Samizdata

Nicolas Chatfort write the obituary of the UN, an organization whose statist premise makes its impending passing something few at Samizdata.net will shed a tear over

We are witnessing a major historical turning point in history. The world order envisioned by the UN is on its deathbed and unlikely to be revived. The world order I am referring to, however, is not the one enshrined in the lofty words of the UN charter. No, that vision died long ago, in fact as soon as the signatures were given in San Francisco. The idealistic vision of an international community working harmoniously toward common ends died stillborn when despotic regimes, whose very existences were alien to the goals set out in the charter, were allowed to join. The idea that the legitimacy to US actions is dependent on the views of countries such as Angola, China, Guinea, or Syria is absurd.

Realpolitiks, on the other hand, have underpinned the UN for over half a century. The myth behind the UN is that it an organization designed to maintain international peace through collective security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the UN has always rested on a grand bargain between the US and the other democracies of world. On the one side, the US would agree not to return to isolationism after WWII and promised to use its military force to provide a protective umbrella to its weaker partners. On the other side, the democracies would provide political support to US actions around the globe, thus enhancing the legitimacy of these actions. The Security Council has been effective only when it has been aligned with the interests of the United States, on whom it has been dependent for military strength with which to impose its will. No other country or collection of countries can adequately substitute for the US military.

This bargain has now been broken. France and Germany no longer feel that they have an obligation to support the US. In fact, it now appears that France views the weakening of American power as one of its major diplomatic goals. Although in the past French posturing has been a nuisance for the US, it had always returned to the side of the US when it mattered. The recent French actions in the UN, however, are unprecedented in that Paris is now working actively to undermine the US position. The obstinacy of the French position suggests that Paris is more interested in bringing the US to heal than Iraq. Chirac is mistaken if he believes that the US will acknowledge UN paramountcy over US security interests. The UN cannot function without the US military power to back it up and the US will not long remain a member if it comes to view UN more as an impediment to US security rather than as an aid.

Nicolas Chatfort

Reading a number of anti-war libertarian blogs such as that of the estimable Jim Henley, it occurred to me that among the various errors in their positions over what to do about Saddam, etc, is a tendency to dismiss or downplay any threat that such countries may pose to us.

Now, I am not going to engage in some long ramble about why I think the case for war is correct (though I think it is). However, what I do want to do is briefly reflect on what I think is an aspect of the anti-war libertarian position which could prove damaging to libertarianism more generally. It is the problem of evasion.

In recent years, libertarians have been aware of a growing threat to our free society, namely, the Green movement. And much time is spent, rightly, dismissing or pulling apart the scare stories (such as the Greenhouse Effect, population explosion, etc) that are offered to justify wholesale government controls over our lives. But a nagging question is – what would libertarians do if the Green case is partly, or even wholly, correct? What if global warming is as bad as they claim? What would we fans of free-wheeling capitalism do about that? It is simply not good enough for us to trash the Green case without at least working out how we would cope with such issues.

It seems to me that the isolationist libertarians who rubbish most government attempts to crack down on terrorists and their state sponsors need to answer a similar sort of question. How can free, minimal state societies deal with serious threats to liberty and life? What sort of measures should such societies take?

I think we owe it to ourselves to pose such questions and come up with a few ideas. Attacking governments for trashing civil liberties and ramping up defence spending is of course a good thing for libertarians to do, and we must continue to do so. But not offering any positive suggestions on how we defend ourselves is not just unwise. It threatens also to make the libertarian movement irrelevant.

And frankly, I don’t give a toss whether such worries make me a ‘neo-libertarian’ or whatever. I am not interested in going to my grave knowing that I died like a good disciple of Murray Rothbard. I want to stay alive with as much freedom as possible. It is about time that we worked on a few ways to achieve that.

Consider the gauntlet thrown on the floor.

Perhaps not the best feel-good title for my first posting and certainly not the usual New Year’s Eve admonition but it concerns the aspect of reality that urged me to blog in the first place. It is also just too horrible to pass on in the interest of New Year’s festivities.

There are many living hells in the world today but North Korea deserves a special mention. According to Anthony Daniels, one of the few journalists to have visited North Korea, no other regime comes remotely as close to annihilating the human personality as North Korea’s does.

Never in history have human beings been so dragooned into uniformity and blind obedience as in North Korea. The regime is one of bread and circuses: but attendance at the circuses is compulsory and the bread has been replaced by rockets.

The North Korean ideal is an eternal marchpast of the Leader by millions of people, expressionless until they let out a howl of rehearsed joy when the leader raises his hand to them. I have seen it myself, and am glad to have done so: for it was absolute political evil, the ne plus ultra of inhumanity.

I know most people realise that North Korea is a ‘bad guy’ although Bush mentioning it as part of the Axis of Evil will certainly prompt some anti-American idiotarians into defending it. In some vague way, we know North Korean are oppressed by a Stalinist-type regime, have been starving for some time and now the North Korean leadership have hit the headlines with their nuclear weapons antics. But just as during the Cold War we didn’t know what communism really meant for the individual citizen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now we don’t know how exactly the North Korean variety of communism continues to crush human creativity, spirit and dignity.

It doesn’t help that an alarmingly high number of other useful idiotarians who have encountered the evil there either cannot or refuse to see it. The former US President Jimmy Carter managed to see in Pyongyang a second Manhattan. Anthony Daniels calls it not blindness, but hallucination. He concludes:

The only question, then, is how to destroy it once and for all: whether to let time take its toll (for all things pass); to offer little fat Kim a gilded retirement in Monaco watching the pornographic films that he is said to like; or to threaten war.

I know which option I’d take.