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Government consistently works to undermine trust in other institutions in order to build its power. That is calculated to increase anxiety, and dependency on the state. It is a sort of reverse confidence trick. The ordinary con-man creates a false relationship of trust, and lets you believe he has something you actually want. The key political trick is, to create false suspicion in order to make you seek a “safety” you never really needed.
Now governments that have spent a decade or more telling the public to be very, very afraid, that it is helpless and needs more powerful government to save it, are very ill-adapted to deal with a loss of confidence in the financial markets. They seem to grasp dimly that stopping a panic ought to be the aim, but their approach to stopping a panic is to appear on television for emergency announcements that the situation is uniquely grave and unpredictable and so government is now going to be doing big arbitrary things inconsistently and without warning.
If they wanted calm resolution from others, then demonstrating it themselves might be a good way to start. But they don’t know how.
I find myself wondering if Britain is a Communist country.
“If the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were a Communist country you would not be allowed to ask that question.”
I think I might be. If Britain was under Marxist rule (which is what is normally meant by “a Communist country”) I think the rulers might allow me to ask how long we were going to be under socialism before we reached the end state of advanced communist equality – they might even give me a date when the new society would be achieved. The Soviet rulers did this from time to time – normally many decades in the future.
“The means of production, distribution and exchange are not under public control – so we have not even reached the socialist stage yet”.
That would be a better reply. However, almost half of the economy is taken by government spending alone (if one takes account of Mr Brown’s smoke and mirrors), and the rest of the economy is so controlled by endless regulations that it is at least close to be under “public” (if by this we mean state) control.
But it is really the near universal propaganda that got me wondering if was living under Communist rule.
This site is not called ‘samizdata’ without reason. In Britain there are many sources of information – books, magazines, newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. But on many matter they all say the same thing.
Take the example of the bailout/takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States.
In America Fox News, so denounced as statists by so many libertarians, had many critical voices on Monday September 8th. On Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” show both M. Malkin and Bob Barr (who are very different from each other on so many political issues) both laid in to the corrupt statism. And Mr Cavuto also did so. The next day (Tuesday 9th September) Ron Paul was on the show – continuing the attack. Later on the 8th of September the Brit Hume show (although Mr Hume himself was away) Ed Crane of the Cato Institute was on denouncing the bailout/takeover. There were, of course, other voices and perhaps to let Fannie and Freddie go bankrupt would have been even worse than what the government did – but this is not my point.
My point is that there was no dissent in Britain – from any media source. The BBC did not even report in its main news shows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the government and run by political cronies. The leftist Independent newspaper gloatingly declared that President Bush had “torn up years of lassez faire polices”. The claim that there has ever even been a “lassez faire” policy in the United States under President wild spending Bush is such a blatant bit of agitprop that it is hard to know how to respond to it.
And the so-called ‘Conservative’ newspapers? No dissent anywhere – at least none I could find. In fact the Daily Mail was demanding something similar for Britain.
It must be remembered that in Britain ‘Conservative’ means ‘Conservative party’, it does not mean conservative in any philosophical sense.
And it is not true that in Communist countries there was only one legal party – often there were several political parties (organized into a ‘front’), as long as they all supported the regime.
But it is not just this one example.
Take another incident on Monday September 8th – the Fox News refutation of “the Americans killed lots of innocent kids” lie that was going round the world.
Fox News had reporters actually on the raid in question, who had filmed the raid and openly denounced the “killed these kids” claims as lies.
This would simply not happen in Britain. Even if a British television crew had been on a raid with special forces – it would never call the crying and screaming “relatives of the murdered children” (who can cry and scream on que whenever they are told to – and can produce pictures of dead bodies) liars.
“We are libertarians, we are anti-war” – I am saying be “pro-war” (perhaps the Afghan war is all wrong), I am saying tell the truth. Something that does not happen here – on any television or radio station. If you were with someone and know they did not kill kids then it is your duty to say so. And, if dead kids are produced, to ask who really killed them. That would not be done by any British network.
But it goes a lot further than this. For example, today I went round the bookshops in my home town of Kettering Northamptonshire – a typical British town if there ever was one. In every shop there were Senator Obama’s books, and so there should be – he may be elected to a very powerful position, so what he has to say is of interest.
But in no shop was there any book that was critical of Senator Obama.
No “Obama Nation“, or “The Case Against Barack Obama“, or “Audacity of Deceit” or “Obama Unmasked“.
Perhaps these books are useless (although the first two are best sellers in the United States), but why were they not on the shelves?
“Because they would not sell” – how does anyone know, if they are not put on the shelves?
And why are the same leftist propaganda books on the shelves for ever – even though people do not buy them?
For example, in the local “W.H. Smith” there is copy of “What’s wrong with America?” (what is wrong with America seems to be that it is not yet sufficiently Marxist) – and it has been the same copy for at least two years (I know that because there is a bend in the cover).
Does this sound like commercial behaviour by a profit maximising private company? American libertarians often complain that the United States is capitalist in name, but semi-socialist in reality.
Actually that is rather more true of Britain.
On a spring day in Beijing almost a decade ago, tens of thousands of people gathered on the pavement surrounding the high-walled Zhongnanhai compound, the Chinese equivalent of the Kremlin. They were protesting, but there was barely a murmur to be heard from the enormous crowd. There were no banners, no megaphones noisily chanting demands, no unruly behaviour. It was not a typical demonstration – the participants were seated and meditating. They stayed for around twelve hours. These people were members of the rapidly expanding Falun Gong sect, and they were asking for recognition, legitimacy and an end to perceived mistreatment from the Chinese central government. The then-Chinese premier met with the group’s leaders, following which they all left as quietly as they had arrived.
Shortly after this protest, the Chinese government declared the sect a dire ideological threat to the People’s Republic of China, and a huge and rigorous nationwide crackdown followed. Practitioners in powerful positions saw their careers ended abruptly. Thousands were ‘re-educated’. Several, according to numerous human rights advocates, did not survive their enlightenment at the hands of the Chinese state. The sect’s leader was demonised, its teachings subjected to the harshest denunciations. In response, many Falun Gong practitioners held silent protests all over China. A few caught the world’s attention by self-immolating in Tiananmen Square, which explains why each of the numerous military personnel guarding the square have a fire extinguisher placed within arm’s length of their positions.
Unsurprisingly, these protests failed. Falun Gong in mainland China is a massively diminished, illegal underground movement. It is still an extremely politically sensitive topic in China. It is carefully referred to as ‘FG’ when written about on-line, in the (probably vain) hope that such abbreviations will avoid the notice of China’s vigilant internet police (who probably do not care all that much about 99% of these references, but the fact that Chinese internet users go to such lengths is revealing in itself). The government has successfully and widely propagated the idea that Falun Gong is a degenerate cult. → Continue reading: A fork in the road
The former head of the Cabinet Office Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit, Julian Critchley, has come out for full legalisation. Interesting, but not very interesting. What is more interesting is what he told the BBC later in the interview:
… the “overwhelming majority of professionals” he met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors, held the same view.
“Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the government would be ‘tough on drugs’, even though they all knew that the government’s policy was actually causing harm.”
There is something wrong with our political system, don’t you think, when policy is determined by people who know that it is wrong, and know that their colleagues also know that it is wrong, but all are compelled by personal interest to rehearse the same orthodoxies? The propaganda of received wisdom has its own momentum, and no one person changing their mind will have much effect. Critchley will be ignored. His colleagues will be silent. And next autumn we will have a new moral panic about some drug-related social phenomenon, real or imaginary, justifying some extended power.
There have of course been other systems that worked this way. But the official Marxism-Lenninism of the Soviet Communist Party or the irrelevant doctrinal minutiae of theocracies had or have at least a clear purpose in maintaining the power of institutions. In our mediated ochlocracy policy is a peacock’s tail in which random illusions of public opinion power political and bureaucratic machines, that then feedback more of the same, regardless of reason or utility.
What, if anything, can be done?
I rather like this observation from Simon Hoggart:
But it’s not just the bigots who confidently announce what’s on the deity’s mind. Often on Thought For The Day on Radio 4 (the equivalent on Radio 2, at around 9.20 on the Terry Wogan show, is usually less embarrassing) someone declares solemnly that God believes this, or God wants that. Usually God turns out to have the same views as a north London bien pensant, who wishes the best for everyone, within certain limits.
He’s completely right. The Most Reverend, the Most Fluffy, Archbishop Rowan Williams is, in his determined niceness, on precisely as solid ground as is his scarey African co-churchman whom I just heard pronounce on Radio 4 that The Bible says the punishment for homosexuals is death and we are not entitled to disagree with God’s word. The ground is precisely as solid because it really amounts to ‘Because I say so. This is what scripture means because this is what I wish it did mean. It accords with the sort of society I want to live in, and therefore it is correct.’
At the risk of waking the throbbing-veined antimussulmen among the commentariat, the same is true of all proponents – and almost all interpreters – of a religious world-view. Those who say cosily with Tony Blair that Islamist terrorists are engaged in a “dreadful perversion of the true faith of Islam” are on precisely as strong a ground as both the followers of ibn Qutb and their countersupporters in western fearfandom, who say that that is what Islam ‘really’ is. Tapdancing in a vacuum.
The assertion of ‘truth’ is meaningless without the possibility of falsehood. The oxymoron ‘true faith’ invariably means the model of a religion, his own or someone else’s, that the speaker prefers, the one that gives him the most explicable, grippable, world.
They all say, without any real self-doubt, and without the glorious dramatic irony of Alf Garnett: “It stands to reason.” No it doesn’t. It is the opposite of reason. All of it.
In one of the most beautiful avenues of Budapest, Andrássy Road, is a museum dedicated to the two 20th century horrors, Nazism and Communism. House of Terror (Terror Háza) does not differentiate between the two toxic ideologies. After all, they are the same thing with different packaging – one in black, the other in red. That they hate and fought each other is not evidence to the contrary, merely evidence of territorial in-fighting.
In winter of 1944, when the Hungarian Nazis came to power, hundreds of people were tortured in the basement of the house in 60 Andrássy street. In 1945 Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Army. One of the first tasks of the Hungarian communists arriving with the Soviet tanks was to take possession of the location. The building was occupied by their secret police, the PRO, which was later renamed ÁVO, subsequently ÁVH (names for political police). The entire country came to dread the terrorist organisation. The ÁVH officers serving at 60 Andrássy Road were the masters of life and death. Detainees were horribly tortured or killed. The walls of the cellars beneath the buildings were broken down and transformed into a prison.
After the end of communism in Hungary, 60 Andrássy Road has become a shrine, the effigy of terror and the victims’ memorial. At least in Hungary they recognised that the ‘past must be acknowledged’. The exhibition is a visual feast, both in the artefacts displayed and in the symbolism of their arrangement. The rooms have themes and objects in them are meant to create an atmosphere as well as communicate facts. Alas, the visual beauty conjures an image of a retro nightmare – distant and unreal it masks the brutality and dull reality of communist terror.
There is an exquisitely designed hall dedicated to Soviet forced-labour and slave camps. There are reminiscences, photographs and the display cases contain relics, the original paraphernalia used by the people detained by the Soviets and taken to gulags. And yet, it does not squeeze your heart and make you sick to your stomach. The muted light and the droning voice of the audio guide fail to convey the tragedy. By trying to describe the suffering of many thousands, they miss the opportunity to make us feel the suffering of one, to put ourselves in their place, imagine our lives being arbitrarily and brutally torn apart. And to remember that this did not happen in some kind of parallel universe, that this is history next door.
I wanted to know the people whose meagre possessions I was looking at in the display cases. Their names, stories, family, circumstances, fates. I believe that the best and only way to understand Communism and Nazism is through the lives of individuals who were affected by it not through a historical methodology or chronological exposition.
And so we need to be told about their neighbours reporting and spying on them, children betraying parents, we need to hear the tales of endurance, mercy and resistance that no historical narrative can capture. We document history in such impersonal terms and yet there is nothing more powerful then actions of a man. We look for overarching explanations but historical causality without human beings and their behaviour leaves the patterns of history indistinct, lacking in colour and texture. → Continue reading: House of Terror
Over at ConservativeHome there’s a survey suggesting the social conservatives are doing the Guardian’s work for it by trying to make one’s position on abortion a party-political issue in Britain. The next generation of Conservative MPs support a lower time limit for abortions says an email questionnaire to 225 candidates, answered by just under half. I’m as irritated by this sort of spinning of some very doubtful evidence as I am by the contrary stuff – to the same effect – from the Guardian, which has recently started to suggest (as a measure of its desperation) that no-one who favours abortion choice should vote Conservative.
What really winds me up, though, is the mendacious presentation of their position by the proponents of this staged debate. The legal position of abortion in Britain is the sort of muddy compromise people with a clear ideas about the question are quite right to resent. But the approach of many abortion-banners (as they actually are) is anything but frank, and reminiscent of the step-by-step strategy of the anti-smoking lobby. For every principled (usually religiously principled) pro-lifer, there is someone who secretly shares their conviction, but makes the case for just a little cut in the time-limit now “because science tells us that babies of that age can now survive outside the womb”.
It’s nonsense. Without a lot of help a two-year-old can’t survive outside the womb. And the prospect of those few born at the limit of current paediatric technology surviving uncrippled to live a normal life is tiny even with a massive input of medical and nursing resources. But worse, it is mendacious nonsense – they don’t care about “viability” in the slightest. What they want is a plausible excuse to cut the availability of abortion just a bit.
So I have a test to flush them out. It is provided by that ghastly muddy compromise. Britain doesn’t in law permit women to choose abortion, unlike most rich countries. It is an extraordinary construct of bureaucratic paternalism.
What British (mainland) law does is to permit pregnant women to petition doctors to give them permission to abort on the grounds that it will be bad for their well-being to carry the baby to term. With two doctors assenting to this opinion in writing (that is, as the doctors’ professional opinion – the woman’s view doesn’t matter in law), you may have an abortion. Where the ‘time-limit’ comes in is that those two doctors can only approve an abortion to preserving the patient’s social or mental well-being before a certain point. After that terminations may only occur where there is a substantial risk to life or health, or in cases of severe foetal abnormality.
So in practice, in the UK you have a choice only if you approach the right doctor armed with the right argument. A naive or poorly educated, woman who seeks help from her GP when the GP happens to oppose abortion, or who mistakenly calls a pro-life charity canvassing itself as offering help to the unexpectedly pregnant (as opposed to one of the pro-choice groups who do the same thing) may never find out how to get an abortion, or at least not until it is too late. The late abortions themselves aren’t occuring as a lifestyle choice – which is another mendacious narrative element in the pseudo-debate.
My test is this: Next time anyone says they want the time-limit for abortion cut to because “science shows” the baby can survive outside the womb after X weeks. Say, “And of course you support changing the law to allow abortion on demand before that date, don’t you?” Then watch them flounder.
I am out of tune with the spirit of the age. My first reaction was to laugh out loud:
The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death.
– Yahoo/ITN News
It is not just the paradox. It is the way such an incident – horrific in reality though it no doubt is – puts the lie to all such sentimental campaigns.
Children are not angels corrupted by contact with mundane implements; they are social animals, small brutes that will grow into large brutes unless civilized. A civilized man ought to be able to carry a gun without offering to shoot anyone under any provocation short of violence offered. A brute will assault you with whatever comes to hand if he feels slighted, and the last thing society needs is for him to have is greater self-esteem. [(1) – (2)] Fetishising mere tools just further exculpates violent people in their own minds.
Am I too cynical, or too idealistic?
In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as ‘misogynistic’, if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:
She complains how the Daily Mail ‘ratcheted up its attacks on me’, demanding to know – though Mr Blair could have answered just as well – if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave ‘the press chapter and verse’.
I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family’s privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair’s current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.
Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people’s children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.
Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.
… Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”
There’s a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for “not doing enough” on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain – and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address – liberty is no longer intelligible.
Does the word “liberty” appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? … → Continue reading: More culture of control
For those who want us all to live in terror, is that would-be terrorists are seldom very competent, and that doing any very big damage is difficult. An illustration just how difficult has just turned up. The Guardian luridly reports:
Terry Jupp, a scientist with the Ministry of Defence, was engulfed in flames during a joint Anglo-American counter-terrorism project intended to discover more about al-Qaida’s bomb-making capacities.
There has been no inquest into his death, as the coroner has been waiting for the MoD to disclose information about the incident. An attempt to prosecute the scientist’s manager for manslaughter ended when prosecutors said they were withdrawing the charge, but said the case was too “sensitive” to explain that decision in open court.
The Guardian has established that Jupp was a member of a small team of British and US scientists making bombs from ingredients of the sort that terrorists could obtain. There is also evidence pointing to experiments to discover more about radiological dispersal devices – so-called dirty bombs – which use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material.
A properly skeptical report probably would not use the magic word “al-Qaida”, rather than referring to terrorists in general. Nor would there be the superstitious mention of “radioactive material”.
However the salient facts are informative: An expert; no difficulty obtaining the materials and knowing what was wanted; proper care and attention – and he still managed to go horribly wrong. The task is a very difficult one.
Could it be the reason the average would-be terrorist doesn’t blow himself up prematurely (as used to happen quite often to old-style IRA/Fatah, etc., bombers equipped with commercial/military explosives), is because he lacks the knowledge to make an explosion at all? The idea that even a real expert could disperse suitably weaponised chemical/radioactive agents, or biological ones using low-explosive paint-tin bombs is just a bit ludicrous. The idea that an inexperienced religious nutter/power fantasist using recipes off the internet could do so is wholly absurd.
Terrorists in Britain are a threat to life comparable with police car-chases. Terror of terrorists is the threat to civilization.
No chance of the government, media, security services, just suggesting we all calm down, I suppose? Nope.
On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.
The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: “How to Cure Government Obesity,” which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.
Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA’s president, by email: ———-. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.
I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It’s the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves – even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed “the rape of the libraries” and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.
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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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