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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So why am I grinning? Simple. It shows that the entire edifice of the French Fifth Republic is rotten to its kleptocratic statist core. This is what the European Union’s amen chorus wish Britain to tie its political, economic and cultural fortunes to. Yet in fact this is a salutary lesson where statism inevitably leads… to ever more profound forms of statism, such as the nationalist racism of Le Pen. The non-assimilative post-modern collectivism of Jospin leads to the even less assimilative atavistic collectivism of Le Pen.
And to think the one thing Jospin, Chirac and Le Pen’s supporters all have in common is that they all look down on the Anglosphere. From people like that I take that as a compliment.
No link I regret to say but the BBC is reporting that exit polls in France indicate that fire-brand nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen has edged out the socialist Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin into second place in the presidential elections behind front-runner Jacques Chirac. At the moment it appears as if Chirac and Le Pen will be contesting the presidency in a head-to-head fight. This could get very….well, interesting.
War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars, and taxes, an observer, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
And, what’s more, he’s a talentless, pretentious wanker. For those who have never heard of him (consider yourselves fortunate), he is a former stand-up ‘comic’ now-turned novelist who rose to fame in the 1980’s with his fiery brand of allegedly funny invective. In reality, his routine was a barely-concealed vehicle for his bone-headed left-wing polemic which he played out in front of adoring and similarly-minded audiences at a time when comedy cabaret was the spearhead of the left-wing resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain. All young Ben had to do was to call Mrs.T a ‘mad old cow’ to have his monolithic audience shrieking with delight and appreciation. Hardly the mark of comic genius. What made it even more galling was his cynical adoption of a painfully fake working-class cockney accent just to ensure that his ‘cred’ with the comrades wasn’t sullied by any admission of his rather comfortable middle-class origins and first-rate education.
He coupled his ‘comedy’ career with a full-blown activist agenda, shouldering his way to prominence in every trendy lefty/green campaign imaginable from benefit gigs for striking miners to marches against cruise missiles, you name the cause, Elton was there and sounding off. He is every inch a bedsit-Che Gueverra who got lucky.
Still, it worked for him and he ended up with his own series on the BBC (natch!) but when the current Labour government was elected, Elton mysteriously left our TV screens. Job accomplished I suppose and, with that, he more or less retired from life as Doyen of Anti-Establishment Radicalism to marry, sire and settle down as a sort of ‘grand old man’ of the British left whose opinion is still canvassed by a new generation of ‘meeja dahlings’ who seem to regard the wretch as some sort of Oracle.
An example is this interview in the Al-Independent where readers are treated to an opportunity to submit their fawning questions and, in response, get drivel like this:
“Incidentally, if you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about, last I heard, he was doing voiceovers for bank ads. I’m not criticising. I use banks. We all do. I just wouldn’t do an ad for one. It’s a question of where you draw your own personal line.”
Well, it’s reassuring to know that Elton’s ‘personal line’ stops short of doing adverts for banks but is far enough advanced to enable him to utilise those same banks as repositories for the considerable personal fortune he has amassed from his showbiz career.
I wish I had known about this question-and-answer session a little sooner, then I could have logged on and posed my own burning question: ‘Ben Elton, why are you such a wanker?’
[Update. How very rude of me to fail to acknowledge that the above-mentioned link comes courtesy of excellent fellow British blogger Peter Briffa]
And it’s getting closer to home. A man in his 20’s has been shot dead on the dancefloor of a North London nightclub. The club is situated about 400 yards from my front door.
There has been a big demonstration in Washington D.C. which was referred to by Dale Amon in a previous post. Radley Balko of The Agitator followed the going on in person and reported:
Unfortunately, the two demonstrations met, turning the entire uptown area into a activist stew of random causes, screams and protests. Palestinian flags flew next to signs excoriating Citibank and Monsanto. The crowd was anti-wealth, anti-racism, anti-terrorism, anti-war on terrorism, anti-poverty, anti-drug war, anti-Israel. All the messages blurred together.
Now this is wonderful news. The sight of groups holding up signs saying ‘a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16’ standing next to an anti-globalization protestor is just about the most sublime sight I can imagine. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This public conflation of toxic idiocies is providing people who are pro-capitalist or pro-Israel or pro-war-on-terrorism, or any combination thereof, with what can only be described as a ‘target rich environment’. Juicy.
I started out my political life as a bedwetting liberal. Young, idealistic and dumb. Then I started paying income taxes…
– Neil Boortz
Undercover operative Radley Balko is going undercover at the anti-globalist demonstration in Washington. If he survives and doesn’t get strung up on a pair of Golden Arches, expect some interesting tales to appear on The Agitator later this evening Zulu Time.
All evil globalists like us should use ‘Zulu’ when discussing our nefarious plans. It sounds so appropriate for the articles in the Secretive Underground Publication of the Samizdata Terran Planetary Cadre of Elite Anarcho-Capitalist Conspirators!
Give ’em ‘ell and fire when ready Radley!
Harry Browne’s American Liberty Foundations has successfully raised funds for another TV ad and it will be airing today, Saturday the 20th, on the Fox News Channel. “Intruder” will air three times so look for it in these slots:
* Noon to 3 PM Eastern
* 11 AM to 2 PM Central
* 10 AM to 1 PM Mountain
* 9 AM to Noon Pacific
It’s absolutely guaranteed to drive the anti-gun crazies over the edge.
On my recent holiday in France I took with me a biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the one by D. M. Thomas (subtitled “A Century in His Life”, first published Little, Brown and Company, 1998). Before that I had been reading Solzhenitsyn’s own The Oak and the Calf (which came out in 1975), and now I’m reading his Invisible Allies, which came out in 1995.
These latter two books are Solzhenitsyn’s answer to the question: “How on earth did you do it?” The first puts Solzhenitsyn’s own exploits centre stage. The second names some of the many names that could finally be named safely, without endangering lives. He did a lot himself. And he had a lot of help.
It was partly being a contributor to Libertarian “Samizdata” that prodded me into this reading burst. I quite understand why Perry gave the name “Libertarian Samizdata” to Libertarian Samizdata � messages that go under the radar and past the editorial defences of the official statist oriented big media, and so forth. Nevertheless I do feel a bit uneasy decking myself out in the word that originally meant people risking their very lives, all day, every day, for years on end, copying and distributing the real Russian literature of those times. The worst that can happen to us is a few hostile e-mails.
This reading has, of course, stimulated a million thoughts, but one thought in particular relates to Adriana Cronin’s point about how Stalin, his henchmen, his successors and his middle managerial puppets throughout the Soviet empire were prone to believe their own bullshit.
Simply: Why didn’t they just kill him? Solzhenitsyn was making a monumental nuisance of himself. So why, as soon as he started doing this seriously, didn’t they just take him out the back of somewhere private and have him shot? They had their chances, as Solzhenitsyn himself relates.
There are many reasons. Western “pressure” was indeed crucial. And Solzhenitsyn was a literary and political tactician of genius. This was no dreamy, socially dyslexic wimp we’re talking about. This was a man who, until they arrested him for being incompletely reverent about Stalin, was a highly effective and courageous Red Army artillery officer, and the military metaphor he uses to describe his “battles” with Soviet officialdom is relentless and entirely appropriate. He writes particularly memorably in The Oak and the Calf of “encounter battles”, involving not only him and his Soviet enemies, but also, operating independently, the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.
But here’s another reason they didn’t kill him. They didn’t kill him because killing him would have contradicted their idea of what they thought they were doing.
It wasn’t just “idiot savants” (D. M. Thomas’ killer phrase) like Jean Paul Sartre and his ilk who swallowed Soviet lies about happy smiling people marching joyfully into the cornfields and the steel factories; they believed this drivel themselves, if not as a complete fact exactly, then certainly as an aspiration. To have killed Solzhenitsyn would have been to admit to themselves that all this socialism-with-a-human-face nonsense was indeed nonsense, and that they were just old-fashioned, self-serving tyrants whose rule was based on brute force and nothing else.
Looking at the larger picture, the tendency to believe their own lies was a major part, not only of their failure to handle the likes of Solzhenitsyn, but of their failure period. The Soviet Empire fell apart because it was founded not only on the deception of others, but on self-deception self-inflicted by and on its own rulers. They didn’t, in the end, con us. Not enough of us, anyway. But they did con themselves.
Al-Ahram in Egypt interviewed one of the Islamic Jihad sappers who helped booby trap Jenin. “Omar” said:
“Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared,” he says. “We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month.”
Omar and other engineers made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.
“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them,” he said.
“We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses–in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas.”
At least they are not trying to blow up civilians for once
I applaud the finding that Somalia is clear of al Qaeda, reported by the Washington Post and the article is itself interesting reading. It was the quote at the end which caught my eye though:
A defense official says Somalia’s lack of a central government or adequate security forces makes it “a potential haven for some al Qaeda terrorist members.”
Really shows the Statist thought patterns doesn’t it? Poor savages don’t have a Big Brother State to take care of them like us Fortunates.
Perhaps Jim Davidson had the right idea in moving there…
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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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