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This day of days again we keep – ‘Tis ANZAC Day Day – ’tis Anzac Day.. April 25th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 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. April 24th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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. April 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
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. April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
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:
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. April 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Hugo Chavez is back in the presidential palace, as I lamented last Monday when I flippantly suggested the coup plotters should have shot him… only I was not really joking. There are all manner of rumour such as this from Instapundit on Wednesday that this is far from played out. Hugo Chavez is the duly elected President of Venezuela. So what? When democracy and tyranny are on the same side, to hell with democracy. Democracy is not an end in and of itself, just a means to an end and that end is liberty… if a majority voted to expel all black people from the USA, would that be okay just because it is democratically sanctified? Of course not. If democracy leads to liberty, fine. If it does not, then time for a coup d’état. I am quite serious that my only problem with the coup against Chavez is they did not shoot the bastard dead. Sic semper tyrannis. April 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I have had two e-mails asking what ‘our’ views are on the Jenin massacre/counter-terrorist operation (choose one), both of which seem to expect ‘us’ to reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Firstly, there is no Samizdata editorial position per se on anything in particular. Our contributors write within a libertarian meta-context (i.e. a world view or frames of reference) but other than that, we all have separate views on many issues and air them as we wish on this blog. My personal views on what did/did not happen in Jenin are… I really do not know. I regard the IDF as no more or less reliable a source of information than the Palestinians. Both lie through their teeth when it suits them. That is what all governments do. I regard press accounts as something that need to be assessed on the basis of past performance and plausibility. Some bloggers have noticed that UK media reports are similar and have taken this as a sign of either collective hostility to Israel or collusion or whatever. I suspect the fact they were being herded around in a group by the Israeli authorities might have something to do with their similarity of reports and observations. However the mere fact Israel is not receiving collective songs of praise from the UK media is evidence enough for some people of all manner of sinister motives. Sorry but the entire UK media is not represented by Robert Fisk and I for one am far from reflexively supportive of what the State of Israel tends to do. Thus sometimes I think maybe the reason some people write that Israel did something bad was that Israel did indeed do something bad. Do I think the IDF is institutionally capable of wiping out hundreds of Palestinian civilians to get a much smaller group of terrorists as some have claimed? Yes, I don’t doubt they are capable but that is not the same as saying I think they actually did that in Jenin. I simply have no way of knowing one way or the other. However, the fact Israel wants to control what the media sees and the fact this is going to upset the media is also no evidence that what the Palestinians have claimed the IDF have done is true either. Israel is conducting a military operation and in military operations, security is life. As I pointed out in a post yesterday regarding Antony Loyd’s rather daft remarks about the US and UK militaries keeping journalists in the dark in Afghanistan, there are sound reasons for doing just that which have nothing to do with hiding atrocities or failures. And just because Arafat is howling about atrocities, so what? Most of what the Palestinians do ‘militarily’ are criminal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and as Arafat is bottled up in a room by the IDF, I doubt he has any more idea of what really happened in Jenin than I do… thus anything he says can be safely ignored (plus the ‘minor’ fact history has demonstrated he is a pathological liar). High intensity urban street fighting is a messy business and sometimes innocent people get killed. That is not the same as a cold blooded massacre and professional journalists are just as capable of failing to understand what they are looking at as anyone else. Destroyed houses and the pitiable residue of shattered lives are not in and of themselves evidence of Israeli malfeasance. Maybe there was a guy with an RPG-7 leaning out of a window immediately before the Merkava tank put an H.E. shell into the building. Or maybe not. Context is everything. And so I have no idea what the truth is about Jenin and really have no desire to venture much in the way of opinions on that. I am sure who is telling the truth will come out (if anyone) but not for a while yet in all likelihood. April 18th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In 1909, British prime minister Lloyd George imposed a levy which was transformed by William Beveridge in 1946 into the modern idea of ‘National Insurance’ by which the welfare state would appropriate money from people to fund various socialist objectives. William Beveridge was the main architect of the British model of force based theft by the state of a huge chunk of national private property. Today, Britain’s socialist ‘National Health Service’ (NHS) is set to consume £184 billion per year soon… which an article in the Times today pointed put was enough to fight the 1982 Falklands War with Argentine 40 times, or about the same at the total Gross Domestic Product of Belgium or twice that of the GDP of Saudi Arabia or South Africa… and this is just Britain’s appropriated healthcare budget. In the US, the process has not really been all that different, merely started somewhat later. This process really began under FDR during the Depression but did not start in earnest until the ‘Great Society’ programmes of Lyndon B. Johnson. Clinton recently tried to go a more socialist route by moving US healthcare towards a more state-based system of appropriated funding, which thankfully failed. But it should show that regardless of the example of failed socialist programmes the world over, not even information rich societies such as the USA and UK are immune to the intellectually bankrupt and economically moronic lure of such ideas as nationally directed healthcare. You may be sure than the next time the Democrats are back in control in the USA, such ideas will reappear, suitably re-branded and re-spun. April 18th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Due to a major UK routing server going splat, our e-mail is not working at the moment (and neither is that of several dozen UK ISPs apparently). If you sent us any e-mail this afternoon, you might want to resend it to our back-up address. As it is such a major router which has done down, it will hopefully be repaired quite soon. Update as of 18:45 GMT: The problem has been fixed! April 18th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In today’s Times, war correspondent Anthony Loyd reports on the current counter-insurgency sweep through an ‘undisclosed’ valley in Afghanistan by British Royal Marines of the 45 Commando battlegroup, called Operation Ptarmigan. He also moans at some length that [emphasis added]:
So he thinks the US and British military are accountable to the press? Interesting concept. Now Tony Loyd is actually a reasonable reporter (he is certainly a million miles from the ludicrous Bob Fisk and his ilk), but such petulant foot stamping on his part is unbecoming. The newspapers have been roasting the US for allowing Al Qaeda and ex-Taliban forces to slip away, and for failing to achieve operational surprise during Operation Anaconda… and now they are going to roast the coalition military for taking operational security seriously? April 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O’Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure. There is also an interesting article (also by O’Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to ‘nation build’ other than en passant… they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan’s domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago. April 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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