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.
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Guy Herber’s excellent article The public mood (while the public moo-ed) got me thinking about the nature of the ‘Radical Centre’.
The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had but unlike them, it is control for control’s sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology: there is no Blairite or Clintonite (or even ‘Bushite’) ‘The Communist Manifesto’ or ‘Mein Kampf’. They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that does not organise mass rallies or collectivise farms, it just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera.
Perhaps this also explains the radical centre’s transcendent hatred of the USA’s system of checks and balances: the US Bill of Rights takes whole sections of civil society and tries to place them outside politics (free speech, the right to have the means to defend yourself etc.). Sure, it fails miserably as often as it succeeds but at least the notion that not absolutely everything is subject to politics is part of the American cultural DNA and that, rather than the US government’s policy towards, well, anything, is what makes the US anathema to the Radical Centre (including the US Radical Centre).
The Radical Centre has also been called ‘Authoritarian Populism’ because it seeks to impose the popular will by force and it does not much care what that will is. Just as liberty for liberty’s own sake is the objective of the Classical Liberal/Libertarian rather than some ‘overarching narrative’ as was the case with the radical statist left and statist right in the corpse filled 20th century, the Radical Centre seek control for control’s own sake with no particular grand reason in mind other than to perpetuate a political class whose reason for existence is to make decisions about other people’s lives.
The reason they dislike us so much is that to attack regulatory statism is to attack these people’s very reason to exist and we challange them on a profound psychological level. They need to control other people just as we need to control our own lives.
The Radical Centre is our demonic reflection.
If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie‘s own blog.
For those of you who are following Michael Totten’s interesting Middle Eastern adventures, he has written about one of the more interesting religious groups in that part of the world.
At the same time Jyllands-Posten in Denmark is valiantly establishing that freedom of expression is a core western value and that the right to say what you will does indeed include the right to say what some people may find offensive… a court in Austria has in effect sided with Islamic extremists by sentencing ‘historian’ and fantasist David Irving to three years in jail for upsetting Jewish sensibilities by making preposterous claims about the Nazi Holocaust.
Am I the only one who sees the sickening irony of protecting Jewish feelings ending up giving aid and comfort of Islamic bigots who want to prevent the publishing of anything they find offensive? I can just hear them now: “Oh, so upsetting the Jews gets you thrown in jail but anyone can upset the Muslims…”
Dr Romain, rabbi of Maidenhead Synagogue, said: “I welcome yet another public rebuff for David Irving’s pseudo-historical views, although personally I prefer to treat him with disdain than with imprisonment.”
And that, Rabbi, is the sign of a mature and freedom loving disposition. What a pity that more Muslim clerics do not take such a view when their sensibilities are offended and their community starts howling for the state to ban offensive remarks as Austria has done in the case of David Irving. Had Jyllands-Posten been an Austrian rather than Danish newspaper, it would be hard to make the argument that there was clearly a legal right to offensive (and therefore free) expression.
And before people in the USA get too smug, this is not just a European issue. Let me ask you this: do you support making burning the US flag illegal? If so, then clearly you agree with the Muslims that free speech does not include the right to offend people.
Time to clean house: all insulting behaviour (short of actual incitement to violence), blasphemy and ‘holocaust denial’ laws are an intolerable abridgement of freedom of expression and must be abolished, now!
Update: Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm have broadly similar views.
There is an excellent article by Michael Totten, who is currently blogging from Iraq, about what quite a few people think is the inevitable end result: partition into three (or at least two) separate entities. It is interesting to see the facts on the ground seem to back up the view that we already have a de facto independent Kurdistan.
An Islamo-fascist Southern Iraq is not such a great outcome but an independent Kurdistan would seem to have much to commend it.
I really have no problem with that and wrote something on the subject myself called: to hell with nation building, lets see some nation wrecking!
This looks like it could be interesting!
London School of Economics
6pm Friday 17th February 2006
Room D702
Head-to-Head
“Freedom of speech: Who cares what Muslims think?”
Sajjad Khan vs. Claire Fox
Sajjad Khan
Editor of New Civilisation Magazine – A quarterly publication providing a unique perspective on Islamic political thinking to the western world, initiated as a unique forum to debate and discuss issues relating to Islamic political discourse seeking to do away with the tired labels of fundamentalist or moderate and instead engage with people holding a concerted rational opinion on these matters from all shades of the political spectrum: left, right and centre.
vs.
Claire Fox
Director of The Institute of Ideas. Its mission is to expand the boundaries of public debate. It is committed to scientific and social experimentation, intellectual ambition and curiosity. Embracing change and making history. Art for art’s sake, knowledge for its own sake, and education as an end in itself. Freedom. To think, to act, to say what needs saying – even if it offends others. Challenging irrational social panics. Open and robust debate, in which ideas can be interrogated, argued for and fought over. Civil liberties, with no ifs or buts.
I must say that I always enjoy reading what Michael Totten has to say even if I do not always agree (though in truth I find myself agreeing more and more often). His reports from Lebanon were always compelling.
He is now writing from Iraq (Kurdistan to be exact) and I strong recommend people take a peek at his blog.
Erik and Arthur Wneir from No Pasaran took on several thousand Muslim protesters and only the intervention of French police prevented a repeat of the Battle of Tours.
More seriously, watch the video to see the characteristic Muslim reaction to people daring to state an opinion different to theirs.
Our home grown authoritarians plan to inflict yet more absurd measures which have nothing to do with defending ourselves against terrorism. ID cards would not have stopped a single terrorist attack in the UK: they are a control measure designed to make taxing and regulating people’s economic activities easier, nothing more. Yet because there is a genuine threat from Islamic terrorists, the government keeps trying to conflate ID cards with ‘doing something about terrorism’. As it is so obviously untrue, this issue makes a rather good quick and easy litmus test to detect people who are either complete idiots or barefaced liars (or both).
Moreover the intend to make ‘glorifying terrorism’ illegal is not just bound to backfire, it is a terrible idea on every level. You would think people in the dismal halls of Westminster would have learned to leave well enough alone given the comical absurdity of past attempts to ban terrorists saying things in the UK, which lead to such farcical situations as having Sinn Fein/IRA’s Gerry Adams’ voice being dubbed by other people’s voices to get around attempts to stop him airing his views. We need people to actually say what they think and the more vile they are, the more important it is to hear what motivates them.
Moreover does anyone seriously think people are attracted to actively support terrorism because of what they read in a mainstream newspaper rather than opinions closer to their every day life? It is a bit more complex than that and again you would think the experience of Ulster would have shown that when terrorists gain the support of a section of a society, all stoping their spokesmen from talking in the media does is prevent everyone else from understanding what they really think.
The BBC and mainstream media generally has followed the government line that there is a large pool of moderate Muslim opinion which does not support or sympathise with radical and intolerant Islamic views. I too have assumed this to be the case, at least in some measure, and yet as time goes by the theory is starting to look rather threadbare as if there really is a majority of moderates out there, they are more than just silent, they are almost invisible. The organisers of the demonstration yesterday in Trafalgar Square carefully choreographed the event to show the world a moderate face of muslim opinion standing hand in hand with a few dhimmis like Ken Livingston and select useful idiots such as Pax Christi and former KGB front man Bruce Kent. Yet it took less than 24 hours for one of the people behind the demo to reveal his true colours.
But any attempt to shut these people up with the law will not stop them saying whatever they want amongst their own community, unless the government plans to have multi-lingual spies reporting on what gets said in every single mosque and Arabic/Turkish/Kurdish/Pakistani social club in Britain. The only people who will no longer know what these guys really think will be the rest of us. And given that anyone who trusts the what the state says to decide who is and is not ‘the bad guys’ is a credulous fool, that is not a good idea to say the least. Yet again we see why freedom of expression is not just important, it is essential if we are to know our enemies as well as our friends.
The demonstration in Trafalgar square, supported by dhimmi-in-chief for London Ken Livingston, was clearly orchestrated to show a homogenised face of ‘moderate Islam’ for the world to see. An interesting feature of the demo was that no ‘home made placards’ were tolerated by the organisers. A small group of Kurds turned up with their own signs and were fairly quickly handed the printed blue-white official signs. I was not quick enough to get a picture of the Kurdish ones before they vanished as I did not expect them to be taken down, but the ones in English were fairly anodyne.
Not even in Islamic green! I would guess maybe 7,000 people showed up, perhaps 10,000 tops, at least by the time I lost interest around 3:00 and wandered off to a nearby computer faire. Many of the usual suspects were there, such as the inevitable socialist workers and CND set…
Quite what wicked old Blair and BushMcHitler have to do with protesting against cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark was not clear
Hands off secular fascist police states and theocratic police states!
You can be sure those naughty cartoons (or that tee-shirt) would not have been allowed in Cuba! The large official signs were clearly expensive high quality creations and contained all manner of utterly irrelevant slogans designed to appeal to the ‘hard of thinking’.
So if some Muslim desires sharia law for themselves, presumably this is what he also wishes for me… Oh I feel much better now!
Tolerance? Sure, it is yours by right. Respect? You must be joking, that you have to earn
Jyllands-Posten did not ‘incite’ to violence, they just defended free expression, unlike some others we know of. Respect however has nothing to do with it
And just to remind people what this is really about…
The Danish embassy in London under police guard And one final picture which tickled my sense of irony… a pleasant looking young woman watching the demonstration in her stylish Christian Dior scarf.
So if hippophobia is a morbid fear of horses… what would a morbid fear of hippototamii be known as?
The European Union is making soothing clucking sounds to try and calm the outraged Muslim masses with plans of a ‘media code of conduct’ designed to prevent a repeat of the Jyllands-Posten incident with the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said the charter would encourage the media to show “prudence” when covering religion.
“The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression,” he told the newspaper. “We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”
Who is this “we”? Does Frattini think he is speaking for the British and European on-line community? If so then perhaps I can spell out the “consequences of exercising the right of free expression” that “we” are aware of… it makes us free, that is the consequence of free expression. Are “we” clear now? These non-enforcible guidelines are just a worthless sop to people who need to be confronted, not treated as though they have a legitimate argument.
And yet later he seems to take a strangely different stance…
The chairman of World Islamic Call Society, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif told a press conference in Brussels on Thursday (9 February) that the cartoons of Mohammed published first in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, fuelled extremism.
“Nobody should blame the muslims if they are unhappy about the images of the prophet Mohammed,” Sherif said coming out from a meeting with EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini in Brussels. “It’s forbidden to create a hate programme to show that the prophet is a terrorist while he’s not,” he stated, “Don’t ask us to try to make people understand that this is not a campaign of hate.”
EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini repeatedly nodded and mumbled “yes” in front of cameras and microphones during Mr Sherif’s statement.
Mr Frattini also denied wanting to create a code of conduct for journalists reporting on religious matters, as indicated by earlier media reports.
“There have never been, nor will there be any plans by the European Commission to have some sort of EU regulation, nor is there any legal basis for doing so,” the commissioner stated.
So in the space of two days, Frattini seems to have done a U-turn and stated his commitment to freedom of expression whilst simultaneously looking like an appeaser. That takes some doing!
Let’s hear it for ‘nuanced’ European diplomacy! 
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