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 submit that it is a therapeutic, every so often, to remind ourselves about the horrors of communism.
A living testament to that horror can still be found today in Siberia. It is the road that runs from Magadan to Yakutsk, otherwise known as the ‘Road of Bones’.
It was built by political prisoners and slaves, countless numbers of whom were worked, frozen and starved to death in the process. Because the perma-frost makes the ground too hard to effect any burials, the bones of the cadavers were broken up and used as ballast upon which to build the road.
We will never know for sure how many lives were sacrificed to this ‘glorious people’s project’, but by repute, every metre of the road cost one human life. The road is 2000 kilometres long.
There are still many people in the world today who subscribe to this terrible, anti-human, homicidal psychosis.
Never forget. Never forgive. Remain vigilant and, above all, never ever, ever apologise for fighting back.
And that is no longer just my pejorative opinion. It is a view that is being enthusiastically endorsed by its proponents:
During the May Day protests, we are going to be in the City of London vacuuming up after capitalism.
We’ll be there with our vacuum cleaners and warning people to watch out for the dirty capitalism all around them.
With our cleaners, we never let dirty capitalism settle.
I hope they intend to clean up after themselves. Last year’s ‘May Day’ marches left central London looking like an industrial tip.
So a lot of work is about humour because that really works. If people see a group of us vacuuming or praying, I think it’s more likely to get them to question things.
You’re right, the humour does work. I am already doubled up with laughter.
All the messages that are put about by advertisers are basically saying that shopping is the new religion. We were just taking it that little bit further.
Shopping as a religion? Damn, that’s a good idea. Anyone else fancy the idea of forming a Church of Conspicuous Consumption?
We had quite an interesting reaction. A lot of the shoppers were quite startled. Some of them laughed. Others looked at us as if we were idiots.
Conspicuous consumers are generally a perceptive and sensible lot.
Eventually the security guards threw us out. We’re not aggressive and we know that what we do and film takes place on private property so if they ask us to leave, we do.
Yet more ‘crushing of dissent’! Oh the humanity!!
The group goes into a store, all wearing the same shirts. Then, in a line, each member pushes around empty shopping trolleys [carts in America] in a quiet meditation.
Just silently contemplating all those seductive bargains.
I’ve got no illusions that what we do is going to stop people shopping. But the person who sees us praying or vacuuming may go home and have a question in their mind about the society we’ve created.
I’ll wager that the question in their mind is, how did you manage to fall from the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down?
Whenever I get despondent about the state of the world, up pop the Children of the Revolution to remind me just how debased, banal and self-parodying they have become.
On April 23rd, the Daily Kos had an article called Bringing libertarians into the Dem fold. In it, the author proposes:
I have argued for the past year that libertarians (with a small “L”) have a more natural home in the modern Democratic Party than with the GOP.
He goes on to describe how the Democratic party can leverage Republican abridgements of civil liberties to show libertarians that the Democratic party is their natural home, and that it is in fact ‘The party of personal liberty’.
Demonstrating at least a partial grasp of the difficulties of selling this notion to libertarians, he concedes that for this to have any chance whatsoever to work, the party of Charles Schumer and Joseph Lieberman is going to have to abandon its position of progressively abridging the right to keep and bear arms.
Although I left a long comment about the article on the Daily Kos, and mentioned that the idea of trying to appeal to ‘the other side’ was something I also had views on, there are a few interesting things about this that make it clear to me why Daily Kos does not understand the nature of the pool they are fishing in. Whilst the author understands the right to bear arms issue as being directly related to the issue of personal liberty, he also clearly sees the great majority of other things the Democratic Party does as being either neutral or unrelated to maters of personal liberty and thus not being ‘deal breakers’ in his proposed hand of friendship to libertarians.
For example, when he wrote about how the Republicans have consistently opposed business regulation, admiringly quoting an article elsewhere decrying GOP attempts to deregulate economic matters, presumably Daily Kos thinks that having the state regulating the control of several means of production is unrelated to issues of personal liberty. Perhaps in his eyes anyone who runs a business is not a person-who-has-liberty but rather some sort of collective entity and creature of the polis to whom issues of liberty are simply not germane. Perhaps this is a product of the ‘them and us’ class warrior view of the world found amongst the statist mainstream on both left and right.
And when he writes about how backs Wesley Clark as a Democratic candidate for President to run against Bush:
As everyone here already knows, he’s my favorite in this race. He’s solid on national security, well-spoken, presidential, pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-affirmative action, anti-PATRIOT Act, and believes strongly that the government should provide for the less fortunate amongst us.
I read that and when I hit the bit about ‘pro-affirmative action’ I hear the sound of screeching brakes. Now whilst I may think ‘affirmative action’ (I prefer to use the term ‘anti-white and anti-asian male state mandated discrimination’) is not materially different morally to apartheid, the fascinating thing here is that Daily Kos obviously does not even see this as an individual liberty issue! So when a specific individual white or asian man does not get a job because of a force backed state law that requires a quota of women and certain favoured ethnic groups to be hired, presumably his personal liberty, and the liberty of the owner of the company offering the job, is simply not an issue of ‘personal liberty’ at all.
Then of course we have the ‘government should provide for the less fortunate amongst us’ remark, which to most libertarians is tantamount to an apologia for proxy mugging at gunpoint. Also implicit in this is the hilarious notion (to a libertarian) that the Republicans do not take money at gunpoint from various ‘fortunate’ sections of society to give to the ‘less fortunate’… and that would be, bad, presumably. Would anyone care to list the number of violence backed redistributive ‘welfare’ acts signed into law by Republican law makers in, say, the last 30 years? Please use no more than 100,000 words.
What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to ‘do stuff’ beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline “No child left behind”… media control legislation described as “Fairness”… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.
Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of ‘personal liberty issues’ by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named ‘Patriot Act’ is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.
Of course, ‘libertarian’ is a broad term, as divisions on the war against the Ba’athist regime in Iraq have demonstrated, and many libertarians in the USA do indeed vote GOP on the grounds they would rather be ruled by the lesser evil (which is to say they vote against the Democrats rather than for the Republicans). But the fact so many people do not vote at all suggests to me that a large proportion say “a plague on both your houses”, and will continue to do so. If folks like Daily Kos realised the sort of disdain libertarians have for matters most in the statist ‘main stream’ would consider beyond debate, I suspect the hand of friendship from the Daily Kos would be withdrawn very quickly indeed for fear it might get cut off with an axe.
Democratic Party talent scout looking for libertarians
Well what would a dyslexic swine like me know about education? I can not even spell and my knowledge of grammar is revoltingly poor. As for my knowledge of languages (ancient or modern) this is confined to my (somewhat limited) knowledge of English. Oh, by the way, my knowledge both of mathematics and the natural sciences is rather limited as well.
However, I am going to comment about one recent incident which I believe shows (yet again) the decline of the classical vision of education (education in moral principles and general good conduct).
Last Thursday evening the Cambridge University Union held a debate on the motion:
“This House would gag the bad”.
By ‘House’ they (of course) did not mean someone’s home, they meant the Union (acting like a legislature) would, if it could, use the threat of violence to prevent people it regarded as bad expressing opinions by voice or in print.
As a publicity stunt the Union invited the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to be one of the speakers against the motion. Various young people then expressed their ‘antifascism’ by smashing up Mr Le Pen’s car.
In the debate itself over 200 students voted in favour of the motion and 12 voted against the motion.
In short in the whole of the University of Cambridge only 12 students exist who have the decency and courage to come and vote against even such an obscene violation of liberty. The rest of “the House” did not even have the wit to understand that the power they wished to have to gag those with whom they not agree could also be used against themselves (some future government could regard them as bad).
As for the 12 just students, will they be part of the ‘saving remnant’ once written about by such writers as Irvine Babbitt and Paul Elmer More? It would be nice to think so, but it is more likely that these students (because of their unfashionable decency and courage) will be forced out of the intellectual and cultural world into dead end jobs where their impact (short or long term) on life will be close to nil.
“Oh well, we are just talking about a mob of students – they will change their opinions when they leave university”. It is true that many people become more ‘moderate’ when they leave university (i.e. they make compromises between their abstract principles and the situations they find themselves in), but it is not true that most people adopt new basic principles once they leave university.
If someone has not learnt decent moral principles by his early 20’s it is quite likely (although not inevitable) that he never will.
I am not quite old enough to have been a full-blooded Cold War Warrior but I can imagine what it must have been like poring over the speeches and statements that emanated from the Kremlin, searching out all those coded mendacities and gussied-up ideological postures.
The closest we come to that kind of excitement these days is by listening to someone like the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke:
BBC director general Greg Dyke has warned of the risks of crossing the line between patriotism and objective journalism.
Not remotely a risk for the BBC where there is not even a hint of either patriotism or objective journalism.
In a speech to a journalism conference in London, Mr Dyke denounced the “gung-ho patriotism” of one US network covering the Iraq war and said it should not be allowed to happen in the BBC.
Oh that vulgar word again! Such a rank obscenity for a member of the defeatist, vacuous, ethically crippled ruling elite.
“This is happening in the United States and if it continues will undermine the credibility of the US electronic news media.”
Credibility in whose eyes?
“And we must never allow political influences to colour our reporting or cloud our judgement.”
This, from the head of a broadcasting organisation whose chief recruitment ground is the jobs page of the Guardian.
“Commercial pressures may tempt others to follow the Fox News formula of gung-ho patriotism but for the BBC this would be a terrible mistake.”
For those of you unfamiliar with British public-sector-speak, allow me to interpret: “We must oppose a free market in information and ideas as this would severely threaten our role as paternalistic gatekeepers of public opinion”.
“If, over time, we lost the trust of our audiences, there is no point to the BBC.”
I think you ought to have a word with the crew of the Ark Royal, Mr.Dyke.
The BBC has yet to undergo ‘perestroika’.
I was an occasional reader of American business-technology magazine Red Herring, which has just closed down. They often carried very interesting articles, such as the excellent round up of the state of nanotechnology (by several authors), and a piece on The Company and Society by John Micklethwait (who is indeed a relative of Samizdata.net’s very own Brian Micklethwait) in the final March 2003 print version (hence no links).
However I was only an occasional reader of Red Herring because although its coverage of technology was rather good, I found its neo-conservative acceptance of statist axioms in so many articles tedious, and to be honest I am not all that interested in the details of how corporate America finesses OSHA and tax regulations in order to function, or how they get their snouts in the public trough for R&D money.
Likewise I found my eyes rolling back when I read remarks from Editor-in-Chief Tony Perkins like…
We wish the Bush administration luck in trying to change the spending culture in Washington, D.C.. State governments must also learn how to do more with less.
…because there, oh so succinctly, is why I regard neo-conservatism as something which completely misses the point. The principle problem with government is not that it takes lots of other people’s money… no… that is just a consequence of what is wrong. The root problem is that government does things it has no business legitimately doing at any cost to taxpayers.
We do not need the state to do more with less, we need it to do less with less.
Most people have heard of concepts such as ‘the rule of law’, ‘respect for the law’, perhaps even ‘a government of laws, not of men’. The idea being that ‘the law’ is a noble thing, worthy of respect, the safeguard of civilization. Even non-libertarians (who reject the idea that ‘the law’ should be the law of nonaggression) hold that the law is something stable, something that helps defend the basic institutions of society over the centuries.
How is it possible to reconcile the above with the ever changing and ever increasing statutes and regulations churned out by politicians and administrators? Far from being majestic and worthy of respect, the actual law is normally a sordid mass of commands worthy of contempt.
By what right does the state tell people to do a certain thing or not do another thing? Whether it be to not cut meat on a wood surface, or to only make cheese in a certain way, or whatever?
The normal reply (which can be traced back to John Locke and others) is that government gets its authority from ‘the people’, but even if one believes (which I do not) that the majority have the right to tell everyone how they should live their lives down to every last detail of civil interaction, it is hard to see how this fits in with the world as it is.
Even in nations with democratic governments ‘the people’ do not tend to vote on the laws. Even the elected politicians who form the ‘legislature’ in such nations do not debate or even vote on most of the laws. The vast, ever changing and ever growing web of rules and regulations that control people’s lives are mostly created by administrators elected by no one. → Continue reading: The Law
Some years ago I read some interesting ideas about the standards of the Victorian gentleman. Superficially they were very strict. There were things gentlemen just ‘did not do’, but the superficial inflexibility hid a deep pragmatism. Sometimes one has to break standards in order to keep them. One must have ‘rough men’ on the borders and in the dangerous lands. One must sometimes compromise oneself or commit a crime against ones deepest beliefs and suffer a lifetime of remorse so that others may blissfully exist ‘within the code’.
This is why we need the Anti-war Libertarians. They are there to remind us that war is in general a bad thing; it is something which often expands state power. They provide us with an unbending code against which we must judge our actions.
Libertarians are thinking beings, not robotic ideologues. There are times when we must knowingly do things we find distasteful simply because it is the world we live in or because an action protects something we hold dear. The existence of a code, is important. Without one each new action defines a new central position which is no position at all.
We Samizdatistas are the rough men and women at the borders of Libertopia, ready and willing to sacrifice our souls that others may sleep peacefully with their more strict adherence to gentlemanly libertarian behavior.
The estimable Stephen Pollard writes that the sheer shamelessness of parts of the anti-war crowd means they are unlikely to learn a good lesson from the fall of Saddam’s regime. Hence we (by which I assume he means pro-war types) should be prepared to get nasty against our opponents, launching personal attacks, emplying savage ridicule, and the like.
This is mighty tempting, but it causes me problems. Yes, taking the p**s out of thugs like Michael Moore, Ted Rall or the latest Hollywood lame-brain is good fun and occasionally worth the effort, but I am not sure that simply using the very same tactics used by our opponents (such as character assassination, etc) is really going to work. Others may disagree (please comment below) but I think that part of the reason why our libertarian meme is spreading is because of clear-cut events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, globalisation, etc, as well as decades of hard intellectual slog by folk with weird surnames like von Mises or Rand. I also think that being decent human beings actually helps, although by “decent” I certainly don’t mean we should be meek or not jump to anger in the face of obvious idiocy.
I must admit – and I share the frustration of Perry de Havilland, Stephen Pollard and others – to being annoyed by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and sheer brass neck of those who even now decry what the Americans and British forces have achieved in Iraq. But I am keeping my cool (well most of the time!). We are better than our opponents, and I suspect, deep down, they know it.
And I also think it worth pointing out that although many of those who opposed the military campaign in Iraq are motivated by hatred of the West and its freedoms, many inside the libertarian parish had doubts or opposed it outright for good and honorable reasons (fears about civil liberties, public spending, deaths of innocent civilians, etc). Let’s not forget that.
The following entry was put in our comment section by G. Cooper in response to Natalie Solent’s post The Floodgates of Anarchy. I thought it was sufficiently interesting to warrant a post of its own (as it saves me from writing one myself as I was thinking much the same thing):
Watching the scenes of jubilation this morning and the way the liberating troops are being greeted, I find myself experiencing strangely mixed emotions. I am deeply, unashamedly, proud of the coalition’s forces and the restrained and civilised way they have behaved in all this and I am also delighted for the Iraqis. But still there’s a troubling sensation nagging away at the back of my mind. It’s that the greater fight has yet to come. Not with bin Laden, Iran or Syria – the one against a far deadlier enemy, our own corrosive, mendacious Left and its fellow travellers: the Lib-Dems, anti-globalisation clowns, pacifists, religious ‘leaders’, self-styled ecologists and the rest.
Yesterday, even as the British were securing Basra and the Americans preparing to liberate Baghdad, I heard a radio phone-in during which an Iraqi in exile was pouring scorn on the liberation, saying that the people would never welcome our forces. He was, of course, wrong but will he would admit that today? He will not. Nor will the intellectually bankrupt army of Left-liberal academics, ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, broadcasters, politicians and journalists which has done nothing but undermine our efforts to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam’s wickedness.
Nothing will make these people admit they were wrong about almost every single aspect of this war. They will simply move on to criticise something else, not even pausing to reflect on their streams of negativity, lies and hopelessly inaccurate predictions (“millions of dead” “armageddon unleashed in the Middle East”, “ecological catastrophe” “it’s all about oil”).
It wasn’t easy to defeat Saddam. How much more difficult will it be to rout those working from within to tear down the very systems which allowed us to defeat this evil?
Stop Press: Even as I write, a BBC reporter in Baghdad is “sounding a note of caution” as he opens the next phase of the war, predicting a tide of anti-US feeling from Iraqis, weeks more fighting, more civilian casualties. This relentless spew continues, even as Uday’s palace burns and the reporter’s voice-over is broadcast to pictures of Iraqis rejoicing, celebrating and proving him a fool.
– Posted by G Cooper at April 9, 2003 10:27 AM
Well Mr. G. Cooper, I suspect very few of the people who found themselves on the wrong side of history, or to be more accurate, on the wrong side of objective reality, will acknowledge that they were wrong not just publicly but even to themselves.
Some who opposed the war on grounds which had nothing to do with Iraq (but rather domestic issues of cost, encroachment on civil liberties at home, etc.) will be unmoved in their views by the success of the war, and that is entirely logical. That ‘the good guys won’ is frankly an irrelevance if the basis of their opposition was an antipathy to the growth of the state at home (a concern which I share in spite of my support for this war of liberation).
However those whose opposition was based on the ‘welfare of the Iraqi people’ or the ‘doomsayers’ (“impregable defences of Baghdad” anyone?)… these people are the willful blind and deaf, walled off from seeing anything which does not fit their distorted subjective world views.
So it falls to you, and us, and everyone else who values the truth, to keep blowing on the trumpets until the walls come crashing down… and then keep blowing a little longer anyway just to be sure!
On Saturday I spent the morning helping out with canvassing for the town council elections (not seeking votes for me this time – I was in another ward seeking votes for another couple of candidate of my party).
Instead of going straight home (after the morning canvass) I visited first the town museum and then the town library. I have visited both places many times over the years, but I still sometimes go (perhaps my senile brain means that each time I visit I find things that have long been there, but which I do not have a clear memory of).
In the museum, amongst other things, I looked at a stuffed red fox and was impressed by the size of the beast. In life it would have clear threat to the nice cats I had met in the morning – how can anyone oppose fox hunting? I know I was supposed to be talking to voters in the morning, rather than to talking to cats, but….. Also I know that cats are very cruel to birds and other such – but I do not much care (I like cats).
In the town library I looked through the main encyclopaedia (the one that is not going to publish any more editions in paper form). The section on Sweden told me that compulsory education was imposed there in the 1844 a few years before the guilds were abolished and the trade monopoly taken away from the special towns that had long held the monopoly. The encyclopaedia article also told me that in the mid 19th century it was decided that the Swedish state was to control all main line railways. Over the centuries it did seem that the state owned vast areas of the country and could steal private land at will – and there were all these detailed facts and figures on everything (in this country the first census we had in recent centuries was in 1801 and the Birth Marriages and Deaths registration act came in 1836 – other than that there was nothing much).
I thought about how this compared to what I had seen in my local town museum. In Kettering there was no town council till the the late 19th century. There was a church Vestry, but the local people had rejected a town council. In 1872 a local government board was imposed and in the 1890’s a Kettering Borough Council was created. Within a year or so the new K.B.C. was out doing wicked things (such as taking over the town water and gas supply). → Continue reading: What we have lost
Forgive this interruption to your scheduled programme of dark forebodings, war worries, terrorist threats, police state and impending civilisational collapse but I am taking a short break in order to bring you some good news.
It would appear that the political landscape of Britain is not quite as barren as I had hitherto imagined it to be. Indeed, little oases of life-giving sanity are starting to spring up amidst the arid desert of top-down, tax-and-spend socialism.
Case in point being Reform Britain, a campaign group consisting of loads of big-brained luminaries who describe themselves thus:
Reform is an independent campaign to promote new directions for public policy based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty.
As I reflect upon the lowly and squalid state of public debate in this country over the last few years, the above words wash over me with all the fragrant and orgasmic tingle of a cool spring zephyr.
And, as if that was not enough, these wonderful people have launched a related website called ‘Down the Drain’, a perfectly appropriate domain name for a site which is devoted to disclosing just how much money HMG syphons off of its productive citizens every day and, more pointedly, where it all ends up.
Broadcast your seeds with gusto, you Great Sowers of Hope, and may those seeds be nurtured, fed, watered, grow and cover all the land with a golden harvest.
Your normal service of doom, gloom, despair, gnashing of teeth, wailing and general despondency will now be resumed. Thank you.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the links.]
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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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