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]
|
As is the case with many libertarians, I am opposed to the death penalty not on the grounds the state is wrong to kill people, it does that all the time on an almost casual basis via more indirect means, but rather that as a falliblist I am all too aware that miscarriages of justice occur with frightening regularity and you cannot ‘undo’ an execution. However I have no objective moral problem with the idea of a murderer paying with his life per se, just a problem entrusting that decision to a fallible judiciary.
In the USA, convicted murderer Tracy Housel has been on death row for 16 years for the 1985 rape and murder of 46-year-old Jeanne Drew. Because he is a British passport holder, the usual parade of people from the UK have been petitioning to commute his sentence to one of life imprisonment. Even our blessed leader Tony Blair has written to the US authorities on behalf of this man. Vera Baird, the Labour MP for Redcar is in the USA and has said that “at a time when British troops are working along side American troops in Afghanistan, some special consideration is called for”.
And so given my libertarian opposition to the death penalty, presumably I agree, right?
Wrong. In this case, the murderer Tracy Housel admits he raped and strangled his victim. There is absolutely no grounds for reasonable doubt here and so I say let him get exactly what he deserves. What is more, the conflation of value by the Member of Parliament for Redcar of British soldiers putting their lives on the line alongside their US comrades in the fight against terrorism, and a self confessed British rapist-murderer in the US is nothing less that a disgusting insult to British soldiers everywhere. To hear the two mentioned in the same sentence is an absolute disgrace of the sort I have come to expect from moral relativists like Vera Baird.
Over on Vodkapundit Stephen Green waxes lyrical about us Brits and speaks of us as ‘Congruent Forces’, a phrase which lends itself to so much more than the reactions to 9/11 and contains within it a recognition of ties that go beyond a common langauge
Thanks to the Bush Telegraph of Blogdom the Americans have learned that, despite the best efforts of our Sneering Classes, every voxpop opinion poll in the country puts support for the USA at over 90%! Is there any country in the world where pro-USA feeling runs so high? Come to think of it, does it run that high in certain parts of California?
This is more than a Fifth Column (although it is that as well); it is the big ghost in Blair’s machine, the great, immovable mass of Britain that he must, by some means or other, tear away from its Common Law roots and into the arms of Napoleon’s Code where rule of the people by the people is replaced by rule of the people by the their betters. Theirs is the other 10% and they are the New Aristocracy, taking their holidays in Tuscany while the vulgar, embarrassing , white-bread English serfs chug Budweisers in Florida and insist on defending their homes. The former, almost without exception, rely on various forms of government activity for their wealth and power. While the latter consist of the plumbers, electricians, small businessmen, shopkeepers, hairdressers and builders; the real ‘warp and weft’ of any country
This is the congruent force that goes deeper than World Wars or 9/11. It is a shared epistimology of liberty assumed not requested; of Magna Carta, Habeus Corpus and each to his own. A worldview that binds at a cellular level and is bedded in the sense of objective rightness that power over the individual should vest, ultimately, in that individual and not in the capricious favour of potentates
These are the values breathed into America by the great English and Scottish enlightenment and it is why Americans like Stephen Green rightly call us The Mother Country for the ‘American Revolution’ was not so much a revolution as a Civil War between the rebels trying to champion those ideas and their imperial rulers whose persistant continental wars had so wounded them
Yet, despite all the wars the British fought, because they too often tried to rape instead of seduce, in every bit of the globe in which the Sons of Albion planted the Union Jack they left behind those Common Law values and good administration and, hence, shaped so much of it. Britain gave birth not just to America but to Gibraltar and Hong Kong and New Zealand. It is not mere coincidence that, today, of the world’s top ten most liberal economies, no less than eight of them are former British colonies
Those Yeomen of England are now the Bloggers of Cyberspace and we lie beneath; we are chained in the attic, buried under the floorboards. That blury shape in America’s bathroom mirror is us; that shocking reflection in their bathwater is us. We are trying to communicate with you Americans. We’re trying to tell you something. We’re trying to warn you that Tony Blair may be sleeping with your President; he may be whispering sussurating, cooing declarations of eternal love in your ear, but really he is a murderer and he is trying to kill us. Can you hear us, America? Can you see us?
…very different things to different people. Let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary:
patriot /n.a person who is devoted to and ready to support or defend his or her country. ../patriotic adj. //patriotically adv. //patriotism n. [F patriote f. LL patriota f. Gk. patriotes f. patros of one’s father f. pater patros father]
Of course this also rather depends on what you mean by ‘country’
country n. (pl.-ies) 1 a the territory of a nation with its own government; a State. b a territory possessing its own language, people, culture, etc. […] 3 the land of a person’s birth or citizenship; a fatherland or motherland.
And therein lies one of the problems with Patriotism. When some one says ‘I am a patriot’, what the hell does that actually mean? Let’s take me, for example. My mother was American and I have lived about one quarter of my life in the USA. My father was British and I have lived a little under half my life here. For purely accidental reasons, I was actually born in the Netherlands. I feel both/neither British and/or American. So much for the complicated heredity and biology. Now for some ideology: I personally reject as illegitimate any function of the state which is not related to the defence of the individual liberty of people within their area of control, within a broad reasonable definition of those terms. I see the State as, at best, a provider of a service (security) in much the same way as I see the Pepsi-Cola Beverage Company as a provider of cans of fizzy brown liquid. I do not accept the very notion of ‘citizenship’ as I regard that as tantamount to denying me free association with non-citizens and implies the State somehow owns me in some way.
So can I be ‘patriotic’?
To the State? Absolutely not. Try to make me pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the Union Jack or the Tricolour with the intention of extracting an admission of loyalty to the state and I will set it on fire instead. And if it is on a tee shirt saying “Try to burn these colors asshole”, the wearer might just get their wish. Try to conscript me and the state will discover that I am not a pacifist and have no problem with using force against someone who tries to impose servitude upon me: starting with the guy who tries to serve call up papers on me.
And yet…
I live in London at the moment but I have ‘Old Glory’ displayed in my front window for all to see. Try walking down Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea and you will see which is my house. It has been there since September 12th 2001. I do indeed feel an affinity for what James Bennett aptly calls The Anglosphere. I regard myself as a member of a cosmopolitan, English speaking global community, a civil society far greater than any mere nation state. For all its flaws, that extended society is the best hope for freedom and liberty the world has ever known and that is something worth defending. Unlike British society, which has a myriad cultural and regional symbols redolent with meaning, only Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Star Spangled Banner, truly represents not just the American state but also American society, warts and all. Truth is I much prefer the Gadsden flag (see side bar of this blog) but most people would not know what it means. And so that is why the Stars and Stripes is stuck in my window for all to see. It was not just the people of New York who were wounded, it was all of us and that is a point I think well worth making publicly.
So is that ‘patriotism’? Opinions vary.
Two days ago, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness the two leading members of Sinn Fein took up an office in the British House of Commons from where they will continue their campaign to wrest Northern Ireland from British control, over the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants. In this task they will be assisted by an annual grant of £400,000 of British taxpayers money. This is how the British government fights a war against terrorism
Sinn Fein is the quasi-marxist political wing of the Irish Republican Army, an utterly ruthless terrorist group that has conducted a murderous war against British state agents and civilians for over 30 years claiming as many victims as the WTC attacks (albeit over a longer period). The wholly understandable howls of protest from the families of some of those IRA victims (both British and Irish) have been callously ignored
This is the latest stage in what is euphamistically called the Peace Process started several years ago under the then Major government and heralded by all as the start of a new era for Northern Ireland. Little did any of us suspect that is was, in fact, the start of an abject surrender by a British establishment that had decided that fighting against terrorists was more trouble than it was worth
The British public had been spun a line but Sinn Fein were under no illusions and all the time the ‘peace’ was being ‘processed’ , the killings, bombings, intimidation and beatings when on almost without a pause. Yet, at every stage, the British government withdrew that bit further under the heat. After all, they couldn’t break their committment to the ‘process’ now, could they
It has to be said that Sinn Fein can hardly be blamed for any of this. In fact, their bloody methods aside, I can almost concede to them a certain grudging admiration for the tenacity and single-mindedness with which they have pursued their political goals. They are surely the most brazen example of a spectacularly successful insurrection movement
No, the blame must lie with the craven and self-serving British political class that will cut any deal, shake any hand, stab any back and spin any lie in order to keep itself grazing peacefully in the pastures of power; a political class that has abandoned even any pretence that it still upholds the core principle that underpins any government of any nation state – the protection and security of its citizens
One can only be grateful that the campaign against Al-Qaeda is being conducted from the Whitehouse and not Westminster for, if the latter, then apparatchicks in the Foreign Office would already be busy negotiating to give Osama Bin Laden a seat in the Cabinet while the compliant and lickspittle media would faithfully distribute and amplify any government propoganda they were fed
How can the message to the world be anything less than crystal clear? Kill Americans and you sign your own death warrant; kill Britons and you sign a book deal
It used to be said that the USA and Britain were two countries divided by a common language. Sadly, they are now divided by a great deal more than that
The US has made it clear that acts of terrorism involving Americans will not be tolerated and will be met with military action. Anyone doubting US resolve has but to look at Afghanistan to see the truth. Tony Blair stands with George Bush on this issue, supporting and indeed participating in US military actions with both Royal Navy sub-launched cruise missiles and Britain’s peerless special forces. Clearly where the US is concerned, tyranny and murder will not be tolerated by Her Majesties Government, and quite right too I might add.
What a pity the many British citizens who own land in Zimbabwe are not instead US citizens…because if they were, rather than threatening tyrant and mass murderer Robert Mugabe with expulsion from the Commonwealth, something which no doubt has him quaking in his boots, the UK Government would be planning military action against him. However it appears Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones.
Perhaps Blair will send his precious friend Peter Mandelson to Harare to meet with Mugabe. No doubt he will be invited to join the British government if only he will agree to stop murdering people. After all, that seems to have been the approach favoured by Mandelson in Northern Ireland, so why not try it in Zimbabwe?
So the Euro is born. Did I say ‘born’? Birth is a natural process. I meant ‘incepted’. From rag-tag bits of body politic it has been sewn together, laid on a slab, given a jolt of electricity and made to walk. Doubtless we shall all watch in fixed horror as it lurches through the verdant European mainland strangling small, helpless economies. I hope they don’t accuse us of not warning them
The economic arguments against the Euro have been made both here and other places with accuracy and reason and, whilst not wishing to marginalise any of them, it is worth bearing at the forefront of our minds that there is a deeper and even more sinister threat posed to this country by the European Empire than inflexible interest rates. Liberty is not just about money
Full absorption into Euroland means not just the surrender of our currency but also the extinction of our Ango-Saxon Common Law heritage. A system where the laws were passed up not handed down; where liberty was assumed, not requested, where the citizens informed the state not the other way around and the King himself was bound by them. It is not merely through the production of a few well-rigged sailing ships that this under-populated and otherwise insignificant little island became the richest country in Europe, opened up vast tracts of the globe to trade and civilisation, built the biggest empire the world has yet seen and spawned the industrial revolution. It is because of it’s Common Law heritage and organic constitution that allowed it’s citizens the freedom to innovate and the dynamism to practice
It is this guttering flame that we libertarians hold in our hands
But this will be consigned to the history books (and may not be safe even there) to be replaced by Corpus Juris and the Napoleonic Code; the continental heritage of laws handed down to the people from the princes and potentates; where citizens are granted a mere licence and where the lives and liberty of the common folk are ‘protected’ by a pottage of grandiose-sounding Convention rights, all of which can be countermanded at any time by the stroke of a bureaucrats pen. It is not for nothing that, of all the countries in mainland Europe, it is only Switzerland that has managed to stay the course of the 20th Century without despotic government, invasion or violent revolution
The is the precipice on which we teeter. It is winter in Britain and I am not talking about the weather. With our entire political and media class seemingly hell-bent on completing the subsuming of this country into the Euro-Imperium (even the ones who say they are skeptical are probably lying) what can be done to prevent this unique flame of liberty from being extinguished forever on these islands?
Across the Atlantic Ocean lies Britain’s birthchild, the fruit of it’s loins and, perhaps, it’s finest monument, the United States of America; a country which owes it’s vast wealth, power and freedom to the those same Common Law Anglo-Saxon values it inherited from it’s parent. Indeed, that America is the now the great repository and shining amplifier of those values is almost certainly why it has earned both the fear and antipathy of the grasping and paranoid European elites
In times of peril, a mother cries out for her child and a child clings to her mother. These truths we hold to be self-evident
Whilst perusing Bryan Preston‘s worthy junkyardblog, I came across this
Jonah Golberg has a lot to say about the Europeans. Dead on. The last good thing to come from the Continent, excepting the Beatles and U2, is the United States of America.
The Beatles were from Britain and U2 are from Ireland. Last time I looked, both were islands off-shore of said Continent.
Call me a chauvinist but I would also like to point out that all three ‘good things’ are a product of the Anglosphere, not ‘the Continent’.
|
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.
|
