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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That the Russians should be such buffoons by backing Ba’athist Iraq long after it became clear they were going to suffer the full weight of an Anglo-American attack is remarkable. That the Germans should have done so is nothing less than astonishing.
Just as in the Falklands War, when Britain’s ‘ally’ France did not withdraw military assistance from Argentina until it no longer actually mattered, we have seen the European Union’s two most influential nations, France and now Germany, actively collaborating with national socialist enemies of Britain overseas.
Tony Blair has just lead Britain into a spectacularly successful war, but at a cost in British blood and treasure. Will even this revelation get Tony Blair to finally see the €uro-fedarists for what they are? Are these really the people he wants to bind the future of Britain to?
Wake up!!!
In British military vernacular they are called ‘bumpy jumpers’, but they are a sight more chilling to the very hearts of Islamic fundamentalist extremists than an approaching squadron of B-52s wheeling in for an attack run.
Women without veils…
Good looking blonde women without veils…
Good looking blonde women without veils with guns!
I have been out of communications for the last week or so. Due the inability of Vodafone customer service to ring FEDEX to get a check delivered, I have yet to get international service running on my mobile. Living without a mobile phone is a terrible thing. How do people exist in the dark ages Before Mobile?
I’ve also been without ethernet connection since I do not yet have an 802.11b (wireless) card. So I may sit thirsting Ancient Mariner like in a cafe filled with wireless internet chatter but unable to drink.
Although I was well connected in Connecticut, I was totally occupied with an R&D job there and barely took time to skim Fox News each night before falling into an exhausted sleep.
So that is why I have not been commenting much on the war. I had thought it might at least last long enough for me to get a few licks in before the end. That was not to be. Modern warfare, like modern culture and technology have speeded up to an almost post-human time scale. If I had gone on business for two months during WWII little would have happened. Or perhaps I should say, little in terms of modern hyperspeed warfare. A major battle might have been engaged and fought to conclusion; a invasion might have established a beach head; the Battle of Britain might have started and be reaching a peak of ferocity… but the war would not seem to have changed in its’ essence.
Contrast 1938-1945 with March-April 2003. It started as I left Belfast and its’ effectively over as I sit here in DC barely a third of the way through a series of consultancy jobs. They held a war and I’ve mostly missed it.
It’s a fast old world we live in.
More evidence, as published by Reuters today (and not in its “oddly enough” pages) is coming out that Saddam’s Iraq was a key supporter of Islamic terror. Looks pretty damning to me.
Come on peaceniks, please tell us this is all a CIA-inspired plot.
When it comes to the British International Development Secretary, Clare Short, any attempt to analyze her views are bedeviled by the fact she is such a mass of contradictions and illogic. Yesterday at a briefing in London she was asked by a journalist if she thought the death toll of Iraqi civilians was a price worth paying for the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism, to which she replied:
I do not think that the death of any human being is a price worth paying
Let us ponder that remark… that the Ba’athist regime was mass murderous is beyond doubt and clearly something of which Clare Short would be cognisant. So what is she saying? She is not saying that what even the hilarious Iraqi Minister for Information admitted was a small number of Iraqi civilians killed was too high a price to end two and a half decades of tyranny.
No, she is saying that the loss of even a single life is not a price worth paying… paying for what? To prevent the murder of thousands of Iraqi people every year, that is what. The term ‘absurdity’ seems inadequate somehow.
Face it… Clare Short does not give a damn about the Iraqi people. She is more concerned about preserving the sanctity of her surreal world view. Why else would she say such an idiotic thing if not because trapped within her dogmatic meta-context, she is simply incapable of saying anything else regardless of florescent evidence suggesting better moral theories.
As I have written before, to oppose the war on the grounds that the domestic cost in Britain or the USA in blood, treasure and encroachment of the state is too high a price for the sake of the Iraqi people, is at least a coherent viable argument… but to oppose the war on ostensibly altruistic grounds that the price to the Iraqi people of overturning the Ba’athist Socialist status quo is too high is simply ridiculous, given that the scale of that Saddamite tyranny was hardly a secret.
To have taken such a position at before the war or in the early stages of the campaign was at least somewhat tenable, at least for a person with a poor understanding of the military and technological realities, on the grounds the cost in blood would indeed be mind bogglingly high.
But to still use that argument after we know that the ‘massive casualties’ scenario has not proved to be the case is bizzare. Pictures of tragic little Ali Ismail Abbas are truly heartrending for sure, but how does that change the cold hard facts about the butcher’s bill if Ba’athism had not been overthrown?
To argue on a ‘what is best for the Iraqi people cost/benefit analysis’ means the likes of Clare Short cannot have it both ways… unless all that matters is not that a ‘single life’ is lost to violence but only who did the deed. Although Clare Short’s logic is hard for me to fathom, perhaps she is saying that preventing thousands of Iraqi civilians dying every year in Saddam Hussain’s jails and torture chambers is not worth a single Iraqi death if a British taxpayer funded soldier was the one who ended the ‘single life’ in question. Or maybe she means nothing of the sort.
So who exactly does Clare Short care about? What does she mean when she opens her mouth and makes noises that sound like English? I cannot figure it out.
People in Baghdad have been protesting to US troops regarding the breakdown of law and order in that city and elsewhere in Iraq. The solution is simple… when the protesters turn up, lead them to one of the large piles of abandoned small arms dotting Iraq, issue each one of them with a Kalashnikov, 30 rounds of ammunition and a fluorescent yellow armband with the letters INW (Iraqi Neighbourhood Watch) in Latin and Arabic letters, and then tell them “Scram… this is your city so take care of the problem yourself and only call us if things get really out of hand”.
At a stroke the Iraqis are given the means to stop the looters, they are empowered to take their post-Ba’athist future into their own hands and they are shown that the coalition is serious about Iraqis running Iraq.
Will this mean some weapons get into the hands of the wacko bad guys? Sure, but those guys are already armed. However the upside is that for every one of them, there will be many dozens of normal armed Iraqi people who just want to live a normal life and who then will be able to say “never will be suffer this nightmare again”… and say it with a Kalashnikov in their hands. Ba’athist or Islamist thugs swaggering around your neighbourhood? Now that the Iraqis have had a taste of freedom, let them cap those bastards.
All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one.
I was surfing our sidebar blog listing and came across an article on JoHo the Blog called Ambivalence.
A murderous tyrant has fallen. The symbolic money shot was carried live, and it was thrilling. So why isn’t my breast filled with naught but joy? For bad reasons and good.
Bad Reason: Because I hate seeing Bush win a bet that he should not have made. There are political reasons to hate this, but my real reasons are petty and small-minded.
My remarks are not really a criticism directed the author and to give credit where credit is due, he freely acknowledges that his feelings are petty and small-minded… and let he who has never been petty or small-minded cast the first stone.
Yet it seems amazing to me that people can be so caught up in the banalities of American domestic politics (as if the Reps and Dems were actually that different) that the liberation of an entire people leaves them indifferent. It would be like a Republican in 1945 being indifferent to the liberation of France, Belgium and Netherlands from Nazi occupation by the advancing Allied armies because they worried that Roosevelt was a Democrat and fretting that he tended to say things like “God is with us”. It is entirely reasonable to lament the cost in blood and treasure of this war but that some can look on with ambivalence at the liberation itself is sad.
Also on that blog was a commenter’s remarks to the effect that as the Bush propaganda machine was operating at ‘hallucinatory levels’ and thus they got their news from places like www.iraqwar.ru in Russia (note: they halted their English language analysis on April 8th but seem to be offering reports once again).
As a small-L libertarian I am at best indifferent to Elephant Party statists like Bush and his counterparts in the Donkey Party, but the objective facts of what is happening in Iraq are not that hard to pick out from the noise and I do not see why party political affinities (or lack of them) should colour the ability to discern that essential and quite obvious facts of what has happened.
People like that commenter must be heart broken to now discover that far from being a hallucination, the truth is that the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq is very real. The hilarious conspiracy ladened drivel to be found on iraqwar.ru treated the pronouncements of the deluded Iraqi Information Minister as having as much credibility as live video feeds from Iraq showing that the opposite of what he was saying.
If that is where people are getting their news from, the hallucination is their understanding of reality itself.
Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, confesses to covering up torture and murder by the Saddam regime in the NYT (free registration required; link via The New Republic and Instapundit).
Jordan bleats that he had to protect CNN staffers who were also Iraqi citizens, even if this meant hiding terrible atrocities. If this is true, I fail to understand why CNN employed Iraqi citizens, rather than US citizens who could be brought back to safety. An organisation like CNN could readily train new translators if Iraqi-Americans would not have been granted visas. Failing to report these events, and failing to give a proper characterisation to the brutality of the regime, certainly risked prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people; either that, or CNN is merely in the light-entertainment business, in which case it should not have been in Iraq at all.
Two days after publication, this may be old news, but with no previous mention here I thought it was shocking (literally, shocking) enough to post belatedly.
That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of ‘progressive socialism’ it is hardly a surprise.
What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba’athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf.
To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba’athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light?
What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba’athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin’s good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services.
It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid.
One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:
DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ
coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues
And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:
“I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!”
→ Continue reading: Poetry
Is Saddam Hussain dead? It is looking increasingly likely that he was killed in a coalition air strike. On one hand it would have been nice to see him on trial for his life, or better yet, end up like Mussolini, hanging in a public square… but dead is dead and that is good enough.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Well, what do you expect? They’ve booked all the buses, printed all the placards, made all the sandwiches, they can’t possibly just call it all off. They’ve got momentum now and they just have to keep going:
Up to a quarter of a million protesters will march in London on Saturday despite the apparent success of coalition forces in Iraq, anti-war groups say.
The Stop the War coalition believes public opposition to the conflict is still strong – in spite of scenes of jubilation this week as American tanks entered Iraqi cities.
Jubilation in Baghdad, agitation in London.
But the police, who will have about 2,750 officers along the route, have said they expect fewer than 100,000 people to take part.
Flagrant fascist Bushista propoganda!!!
Speakers will include MPs Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, who face having the Labour whip withdrawn because of their anti-war stance.
Heroic martyrs!!
The group’s spokesman Chris Nineham said he believed “a great deal more problems” lay ahead for the British and US forces as they tried to take over Iraq’s administration.
Now this wouldn’t happen to be the same Chris Nineham who played such a prominent role in Marxism 2001? But I thought this march was supposed to be representative of ‘public opposition’, a great, spontaneous outburst of ordinary people’s sentiments?
The march is underway about now. I’d say 250,000 is probably a gross underestimation. Expect at least half a million. No, two million. No, twenty million….no, the entire population of the Northern hemisphere!!
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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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