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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Dr. Frank on the Blogs of War has blogged an article called Group Think which raises all sorts of interesting issues to those of a libertarian persuasion. He also touches upon one of my earlier bloggings.
I have no stake in the “whither libertarianism” question that appears as the background to many such arguments, and I’m probably missing some of the subtleties of it; but just because the idea of attacking Iraq is a hobbyhorse of “National Greatness” conservatism doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad idea. Saddam Hussein is dangerous. He’ll have to be dealt with in some way sooner or later, whether or not doing so would be in line with the official principles of libertarianism (whatever they turn out to be.)
Libertarianism is not a political party, it is a social but non-statist meta-context within which political though occurs: a ‘vibe’ if you like. There are no ‘official’ principals and by its very nature there are only a loose series of underpinnings as the ends of libertarianism is simply liberty, rather than, say, tractor production or discouraging one-parent families. In my view at least, all forms of genuine libertarianism revolve around this:
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.
I have always thought all the other sundry libertarian principles often quoted, such as ‘Propertarianism’ and the ‘non-initiation of force’ principles all flow from that. Other libertarians see it the other way around.
Can the “aggressive defender” sub-species in de Havilland’s aviary legitimately launch pre-emptive strikes without turning into an Imperialist “predator?”
For sure. The big difference would be going in to destroy a threat and then going home or going in and making all of Arabia and Iraq into an American satrapy, as some seem to be suggesting.
There are those who maintain that any military action on behalf of US/British/Western security is automatically suspect; this, as de Havilland points out, is often elaborated into a belief that “anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys.” That’s the shared target of “anti-idiotarians” where this issue is concerned, isn’t it?
Yes indeed. It seems to me that September 11th was a watershed in that it resulted in an event so stark in its moral simplicity and lacking in the ambiguity that shades Iraq, Israel, Kosovo etc. that the true nature of many was revealed in the shadowless light of the burning twin towers. Much to my astonishment some on the left, like Christopher Hitchens, turned out to be critically rational whilst many who I had thought far better of, were revealed to be crypto-subjectivists so emotionally attached to their unalterable world views as to be incapable of rational moral judgement.
And by the way, I wonder why all my recent articles seem to feature birds in some form or other? Is someone e-mailing me subliminal messages?
Sean McCray has an interesting de-construction of the New Black Panther Party over on Next Right. Judging by Sean’s analysis, the Panther is just a soggy little crypto-Marxist pussy cat.
Over 3000 mostly American civilians die when Al Qaeda terrorists hijack four civilian airliners and crash two of them into office buildings in New York. A 22 year old Catholic postman is gunned down in the street by the ‘Loyalist’ Red Hand Defenders in Northern Ireland. Six Israeli Jews are gunned down during the bat mitzvah of a 12 year old girl by a Palestinian terrorist with the Al Asqa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Fatah.
In none of these cases was there any pretence that the people being murdered were military targets or in any meaningful way part of the apparatus of state. They were just members of the wrong collective group.
Collectivism is the real world manifestation of the subjective, emotion based feral animal origins of humanity, like some recurring echo emanating from the primitive reptile brain that physically exists in all of us. It is the antithesis of rational objectivity, something that no amount of fancy verbiage from Marx or Chomsky or Himmler or Plato or Rousseau can disguise in their respective paeans to force and unity over intellect and evolution. Collectivism is a fancy word for tribalism. It is a hold over, an atavistic throw back to times before the modern civilisation of the extended order.
And then I see a huge protest against violence in Northern Ireland like the one today. A great and wonderful angry howl against sectarian violence by both catholics and protestants together, all revolted by the madness in the hearts of paramilitary murderers. And there, amongst the grim faced ranks of ordinary people standing under their umbrellas in the rain, I catch sight of members of the Orange Order, of Sinn Fein, of the SDLP, of various well meaning ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing groups, all calling for unity.
Wrong.
Tragically, terribly and utterly wrong.
The world already has enough ‘unity’ to kill every man woman and child one hundred times over. The lasting repulse of tribal violence will not come from ‘unity’, which is just an appeal for the creation of a different, larger tribe to combat the ‘other’ tribes, but rather individualism: the explicit rejection of every tie that comes not through choice but from force. Do not mistake collective action for collectivism, for it is the latter, not the former, that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ has on offer.
The answer is not ‘Unity’, which is just short hand for ‘join us, not them’… the answer is ‘Don’t tread on me’
Truth on campus?
With the new airport security measures going into action today across the old USA, I expected to hear my teachers rejoice that Big Brother has come to the airports to “protect” us.
However, one of my teachers surprised me, saying, and I quote:
“The new airport security bill combines the worst of the private sector with the worst of the federal government”
Despite all the negative stuff that goes on at the university, in terms of the “politically correct” nonsense and blatant communism, there are some good things, such as far and few between truthful statements.
The good times can’t last forever
Showing their Puritanism-like beliefs, the university has beefed up the anti-drug and anti-sex rhetoric. While I am anti-sex and I am anti-drug, the university’s luck with cracking down on these vice crimes is doomed with the same fate that plagued the War on Drugs, the War on This, and the War on That.. College kids, with the exception being me and ummm me, want sex and want drugs. The authoritarian puritans that run the school apparently have no concept of reality, and instead want to violate human nature and individual rights to sex and to getting high.
Jim Henley over on Unqualified Offerings has turned a private exchange between us into a very interesting open letter to yours truly. He makes some very interesting points!
I’ve got to tell you, Perry, I get infuriated too. What we have is, on one side, Rothbardians arguing that prophylactic war is incompatible with limited government. On the other, self-described “anti-idiotarians” who claim to believe that it is. The identity of the actual idiots here is less clear to me than it is to some others. When you factor in the Rothbardians’ least tenable thesis – that “aggressive defense” can never be anything but a smokescreen for imperialism – neither side seems to brim with promise.
Sort of Anti-anti-antiwar.com… but only sort of. I have always thought Unqualified Offerings was a daily ‘must read’ and this confirms it if you enjoy the illuminating spotlights of reason and insight. Thought provoking stuff.
“Speciesism is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species. Speciesism is wrong for the same reason racism and sexism are wrong–because all beings interests should count equally. Peter Singer refers to this as “the principle of equality”. “All the arguments to prove human superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals”. For any individual who can suffer, the degree of suffering, not the species of the sufferer is what should count”
I promise that I have not made this up. It is lifted from the ‘Animal Rights’ section of ZNET which, quite deservedly, has a link in our ‘Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy’ section
Must rush now. I’ve got a member of another species nicely browning off under the grill.
Amidst the hand-wringing of the chattering classes about the fate of the Al Qaeda members now enjoying an extended break at Club Fed in Cuba, it may be useful to examine the claim that they are prisoner of war and, therefore, should be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva Convention.
The Convention they are referring to is Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and the defintion of ‘Prisoners of War’, contained in Article 4, includes ‘…militias and volunteer corps’. However, important provisos are set out in Subsection A (2):
“(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war”;
In order to be classified as ‘Prisoners of War’ militias or volunteer corps must satisfy all of the above conditions.
It is my view that Al-Qaeda fails to satisfy any.
(a) Al-Qaeda operates by means of an autonomous or, at least, semi-autonomous, cell structure. They are therefore not commanded by any identifiable person.
(b) Anybody seen the Al-Qaeda flag/symbol/pennant/banner? No, neither have I.
(c) Whilst the combatants in Aghanistan most likely did bear arms openly, other Al-Qaeda operatives moving and living undercover in up to 60 different countries around the world cannot possibly be carrying any arms openly.
(d) The attacks in which Al-Qaeda is implicated have, in most cases, been against civilian targets and devoid of any obvious or identifiable tactical or strategic purpose other than to cause terror and widespread fear. It is my view that is not within the laws or customs of war.
Therefore, it is my view that the US government has a very good case that the Al-Qaeda members do not qualify as ‘Prisoners of War’ and are, therefore, not entitled to the protection of the provision of the Geneva Convention.
Of course, this does beg the question of the status of the US actions. Do they constitute ‘war’? Well, possibly not but call it a ‘military action’ or a ‘police action’ if you will. For that matter, call it a ‘Ballroom Dancing Competition’; the point is to prevail.
Rand Simberg made a cute observation about this war taking on Pythonesque dimensions which I find highly apposite in view of what the war has done to Libertarians.
Prior to 9/11 we were united in grim struggle against the predations of our respective governments and the ‘liberal/left’. Since 9/11 we have cleaved in two; now we are Anti-war Libertarians and the Warblogger Libertarians. The former find themselves lining up with Noam Chomsky and the latter have locked step with Christopher Hitchens. We fire pixelated Katushya rockets at each other over the Green Line of cyberspace
Of course they are now the Judean Peoples Front and we are the Peoples Front of Judea. Or is it the other way around? In any event they are the Splittists!!
Enviro-mentalists everywhere blamed the energy industry (and, in particular the US energy industry) for the phenomenon of ‘Global Warming’
It was all because of emissions, they said, and it appears that they were right. According to this article the whole ‘Global Warming’ boondoggle was due to the emissions of large amounts of money from Enron
Whilst short on specific details it does provide a suggestion of the extent of the link between giant corporations and the various ‘movements’ that purportedly campaign against them
What next I wonder? We will discover that Naomi Klein is funded by Nike? At this stage, I wouldn’t bet against it
The traditional bestiary of belligerency is inhabited by two feathered beasts: the Hawk and the Dove. However, that is a very crude and misleading way of looking at things for there is a third beast to be found. The Ostrich.
The Dove constituency is essentially pacifist: whilst such folks are largely found amongst the ‘soft’ socialist left wing, there is also a small conservative constituency that is profoundly dovish on religious grounds. A few libertarians also fall into one or both of those categories of dove as well, though actually very few libertarians are true pacifists.
Hawks can be found on the left, particularly the communist left. Many of the anti-war left are far from pacifists, they are just opposed to all American use of force, rather than objecting to force per se. On the conservative right there are also many hawks of several different sub-species, such as the Jeffersonian ‘aggressive defender’ who was quite prepared to send the US Navy to shoot it out with Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, and Teddy Roosevelt style ‘predators’ who dream of Pax Americana and an American Imperium. Most libertarians fall into the ‘aggressive defender’ category despite what antiwar.com would have you believe.
The Ostrich is largely found within both the paleo-conservative right and the surrealist areas of libertarianism. This is a school of thought which is certainly not pacifist but regards the instances under which force can be legitimately, at least by America, Britain and Israel, used as being so narrow and constrained that many make the mistake of calling them doves, but this is quite incorrect. Amongst conservatives Pat Buchannan is a member of this flock and he is joined by quasi-surrealist libertarians like Lew Rockwell and full-blown psychedelic surrealists like the totally barking Justin Raimondo. Rockwell is a largely pukka and worthwhile commentator but who seems to become unhinged when the issue turns to military matters. Mr. Raimondo on the other hand is more florid in his views generally: imagine a version of Noam Chomsky but with at least some grasp of how economics actually work.
The essence of the ostrich is that of huddling behind national borders and refusing to use force against anything short of a homeland invasion of Pittsburg. The more florescent surrealist ostriches like Raimondo also take this view but adds some interesting touches, such as a fondness for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes under which he does not live himself, provided they dislike the United States.
I must confess I have occasionally wondered if he is ‘for real’. He is a peculiar sort of libertarian, as he seem to view mass murder as being just fine provided it is confined to within national borders. Raimondo is an apologist for the Chinese massacre in Tiananmen Square, contending that in fact it was a triumph of capitalism over communist counter-revolutionaries. The non-Euclidian geometry of his logic is hardly worth the effort of trying to follow; suffice to say Occam’s Razor does not feature prominently in his thinking. He also seems to be of the view that the press in China is as free as in the west, so I look forward to someone directing me to the Chinese publications and websites within China taking critical views of Chinese policy in Tibet and towards Taiwan (I have a Chinese reading friend). As for his contention that:
“Today, government-sanctioned “patriotic” churches, including Catholics and the various Protestant denominations, function openly”
…rather misses the point that the ‘patriotic’ catholic church is an adjunct of the Chinese Communist Party (which he thinks is actually a capitalist party)…the real Catholic church operates underground at great risk and I personally know a French priest who is a member of it in China. To put it bluntly Mr. Raimondo does not know of what he speaks. Typical ostrich.
Many ostriches are strongly anti-Israel due to its repeated projection of force beyond its borders. Now defending Israel is something of a novel experience for me as I am highly critical of their behaviour: a case in point being the disgraceful bulldozing of 50 Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip last Sunday as collective punishment for the actions of a few: collectivist Israeli psychopathy at its most typical. And yet, I also argue that just because Israel frequently behaves criminally, Israeli society still has a right to defend itself from the clear and present dangers it faces. To do this effectively requires more than the reactive use of military force within Israel itself. An extreme example being the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981 by the Israeli airforce.
What many ostriches refuse to acknowledge is that if the IAF had not destroyed the Iraqi reactor, Saddam Hussain would have developed either nuclear weapons or at the very least ‘dirty bombs’. Of course I am sure Mr. Raimondo probably refuses to believe that Iraq was in fact ever trying to develop nukes or might have stuck plutonium dust on a Scud. To see an ostensible libertarian acting as an apologist for yet another mass murderous regime is curious indeed. Surreal in fact.
One theory I have to explain the ostrich mindset (as found in libertarians, rather than paleo-conservatives) is that they are so reflexively hostile to the American and British states that anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Now anyone who has been reading my articles on Samizdata.net for a while can hardly have failed to notice I am hugely distrustful of nation states generally…yet I try to base my views on critically rational analysis and not just reflexive anti-statism. I realise states lie. They lie a lot. But that does not mean that everything a state says is automatically false. Yet I suspect that in reality that is what ostriches think, leading them into pretzel logic apologias for Chinese, Middle Eastern and Balkan tyrants under whose regimes the likes of Mr. Raimondo do not actually have to live and therefore do not reflexively distrust. Keeping ones head in the sand is not conducive to a realistic view of the wider world.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about an organisation that calls itself ‘Anti-war’ who operate a website called (not surprisingly) ‘Anti-war.com’ wherein a cabal of eminent writers and thinkers campaign vigourously against the foreign policy of the US government and, currently, its choice to respond militarily to the WTC attacks. Making quite a to-do they are
Chief among the ‘anti-warriors’, and apparently their poster boy, is one Mr. Justin Raimondo who seems to be postively incandescent with rage at the US government for launching a racist war to further the imperialist aims of the Washington elites. Mr.Raimondo claims that his views are informed by his libertarian, non-interventionist, principles based on which, the US should stop its foreign adventures, stop meddling in other countries, stop ‘putting pins in rattlesnakes, stirring up hornets nests etc, etc (By the way, foreigners are all ‘rattlesnakes’ and ‘hornets’? Just how racist is that?)
Nothing reprehensible about that position. Isolationism is not a principle I agree with but, when honestly debated, it is a defensible position. What is reprehensible are insinuations that the US brought this attack on itself and only has itself to blame. Reprehensible because (a) they are factually wrong and (b) brutally insensitive and (c) par for the course with Mr. Raimondo
That’s right. He’s flogged this particular ‘blame the victim’ horse before in an article that I’m quite sure he’d like buried now but, alas, it’s too late (thankyou, Google). The link below will take you something that Mr.Raimondo wrote in 1999 as an expression of his ‘libertarian principles’
Now before you go there, I feel it only fair to issue a product warning: it’s long. It’s long, it’s turgid and it’s full of details about who said what to who at the National People’s Democratic Conference of 1968 (or something). In other words, it reads like a Trotskyite student screed; the kind of thing that is so laboured and coma-inducing that you get the feeling it has been written with a view to bludgeoning you into submission by the sheer weight of it’s paragraphs. Not that I am, for even a moment, suggesting that Justin is a Trotskyite because he clearly isn’t. No, he’s worse than that, he’s a bore
But I always say that the truth is worth suffering for so, take some amphetamines, prepare a pot of strong coffee, tell your family you’re going to be away for a while and click here
You’re back! Well, brace yourself: it is the year 2025. Men have colonised Mars and… Okay, only joking
The article itself though is rather less of a joke and I knew something was iffy right away when I saw this breathtaking assertion:
“…the Chinese media has been relatively open for some time”
Really, Justin??!! Perhaps you could direct us all to the URL for the Chinese Anti-War.com then? Better still, take yourself over to Hong Kong and start ranting at the Beijing government in the same manner as you do Washington. Go on, Justin, I dare you. I double-dare you!!
But that’s the least of it. Justin goes on to assert just how reasonable the Chinese government is and that the Tiananmen Square protestors were nothing more than a contemptible rabble who were complaining about China’s progress towards capitalism and wanted a return to socialist purity and the true principles as espoused by Mao Tse Tung. Now, I am the first to admit that memory does not constitute history, but I clearly recall that the centrepiece of the protest was something called the Goddess of Liberty, a simulacram of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps Chinese ways are just too inscrutable for this particular British dunderhead, but that would seem a very strange choice of totem for a bunch of Maoist fundamentalists to rally around
But that’s not important. Any public demonstration will invariably attract all manner of folks with all manner of sundry grievances and I wasn’t there so I don’t know. What is important is that they were unarmed civilians and the ‘enlightened’ Chinese government responded by killing them all
Or not, apparently. Because in the Gospel according to Justin:
“… Instead, the President engaged in an hour-long colloquoy with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin on the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, in which a few hundred rioters bent on self-immolation achieved their stated ends”
So there we have it. The protestors were a bunch of suicidal nutbags with stupid ideas who brought it on themselves. They were asking for it. Sound familiar? He even goes as far as to suggest comparison with Jonestown. What were all those tanks doing there then, Justin? Shipping in the laced vodka?
We all know what happened to those protestors because we damn welll saw it happen and what I’d like to know is where is Justin’s incandescence? His outrage? His grief? His condemnation? His concern? Does he even give it a mention? No. Nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Must’ve slipped his mind
I don’t quite understand how someone can live through one of the most savage and brutal episodes of state repression in post-war history (not to mention the persecution of dissidents that goes on to this day) and not only try to pretend that it didn’t happen but actually try to convince us all that the victims commited suicide! Not only that, but ten years after, he goes on to write a fawning apology for that same regime while turning all his indignant guns on Washington. Some people call that historical revision: I call it being on the payroll. If you ask me, this guy is being given an easy time
The fact that he does champion capitalism and free markets, in a way, makes it worse because he clearly has a brain and either he’s delusional or downright mendacious. Either way, if that’s an example of libertarian principles then, damnitall, my application for membership of the Labour Party is in the post
I don’t know Mr.Raimondo and I’ve never met him and I daresay he would rather be hung by the thumbs than to consort with a warblogger like me. So perhaps someone would be obliging enough to pass on this piece of advice next time young Justin starts up on one of his ‘anti-war’ rants:
Mr. Raimondo, you live in a glass house, old chum. Stop throwing stones
Oh and, by the way, be careful what you publish: Google is watching you!
Reader Martha Lane e-mailed me to ask what was a typical libertarian position on ‘hate speech’ in a free society. I referred her to In Defense of Hate Propaganda (Sort of) by Pierre Lemieux (pdf format: requires Acrobat reader or similar).
I often recommend stuff found in the Libertarian Alliance archive of publications. It has over 650 mostly short and to the point pamphlets from a wide range of genuine libertarian view points. The Libertarian Alliance does not have a manifesto or a single ‘party line’, choosing instead to showcase the full range of libertarian views, from anarcho-capitalists to minarchists to Old Whigs to libertarian-conservatives… and everything in between.
Pierre Lemieux’s two page article that I recommended above is typical of most of the LA’s on-line publications, which is to say brief, easy to digest and free.
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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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