Samizdata

And, no, this isn’t just my muscular, traditional British chauvinism. France gets a thorough ‘Fisking’ and from a Frenchman no less!

J.P. Zmirak cuts right through the bull to remind us that the the ‘glorious’ French Revolution was anything but:

“That little thought experiment should give you an idea of what the French Revolution was really like – a digestive eruption of all the basest instincts in the lowest elements of society, led by power-drunk ideologues of the radical Left.”

The writer also goes on to point out that French Revolution had nothing whatsoever in common with the American Revolution, despite the two events so often lumped in with each other, and was driven by a wholly different impulse:

“It was utterly unlike the American rebellion against the English colonial officials – which amounted to a regional secession, led by the responsible members of the upper middle class. And for that fact we should be forever grateful – as should other countries which emulated the American model of political reform, rather than the French.”

He also goes on to lay the blame for so much future barbarity squarely upon the shoulders of those French leftist jackasses:

“At the heart of this exquisite movie is the relationship between Grace and the Duc d’Orleans. The latter is a pampered, ambitious, not very bright cousin to the tragic King Louis XVI, a Duke who throws his weight and wealth behind the Revolutionaries, in the hope that they will place him on the throne. He spouts, and no doubt believes, the new rhetoric of hysterical, xenophobic revolutionary patriotism – which would soon spread to Germany and Italy, planting the seeds of both the Nazi and Fascist movements.”

The whole article is written with the kind of florid anger born of pain and profound regret. It rings out a warning of the depravity and destruction which results from letting the bad guys get their way.

Many apologies but it is late here in England and I am too tired to spend hours trawling through our archive with a view to digging out all the previous postings about the link between welfare and terrorism. However, I do distinctly recall that the general theme was that it is far easier to recruit young men for terror attacks and guerilla wars when they are poor and under-utilised recipients of state largesse.

Now I am only too aware of the profound mischief and hazard produced by state serfdom but if this report in the US News about American Jihadis is anything to go by, then perhaps the phenomenon needs further examination (or, at least, revisiting):

“Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov–that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up. All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world’s religions.”

Clearly this young man (along with several others described in the article) was not the product of a broken home, a deprived slum or welfare benefits. It follows, then, that the welfare-terrorism link is rather too glib. Rich kids go crazy as well.

[Link courtesy of Pejman Pundit ]

Many of you will never have heard of Will Hutton and for those that haven’t, this little introduction is necessary.

Mr.Hutton is pure Enemy Class. Ostensibly a journalist he has also headed up or contributed to various lefty think-tanks. He was quite influential in the formation of the New Labour project and, like all such people, he is a fanatical Federast who has adopted an ‘Animal Farm’ mindset of ‘America bad, Europe good’. Every now and then he pops up on British TV to excoriate people who are reluctant to pay higher taxes. He sneers so much that one could be forgiven for thinking that his top lip has been surgically attached to the bottom of his nose.

He is ripe for a ‘fisking’ by a higher organism such as James C. Bennett

“As a result of these moves, and the increasing prosperity of Britain in general, the island now enjoys booming do-it-yourself stores (so reminiscent of American ones, no doubt to Hutton’s disgust) and popular television programs such as “Changing Rooms” (whose American knockoff, “Trading Spaces,” is also popular on the other side of the Atlantic.)

The most interesting thing about “Changing Rooms” is the 500-pound limit on expenditure for the domestic makeover. This is not some Martha Stewart upper-middle-class consumption extravaganza. Rather, it is the application of ingenuity to ordinary people’s spaces, and conveys the message of what can be done by individual homeowners to bring delight to their own property.

Undoubtedly Hutton would rather they spend their time petitioning the local council to repair the window, as they used to. This would end their socio-politico isolation and selfish indulgence, so un-European. In Hutton’s mind, it seems, private housing is only one step from private car ownership, private gun ownership, and Columbine massacres”.

It is worth your while reading the whole thing. Not only does it skewer Hutton but it does so much else to clarify the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

David Carr is his usual pessimistic self concerning the possibility of nuclear war between Pakistan and India. I am my usual (cautiously) optimistic self. As I said to David face-to-face over the weekend, and as he said I should stick up here, there is one huge difference between nuclear weapons and the previous sort. Nuclear weapons can kill Presidents, Prime Ministers and Generals, as well as the lower ranks. Would World Wars One and Two have proceeded as they did if, every time you (one of the grand fromages) launched your Grand Offensive from the safety of your French Chateau or your German or British or Russian command bunker, there was a one in five chance that you personally would die a horrible death. Would the Cold War have remained throughout its duration so cold without nuclear weapons concentrating the minds of the Great People?

Lowell Ponte over on Front Page has written a superb retort to Frances Fukuyama’s latest collectivist cri de coeur ‘Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution’. Although critiquing Fukuyama is sometimes a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (Instapundit frequently makes sport of him on slow news days), Ponte does a very good job at pointing out the horrendous implications of Fukuyama’s line of thought

Who owns your body? In Fukuyama’s implicit view, the government does because “you” are merely a cog transmitting your DNA on to the collective of future generations whose rights are superior to yours. You should have no right to tamper with your own mind or body via drugs or with your heredity by cloning yourself or altering your own DNA.
[…]
Fukuyama likes big government, especially when it grabs people by the short-and-curlies and prohibits them from using science to alter reproductive DNA. “Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their children,” wrote Fukuyama, “But do we really know what it means to improve a child?” (“I am guessing,” riposted Libertarian David Dieteman, “that Johns Hopkins, where Fukuyama is a professor, does not include this query with its tuition bills to parents.”)

This is terrific stuff and I strongly commend the whole article to anyone who holds to quaint notions of self-ownership as I do. Fukuyama and his ilk are not just misguided, they are the intellectual cheerleaders for a totalitarianism of the most profound kind… they would have the state lay claim to the very molecular structure of your body.

As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. Well not if Frances Fukuyama has his way.

Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is a happy puppy. The new Miss Universe is Oxana Fedorova, a policewoman from St.Petersburg in Russia… now I am off to that historic city to see if I can get arrested.