeing with him about state over-regulation and the state crowding out individual initiative, I tried to put in an optimistic word along the lines of "you can still do some things – it's not all misery". He replied "Maybe you can, but I'm starting to think seriously that you can't do it here any more?" "So where can you?" I said. I can't remember what he replied, but no specific locations were mentioned.

During our brief conversation, I accused Dickin, politely I hope, of being a fine example of the Baby Boom generation having entered its Grumpy Grandad phase. When the Baby Boom was a teenager it told the world it had invented sex. When it got its first job it and started driving about in a flash car it told the world that it had invented the idea of getting a job and driving about in a flash car. And now the Baby Boom is starting to creep away to the pub where it booms forth to anyone who will listen that the world is going to hell, and that young people these day, blah blah blah.

However, it occurs to me that I might just as fruitfully have identified the particular way in which the State now makes a mess of our lives as having lilkewise entered its Grandad phase, or to be more exact its Grandma phase.

When young people use politics to wreck lives, they do it by shouting at you with megaphones, by yelling big vague words at you like "Freedom!", "Revolution!", "Democracy!", "Peace!", Participation!", and of course, by way of justifying all this, they generally also yell something like: "Socialism!". If they shout their way into a position of real power, they get hold of the most impressive old people they can find and of whom they are most jealous, and they sit them in chairs and stand around them in a circle and yell big words like these at them, until the old persons are blubbering wrecks. This is what the Red Guards of Red China did to their elders and betters during their infamous Cultural Revolution, and I had a close enough look at their ideological cousins in western Universities when I was a sociology student at Essex University in the seventies to know that our would-be Red Guards would have done something like this to their professors and betters if they could have.

But when Grandma makes life hell for you, she doesn't do it with generalities like "Freedom" or "Democracy", or even "Socialism". With Grandma, the hell she inflicts on you is done with a relentless stream of detail. Don't talk like that! Beans aren't supposed to go on that bit of the plate. Here, let me do that, you're doing it all wrong! And when Grandma uses politics to make life hell for you, the laws and diktats she throws at you are not tyrannical in their vagueness. Rather are they tyrannical in their relentless volume and their relentless detail.

Young people use the grandiose vagueness of political ideology to even the argumentative score with the oldies they are up against. Detail (by which they often mean experience) doesn't matter, they say. What matters is the Grand Principles. What matters is the simple list of Big Ideas against which all the Old People type detail can be checked and found wanting. But old people, when they hold the political whip, smother the young in detail.

Looked at in this light, the much trumpetted "New" left, "New" Labour shunning of ideology looks rather different and rather more sinister and creepy. A major paradox of New Labour is that although it is feebler and more timid in the Big Word aspect of socialism than any previous left-inclined government that I can remember, the volume of legislated complaint and nit-picking that it is presiding over is unprecedented.

Looking beyond Britain and across the channel, I also see something very Grandparental about the EU. In France, which I visited earlier this year, I got the palpable feeling that I was in a sort of giant old people's home. France is beautiful. France does, in its own fuss-pot pretty-pretty way, work. It photographs beautifully. It makes a lovely calendar, practically everywhere you look. But if you are a entrepreneurially inclined twenty year old, God help you, because France will be no damn use to you. You can be a waiter. You can wipe old people's bottoms in old people's homes. You can sell little cakes in a little cake shop, the one run by your grandparents. And that is pretty much it, if you aren't qualified enough to join the predator class by going to that Ecole Normal SUPERIEUR thing, or some similar place. At present, although I don't know how long this will last, if you are a French person of spirit and you want to make anything of your life, step one is to come to London. That's right, for a lot of French kids now, this is the country you flee to,

In my last Samizdata posting I pointed towards lawyers as one of the sources of the current maniacally meddlesome state. Commenters pointed out that there were other forces at work, and that a lot of the government lawyers now churning out laws were merely doing what their client wanted. So why does the client now want so many laws, and of such meticulous annoyingness, while in public claiming that socialism has nothing to do with it and its just commonsense and doing things the way they should be done?

The state is never your friend, but the kind of enemy it is varies from decade to decade. I think another part of the story is the particular style that the Baby Boom has imparted to state annoyingness as it has got older. This definitely makes sense to me.

I know. What comes next? It's a horrible thought, isn't it. The senile state. The great grandad and great grandma state. The state with its short term memory shot to hell. ("Never mind what I said yesterday!! Bring me my stick!! I want to go to Birmingham!!" "But Gran, you're already in Birmingham." "Bank robbing should be illegal!! It's got to stop!! Stop it!! Stop it!!" "Gran, bank robbing already is illegal.") And then eventually, the state just lying in a bed, breathing with extreme difficulty and running up a huge medical bill, fed with tubes.

I remember once talking with a priest – the father a school friend of mine – about a stint he did in Norfolk or some such rural place, and he told me that although the people there would never admit it straight out to a priest, as a result of such things as arms-folded silently meaningful eye contact what he became convinced they did with old people who had become extremely annoying and nothing else was smother them with pillows.

So, in twenty years time, we smother the state with a pillow? Or, the modern equivalent, we rip out the tubes and unplug the machines? This also makes sense to me.

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A British mother and her two sons were given jail sentences yesterday, less than four days after they were arrested for allegedly attacking an Athens shopkeeper.

During a four-hour hearing at Athens criminal court the main prosecution evidence was read, with no opportunity for cross-examination. Police statements were contradictory and the British defendants had only five minutes each to state their case.

The family believes it has been the victim of a Greek backlash against the drunken and lewd behaviour of young British holidaymakers on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu.

We are being made scapegoats for the antics of hooligans on some of the islands. There have been despicable occurrences on the islands, but we are not that type of people.

No forensic evidence was presented, although it had been stated that Mr Karamichalous was bleeding heavily after the brothers kicked him.

The metal bar referred to both by the Britons and Mr Karamichalous was not recovered from the scene. Although the Johnsons had been locked up since the early hours of Sunday, officers did not take a statement from any of them.

Their only opportunity to give their side of the story was when each took the stand for about five minutes.

Regardless of the facts of the case, of which I have no detailed knowledge, the speed and manner in which the family of Britons living in Greece were sentenced smacks of political and nationalist gestures. Their prosecution is seen as backlash against the loutish behaviour of British tourists on Greece's holiday islands. The case has made headline news in Greece where the Johnsons' story has been illustrated with photographs and footage of British tourists misbehaving on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu.

Blimey! The Greek legal system makes the British courts seem like the pinnacle of civilisation.

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Although this article was published a week ago, I doubt it is out of date. Andrew Osborn speaks of his and other Belgians' encounters with the country's small army of fonctionnaires.

Armed with a battery of Dickensian stamps, a rulebook as obtuse as it is thick and the mindset of Cruella De Vil, they do their best to make the life of the ordinary citizen a special Belgian form of hell.

Apparently, in Brussels, you can end up in court for taking your rubbish out a day early.

Put it out on the wrong day or in the wrong type of bag and you are likely to bring down the entire weight of the Belgian establishment on you. A friend recently received a letter saying she had been fined 80 euros (£57) for putting her bin bags out a day early.

But how did they know it was her rubbish? The "rubbish police" of course: enclosed with the demand for 80 euros were grubby photocopies the police had made of letters addressed to her which they had scrupulously recovered from the offending bin bag. Big Brother, it seems, is alive and living in a suburb of Brussels. In order to contest the fine she had to appear before a special "bin bag" tribunal and explain that a neighbour had erroneously put it out for her.

Failure to sort your rubbish into a choice of three different coloured bin bags is also a serious offence. In normal circumstances, that would be understandable, highly laudable, and a real fillip for Belgium's environmental credentials. But it isn't: all the bags are thrown in the back of the same truck and then thrown onto the same dump. The Belgians, it is explained, are merely trying to get people into good habits before they start properly recycling the rubbish themselves.

The Belgians are taxed on the most ludicrous items. Who works out which ones they should be?

The issue on which Belgian officials outdo themselves is tax. Own a car radio? You had better make sure you're paying the special car radio tax, and don't try to pretend that you haven't got one. They know.

Want to open an office in Brussels? Then make sure you're paying your computer screen tax. Just count up the screens and tell the authorities and they'll send you a bill.

The most poignant example of the kind of mentality that is threatening to engulf Britain is the depressing lack of humanity of the rule and those who enforce them. A long-term resident gloomily describes his trip to a Belgian police station to complain about being woken up by builders illegally starting work at 6.30am:

"Do you have your identity card Monsieur?" (mandatory in Belgium).

"Well, no, it's 7am and I've forgotten it. I've just woken up. Sorry."

"Monsieur, that's an infraction of the penal code. You're breaking the law."

We often complain that the British officials are robotic, impersonal and inefficient. And yes, they are. But they cannot compete with the spawn of the Belgian officialdom.

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Having already done most of my schoolboy sniggering in private (although I reserve the right to indulge it again at a later date) I think I can now bring myself to say a few (semi) serious things about this:

Belgian legislators are hoping to bring that to a close with a parliamentary bill that would draw prostitutes into the legal fold and bring the industry under state control, providing sex workers with labour rights and greater health protection.

But for a fee.

The sex workers themselves would be expected to pay up when the tax man calls - boosting state coffers to the tune of an estimated 50 million euros a year.

It represents an attractive option for a country currently struggling to balance its budget deficit - a means of generating money while affording prostitutes better protection.

Not so much legalisation then as part-nationalisation and while it would be nice to imagine that Belgium's lawmakers have been driven by a genuinely liberal impulse it is more likely that they have been prompted by the desire to get their sticky mitts on all that revenue.

However, I think complaints would be out of order. The trade in (ahem) 'personal' services between adults is not a crime and should not be treated as one, so although they may have to hand over a chunk of their earnings to the state at least the prostitutes (and their clients) will have been freed from the constant threat of arrest and prosecution. That is a good thing.

Aside from the fact that we can now justifiably and factually regard them as pimps, the Belgian government would undoubtedly argue that they cannot legitimise the sex industry without subjecting it to the same taxes that every other legitimate industry is forced to stump up. Nor should it be overlooked that gangster protection may prove cheaper than the Belgian state but tax-inspectors generally do not use razors as a means of enforcement.

I sincerely hope that HMG decides to follow the Belgian example on this issue but I don't expect they will do so anytime soon. Even in this day and age there is still a deeply-ingrained Sabbatarian disapproval of 'bawdiness' in this country that manifests itself as a very noisy and effective 'no' lobby at the merest mention of relaxing the laws on prostitution. I wish it were not so because even a taxed-and-regulated sex industry would be an improvement on the current arrangements.

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There are probably several books worth of analysis here but, at first glance, I cannot decide if this is an example of the left trying to appeal to Islam or Muslims trying to appeal to the left:

An Islamic conference in the Spanish city of Granada has called on Muslims around the world to help bring about the end of the capitalist system.

The call came at a conference titled 'Islam in Europe' attended by about 2,000 Muslims.

On the face of it, it looks like Muslims nailing their colours firmly to the marxist mast but, on closer examination, that may not actually be the case because it appears that the ringleaders here are not Arabs or Africans but European converts:

Mr Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim, called on all followers of Islam to stop using western currencies such as the dollar, the pound and the euro and instead to return to the use of the gold dinar.

The conference also heard from Abu Bakr Rieger, a German Muslim.

He said Islam could only be practised in Europe in a traditional way, not in one adapted to European values and structures.

It is entirely possible that these peope have converted to Islam our of a sense of sincere conviction but it is equally possible that they are anti-Western revolutionaries who, thirty years ago, would have joined the Red Brigade or the Bader-Meinhoff gang. For them, Islam is now the best and most accessible means of publicly rejecting Western enlightenment values as wella s providing a far bigger and more respectable fig-leaf behind which they can play out all of their psychoses.

If that is the case, then maybe it is not so much a case of Islam overunning Europe but Europe overunning Islam.

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With his surname partially derived from the Gods, and his standing as an Englishman of Scottish descent, you may already know I love Iain Duncan Smith, beyond the edge of reason. But yesterday, in Prague, he ripped open his long silence, on the European issue, and moved to lead the Europe-wide revolt against the long-planned socialist super state. Which, for those of us in the "Get out of Here" Euro-nexus, within the Tory party, is excellent news; it confirms our faith, in why we voted him in, as leader.

As the Maastricht rebel leader strutted his stuff, he even picked up a favourable review from Alastair Campbell's scoop-favoured creatures on The Sun. Trevor Kavanagh, their maverick political commentator, feared by the Downing Street lie machine, and a man, by order of Rupert, beyond the reach of Labour-supporting editor Rebekah Wade, also said about Duncan Smith:

Europe will hear him and Britain will agree

In my opinion, IDS is the bravest man, in British politics, from the entire period of the last 30 years. Can you imagine having woken up, every morning, for the last two years, and then been forced to view the world through his semi-oriental eyes? He has been vilified, pilloried, and humiliated, in every newspaper, on every Channel 4 news programme, and on every BBC web page — virtually every single day — for being a charisma-less, hopeless, and witless fool. But he has come through this burning fire, to nudge ahead of Phoney Tony in the polls, much to the incredulous bafflement of the New Labour-Guardian-BBC aristocracy, which rules this once glorious, and sceptred isle.

It's a fragile lead, admittedly, and there's still a lot more work for IDS to finish, to cement it in; even assuming it's not Gordon Brown who ends up as the initial beneficiary, from Tony's fall; and yes, it's a shame about that bovine statism, inherent within the general Tory Party; and yes, I would prefer a straight decision to just get out of the EU Dodge City, right now. But on the topic of Iain Duncan Smith, army officer and gentleman; I am a believer.

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The French and German ministers recently tasked with boosting bilateral cooperation have already agreed on one important point - the need for summer crash courses to learn each other's language. French European Affairs Minister Noelle Lenoir and her German counterpart Hans-Martin Bury said each would spend part of their holidays in the other's country sweating over grammar rules and vocabulary lists.

They met to prepare an October conference bringing together the heads of France's 22 regions and Germany's 16 federal states to discuss boosting cooperation in education, culture, economic development and environmental issues. Lenoir told journalists in French after talks with Bury:

German must gradually become almost as widely spoken and as easily spoken as English is today.

Heh.

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I suppose that, one way or another, this will all get smoothed out in the long run but, nonetheless, we can enjoy it while it lasts:

Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, called off his summer holiday to Italy yesterday, as the worsening row between the countries began to unravel years of carefully orchestrated co-operation at the heart of Europe.

More and faster, please.

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We're all familiar with the popular cartoon caricature of Americans as gun-crazy cowboys who would shoot you as soon as look at you and peaceful, sophisticated, post-history Europeans who only need their directives to keep them safe from harm. In fact, I have lost count of the number of sneering British lefty journalists who prefix every reference to Americans with the words 'gun-toting' as a means of driving home the impression that they are dangerous, violent, atavistic non-communautaire people.

True? Well, probably not:

"Contrary to the common assumption that Europeans are virtually unarmed, an estimated 84 million firearms are legally held in the 15 member states of the EU. Of these, 80 per cent - 67 million guns - are in civilian hands,"

Good gracious! And to think that Tony Blair wants political union with these gun-loving maniacs!

Finland, with its strong hunting tradition, has the most legally registered guns in the EU at 39 per 100 people, the UK has 10 - one third of the German and French figures - and the Netherlands has two. Gun laws are tightest in the UK, the Netherlands and Poland, while France has more legal handguns than the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, England, Wales and Scotland combined.

Just one quibble: there are no legally held handguns in the UK at all so maybe France is not quite as awash with hand cannons as the article would suggest. Nonetheless it is clear that most Europeans have not, in fact, been gripped by the same anti-gun hysteria that has swept over Britain.

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On this day, nearly two hundred years ago, the artillery, cavalry and red coated infantry of Britain, along with their Dutch and Prussian allies, finally put an end to the tyrannical rule of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Belgian wheat fields of Waterloo, near Brussels. It was the Duke of Wellington's greatest triumph.

Given that this blog is of course, such a great fan of the French political class (heh), I trust no readers of this publication would be so vulgar and unsophisticated to point out this salient historical anniversary to their friends and colleagues today.

I just thought you would like to have this titbit of historical information, gentle reader.

"Up Guards, and at 'em!"
- Wellington, June 18th 1815

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As a break from the usual tread-mill of Libertarian Principles, here is a story that best reflects the 'quagmire' Britain got itself into by having anything to do with the EU and the countries using its institutions to their advantage. Despite the ravenous inclusiveness of the European Union, the one thing there is no room left for is common sense.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled that Italian Parma ham must be packed and sliced in Parma itself to be marketed with its name of origin. The Asda supermarket chain has lost its legal battle to carry on selling Italian Parma ham, because it is packed and sliced in Britain.

Asda's Parma ham comes from Parma, but it is sliced and packaged near Chippenham in Wiltshire. Its delicatessen Parma ham also comes from Parma - but is sliced in its stores, in front of the customer. European judges have ruled that this is not enough under EU law to justify using the name.

Maintaining the quality and reputation of Parma ham justifies the rule that the product must be sliced and packaged in the region of production.

According to The Daily Telegraph Asda claimed the Italian law was not part of EU law and could not be applied in the UK, but ham from Parma was registered under a 1992 EU rule protecting the use of geographical names on some products. The battle went to London's High Court, which passed the matter to the Luxembourg judges for a ruling on the EU's Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) law.

The Parma ham producers' association, which owns the trademark Prosciutto di Parma, has been seeking an injunction against Asda since 1997. Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma won the battle despite judge's recommendation to overturn the relevant European regulation and the advice the European Court of Justice received by one of its own members to invalidate the European Union rule.

As Asda representative said last year:

No one doubts that Scotch beef remains Scottish if sliced in Southampton; Jersey potatoes are still Jerseys when boiled in Blackpool; and cheddar cheese is still cheddar if grated in Gretna.

In most cases the court follows such advice, for example, the European court's advocate general delivered a similar opinion in a case brought against a company that grates the hard Italian cheese Grana Padana in France.

Not this time though. When you next eat your Parma, you can rejoice in the knowledge that it has been subjected to the traditionally tough quality control by its Italian producer. I suppose there is a first for everything...

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Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an eco-terrorist, ending what was a truly interesting period of business-not-as-usual in the Netherlands.

Fortuyn was a fascinating man, easy to misunderstand. Both David Carr and I had initially mistaken him as just a Dutch version of French fascist Jean-Marie le Pen, but in fact nothing could have been further from the truth. To have even labelled him as 'right wing' was profoundly uninformative and in many ways down right misleading, revealing more about the commentator doing so that anything about Fortuyn.

One year on and sadly the people who reaped the 'benefit' of Pim Fortuyn death have proved to be the same grey men and women of the orthodox Dutch left and right who have enervated that once dynamic nation, hanging on to an electoral party list system that amounts to the political equivalent of Henry Ford's 'choose any colour, as long as it is black'.

The weed has been pulled out by the roots and nothing disturbs the monoculture of blood red poppies adorning that graveyard which is the political status quo.

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The European Central Bank has said that joining the Euro would mean the end of the free NHS, reports The Times (we do not link to the Times). Apparently the April edition monthly report of the ECB said that:

Governments should distinguish between "essential, privately non-insurable and non-affordable services", such as emergency treatment, and those where "private financing might be more efficient".

In truth, the actual ECB report [pdf file] does not say anything quite so bluntly. The actual report is full of careful conditionals and non-assertions: "governments may have to rise contribution rates", such co-payments could increase efficiency", "pre-financing [of geriatric care] has been proposed" and "It has been argued that setting of budget caps...can improve overall performance". (page 45)

Nonetheless, this report should be taken very seriously. It is the formal monthly report; not a mere research paper or discussion document, but the official view with the imprimatur of the body charged with running the Euro. Given the sanctity of free NHS provision in mainstream British politics, to have its underlying rationale brought into question by a multilateral institution of such power and influence is a political bombshell. We are not talking 'Private Finance Initiative' here; the ECB is suggesting that for most operations patients should arrange their own insurance voluntarily, pay up when they need it, or go without. In suggesting patient co-payments for operations, rather than mere privatisation of provision with continuing government funding, the report goes far further than anything suggested by the Conservatives.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is due to report to Parliament on the 'Five Tests' for Euro membership shortly. Before then there will be a major Labour rebellion on Foundation Hospitals; giving hospitals slightly greater control of their own funds and services is already too radical for many MPs (including, with little concealment, Gordon Brown). This report is therefore also be an amazingly timed intrusion into that debate.

One can imagine the glee with which Iain Duncan-Smith will seize upon this report: he will be able to simultaineously portray the Foundation Hospitals policy as unduly timid, with the full weight of the ECB as 'independent experts', while also saying that the NHS is only 'safe in Tory hands' because of the government's committment in principle to joining the Euro. After all the kerfuffle on IDS' leadership in recent days, I shall be reserving my judgement on his capabilities to see whether he makes real capital out of this absolute gift from Europe.

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As a firm believer in judicial independence, I consider it to be a generally good thing when Courts refuse to be swayed by the capricious impulses of public sentiment. Having said that, I wonder if the Dutch judiciary are going to have cause to regret the perceived leniency they have shown towards the assassin of Pim Fortuyn:

Admirers of the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn struggled to contain their fury yesterday when his self-confessed killer got off "lightly" with an 18-year prison term.

The killing and its overtly ideological nature had persuaded many that the only sentence the judges would dare pass was life.

Regardless of the 'ideological nature', I think a life sentence is wholly appropriate in cases of pre-meditated murder such as this.

Dutch convicts tend to serve only two-thirds of their sentence, and the three judges in Amsterdam made it clear that they believed he should be given a chance to reintegrate in society.

Which means that the perpetrator will actually serve about 10 or 11 years.

Comparing Fortuyn's rise to that of Adolf Hitler, he said he had felt compelled to eliminate him as a favour to the Muslim minority and other vulnerable sections of society.

As with most 'Hitler' comparisons, this one is way over the top. The late Mr.Fortuyn may have had some rather strident views on immigration but nothing I have read about the man suggests that he was any kind of 'blut und boden' ethnic nationalist.

"This is unbelievable," Henk Sonneveld, a member of one of Fortuyn's political vehicles, Leefbaar Rotterdam, told the Guardian.

"We are angry and mad with this. Eighteen years is not enough. In nine or 10 years' time this guy could be walking the streets. It should have been life. Fortuyn was killed for his ideas - think about that."

Yes, I have thought about it and my conclusion is that the ghost of Pim Fortuyn is going to be rattling its chains around Holland for a long time to come.

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One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:

DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ

coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues

And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:

"I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!"

"when the criminals released from prisons of Iraq
most bloody pedophile ones didn't delay
to embrace these uniformed human butchers
Evangelian Jewish coalitioned bastards, followers
same day he killed two children more
"I am cleansing Saddam's guards". explained
when a journalist witnessed him on next deal
manouvred well, joined plunderer masses of thieves
the journalists almost took his group's photo
because he was most active provocator instrument
on all the cold-bloody scenes, what Big Brother needs
to manipulate the opinion centers of the communities
most useful traitor like many other willing whores, everywhere
I saw him when he climbed on Saddan Hussein's statue
like a monkey danced on the ruined wealth of the museums
"democracy saver army" saved such nonsense actors during looting
weared American flag
on an american tank cried
showed his knife and a handfull bloody dollars
yelled like an true Texas jackal:
"I am an American now
I love you Bush double U Sharon!..
from and now I am an AmeeeeriiiiiCoww!.."

These two poets were, for some reason, only following in the footsteps of (I kid you not) "Aisha Maria Oilworkperson", who for equally opaque reasons appended to the same posting, not long after I wrote it, a screed that was somewhat less nasty but in a similar vein. And she has "intifada" in her email address. And you'll see that another blogroach (who wrote at truly psychotic length, as I recall) had to be removed by Perry.

Several thoughts occur to me concerning these various exhibits.

I'm guessing that Mr Brandberger's first language is not English and that he is European. If so, Mr Brandberger, in particular, is the best argument I know for not bothering with racial profiling, because this is suicide bomber talk. Guess/prediction: the next suicide bomber will be a white European, probably from Germany or Scandinavia. If this poem is any sort of clue concerning how a certain sort of person in Europe is thinking, and I'm guessing it is, then we don't only need to be concerned about Muslim nutters or Muslim convert nutters with white skins but middle eastern names. Suicide bombing may be about to become an equal opportunities career. (In fact I rather think it may already have done so. I vaguely remember David Carr saying something here along these lines. Did not some Scandinavian strap a bomb to himself and blow up a shopping centre? Perhaps he, or someone, can jog my memory and supply a link back.)

But second, if that turns out to be right, the name of the suicide bomber is unlikely to be Martin Brandberger, because Mr Brandberger has already very publicly identified himself as a rather threatening sort of person who ought to be watched by those whose job it is to watch such people.

What we have here is an argument, paradoxically, for freedom of expression. I think it is good that people like Mr Brandberger are allowed to warn the world concerning the sort of persons they are and the sort of thoughts they are having. Mr Brandberger should not be locked up for his poetry, horrible though it is both poetically and morally. But I think that I am in favour of someone tapping his telephone from time to time, preferably in a rather obvious way involving lots of clicks and buzzes that makes it clear to him that "AmeriCow" persons are observing his every move and scrutinising and pondering his every thought.

Imagine how the world would be if such people were not allowed to write such things and fling them about on the Internet, and thereby identify themselves as the nasty and perhaps dangerous nutters that they are.

As for "Victoria Miller", she doesn't sound like a European, does she? But if you follow the link from her comment, you get to a Swedish website of what looks to be some variety of socialist persuasion. No doubt someone can translate and explicate.

It all seems to me to be further proof of the depths to which a certain sort of European anti-Americanism and anti-Anglo-Saxonism has now sunk.

This is the stuff that some of the most prominent leaders of continental Europe have spent the last few months, with their every public pronouncement, encouraging.

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Megan McArdle (linked to by Instpundit) probably speaks for many on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the USA, when she asks: what is Chirac up to? She doesn't know. All he seems to be achieving is to antagonise the USA, to no apparent purpose.

She's right about what he's doing. But maybe the answer is that he is doing this deliberately, for local reasons.

It was said after 9/11 that you couldn't understand Al-Qaeda's thinking if you thought only about what they were trying to do to the USA. You had to look at their local picture. What if they were really trying to impress fellow Muslims, and to increase their power not so much in the world as a whole but within the Muslim world?

I believe that something similar applies now to France. France's main concern now is to get the sort of Europe it wants, namely a centralised European state, with France playing a very prominent part.

One of the basic problems that the European Project has had in recent decades has been to create a sense of European nationality, to replace all the existing national feelings of "old" Europe. How do you do this? Well, the usual method is to pick a fight with a nice big enemy, who then obliges with insults against the nation you are trying to put together, with the result that people who might join this new nation, but might not, depending, feel insulted by the big bad outsider, and throw their lot in with the new nation. Oh yes, and it's best to pick a time when they are preoccupied with their own situation, rather than with yours.

For an exposition of how this kind of thing is arranged, see Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where separatist Moon colonists contrive a war of words (and by the end a great deal more than words of course) between the Moonies and the Earthies. This has the effect of uniting the Moonies behind the revolutionary separatists.

I don't know much about the history of the American Revolution, but I'm guessing that this kind of trick was also pulled in America, to unite the colonists there, and to persuade them to stop thinking of themselves merely as the citizens of their separate little sovereign states, but rather as Americans.

Well, France seems to me to be working the same trick. Time was when Russia served as the perfect unification Big Bad Wolf, and during the Cold War, European unity cruised ahead, seemingly unstoppably. But then Russia was switched off as a threat, and so now the USA is the Bad Guy, an enemy with whom, one suspects, many French leaders are, in any case, far more comfortable. Preoccupied Americans look hastily at recent French diplomatic (i.e. extremely undiplomatic!) moves, and ask in amazement: Don't these cheese eating surrender monkeys realise that they will bring down upon themselves the wrath of America? Yes they do. And I surmise that this is the whole idea.

The speed with which even now EUro-integration is proceeding certainly fits in with what I'm saying.

Of course this is a risky strategy. What if the other Europeans interpret all this not as America v Europe, but as France v Sensibleness (and by extension France v. Rest of Europe – dragging the rest of Europe into their silly little French antipathy to hamburgers and Stallone movies)?

The USA may oblige with an artillery barrage (see the rest of the blogosphere) of anti-French and anti-European insults, and a number of non-lethal economic punishments, a process that is already under way. Defacing war memorials always works. You daub some anti-American crap on war graves, the Americans explode with rage and say things about all the damn Europeans that not all Europeans are guilty of by any means, and all Europeans feel insulted. Or maybe many Europeans hear the American counter-blasts without hearing about the original insult hurled at them, and so it tit-for-tats into a serious antipathy. Success!

But the USA may, instead, give some serious thought to getting its revenge over France by doing exactly what France does not want, which would be something more like to sweet-talk its way around Europe, and dissolve "L'Europe" in a bath of Uncle Sam niceness.

Until recently, the USA has been supportive of European unity, as understood by the French, because unity against the Red Menace was what mattered. After 1990, the USA has been indifferent. But what if the USA now (a) decided to smash up not Europe itself, but the French version of it, and what if (b) they got serious about this and did it properly and subtly, rather than in a way which plays into French hands? What if the USA settles down to help the UK to create a European Free Trade Zone, a loose affiliation of freely trading nations (either within the EU or outside of it – whichever), rather than a deeply statist Euro-Superstate presided over by a Euro-version of France's "Enarques"?

Interestingly, one of the commenters over at Megan McArdle's notes that the man doing all this is the Gaullist Chirac, who is trying to get us all here to feel about "L'Europe" the way that de Gaulle used to talk about "La France", as a mystical entity and an object of blind love and devotion. And a recent critic, this commenter notes, of Chirac's anti-Americanism is the Socialist Jacques Delors. The Gaullist is the nationalist, with "L'Europe" as the new nation. Delors, the socialist, is concerned about the unity of mankind, and sees a Europe vs. USA split as a mortal threat to everything he believes in.

As does Tony Blair, but that's another post.

I don't know if this is true, I'm not an expert, I could be quite wrong, blah blah blah, but it sounds about right to me. What does anyone else think?

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You can barely take a casual stroll through cyberspace these days without tripping over some hot-off-the-press manifestation of blistering European anti-Americanism. Such a stark contrast to all the pious one-world anti-xenophobia cant that Brussels has spent that last decade or so assiduously peddling.

Since 'xenophobia' is regarded as a crime under the proposed European Criminal Code, it does make me wonder how they're going to enforce it against the gangs of 35 year-old 'students' burning flags and screaming 'Death to America' on the streets of Berlin and Paris. I suppose the answer is, they're not.

Which leaves the Americans to do something about it themselves. That is, if they are so inclined. While B-52s are still swooping over Baghdad, it is unlikely to be a top priority but if, at some point in the future, George Bush et al are minded to huddle in the War Room and cook up some delicious helping of Creme du Revenge, my advice would be, don't bother:

Europe's population could fall by up to 40 per cent by the end of the century because of declining birth rates and the tendency for women to have babies later in life, researchers have found.

For the first time in human history, the population has begun to experience what demographers call "negative momentum", when a shrinking population goes into a spiral of decline. Wolfgang Lutz of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, says that Europe experienced a "flip" from positive to negative momentum in 2000 because fewer babies were being born to younger mothers

There is an element of pantomime here. While legions of moral busybodies in Brussels spend all the live-long day worrying about whether Dutch toe-nail growth conforms to European standards, somebody from the audience should be shouting 'Look behind youuuuuuuuu' as big, bad reality creeps up from the wings wielding a terminal two-by-four.

The huge social and economic costs of the shift to an ageing population, where one European worker would be expected to support two pensioners by 2065, could be offset if governments encouraged women to start families earlier, he said.

And how are governments going to go about that exactly? Oh, I sense a whole new 'regulatory framework' in the pipeline. The suggested solution does nothing except to perfectly illustrate the problem: to the European way of thinking, change must come from the top down or it will not come at all and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed by the appropriate form of state activism.

I do not suppose that it has even occurred to the authors of this report that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. The ubiquitous well-meaning interventionism of the kind they have invoked only comes with the kind of tax rates that price babies out of the family budget. It is almost like a prospector mentality; that curious messianic fever that causes otherwise intelligent men to sell all their belongings, hock the family silver and mortgage their houses to the hilt so that they can keep digging away in the unshakeable, quasi-mystical belief that the mother lode is down there somewhere. If only they can keep digging they are bound to find it and then everything will be well.

The calculations do not taken into account immigration from outside the EU but the scientists warn that policies designed to counterbalance the population decline by relying on foreign migrants could trigger their own social problems.

That's because the kind of 'immigration' envisaged is not immigration at all. It is more like population replacement, a sort of demographic transfusion. Out with the tired, old blood and in with the new, young, vigourous variety. The mestizo zone that European paladins envisage will not be the vibrant melting-pot that quickens the continent and heralds in a new age of wealth and glory. Rather it will resemble a huge, open-air Retirement village with a native population of arthritic, dependent, grumpy pensioners being entirely supported by (and therefore at the mercy of) a working cadre of African metalbashers, Asian entrepreneurs and Middle-Eastern shopkeepers.

But, who knows, perhaps this is what they want. Perhaps it is already too late to reverse the trend. Maybe the die is already cast. In so far as any 'European' identity is publicly flaunted it is expressed in terms of a preference for 'stability' and the conscience-salving constructs of 'social justice'. Yes, it all sounds so warm and comforting and I suppose it is warm and comforting as long as there is sufficient cash slushing around to pay for it. But as the civilisational credit-card tips over the spending limit, Europe's planners and thinkers prefer to shut those alarming monthly statements in the draw and kid themselves that the reckoning will never come. After all, tomorrow is a brand, new spending day.

The future is not bright. They don't need shades.

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Polish Ambassador Maciej Kozlowski said yesterday that Europe should remember what America has done in the last 80 years, twice saving Europe from calamity. He brushed aside French President Jacques Chirac's harsh criticism of those European countries which support the war, insisting that France and Germany are misreading the political situation.

In a mostly symbolic move that exemplifies the pro-American stance that Poland has taken, the Polish army sent some 200 troops including special commando forces, navy, and chemical warfare experts to buttress the primarily American and British forces. The country's small contingent of special forces, which also operated in Afghanistan, is reportedly now in action in Iraq.

Declaring that each country has deeply different historical remembrances, Kozlowski, who came to Jerusalem without a gas mask, said that Poland remembers America opposing communist and other brutal dictatorships.

As such, we accepted as inevitable the war with Saddam, who by everybody's account is a brutal dictator.

Refreshingly straightforward.

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Vaclav Klaus has been inaugurated as the new president of the Czech Republic, after several months of wrangling in Parliament. The position is elected by the two houses of the Czech legislature and represents a victory for the free-market opposition.

I first heard of Klaus when he was the Finance Minister of the Czech Republic when Czechoslovakia was a federal state (1989-1993). He was known to have a photograph of Mrs Thatcher on his wall and to be a keen follower of Hayekian economic theory. Vladimir Meciar, the double-agent populist who became Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1992 on promises to restore Slovak honour, demanded more subsidies from the Czech Republic or he would take Slovakia out of the federation. The response of Klaus, by then Czech prime minister was to say "Goodbye!" and not out loud, "Good Riddance!" to the horror of Meciar's entourage. The episode soured relations between Klaus and Vaclav Havel, the friend of London's 'champagne socialist' set who enjoyed the trappings of the presidency.

I last saw Klaus at the summer university last September at Aix en Provence, where he was awarded a special honour by the town, and guest of honour at the IES event. His election is a blow to the Left in the Czech Republic, to the European Social Democrat consensus (especially Messrs Chiraq and Schroder), and to spin-doctoring. Klaus's TV debate technique is to explain unemployment by drawing supply and demand curves on a blackboard and drawing a line to show how many more people need to lose their jobs or take pay cuts. With the imminent accesion of the Czech Republic to the EU, I think some entertaining Council of Ministers' meetings are in prospect.

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Will this age of wickedness never end? First, some Danish quack tries to convince us that the world is not about to end and now some Swedish 'reactionaries' try to debunk recycling:

"Throw away the green and blue bags and forget those trips to the bottle bank: recycling household waste is a load of, well, rubbish, according to leading environmentalists and waste campaigners.

In a reversal of decades-old wisdom, they argue that burning cardboard, plastics and food leftovers is better for the environment and the economy than recycling."

WHAT??!! How dare they? Don't they realise how many years of activism are at stake?

"The claims, which will horrify many British environmentalists, are made by five campaigners from Sweden, a country renowned for its concern for the environment and advanced approach to waste.

They include Valfrid Paulsson, a former director-general of the government's environmental protection agency, Soren Norrby, the former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, and the former managing directors of three waste-collection companies."

Probably just a bunch of nazi zionist illuminatis in the pocket of Donald Rumsfeld.

"The Swedish group said that the "vision of a recycling market booming by 2010 was a dream 40 years ago and is still just a dream"

Do the words of John Lennon mean nothing to you, you baby-eating monster?

"Technological improvements had made incineration cleaner and the process could be used to generate electricity, cutting dependency on oil."

See, it's all really about OIL!!!.

They added: "Protection of the environment can mean economic sacrifices, but to maintain the credibility of environmental politics the environmental gains must be worth the sacrifice."

What do these people know about credibility? Everybody knows that the credibility of enviro-mentalism is maintained by clambering all over public monuments unfurling stupid banners and shilling for marxist despots.

"A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "It's a nonsense to say incineration could ever be better than recycling. That would be a regressive step."

Yes, quite right. How can one possibly tolerate anything 'regressive' whilst trying to drag us all back into the Stone Age?

These Swedes are nothing but terrorists.

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Well, if you have a lefty friend who you think should be taken to sample what life under socialism is really like, then this "tourist attraction" in former East Germany is just the ticket.

Who said the Germans don't have a sense of humour?

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I ran across this great quote from the Cold War generation:

"An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured." - Konrad Adenauer

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There was an interesting piece earlier this week in the UK's Independent newspaper by one of its main economics correspondents, Hamish McCrae. He argues - and this won't be a surprise to you, gentle readers - that the economic weakness of Continental Europe, especially the highly-taxed, highly-regulated bits such as France and Germany, poses a long term problem not just for the citizens of those nations but for the wider world. A good, thoughtful article. Read.

The piece is all the more telling for being written by someone who hardly qualifies as a rabid free-marketeer. Parts of the liberal-left are beginning to understand that the supine foreign policy stance of the French and German political class is in many ways a reflection of those countries' relative economic decline versus the Anglosphere nations, especially the US and Britain.

Oh, and while I am in the mood to plug interesting places of economic wisdom, take a look at this site, The Capital Spectator, which is a broadly free market blog focussing on economics and official policy. It has a particularly sharp piece on the Bush tax cut and the reputation of US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. I have even got my work colleagues to bookmark it. (Ideological subversion in the office. Heh).

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I'm certain all have been following the Orange Alert in the US. If, as
George Tenet said today, these threats are about radiological or chemical attack on the US to occur this week then the Weasel Axis are following a very, very dangerous course.

If the headlines on one day are "France blocks NATO protection of Turkey" and the next day it is "10,000 feared dead in DC Attack" then France can expect to recieve a level of anti-frenchism verging on pure hatred. The damage would last until the American youngsters of this generation are dead and gone.

And worst of all for the dirigiste... they will have to defend their own the next time, something they have proven summarily incapable of in the past.

Maybe the Germans will help them.

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Drop what you are doing and follow Instapundit's link to the Washington Post article on German Minister Joschka Fischer's past.

To be fair, many, many people at the time would have been involved to some level or have known some of these people. I imagine more than one amongst us cringe at the memory of things they did as kids. Why, I knew a person who knew Bernadette Dohrn (later of the Weather Underground) when she was a teenager. This was a status conferring thing. We'd sit around the Student Union and say "Wow, man, like you really, like knew her? That's like, really far out! Pass that over would you?"

There was a certain cachet about those who "did something". None of us would have dreamed of doing anything really destructive. We even had a team clean up the administration building (Warner Hall) before we handed it back in the morning [we took it over the night after the Kent State murders]... all tidied up and us on our way just in time for the staff arrival at 8am. Wouldn't have been nice leaving all our coffee cups and candy wrappers laying about from the overnight demonstration, now would it? Such was CMU.

I particularly remember the Coke machine on the second floor (first floor in the UK). If you gave it a sharp punch in just the right place, a cup dropped into the dispenser, a relay clicked and you got a Coke. Free. By the end of the night almost everyone had mastered this student survival art.

I'm afraid the youthful Joschka and his violent friends would have laughed at us for our bourgeoise values.

It was another time and place and has little connection with today's world. For many of us they are fond memories of a time past. It was fun. Sadly, there are those who are forever sitting in the Student Union of their minds. They have not moved on. They do not live in the world that is.

I'm not saying Joschka is quite that stuck, but the Washington Post story does tell us "where he is coming from".

MORE:Glenn posteda link to an even worse bit of Joschka's past straight from the mouth of General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Nicolae Ceausescu intelligence chief. Fischer is connected via a number of insider sources to a Libyan terror operation run by Carlos "the Jackal".

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Yesterday France, Germany and Belgium announced that they are invoking an unprecedented NATO procedure to prevent the United States lending support to Turkey to defend its border with Iraq. Washington was disconcerted and dismayed by last week's move. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, described the Franco-German action as a "breathtaking event" that would "reverberate throughout the alliance".

Turkey has invoked Article 4, that requires members to consult together when, in the opinion of any of them, their territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened. It is the first time this has been done in the history of the alliance, thus ensuring an urgent and high level debate over the Franco-German action. The impact of that action is questionable for a number of reasons.

John Keegan has an insightful analysis of the reasons for the rift and the potential fall-out.

1. Turkey has bilateral defence agreements with the United States, which allow military aid outside the NATO relationship.

2. The Patriot missiles offered to Turkey are under Dutch sovereign control and so not subject to NATO interference.

3. America could provide the Awacs early warning aircraft if NATO refuses to send its own.

There is nothing new about the French being obstinate towards the United States in general and NATO in particular. France withdrew from NATO's military structure in 1966 to pursue an independent foreign and defence policy. Later it attempted to revive the military role of the Western European Union, NATO's long sidelined precursor, and then tried to invest the European Commission with defence responsibilities.

As long as the United States perceived the drive for European unity to be economic in thrust, the French efforts to create a parallel military structure within the western European NATO area were tolerated. It was the disputes over authority in Bosnia and Kosovo that eventually caused Washington to see the purpose of French policy as intended to weaken NATO. American acquiescence was eroded and led to hostility.

I whole-heartedly subscribe to Keegan's view that the United States created NATO and has fostered its development and welfare devotedly over 50 years and that the alliance is, without question, the most important, successful and creative foreign policy initiative of the United States since the Second World War.

The French and Germans, not to mention the insignificant Belgians, seem simply, like tiresome neighbours, to be demanding attention. In so doing, they are inflicting damage on the organisation that secured their safety during the Cold War, and affronting the ally that guaranteed it, to a degree that cannot easily be forgotten or forgiven.

Several NATO members are unshakeable in their loyalty. They include this country, Turkey and probably Italy and Spain. Several of the new NATO states, Poland foremost, would be eager to offer basing facilities to troops withdrawn from Germany soil. The Belgians do not count. The Dutch seem solid. Denmark and Norway are, with reservations, good NATO citizens.

A map of NATO with a hole where Germany had been would look odd; but the map has looked odd for 40 years since the French went their separate way. Now that the Soviet threat is no more, Nato does not really need Germany, except for purposes of internal communication. Germany's armed forces are in disarray, as are those of France.

An Anglo-Saxon NATO, plus Turkey, plus Scandinavia, plus Italy and Spain would still have the bases necessary to command the key strategic positions and the strength to keep the peace in the northern hemisphere.

I just hope the United States does not budge and ensures that the French and German leaders get exactly what they deserve for their unprincipled and self-interested behaviour. To me that would be France and Germany finally occupying positions on the international scene that are commensurate with their true significance rather than based on some historically misplaced delusions of grandeur.

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I don't care how hungover you are. Get thee hence to the newsagents and buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today. They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it's a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too.

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Germany's hapless Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has dished out insults at the musician who penned a chart-topping song that Adriana wrote about last week, taking a crack at Germany's onerous taxes.

Well, tough luck, Gerhard. It seems the Chancellor doesn't like the fact that the crippling confiscation of German citizen's money is provoking satire as well as anger. When a politician starts bashing the comics and music makers, it is a clear sign he or she is in trouble - big trouble.

This bespeaks a political elite on the Continent of Europe that is increasingly aloof and out of touch with ordinary citizens. On one level, this is encouraging, because such arrogance usually comes before a fall from grace. However, it also suggests that if the situation is not tackled soon, the anger boiling up in Germany and elsewhere could turn ugly.

Sure, Gerhard. As logical as
assaulting someone's fist with your face

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Paul Staines reports on the latest rather splendid twist in the ongoing German anti-tax protests about which Adriana first reported last month on Samizdata.net

There is a brilliant story at wired news about a tax protest with a difference. It started as a wacky idea in an Internet chat-room but now thousands of Germans have sent Chancellor Schroeder their shirts. Schroeder has donated the thousands of shirts his office has received to charity. Shame he does not show some charity towards taxpayers...

The political campaign is being promoted with this rather fetching picture of Katja Kassin in the process of losing her shirt! Who says the Germans do not have a sense of humour?

Paul Staines

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The German Chancellor is clearly feeling just a wee bit insecure these days. Why else would would he actually go to Court to sue a news agency because they claimed that he used dye in his hair:

"With affidavits from his barber, Schroeder insisted that the article was false and that it had created a wave of stories that were hurting his image."

Would that be his image as an incompetent, plundering, unreconstructed tax-and-spend socialist who is wrecking his country's economy? Oh right, that image.

Anyway, in order to avoid any legal complications here at Samizdata, I hereby categorically refute any suggestions that the German Chancellor has ever dyed his hair. After all, why would he need to? It is a wig.

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Germans are fighting back with humour! The country's number one hit is called Der Steuersong (The Tax Song), and has found fertile ground in the hearts of a nation fed up with broken election promises and increasing taxes.

The song that shot to the top of Germany's pop charts with more than 350,000 copies sold within a week is a spoof sung by Schroeder's impersonator, Elmar Brandt, who has captured the mood of the country in the lyrics:

"Promises that were made yesterday can be broken today...."

"I'll raise your taxes, I'll empty your pockets, every one of you nerds stashes some cash away, but I'll find it no matter where it is..."

"I'll raise taxes now because the election is over and you can't fire me now..."

"We could raise a 'bad weather tax', or an 'earth-surface usage tax', a levy for breathing, air's going to become more expensive, and I'm only getting started.."
"A tooth tax for chewing, bio tax for digestion - nothing's free anymore..."

Schroeder's government of Social Democrat-Greens has slumped dramatically in voter surveys since the September 22 polls after breaking election promises not to raise taxes. On Monday Schroeder announced another new tax on equities and property sales - which the conservative opposition called the 49th new tax since he was first elected in 1998.

"I'll rip you nerds off, you'll be overpowered, I'm always in for a surprise..."

"There is no tax that I can't collect. I want your bank notes, your sweaters, your cash and your piggy banks..."

"Dog tax, tobacco tax, car tax, ecological tax - did you really think that was the end of the line? Like a pirate hunting for income, I'll raise all your taxes and if you're broke, you can buy your food at a discount store or go hungry..."

I am not sure it sounds better in German (here is the full English translation) but the spirit of the song is sound. Ordinary Germans say that "it sums up what we're all thinking." Fed up with taxes? Well, what are you going to do about it?

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The tide of mendacious pro-EU propoganda that has flooded this country for the last 20 years or so, has been so relentless and has become so institutionalised that us beleaguered 'antis' were, until recently at any rate, quite despondent about the prospects of getting our message across concerning the reality of this misconceived 'Reich'.

No lie has been too outrageous and, on occasion, the lies have even been contradictory without anybody seeming to notice. We have been told that Europe is more prosperous, Europe is fairer, Europe is more open-minded, Europe is more dynamic, Europe has less crime, Europe is more modern, Europe is more generous, Europe is more caring, the cost of living is cheaper, everyone in Europe has a better standard of living and (drum roll, please) Europeans are more sophisticated!!

My father told me that he remembers exactly the same things being said about the Soviet Union in the 1930's.

So it gives me an incalculable thrill to see an article about Europe's coming collapse in a British newspaper:

"The cause is a self-destruction wrought by a political elite that has wrapped itself in fantastical self-delusion about the superiority of its economic system, the coming ascendancy of the single currency over the dollar, and the tide of wealth and prosperity that would inevitably flow from the relentless pursuit of "ever closer union". Here, on an epic scale, has been a procession of naked emperors who cannot begin to grasp why the world has stopped applauding."

The article may be right or it may be wrong but, for my purposes, that almost doesn't matter; its very publication is the rub. It would certainly not have appeared even a year ago and the fact that it has surfaced now, and in a mainstream publication to boot, is an indication that the tide is turning.

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We all know what caused the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, right. We all know because we have been told (ad nauseum) by this lot among others that the root causes lie with America's wrong-headed foreign policy, its empire-building and its constant meddling in other people's business. If one accepts that argument then the solution presents itself: America should mind its own business, stop arming foreigners, bring troops home and quietly get on with the business of building a peaceful, free, non-interventionist country. Then the worlds bad guys and bullies will simply leave America alone and go off to look for someone else to haunt.

In other words, America should be more like Switzerland. After all, nobody ever attacks Switzerland. Why should they? There's no reason to. Switzerland is neutral and peaceful and prosperous and...under attack:

"Switzerland is facing the risk of sanctions from the European Union over failures to lift its banking secrecy laws and co-operate with Brussels over a new savings tax".

Nothing to do with Swiss foreign policy then. Nothing to do with Swiss meddling in other people's conflicts. No, it's everything to do with the exceedingly domestic policy of banking secrecy which means that Switzerland is a living, breathing bolt-hole for those desperate Euro-serfs who want to hang on to whatever precious capital they have left and shield it from the endless predations of Brussels.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Switzerland must die. Well, more accurately, its sovereignty and independence must die because it cannot be allowed to continue to flourish in the face of those who have altogether different plans for Europe.

Now, I do not expect missiles to be raining down on Geneva any time soon or at all but that is largely due to the fact the EU countries don't really have the cojones for that sort of thing. However, if the EU were just a bit more aggressive and a bit better armed then that vista is not inconcievable if the Swiss steadfastly refuse to buckle.

But the attack is both political and diplomatic and may soon degenerate into economic blockade and in case anybody thinks that that threat is just smoke and mirrors they would do well to remember that economic blockade (itself an act of war) is exactly the threat that was used by the EU to strong-arm little countries like Malta, Liechtenstein and Andorra into abandoning their lucrative tax-haven status and toeing the line on the EU's ludicrous 'campaign against unfair tax competition'.

The Swiss have played by the rules exactly as they are written by the isolationists and they have played them both sincerely and immaculately. Their reward for doing so is that the barbarians are now at their gate. The Swiss may choose to either surrender a big chunk of what makes them so prosperous in the first place or make a stand against the barbarians. Ignoring them is no longer an option.

Now before anybody flames back with affirmations of the obvious, yes I do realise that threatening the USA is a very different proposition from threatening Switzerland but just because your protagonist is militarily weaker doesn't mean that they can't make life very nasty for you, as Al-Qaeda have so graphically proved.

The peaceful, neutral, non-interventionist, money-making Swiss are under siege because they are, comparatively speaking, a beacon of light amidst a sea of darkness and they threaten that darkness by sheer dint of their existance. This should serve as an object lesson to those who are naive enough to believe that, as long you mind your own business, then the bad guys will respect your privacy.

Creating a free and prosperous society places you in the cross-hairs of those who harbour less laudible ambitions and turning the other cheek just gives them a golden opportunity to punch your lights out. As far as they are concerned, you must change or die. You may refrain from intervening in their affairs but they are compelled to intervene in yours whether you like it or not.

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A suicide-bomber has exploded himself in a shopping mall in Helsinki killing eight people and maiming and crippling scores of others. [I find the word 'wounded' to be so anodyne and unsatisfactory. It implies that the damage done can be healed by the application of some bandage and a smear of antiseptic cream. Bomb explosions leave people limbless, blind or paralysed]

It appears as if the perpetrator was a 20 year-old student but there is no indication as to his motives. Of course, given the style of attack, thoughts immediately turn to Islamic radicals but there is nothing in the reports thus far to suggest this and, in any event, why they should target the Finns is beyond me.

More likely this young man's head was buzzing with some other kind of savage insanity but the method he has used to vent it does have some significance nonethless. We have never been short of psychotics or dangerous malcontents in our midst but when they do finally unhinge they typically do so by taking pot-shots at their employers or attacking their landladies with a kitchen knife.

Is this changing up a gear? Could it be that the suicide-bombing is becoming the preferable modus operandi for the deranged and the grudge-ridden? It is certainly a far more dramatic way of leaving your forget-me-not impression on a world that you loathe and that you believe loathes you.

Maybe I am extrapolating too far here. It is, for sure, too early for anything like a cogent analysis. But, if it turns out that I am on the right track, then we all better start watching out for that twitchy guy on the bus; that thing on his shoulder could be a lot more than just a chip.

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Paul Marks points out the importance of remorselessly pushing out the libertarian memes into a world that does not 'get it'.

As I write this the results of the German general election are not known. However, there will be few clear lessons to learn even if the Red-Green alliance win (as it could be argued that the Germans voted Red or Green out of hatred of the United States and hatred of Jews [oh sorry, 'love of the Arab people'] rather than because of support of Red/Green economic policy).

However, the recent election in Sweden teaches us some clear lessons. Promising tax cuts and pretending there will be no cuts in the Welfare State (the policy of the Swedish opposition "Moderate Party") does not work. People, quite correctly, reject the idea that 'public-private partnerships' (or other clever schemes) mean that one can have tax cuts and much the same level of 'public services'.

The Swedish election also shows us that given the choice of tax cuts at what people believe will be the 'cost' of cuts in the public services most people reject tax cuts. Although (it could be argued) that an honest approach "we are going to cut taxes and government spending" would have done better (some people may have voted against the Moderate party because they were seen as liars).

The basic ideology of our age is that government should look after the poor, the weak, the children, the old, the sick (and so on). So are we doomed? Is libertarianism (which runs directly counter to the basic ideology of our age) simply never going to be 'relevant' to most people?

I do not think we are doomed. I continue to believe that in a time of economic crisis people are capable of changing their beliefs.

It is a matter of making libertarian ideas known - not so they will be accepted now (they will not be accepted at present), but so that they are available to be turned to in a time of crisis.

Paul Marks

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This piece by Janet Daley in today's Telegraph is of interest, and these paragraphs are the heart of it:

… there must be a lesson here for those who hold - and would like to proselytise - currently unfashionable opinions. How exactly has this happened? How is it that this stance, which has been travestied and traduced by the entire Left-liberal media behemoth, has still managed to win through to the hearts and minds of so many fashionable anti-establishment people?

And perhaps even more beguilingly, why are so many acerbic comedians and social satirists happy to stand up in public for a cause that has been largely associated with politicians who have never knowingly told a joke? …

Of one thing I think we can be fairly sure. Harry Enfield, Bob Geldof, Vic Reeves et al were not won over by Teresa Gorman's 'street cred' or Norman Tebbit's hairstyle. Neither the cut of Norman Lamont's suits nor John Redwood's demotic vocabulary made them think: "Hey, these guys are my sort of people. I like the look of them. What's this they're saying about the European single currency being a bad idea for Britain? I think I'll join up."

No, I believe not. They must have been - wait for it - persuaded by the arguments. Imagine that. They must have heard people who look and sound nothing at all like them, saying things that struck them as basically sound. …

I've been flogging away with ideas for the best part of my adult life so far, so you might expect me to greet JD's piece with unmitigated reverence. However, one of the ideas I've been flogging away at is that persuading members of the Conservative Party to support something is not the kiss of life, rather is it the kiss of death. This is not an idea of the kind JD is talking about; it's a propaganda idea, a focus group idea, an idea about how to win arguments by unfair means as well as by fair ones. It's an idea about "positioning", "associating", about atmospherics rather than just about principles. (At the risk of getting too technical, much of the idea of being principled is itself an idea about atmospherics.)

The story here is of a generational divide, between on the one hand the parents of the sixties generation, and the other the sixties generation and all generations since. "New" Labour is now firmly this side of The Divide. But the Conservatives are still desperately trying to cross this divide (the less dumb ones) or still fighting the old sixties battles against the future (the relentlessly dumb, geriatric ones), and thus still pathetically stuck on the far side of The Divide. Poor old Norman Tebbit is a perfect example of this phenomenon. He explicitly blames "the sixties" for everything bad that has happened since, and if he doesn't actually believe that the Beatles etc. should be dis-invented he nevertheless allows himself to come across like that.

And my point is this: "we" (the libertarian movement, the social and intellectual and cultural milieu that gave birth to things like Samizdata.net, i.e. every other rock musician on the planet who hates both taxes and drugs laws and all their friends and admirers) are all firmly this side of The Divide. We don't have an army of old age pensioners moaning about single mothers to piss in our propaganda every time we say anything. We don't have a racist rump to expel, because our pro-immigration propaganda made sure that these bigots never joined us in the first place.

Every time some hideous Conservative dinosaur denounces us, we win. New Labour people don't hate libertarianism; they listen to it and learn from it. Many Old Conservatives do hate libertarianism with a passion, because we piss in their propaganda (by pointing out, for example, that freedom means capitalism and drugs). The strength of the libertarian movement is not just its friends; it is also its enemies.

In general, if you have a good idea, you have to explain it to the post-sixties generations in their (our) language, and wrench your idea out of the hands of the Tebbits of this world.

It helps if you are post-sixties yourself. And I'm not just talking date of birth here, I'm talking state of mind. I know dozens of self-crafted Conservative dinosaurs, many of them not born until long after the Beatles split up, who have spent their lives making sure, quite deliberately, that they didn't cross The Divide. (Think John Redwood.) These idiots and their camp followers spent the eighties telling me that they knew all about "persuading people" and that I and my fellow libertarians knew nothing of such things, because we were too "extreme". You have to "take people with you", not "upset people", blah blah blah. Now, these wretched folks, and all those whom they duped into wasting half their lives following them, are realising that it was actually the other way round. We were ahead of them both intellectually and atmospherically.

And one of the ideas we have spread is that, despite many appearances to the contrary – niceness to foreigners, better food, better sex, etc. - British membership of the EU is actually a bad idea.

It was us (broadly defined - I'm including the rock guitarists in with "us") who got through to those comedians, not the Conservatives. Those cinema adverts didn't just happen. 'Street cred' operators, former rock guitarists and pop group managers, made them happen, operators from this side of The Divide.

It is precisely because the Conservatives have not been in charge of the anti-EU campaign that it may now be beginning to succeed. We anti-Conservative anti-EUers translated the anti-EU case out of Conservative dinosaur language and into post-sixties language, normal language, and enough of what we said got through, despite the best efforts of the Conservative dinosaurs to keep this argument to themselves and thus guarantee defeat for it. When you look at the Conservative Party, don't think: future. Think: asset stripping. Think: rescue the good stuff and kill off the thing itself. "Conservative"? What kind of a brand name is that? If it wasn't called that, would anyone with a grain of sense want to call it that now?

It's a nice idea that the Euro is becoming unfashionable because of pure high-minded principle. But there was more involved than that in this victory, if that is what it proves to be.

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There is an interesting article in the print version of Inside The Vatican (sorry, no article link at their meagre on-line site) about Rabbi Israel Zolli, formerly the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1939 until 1945.

So if Pope Pius XII was an anti-semitic pro-Nazi collaborator in Italy as some have claimed, why did Rabbi Zolli convert to Christianity in 1945, professing his admiration for the pontiff? Zolli was certainly in a position to know what the truth of the matter was! The fact the Pope was no supporter of Zionism did not mean he was antagonistic to Jews.

Clearly the reality is the calumnies against Pius XII have more to do with modern agendas than historical facts.

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The Dutch have rained scorpions of political death onto the Centre-Left coalition government and driven the List Pim Fortuyn into second place behind the Christian Democrats making it highly likely that that the 'List' will form some part of a new Centre-Right coalition government.

It is a spectacularly vicious kick in the Nether regions for the left but will it actually amount to anything more than ripples across a very stagnant pond? The media hacks have been quick to point out that, minus their charismatic leader, the 'List' is a party which is less than three months old and appears unfocussed and a little incoherent. For once, this may be more than the familiar journalistic (which is to say, socialist) whining and sour grapes. There does seem to be something which is rather cobbled-together and even rather amateurish about the 'List' which, whilst it may have benefitted from a sympathy vote to a degree, is also the collective expression of an impatient, anti-consensus, anti-elitist grouch.

Such movements, when they actually do get anywhere near the corridors of power, have a tendency to be ineffective; proving to be nothing more than smoke, mirrors and tinkling brass. Lacking both political nous and a clear vision, they may find themselves being outmanoeuvered by their establishment foes who, while lacking any enthusiastic support, nonetheless possess the guile and experience sufficient to form the de facto coalitions and horse-traded allegiances that ensure that they keep their grip on the real levers of power.

And the Dutch will find themselves right back where they started.

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It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words 'left' and 'right' are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.

An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.

Take this dumb paragraph:

"Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture... Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem."

Phillips' attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such "libertarianism" undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not - I am not entirely convinced either way - but Fortuyn's views struck me as entirely coherent.

As for liberalism's roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?

Phillips' analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.

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Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance

Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)

The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the 'classical liberal' about him.

In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism's prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called 'citizen') and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.

Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn's overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.

Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as 'nightwatchman'... if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.

Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one's friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o'clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of 'tolerance' any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.

Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos... and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don't be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.

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Tony Millard strikes again with a Pythian observation.

The following words were captured directly from a radio broadcast - it's an excerpt from an interview with Fortuyn a couple of weeks ago, in which he was complaining about his security arrangements, that is, total absence thereof:

...when I am killed or wounded then you (prime minister) are responsible because you give me no protection and you make the atmosphere in this country so poisonous that people want to hurt me...Pim Fortuyn, 2002

Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)

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1)Who? and 2) Why?

Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pym Fortuyn has been assassinated.

First reports suggest he was shot several times outside a radio station in Hilversum by a lone gunman.

I think those tectonic plates of history just juddered. Stay tuned.

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Tony Millard serves up a tasty critique of politics.

I was listening to Radio 4, my only live link with the Anglosphere, the other day and heard a short trailer for Sunday morning's news and comment slot, Broadcasting House. The journalist listed out five reasonable-sounding but right wing policies and then sought our amazement by saying they were taken from Le Pen's manifesto. I got thinking about this whilst doing something pointless with a tractor and it occurred to me that the body politic is in many ways like the human body.

Left wing policies - radicchio and polenta, right wing policies - carpaccio of beef and wild boar sausage. No healthy human body can be properly and efficiently nourished with only one or the other, and it's the same with nations. Some of Mr Le Pen's view I am sure are reasonable and meritorious but are rejected wholesale by the left because of some of his less palatable concepts. Unfortunately, our politicians believe in a mostly herbivorous diet and lack conviction when it comes to richer flavours. Perhaps someone should gently remind them of our omnivorous tendencies and introduce them to a Fiorentina (T-Bone steak, Tuscan style) every now and then.

Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)

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My Norwegian libertarian friend Kristine Lowe has a personal interest in tattoos, and in their tax status, see above. ("Lowe" is Norwegian for "lion", hence the nature of her magnificent adornment.) Thus alerted to any tattoo-related media item, she sent me the following report, based on a longer piece in the Norwegian Aftenposten:

Is a tattoo a creative work or simply a reproduction? This is a question Norwegian tax officers have to consider carefully when they come to implement last year's VAT (Value Added Tax) reform. Tattoos, crosswords and fireworks may be exempted from VAT - as long as they have creative value.

The eight page long tax office guidelines document, Art, culture and sport – an orientation, says that creating an image for a tattoo is indeed a creative work. But to burn it into the skin of someone fooled into the tattoo shop by his mates is "only a reproduction of a creative work protected by copyright". Hail to the Norwegian authorities' profound respect for artistic and intellectual property rights.

A concert which is just a concert is also exempted from VAT. A concert venue where people can dance, on the other hand, is logically not. Ballet and traditional dances are exempted from VAT. Disco is not. One could be led to believe that only boring culture is exempted from VAT, but the rules are not that coherent. Stand-up comedians don't have to pay VAT - but lecturers, presenters and commentators do.

At least we finally have an explanation for why it's so difficult to get through to the tax office in Norway - they are busy reading crosswords, hanging out in tattoo shops, checking concert venues for dancing space and so on and so forth.

Kristine has also had trouble with her legs. Now me, I've never had trouble with Kristine's legs - see below. But she had a bad accident several years ago, and the original doctors didn't catch everything. So soon she's off back to Norway to get everything finally fixed. I and the rest of the libertarian movement wish her all the best.

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Well, when he is not a fascist... Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen

I have to disagree with some of David Carr's analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist 'right-wing' successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller's or Fortuyn's manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.

Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being 'unavailable for democratic dialogue'. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the 'far right' like Le Pen.

The shocked left-wing, whose 'multi-cultural' agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: "Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race." And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. "If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I'd say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence." In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.

Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn's anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as 'city apartheid'. However, he gives a 'right wing' answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and 'politically incorrect' way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.

I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.

Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)

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Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.

Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.

The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of 'enlightened' self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?

The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.

But it isn't just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw 'European culture' as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended 'tolerance' while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.

There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?

Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.

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I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.

Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.

For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN 'Safe Havens' to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.

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If anybody needs a sobering insight into the mindset of the European elites, they need look no further than this staggering decision from an Italian Court.

"The case revolves around a wealthy family in the southern city of Naples, where the father is still paying some $680 a month in maintenance to a son who is in his 30s and has a university law degree".

Seems that this low-life's parents have to continue supporting him until he finds a job which is 'to his liking' (which, of course, will be never). Hardly an incentive to family-life in a country that already has a negative population growth.

Understandably, the father is less than best pleased:

"I feel disgust for a country that I love. It wasn't always like this"

Do you think it might occur to him to stop voting for it? No, course not. Silly me.

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Italy is becoming interesting

Or, should I say, more interesting because Italy has always struck me as an intriguing place: exotic, sexy, creative, appealing and yet byzantine, noisy and chaotic.

Italy is notorious for its instability. It has had some ridiculously high number of governments since World War II all of which are coalitions of social democrats, christian democrats, communists, fascists and probably a few mafiosi. All of them collapse after a couple of years or so in an orgy of self-destructive conflict and raucous bickering. Corruption is famously rife and state regulation is so labrythine and ridiculous that something like 50% of the population earn their living in the 'black economy'.

Despite this (or, more likely, because of it) Italy remains a prosperous country but it is clear that Silvio Berlusconi recognises that it will not remain one unless it liberalises its fossilised labour laws which, at present, guarantee a job for life.

"The protesters fear that workers' rights will not be as well protected if the new laws come to fruition."

The massive protest in Rome has been billed as a protest against terrorism following the assassination of government adviser Marco Biagi but let nobody be fooled. This was planned long before as a message to Berlusconi that the left are aiming to thwart him. The left and the public sector in Italy (as in the rest of Europe) is well-organised, stridently militant and relies on a hair-trigger willingness to adopt street confrontation as a tactic to defeat reformist politicians who, thus far, have lacked the cojones to face them down.

Berlusconi is talking tough:

"Nobody is going to stop us going ahead with our reforms," he said. " Terrorists and street protesters won't stop us."

Can he succeed where so many others have previously failed? If so, he will be leading Italy down the road of 'Thatcherite' revolution.

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Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.

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When economist and law professor, Marco Biagi began advising the Italian government on reforms to Italy's ossified Labour Laws, the Italian left sprang into immediate action. Using the rationale of marxist production theory and by the rigourous employment of dialectic method, they planned to confound Biagi by convincing him of the systemic contradictions of free-market ideology.

But that didn't work so they just shot him.

"Investigators said flatly Wednesday that they had no doubt Biagi was slain over his controversial efforts to help Silvio Berlusconi's center-right government rewrite Italian labor law in a way that would make it easier to fire workers. The unions, and the left in general, vehemently oppose any challenge to the current labor law, which effectively guarantees many workers lifetime job security."

We have seen this in Europe before. In the late 60's and early 70's a number of marxist terror gangs starting springing up as the cracks in the heads of their own 'intellectuals' began to show. But, they were assuaged as Europe embraced the 'Third Way' and thus cocooned them from the chill wind of Reagan/Thatcher capitalism.

Only now, the cracks are starting to appear in the 'Third Way' as well and they know it. Having nothing else to offer, the die-hard disciples must resort to terror and murder. What else can they do when they have invested so much of their lives in a bankrupt philosophy that fewer and fewer people wish to buy or even browse? Like their apprentices in the anti-globo movement, they seethe within the spiritual prison cells of their own incoherent minds.

"An intelligence report to Parliament last week had warned of the risk of terror attacks in response to the conservative government's policies."

The article makes it clear that we are not dealing with Islamic radicals here but, in a sense, we might as well be. The same flat-earth mentality is at work; an identical impotent rage in the face of better people and better ideas. Wahabbism and marxism are merely two sides of the same psychotic coin and it is entirely predictable that they are undertaking a congruence of method.

The poor Mr.Biagi deserves better then to be a chilling portent of things to come. Tragically, though, that is exactly what he might be.

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Following hot on the heels on people like Jorg Haider in Austria and Umberto Bossi in Italy, the newest kid on the Nationalist block appears to be Pim Fortuyn who is causing more than a stir in the normally sedate fabric of the Dutch political landscape.

The rise of Mr.Fortuyn and his anti-immigrant message is notable if only because of Holland's legendary tradition of moderation and tolerance. Maybe this is curiously reflected by the fact that I cannot think of any other Nationalist candidate who is overtly homosexual. It's probably a 'Dutch thing'.

Mercifully, the article stops short of describing him as 'charismatic' but it pulls no punches otherwise:

"Nearly one half of 18-30 year-olds recently polled want to see zero Muslim immigration, and said they would be voting for Mr Fortuyn in May's ballots."

And it looks like those 18-30 year olds were good to their word because Mr.Fortuyn has just trounced his opposition in the municipal elections in his native Rotterdam and, for better or worse, he is now clearly a man to be reckoned with:

"However, the Dutch political establishment is at a loss when it comes to countering the Fortuyn phenomenon. They say he has no party manifesto – which is true, Fortuyn has promised to present one later this month - and accuse him of pandering to ultra rightwing sentiments with his controversial statements about asylum seekers and Muslims. Still, Mr Fortuyn appears to draw voters from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum"

Time will tell if the 'Fortuyn Factor' has legs. It could just be a flash in the proverbial pan; a protest vote that rear-ends the complacent political establishment into action.

But I have the feeling that the phenomenon is not merely transitory. These guys are popping up all over Europe and making a whole lot of people very uncomfortable. Of course, to suggest that immigrants are the source of Europe's problems is simplistic drivel but it is equally simplistic to suggest that men like Fortuyn are merely exploiting resentment for their advantage. Europe has been governed for decades by a consensual Centrist/Social Democratic porridge that long ago ran out of ideas. It is the Randian 'stagnant swamp' which exudes nothing but choking miasma from its fetid pools.

Some people are praying for rain.

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Or perhaps language 'lesions' might be a better description over on Spanglolink's page Inside Europe: Iberian Notes. Their resident 'cranky yanqui' seems to be living up to his billing! Not for the delicate of disposition.

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When society and state come into conflict, government will always choose the interests of the later. Here is some insight from Michael Wells, who sees what is happening to Gibraltar and why

After nearly 300 years, Spain is regaining control of the Rock of Gibraltar, against the wishes of nearly everyone who actually lives in Gibraltar.

The British government plans to "share sovereignty" with Spain. Until recently, Britain has insisted that any deal would have to be approved by the people of Gibraltar in a referendum, as required by Gibraltar’s constitution, but now they appear to be backing off from that position. Gibraltarians are livid, and the Gibraltar government has refused to take part in the negotiations as anything less than equal players. They’ve even made a desperate appeal to the Queen.

"Shared sovereignty" is merely a foot in the door. Spain considers anything less than full control to be an interim measure and will continue to claim full sovereignty over the territory. Spain's foreign minister Josep Pique expressed indignation at the idea of a referendum in Gibraltar to accept or reject the agreement: "Negotiations between two sovereign states cannot be subsumed to the will of 30,000 Gibraltarians. The opinion of 30,000 people will not dictate the will of two sovereign states." The taint of Franco endures.

Britain’s willingness to relinquish control comes partly from Gibraltar’s decreased military significance and partly from a desire to strengthen ties with Spain. According to the Telegraph, Britain wants a closer relationship with Spain to balance the power of France and Germany within the EU, a situation reminiscent of the Habsburg-Bourbon power-jockeying that created the Gibraltar situation in the first place.

But Gibraltar was probably the least significant of what Spain ceded after the War of Succession. Why are they so intent on getting it back? A peevish nationalism is certainly a large factor, but just as important is Gibraltar's tax status. Gibraltar is exempt from the EU's tax uniformity and, in particular, has no VAT. Pique’s belligerent ravings about smuggling and money laundering are a result of this, and echo the OECD’s criticisms of 'harmful' tax practices.

Gibraltar is an easy target, since it's already part of the EU. But other European tax havens are at risk as well. Andorra, though ostensibly sovereign, is a co-principality under Spain and France. Monaco reverts to France if there is no male heir to the throne, and is dependent on France for water and electricity. As long as the EU is bent on spreading bureaucracy and high taxes throughout Europe (all EU countries are members of the OECD), the situation looks bleak for Europe’s tiny tax havens.

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The British International Development Secretary Clare Short did a bit of off-message, and hence truthful, commentary by pointing out that the French state is one of the primary obstacles to Africa's economic development due to their insistence on Europe-wide protectionist trade policies.

Now whilst I usually regard Short as a subjectivist economic ignoramus and thus part of the problem, not the solution, she is quite right in her remarks in this subject. The fact is that French policy in African being aimed at maintaining French control rather than fostering African development. My family has had quite a lot of first hand experience of doing business in Africa and I know this to be true on many levels.

Socialists have the gall to claim to be the people who care about the impoverished Third World and yet put duty on African goods which can run as high as 300% in order to protect the EU's grotesque Common Agricultural Policy. The EU are in truth the architects of misery, poverty and starvation if Africa and France is the ring leaders of this ignominious association of the statist, regarding their preposterous concepts of Francophone prestige in Africa as being more important that African prosperity.

Clare Short is just another statist clod but she is quite right that France's strong presence in Africa is a truly malign influence. I could have told her that 20 years ago. Who cares of people are living in abject poverty in Chad just so long as things are status quo on the Quai d'Orsay.

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Can anybody think of any historically-significant cultural or technological innovation to have emerged from Continental Western Europe since World War II?

[Editor: does Catherine Deneuve count?]

[Other Editor: how about the World Wide Web?]

[Reader Ken Hagler: "How about the VAT? You didn't say it had to be good..."]

[Reader & blogger Mark Byron: SCUBA, Velcro]

[Reader & blogger Steven Den Beste: Audio cassette, laser disc]

[Reader Aaron Dickey: ABBA] hmmmm.

Update: Of course although the World Wide Web was created in CERN (Switzerland) Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor, was an Englishman

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News that elegant Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has appointed the leader of the 'post-fascist' National Alliance party Gianfranco Fini as his representative to the Convention on the future of Europe has me grinning from ear to ear.

This is not because I am really any fan of the numbskull statism favoured by Gianfranco Fini but rather because it will make the superstatist collectivists that will have to deal with him apoplectic. As several articles on Samizdata have pointed out, the essential difference between fascist and socialist economics is that fascists believe that what matters is control rather than ownership of the means of production. Fini is a classic advocate of that approach, wanting to regulate economic matters in order to further 'Italian national objectives'. Of course this approach is in no way different in methodology to that practiced by most social democratic regimes with their 'national industrial champions' and acronymed French conglomerates.

And of course that is exactly why a man with overtly fascist links like Fini is hated so much by the 'social democrats' across Europe. I am sure if he wore a black shirt and called prime minister Berlusconi 'Duce' they would actually not mind so much, but that is not the case. They do not want to be seen standing next to him because people might start to realise that there really is no difference between any of them.

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USS Clueless has a lengthy article about US unilateralism which makes some interesting points. He also makes some rather dubious ones.

We gave Europe one chance, after WWI, to dictate their own terms and the result was another bloody war. So the second time, we did call the tune -- and the result was a hell of a lot better.

As for Britain and France dictating its own terms, what about Woodrow Wilson's role in dismembering the Austro-Hungarian Empire and trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order? America shares some of the blame for the instability in Europe in the 1920's and 1930's. And the 'second time' was better for who? I don't think too many Poles, Czechs and Hungarians would agree with Steven as they ended up with nearly half a century of communist rule. Does Steven think Yalta was America's finest hour?

But that's because we are willing to try the unconventional. For example: after WWI, France insisted that Germany, with its ruined economy, pay drastic reparations to France. The result was hyper inflation, collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party.

All of which may never have happened if the US had stayed out of the Great War and a negotiated settlement had been reached in 1917 or early 1918.

And even in the recent past the Europeans have proved that their counsel sucks. That's what we learned in Yugoslavia, something I've discussed here at great length. Years of dithering where the US lobbied for military action and the Europeans counseled diplomacy and sanctions, and what it got us was years of slaughter and civil war there. Finally the US issued an ultimatum; and after 6 weeks of bombing, and the war there ended. Milosevic was deposed, and the Serbs went back to democracy and ceased to be imperialistic. And it's been reasonably peaceful there ever since.

Yeah, and they all lived happily ever after dreaming good dreams about nice Uncle Sam. That is an... interesting... analysis of the intricacies of the recent Balkan Wars. Whilst I am not fan of European diplomacy (to put it mildly), US actions in the Balkans were at best only half right and Kosovo was a rather more ambigious matter than you seem to think. Do you not think the fact the Croatian and Bosnia Armies (not the USAF) had defeated the aspirations of a Greater Serbia might have had more than a little to do with Slobo's declining political fortunes? He was politically very vulnerable due to the fact he had lead Serbia to catastrophe, horror and defeat in Bosnia and Croatia, unemployment was running at over 30% (50% by some estimates), the currency was fast turning into toilet paper and so is it really so surprising that he collapsed after yet another military defeat, this time at the hands of the largely US strategic air offensive that resulted from the Kosovo affair?

I am afraid Steven's analysis contains some grossly simplistic elements and seems to ascribe almost magical qualities to the application of US military force: the USAF turns up and shazam... peace breaks out all over the Balkans. It is rather more complex than that.

[Editor: Link fixed. Now goes to correct article on USS Clueless]

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More bellicosity from Silvio Berslusconi

I'm not at all happy about this 'common foreign and defence policy' guff but, hopefully, it's a case of one step at a time. Besides who on earth would entrust their foreign and defence policy to the French??!!

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I can't quite make my mind up about this

Undoubtedly one of the primary driving forces behind the EU has been post-war German guilt and the desire not to be Germans anymore. So perhaps this should be welcomed

On the other hand... er...

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I went into a small café in Zürich today and inadvertently tried to pay with Euro's rather than Swiss Francs. The woman looked at me as though I had just handed her a dead mouse, then peered at the note, holding it in two fingers with her arm fully extended as if worried she might catch something. I snatched it back and handed her some Swiss Francs. She nodded and said "Much better... Euros are so ugly".