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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In my last two postings about war on Iraq, I tried to set out the moral grounds for using military force against another country, as well as distinguish between civilians and combatants. The blogosphere had already been teaming with opinions, moral or otherwise, about the war on terror, Iraq, the US military power and its proper use. when Steven Den Beste posited the conflict as more than a mere ‘war on terrorism’ but rather clash of cultures and civilisations in his article last week.
The majority of reactions were, predictably, based on the respondents’ previously established positions. Some agreed because they agree with Den Beste and his ‘Hollywood-style patriotic wanks’ that make them feel good about themselves and the country they live in 1. Some disagreed for the sake of disagreeing; some may have even had genuine grounds for dissent although I am yet to see a counter-argument that would rise to the challenge. We at Samizdata have taken, ehm, a rational approach, and judged his ideas on their merit. We found that we could not disagree with the fundamental points of the treatise and were ready to admit it openly. Long live our unbiased and rational intellects!
Most of the analysis of the Arab World certainly made sense to me despite the occasional twinge of disagreement. It still did not add up to opposition in principle and I have continued to seriously think about Den Beste’s ‘Modest Proposal’ to subdue and transform Arab Traditionalism, to find out why I agree or why, if at all, I disagree with him. Re-reading the piece point by point did not yield conclusive result. I decided to re-examine my own fundamental reasons (both moral and practical) for supporting the war on Iraq.
This means that I will not fisk Den Beste’s proposal for his opponents’ benefit, nor will I please those who wish the world to agree with their ‘champion’. It is perhaps aimed at those who may share his conclusions but not the journey to it. → Continue reading: War and Peace
(Photo: D. Amon)
…but who can help me identify the arcane Techno-mage, Transterrestrialist, Anglosphericaloid and, er, Pundit, who make up this sinister cabal before whom the world trembles?
We have had a few e-mails (plus a couple comment entries) asking how is it that whilst numerous articles on Samizdata.net have bitterly decried farm subsidies of any sort, we are also writing articles in support of tomorrows Countryside Alliance March in London.
The answer is to be found in the slogan of the Countryside Alliance March itself: for Liberty & Livelihood.
Supporting ‘Liberty’ is not exactly unusual for us: we are libertarians! The liberty in question is the right of country people to hunt in Britain as they have done for centuries, without bigoted class warriors using the violence of law to criminalise their way of life. Hunting is an activity not of ‘state’ but of civil society… and the state simply has no business intruding into what goes on across privately owned land (and of course as libertarians, we believe that the only ownership of land that is legitimate is private ownership). That is why we support the Countryside Alliance’s March.
As for ‘Livelihood’… Hunting is also a significant source of jobs in many areas and in that respect we are all in favour of the state not putting those people on the dole queue. The most vexed issue however is that of farm subsidies. It must be clear to all who regularly read Samizdata.net that all of our contributing writers are in favour of true laissez-faire capitalism and therefore resolutely opposed to subsidising any businesses (i.e. farm subsidies or industrial subsidies)… and the great granddaddy of all market distorting, theft based systems of redistribution-by-subsidy is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What CAP means is that efficient farms (and by European standards, British farms are indeed efficient) are made to subsidise inefficient farms, and other sectors of the economy are forced to prop up agriculture generally. Moreover, even the way efficient farms are run is distorted by subsidies and directives that have the effect of addicting even the stoutest souls to state handouts like so many heroin addicts. One major result of this being massive overproduction of food and agricultural overcapacity on a truly epic scale.
So for a farmer to remain in business when competing within the massively subsidised and mind-bogglingly regulated British and European agricultural market, clearly just cutting all subsidies to the UK would mean capital intensive UK agriculture more or less drops dead over night.
Thus clearly the most rational solution is a complete Europe-wide ban on all farm subsidies in any form… with no exceptions whatsoever. No doubt many farms would indeed go bust as there is simply no rational economic reason for their existence when detached from the fantasy world of state planning… and that is just too damn bad. Yet business go bust all the time, so why should farms be any different? Food is a colossal interlinked global market and so there is no reason at all for the great trading nations of the world to protect indigenous food production on non-economic grounds.
The fact is socialist and paleo-conservative farm policies are the reason food is so damn expensive in the developed world. The so called ‘friends to the poor’ in the Labour Party in Britain and their friends in the dominant statist wing of the Conservative Party are the self same people who are responsible for poor working men and women in Britain paying vastly more for food, the very stuff of life, than would be the case if free markets decided what things would cost. Not only that, these are the self same people who claim to care about poverty in the Third World whilst at the same time denying the First World consumer access to their cheap agricultural products whose sale would actually improve the economic situation in the Third World.
Of course the situation in the United States is only slightly less subsidy distorted than the EU, so one would hope that eventually taxpayers over there will also decide it is time for some ‘tough love’.
Therefore when we go to the march tomorrow, we will be supporting the liberty of entire communities to not be beggared and persecuted by state sponsored bigots regardless of the sanctification of such tyrannous acts by democratic politics… and we will also be reminding the country folk that if they want to insist the state stop interfering in countryside pursuits, that should logically also mean an end to interference by subsidy and regulation. British agriculture is more than capable of looking after itself, if only it is allowed to play on a level playing, field rather than a CAP distorted one.
The essential problem of campaigning for the proliferation of handguns is the same as for proliferating nuclear weapons. The suspicion that the first million people who would choose to take advantage of the restoration of legal handgun ownership in the United Kingdom are precisely the million people least trustworthy with such weapons.
The assumption behind the global crusade to keep nukes in the hands of a global establishment is the same as that which would only allow state officials to carry guns.
Yet we have a case example of how nuclear proliferation need not make the world less safe: India and Pakistan. Both sides have governments that are itching for war: the Indian nationalist government believes it would win a conventional war and the Pakistani military regime stands to gain legitimacy from a show of force against India.
There is a balance of terror which ensures that neither side has opted for all-out war, as well as keeping neutral bystanders concerned enough to pressure both sides into staying within certain bounds.
Even deranged leaders seem to accept the balance of terror. One of the curious differences between the First and Second World Wars was the use of battlefield chemical weapons. Civilians in London and Paris carried gas masks during the early months of the second world war in the expectation of gas attacks by the German air force. No such attacks were made because Hitler believed that the British would retaliate (the British government planned to use anthrax bombs).
Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurdish people living inside Iraq and against the Iranian foreces during the 1980s Gulf War. He did not however use them against Israel or the Gulf states, despite firing missiles at both during 1991.
As a libertarian internationalist, I have no problem with free countries liberating the unfree, by deposing tyrants. I support a global assault on leftist, fundamentalist, racial supremacist and eco-terrorists. However, I have misgivings about wars started to impose global gun control, especially as this is so selective: why no war to disarm North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, or France? Would Australia be a target, or Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Japan, Germany and Iran if they planned nuclear weapons programmes?
I have a theory that nuclear powers are simply not allowed to develop crack-pot governments: one way or another they are weeded out. If true one could say “A nuclear armed society is a VERY polite society.”
Intellectual property rights are a hot issue now, probably because there are at least two distinct intellectual and political traditions who want to talk about them. The left are having a huge push about (especially) pharmaceutical patents in the third world as Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas reported last Sunday. So does this press release about a new book that also contests such notions.
Meanwhile many libertarians are particularly interested in the impact of the new instant copying technology that is now spreading to every other desk on earth. It used to be quite an effort to photocopy a book (although even that got the patent lawyers and lobbyists very jumpy). Now you can copy whole movies in minutes, and individual music tracks in seconds. Entire industries are tottering.
But hot issue or not, the Libertarian Alliance will always be interested in publishing a piece like Nigel Meeks’s An Individualist Anarchist Critique of ‘Intellectual Property’: The Views of Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) (Libertarian Heritage Number 23). Follow the link and read all of it (although I’m embarrassed to say that we are still only producing our stuff in Acrobat format, a situation I hope very soon to correct). This piece is the ideal introduction to Tucker’s ideas about how ideas should, and more particularly should not, be protected. → Continue reading: New from the Libertarian Alliance: Benjamin Tucker and intellectual property rights
Paul Marks feels that Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read.
I have been re-reading this work (no, security guards do not have a lot of time to read – that is, sadly, a myth).
There is a lot of ‘good stuff’ in Democracy in America and it is well worth reading (although please be careful that you do not buy or borrow an edition with bits cut out, it only takes a few seconds to check – by reading what the translator has to say for himself).
However, I would warn anyone against treating Democracy in America as an accurate picture of the United States in the 1830’s.
Firstly De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements (I almost find myself typing ‘like so many Frenchmen, De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements’). For example, we are told that Americans know little of the various schools of philosophy. → Continue reading: Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”
As they are both about to drop off the front page and we are still getting visitors looking for them…
The article mentioned by Kathleen Parker:
…To those suffering anger deficiency, click over to http://www.samizdata.net/blog (linked by Instapundit.com) to jump-start your moral outrage. The Web log features a photo – of a man plunging headfirst from one of the towers – that ought to help us remember exactly what no one deserves…
The article Kathleen refers to is called News from another universe.
And the article mentioned by James Bennett:
…However, after I returned to my office, I began looking at some of the Web logs I like to follow. On one, samizdata.net, there was a modest little posting. Perry de Havilland, one of the site’s contributors, based in the posh London neighborhood of Chelsea, had walked out at lunchtime, and had been stuck by the fact that “shop after shop are displaying signs saying words to the effects of ‘At 1:46 p.m. today, we will be observing two minutes silence in remembrance of the atrocities on September 11th of last year in the United States.’ Others are expressing memorial sentiments, still others just displaying small American flags.”…
The article James refers to is called The real England speaks.
Just another fine service from samizdata.net!
Part I of III
Arguments over war in Iraq and its justification, recently fuelled by emotions running high over the first anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, have been plaguing the libertarian camp. Samizdata decided to summarise its contributors’ positions on war in general and Iraq in particular and received some interesting responses. There are many strands of arguments for and against war on Iraq and it is impossible to even mention them all in one posting. There are several interesting points I wish to add to or stress in the debate.
One of the objections to Perry’s position on the destruction of tyranny and libertarian opposition to it comes from Julian Morrison (a comment on the above linked article):
There are many ways and means of destroying tyranny, but the only ones that are “libertarianly correct” are those which do not involve harm to innocents. Assassination is far preferable, for example, to war – and hand-to-hand war is preferable to blanket bombing. There exists no right to murder, regardless of how convenient it might be.
Here justification of war is reduced to the effects it may have on the civilian population or innocents. This makes opposition to tyranny impossible. For example, makes it impossible to fight anybody ruthless enough to use human hostages.
Ignoring for a moment the other important conditions of just war, which I will deal with in Part II, I want to look at Nazism and communism as examples of historical tyrannies that were accepted as evil to be justifiably eliminated. Opposing Nazism by force was justified as self-defence and the war against Hitler and Germany has been accepted as a just war. The WWII experience proves appeasement wrong on both grounds – moral (fails in self-defence) as well as strategic or practical (gives the enemy opportunity to accumulate weapons and pose a greater threat).
Although during WWII the distinction between a dictator and the nation he lead was blurred, the Cold War made abundantly clear that there is a difference between a dictator waging a war with the country behind him and a dictator with the civilian population being at his mercy and under the same threat as his opponents.
Perry mentions Czechoslovakia as a case in point and I will merely add to his voice. During 1968 Prague Spring civil resistance the Warsaw pact used military threat on the civilian population and in the early days of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 there was in our minds a real threat that the communist government would use the army on the demonstrators. How could an attack by the West make the situation any worse in a country where the state is ready to use ‘military force’ (not just law enforcement) on its citizens? Whether I die being run over by a T-55, shot by AK-47 or by a stray ‘Western’ bomb does not make much difference to me as an individual in such situation. In fact, young and idealistic as I was in those days, I’d probably prefer the latter, given that being killed during a ‘Western liberation’ would at least serve a purpose I agreed with, whereas being killed by communists wouldn’t.
We know Saddam has used military force and chemical weapons on Kurds and will not hesitate to use such force again… Those who oppose war on Iraq on ‘moral grounds’ will find it hard to wriggle out of agreeing that it was right for the West to fight Nazism and wrong to leave the nations of Eastern Europe under communism. The problem is that Nazism and communism are obviously wrong ex-post and the current debate is about determining the moral and strategic position ex-ante.
To be continued…
Doctrine of Just war and libertarians (Part II)
Strategic considerations for attack on Iraq (Part III)
Yesterday I wrote about how I simply do not believe that the true motivation of some who speak out against intervening militarily in Iraq, or elsewhere, is quite what it claims to be. Now that does not mean I question the honour of all who counsel against war, though in some cases that is indeed what I do.
But when some, like Jacob Hornberger, claim that their opposition to war comes in any way out of concern for the well being of the people who live under ghastly regimes like that of Saddam Hussain or Stalin, then I do start to question whether ‘whiteman speaks with forked tongue’. I do not know if Hornberger honestly believes that (he is after all a politician) but even if he does, I wonder how he would react to the discovery reported today in The Times of London (sorry no link) of yet another mass grave in Russia dating from Stalinist times, containing 30,000 people. That is the equivalent of 10 World Trade Centers worth of innocent victims murdered by the NKVD between 1936 and 1939.
So please, if the exclusive reason Ron Paul and Jacob Hornberger at al want to avoid military conflict with far off tyrants is that they do not want members of the volunteer US military to get killed whilst earning their pay, well fine, I don’t agree but I can respect that. Just spare me the crap about worrying about ‘innocent Iraqis/Russians/Czechs/Slovaks/Koreans/Tibetans etc.’ who are or were living under the rule of mass murdering tyrants because it is complete bullshit.
An interesting Q&A article between Congressman Ron Paul (R, Texas) and Jacob Hornberger, an Independent Candidate for the U.S. Senate from Virginia, brings forward several of the reasons that I both like, and regularly disagree with Ron Paul on many issues.
Rather than do a lengthy take down, I will confine my remarks to Hornberger’s remarks in question 17 in the Q&A:
From a moral standpoint, we should not only ask about American GI casualties but also Iraqi people casualties. After the Allied Powers delivered the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II, those people suffered under communism for five decades, which most of us would oppose, but who’s to say that they would have been better off with liberation by U.S. bombs and embargoes, especially those who would have been killed by them? I believe that despite the horrible suffering of the Eastern Europeans and East Germans, Americans were right to refrain from liberating them with bombs and embargoes. It’s up to the Iraqi people to deal with the tyranny under which they suffer – it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to liberate them from their tyranny with an attack upon their nation.
For a start, the Iraqi ‘nation’ is not by any reasonable measure under the control/ownership/whatever of the Iraqi people, it is under the control of the Iraqi flavour of Baathist Socialists lead by Saddam Hussain and his family… so attacking Iraq is not attacking the Iraqi ‘nation’ and certainly not the Iraqi people, but rather the regime which controls it.
However Hornberger is quite right that as a result of that huge moral blot on Roosevelt and Churchill, the Yalta Agreement, the Western Allies did indeed “[deliver] the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II”. Given that both Hornberger and Paul have chosen to frame their views firmly within the state centred meta-context of ‘national interests’, thereby at a stroke moving their position off the true moral high ground, I will follow them for now into the murky valley in which congressmen and would-be senators choose to dwell.
Well if the US and ‘Western Powers’ were indeed responsible for people in Czechoslovakia ending up under Soviet control, as it was indeed US troops which liberated much of the country from the Nazis, then how is it such a reach to see how ‘Americans’ did indeed bear a responsibility for undoing the state of affairs which condemned two generations of Czechs and Slovaks to communist tyranny?
Likewise, is Jacob Hornberger really going to suggest that Czechs and Slovaks are going to thank people like him for not actively trying to liberate them? It is not as if they were passively accepting communist rule and yet in 1968, the likes of Hornberger did nothing. If he thinks people in Czechoslovakia were happy they were not supported on the ‘moral’ grounds it would not be good for them I suspect he is in for a shock. Hornberger’s responses to Ron Paul wear moral clothing but frankly it is as phoney as three dollar bill. Hornberger is actually talking about utility, not morality. The only moral position is to oppose violence based tyranny with force. That was my view in the Cold War and it is my view regarding Saddam Hussain.
The destruction of tyranny whenever it is possible is never a bad thing for any libertarian to support, if liberty is to be more than just some abstract thing bandied about in debates.
What all neolibertarian hawks should be driving these days
![[photo of Sarah Lawrence]](http://www.sarahlawrence.org/Images/sarah2.jpg)
Sarah Lawrence: clearly up to no good
In May this year, I had the pleasure of meeting George Smith when we were both speaking at the Youth 4 Liberty Summer Camp in Orono, Ontario, Canada. I found him interesting, learned and charming, but my speech, which was an anarcho-capitalist argument for the war on terrorism, apparently made little impact on him, if a recent article of his is anything to go by. In The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 1, No 31, he says darkly: If a crisis presents an opportunity, an endless crisis presents endless opportunities. With bin Laden off the radar, the administration is setting sights on Hussein. Is he now the linchpin of world terror or just the one we might get away with killing? Have we reviewed all tyrants and found him the most imminently threatening?
What is this conspiracy theory asking you to believe about yourself? Suppose you think that Saddam Hussein needs to be disarmed, deposed and replaced by a democratic government. George Smith is asking you to believe one of two things:
- You are a nefarious character (in league with the US government and other reprehensible scoundrels) who thinks that Saddam Hussein is not a bad chap who should be taken out to protect the people of the world from whatever dreadful wrongs he might do next, but merely someone “we might get away with killing” OR
- You are a gullible fool who has been taken in by the dastardly US government’s anti-Saddam rhetoric.
If you came to this conclusion long before the US/UK governments did (and let’s face it, only a matter of ten days ago, Tony Blair seemed unconvinced), (2) would imply that you were taken in by people who did not themselves hold that opinion. So it follows that George Smith is asking me to believe (1) – that I am an immoral person who wants Saddam taken out merely because he is someone “we might get away with killing.” George, George! Tell me you don’t really think this!
Following the remarkable reaction to the article The real England speaks, several people have e-mailed us to ask what ‘our’ views are regarding the ‘War on Terrorism’ or ‘Israel and the Middle east’ or just plain old ‘war’.
Firstly, Samizdata.net has no ‘editorial positions’ on issues per se. Our writers would all be described as libertarian, ranging from anarcho-capitalist to minarchist to neo-libertarian conservative. In other words we all hold fairly divergent views on quite a few issues, but broadly speaking we all tend to fall into the more hawkish end on issues of war and peace, taking the view that violence based tyranny is best dealt with by confronting force with force, though without losing sight of illiberal abridgements of civil liberties which may be wrapped in more genteel cloth closer to home.
Articles laying out what we feel is the rational position regarding these issues are…
The modern bestiary of comparative belligerency
Birds of a feather… sometimes don’t flock together
Brendan’s back and rallying…not
With friends like these…
Saddam moves in mysterious ways
Exquisite appeasement
None of the above
The Palestinian Götterdämmerung
The time for choice is long past
Why the US fights the way it does
As we have written enough articles on the topic of war and peace to fill ‘War and Peace’, this is by no means the totality of germane articles we have written… but if you read these you will have a pretty shrewd idea where the writers of samizdata.net are ‘coming from’.
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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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