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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I clearly recall that first time I attended a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance here in London. The guest speaker, a very earnest but rather monochromatic fellow (whose name, I must confess, I cannot now recall) was issuing forth on the subject of the purpose of the Libertarian Alliance and what its goals should be.
His conclusion was that those goals should, at the very least, include ‘the spreading of good ideas’. That sounded like a worthwhile project and, indeed, it is one in which I am engaged to this day.
But, how to do it? That’s the real trick. Marketing is dead simple when you’re peddling, say, luxury motor cars. But if you’re peddling the kind of ideas that make luxury motor cars both possible and widely available then you tend to find that you’re butting your head against a brick wall of indifference.
Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of those people who spread bad ideas because they seem to be enjoying no end of success, especially in Southern Africa:
“South Africa’s ruling African National Congress yesterday effectively gave its backing to President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe, cheering a speech by a Zanu-PF loyalist attacking “western imperialists”.
Now one would think that the experience of a lunatic marxist regime transforming a neighbouring country from a relatively prosperous bread-basket into a ‘Year Zero’-type hellhole would provide a pretty stark lesson in ‘How Not To Do Things’. But, such is the seductive power of those bad ideas, that they can trump even the most graphic and immediate realities.
And so British libertarians are left wrestling with the puzzle of how we capture that magic driver for impelling bad ideas and turn it to good use.
It is a thorny and will-sapping problem but one of far less magnitude than the one facing those South Africans of European or Asian descent. As far as they are concerned, all I can say is that I sincerely hope that they have an exit strategy because the day that they’re going to sorely need one appears to be getting closer.
Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa…
Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.
But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just ‘Jewish’ but also ‘White’. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided ‘Islamic activists’. Terrible but ‘understandable’ to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say “Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?” and “Of course I deplore terrorism, but…”
Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya’s economy…
Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?
Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah…
I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say “It is all about Israel!” or “It is all about oil!” or “It is all about US policy!“… those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.
What “it is all about” is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.
Graphic from ‘Blue Skies of Freedom’ blog (click)
People across Europe are digging bomb shelters in their back gardens and staring skyward fearfully for the first signs of the mighty Namibian airforce.
No, not really… Afro-socialist bigot President Sam Nujoma of Namibia has added all the nations imposing the flimsy and ineffective sanctions against his good buddy Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to the list of his usual targets for incoherent invective (i.e. homosexuals, capitalists, white people).
“I just want to make it categorically clear that if the EU does not lift the sanctions against Zimbabwe, the whole African Union will also impose economic sanctions against Europe. Either there is peace or war and we don’t want a war. Change your attitudes. If you don’t change, we are going to get you.”
I am quaking in my boots. 
The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister’s ‘passionate’ calls for African development and increased ‘aid’ to Africa by the West.
But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants… ungrateful tyrants at that.
Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party’s leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.
Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the ‘Third World’.
So when you read of calls for an ‘answer’ to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe’s political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe’s ruined farmlands.
Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa’s ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.
Fear and self-loathing in Johannesburg.
This deeply concerned man was going about his usual business of saving the poor and oppressed of the Earth when one them mugged him. His response?
“He had not laid a charge because he believed the muggers were the very people who needed to be helped by the summit”.
Things in Zimbabwe are going from worse to even worse than that and I think it is safe to assume that Robert Mugabe is really not kidding around. Zimbabwe surely must qualify as Evil Central combining marxist year-zero policy with a highly illiberal dose of ethnic cleansing. Yummy!
White farmers are now being arrested for defying Chairman Mugabe’s edict and, in due course, they will either be expelled or killed. Mugabe has had, to all intents and purposes, the green light from the Tranzis who have been far too pre-occupied with bringing down the Great Satan (USA) and Little Satan (Israel) to waste any valuable hectoring time with the likes of Brother Mugabe whose odds of seeing the inside of the Hague are considerably longer than my odds of seeing the inside of Gwyneth Paltrow’s bedchamber.
Still, the Tranzis might live to regret it. Comrade Mugabe is in the process of setting a precedent and precedents tend to get followed. That’s why they’re called precedents. Trouble is, a whole load of other people might live to regret it as well.
To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe.
Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe’s thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country.
Yet it is no more a ‘political’ question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one’s sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for ‘harder sanctions’ or ‘robust diplomacy’ but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe’s and Saddam Hussain’s of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don’t see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them.
There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe’s head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The ‘heads’ of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis.
Quite why so many people write about Nelson Mandela in such a hagiographic manner baffles me. This is a man who is going out of his way to give aid and succor to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of murdering 270 people in the air and on the ground when he blew up a Pan Am Jumbo Jet full of people over Lockerbie, Scotland.
One of the angry relatives, who lost their 19 year old daughter, asks:
If Mr Mandela is truly concerned about the conditions Megrahi is suffering, then perhaps he should visit and represent other convicts in Britain’s prisons who are serving their sentence for their crimes in worse conditions than Megrahi will ever have to experience.
Back when I was at school, I reall seeing some people wearing tee-shirts saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’… Now whilst I abominated the apartheid regime in South Africa, it seemed to me that replacing white tyranny with the ANC was just going to be a case of changing not that country’s tyranny but merely that tyranny’s colour. I also happen to recall seeing other folks, ‘Young Conservatives’, in the 1980’s wearing a tee shirt which said ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’… hmmm…
Perhaps marketing those tee-shirts again might be a nice business opportunity!
Better late than never?
As everyone knows by now, US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and U2 frontman Paul “Bono” Hewson just completed a week-long tour of Africa. While the unlikely pair seem to play off each each other well on stage, and seem to be getting along well offstage, it is not entirely clear how Mr. Bono has suddenly emerged as a power-broker. Several news sources attributed this quote to the man with the wraparound shades:
“[O’Neill] is the man in charge of America’s wallet … and it’s true, I want to open that wallet.”
None of the news sources I saw chose to elaborate on this comment’s obvious falseness. The treasury cannot release any funds until the proper appropriation and authorization bills have made their way through Congress. (I will cut Mr. Hewson some slack because he is not an American; but if certain members of the press need a refresher course in this area, I would recommend that they review their Schoolhouse Rock.) At any rate, it makes you wonder why we should take anything else the guy says seriously.
Bono’s cause is third-world debt relief. He argues that the heavy external debts of foreign governments are the principal obstacle to their emergence from poverty. We shall examine those claims briefly. How effective are official debt-relief programs in improving economic performance? Well, we can let history be the judge, since we have tried this before. In the late 1980s, the US treasury department began a debt-relief program called the Brady Plan, in which creditor banks were encouraged (through the stick / carrot of the federal tax code) to refinance debt at subsidized rates and reduce principal levels by allowing banks to replace severely discounted loans with new debt at levels closer to par value.
Was the Brady Plan a success? It depends on how you define success. If the objective was debt reduction as an end in itself, then the Brady Plan looked good — more than $60 billion in foreign debt was forgiven, by one estimate. But did the Brady Plan succeed on a larger scale, i.e. did it promote economic growth and encourage more responsible borrowing by third world governments? Sorry, Bono, but the track record there is not so good.
In his book International Debt Reexamined (unfortunately no longer in print, though I have a copy from my grad-school days), economist William R. Cline demonstrates that the economies of Brady Plan participants did not outperform those of nonparticipants with similar debt levels in the 1990s. So much for the argument that debt relief is a sine qua non of future economic growth.
Moreover, there is evidence that the Brady Plan (and other official debt relief programs) merely crowded out private debt relief efforts such as debt-for-equity and debt-for-nature swaps, which had commendably been on the rise throughout the mid to late 1980s. The announcement of the Plan itself had the effect of encouraging further profligacy — if your mortgage banker announced that it might be forgiving or substantially reducing your mortgage debt in the near future, wouldn’t you think twice before mailing in your next payment?
Bono’s line of reasoning on third-world debt would have found a favorable audience with economists a generation ago, but has long since fallen out of respectability. The new generation of development economists, spearheaded by the Peruvian economist and think-tank chairman Hernando de Soto, argues that the people of the third world already hold the solution to their poverty. This makes things difficult for would-be celebrity messiahs like Bono. Sorry, pal, but the world is ready to move on, with or without you.
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…
Todays newspapers give us two contrasting images. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ANC leader smiling as he poses with his friend Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF leader, sticking by him in the face of world wide (but not African) criticism of Zimbabwe’s descent into collective nihilism.
It also gives us a picture of the dead body of Zimbabwean farmer Terry Ford, murdered by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF thugs. It shows his distressed Jack Russell terrier, Squeak, who lay curled up next to his dead friend, refusing to leave his side.
And so now we read that Commonwealth Leaders meeting in London today will delay their ‘verdict’ on the farcical ‘elections’ in Zimbabwe and whether to suspend that country from the Commonwealth, a trivial matter of suspending a murderous tyrant from a trivial organization.
Yet clearly if the Commonwealth is serious about democracy then surely nations with governments which do not adhere to the social values of the majority of the Commonwealth must be expelled.
Therefore, I call on the Commonwealth’s leadership to expel The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India forthwith as being grossly unrepresentative of the murderous kleptocratic regimes which characterize the majority of the Commonwealth.
Next time they want a Foreign Aid hand out, let the murdering sons of bitches ask their good friend Thabo Mbeki for South African taxpayers money.
Update: Kill white landowners, kill black political opponents, destroy a nation’s economy and plunge it into a nightmare and what happens? Does the Commonwealth demand the overthrow of the tyrant and his government? No. Does the Commonwealth demand Zimbabwe’s expulsion whilst ZANU-PF remains in power? No. The Commonwealth has in fact decided to suspend Zimbabwe for one year. Read that again. ONE YEAR. The fact even this pathetic gesture has been so long coming is an indictment of the moral bankruptcy of the Commonwealth as an institution.
John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister stressed: “The committee expressed its determination to promote reconciliation in Zimbabwe between the main political parties.”
Reconciliation? Mugabe is a tyrant and murderer and any rational society should be urging that he be summarily put up against a wall, shot and then thrown in a garbage dump, not ‘reconciled’ with. Well I guess we should look on the bright side: things will not be so violent in Zimbabwe one year from now as all Mugabe’s opponents will either be dead or Mugabe will be hanging on the meat hook that he deserves by then.
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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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