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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Interesting interview in the Daily Telegraph today with the 21-year-old Sabine Herold, the French student who has startled Frenchmen and women with her passionate advocacy of rolling back the state, reining in the unions, and cutting taxes.
I have no idea how this lady will fare in the future, and what effect the views of such young people will have on French national life. But she offers a glimmer of hope for those of us, who while revolted by the cynical Chirac, nurse a deep affection for that country.
She is an avid fan of Edmund Burke, Hayek, and the English classical liberal tradition. She is also – ahem – quite an eyeful.
I am in love.
The key reason why I oppose boycotting French businesses is because it is counterproductive. Some of the boycotters just avoid French goods to make themselves feel better. But many boycott with the idea that somehow this will get the French to be more supportive of America in future. They are mistaken.
The effect of fewer American tourists on the streets of Paris is to cut the interaction between ordinary French people and ordinary Americans. It eliminates those conversations in which the American tourists say, “Well, I can understand why you opposed the war, but I’m very pleased that Saddam can’t kill any more people.” It reduces understanding between the two peoples. It makes the French less reliant on trade with America, helping to make America more distant and easier to demonise. It encourages anti-Americanism.
In short, boycotting the French is a mistake.
Woody Allen has been hired by the French government to encourage Americans not to boycott France when going on holiday. In a promotional video, he says:
I don’t want to have to refer to my French-fried potatoes as freedom fries and I don’t want to have to freedom-kiss my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.
I am of the same opinion. Disagreeing with Jaques Chiraq’s opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people isn’t the same as hating French people. In fact, I really quite like France. It may sound odd to some neo-cons, but France has many positive aspects to its culture.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the go-getting, entrepreneurial, play to win culture that America brings to the world. I like the ideas of Jefferson and other founding fathers. But it is a mistake to think that any culture cannot benefit from other ideas. For a start, the Paris approach to fashion and marketing is chic – often much hipper than America’s. Readers in Britain will most probably have seen the recent adverts by Orange, the French-owned mobile phone company. They have a boy, aged maybe twelve, dressed up in a suit advertising their products. But it’s not just any old suit. Oh no. It’s a suit that oozes of fashion. The shirt and tie combination are spectacular. It’s so, so French, and it’s very appealing advertising.
Yes, I’d like the French government to learn from America’s lower tax economy, but there’s French culture that’s valuable too. Oddly, French culture is actually less statist than American culture in some respects. There aren’t any speed cameras on the road. There aren’t proposals, as far as I can tell, for banning smoking in bars. Nor do they have America’s puritanical laws against drinking by under 21s. There is an element of social libertarianism that is really quite refreshing.
For those who feel like a little (slightly horrifying, but not especially surprising) insight into the French way of doing business, might I recommend reading this article from the Economist giving a detailed history of the various occasions in which Airbus Industrie have been revealed or alleged to have paid kickbacks in order to procure orders for their airliners. It is worth observing that to some extent the cause of the problem is the traditional structure of the airline industry, in which there have been a great many state owned carriers for which aircraft purchases have had to be approved by (very corruptible) government (or in some instances even military) officials. Airbus are by no means the first company to indulge in this sort of activity, but the enthusiasm with which they apparently have gone about it, and the apparent collusion and encouragement of the French government, are quite impressive.
A highlight
The Delhi court has a withering opinion of the help Airbus has given the CBI. It allowed Mr Wadehra to add Airbus’s Indian subsidiary to his action on the grounds that Airbus in France was not co-operating. Airbus told Mr Wadehra that French law forbade it from answering his questions. “[Airbus] sells its aircraft on their merits,” the firm insisted.
The court has castigated the CBI for its dilatory approach. It took the Indian authorities until 1995 to contact Airbus for information, only to be told that such requests should be routed through the French government. The CBI told Mr Wadehra, despite trying Interpol and diplomatic channels, it was not getting any help from the French government. The French embassy in Delhi in effect told Mr Wadehra to get lost when he wrote to ask why France was not co-operating.
(Link via Arts & Letters Daily).
Ilana Radwinter captures a precious moment of French ‘democracy’ and shares with us her experience of encountering striking teachers.
Well, most of the people demonstrating are teachers — and not too many of those either — but they are trying to engage others and actually managed to do a lot of damage by disrupting the end of year examinations as well as gross acts of vandalism.
Last Monday, I was driving my children to school at about 8 o’clock. On the way to the centre of Perpignan, just before a large roundabout, we hit a huge traffic jam. I saw a lot of cars turning back in front of me but I decided to continue. Eventually, the cars in front could no longer turn easily and I spotted some men holding banners. Ah, the strike! I had the choice of staying put or getting off the road and driving on the grass.
All around me there were people who were meekly waiting to be able to turn back. I could not believe it. Why couldn’t we all shout and rev our engines and hoot and call them names and go past?! Haven’t these people ever been to a football match?! After all, these were not the burly, tattooed hunks we saw last year during the truckers’ strike! They were the normal, testosterone-depleted, round-hipped western males as seen putting the rubbish out on Monday mornings.
I chose the way forward and soon I found myself in front of the eight men who were stopping all the traffic. They pounced on my car and forced me to stop. It was just me, a petite middle-aged woman, dressed in pyjamas as mornings before school are too hectic to allow for any grooming, and my three children (11-year old girl and 7-year old twin boys).
I rolled the window down and I asked why I am not allowed to go where I needed to. I said that I respected their right to strike, I lied but I was not in a position to start fight, so a bit of politeness was probably wise, but by the same token they should respect other people’s right to go about their business. After all, I was neither the government nor another teacher trying to cross the picket line.
They gave me leaflet and told me they were actually fighting for my children’s future. Then, I really lost it — I can’t stand people using my children as an excuse for their anti-social acts. I told them that on the contrary, they are fighting for my children’s ruin as in the future they will have to work for next to nothing to pay for their pensions. As anger tends to exacerbate a foreign accent, they realised I am a ‘foreigner’ and told me to go back where I come from. I retorted that they should go as they are the ones who clearly do not like their country as they were rebelling against a legitimate government. I suggested North Korea as a possible destination.
My 11-year old daughter was crying — she had been crying all morning because her elder sister was going back to London — and the boys at the back were speculating who was going to win, Mummy or those old men.
Sometimes during the argument, the bullies took their hands off my car and, quite unexpectedly, started to back off. It transpired that they were not in charge, just being big mouths. The real ‘master of ceremony’ was someone else, who kept quiet during all this. As they backed off, a nice woman approached me and said that many demonstrators did not approve of such methods.
A group of teachers just wanted to slow down the traffic, smile and hand out leaflets. So there were two camps: those who wanted to allow us to pass and those who did not. In the end, we were allowed to go…
Ilana Radwinter, Perpignan, France
Unlike the British press, we at the Samizdata are keeping our eyes on what appears to be the increasingly deteriorating situation in France. Because, say what you like about France (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?) but it is still a major and important country and also one that happens to be but 26 miles away from us.
If the stream of reports from Claire Berlinski (who lives in Paris) are anything to go by then that country is in the process of meltdown. I am not sure whether anything can or will be done to reverse or halt this process but at least this Frontpage Symposium may go some way to shedding light on the context of this disintegration:
France behaves more and more as if she does [sic] belong to the West anymore and as though she is the leader of the third world. Doing this, France has nothing to win, maybe just second-rate contracts and an ephemeral popularity among all the frustrated in the world. France will win only one thing, and for a short time, peace inside France: it will avoid riots among Muslims living in France now.
The opinions and prognoses range from melancholy to apocolyptic but this is still well worth reading because it is not just another familiar orgy of Anglospheric Frog-bashing; the symposium participants are all French.
[My thanks to reader ‘Rich’ for the link to the Frontpage article.]
People involved in political arguments often argue as if arguments are the entire point. Yet the current disputes within the USA, within Britain, and between the USA and “Europe” are as much about who we are, as they are about who is right.
Take France. Ruled by a bunch of sleazebags, right? Their “arguments” for not going to war against Iraq were, if that’s the way you are inclined to think, feeble in the extreme. X ergo Y and therefore it follows Z, blah blah blah.
But what if the real arguments now are not about who is right, but about who we are?
One of the oddities of British life is the extraordinary expensiveness and dramatic complexity of British TV car adverts. Something to do with a car cartel, I believe, which means there’s money to burn getting each buyer to step forward. And one TV car advert in particular goes straight to the heart of the France question, and the “who we are” question. I refer to the one that advertises the Renault Clio, by claiming that this car possesses “va-va-woom”. Various other things do also, like posh French-type birds posing in Mies van der Rohe style modern houses, while various other things don’t, like an over-coiffured small dog, and a strange looking character wearing nothing but a pair of stars-and-stripes bathing trunks and a cowboy hat, and waving guns.
This last one is so ghastly an apparition that Thierry Henry – the ultra-skilled black French footballer who plays for Arsenal (and France) with great distinction and who is in amongst all this, narrating with good humoured subtlety – just stares blankly into the camera. That’s all the comment we need. Those ghastly cowboys are just, you know, ghastly, while those (us) continentals are so suave and sophisticated and cultured.
It’s also a clever ploy to use a black man for all this, because smuggled in there (but totally deniable) is the suggestion that the cowboy is probably the type of hick who’d be bothered by Thierry Henry’s blackness, whereas you, oh viewer, are not, are you? Maybe I’m reading too much into things there, but I don’t think so.
What the advertisers are betting on is that there are a lot of Brits who think of themselves most definitely as on the French side of the France/Anglosphere confrontation, and who are willing to put large wads of money where their preferred identify is. And there surely are. This advert has been running for quite some time, and they’d have pulled it by now if it didn’t do the business. If Renault’s sold better by being smothered in Union Jacks and sat in by British bulldogs, then that’s what they’d have. Lots of Japanese companies sell stuff by waving the Union Jack and sponsoring ultra-British things like show-jumping.
Samuel Huntington (in Clash of Civilisations) saw all this kind of thing coming. He saw that whereas the communism/capitalism thing was about who and what was right (X ergo Y), now it’s all about who and what we are. This, for example, is what the Euro argument is really about. “Economic interests” have nothing to do with it. Who we are is what that is about.
And this is why, in this new world, “we” (whoever, exactly “we” are) need to go beyond the narrow logicality of political debate – beyond X ergo Y, into the territory of cultural affinities and coolnesses, the territory of who has va-va-voom and who does not.
This is why blogging is such a crucial addition to our persuasive arsenal. We can argue on our blogs. And, as part of and in among and in between the arguing, we can tease out the va-va-voom of things.
I never know with Samizdata postings whether there’ll be lots of comments, or some, or hardly any, or none. If there are comments on this, no doubt some will be easily summarisable: “I’m not French!!” But I’m hoping that others may be more nuanced.
There is a lot of remarkable news in Gabriel Syme’s posting about Sabine Herold, the young French woman who is spear-heading a brave fightback against the bolshevik hegemony that squats on her country like a poisonous toad.
That someone so young should be prepared to shoulder such a herculean (or perhaps even quixotic) task should be enough to earn her unqualified praise but what takes her stance onto a higher plane of bravery is the fact that she is prepared to do this openly. As this e-mail letter sent to Steve Den Beste reveals, France is a country where dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy is really dangerous:
As you may now, France is now undergoing a series of strikes protesting the government’s pension reform. Among the strikers, the Communist Union “Confederation Générale du Travail” is using unacceptable methods that violate the most basic human rights. Today it has vandalized and burnt the employers’ union offices in several cities. Worse, this organization has prevented, in the city where I leave, a meeting by a democratic political party and violently intervened in a demonstration by people who protested the strike, in order to make sure that demonstration would fail.
Furthermore, the government is taking no steps to maintain public order and guarantee people’s freedom of goverment and expression. The city of Toulouse was blocked during the morning of yesterday and not a single step was taken by public authorities to end this blocking. On the contrary, the police collaborated with the unions in order to make sure that people could not pass. In the demonstration I just mentioned, not a policeman was dispatched to protect us against the assaults of the communist union’s members.
I realize that this is small stuff compared to the atrocities taking place in several countries. Nevertheless it is taking place right in the middle of Europe and it would be of great help if this state of things were publicized by your organization. I can provide you with further testimonies about the events I am referring to, if needed. We badly need the help of the international community in fighting these constant violation of human rights by the communist union.
Yes, this is happening right smack dab in the heart of ‘civilised, sophisticated, nuanced’ Europe. What a stark contrast it provides to the baseless squealing of the spoilt brats of Hollywood as they wrap themselves in cloaks of martyrdom at the first sign of a drop in CD sales. France is a country where it is not just your dissent that can get crushed; you can get crushed along with it. → Continue reading: Le coeur de l’obscurite
Sabine Herold is a courageous young woman who has put herself at the head of a popular uprising against the tyranny of union militancy to which President Chirac constantly kowtows, as reported by the Telegraph. She has been compared to Joan of Arc, and her impatience with her Gaullist government is certainly reminiscent of the saint’s frustration with the French monarchy.
She is another example that despite the Left’s intellectual hegemony established since the 1960s that turned France into a second-rate country with delusions of grandeur, some French individuals can transcend that context. The kind of liberal, cosmopolitan conservatism Mlle Herold embraced is almost extinct in France.
She has a memorable phrase for those, Left or Right, who are leading France to perdition: “reactionary egotists”. Her movement may mark the beginning of the end of the organised egotism that has held France (and countless visitors) to ransom for so long. For France’s sake, let us hope that it is not a revolt, but a revolution.
The good news is that she is by no means the first and only one. One only needs to visit Dissident Frogman’s dacha or Merde in France to see how the blogosphere helped to flush out the illuminated few. The bad news is that if their numbers start growing, that popular Anglo-Saxon past time, ‘frog bashing’, may no longer be completely justified.
Vive les Français liberes! 
As is obvious from reading this blog, we boys and girls at Samizdata are not exactly big fans of the European Union and its attendant horrors of red tape and regulation. So, here’s an interesting experience of mine from last weekend. I managed to leave and enter France and then return without having a single item of paperwork inspected, including my passport. How come?
Well, I sailed to Cherbourg on a yacht from Portsmouth, stayed overnight in France and came back to Portsmouth. No passport check was carried out at either end. Now, I am sure if British Home Secretary David Blunkett were reading this (dream on!), he’d be aghast. (“You mean people can travel, breathe and eat without my express permission? Form a committee!”). But actually, I found the experience rather liberating. I was able to travel, using my own humble skills as a yacht sailor, to travel to and from a Continent without being troubled by officialdom.
And of course I loaded up the boat on cheap wine due to lower French duties on booze. So all in all the whole weekend was a poke in the eye for the offices of the Blairite state. C’est magnifique!
Nice ‘fisking’ of Chirac’s preparations of G8 summit agenda by Collins on Pave France based on yesterday’s article in the Telegraph titled Chirac to embarrass Bush at G8 conference:
He said Evian’s main goal would be “to build the institutions and rules of a global democracy, open and interconnected”
Translation: I’m going to feed Bush a steady line of Communist bullshit until he gets fed up and leaves. Once he is gone, I will take cheapshots at the U.S., and then deny them when later confronted.
The French Trade Unions are up in arms at the disgraceful antics of pro-government activists. It seems that in response to the national strike by bureaucrats desperate to preserve their looting rights, a group of libertarian and pro-market conservative activists bombarded the mail servers of the trade unions with several million email messages crying out a stronger version of “Enough is Enough!” [“Ras le Bol!”].
As Marc Blondel, the General Secretary of FO (Force Ouvrière = “Workers’ Power”) bleated: “This is no way to engage in dialogue”. The anti-strike campaign was launched by “Droite libre” (“the Free Right”) a faction in the pro-government party. The grouping is led by former candidate to the UMP leadership, Rachid Kaci. He described the action as “supporting the reform of [state bureaucrats’] pensions. They blocade France, we blocade their email inboxes.”
The campaign will continue in retaliation for any further strikes by the transport and teaching unions. I thought that I might include the list of email addresses being bombarded by the Free French forces, just in case any foreigners might wish to add their comments:
secgene@snes.edu; SUD-Rail@wanadoo.fr; sudrailpaca@free.fr; g10nat@ras.eu.org; sud.education@laposte.net; mblondel@force-ouvriere.fr; rhoup@force-ouvriere.fr; mbiaggi@force-ouvriere.fr; jmbilquez@force-ouvriere.fr; bdevy@force-ouvriere.fr; jjayer@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmailly@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmallet@force-ouvriere.fr; mmonrique@force-ouvriere.fr; mspungier@force-ouvriere.fr; rsantune@force-ouvriere.fr; rvalladon@force-ouvriere.fr; info@cgt.fr; cgt-com@cgt.fr; presse@cgt.fr; scbc@cgt.fr; synd-societe@cgt.fr; environnement@cgt.fr; territoires@cgt.fr; act-eco@cgt.fr; eco-sociale@cgt.fr; doc@cgt.fr; jeunes@cgt.fr; orga@cgt.fr; form-synd@cgt.fr; polfi@cgt.fr; revendicatif@cgt.fr; formation@cgt.fr; emploi-garanties-coll.@cgt.fr; culture@cgt.fr; travail-sante@cgt.fr; protection-sociale@cgt.fr; compta.conf@cgt.fr; ugict@cgt.fr; ucr@cgt.fr; ihs@cgt.fr; indecosa@cgt.fr; lepeuple@cgt.fr; webmaster@fsu.fr; unsa@unsa.org; cnt@cnt-f.org
Vive La France Libre!
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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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