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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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A couple of weeks ago, while taking a little tour of Provence, I found myself in Arles, once a great Mediterranean port but today a small town with some spectacular Roman ruins, famous for being the location where Vincent Van Gogh painted many of his most famous works, as well as being the place where he cut off his left ear.
In one of the town squares, I found a fairly ordinary and old looking memorial to the events of the second world war.
However, there was a very new plaque on it. Let’s get a closer look.
This is quite intriguing. Unless the servicemen in question did something extremely famous, it is unusual to find a memorial to one or two specific men. (At least, it is outside graveyards). While the sacrifice of every soldier or airman who died is worthy of commemoration and remembrance, the numbers who died were so great that it is not possible. So why these two? Were Lieutenants Tippett and McConnell the only Americans to die in Arles in the war? If not, what did they do to merit this memorial? And why was this plaque not erected until almost 60 years after the action in question? Were more details as to what happened in the war only found out recently? Had some historian who knew what they did long campaigned for such commemoration. One senses that there is an interesting story there, either about the actions of the men themselves, or at least about how the plaque came to be erected. I googled for their names on the internet but found nothing. I am sure that if I wrote to the mayor of Arles to ask, I would receive a letter back telling me the answer. However right now I don’t know anything. Still, if any readers of this site know anything, I would be interested to hear it.
And it is worth noting that the citizens of at least one French town felt the need to erect another memorial to the American sacrifices made in 1944 in liberating France as recently as last year. Not everyone forgets.
How exactly did the Cold War end, and who exactly won it, and lost it?
I like this summary, provided by someone or something called “The Friendly Ghost”, which he (it) wrote in response to the accusation that the current President of the US has also been telling the occasional untruth.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he was briefed on the military capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At the end of the briefing, Reagan asked, “Is that all the forces we can afford?” The answer was yes. The president then asked, “Then how can the Soviet Union afford such a huge military?” He was told they couldn’t. At that point, Reagan decided to see the Soviet Union’s 20-year military build-up, and raised them Star Wars.
Now, President Reagan couldn’t just say he was building a shield to shoot down ICBMs. He had to demonstrate that the technology actually worked. But it didn’t really work. So the decision was made to rig the tests, so that it looked like the system worked. In other words, HE LIED. But the Soviets believed the lie, and bankrupted themselves trying to catch up to the Americans. Gorbachev eventually came to power, and shouted “glasnost!” A few years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The moral of the story? By telling a lie, Ronald Reagan helped bring down the United States’ biggest, most powerful enemy, without firing a shot. Sun Tsu would be proud.
I’m not exactly sure what the provenance of the above is. It seems to be a summary of things that the Friendly Ghost guy got from this guy.
The Friendly Ghost then continues, in his own voice, so to speak.
Yes, the story is a simplification of events. But a couple of months ago, I watched a documentary on the History Channel about Star Wars. The Soviets really were that paranoid about SDI, at least for a few years. Although by the time of the Reykjavik Summit, there was some suspicion about the effectiveness of SDI, Reagan’s actions in not giving it up helped sustain the illusion in many minds in the Soviet leadership. But the most telling statistic? When the Soviet Union fell, it was discovered that the CIA had woefully underestimated Soviet military spending. The Soviets were spending 25% of their GNP on their military. Yes Virginia, there was a reason the Soviet Union fell. The military spending killed the economy. And why were the Soviets spending so much on their military? Two words: Ronald Reagan.
I was always of and remain of the opinion that the proper percentage figure for Soviet “defence” spending was one hundred.
A lot of my libertarian friends, acquaintances and competitors believe that the USSR would have collapsed anyway, a victim of its own “internal contradictions” – i.e. its useless economy, inability to make PCs or washing machines or jeans or decent cars, or make sensible use of fax machines and photocopiers.
My feeling about that is, maybe it would, but how might it have collapsed? Had the old USSR not been faced by a weapon-wielding USA breathing fire, brimstone and Tom Cruise movies all over it, and flashing cool photos of stealth bombers all over the place, might the USSR not have collapsed outwards, so to speak? Might it perhaps have attacked lazy, fat, pre-occupied Western Europe, in order to get more plunder, and to divert its domestic population from its domestic griefs with foreign glories, Henry V style – and because it preferred going out with a bang to going out with the whimper that it actually did go out with?
My favourite end-of-Cold-War moment came in the late eighties when, on a British TV show, a Dimbleby asked Caspar Weinberger what defence spending was being “prioritised”. Said Weinberger, after a thoughtful pause: “Well, pretty much everything.” I knew then that it was over.
I know, I’m a libertarian and I’m not supposed to enjoy stuff like that, but I did and I do. Given what Reagan could do with the buttons he had on his desk, and did not have, I think he did very well.
I have been enjoying the television documentary of the American war of Independence shown over on the BBC (yes, that pinko channel!), presented by military historian Richard Holmes.
Bestriding around the countryside, Holmes is excellent. He even looks the part with his bearing and military moustache – you could imagine him in an army officer’s uniform circa 1940.
During his trip Holmes asked some locals on a bus travelling near Charleston about what the war meant to them. One elderly lady gave an articulate take, arguing about the issues of taxation, representation and liberty. And then he spoke to a young guy, probably in his early 20s, who came out with this gem. I paraphrase slightly:
Well, it was all about rich folks, who just did not want to pay their taxes. If it hadn’t been for them, we’d be British, and enjoy (!) socialised medicine.
So there you have it. Some of the younger American generation wish that George Washington had lost so that all Americans could use the National Health Service.
Don’t know whether to laugh or cry, really.
The dominant ‘story’ of economic development is that science gives birth to technology, and technology makes money. But who pays for science? That has to be the government, the community, all of us. Because, who else will? So, economic development depends on a strong state, because only a strong state will pay for all that science.
Terence Kealey, in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, tells a different story. Strong states destroy freedom. Weak states allow it, and thus allow capitalism, which pays for technology, which stimulates, pays for and is in its turn stimulated by science (the causal link between technology and science is that technology causes science at least as much as science causes technology), and technology also (Kealey accepts the usual causal link about this bit) causes increased prosperity.
The early chapters of this book supply an excellent potted history of pre-industrial Western Civilisation and its development. Here are the paragraphs that describe the fall of the Roman Empire:
So unconcerned with research did the Roman State become, that the Emperors actually suppressed technology. Petronius described how: ‘a flexible glass was invented, but the workshop of the inventor was completely destroyed by the Emperor Tiberius for fear that copper, silver and gold would lose value’. Suetonius described how: ‘An engineer devised a new machine which could haul large pillars at little expense. However the Emperor Vespasian rejected the invention and asked “who will take care of my poor?”.’ So uncommercial had the Romans become, their rulers rejected increases in productivity. In such a world, advances in science were never going to be translated into technology. Thus we can see that the government funding of ancient science was, in both economic and technological terms, a complete waste of money because the economy lacked the mechanism to exploit it.
The fall of the Roman Empire was frightful. The growth of the Empire had always been based on conquest, and the Empire’s economy had been fuelled by the exploitation of new colonies. When the Empire ran out of putative victims, its economy ceased to make sense, particularly as the mere maintenance of the Empire, with its garrisons and its bureaucrats, was so expensive. From the beginning of the second century AD, the State had to raise higher and higher taxes to maintain itself and its armies. It was under the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, when the Empire was at its largest, that residual freedoms started to get knocked away to ensure that revenue was collected. Special commissioners, curatores, were appointed to run the cities. An army of secret police were recruited from the frumentarii. To pay for the extra bureaucrats, yet more taxes were raised, and the state increasingly took over the running of the economy – almost on ancient Egyptian lines. In AD 301, the Emperor Diocletian imposed fixed wages and prices, by decree, with infractions punishable by death. He declared that ‘uncontrolled economic activity is a religion of the godless’. Lanctantius wrote that the edict was a complete failure, that ‘there was a great bloodshed arising from its small and unimportant details’ and that more people were engaged in raising and spending taxes than in paying them. → Continue reading: Terence Kealey on the fall of the Roman Empire
When reading about the many and disparate anti-globalisation activists who protest against international trade, one often gets the impression that the writers discussing their antics think that what motivates these folks is a relatively new phenomenon.
Not so. The desire to replace free trade with politically controlled and above all, domestic trade has long been a central aspect of collectivism of all flavours.
Adolf did not much care for global trade either
At its root, all forms of collectivism have more in common than its supporters might be comfortable admitting.
From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme “High Rise Dreams”, shown on Thursday June 19th:
Time Shift looks back at how a group of idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, inspired by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier and new materials, only to be thwarted by financial restraints, poor craftsmanship and Margaret Thatcher’s private ownership creed.
In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:
In the first of three programmes on architecture, Time Shift looks at how idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, only then to be thwarted.
Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I’m afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it.
The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they’d been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well.
A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism’s opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.)
The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating.
The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I’ll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens.
The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an “experimentally designed” block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited.
The idea of a “vertical street”, also made much of by certain Britain’s Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don’t work. Think square wheel.
I’ve chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times.
I think I’ve found the culprit.
6 June 1944… the start of the Anglosphere’s armed liberation of western Europe from National Socialism.
It never hurts to keep reminding some people of that.
Instapundit links to this UPI report:
WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) — As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully — and knowingly — false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.
“In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an ‘appropriate and serious review’ of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times,” Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.
Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the “confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty’s award,” Nynka wrote.
The utter falsehood of Duranty’s claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine – a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others – has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented – and potentially immensely embarrassing – procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.
The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the “Harvest of Sorrow” by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.
One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.
So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty � Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?
Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What’s Up, Doc?, Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called “You’re The Top” or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to “The Great Duranty”. Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it’s Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?
It’s not that I’m opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren’t murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies – merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.
This appeared as a comment from Nick Forte in the largely humorous article about the brouhaha relating to the State Flag of Georgia. As Nick makes some very interesting points about an endlessly debated subject, we thought it was worthy of appearing as a Samizdata.net article in its own right
I fear the debate over the cause of the Civil War will never be resolved. This is because there was no single cause. There was not even a predominant cause. The various participants in the war fought for a myriad of different reasons. On the Southern side, it is true that many advocates of secession argued that slavery was threatened if the South remained in the Union. This view was strongest in the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), were most of the slaves were located.
But is must be remembered that there were two waves of secessions. The states of the Deep South seceded in the early months of 1861 and many of their articles of secession did claim slavery as a major issue.
The Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) did not secede until after Lincoln called for a levy of state militias to put down the “rebellion”. It was their view that the Federal government was abusing the sovereign rights of the seceding states that drove the Upper South out of the Union. In fact, prior to Ft. Sumter, Virginia voted against secession. Also, both Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson, two Virginians who were unarguably the Confederacy’s two best generals, viewed slavery as an abomination and wouldn’t have taken up arms simply to fight for slavery. They were fighting to defend their home and hearth from what they viewed as a foreign invasion.
Even this dichotomy between the motivations of the Deep South and Upper South over simplifies the issue. The South also had other grievances against the North, particularly over the tariff. The Republican Party, representing the manufacturing interests of the North-Eastern States, was highly protectionist at that time. Lincoln had written quite extensively on the benefits of high tariffs. The South, with few manufacturers, generally supported free trade. → Continue reading: The Civil War rumbles on
Once upon a time, there was a group of states within a larger nation who did something terrible…they allowed slavery. Eventually there was a dreadful civil war between those states and some other states who did not approve of slavery. Although the war was only incidentally about slavery and rather more about centralised versus decentralised power, it did at least have the happy effects of ending slavery.
The National Flag of The Bad Guys: The Stars and Bars!
The flag which The Bad Guys flew in battles
How do we know they were ‘The Bad Guys’? Because of slavery, of course, but mostly we know this because they lost and the winners get to write the history books.
So much later, after the war was over, one state used a flag which harked back to the old battle flag. They argued that most of the people who fought in that war from their state were just fighting for hearth and home and very few of them actually owned slaves anyway. Regardless, those days were part of their history and they rather liked their old flags.
Oh no…Echos of The Bad Guys!
This upset some people mightily and they threatened economic boycotts and all manner of other nastiness if the state did not change their flag to remove the symbolism of The Bad Guys of Old.
So the governor said people could vote on this, but then decided that no, actually, they couldn’t, or maybe they could… but in the mean time, here is a splendid new flag and will you leave me alone now?
The Flag Spangled Banner?
So folks stopped for a moment, looked at this new flag and agreed that it was just about the dumbest, ugliest dish-rag to flap over the state capitol ever. “Screw that!” they all cried, and so the arguments continued to rage.
Eventually however, they agreed to another splendid brand new flag and everyone was happy because this new flag does not look anything like the flag used by The Bad Guys of Old, right?
The State Flag of the Good Guys: The…er, um, ah…Stars and Bars
Those Americans… who says they have no concept of ironic humour? You just gotta love ’em.
On May 4, 1626 American Indians agreed to sell Manhattan island to European settlers for $24 in cloth & buttons. As with most free market transactions, all parties involved were satisfied with the deal: the settlers got land to homestead, the Indians received exotic manufactured goods that were beyond their ability to produce.
This is the first posting in what may or may not turn into a series on the general theme of the historic impact of the ever changing and evolving technology of communication, thoughts provoked by the talk that Michael Jennings gave at my home on the evening of Friday April 25th.
One of my fondest memories is of an earlier talk given by Sean Gabb in this same ongoing last-friday-of-the-month series, about the impact of the printing press. He described this not in the usual way, by telling the story of the printing press itself, and how it spread, and what it caused, but by describing how things were done before printing existed. He described how documents were copied before there were any printing presses to copy them, the central point being that such documents only lasted so long and it was all that the copyists could do to keep existing texts in continued existence. In such a world it was very hard for knowledge to grow. On the contrary, the only thing it could really do was shrink, which does a lot to explain why the Golden Age in those days tended to be placed in the past, rather than in the future as we now tend to prefer.
But another way to look at the arrival of printing is to look at it not just as a means of data storage, but also as a means of data transmission.
Consider. With any means of communication there are basically two problems to solve. First, you have to concoct the message in the first place. Second, you have to transmit it. Now, look at printing from these two points of view. Clearly, it does wondrous things to the first process, but equally clearly, a little compression aside, it contributes almost nothing to the second. Getting a book from Antwerp to Rome still depends on the speed of a donkey, just as it always did.
This simple fact had huge consequences for the way that printing impacted upon the wider culture. → Continue reading: How printing caused nationalism
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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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