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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I doubt the BBC particularly wants my off-the-cuff attempt to pee in their iCan pool and I really look forward to goading Johnathan Miller into setting up an anti-TV licence campaign on iCan. However with the Cambridge Women in Black we see an example of exactly the sort of campaign the BBC had in mind when it set up its strange vaguely bloggish monstrosity. They state:
Cambridge Women in Black are holding silent vigils to protest against the ‘war on terror’. We are women of all ages and from all walks of life who oppose the use of violence. We are wearing black to show that we mourn all victims of terrorism and war.
In March 2003 the UK and US governments again attacked the people of Iraq, who have already suffered extensively from war and more than a decade of devastating sanctions. Cambridge Women in Black are here to show that we believe that more violence will not bring security and peace. We call on our government to stop creating yet more misery and hatred.
Note that the woes of the Iraqi people are not due to decades of Ba’athist mass murder and repression but are from the war and sanctions… sanctions during which large palaces and grandiose mosques were constructed in Iraq. Still, I do not suppose I should hold that against the ‘Cambridge Women in Black’ because after all, they state they are mourning “all victims of terrorism and war”… and never said anything about the victims of national socialist tyranny.
story via The Daily Ablution
Finally, a decent update on how the reconstruction is going in Iraq. It is astonishing that all the thousands of words that spew forth on a daily basis concerning the Iraqi situation manage to impart virtually no useful information. The Economist has a very nice overview of the reconstruction work in Iraq that paints a realistic and encouraging picture.
For many Iraqis, living standards have already risen a lot. Boosted by government make-work programmes, day labourers are getting double their pre-war wages. A university dean’s pay has gone up fourfold, a policeman’s by a factor of ten.
Stacks of such goods now crowd the pavements of Baghdad’s main shopping streets, shaded by ranks of bright new billboards. Prime commercial property, says a real estate broker in the Karada district, easily fetches $1,000 a square metre, four times the level this time last year.
The southern capital, Basra, for example, got only two-to-four hours of electricity a day before the war—and now has a power surplus. Baghdad still works to a regime of three-hours-on/three-hours-off, but the country as a whole is producing as much power as before the war. By spring it will be up by 25%. Within three years, if America sticks to its plan of sinking $5 billion-plus into the sector, power output should have more than doubled.
→ Continue reading: Iraq update
Another group of members of Congress have had a press conference after their return from Iraq. It seems quite telling how nearly every US politician, Republican or Democrat, find the ‘ground truth’ different from what they are hearing day after day from the Palestine Hotel bar.
If even a politician can see what is going on, what does this say about the intelligence of journalists?
Most Arab media on Tuesday blamed the U.S. failure to provide security in Baghdad for the latest suicide bombings in the Iraqi capital. They agreed that Washington had only itself to blame for the chaos and said the United States had failed Iraqis by not providing enough security to prevent the devastating attacks that killed 35 people on Monday, the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
I think my personal favourite is from the daily al-Khaleej, published in the United Arab Emirates:
Iraq, on the first day of Ramadan, was the scene of a bloodbath and occupation forces are directly responsible for this because of the instability they created in Iraq.
I suppose knowing where you stand with your torturers is stability of sorts but somehow I do not think that the victims of Saddam’s regime see it that way.
Saudi Arabia’s leading al-Riyadh newspaper opines:
The political bubble has burst in Baghdad. Will it be followed by other explosions or will the voice of reason prevail over the American dream of hegemony?
Disasters and conflicts notwithstanding there has never been a shortage of rhetorics in the Arabian Penninsula. There is only one voice that sounds half-reasonable although based on where it originated I would not want to look too close at the context of the quote. In non-Arab Iran, reformist parliamentarian Reza Yousefian said:
It is unjustifiable to kill ordinary people in the name of an anti-American campaign. On the contrary, the more insecurity prevails in Iraq, the longer Americans will stay.
Others, although outspoken against those who carried out the attacks, cannot help but add a sting in the tail. Lebanon’s as-Safir daily writes:
What happened yesterday in Baghdad is a crime by all measures, but it is more disgraceful than a crime: it is a deadly political mistake… Such political mistakes help the occupation to justify its horrible crimes.
Such outrage was lacking when it came to commenting on Saddam’s horrible crimes. I wish the Iraqis realised who their real enemies are.
I’ve lately been following the writing of the new kid on the Baghdad block.
Good stuff, well worth a regular read.
Wait a minute, I thought it was George Bush who was supposed to be the new Hitler:
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has called on Muslims to use brains as well as brawn to fight Jews who “rule the world”.
“The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy… 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews,” he said, speaking at the opening of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in the Malaysian administrative capital Putrajaya.
Well, at least he’s not a holocaust-denier. Anyway, he has probably been driven to desperation by the Zionist occupation of..er, Malaysia.
The Reconquest of Spain
D. W. Lomax
Longman, first published 1978
It is surprising to read (p. 179), “There seems to be no serious book in any language devoted to the history of the whole Reconquest,” (at least when the book was published in 1978) despite the fact that it would seem to be the underlying theme of the history of the Middle Ages in the Peninsula, with the nice firm dates of 711-1492. The author commends O’Callaghan’s A History of Medieval Spain.
Like everywhere else, from Persia to the Atlantic, Islam rolled unstoppably over the whole of Spain, except its tiny northern edge, probably leaving that out in favour of richer pickings in southern France. Even here, in Asturias, only active resistance to the Arabs ensured the survival of the tiny state and an early civil war amongst the Moslems led to the withdrawal of disaffected Berbers from northern territory which was then occupied by Christians.
The author claims, with some evidence, that quite early the ideal of Reconquest was the ambition of the Christian kings and people. However, the initial Ummayad emirate, subsequently caliphate, flourished until the end of, and particularly during, the tenth century, though the last caliphs were puppets. It is probably this period of the Muslim occupation that has been idealised as a time of toleration by Muslims of Christians and Jews, though these were definitely second-class citizens and persecution of them not unknown.
The break-up of the caliphate enabled the Christians to advance again, with some assistance from France; also the crusading ideal, though mainly focussed on Jerusalem, was some help, sometimes by crusaders en passant. The capitulation of Toledo, even though it remained something of an outpost, signalled this. However, about 1085, some of the Muslims, in desperation invited in from North Africa the Almoravids, a puritanical sect (often hated by the more liberal decadent Spanish Muslims) who, in the great battle of Sagrajas (1086) halted the reconquest. The Cid (1043-99) is of this period. Much of the time he as often served Muslim kings as Christian, but after capturing Valencia, “was the only Christian leader to defeat the Almoravids in battle in the eleventh century”. (p. 74)
By this time the Christian states were Portugal, Leon-Castille (gradually united), Aragon and Navarre, sometimes allied, but more often not and generally with no scruples about fighting each other with Muslim allies. However, Aragon was pushing down the Ebro valley, taking Saragossa in 1118, though the Almoravids fought back successfully to prevent it reaching Valencia, which had been evacuated after the death of the Cid.
Like the Caliphate before them, the Almoravids disintegrated and were largely replaced, from 1157, by another sect from Africa, the Almohads, who soundly defeated the Castilians at Alarcos in 1195. This defeat seems to have first cowed then roused the Christians (particularly the Pope); finally Christians from all the Spanish kingdoms, and some from France, united in a campaign which won the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). In the forty years after the battle the Almohad empire broke into pieces which were annexed by” Castile and Aragon. Vital cities – such as Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248) – passed permanently into Christian hands so that “by 1252 the whole of the Peninsula was nominally under Christian suzerainty” (p. 129), though this, of course, did not mean the end of Muslim kingdoms.
The pace of reconquest slowed down, initially as a result of another transfusion from Africa, the Marinids, who, however, could only defend the Muslim rump. In 1340, at Tarifa, their sultan was decisively defeated and no successor state in Africa invaded Spain again. Muslim Spain survived as Granada for another 150 years, the Christians occupying much of the time fighting and rebelling against each other. One is forced to add: when they should have been completing the Conquest. The process, when it happened, certainly united Spain. In the end, “Fernando and Isabel could cure one crisis in 1481 simply by setting the war-machine to work once more to conquer Granada.” (p. 178)
The author, at his Conclusion makes the persuasive claim that “Only Spain [and also, I suppose to a lesser extent Portugal, which he does not mention] was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries her society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus.” (p. 178) As so often in books published from the 1970s on, the maps leave much to be desired; certainly places are mentioned in the text which are not to be found on them.
Two days after I had finished this book I listened to a discussion on “Cordovan Spain” under Melvyn Bragg’s chairmanship on Radio 4. The three other participants were Tim Winter, a Muslim convert, of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, Mary Nickman, a Jewess (carefully correcting herself from AD to Common Era) and an executive director of the Maimonides Foundation, and Martin Palmer, whose voice was not to me sufficiently distinguishable from the first, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of A Sacred History of Britain. Although the consensus was largely positive about the Ummayad regime, and their tone “multicultural” in the modern sense, the first two did seem to agree that the three religions, while coexisting, did not indulge in dialogue, let alone interpenetrate. This confirms an episode mentioned in the book, that even when promised immunity in a bilateral debate, a Christian was executed “when he expressed his real opinion of Mohammed”. (p. 23) Nor was the Koran translated into Latin “until the twelfth or thirteenth century”, someone said in the discussion. Needless to say, the rosy view of Muslim Spain did not take into account that the Muslim conquest fatally disrupted Mediterranean civilization, the burden of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. To pick up the shards and pass a few of them on does not strike me as a very large recompense.
Another bracing dose of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
[A]fter September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad — or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
[B]y any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs.
As always with VDH, it pays to read the whole thing.
Ralph Peters bangs one out of the park today, echoing and expanding on the sentiment behind my earlier post on “I hope we win”. A few tidbits:
The truth is that today’s media shape reality – often for the worse. The media form a powerful strategic factor. They’re actors, not merely observers.
The media is a key strategic factor today. And it is profoundly dishonest for so powerful a player to pretend it bears no responsibility for strategic outcomes.
The selectivity with which the news is reported shapes opinion, here and abroad. The news we see, hear and read from Iraq is overwhelmingly bad news. Thus, the picture the American electorate and foreign audiences receive is one of spreading failure – even though our occupation has made admirable progress.
We’re on the way to talking ourselves into defeat in the face of victory. Much of the media has already called the game’s outcome as a loss before we’ve reached half-time. Even though the scoreboard shows we’re winning.
To an extent few journalists will admit, terror as we know it depends on the media as its accomplice, amplifying the terrorist’s deeds and shaping successes out of terrorist failures – the opposite of the media’s approach to American efforts.
From the terrorists’ perspective, 9/11 was, above all, a media event – a global demonstration of their power.
This is not an argument for propaganda, or for turning our press into mindless red-white-and-blue cheerleaders. But the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence.
The terrorists, from Arafat to Hussein to bin Laden, all count on the media as a critical element in their campaigns, relying on the faux objectivity of “the cycle of violence” and moral relativism to conceal their barbarity, counting on the instinctive oppositionism of the Western media to undermine support for the war, and relying on the “news appeal” of bad news to give their side the bully pulpit while draining the life out of our victories.
The media have to understand that they are not neutral bystanders, but, against their will, have been made into combatants in this war. The only question is, whose side will they aid? So far, the verdict is pretty clear that the mainstream media, unwitting as it is, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as “Pierre55”, suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.
There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington…
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing out this Reuters story. It seems Polish force have found some brand spanking new 2003 dated French Roland missiles in an Iraqi arms dump.
It just goes to show: where there’s a customer, there’s a way.
The third post by Our Man in Basra about his observations from both Iraq and the West, to which he has now returned.
I have noticed that most Westerners tend to form one of two opinions about the situation in Iraq and about what we should be doing. One opinion is what I would call Idealistic. Iraqis are human beings just like us and so deserve democracy and freedom just like us. Therefore we should give them these things, as soon as possible. This viewpoint seems to be held by Americans who do not work with actual Iraqis, and by many libertarians.
The second opinion, which I shall call Realistic, is that the Iraqis are fundamentally different people to us. They have a different culture, a different religion, are basically untrustworthy, and uncivilised. They like stealing from and killing each other. They need a brutally authoritarian regime to keep them in order, and basically we are wasting our time trying to teach them anything else. This point of view tends to be held by those who deal with Iraqis day-to-day and is most acutely felt by ex-Idealistic Americans who simply cannot understand people who, instead of repairing their country, trash it.
The problem with the Idealistic theory is that Iraqis have been traumatised by thirty five years of brutal kleptocracy. They have no experience or understanding of what democracy, or even freedom, actually mean. For example, the end of Saddam’s rule in Basra was taken by most Basrans to mean the end of traffic rules as well, so they now drive like suicide bombers.
This is similar to what occurred in Central Europe after communism. Most people had little understanding of what a free market meant. They tended to think that capitalism meant a free license to rip off your customers. They also expected that the coming of freedom would mean instant wealth like in the West. They took a while to realise that it meant the freedom to build yourself wealth like in the West. The same is true, but twenty times more, in Iraq. At least the Central Europeans had a past history of civil freedom, and neighbours to learn from. None of this is true for the Iraqis.
The Realistic viewpoint, on the other hand, is intrinsically, if unconsciously, racist. There are objective differences between Iraqis and Westerners due to Islamic faith and tribal traditions. But these are not genetically encoded and impossible to change. In fact there are aspects of both Islam and of tribal traditions that are perfectly compatible with democracy and freedom. And indeed, the argument that Iraqis are lazy and stupid simply does not reflect the facts to be seen on the streets of Basra. You can see Iraqis driving cars that are little more than steering wheel, engine and a few road tires, but they keep them moving. They may be destroying their own infrastructure, but they show incredible determination and inventiveness while doing so.
What astounds me about both viewpoints, which are held by many intelligent people, is how absurdly simplistic they are. Iraqis are for the most part rational people, whose behaviour can be rationally explained. They react rationally to the environment they are in, which includes their experience under Saddam and their fear of his return. It may not make sense to give them complete democracy and freedom immediately and this point was made to me often by Iraqis, who insist that we should not try to govern Iraq with Western laws. They keep saying that Iraqis are different and need a strong fist.
But to suggest that Iraqis cannot learn to operate in a free and capitalist society is absurd. The problem here is the time scale. Neither viewpoint seems to take account of what of the blindingly obvious – you cannot rebuild the entire Iraqi society in a matter of months. The war ended at the end of May and we have only had four months so far. The reconstruction of Germany after World War II took about a decade.
Having been in Basra for some months, I am convinced, as are most Iraqis, that it will be a rich and prosperous city somewhere around five to ten years from now. As long as Iraqis have security from Ba’athists and from the neighbouring states, they will achieve this themselves. But with the French manoeuvring to give the UN political primacy in Iraq, the question is not: will Iraq be rebuilt, but who will get the credit?
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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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