We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Well, when he is not a fascist… Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen
I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.
Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen.
The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.
Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.
I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.
Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)
There has been a widespread outbreak of harumphing, moaning and hand wringing by the forces of statism across Europe over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s National Front Party in France.
Yet when Le Pen declares he is “socially to the left, economically to the right”, his remarks go reported but largely unchallenged. However somehow regardless of his being bitterly opposed to market driven mechanisms, free trade, ‘Americanization’ and globalization, the newspapers demonstrate yet again that the term “right wing” is largely meaningless.
John Lichfield of the Irish Independent tells us “Let us not exaggerate. Let us shut our eyes and think of France, the real France” after himself pointing out that when you add the neo-fascist vote in France for Le Pen to the extreme Troskyist vote for the far left, it is a whopping 35% of the French electorate. Sorry John, you cannot write off one third of a country as ‘not the real France’. Violent collectivist statism is as French as camembert cheese, Laetitia Casta, the Eiffel Tower… and the Guillotine.
It is the long process of erosion that French civil society itself has been undergoing for over 150 years that provides such welcoming ground for the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s of this world. Jaques Chirac is not part of the solution but is rather part of the problem. ‘National Greatness’ conservatives like him are no less statist than socialist Lionel Jospin or neo-fascist Jean Le Pen. There simply is no significant political constituency in France that does not see the state as being the very centre of society, rather than just its boundary keeper. Almost all significant interaction is touched on by the state and thus reduces society to a series of competing political, rather than social, factions, all clamouring for the violence backed recourse of the state to champion their interests. These people who are aghast at the rise of Le Pen are the self same people who tilled the soil in which he grows.
Statist political interests of ‘left’ and ‘right’ appropriate a vast swathe of the national wealth, encouraging people to simply vote themselves other people’s money, and then wonder why folks have no time for tiresome and time consuming social integration or a dynamist assimilative culture. Why bother when it is clear that the normal way for solving all problems is the hammer of the state? You don’t like American products competing with French ones in the shops regardless of the fact other people want to buy them? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that. You don’t like the sound of all those English language pop songs on the radio and TV? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that too. If all these other unjust things are democratically sanctified, then if you don’t like Africans or Moroccans, well, I guess there ought to be a law against them as well if that is the way everything works. If everything is up for grabs by the ‘democratic’ state, well, don’t be surprised if everything really does mean everything.
Brian Linse says, among all the other things he said on Monday 22nd, that football (or “soccer” as he calls it) is boring. He proposes a number of USA-type “reforms” to rescue it from its current state of total global obscurity.
Personally I thought that the highlights I watched last night of Real Madrid’s 0-2 first leg victory over Barcelona in Barcelona – an amazing result for Real, which virtually guarantees their place in the European Champions League final in Glasgow, against either Manchester United or Bayer Leverkusen – were about as good as sport can get without my own team being involved and winning gloriously.
But if you agree with the (Ain’t No – pah!!) Bad Dude, probably because you are also an American, or perhaps because you think that blogging and politics and whatnot are more important than “soccer”, then go to Soccernet Europe (the “soccer” disease is spreading I’m afraid) to find out how boring football is when Stefan Effenberg is involved.
Effenberg is currently out of the Bayern Munich line-up for having (a) “long been a controversial figure” and now (b) for saying in a recent interview that unemployment benefit should be cut, and then refusing to take it back.
(My thanks to Antoine Clarke for pointing me to this story.)
Here’s a poser for Samizdata readers – does the institution of constitutional monarchy help to domesticate feelings of patriotism into something more civilized?
Michael Gove, in a splendid column for the UK’s Times newspaper today, makes the point that the monarchy, precisely because it is composed of fallible human beings above the political fray, acts as a far healthier focus of national loyalty than often afforded by more “modern” republics, like, say, France. As our society becomes more individualised, multi-ethnic and diverse, it is surely more, not less, important to have institutions that can provide some kind of common bond. Think, for example, how the breakup of the Hapsburg empire after the First World War led, in short order, to an upswelling of often unpleasant nationalism in the states composed out of its demise.
If the electoral travails of the French tell us anything, it is that, even after five republics and the Empire of Bonaparte, they still haven’t figured out the value of constitutional monarchy as part of a truly liberal order.
Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany in Italy to express his views on Le Pen, multi-culturalism and over-enthusiastic well-diggers
I am now a regular reader of the Samizdata (or the Lib Sam as I like to call it) and enjoy most of the articles. What I find depressing at the moment is that as I raise my gun to shoot a topical bunny I see hundreds more all around me – Le Pen, the UK Budget, Italian politics, NHS, multi-clutch-and-graspism, blah blah. It has taken a while to start shooting them down as I currently have a well-digger on my farm here in Tuscany. Charming chap, though he has a habit of trying to reach magma in order to enhance revenues (they are paid by the foot) so I’m keeping an eye, as they say.
Whilst overseeing the keen well-digger, I heard a number of things on Radio 4 yesterday that disturbed me, to say the least. Most of the afternoon’s bulletins were taken up with a slanted condemnation of Le Pen by an almost constant referral to the “thousands” or, in extremis, “tens of thousands” of protesters on the street. Not one single reference was made to the fact that he did after all garner the votes to oust Jospin from the fight. Odder still was my recollection that by comparison last year’s Countryside Alliance pro-hunting march in London was supposed to have produced in excess of half a million people on the streets. However, the general reporting slant was decidedly unfavourable. Hmm.
I am not exactly sure of Monsieur Le Pen’s precise political destination and would probably find it on the crude side. I am not a supporter by any stretch of the imagination, so no skin off my nose, if he doesn’t win the presidential seat. What I do find shocking though is the childishly obvious suppression of any voice that dissents from the European melting pot theory, and the assumption that any anti-immigration stance implies a shaved head and a tattooed forearm.
The problem does not reside in the shape (or lack) of a haircut or the pattern of a tattoo. We are wasting time arguing about the mode of travelling when the real need is to decide on the destination. What happens if we ‘prove’ that the mass immigration of 40 years ago to date was ‘wrong’? The argument is sterile (and therefore futile) as the situation is with us and cannot be humanely reversed. We might as well argue and debate a meritocracy based on the colour of people’s eyes. On the basis that someone born in Europe is an honorary Caucasian, most of the population is on a level. What we must therefore focus on is the evils of the tiered language and cultural gap currently opening and prompted by the left. Le Pen is gaining support from the Franco-Jewish population (courtesy of Radio 4 news) and why? Buried at around 3.30pm in the yesterday’s programme was a possible answer – they are apparently regular victims of Muslim violence in the Parisian suburbs and have had enough. Allowing a separate ‘nation’ to grow within the EU is societal suicide. I am, in accordance perhaps with the previous Lib Sam articles (see related article links below), a fervent supporter of anti-multiculturalism in its accepted sense – that is I believe it’s a load of rubbish and smacks of left wing appeasement and head-buried-in-the-sand denial of reality.
Realpolitik is that we like our neighbours to be like us and we all, whatever our racial origin, need to face up to this reality. Incidentally, my oldest friend is from Sri Lanka. Unless you saw him, you would not know. He is an Englishman, like Nathan Rothschild aspired to be and in the end considered himself to be. Perhaps, more needs to be done to foster the true concept of Englishness or Frenchness or whatever, and less time should be spent on muddled searches a là: Mr Blair for a sort of crypto-Britishness that is designed to please and appease rather than make sense of cultural and racial diversity.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
One definition of the Libertarian Samizdata ‘anarcho-militarists’ tendency
“You don’t believe there should be a state but if there is, it should be bombing the shit out of Iraq”
-Paul Coulam at the St. George’s Day Party tonight
No, not really… but Brian Linse is back home in L.A. after completing filming of his movie Den of Lions in Budapest. He is back to his old blogging habits at Ain’t no bad dude.
Cato Institute member, scourge of protectionist idiocy and blogger Brink Lindsey pays a fulsome and moving tribute to recently-deceased American steelmaker Ken Iverson, who tore up the script on how to make steel. Iverson reads like a character straight out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He founded the “mini-mill” model of steel production using scrap steel and smaller, less cumbersome production techniques, founding the North Carolina firm Nuccor.
Iverson consistently opposed tariffs and other protectionist measures, believing his style of business could flourish in a free market. His success as a businessman is a poke in the eye of deluded economists and vote-grabbing politicians who think that such key industries as steel can only survive under the umbrella of government support. Iverson proved the opposite. Ken Iverson was by all accounts very different from the sleek business figures of left-wing demonology. A down to earth character who took his own phone calls and motivated his staff. He surely will take his place in the Pantheon of real capitalist heroes. Reading his brief life story helped brighten my day.
It would seem that evil retreats when forcibly confronted.
– Yarnek of Excalbia, “The Savage Curtain”, stardate 5906.5
Hey, even that fountain of marxist science fiction, Star Trek occasionally gets it right
Last week, immediately after returning from my trip to France, I visited St Andrews University in Scotland, courtesy of the Liberty Club guys, to speak at a meeting they’d organised. It was all a great pleasure, and not just because the lodgings they shared with me for the night after the meeting are so nicely situated right by the sea or because they are such nice people or because the weather was so nice.
Even nicer is that the Liberty Club is doing so well.
Universities are vitally important places if you’re in the idea spreading business. You’ve got a clutch of bright people relatively early in their lives, selected for their brightness and put together into a community. And, for once, community really means community. As I wandered about the town with Alex Singleton on the day after the meeting, he kept greeting familiar faces. Messages sent out in one part of the place don’t just meander off into the wild yonder. They double back on themselves, and if you keep on with them you can very quickly dose the entire place. Universities are, to use a word libertarians are particularly fond of, meme machines.
So, if you do what the Liberty Club does, and hold a series of different meetings on different topics, and if you get thirty people to each meeting but not always the exact same thirty people, and if libertarianism is the meta-context of the people organising all this, then pretty soon everyone in the university with any interest in such matters gets to hear about libertarianism. You don’t agree with it necessarily, in fact you may disagree with it all the more fiercely on account of understanding it all the better. But for the rest of your life the libertarian attitude is fixed in your head as an attitude that you can have, that other intelligent people do have, and that you could switch to if you ever felt like it.
The Liberty Club is one of the most if not the most active student organisation on the entire St Andrews campus. It is (a) definitely libertarian. It is in particular (b) not conservative. And it is in general (c) not stupid. Its leading lights are not thoughtless, unfunnily self-mocking posturers, of the “we don’t mean this really we’re just students arsing about” variety. They give off vibes of philosophical and political passion and intelligence.
Their Liberty Log is a modest operation, with bits appearing only every day or two rather than every hour or two as here. Before leaving I contributed a piece to it concerning the meeting I spoke at, and there’s only been one further posting (by Marian Tupy) since then. But that’s a pace they can sustain, and their web activity (see also their website), is but the seasoning of the philosophical and intellectual dish they are serving up to their local target community. The meal itself is face to face contact and face to face argument and public debate. What their internet activity does is add a few more libertarian memes to an already meme-rich environment, and supply heavyweight back-up for any who want to pursue libertarianism further, either to agree with it or to attack it.
Like all capable people, the St Andrews Liberty Clubbers worry that they could be doing better. Couldn’t we all? Alex mentioned setting up some kind of organisation for reaching students everywhere, and that might make sense if it could be done without too much strain. But I’d say that what they’re already doing is a model to libertarian groups in colleges and universities everywhere. And thanks to the internet, others really can look and learn. My bet is that they’ve already “infected” several other campuses without even realising it.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.
Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.
The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?
The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.
But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.
There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?
Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.
In protest at the electoral success in France of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French EU commissioner speaking in Brussels, Bertrand Maginot has expressed his outrage and concern.
“This is unacceptable and contrary to all democratic European principles” said Monsieur Maginot who took the opportunity to formally announce the imposition of trade sanctions on himself.
Camped in his apartment in Brussels Monsieur Maginot has refused all food, provisions and even a change of clothing. He is forced to stay in Brussels because he also banned himself from travelling.
Asked how long he intends to persist with the sanctions, Monsieur Maginot replied:
“Until I come to my senses”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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