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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Victor Davis Hanson has written a truly bizarre and confused article in National Review in which he attempts to define the widening gulf between the ‘Europeans’ and the United States (he does not really explain which Europeans he has in mind… Greeks? Germans? Portuguese? Finns?).
He suggests that one reason for ‘European’ disdain for the United States, not just amongst some poisoned social elite ruling class but the man in the street, comes from dislike of the middle and lower class orientation of American culture.
[America is] the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically and have fully taken control of the popular culture to create strange institutions from Sunday cookouts and do-it-yourself home improvement to tasteless appurtenances such as Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs.
Ah yes, I frequently hear ‘European’ taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other… oh pleeeease. I don’t know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to ‘Europe’ (I guess ‘Europe’ is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs… and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like ‘Big Brother’ on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class ‘cultural empowerment’. The reality of what common people in ‘Europe’ think about the United States is that for the most part they don’t really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.
As for me, describing the United States as ‘the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically’ causes a wry smile. I wish it was more generally true. Unfortunately the USA is just as much in the grip of statist corporatism as Europe, only unlike Europe, the opposition to it is better organised. I wish Hanson’s rose tinted view of the USA was correct because I see much in American enterprise culture to admire but there are two Americas… one of which twice elected President Clinton on a platform not of economic empowerment but of welfare dependency and statism. Unfortunately it is not too hard to find the views Hanson thinks particularly ‘European’ being aired in Los Angeles and Boston.
Now whilst I have long known that there are tiny fringe communist parties quixotically tilting at windmills in the United States, until I read an article about so-called September 11th ‘profiteers’ on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, I had no idea that any of them were in fact in power. Yet it seems that Michigan’s Attorney General Jennifer Granholm not only believes that the State owns the means of production and distribution, but is willing to use the force of state to simply impose by edict (not even by ‘law’) how people dispose of property they have legally purchased for resale.
I strongly recommend this article to anyone who still blithely feels that ‘America is the freest country in the world’ and ‘it couldn’t happen here’ and ‘that sorta thing only goes on in Europe’. Dream on. The enemy is not at the gate enviously looking in, she is sitting in an office in a state capital near you.
The Commonwealth games have been organised to be a ‘logo free’ event so that they are not ‘tainted’ by commercialism. Ok, now let me get this straight… the Commonwealth, an association of kleptocratic nation states that includes mass murdering tyrants like Robert Mugabe, think it is okay to celebrate nationality, a concept in whose name Commonwealth subjects are robbed and imprisoned, but it is not okay to celebrate commercialism, a concept that allows people to gain employment and acquire the money that the state then steals in taxes. Riiiiiiight, gotcha.
However when I saw that the game’s organisers were annoyed at David Beckham for wearing a track-suit with ‘Adidas’ sequined across it when he presented the weird looking baton to the Queen, Beckham went up in my estimations. Way to go, Becks, you subversive capitalist tool you!
Yo, Mugabe! Guess where I’m gonna to stick this thing!
Due to the chaos caused by the change over to the new blog format (plus the fact we actually have lives beyond blogging… shocking I know), many people to whom we have written saying we would link to them have not seen the link appear.
We will try to catch up with all the additional blog links (and perhaps cut a few inactive ones) over the next week or so. Feel free to remind us if we have previously promised to link to you 
There are several companies that anti-capitalist protestors love to hate and two of them are Disney and MacDonalds. These companies are seen as the very embodiment of American ‘economic and cultural imperialism’. Samizdata contributor and blogger in her own right Natalie Solent once remarked on the Libertarian Alliance Forum (20 June 2002) that there is a near 1:1 correlation between people who slag off MacDonalds, using derisory terms like ‘MacJobs’, and people who are in reality advocating a nihilistic communistic reordering of society.
And yet whilst I think Natalie is generally correct on that point, in the right leaning Daily Telegraph, Andrew Gimson also writes a rather flaccid article about why he too does not like Disney and it has nothing to do with big business.
Like Andrew Gimson, I have nothing against big business and am an avid supporter of globalization. As a result I regard Disney and MacDonalds as remarkable examples of international commerce and I have no problem with them plying their toxic wares everywhere across the globe… hang on a minute…’toxic wares’?
Yes, the truth is, I detest both Disney and MacDonalds. 
Much in the same way as I support the right of looney toon Nazis and incoherent socialists to publicly advocate their idiotic views, so too do I support the right of Disney and MacDonalds to hawk their wares from Peoria to Petropavlovsk… and just as I support the right of people to shout abuse and pour scorn on Nazis and Socialists when they do air their views, so too do I support the right of people to vote with closed wallets in order to protect their children from near-fraudulent cultural hijacking by Disney and heart disease and obesity by garbage-like ‘food’ sold by MacDonalds.
If Disney wants to create animated movies (that are in reality little more than an exercise in merchandising) from whole cloth, then I have no real objection. But when they produce something like ‘The Little Mermaid’, I find my blood boiling. The Little Mermaid is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, and was written not as Disney would have us believe, to convey the message ‘go for your dream, girl, and live happily ever after’. No, not at all.
Your tail will then disappear, and shrink up into what mankind calls legs, and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow. If you will bear all this, I will help you.”
“Yes, I will,” said the little princess in a trembling voice, as she thought of the prince and the immortal soul.
This is far from the pallid castrated ‘culture’ that Disney’s marketing wonks would have you believe the story contains. Now I realise this sort of gritty prose might not sell so well in some places with sugar coated rose tinted views of what children should hear and read, but then why the hell call it ‘The Little Mermaid’ then? Call it ‘The Adventures of Ariel’ or ‘Fishgirl gets her Prince’ or anything that does not claim to have the slightest intellectual similarity to what Hans Christian Andersen was actually trying to say.
Feel free to purchase Disney’s drivel if you wish for your hamburger bloated offspring, but do not kid yourself that your children are hearing anything whatsoever from probably the most famous writer of children’s stories who ever lived.
The good news is that it looks like there is no significant support for the US joining what can only be described as a monstrous tax cartel with truly global reach being advocated by the high tax states of Europe.
This is truly splendid but do not for a moment think that this is the last we have heard of attempts to end the ‘unfair’ competitive advantages of lower tax economies.
There is an interesting article in the print version of Inside The Vatican (sorry, no article link at their meagre on-line site) about Rabbi Israel Zolli, formerly the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1939 until 1945.
So if Pope Pius XII was an anti-semitic pro-Nazi collaborator in Italy as some have claimed, why did Rabbi Zolli convert to Christianity in 1945, professing his admiration for the pontiff? Zolli was certainly in a position to know what the truth of the matter was! The fact the Pope was no supporter of Zionism did not mean he was antagonistic to Jews.
Clearly the reality is the calumnies against Pius XII have more to do with modern agendas than historical facts.
Back in 1991, the English band that rejoiced in the name of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine re-released a song called Sheriff Fatman from the album ‘101 Damnations’, about nasty landlords in London. One verse in that song was:
Now he’s moving up onto second base
Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface
At six foot six and a hundred tons
The undisputed king of the slums
I assume I am not the only one who rather suspected at the time that ‘Nicholas Van Wotsisface’ was referring to Nicholas Van Hoogstraten and ‘Sheriff Fatman’ was lawyer Michael Harris, who was not only a tad portly but was under-sheriff of London, responsible for serving many of the eviction orders Nicholas Van Hoogstraten used to gain possession of properties.
It is just a theory of course 
On this day in 1704, British Admiral George Rooke took Gibraltar from Spain by force of arms. British control of the Rock was later permanently granted to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht on 13th July, 1713.
Britain has controlled Gibraltar for almost 300 years, i.e. longer that the United States has even existed, and what is more, unlike the goats and scorpions of Perejil Island off Morocco, the people of Gibraltar refuse to submit to Spanish sovereignty or be bartered away against their will like livestock.
Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who opposed both the Nazis and the Red Army (whom they regarded as occupying Russians) from 1942 until they were largely crushed by the communists in 1953, are to be accorded the same rights as former Red Army veterans by the Ukrainian government. It is interesting that the Russian government regards this as an affront even after all these years, calling the UPA ‘bandits’ for having the audacity to defend the Ukraine against all comers.
However although the UPA opposed both the Soviets and Nazis, they were also implicated in the mass murder of Poles and Jews and do not really fit comfortably into the ‘clearly-the-good-guys’ category, a fact surprisingly absent from several reports on the recent hostile reaction by the Russian government to the Ukrainian decision to grant surviving UPA veterans full military pensions.
After casting our eyes enviously at the Instapundit’s and Bitter Girl’s on-line shops, we decided to also open an on-line shop for Samizdata.net as well (click here or see our sidebar under ‘Network’)
Now you too can prove you are one with the sinister globalist Illuminati (not to mention defray the cost of setting up this nice new blog!)
Sarah Lawrence, the object of the previous article by Brian, is in fact the latest member to join the Samizdata Team, as eagle-eyed perusers of this blog’s sidebar may have already noticed.
She is an indomitable advocate for children’s civil liberties via her organisation Taking Children Seriously and her view can be found expressed on her own site SarahLawrence.org.
We look forward to seeing Sarah’s often highly controversial views on Samizdata.net!
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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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