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As the London based Samizdatistas are meeting for a booze up at the Black Widow Pub on Gloucester Road this evening, there may be a lack of new articles tonight.

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It is good to see Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of that fine weapon that was for so many years an icon of violent socialism, finally succumbing to full blown capitalism.

Coming to your neighbourhood soon... Kalashnikov umbrellas, snow boards and cocktails: products for real men!

More seriously, it seems only fair that the man who created what is pretty much the definitive assault rifle finally gets to make a buck or two out of his masterpiece.

(link via Kevin Connors)

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I don't always agree with what SecDef Rumsfeld says and I find his statements on volunteer human shields to be particularly wrong:

"And I want to note, again, it is a violation of the law of armed conflict to use noncombatants as a means of shielding potential military targets -- even those people who may volunteer for this purpose. Iraqi actions to do so would not only violate this law but could be a -- could be considered a
war crime in any conflict. Therefore, if death or serious injury to a noncombatant resulted from these efforts, the individuals responsible for deploying any innocent civilians as human shields could be guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions."

There is no such thing as a "voluntary human shield". The words cancel each other out and leave... just another ordinary enemy combatant. Any British, American, Australian or person of whatever nationality who makes a decision, of their own free will, to intentionally place themselves in harms way in defense of a combatant's facilities should be treated like any other member of that combatant's forces.

This is an issue of personal liberty. These people may be stupid. They may be fools. It does not matter: they have made their own choice.

We should treat them no differently from any other Iraqi soldier, nor should we treat their chosen superior officers any differently than any other Iraqi officer.

Let's not muddy the semantic waters. A Human Shield is an involuntary innocent, a person taken forcefully and tied to the front of a tank or staked out beside a power plant. If we start calling volunteers by the same name there is no telling where such logic will lead.

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I have finally worked out to link to specific items in stephenpollard.net. Stephen Pollard is a man whom Samizdata.net readers should all be told about if they haven't been yet. In addition to having his own blog, he also contributes regularly to this blog on European health issues run by the Centre for the New Europe (although linking to stuff in that is truly complicated and I won't attempt it – just scroll down). And he's a mainstream journalist of renown.

Two recent postings that get inside his head well are this, about Milton Friedman, and this, concerning the demonstrations last weekend, which also appeared in The Times. Here's the conclusion of the Friedman posting:

Milton Friedman’s influence on the Left extends well beyond the NHS voucher. The congestion charge, introduced in London on Monday, has been lifted straight out of the professor’s 1951 essay, “How to Plan and Pay For the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need”: “[on] a crowded road...it would be desirable to discourage traffic…the people who drive on a road should be charged...in proportion to their use of the service”. As Ken Livingstone has put it: “I nicked the idea off Milton Friedman”.

Third Way, Shmird Way. Stand back, Tony Giddens; step forward, Milton Friedman, guru of the Left.

I also liked following this link, to a report about the events of June 7th 1981. Clue: CND ought to have liked it, but I'm guessing they didn't.

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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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As we await the Budget in March and the rise in National Insurance rates in April, you'll be glad to know that Gordon Brown is responding to criticism that he's made the tax system too complicated. The new tax form will have only two lines: 'How much do you earn?' and 'Hand it over'.
- Eamonn Butler from yesterday's Adam Smith Institute Bulletin

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I've found another capitalist Object of Desire, via B3TA: WE LOVE THE WEB, whoever they might be. It's a toaster.

Or is it? They were trying to sell stuff like this. So they rigged one of them up as this.

This Toaster is loaded!!!

It got:
800Mhz CPU (VIA C3).
128MB SDRAM.
40GB Harddrive.
16X DVD Drive.
Built-in Video and sound.

The HD-light is wired to the Bagel LED :)
You turn on the PC by pushing down the lever :)

Anyone like to try turning my cooker into a mainframe?

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Currently watching on Sky News a massive fire on a propane barge which exploded off New York's Staten Island. So far it is not clear what the cause is, either an accident or something more sinister. So far no reports I can link to on the Web.

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Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz pointed out we will no longer need troops in Saudi Arabia after Saddam is gone. I'll just quote him because he says it all:

"First of all, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. We won't need troops in Saudi Arabia when there's no longer an Iraqi threat. The Saudi problem will be transformed. IN Iraq, first of all the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory. They are totally different situations. But the most fundamental difference is that, let me put it this way. We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq."

The general tenor of what is coming out of Washington lately is much less "diplomatic" than in the past. Spades are being called spades; phony allies are being given the respect they deserve.... and I imagine the rate of coronaries inside the beltway has fallen considerably.

Soon is a good time to get out of Saudi Arabia in any case. They are seeing serious poverty in the cities now; they are seeing young men hanging out on the streets and ignoring the the Vice and Virtue cops and there is considerable terrorism occuring inside the country. The ruling family has done everything in its' power to cover this last fact up. They imprison and torture a few Brits or others every time something gets blown up. They claim the bombs are "gang" murders for the alcohol trade between foreigners.

There is also some liberalization going on inside the country and it would be best for the liberalizers if we were not there as a target for the conservatives.

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Dr. Johnson-Winegar of the US DOD discussed NBC readiness on 60 Minutes a few days ago. From the transcript, it appears NBC readiness was a total bollocks last summer. From the "subtext" I can imagine Rumsfeld having fits when all of this first came to light. There were Congressional hearings as late as October, faulty suits being hunted down through a Byzantine (ie military) inventory system, training filters shipped with some suits to Kuwait. SNAFU from word go.

It appears they have been getting it sorted, albeit at great cost of time and money. Hundreds of thousands of new suits have been produced in the last few months. Soldiers have received some training. Mostly in Kuwait I'd bet. They are tracking down the problem gear the Army way. Throw manpower at it. When a soldier is doing nothing else on a battlefield they "clean their gun". I think "inspect your NBC gear" will be the 21st Century's addition to that old adage.

There are bound to be problems. We have not actually fought on an NBC battlefield since WWI. Whatever we see, it will not be static trench warfare with tightly bunched troops so there are no real tactical lessons to be learned from WWI. Doctrine is based on training exercises, some with live Chemical/Bio agents. Good, but not the same as a real enemy with the same weapons trying to kill you before you kill him.

Lethal chemical and bio agents are actually not very useful as weapons on a modern battlefield. It's one of the reasons why they have seen so little use. Iraq is the only nation I can think of which has done so since 1918. It was "useful" for them because they faced waves of under-trained, under-equipped conscripts in the war with Iran. Saddam also found it useful for "fumigating" civilian areas from which he wished to clear "undesirable" races.

On the battlefield they are "area denial" weapons. They slow troops down and make them uneasy but kill very few. Those few die horribly, particularly from Mustard gas. That is psychological warfare with immediate impact on the battlefield and longer term impact "back home". At best they can help "shape the battlefield" but little else.

Nuclear weapons, if he has them, are different. They are actual weapons of war, terrible and fearful because of the size of the explosion. A few meters separation from your buddy isn't gong to help much if you are too close or haven't dived into a ditch at first flash. If you are still alive on the battlefield after the shock wave passes, chances are you will remain that way. NBC suits are also protection against contact with radioactive fallout. Don't believe all the crap you've read. In the '50's when the nuclear battlefield was a real threat and a total unknown, US Army units trained with the real thing. They took cover at the burst and advanced through the target area immediately afterwards. Some volunteers were uncomfortably close to ground zero. I won't quote distances because I'd have to dig deep into my files and I've already spent far longer on this article than intended.

Most doubt Saddam has nukes. At least one of the inspectors who worked for Scott Ritter believes he does. If he does he can not hope to use aerial delivery; within hours of the initiation of hostilities there will be nothing flying over Iraq that doesn't say USAF or RAF and damned little on the ground with wings still attached. His highest probability of success lies in a pre-planted bomb, but how would he know where to put it? I can think of last stand/blaze of glory scenarios, but those are not useful military tactics.

Suicide truck bombs, hidden UAV's, pre-positioned weapons, missile delivered war heads... all are possible. And all have serious shortcomings. The probability of success of any given attack is low. If Saddam has nukes, he only has only a few so he would want to make them count. The only way a given enemy vehicle can be guaranteed to get anywhere near the American troops is as battlefield wreckage or with a white flag over it. They could attempt a white flag ploy to get one close, but I should hope our troops have detection gear. I would consider it rather certain the Abrams and some other vehicles do as they were intended for use in the nuclear battlefield of the Fulda Gap.

The bottom line? Weapons of Mass Destruction will be of little consequence on the battlefield in Iraq if the war unfolds as I expect it will. They are more likely a threat to civilian populations in Iraq and America and as last ditch "take them with us" weapons.

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And now, a bit of homegrown outrage. If you live in a EU country, in a few years, you could be subjected to the new European arrest warrant. Under legislation going through Parliament, it might soon be possible to have you extradited to the Continent for "racism" and "xenophobia".

There is a new form of bigotry - "monetary xenophobia", or opposition to the euro as identified by some EU funded bodies, such as EUMC, the European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia.

It has become increasingly obvious that European integration means transfer of authority to ever greater number of EU institutions, further from the reach of the member states' citizens. Despite the decades of assurances that there are no plans to set up a common legal system and its enformcement, the Federasts just couldn't contain themselves.

Now, it is becoming a reality - smuggled past unsuspecting publics in the traumatic days after September 11, 2001. If the emerging European constitution is ever implemented, Britain seems destined to give up its remaining veto in home affairs.

This has already been seriously diluted since the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 - which, incidentally, committed Europol to a more aggressive role in combating "racism" and "xenophobia". Indeed, clause 3, section 20, sub-section 2 of the proposed legislation states that arrests under such warrants can be effected by policemen or "other appropriate persons". Who are they? Commission officials? Europol?

Apologists for Europol have always claimed that it would be nothing more than a 'clearing house for information'. Yet, Europol is initiating changes in policy and is in the vanguard of moves to increase the power of the authorities over ordinary citizens within the EU.

Europol can hold information on individuals on its Central Information System database that includes their 'sexual orientation, religion, or politics', as well ethnic origin, age, address, and so on. Indeed under article 8.4 of the Europol Convention there is a catch-all category of 'additional information' that could include hearsay and unsubstantiated allegations. Individuals included in the database need not have been convicted of committing criminal offences under national law or be thought likely to have carried out crimes for which they were never convicted. Information can be entered about persons who it is believed will commit crimes in the future.

The difference between British and Continental public culture, manifested in the legal realm, could not be more obvious.

In Britain, expression of heinous - even unconventional - views can marginalise you. But unless you seek to incite violence, your opinions in and of themselves cannot subject you to the rigour of the criminal law.

Not so in Europe, where technocratic elites have inherited the jealous intolerance of absolute sovereigns. Even as ministers struggle feebly to minimise the remit of Brussels in criminalising opinion, one is left with the abiding impression that they are acquiring far more influence over our traditional way of life than we will ever enjoy over theirs.

I think we should now be thinking of how best to live 'independently' of the EU avoiding its technocratic nightmare, whilst aligning Britain's strategy with allies more powerful and far more natural to our Anglosphere traditions.

The State is not your friend...
and the Superstate even less so

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Taking my life into my hands the other day, I squeezed around the London Underground and found myself pressed up against an advertisement on the Piccadilly Line for that manufacturer of jobs, I meant 'first-rate military equipment' British Aerospace or BAe as it would now prefer to be known.

I discovered that Royal Air Force pilots enjoy the delights of an 'assertive' and 'calm' woman's voice, produced by electronic circuitry, telling them 'Missile locked onto you', 'Pull up! Pull up' and 'You fool! You're going to die'... I made that last one up, I hope.

The advertisement informed me that the pilots affectionately know this disembodied squawking harpy as 'Nagging Nora'. Far be it from me to even hint that this nickname could be anything other than a cute moniker of endearment. However, the only person I have met in the last five years who worked in the R.A.F. was a woman, although she wasn't a pilot. And I also know that gays are now allowed into the armed services. So this caused me to wonder... Has a pilot been sued for divorce yet, by a jealous wife, angry at her beloved calling out of 'Nora, Nora' in his sleep?

Can a female pilot sue the R.A.F. for refusing to provide her with a 'Nagging Norman' voice, perhaps modelled on the authoritarian tones of that former pilot Lord Tebbitt? Can a homosexual pilot demand the same (which would be funny given Lord Tebbitt's known 'enthusiasm' for gay rights)? And if different voices are provided for women and gays, will it be considered 'pressure' on lesbians to reveal their sexuality to admit that actually, they rather preferred Nagging Nora's soft and assertive tones, all along?

As we prepare for war, I hope that these vital issues for the nation's defence are given the proper attention that they deserve. And never mind that the Tornado is hopelessly outclassed as a fighter by the Iraqi Mig 29s.

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Do economists have much to tell us about war, terrorism, interventionism and the pros and cons? It strikes me that there is a bit of a dearth of stuff on this area from the libertarian-orientated economics camp, though I would be very happy to stand corrected.

After all, if we are going to invade Iraq as part of a grand strategy to bring liberalism, prosperity and free internet access to the Middle East, does this not in a way smack of the kind of hubristic utopianism which the likes of F.A. Hayek warned against when applied to socialism and central planning?. Do issues of defence and foreign policy inhabit seperate intellectual universes from business?

Discuss.

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I was going to write about Les 4 Vérités a French free-market libertarian/liberal weekly magazine. However I came across a survey on pornography on the magazine's site which produced the following results:

• 32.52 per cent - "The State must take strong restrictive measures"
  
• 23.40 per cent - "I'm against it, I try to persuade others, but it's none of the State's business"
  
• 2.13 per cent - "I'm a consumer and I would like politicians to stop me"
  
• 41.95 per cent - "It's a pleasant past-time which should not be prohibited"

From these figures I assume that the number of British immigrants in France connected to the Internet is small.

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Khidmir Hamza, a former member of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program has written an interesting article for the Opinion Journal:

"My 20 years of work in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program and military industry were partly a training course in methods of deception and camouflage to keep the program secret. Given what I know about Saddam Hussein's commitment to developing and using weapons of mass destruction, the following two points are abundantly clear to me: First, the U.N. weapons inspectors will not find anything Saddam does not want them to find. Second, France, Germany, and to a degree, Russia, are opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq mainly because they maintain lucrative trade deals with Baghdad, many of which are arms-related."

Mr Hamzi also points out biochem carrying artillery shells are always stored empty in Iraq due to corrosion problems. They are only filled when they are to be deployed and used.

He says much more about the uselessness of inspections. This is from someone who worked inside the other side. It's worth reading.

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Many people (including myself) comfort themselves with illusions.

Some people misread F.A. Hayek and think of corporations as examples of spontaneous order where people 'just get on with things' - rather than accepting the grim truth that whereas the interaction of various corporations and their customers may produce a spontaneous order, what goes on inside a corporation is (in part) a matter of plans and orders - what Hayek called Taxis rather than Cosmos (indeed Hayek greatly feared that most of the employees of a corporation had little direct contact with the market place).

Other people believe that poverty or unemployment can be dealt with by supporting credit-money expansion - a fallacy refuted so many times, but which refuses to die (for it is such an attractive fallacy).

Very many people believe in democracy. If the majority vote for good people things will get better. And if the majority make a mistake - why then they can 'throw the rascals out' and vote for different people.

At least (so the pleasing illusion goes on) this will work if most people are basically good.

In the United States the great critic of democracy is seen as H.L. Mencken (he is even honoured by the predictable attempts to smear him as a racist bigot - which would have come as a surprise to all the black and Jewish writers he helped in the interwar period).

However, I believe that the greatest critic of democracy in the United States was not Mencken. The great journalist often failed to use measured language (his attacks on President Roosevelt failed, in part, because people remembered the wild abuse Mencken had flung at such men as President Coolidge -"Stonehead" and all the rest of it).

And Mencken had a terrible illusion of his own. Surely the radical writers he supported, who mocked the common people's prejudices and the smug traditionalism of the establishment where the men of future enlightenment. Reason would be supported by the hard boiled radical writers and superstitions and mindless tradition would be cast down. Certainly many of the radical writers might be statist in their politics now, but one would could reach them with the use of argument - or if not them then the new radical writers of the future.

It was all an illusion. The 'rebel' writers that Mencken championed - men like Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis were powerful writers (Dreiser was my father's favourite writer). But really they were not rebels at all - they supported the driving movement of their age - hostility to private enterprise and support for collectivism. The writers who carried on in their tradition are not people who tend to be influenced by arguments (if these arguments are in support of private enterprise and are hostile to collectivism) - indeed the 'radicals', 'progressives', 'realists' (call them what you will) are the collectivist establishment of American literature. They have less understanding, their political opinions are further from the truth, that the most ignorant rural 'good old boys'. Democratic rule by the 'good old boys' may be terrible, but democratic rule where the people are "enlightened" by such teachers is far worse.

There was a man who predicted all this and attacked the ruling illusions of his age in rather more measured and reasoned words than H.L. Mencken did, and that man was the person who Mencken regarded as his great enemy - Irving Babbitt.

Babbitt was hated by all 'progressive' folk, I do not know (but I suspect) that the very title of one of Sinclair Lewis' best known works "Babbitt" is a calculated insult. Mr Babbitt is presented (in most of the book) as the typical small town, small minded Republican hostile to such noble things as Labour Unions. Only a stupid man and a coward could be hostile to 'progressive' things Mr Lewis shows us - a man like Mr Babbitt (or Irving Babbitt?). And, of course, Irving Babbitt opposed the Adamson Act (the pro union measure under President Wilson) so he must be a beast - a man without 'imagination' or a caring heart.

Irving Babbit despised religious rabble rousers such as "Billy Sunday" as much Mecken or Sinclair 'Elmer Gantry' Lewis did. But he understood that it was neither popular religion (still less unthinking tradition) that were the great threat to America - the great threat to America was 'humanitarianism'.

If the voters elect politicians who wish to help people, and if these politicians fail and the voters then elect other politicians who also wish to help people - well that sort of democracy is a certain road to the collapse of civilization.

Certainly Mencken would have despised such statements of Mr George W. Bush as "we must not balance the budget on the backs of the poor" and "medicare is central to a civilized society" as much as Babbitt would have done - but it is in Irving Babbitt (not Mencken) that we see the calm examination of such ideas and the following of the history of these ideas back to their sources (such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

The belief that problems can be solved by passing laws (as in Greek city states in their latter years, or during the decline of the Roman Empire) and the belief that poverty can be fought by more government spending are central to modern democracy. It is not the 'corrupt' or "wicked" politicians who are the biggest danger - it is the honest, good politicians who are both popular (in that they say, and believe, what the public wish to hear) and 'well educated' and successful (in that they accept things that modern universities teach and which people in the outer world, both in government and in private enterprises, assume are true) - it is these 'idealists' who are the worst danger.

However, corrupt politicians can not protect us from the tide of destruction. How could they protect us? They may not believe in the beauty of government, but they to wish to win elections - and are unlikely to come up with convincing arguments to change the climate of their times (if such a thing is possible).

Only the 'saving remnant' have a chance of protecting civilization or restoring it. The people who have understanding - both of themselves and of the standards of knowledge. If they fail then democracy (or any other political system) is doomed. Votes do not change the laws of reality and a doctrine being popular (either among intellectuals or among the wider population) does not make it true.

Babbitt is often misrepresented. He was presented (by George Santayana) as a representative of the genteel tradition of Massachusetts (Babbitt came from Ohio, had lived in New York City, New Jersey and Wyoming and had taught in Montana and, more importantly, was certainly not 'genteel' in any 'soft' sense of this word).

Babbitt has been presented both as an unthinking supporter of Christianity and as a Buddhist crank - actually he was neither. Babbitt respected religion (which may indeed put him beyond the pale of 'modern thought' - so much for modern thought) - but he was not the unthinking supporter of any set of doctrines. In thinking about religion respectfully, but not with blind acceptance, Babbitt was part of a very old Harvard tradition - a tradition they may even be seen (to an extent) in the foundation of Yale in 1701. One of the reasons given for the foundation of Yale was that Harvard was not firm enough in its support for certain religious doctrines.

Not that religious doctrines were unimportant to Babbitt - nothing could be more insulting to religion (according to him) than the effort to present it as just a way of helping people, 'serving mankind'. Religion was about the fundamental questions of individual existence and the nature of the universe - or it was about nothing.

Babbitt has also been presented as a conformist who supported 'traditional standards' because he wanted a comfortable life in university. This view might be compatible with Babbitt's attacks on the "professors of our law schools" who were (and are) busy "boring from within" with their doctrine of 'social justice', but it harldly fits with Babbitt's respectful but determined struggle against the policy of the President of Harvard Charles W. Elliot (and the rest of the powers that be) over what the university should teach and how it should teach it.

Lastly there is the silly mistake that Babbitt was simply a party man (a Republican party man) - an idea that is clearly shown to be false by Babbitt's comment on the Democrat President Grover Cleveland "perhaps the last of our Presidents who was unmistakably in our great tradition".

Babbitt was not always right. For example his hatred for slavery and his love for the unity of the United States led him to idealise President Lincoln - and whereas I do not support the "Lincoln was the Devil" view of some libertarians Lincoln was a deeply flawed President. Also Babbitt's hatred for supporters of the French Revolution and of all those who appeal to mob violence led him to play up the bad in Thomas Jefferson and play down the good in him.

To Mencken Babbitt was a puritan and Mencken had a one sided (negative sided) view of such folk. Babbitt may have opposed prohibition - but the "New Humanism" was still just the 'gloomy humors'. And yes there is something grim about Babbitt's (and his friend and ally Paul Elmer More's) conception of man and art. One may not see it much in his student Walter Lippmann, but one can certainly see it in his student (and ardent admirer) T.S. Eliot.

Babbitt is far from a comfortable (or comforting) writer. In Mencken one can see Nietzsche - man makes his own standards. In Babbitt stardards are objective and hard to reach - if you do not reach them you are not 'going your own way' you are just a failure as a human being. And yes very many people are failures whose problems are due to a lack of moral responsibility (and some of us know it). This is the mental universe of Aristotle.

Are you a moral agent? Can you make choices? If so then make the choice to get up in the morning and go to work - if you do not like your job then better yourself and get a better one. Develop good habits of dress, hygiene and work - do the right thing (morality is objective too) or die trying.

Do you want to help the poor? Then go and do so (empty the bed pans, feed the hungry children and so on) do not prattle about "serving mankind". And first make a success of yourself and feed, clothe and educate your children.

No doubt they would both have been horrified by the comparison but I see some similarities between Irving Babbitt and Ayn Rand.

For those interested in Irving Babbitt I would recommend Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings edited and with an introduction by George A. Panichas, University of Nebraska Press 1981.

I first came across Babbit when I was studying Rousseau about 20 years ago (if you are interested by what you see in Representative Writings - then go on to Rousseau and Romanticism), and I remember thinking what Babbitt, the high guardian of classical standards, would think of a semiliterate barbarian like me.

However, whatever Babbitt would think of me, I would still encourage people to read his works.

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I was able to avoid the so-called peace rally on Saturday by spending the weekend in the altogether more agreeable company of my girlfriend and the wonderful people of Malta. Malta is currently going through a referendum on whether to join the EU, having won the dubious right to apply for entry to that body recently. Naturally, my temptation is to tell any proud Maltese (and they are proud) to say no.

Malta has a mixed and varied history, as rich as that of any much bigger European nation. English is widely spoken there and there are many signs of Britain's influence on the island when it was a vast Royal Navy base - red telephone kiosks, old English cars, road signs, old-fashioned bakery stores out of an Arnold Bennett novel. The country has a relaxed feel about it and a fairly liberal business regime. I cannot vouch for this with 100 percent certainty, but I would imagine doing business in Malta is going to get a lot more of a bureaucratic ordeal if it does join the EU.

I think French President Chirac's recent arrogance towards the European nations who have sided with the Bush administration over Iraq will not have gone missed among the Maltese. It may even have a direct impact on the referendum vote, if the antis can use this intelligently. The Maltese will see, in its rudest form, what being a member of the EU means. Obey moi.

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This looks as if it might be interesting, in the Far Oriental sense I mean.

Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources.

The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country.

Uncovering such a deadly cargo on board would give George Bush and Tony Blair the much sought-after "smoking gun" needed to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, in the face of massive public opposition to war.

The suspicious ones amongst us will no doubt be saying: how convenient! If it's just what they wanted to happen, then who's to say they didn't make it happen?

Well, either way it is interesting. If it's a real threat, then … well if that isn't interesting to you then you are now having a near death experience, and the usual follow-up to that will be with you very soon. And if the Axis of Bush contrived it, then that just shows you that these guys are serious, and serious right about now (what with now being when they broke the story, the timing of which is interesting either way), which in my opinion is all to the good, but which I can understand others not liking so much. We may never know.

Here at Samizdata.net we have our own somewhat wordy house style, and we like to spell the stories out for the time when Samizdata.net roams the earth unchallenged, but paltry things like independent.co.uk have collapsed into oblivion. If this had been Instapundit (to whom, by the way, personal and Samizdata thanks for this link, which made quite a difference here yesterday), this would just have said something like: I don't know what this is about, but it sure looks like something.

Indeed.

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We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It is much easier to tolerate a dictator when he is dictating over somebody else's life and not your own.
- Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga in response to Jaques Chirac's outburst.

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Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has arrived in Paris to take part in a Franco-African summit despite European Union sanctions against him.

France obtained a waiver to allow Mugabe to enter Europe as sanctions were formally extended for a further year on Tuesday. Mugabe will be joinig around 45 other African heads of state, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, as part of French attempts to forge closer ties with Africa.

His arrival has prompted protests from Britain and other EU countries and human rights groups are planning a series of protests during Mr Mugabe's visit.

Given the company Jacques Chirac likes to keep, I would be deeply concerned to see him getting along with Tony Blair and George Bush.

Or perhaps it's not personal. It is worse. Philip Delves Broughton's excellent analysis of France's hang-ups and downs shows a burning desire to emulate de Gaulle and restore France's glory. Chirac's years of political hackery and alleged expense fiddling and kickbacks as Paris mayor will be forgotten as the echoes of General de Gaulle are ringing louder and louder:

The Franco-African summit that convenes in Paris tomorrow has long been one of his favourite events. In years of diminished French influence, this bi-annual get-together of African leaders was a chance for French presidents to stand tall. But this week's summit will be especially satisfying.

It will mark the triumphant conclusion of phase one of the Chirac Doctrine, a foreign policy that has enraged America and large parts of Europe, but delighted the French and made M Chirac popular beyond his dreams.

M Chirac ignored Britain's objection to the invitation to the Zimbabwean leader because he believed far more was at stake than antagonising the Foreign Office or pleasing the Zimbabwean opposition. He sees France extending its reach into Southern Africa, once a British preserve. France believes it can bring peace to Congo, for which it needs Zimbabwean help, and expand its political and economic interests in the continent.

Despite the continuing unrest in the Ivory Coast, worsened by a recent French-brokered peace deal, M Chirac is confident France can display its full diplomatic plumage in Africa and demonstrate to Washington that it has a sphere of influence too.

He may even not be worried about missing a post-war carve-up of influence in Iraq. It just could be that France, he believes, is now the leader of the anti-American world and with that come dividends and responsibilities appropriate to the grand ministries of Paris and far exceeding those in one corner of the Middle East.

I hope the United States does not forget French crude attempts at the realpolitik game. I hope that the important players in the international arena will not let France usurp more influence that it deserves and make it face the consequences of its actions. Or is it too much to hope for?

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The Guardian is a true equal opportunity newspaper. It has generously extended its ability to be proven wrong on many issues to Salam, who welcomes the opportunity.

I am getting a real kick out of posting this. THE GUARDIAN IS WRONG, check your sources baby. In the article titled Iraqi defence minister under house arrest it says:

He [Lieutenant-General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Tai, minister of defence] is not only a member of President Saddam's inner circle, but also a close relative by marriage. His daughter is married to Qusay Hussein, the dictator's 36-year-old younger son - considered by many as his heir apparent.

Wrong, Falsch, Khata'a. Qusay's wife is the daughter of Maher abdul-Rasheed who is a very important military man. He led the armies which 'liberated' the Fao area in the south of Iraq in April 1988. He was put under house arrest a year after that for some reason or other and is now living in the Iraqi western desert raising camels and staying out of politics. Qusay does not have a second wife only Saddam has. So there is no use saying that those loony muslims have more than one wife, maybe she is the second missus Q.Hussein.

Last night one independent source in Baghdad contacted by the Guardian confirmed that Gen Sultan was in custody. "He continues to attend cabinet meetings and appear on Iraqi TV, so that everything seems normal," said the source, a high-ranking official with connections to Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party. "But in reality his house and family are surrounded by Saddam's personal guards. They are there so he can't flee."

I, not a 'high ranking official', can tell you that his family is not under house arrest, his son is still driving that fancy car around Arasat Street intimidating everybody like all good sons of ministers do.

To be fair, the main point of the article was reporting on the signs of dissent in Baghdad in the past few days. And that must be a good thing.

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I still cannot say the word 'blog' in any non-blogger company without being confronted by blank faces and puzzled expressions. The medium isn't really 'out there' yet.

But gradual recognition in the circles of orthodox journalism gathers apace although I am not, perhaps, as wildly enthusiastic as I ought to be about this BBC editorial:

"Weblogs, for those of you still outside this ever-increasing loop, are personal web sites, updated frequently, and increasingly interlinked and interconnected to such an extent that some people have started to think of them as a kind of "hive mind" for the internet community.

As American technology writer Dan Gilmor, who first reported the Google/Blogger story, has realised and publicly stated many times: with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists. And the journalists had better remember that."

The hook of the editorial is the acquisition of Pyra by Google but I suppose that it's a good sign that they've been interested enough by blogging to write about the medium in fairly glowing terms.

They do mention one or two blogs specifically and, naturally, both are left-wing but then the BBC can hardly be expected to even acknowledge the existance of anyone or anything that isn't.

Do you think they've noticed this one yet?

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So, the human shields arrived in Baghdad already! Well, most of them. One of the three red London buses broke down in Italy, and several activists dropped out after being dug out of snow drifts near Istanbul, but, heroically,

"The rest endured bitterly cold weather, illness, poor living conditions and a great deal of bickering."

Well, you need mental toughness and nerves of steel to become a Human Shieldster, of course! Just ask Ken O'Keefe, Shield Leader: he used to be in the American Marines. Although you might have trouble finding him, as sadly, he has now gone nuts and is no longer part of this brave Western anti-war protest:

"Ken O'Keefe, their informal leader and a former American marine, burned his US passport and designed himself new travel documents proclaiming him a "Citizen of the World". As a result, he was detained in three countries.

Mr O'Keefe has yet to arrive in Baghdad and Mr Joffe-Walt last heard of him in Syria."

Mr Joffe-Walt mentioned various other hardships and tribulations which the Shield had suffered in its crusade to save human history from itself:

"Very few people knew each other. I did not know any of them and it was difficult to organise it. There were lots of different ideas on when to go to bed, how long to spend on the bus."

Shield-members will apparently be camping

"inside hospitals, schools, power stations and other buildings "needed for basic human living"."

Erm, I wonder if they've negotiated that with the Iraqi humans planning to be living inside them already? If bombing starts, numbers of safe buildings available for human living could possibly be reduced. I can tell the Shield has considered the possibility of bombing, because one of them said,

"the presence of vegans and spiritual healers would shield the buildings from harm if war broke out."

Of course. And equally predictably,

"Saddam Hussein's regime, which normally admits westerners with great reluctance and treats them with deep suspicion, has granted the human shields three-month visas and given them freedom to go where they wish."

It takes a nutter to know a nutter, I suppose.

(Thanks to the Telegraph)

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Stephen Zunes, Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, writes:

It was the United States, through its Central Intelligence Agency, that overthrew Iran's last democratic government, ousting Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. As his replacement, the U.S. brought in from exile the tyrannical Shah, who embarked upon a 26-year reign of terror. The United States armed and trained his brutal secret police - known as the SAVAK - which jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iranians struggling for their freedom.

The Islamic revolution was a direct consequence of this U.S.-backed repression since the Shah successfully destroyed much of the democratic opposition. In addition, the repressive theocratic rulers that gained power following the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah were clandestinely given military support by the U.S. government during the height of their repression during the 1980s. As a result, there is serious question regarding the United States' support for the freedom of the Iranian people.

I have two observations to make about this:

1. There is no mention of the support given to Ayatollah Khomenei by the French government before 1979. No doubt French politicians including Valéry Giscard D'Estaing and Jacques Chirac had no thoughts whatsoever of obtaining oil concessions once the hated US puppet was ousted.
   
2. To the extent that what Chair Zunes writes is at all plausible, outside the USA, the last sentence is undoubtedly true. However, I suspect that there really is a change of view in the US administration, to the effect that simply finding more efficient despots won't do. If this is the case, I believe that saying so publicly and repeatedly, will be somewhat disarming.

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This Iraq business. Every few weeks I sit down and try to write something short and sweet on the subject and it soon grows long and ugly. Yesterday I did it again. Today I'll try it yet again. (And hurrah! Here it finally is. But long and ugly, I'm afraid.)

So. Iraq. Blah blah blah, cut cut cut. And then this:

The USA is not just squaring up to Saddam Hussein because he is a big bad threat, although I'm sure that's part of it. It is also going to take out Saddam's Iraq because it is a good place to set about influencing other important places from, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and because it is takeable. Iraq is nasty, but it is also weak. Saddam Hussein is a monster and is known to be a monster, which makes him weak. Arabs aren't nearly as opposed to the USA taking out Saddam as they would be if it attacked another of their countries, which makes him weak. Even the UN has resolved various things against Saddam over the years. So he's vulnerable as well as threatening. The benefit of taking him out is big, while the cost of taking him out, by the standards of your average piece of conquest is quite low. I mean, imagine if the USA was instead trying to conquer Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Nightmare. Couldn't happen.

The point is: USA thinking isn't only about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq, liberating the Iraqis, and stopping Saddam-bossed or Saddam-assisted future terrorist attacks. They have many other dishes on their menu besides him. The purpose of taking out Saddam is not just to take out Saddam, but to wrench the whole balance of power in the Muslim world into a different state, a state far less helpful to Islamofascist (and other) terrorists.

The key questions are: Will the USA setting up shop right next to the very heart of the Muslim world like this enable it to take out terrorists and terrorist infrastructure more efficaciously than before? Will it persuade potential terrorists that, what with the USA getting so exercised, maybe they'd be better off forgetting about terrorism and becoming accountants and computer consultants? Or will it provoke now reasonably "good" Muslims into becoming terrorists the way they wouldn't have done if the USA had just carried on Clintonising about it all? Presumably President Bush reckons that the answers to those questions add up to a big gain to the USA if they go into Iraq, and although I am definitely open to persuasion about all that, at the moment, for whatever difference it might make, I strongly agree with him.

Asking "Why Iraq?" and "Why not somewhere else?" is like asking "Why France?" and "Why not somewhere else?" in 1944. Lots of reasons, and meanwhile: be patient. They'll get there. Basically, Iraq is the next big step that makes the most sense. But don't confuse taking out Saddam with the endgame of this thing. Oddly enough, in Europe at any rate, it's the opponents of Bush who are now being rather more public about this than Bush's supporters. "It won't end with Iraq", said the protesters last Saturday. They're right.

Tony Blair's problem is that his public support for Bush is based on a diminished idea of what Bush is up to, which comes over as dishonest because it is. But, if Blair were publicly to support what Bush is really up to, that would be honest, but very probably even more unpopular, especially with his own Party, than what he is saying now. A lot – and I mean a lot – of British people think that the USA is quite assertive enough in the world now, thank you very much, without it getting an order of magnitude more assertive. I hope Americans realise what a public pickle Blair is getting himself into over this.

Meanwhile, whatever Blair or the Brits or the French or the Timbuktooans might say or think, the USA plan is to take Iraq, and following that, over the next few years, to make itself a lot safer than now from terrorist attacks by (a) chasing terrorists, absolutely everywhere on the planet, and by (b) putting whatever pressure is necessary on any government anywhere which is now not chasing terrorists to switch to chasing terrorists with comparable zeal to the USA, thereby making the USA, and the West and the World in general, massively safer from terrorist attack than we all are now. And if that also makes the USA a whole lot more of a force in the world even than it is now, well, the Americans can live with that.

Ah, the irony of it. The idea of 9/11 was that it would bring the Great Satan to its knees. Now it looks as if this attack, breaking the Machiavelli rule that if you attack your enemy you had better be in a position then to finish him off, is actually going to result in the Great Satan becoming a lot stronger. By launching that astonishing assault, the Islamofascists have turned the world into a place that the USA now feels it has to control far more completely than it ever has before, in sheer self defence, and in particular it has turned the Muslim world into something that the USA is now determined to plunged into the middle of and severely re-arrange.

I know, I know. Is what the USA is doing right? Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But me? - I sympathise with the USA. If I'm right about what it's doing and why, well, I think it all makes perfect sense. Plus, frankly, in situations like this, I'm far more interested simply in trying to work out what is happening than I am to inform the world of what ought, in my opinion, to be happening instead if I do not approve.

One final point, which strongly tilts me towards the USA in all this.

The USA is now powerful enough to influence large tracts of the world in a big way, provided it does mostly nice things (like squash terrorism, spread capitalism and spread democracy) and that will be mostly very good news for the world, in my opinion, even for most of the people who will never admit this. And the USA may also be stupid enough to do serious damage to itself in the process. War is the health of the state, etc. But what the USA is not capable of doing, now or for the foreseeable future, is to tyrannise over the world. The USA can't, in other words, do to the world what Saddan Hussein and his cronies have been doing to Iraq for the last two decades, whatever the USA's enemies now say. The USA is simply not constituted to do such a thing. It's not in its nature, flawed though that may be. It doesn't have either the will or the power to do this. Had the old USSR ever had the power of the current USA, who knows what it might have done, and how many more millions it might have slaughtered in the process? But the USA, no.

If the USA had two billion people in it and an economy twice its present size and growing really fast, and if all its internal checks and balances had either been castrated out of it by a succession of Julius Caesars (and there are some who say that exactly this last bit has already happened or will shortly happen) or else if the USA had never had any checks and balances in the first place – instead of a mere three hundred million (??) people and an economy chugging along okay, and a Constitution and a democratic political tradition that still counts (in my opinion) for a hell of a lot – then I wonder what I would think about the USA hegemonising in all directions the way it is now doing? Power corrupts, and absolute power, … etc. With a USA like that, I might regard even the occasional serious terrorist stunt in places like my own London SW1, even with WMDs, as a price worth paying to avoid such a world.

But as it is: go Uncle Sam. And then keep on going. Just don't fuck up.

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When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty
-Thomas Paine

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Yesterday evening I was present at a very interesting gathering that took place in the City of London.

It was, or at least appeared to be, a joint venture between the American NRA and the NRA of Great Britain (yes, we do have one).

I have not attended anything like this before. The format was that of a TV chat show which was hosted by a representative of the American NRA who fielded questions to, and took replies from, an almost entirely British audience. The event was filmed by an American production company and will, in due course, be edited into an info-mercial for distribution in the USA designed to press home to an American audience the folly and dangers of apparently 'reasonable' gun control measures.

It was a remarkably well-informed audience. Many of them were former shooters and gun-owners and, without exception, they were able to recount, by reference to both historical data and relevent legislation, the way victim-disarmament had started in the 1920's as merely sensible measures to remove the 'most dangerous' weapons from society and, over the years, chip by chip, step by step, measure by measure, the disarmament programme advanced up to 1997 when all handguns were prohibited along with every other potentially life-saving tool (e.g. pepper sprays). Emphasised too, was the political and legal slippery slope which has resulted in a situation in Britain today where acting in genuine self-defence is classified as serious crime.

On the face of it, this is an exercise which will benefit Americans not Britons but, on a deeper level, it will benefit Brits as well because events like this bring together those too-few Britons who still believe in a right of self-defence and spurs them on to greater levels of mutual education and political activism. That is how things change.

I detected not the merest hint of a defeatist atmosphere last night. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the self-defence movement in Britain, albeit still small, has been galvanised to an unprecedented degree.

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The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.

How much is an Iraqi life worth? To me personally, about zero. Here's why:
- I have no friends in Iraq (and doubt I ever will by the end of this post)
- No Iraqi signs my paycheck
- No Iraqi makes anything special that I can't buy anywhere else (oil?)
- Iraq is on the other side of the globe

"But they're being killed" you say. So are many other people. What about the North Koreans? What about the people who will effectively be killed because they cannot afford medical care due to this war? What about third world countries where parents have more children than they can afford to feed? Please make an objective, logical argument why the life of an Iraqi rates above (not just equal to) these others.

There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question "Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?" We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It's long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what's left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy.

The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata's eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state.

More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)?

I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every 'utopia' has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the 'mountain of skulls' left behind.

 

Savonarola's Florence, Robespierre's France, Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Kim Jong-il's North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, note that there is an individual's name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to 'care' about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence.

We see people suffer on TV everyday. They suffer even more off screen. Should we mobilise the world every time this happens until there is no more pain? Sounds like utopia to me. However, there is a difference between suffering caused by natural disasters and pain inflicted on an individual by another. The first inspires compassion and assistance, the second moral outrage and a corresponding action to remove the oppression.

"But why should I care about someone else being oppressed when I am busy building my life to my specifications and according to my abilities?" I hear you say. You attach certain importance to yourself, which is natural and right. An individual Iraqi, North Korean, Chinese would feel the same, if not for some homicidal megalomaniac ruling his country. Self-awareness is the most fundamental expression of a human being as an individual and one of the greatest sources of evil is the ability of one human being to deny this to another.

Again, why should 'we', individuals living in another country, 'other side of the globe', do anything about it? The first part of the comment reads to me exactly as this (in)famous quote:

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...[and elsewhere]...My answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country...

These words were uttered by Neville Chamberlain before one of the most appalling episodes in modern European history. His 'sensible' attitude did f**k-all to prevent or restrain what followed. These words were said after:

The rights of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man, trampled upon by a state in a manner shocking the sense of mankind, has long been considered to form part of the recognized law of nations. If murder, rapine, and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries, shall those who differ from the common criminal only by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation?

These crimes [crimes against humanity] were committed both before and after Nazi Germany had launched her series of aggressions. They were committed within Germany and in foreign countries as well. Although separated in time and space, these crimes had, of course, an inter-relationship which resulted from their having a common source in Nazi ideology; for we shall show that within Germany the conspirators had made hatred and destruction of the Jews an official philosophy and a public duty, that they had preached the concept of the master race with its corollary of slavery for others, that they had denied and destroyed the dignity and the rights of the individual human being. They had organized force, brutality, and terror into instruments of political power and had made them commonplaces of daily existence. We propose to prove that they had placed the concentration camp and a vast apparatus of force behind their racial and political myths, their laws and polices.

As every German Cabinet minister or high official knew, behind the laws and decrees in the Reichsgesetzblatt was not the agreement of the people or their representatives but the terror of the concentration camps and the police state. The conspirators had preached that war was a noble activity and that force was the appropriate means of resolving international differences; and having mobilized all aspects of German life for war, they plunged Germany and the world into war.

We say this system of hatred, savagery, and denial of individual rights, which the conspirators erected into a philosophy of government within Germany or into what we may call the Nazi constitution, followed the Nazi armies as they swept over Europe. For the Jews of the occupied countries suffered the same fate as the Jews of Germany, and foreign laborers became the serfs of the "master race," and they were deported and enslaved by the million. Many of the deported and enslaved laborers joined the victims of the concentration camps, where they were literally worked to death in the course of the Nazi program of extermination through work. We propose to show that this Nazi combination of the assembly line, the torture chamber, and the executioner's rack in a single institution has a horrible repugnance to the twentieth century mind.

You might have guessed that these are extracts from the prosecuting speeches at Nuremberg Trials. (The first paragraph was from one made by Sir Hartley Shawcross, Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom. The rest is from the speech of Mr. Thomas J. Dodd, Executive Trial Counsel for the United States.) I resorted to this historical example of tyranny, oppression, human misery caused by the Nazi state, ideology, bureaucracy and most of all individual Nazis, because it is recent, well documented and its horrors rarely denied. The consensus is that defeat of Germany had been necessary not only for strategic and military reasons but also from a human standpoint. The aftermath may have spawned international laws and institutions that deserve severe criticism in their present form. Nevertheless I would argue that the moral force of their underlying principles remains unabated.

It is an impossible and ungrateful task to try provide irrefutable grounds to those who do not already believe in the intrinsic need to defend individual freedom whenever it is seriously threatened. To insist on such a moral imperative for everyone would be foolish. Instead I insist on consistency. If you believe that it was important to fight the likes of Nazi Germany and its ideology not only as self-defense measure, then extend that reasoning to Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran. To argue that the US, UK and other governments are not worthy to be moved by such considerations and that their actions are driven by non-humanitarian, self-interested or utilitarian objectives is a non-starter. The countries fighting in the WWII were far from perfect. The Allied armies were commanded by the same kind of statists as the ones that live off our taxes and erode our civil liberties. Indeed, after the war, they all got back to doing so with greater vigor. But that is the stuff of daily posts on Samizdata.net.

If freedom of individual matters sufficiently to oppose the US and UK state, it matters more in Iraq and anywhere where such expression is suppressed and our 'libertarian' truths ring hollow, if we deny them to anyone but ourselves.

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Nicolas Chatfort write the obituary of the UN, an organization whose statist premise makes its impending passing something few at Samizdata.net will shed a tear over

We are witnessing a major historical turning point in history. The world order envisioned by the UN is on its deathbed and unlikely to be revived. The world order I am referring to, however, is not the one enshrined in the lofty words of the UN charter. No, that vision died long ago, in fact as soon as the signatures were given in San Francisco. The idealistic vision of an international community working harmoniously toward common ends died stillborn when despotic regimes, whose very existences were alien to the goals set out in the charter, were allowed to join. The idea that the legitimacy to US actions is dependent on the views of countries such as Angola, China, Guinea, or Syria is absurd.

Realpolitiks, on the other hand, have underpinned the UN for over half a century. The myth behind the UN is that it an organization designed to maintain international peace through collective security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the UN has always rested on a grand bargain between the US and the other democracies of world. On the one side, the US would agree not to return to isolationism after WWII and promised to use its military force to provide a protective umbrella to its weaker partners. On the other side, the democracies would provide political support to US actions around the globe, thus enhancing the legitimacy of these actions. The Security Council has been effective only when it has been aligned with the interests of the United States, on whom it has been dependent for military strength with which to impose its will. No other country or collection of countries can adequately substitute for the US military.

This bargain has now been broken. France and Germany no longer feel that they have an obligation to support the US. In fact, it now appears that France views the weakening of American power as one of its major diplomatic goals. Although in the past French posturing has been a nuisance for the US, it had always returned to the side of the US when it mattered. The recent French actions in the UN, however, are unprecedented in that Paris is now working actively to undermine the US position. The obstinacy of the French position suggests that Paris is more interested in bringing the US to heal than Iraq. Chirac is mistaken if he believes that the US will acknowledge UN paramountcy over US security interests. The UN cannot function without the US military power to back it up and the US will not long remain a member if it comes to view UN more as an impediment to US security rather than as an aid.

Nicolas Chatfort

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Many of the anti-war protesters has been carrying placards with the slogan 'Not In My Name'. Well if you voted in the UK, regardless of whether it was for Labour or Conservative or LibDem, then you gave your consent to the system which taxes me without my consent, so I suppose I am robbed in 'your' name. I was disarmed (by a Tory government) and forbidden to effectively defend myself in 'your' name. My rights to own property and control my own labour and capital are abridged into meaninglessness in 'your' name.

So when you say say about a war against the Ba'athist socialists of Iraq "Not In My Name", please forgive me if I really do not give a damn if something gets done by the state that you do not like.

I do not think George Bush and Tony Blair want to topple Saddam Hussain due to an abiding concern for the Iraqi people, but frankly I really do not care why the statists who tax me are going to do it, just that they do it. Provided there is a net gain in liberty in Iraq, and it is hard to see how that could not be the case post-Saddam, then I am in favour of the violent and hopefully fatal removal of the Ba'athist thugs.

Do it for 'Freedom for Iraq', do it 'because Saddam is a threat', do it 'because of links to Al-Qaeda', do it 'because the voices in my head told me to'... I do not care. Just do it!

You can even do it in my name if you like.

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David Goldstone has written in with Why Libertarians should be for the liberation of Iraq but against the war. I have replied to his thoughts afterwards

Dear Perry,

I have every sympathy with those on Samizdata who support the forthcoming war. The thought of Tony Benn telling an Iraqi women why it is wrong for her people to be freed from tyranny is skin-crawlingly repellent. And as for the marchers yesterday, well if they against the war that is almost reason enough for me to be for it.

Almost reason enough, but not quite. In the final analysis, I still believe (and I say this with all respect to those who disagree), that the pro-war libertarians are wrong.

Let me say clearly that this posting is not addressed to those who believe that the war is justified on the grounds of pre-emptive self defence. I disagree with them but the debate between us is not a debate of principle, merely one as to the weight of the evidence. Rather, this posting is directed at those who would justify the war on the grounds that it will bring liberty to millions of Iraqi’s.

Let me also say clearly that I fully endorse the goal of bringing liberty to Iraq and I would willingly contribute some of my own money to pay for a military effort to bring about that end.

But others would not. And therein lies the contradiction for libertarians. How can we justify using force (viz tax revenues) to make others pay for a war that they oppose? If the U.S. or U.K. governments were to conscript people to fight to free Iraq, I am sure we would be loud in our condemnation. Yet taxation is at only one remove from conscription. Whether we like it or not, millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. disagree with the war. We may disagree with them, but how can we as libertarians justify forcing them to pay for it? The implications are obvious and run counter to everything that libertarians stand for.

I would dearly love to see a compelling answer to this question because I would dearly love to be able to support the war. But so far, I have yet to see any answer to this question on Samizdata, let alone a compelling one.

David Goldstone

Well David, I actually agree with you more than you might suppose! Although I am less convinced than you seem to be that Saddam Hussain poses no actual threat to me, my primary reason for wanting to see the overthrow of Ba'athist socialism in Iraq is that I wish to see an end to tyranny, the death or imprisonment of its perpetrators and an increase in liberty for Iraq's hapless people.

For me the only argument against this being done by the militaries of the USA and UK is that this requires the theft of tax money from US and UK taxpayers.

However...

What is done is done. I have been robbed by the US and UK states (the two places I have been paying taxes) for a great many year and the lavishly equipped volunteer militaries capable of overthrowing Ba'athism are already in existence.

As selling off the military equipment and returning a huge pot of my stolen tax money to me is going to happen when pigs fly, I am left with either watching the proceeds of my robbery slowly depreciate as they sit in military bases scattered across the world, or instead demanding that I at least get some value for my stolen money!

Just as I would rather have privately own roads, private police forces and private healthcare, in the here-and-now I at least what the state owned roads to have no potholes, the state owned police to prevent me being mugged and the National Health Service to fix me up when I am injured. I am after all being forced to pay for all these things!

And so... please take this volunteer military I was forced to pay for and go and kill Saddam Hussain. The state made me pay for the weapons and salaries, so bloody well give me some value for my money!

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This was posted today to the Libertarian Alliance Forum by Nigel Meek.

"Although generally always pro-War - I accept the case that Islamic Jihadists and bandit states such as Iraq and North Korea might ultimately have to be confronted and put down by relatively large, well-equipped armed forces, and it's one of the reasons that *in practice* I'm a minarchist rather than an anarchist - like any libertarian with a right to be called by that name I've nevertheless always been somewhat hesitant about fully committing my meagre support to the whole thing. Whether it's the prospect civilian casualties, of increased taxation to pay for it all, or a lasting diminution in domestic civil liberties - in short, a growth of the State's reach and power - it is not good news for our way of thinking.

And yet the marches in London and elsewhere yesterday have as near as it's possible so to do obliged me now to side with Bush and Blair effectively unequivocally. I peeked at the TV screen every now and then on Saturday - and thanks, too, to Perry de Havilland and David Carr for their reporting on the event in Samizdata -and even if one knew absolutely nothing about Saddam Hussein, his family, his supporters, the Ba'athist regime, and the actions of all of the forces under their control nationally and internationally over a great many years, simply looking at those who attended ought to be enough to make any sane person opt for Bush and Blair and to support a military invasion of Iraq, not just in the absence of any formal support from the UN but in complete indifference to what the UN says.

For what did we see on Saturday in London and elsewhere? Warmed-over Cold War moral equivalencers and Communist fellow-travellers; various latter-day Marxoid sectarians; geriatric Aldermaston veterans and other one-sided nuclear
disarmers; 'smash Anglo-Saxon civilisation' multiculturalists; assorted celebrity egotists; outright pro-Saddamites; anti-globalisation nihilists; re-invigorated public-sector trades unionists; UN-supporting single-world-governancers; full-time protesters-without-a-cause; liars and fantasists; pan-Arab socialists; Green nature worshippers; anti-Semites; 'nice' middle-class people who are "worried about their children's future" and who voted for the Greens in the 1980s and latterly and ironically for Blair and New Labour; insolent purveyors of an alien and wicked Islamic creed; immigrant welfare-spongers; those who simply think that evil is good and vice-versa; and Lord alone knows who else. Saddest of all - however small in number -capitalist-libertarians whose hatred of Statism is so great that they would apparently look with more favour upon a 'private' mugger the a State-employed policeman coming to the victim's aid.

In short: a march-past of Those Who Are Wrong. This is not a black and white issue. No libertarian could think so. But I believe that it's fair to say that it's a black and rather-grimy-off-white-grey issue. The very real faults of Bush
and Blair personally, their political views overall, the parties that they lead, and the only semi-free countries that they run simply must not blind us to the demonstrable truths not only of the nature of Saddam Hussain et al but that those who oppose them here in the UK and elsewhere are (at best) mistaken and (at worst) a fairly representative cross-section of every wicked creed to have recently assailed the world, certainly since the end of the Second World War.

What we witnessed was a March for Evil."

I think that was worth re-printing.

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If "International Law" is more important than saving the lives of innocent people now and in the future, by:

1. Liberating the Iraqi people,
   
2. Preventing Saddam from invading and attacking any other places in the future,
   
3. Making sure he can't develop nukes, not even in secret, and can't give them to international terrorist organisations...

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From time to time the question surfaces on Samizdata: how come the British Conservative Party is doing so badly? One of the most coherent and convincing answers I've come across lately is to be found in Free Life, the (now all electronic) journal of the Libertarian Alliance, from Manchester based libertarian historian Steve Davies, responding to a piece by Sean Gabb. Davies explains how the British electoral system now hurts the Conservatives. But, he says, their problems go deeper.

… Simply, the electoral coalition put together in the 1920s has split into two sharply distinct and increasingly hostile groups of voters. This happened between about 1989 and 1997. So the split in Conservatism today is not just a matter of divisions within the Parliamentary Party or the wider Party. It's a split in the electorate. That means the issues facing the party are much more profound than a matter of who the leader should be. It also makes everything far more problematic, given our electoral system.

The two groups of 'right wing' voters today can perhaps called Tories and Whigs. To use stereotypes, Tories are older, of either below average or well above average income, live in seaside resorts, rural areas and older industrial areas. They are Daily Mail and Telegraph readers, they are strongly socially conservative, very hostile to the EU, dislike multiculturalism and favour very strong controls on immigration, are supportive of the war on drugs. They are hostile to socialism and much of the welfare state but support some parts of it such as the NHS (for now). Although they generally favour free markets this is becoming less true all the time. They increasingly do not like globalisation and dislike large corporations. Whigs are younger, average to above average income, and live in suburban areas including suburbanised parts of the countryside. They are economically liberal, often very much so. They hope that the government is going to sort out the welfare state but suspect it isn't and are becoming increasingly hostile to it. They are very socially liberal, much less bothered about immigration and dislike anti-immigrant campaigns. They favour relaxing laws against drugs or outright legalisation, they are very relaxed about homosexuality. They don't like the EU particularly but don't have the visceral hostility of the Tories and they don't like appeals to nationalism because they have a very different sense of national identity to the Tories. They like and support many kinds of multiculturalism. Many read the Telegraph but they are also Times and Independent readers. They absolutely hate and despise the Daily Mail.

... The problem is that, increasingly, Whig and Tory voters just do not like each other. Policies and, above all, rhetoric that appeals to or inspires one group of voters will alienate the other. So having a campaign concentrating on attacks on asylum seekers, family values and national sovereignty will inspire the Tories but alienate the Whigs. Emphasising personal liberty via 'hot button' issues like homosexual rights and drug liberalisation will please Whigs but enrage Tories.

Davies goes on to speculate about how all this will play out. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, he reckons they'll be captured by the Whigs, and won't actually split.

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Those who oppose war with Iraq on the grounds that that civilians would be killed fail to understand that people are already dying due to Saddam's misrule. Saddam Hussein has not earned his name "the Butcher of Baghdad" for nothing. He has been ruthless in his treatment of any opposition to him since his rise to power in 1979. A cruel and callous disregard for human life and suffering remains the hallmark of his regime.

The repressive violence of Saddam's regime is the norm and not something used by the authorities in exceptional circumstances as it is in many countries. The repression, imprisonment, torture, deportation, assassination, and execution are strategies followed by Saddam's regime in dealing with Iraqi people. The following are few examples of these crimes:

1. The killing of Sunni leaders such as Abdul Aziz Al Badri the Imam of Dragh district mosque in Baghdad in 1969, Al Shaikh Nadhum Al Asi from Ubaid tribe in Northern Iraq, Al Shiakh Al Shahrazori, Al Shaikh Umar Shaqlawa, Al Shiakh Rami Al Kirkukly, Al Shiakh Mohamad Shafeeq Al Badri, Abdul Ghani Shindala.

2. The arrest of hundreds of Iraqi Islamic activists and the execution of five religious leaders in 1974.

3. The arrest of thousands of religious people who rose up against the regime and the killing of hundreds of them in the popular uprising of 1977 in which Shia cleric, Agha Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim, the leader of SCIRI was sentenced to life imprisonment.

4. The execution of 21 Ba'ath Party leaders in 1979 in Iraq , the assassination of Hardan Al Tikriti former defence Minister in Kuwait in 1973, and the former Prime Minister Abdul Razzaq Al Naef in London 1978

5. The arrest, torture and executions of tens of religious scholars and Islamic activists in such as Qasim Shubbar, Qasim Al Mubarqaa in 1979.
   

6. The arrest, torture and execution of Shia cleric Agha Mohamad Baqir Al Sadr and his sister Amina Al Sadr (Bint Al Huda) in 1980.

7. The war against Iran in 1980 in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, and many more were handicapped or reported missing.

8. The arrest of 90 members of Al Hakim family and the execution of 16 members of that family in 1983 to put pressure on Agha Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim to stop his struggle against Saddam's regime.
   

9. The occupation of Kuwait which resulted in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and injuring many times that number in addition to the destruction of Iraq.

10. The assassination of many opposition figures outside Iraq such as Haj Sahal Al Salman in UAE in 1981, Sami Mahdi and Ni'ma Mohamad in Pakistan in 1987, Sayed Mahdi Al Hakim in Sudan in 1988, and Shaikh Talib Al Suhail in Lebanon in 1994.

It is well documented that Saddam's regime has produced and used chemical weapons against the Iraqi people and against neighbouring countries. Here are some examples of his use of such weapons:

1. It is widely known that Saddam's regime dropped chemical bombs by air fighter on Halabja in Northern Iraq in 1988. The reports of the UN, other international organisations and Western governments confirmed that more than 5,000 thousand civilians were died within a few hours. Eye witness accounts, photos and films have verified the horror of this attrocity.
   

2. Saddam's regime used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers during Iraq-Iran war. Many of them were sent to Europe to receive medical treatment and they were seen on TV across the world.

3. General Wafiq Al Samarae, the former director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, admitted in his book Eastern Gate Ruins that Saddam's regime used light chemical weapons against Iraqi people in the cities of Najaf and Karbala to crush the popular uprising of March 1991 which followed the defeat of Saddam after his invasion of Kuwait.

4. After the crushing of the uprising, large number of people took sanctuary in the Marshes of Southern Iraq. In 1993 Saddam used chemical weapons against those hiding there in order to crush resistance.

 

Now tell me again that Bush or Blair are worse than Saddam...

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I have no time for the those who took to the streets this weekend, de facto, in support of Saddam's murderous regime. These are people who feel the need to soothe their morally atrophied consciences deafened by political correctness, the modern obsession with emotion and the life of comfort and material excess¹.

Their act of protest is a far cry from a reasoned consideration of facts, the reality of international politics, of Iraq and the suffering of its people under Saddam or Iraq's threat to the Western world. Theirs is a response based on emotions only, without thinking of the consequences of such action. Hate America? Join the protest. Hate Bush and the Republicans? Join the protest. Hate Tony Blair and the government? Join the protest. Hate Israel? Join the protest. Hate politicians? Join the protest. Hate the fact nobody takes you seriously? Join the protest. Hate your mediocre existence? Join the protest. Hate rational discourse? Join the protest. Miss the marches of the communists, peace movements, anti-Vietnam protesters etc of the Cold War era? Feel inadequate or need to feel important? Join the protest.

In fact, 'peace and motherhood' have very little to do with the global protests against the US and UK determination to remove Saddam. What is the point of peace, if the price paid for it is someone else's pain and suffering? Proclamation of support for all things pink & fluffy and for general concepts of 'goodness' is the perfect anchor for those drawning in moral vagueness unable to reason their way out complex issues that defy simple solutions.

How much easier it is to look away, or to hastily cover the offending sight with excuses, defensive answers and idealistic slogans or level accusations against those who try to point out unpleasant facts. This type of anti-rationalism prefers slogans to serious consideration of complex reality.

However, this is a luxury not afforded to those who battle for their survival - physical and moral - wrestling the remnants of their humanity from the daily tyranny, whether they live in Iraq or Iran, North Korea or China. It is a fight that they are almost certain to lose without help, their oppressors poised to pounce on any expression of integrity and purpose as a sign of defiance. No-one can undo the suffering already inflicted on them. I protest against those who deny them the chance of living like humans for the rest of their lives.

Note¹: I have nothing against comfort and life of excess, the point is that those who have it should not claim the moral high ground in deciding what is better for those who have to face different and starker kind of reality.

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It is a strange experience finding myself supporting Tony Blair, the man who presides over my ongoing robbery by the British state, let alone quoting his remarks of yesterday approvingly, but I suppose these are strange times:

There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which, if he is left in power, will be left in being.

I just wish the people marching yesterday would spare us the nauseating claim to the moral high ground and, if they still oppose the war, just acknowledge that theirs is an emotional rather than a moral argument and that the reality of their position is that if they get their way, Iraqi people will continue to die at the hands of murderous Ba'athist socialism in Iraq whilst they smugly congratulate themselves on their 'having prevented a war'.

Preventing the overthrow of the people who did...

this...

and...

this...

... to the people of Halabja with a weapon of mass destruction (poison gas) is the reality what those marchers are trying to achieve.

Regardless of how you feel about George W. Bush or Tony Blair or capitalism or Israel or the Palestinians or globalisation or anything else, that does not change the fact that the continuation in power of the murderous Saddam Hussain and his Ba'athist thugs will be the consequence of appeasement. Is that what you want? Is it?

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The entire world, apart from a few evil American warmongers plus Tony Blair, took part in an anti-war demonstration in London yesterday with millions of inter-galactic aliens joining other peace protests around the galaxy. Organisers claim that the march is sure to topple well-known right-winger Blair, allowing him to be replaced by the cuddly lovable Ken Livingstone, Mayor of the People's Republic of London.

"We never liked Blair in the first place," said some bloke in a scruffy jacket with corduroy arm-patches. "The whole way he managed to get elected was always suspiciously un-socialist. But now we are really hoping the country will rise up in revolution and institute Ken in his rightful role at last. If the Houses of Parliament spontaneously fall today, maybe the Americans can get rid of their president tomorrow and let Hillary Clinton take over the world! Erm, their insignificant burger-ridden country."

"But don't Americans like their president? I mean, they chose him in an election, right?" asked a reporter for extreme rightist media propagandists, Fox News.

"No, the whole American electoral system is rigged by right-wing Capitalists to help them win despite having only a minority of the vote," explained the corduroy guy. "Real democracy would prove that the people want Marxism, obviously, as Marxism is for The People; it's self-explanatory!"

In his speech at the Labour spring conference later yesterday, Mr Blair told delegates that if they want to send him to the Tower of London and let Saddam have his way and produce the bloody nukes and give them to Al Qaeda then, fine, he is sick of the lot of them, and he just hopes their bunkers will hold if they get enough warning to climb inside before the bombs start flying. He stressed that if they want to support evil dictators why don't they all bloody well go and live in Baghdad and see what it's like, or they could try Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or that Korea place whichever one it was, any one of a number of countries on the US's list for upgrading sometime when they get round to it.

Mr Blair then requested a large bowl of warm soapy water water, and washed his hands on the rostrum, while everybody watched not knowing quite what to think. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, called on the entire party to get behind Mr Blair and give him "full support" as he is worried about what might happen to his own job if Blair is beheaded.

Yesterday Downing Street urged the protesters taking part in the anti-war demonstrations around the country and the world to remember the brutality in Saddam's regime and see how they would feel about having their civil servants routinely executed, before realising this was not a very good argument, and going back indoors for toasted muffins.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said that if a million people turned out to march against the Government - as some are claiming - they would equal the number of Kurds who fled Iraq after the Gulf War because they were being oppressed by Saddam. However, he assured the British people that they would not be gassed by their own government at this stage.

Last night Downing Street denied reports that Mr Blair was angry at the protesters and rejected claims that he was trying to avoid them. "He believes that they have an absolute democratic right to protest and if they want to they can," a spokesman said. "He just wants them to f*** off."

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Hurrah for remainder shops. A week or two ago I found a copy of Tom Wolfe's little book of essays entitled Hooking Up, after the first essay in it (which I thought was the least good one), for £2.99. It is crammed with interesting and very readable stuff, including a wonderful piece called "My Three Stooges", in which the Wolfe man rips the pants (first in the American sense and then in the British) off three critically acclaimed but not much read (compared to him) novelist rivals of his (John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving). I do love a good literary row. Lots of hits below the belt. Lots of quasi-military calculation, on both sides. These Stooges, by the time Wolfe has finished devouring them, come across, to switch metaphors, as giant structures that occupy the spaces that ought to be occupied by real writers of real substance, but with nothing inside them, like that design to replace the Twin Towers with giant empty children's climbing frames. By going for Wolfe in a gang the stooges hoped that they'd flatten him. By counter-attacking against all of them instead of just picking on one and ignoring the others, Wolfe comes over as Errol Flynn, as the outnumbered hero, rather than just as a rougher and tougher bully.

The piece I've just finished reading is the one called "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died", which is about the collapse and replacement of Freudianism and Marxism by "Neuroscience", as Wolfe terms it. Neuroscience is the catch-all name he gives to the fact that Neuroscience (minus inverted commas) is, he says, the new hot scientific frontier, together with the claim that it and other closely related theories (such as Evolutionary Biology) explain everything that people think and do.

To me it is all very clear what is and is not true here. First, unlike Freudianism and Marxism, Neuroscience and Evolutionary Biology are genuine scientific disciplines. But as the bases for a Universal Theory of Everything to explain and predict everything that we do or will ever do, they are merely the latest version of the delusion that goes: hey we've got cool machines now that they didn't use to have, and hey, we know stuff about the brain or the universe, or whatever, that all those dead guys didn't know before, ergo, we now know (or will soon discover) everything. We are about to be Gods. Which means that we sort of are already.

No you aren't fellas. But Wolfe loves to get out there into the real world (into "this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours") and chew the fat with guys like this, whether they are jet jocks (The Right Stuff), "Masters of the Universe" (Bonfire of the Vanities), or, as now, brain scientists (to reclaim this wild, bizarre, etc. country of ours "as a literary property"). These Gods of Neuroscience may not find out everything, but in the meantime – like earlier generations of scientists who thought they could reduce the entire universe and everything in it to bouncing billiard balls – they are finding out a hell of a lot. And Wolfe revels in and respects and is happy to memorialise such high-achieving hubris every bit as much as he despises Gentlemen of Letters who ignore all such things and write only about their own divorces and their own literary lives, or about the past.

Wolfe makes much of the big difference between Marxism and Freudianism on the one hand, and "Neuroscience" on the other, which is that the first two are environmental, while the new revelation is hereditary. Marxism and Freudianism enthrone nurture, offering two different environments scribbling on the same blank slate, while Neuroscience enthrones nature, offering us, in the words of bug-hunting sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, "an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid", that is to say, a nature that may or may not be developed, but is in the meantime predetermined by the photography that is Darwinian Evolution.

To me what is striking is the similarity of all three Grand Theories, in that all three offer the illusion of a total explanation of human behaviour, and all three offer, to the non-initiated mob, excuses for failure and for wickedness. All three are ranged against the notion of individual responsibility for individual action. All three make moral nonsense of murder trials which yield a "guilty" verdict and then take away the "bad guy" (note all the sneer inverted commas) and either execute him or bang him up for life, or the grounds that he damn well shouldn't have done it and should have chosen to behave differently.

But, says the new revelation, he couldn't help himself. In the olden days, of the two old revelations, bad guys weren't really bad, because they were born poor, or came from deranged families. Now, the bad guys are born with bad genetic wiring. But the pitch is the same. You can't blame anyone for anything.

But, whatever the degree of truth behind the ultimately false claim that genetic inheritance explains or can ever explain absolutely everything that we all do, if you rip the criminal law to pieces and turn it over to doctors or psychologists or for that matter neuroscientists, you are going to have yourself a lot more criminals. That truth is one you can carve into the tablets and hang up there for ever.

After all, suppose that wicked people are hardwired for inevitable wickedness. So what? Lefties deduce that this makes them blameless for their wickedness. But that doesn't make it any less necessary to lock them up, and stop them being wicked. Even punishment, in fact especially punishment, has its place in the world of the genetic determinist, because punishment, especially if speedy and predictable, is something that even very wicked people may well be genetically programmed to pay attention to. And if they don't pay attention to punishment, then surely they should be locked up for ever, and if that's considered too expensive and hence unfair to the people impoverished by such procedures, just killed.

It's horribly unfair to the ones who are born bad. But something like this has to be done if civilisation is to have a chance. It's a brutal fact – human nature or no human nature, choice or no choice, individual responsibility or no individual responsibility – that societies with semi-functioning, not completely brutish and arbitrary criminal justice systems tick over after a fashion and maybe better than that, while societies without such systems are an evil shambles.

Politically, the interesting feature of all this is that whereas Marxism-versus-Individual-Reponsibility, and Freudianism-versus-Individual-Responsibility, were both left-versus-right dramas, and accordingly everyone in politics could feel comfortable about them, even as they exchanged ferocious blows with one another. Indeed, the two dramas tended to merge into one another.

But this battle – the one with "genetic determinism", Neuroscience, Evolutionary Biology, "Human Nature", or whatever we call it, on one side, and Individual Responsibility on the other – is a right-versus-right political drama. That's uncomfortable for the right, because they are liable to be torn by civil war. And it's uncomfortable for the left, because they are liable to get left out.

However, I think that Wolfe exaggerates the degree to which it is seriously being proclaimed, by philosophically serious people, that genetics really does determine everything. Oddly enough, he is a righty lining up with the lefties in this. Wolfe says that there are all these neuroscientists muttering on the quiet that genetic determinism is where it's at, and that's exactly what the lefties say is happening as well. And the lefties add that this is also what all those political righties say, also on the quiet.

Most of the actual righties, on the other hand, stand ready to trash any politically and philosophically ignorant neuroscientific hotshot who tries to elevate the hubristic canteen chatter of him and his new "Masters of the Universe" mates into a serious political philosophy. In this they are aided by non-righties such as Richard (The Selfish Gene) Dawkins, who are expert geneticists but who oppose genetic determinism. Wolfe implies that Dawkins and his ilk are just ageing ex-jocks, who just don't have enough of the Right Scientific Stuff to embrace the logical consequences of their own discoveries and theories. Dawkins, Wolfe implies, has been "left behind", like some clapped out former fighter pilot who now drives a 747. Me, I'm totally with Dawkins and against Wolfe on all this. Being an expert geneticists absolutely does not oblige you to be a determinist, any more than being an expert Newtonian physicists did in former times. I don't like to think of myself as a righty any more than Dawkins does (well, not much more), but as far as I'm concerned there's nothing remotely logical about the extreme kind of determinism, except as a mathematically modelled approximation to some mere aspect of reality.

In short, we good guys can take the best from both Neuroscience and from Individual Responsibility. We can dump the philosophical hubris now apparently attached to the former, while welcoming whatever truths, old and new, that it can tell us. And we must accept the philosophical crudities and downright injustices of the latter theory, while grimly noting that if you ignore it, you get mayhem and pillage out there in that real world, and you are doing the good people of the real world (however difficult the goodness of these good people may be to explain) no favours.

There is, of course, a problem with relying on remainder shops for your intellectual nourishment. You are liable to pay attention to intellectual news only years after it has broken. Hooking Up was first published as long ago as 2000, and the pieces in it were published pretty much in their final form in various magazines and journals during the years before then. So, I rather think that some of the above matters have been somewhat gone into before, by others who get their books free to review, or who can afford to buy them as soon as they come out, or who, unlike me, were properly internet-connected in the year 2000. Nevertheless, the stories Wolfe dealt with in Hooking Up, and especially in "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died" (which is what I've concentrated on), are important enough to be worth thinking about even if you do it a few years later than you might have.