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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Social individualists of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains
and a whole world to win!
Although intended as a humorous meme-hack, the statement is also quite clearly true. The irony is that for individuals to preserve their individuality, they must unite with others to fight the collectivist political pressures that would deny that we are moral free agents and make us so much less than we are: to fight involuntary collectivism we must voluntarily act collectively.
And so that is why I set up Samizdata.net and lured others to dive into the blogosphere with me head first.
It was my attempt to give a platform to shout out to the world for like-minded individuals who rejected the intrusive force backed collectivist view of the world. We are not really trying to ‘convert’ people, though that would be nice, rather we are trying to change people’s meta-context and let the ideology take care of itself. That is our ‘mission statement’ if you like.
A meta-context is a person’s frames of reference through which they interpret the world around them. It is not an ideology or a political ‘ism’ or even a philosophy… it is ‘just’ a series of axioms and ‘givens’ that colour and flavour how you think about things and come to understand them via a set of critical or emotional preferences and underlying assumptions. We all have a personal meta-context.
For example, it is one of the reasons that although I have written many articles on Samizdata.net about the issue of private ownership of firearms in the USA, I very rarely discuss the Second Amendment. Why? Because an individualist meta-context does not have rights as something which are dependent on The State.
The Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is a legal artifice, but it is not the source or reason that people should be able to own weapons as a matter not of privilege but by right. In fact, no state and its laws is the source of any right whatsoever: rights are objectively yours to begin with and are not given to you by anyone. Thus I will never argue an American has the right to own a gun because ‘it says so in the Second Amendment’ because they would have a right to do so even if it said nothing of the sort.
Yet that is not to say I think the Second Amendment is a bad idea, just that it is nothing more than a useful profane tool to secure an objective right, not a source of rights. To me as an individualist, I see do not see the state as central to my life or quite frankly to civil society… as I am not a fully convinced anarchist I do see some role for limited government in securing the rights of individuals, but just as an adjunct to far more important the networks that are primarily social rather than political.
And so if we are trying to change people’s meta-context to include more individualist and less collectivist frames of reference, then it behoves us to use phrases which assist in this process rather than those which are loaded with ‘trigger words’ that may well get our views unhelpfully pigeonholed in places that does not really reflect where we are coming from. Now I certainly regard myself as a libertarian of the minarchist flavour… what is sometimes called a ‘Classical Liberal’. However the term ‘libertarian’ is increasingly loaded with meanings that generate more heat than light, and thus I have started using the term ‘social individualist’ rather than ‘libertarian in Samizdata.net’s introduction in the sidebar. We have not changed… certainly I have not… and I intend to continue arguing that the term ‘libertarian’ can only be used correctly to describe people who promote the individual liberty to chose how you interact with the world via social interaction rather than force backed political interaction. Just as Living Marxism changed its name to Spiked in order to shed the ‘baggage’ of the term ‘Marxism’ without actually changing a thing ideologically, we started life as ‘Libertarian Samizdata’ back in our early days on-line and then just became Samizdata.net in order to better reach beyond the worthy true believers. We are no longer Libertarian Samizdata but our thinking is really no different to when we started.
Yet if the term ‘libertarian’ gets in the way of what we are trying to do, it is time to start de-emphasising it. I am still a member of the executive committee of the London based Libertarian Alliance and I still regard myself as a pukka libertarian. But a more accurate description of my views than just the broad church of ‘libertarianism’ would be that I reject collectivist views of the world as utterly falsified, but at the same time I do not regard individuals as atomised objects existing in splendid isolation. Unless you live alone in a log cabin in the middle of Canada subsisting on nuts and moose meat, you are an individual within a social environment: a civil society. And it is the extent to which you can freely act within civil society as an individual pursuing self-defined ends by right, without political coercion or permission, that is the measure of whether you are free or not.
Additionally, I have long regarded socialism as the most ironic use of language in the history of mankind, given that it means to replace social interaction with entirely political interaction. It is time to reclaim the word social and reject the newspeak inversion of it into meaninglessness.
And it is addressing those issues that make this a social individualist weblog.
It seems curious to me that many of the people who were pouring scorn on the US insistence that it was fighting a ‘war’ against Al Qaeda, rather than just treating September 11th as a criminal matter, are the same people now howling about treatment of captive Al Qaeda fighters. So let me get this straight: this is not a war but these pundits want the captives to be treated according to the Geneva Convention?
Interesting. Next time I get pulled over for speeding, I will refuse to pay the ticket on the grounds I was not treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. That should work.
Also I saw one talking head after another on the television tonight, usually ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’ that I have never heard of before, declaiming that “this treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners is going to ‘inflame the Arab street’ like never before!”. Ah, the good old ‘Arab Street’ again. Earth calling all ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’: no one in the Western world who actually matters gives a damn about the mythical ‘Arab street’. Perhaps these ‘Professors’ need to take a sabbatical and do some ‘American Studies’ before they get in front of a camera and have the opposite effect on US opinion they were probably hoping for.
When the average westerner (i.e. not Robert Fisk) hears these people’s warnings followed by a clip of a street full of chanting Arab and burning American flags, what is going through their heads is not “Oh… we’d better get Alan Dershowitz out to Guantanamo Bay pronto to represent those poor Al Qaeda guys.” No, they are thinking “Gee, I wonder how many of those fuckers in that ‘Arab street’ I’m looking at on the TV a single cluster bomb would take out if dropped right about…now.”
In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.
Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.
Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.
However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.
However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.
Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.
My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock.
Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).
I spent yesterday evening watching a recording of an excellent two-part four-hour TV dramatisation of the exploits of Sir Ernest Shackleton. As World War I was about to tear Europe apart, Shackleton raised the money to lead an expedition to the South Pole. He never reached it. He and his 28 men, by rights, should’ve died from the intolerable cold, exhaustion, hunger, frostbite, gangrene and madness. But they didn’t. Not a single man jack of them died because Shackleton, by dint of his sheer indomitable courage, ingenuity, determination and sheer force of will managed to bring them home to Britain where Shackleton himself was hailed as a national hero
God, it was all so British and stirring, damn you!!
Well, I say, ‘British’ but that was back when Britain was full to the gunnels with square jaws, stiff upper lips, steely eyes, straight backs, iron resolve and not even the women were in touch with their feminine side. Mountains were there to be climbed, oceans were there to be plumbed and there was not a single square inch of this wild and windswept planet that could not be trampled all over and conquered by stout, horny British feet
Would Sir Ernest still be a national hero if he’d lived today? No, I rather think not. I rather think he’d be denounced as irresponsible and an environmental vandal. He’d be reviled in the media as a danger to health and safety, for setting a bad example for our children and for failing to provide diversity training. He’d be sued by his crew for emotional trauma and be forced into bankruptcy as a result. He would lose his home, his wife would dessert him and his kids would be taken into care. On top of that he would be ruthlessly persecuted by the government who would pass laws (retrospectively) to enable them to throw him into prison and ban any further expeditions to anywhere more risky than Hyde Park
God, it’s all so British and depressing, isn’t it
I am writing this more to understand what I feel than to tell anyone else anything. A few weeks ago I was in Belgrade and saw several good friends that I had not seen for a while. Yet most of them were people who, when the war came to what used to be Yugoslavia, had got out and moved in with friends in Hungary or Austria or Italy. Gradually during the war years we reestablished contact with telephone calls across those borders which were not sealed. We often met up to exchange gossip or seek information about missing friends over a coffee or a brandy in Budapest or Graz or Vienna or Ljubliana, neutral ground so to speak. Now most of them are back in Serbia as the Demon is gone and it is now possible to travel there with ease. And so our friendships continue, not quite as before, but they continue. But there are quite a few people who I lost contact with on those terrible days and weeks in 1991 as nightmare came upon us all, never to hear from them again or learn what happened to them, and for reasons I only half-understand myself, I have made no attempt to find them…and that is especially true of one person in particular.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a New Years party in Vienna by an old friend of mine, a lovely Croatian woman married to a wonderful Austrian man. As we have many friends in common, I asked who else would be there and she told me. She mentioned many acquaintances and a few fine friends, but at the sound of one name, I almost dropped the phone. I had to wait a few moments before I could even speak. I wanted to ask her what she knew about him, where he had been, was he married? Where did he live now? What does he do for a living? Were his parents still alive? But I did not ask her any of those things. After just a moment I just told her I would come and that was that. I would meet Him again.
And so I went to that New Years party in Vienna, driving up from Croatia in my baby Mercedes and not telling my parents exactly who would be there. As I expected, the party was a charming extravagance, well attended, lively and disdainfully elegant in a manner in which the Austrians have no equal. Although I was quite unsettled at the idea of meeting Him, I was also determined to be cool and not over-think the situation. For a while I wondered if he would even recognised me: I was blonde then, my hair is black now. Silliness of course. I was looking around for him, trying not to look overly preoccupied and wondering if I should slap him or kiss him or laugh or cry. Maybe I would hug him and wish him well… or more likely curse him for disappearing that terrible morning when strange trucks appeared in my little town and the first crackle of Kalashnikovs from nearby told me that life as I had known it was ending, right here and right now. I rehearsed a few things in my mind, and then changed my mind, many many times.
And then I saw him and he saw me. It was a strange and electric moment. So I just smiled and said hello. And I realised that ten years and the jumble of events had produced such a confusing static of thoughts and emotions, that all that was left was the breath quickening spark of attraction. And so we talked about everything and nothing. He touched my dark hair, making me shiver, and I touched his face, running my finger along an unfamiliar scar. We drank and we danced and we chatted to mutual friends and once the old year had died, we left together. As we walked down the cold Viennese streets to where I was staying, we stopped talking but held onto each other as if afraid the other might disappear like mist. We did not say much at all for the rest of the night, but as daylight came I must have finally fallen asleep with him, time somehow telescoping ten years into a few hours.
Then as morning, or rather early afternoon came, I woke as he got up to dress. We exchanged a few words, smiling and laughing. He grinned when he could not find his undershirt and I realised how little and how much we have both changed. And finally more words, sweet lovely words that neither of us really believed as I felt him touch me again.. and then he was gone, just so many echoing footsteps as he trotted down that stone stairway outside. And if it was not for his tee shirt that I still held under the sheets, smelling of him, I would have said it was a dream, an echo like those footsteps.
I have never forgiven him for choosing an accident of birth over me when I needed him most, and I know for sure now that I never will. But I also know it does not matter. The past is the past and He is just a ghost heading eastwards, an echo of another time and another life, as I am to Him. In a few days I will drive to Milan. I am glad I came here and I am glad I am leaving. Vienna is full of ghosts.
[Editor’s note: this started out as a private e-mail to me from Natalija that I convinced her to make into a blog article]
I recently received an article about hate crimes from one of the many email groups I read. It purported reporting is one sided and made a number of interesting statements. One that cannot be denied is that acts of violence of one person against another simply because of “what” rather than “who” they are is about as nondiscriminatory an occupation as one can find: everyone bashes everyone else with approximately equal fervour. This was most humourously stated several decades ago by Tom Lehrer in his song “National Brotherhood Week”.
The gist of the posting was that when whites trash blacks it is reported; but when blacks do similarly awful things it is not. It noted the absolute numbers of hate crimes committed by whites against blacks was larger, but statistically the rate of such crimes by blacks against whites was higher. As I have somewhat of a mathematical inclination this got me thinking. There was just something wrong with the reasoning and it wasn’t until much later over a pint at the local the flaw finally made itself clear to me.
It’s the perceived risk.
Let’s say there is an imaginary and mostly happy land of VRB in which a mix of A’s and B’s live. The vast majority of A’s and B’s are extremely decent folk, but unfortunately there is a rare genetic disorder that strikes 1 out of 10 newborns. They are born throwbacks to a primitive type of A or B. On the average these pitiful genetically-challenged pre-A’s and pre-B’s commit one act of violence against a member of the other type per year.
Now it happens that the VRB’s population is 100. There are 85 A’s and 15 B’s. So there are roughly 8 pre-A’s and 1 pre-B’s. That means that 8 B’s and 1 A get the shite kicked out of them each year. That is to say, over 50% of B’s are assaulted in a given year and 1% of the A’s.
Needless to say, the perception of B’s will be all A’s are out to get them. The average A will feel virtually un-threatened. They may not even know any of the violent pre-A’s who attack the B’s and wouldn’t associate with that sort anyway. The average A would likely only have heard pub rumours of an A getting beat on.
The second year, the pre-B’s will have some of the more fearful B’s beside them for “self-defense” and the percentage of violent B’s will go up. If just 2 more join the pre-B, they will triple the rate of violence of B’s against A’s. However the difference between a 1% and 3% chance of getting clobbered will not modify A’s risk perceptions at all.
It is almost inevitable that a degree of triumphalist intoxication starts to surge into commentary regarding the allegedly all-but-over war in Afghanistan. However in their eagerness to at last drive a stake through the heart of that American vampire-of-the-soul, Vietnam, people are starting to sound rather like the pundits opining on the future after every war since the industrial age started to make each war different than the one before. Television, internet and printing presses are humming with commentators who are making extravagant leaps of inductive thinking… never a good sign.
Victor Davis Hanson over on National Review is a case in point and has written an intemperate article called Glad We Are Not Fighting Us, that takes dramatic historical and sociological liberties with fact and evidence. Although I do agree with many of his points, others that he makes are very odd indeed.
America now enjoys a level of global military and political influence not seen since the Roman Empire in the age of Trajan.
This is a poor comparison. What of the Mongols? Theirs was a vast empire based on sheer military might into which the Roman Empire, even under Trajan, could have neatly fitted into one corner. The shadow it cast over the entire Eurasian world was every bit as profound as the US casts now and far harder to ignore.
He goes on to describe an America that will no doubt appeal to a section of his US readership but it is really nothing more than tub-thumping propaganda rather than sensible appraisal of the undoubted might of the USA.
But in the last two decades America, for better or worse, has evolved beyond the traditional Western paradigm, in reaching the theoretical limits of freedom and unbridled capitalism to create a technologically sophisticated, restlessly energetic, and ever-changing society whose like has never been seen in the history of civilization.
That is not just wrong, it is ridiculous… for one, I would argue that the United States was far more free in many ways, both in terms of general liberty and economically, prior to the First World War. The astonishing US forfeiture laws under which one can have property seized and then not returned even if not eventually convicted of a crime (and in some cases not even charged), make it clear that large chunks of the much hallowed Constitution are in fact a dead letter. Even more grotesquely obvious, one only has to look at the huge share of national wealth appropriated by the various tiers of American government and compare it to 100 years ago to realise the absurdity of claiming the United States is “reaching the theoretical limits of freedom”. Ethnic minorities and women are now freed from onerous restrictions compared to a century ago, yet what they may actually do with that restored liberty and economic power is drastically ‘bridled’ by the intrusive regulatory state as never before in American history.
In areas of US society where liberty is indeed in the ascendant rather than in retreat , it is due to the information technology and communications that are exerting their influence far beyond just America.
I would also contend that the Dutch in the 17th century and British in the first half of the 18th century were every bit as dynamic. And of course their pundits made much the same overarching claims about their cultures as well.
Hanson gets back on more solid ground by pointing out where the true root of America’s real comparative advantages lie by contrasting its freedom of expression with that found in other civilisations. Yet it does not take him long to stray back into questionable historical contentions
But unlike the Soviet infantry and armor doctrine of the 1960s and 1970s, which had changed little from World War II our new tactics are not static. We are just as likely to see armored divisions on the ground in Iraq, storms of cruise missiles in Lebanon, or covert assassination teams in Somalia or the return once again of the Afghani mode depending on the changing nature of our adversaries.
Here Hanson just does not know what he is talking about. Soviet infantry and armour doctrines evolved hugely after World War II and in the 1970’s, US doctrines might as well have been drawn up with the intention of maximising the Soviet advantages in combat mobility. Soviet military theories very accurately assessed US strengths and weaknesses, leading to the Operational Manoeuvre Group (OMG) doctrines. US Army reforms came belatedly in the 1980’s to address the weakness of US operational level doctrine compared to that of the Soviets (i.e. the introduction of ‘Air/Land Battle’ doctrines aimed at reducing the large Soviet advantage in combat mobility).
I cringe somewhat at Hanson using ‘covert assassination teams in Somalia’ as an example of American military superiority. What the last US adventure in Somalia proved was something rather different. As any NRA activist will tell you, never underestimate a pissed off armed civilian population. Sure, high tech and well trained US troops can probably kill a low tech bunch of Somalians at a ratio of 100:1… but at the end of the day, it was the Somali ‘warlords’ who held the field and watched the US retreat, because they, unlike the hideous Taliban in Afghanistan, commanded the genuine support of their population. It would be hard to overstress the importance of understanding the implications of this.
I came away with the impression that September 11 has supercharged rather than short-circuited this multifaceted engine of America. What were bin Laden, the mobs in Pakistan and the West Bank, the nuts in al Qaeda, and their opportunistic supporters in the Middle East drinking? We shall never know, but their attack on a country such as this was pure lunacy. Thank God we do not have to fight anyone like ourselves.
Yes, that is quite true and in fact much of Hanson’s article is spot on. However I do worry that in the wave of understandable euphoria following the destruction of the Taliban and the scattering of Al Qaeda, that an air of unrealistic expectation and ill conceived adventurism may replace the air of unrealistic pessimism so beloved of the dismal and irrational Buellers and Fisks.
One of the most appealing things about working with Libertarian Samizdata is the opportunity to show the many faces of the libertarian philosophy and the people behind it. Libertarians aren’t a bunch of humourless ideologues who spend all their time pondering pin heads. We’re real people who love liberty because we love life and desire to live it to the fullest. We play music, do sports, ride bikes, drive fast cars, ski, fly airplanes, get drunk, fall in love, go to churches or not, read porn or not, and believe it or not, party until dawn with our non-libertarian friends… without ever once mentioning politics.
If you come to us looking for an enlightenment or a revealed truth you will be very disappointed. Rather than answers, we give you questions; rather than proscriptions we tell you to think and to take responsibility for your own life. Of course if you do find comfort in some strange -ism you might find us a community tolerant of whatever strangeness you believe… so long as you do it peacefully.
Libertarianism does have core ideas and core beliefs. No one can be a libertarian without accepting the noncoercion principle. You must accept that I have a right to do anything I damn well please so long as I do not threaten you with direct violence to person or property and I use resources acquired honestly to do whatever it is I wish to do. I can’t use force, fraud or theft to take from you what I “need” for my lifestyle. I am both free to act as I please and wholly responsible for the results. If you are certain I’m a damn fool and will probably kill myself, you are free to attempt to talk me out of my bad behavior if you can get me to listen voluntarily. Otherwise you will have to wait until reality teaches me its’ harsh lessons. If the time comes when I am ready and contrite enough to beg for help and if you are of good enough heart to assist, you are free to do so.
Alternatively, if I attempt to steal from you or threaten you, it is your right to use whatever force is necessary to stop me even if it means my death. Libertarians are not pacifists. You are always in the right when you defend your person and property and loved ones against those who would do them harm.
Understanding non-coercion as an idea is the simple part. But ideas are fuzzy things when brought across the dream bridge to the physical world, a world in which maniacs fly airplanes into office buildings. What action does a libertarian take against a threat like that? The extremes are easy to judge. Few libertarians would agree that we should have had troops in Somalia or Panama. Most would agree that September 11th, 2001 and December 7th, 1941 were sufficient causus belli for any society, libertarian or otherwise. Some don’t and that is their right.
There are numerous philosophical strands that wend their way through the space of ideas and dump their passengers in pretty much the same location. If one thinks of ideas as points in space, then libertarians are those who are neighbors in that thought-space. Each will have their own unique perspective on how and why they ended up there.
However different our journeys we have all ended up with similar ideas. A belief that individuals know better what is good for them than any collective; that more individual liberty leads to better, happier lives; that government intervention even with the best of intentions fails to deliver the goods; that the vast majority of the several billion humans on this planet are decent, honourable and just plain nice.
If you’re really curious about us, try taking this little quiz. It’s not perfect, it’s probably not scientific, but you’ll come away from it with a sense of what all these crazy libertarians believe in. And who knows? Maybe you’re one of us.
Back when I was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, I remember a blue neon sign across the Allegheny River from the downtown. Mostly I remember it from winters, because that was when it would already be dark when mom and I were on the bus home after one of her shopping expeditions. I don’t think it is there anymore, what with all the Northside development that has come to pass over the years, but it was a series of circled W’s: the Westinghouse emblem. Now Westinghouse was a local Pittsburgh company and absolutely anyone who grew up there knows “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse”.
One can apply the same phrase to other companies. Many companies really do have products with features you can always depend on, always be sure of.
That is why I was not terribly surprised while I was having difficulties posting stories to blogspot all day long and kept seeing this message:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
/blog_form-action.pyra, line 53
Yes, you really can be sure of some things in this life.
There have been quite a few retrospective’s recently about how badly wrong some September pundit prognostications were. Unfortuneately Samizdata was not then in existence so my thoughts were spread amongst numerous private email groups and private “conversations”. I looked at some of these this evening as I was doing some system admin and came to the conclusion that I did much better than most. The essay below is one I mailed to a small private policy discussion that sprang up shortly after September 11th and lasted only a week or two. I won’t specifiy any names but there were some interesting people on it. I also know it circulated a bit in amongst some policy types but whether anyone “in high places” read it I do not know.
I’ll leave it to you the reader to judge, but I think I deserve at least a B grade.
Wed, 19 Sep 2001 00:28:09 +0100
Comments to a small group of friends.
I’ve a few thoughts on the prosecution of this war, and although I’ve stated a number of them in assorted public lists, some may be of interest to this small selection of what appears to be rather more than average in terms of policy analysis.
One issue that is paramount to me is that we do not give an inch on the liberties we value. There is no sense prosecuting a war against a potential oppressor if we are willing to do to ourselves what he would do to us if victorious. I hear all to many calls for invasions of privacy, restrictions on civil liberties and the like. If such are indeed required for the prosecution of the war, they should be carefully limited to what is needed only for the prosecution of that war and sunsetted so that they must either be re-enacted at a specific time and unconditionally terminated with the end of the war, regardless of how much time there is left in the sunset clause.
The country has a significant libertarian and libertarian leaning component now, and if those (myself included) are to give wholehearted backing, we must know that by so doing we are not driving a stake into the heart of our liberties.
If we are to prosecut a war, we must have a clearly defined target and a clearly defined end point. The information supplied on bin Laden shows that we do indeed face a foe who is effectively one of the new nonterritorially based states. His is based on hatred and violence whereas as most of the others which are developing are not. The concept of a nation as a place with borders is blurring and will continue to blur. I, for instance, am an american by birth living in the UK/Ireland and dealing real time with a peer group that spans the globe.
So we have a new form of warfare as well. bin Laden is the first virtual state to declare war on another state. Defeating his virtual state will require application of force that is independant of borders. To do that there will have to be strong international acquiesance. And to retain support at home it will have to be clear that we are not creating a tool that will be turned to other, highly undesirable uses.
On the home front there are several battles:
* ongoing public support
* classical law enforcement and security
* the average citizen as a soldier
* dealing with the 5th column
I’ve touched on the first issue. We have to be sure we are fighting for our liberty.
The second issue is the one the press and most policy types seem to be focusing on. I probably cannot add a great deal to what has been said there.
The third issue is one that has been almost ignored. What is new about this war over others is that there are no lines. The battlefield is anywhere at any time. The enemy will attempt to chose those times and places such that miniscule force will be overwhelming force. That is what they did on Tuesday. However if we learned no other lesson on that day, we have better have learned this one;
Terrorists will always be victorious when surrounded by sheep.
That was the force multiplier that allowed them to capture an airliner despite being outnumbered 10:1 and most likely in fact *outarmed* at least 5:1 as well. Most guys carry small knives just as dangerous as the mattknives carried by the enemy; additionally, large numbers of americans are trained in martial arts.
The only reason that they succeeded in the first two cases was that what they planned to do had never been done. All previous hijackings ended in extended negotiations. The vast majority of all passengers hijacked sat quietly and eventually returned to friends and family.
But that all changed. The second flight may have found out about the WTC; the news has not told us, but I would suspect that at least one of the known cellphone calls passed the info on. However there was simply no time to react for them.
But the time line for the 4th plane was enough for the fact to be communicated and discussed. There in lies the flaw in the enemies logic. Americans are rational; but they are not sheep. The terrorists in aircraft number for died for their mistake.
This is what I would call the “citizen as soldier”. In this kind of war, the enemy will strike when and where they want, and they will not go where either military or police are in abundance. Neither will security measures at airports or elsewhere stop them from hijacking if they can get on board at all. Remember the dictum:
“There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous people”
Trained enemy can kill with their bare hands. Or with a bit of string for a garrot, or a pen through the eye into the brain, or…
If there is a single guard on the plane, he will be taken out first and then they will proceed. However the citizen is now aware that they are a soldier. Perhaps the average american is not thinking in those terms, but it is almost certainly that case that if a plane is hijacked, the passengers will assume that no matter what the hijackers say, their intent is to kill thousands. Americans will make the rational decision and they will kill the hijackers with their bare hands, even if they all die.
This is a fact proven by the new crater in Somerset.
Next on our agenda. There is a 5th column in place in American and it has had years to bury itself in the flesh of the american islamic community. It will have to be dug out.
I have suggested to some friends that moslems who are truly citizens of the US or UK or where ever should back a Fatwah against bin Laden and his organization.
If they do not do so, they prove they are either unreliable, traitorous or afraid of retribution. A movement by patriotic american moslems to make such a declaration would drive a wedge between moslems. The moslem community must be split into the part which belongs in a modern society like America, and the part which is the enemy to be defeated.
Like others before them, american Japonese, Germans and Italians, they should be offered the chance to stand up and be counted. After WTC there can be no mixed loyalties on the issue of bin Laden. Either you is with us or you ain’t.
Now to move to the international side of things. While bombs and technology and push button warfare have their place… they will only be a backup part of this war. I suggest an air cavalry able to insert divisions onto a target anywhere in the world, with whatever other assets are necessary.
They should be prepared to operate without the permission of the harboring state; they should be intended not for holding ground but for reaching, confirming and destroying (or killing) a specific objective. It also avoids many disastrous mistakes. And if the target has moved or dug in, you will know it and can act on that knowledge immediately. A cruise missile is a hell of lot dumber than the lowliest grunt, and I for one hope that it stays that way.
It does look like there is a great deal of common cause with Russia on this; there have also been been news that the Northern Alliance is willing to back us wholeheartedly; and that Turkmenistan has offered support because it would like a peaceful environment in which to develop it’s (alleged) massive oil and other resources in peace. US investment to extract those resources could change it from dirt poor to one of the wealthiest per-capita countries over night if what I have heard is indeed true.
We may also turn the Taliban’s threats of invasion to our own advantage. They may do very well in their own mountains, but the mathematics of offense are very different from those of defense. If they can be taunted into acting, they can be made to take massive casualties.
Afghanistan is a nation held captive by a (relatively) small number of fanatics. Our goal should be to work with the Russians, the NA and such to get the civil war there going against the Taliban. With the Iranian border closed to them, they have their backs to Pakistan.
So ideally we assist existing forces to install a moderate government that is sufficiently friendly to Russia to give them a stake in this, and under ideal circumstances, friendly enough to us to allow continued hit and run operations against any bin Laden or similar groups who attempt to operate in those fearsome mountains.
In other nations the battles might be entered by working with the local government, as perhaps in the Phillipines; to inserting a commando squad without that government’s knowledge to take out the bin Laden organization members manu a manu.
I see on excellent blog Inappropriate Response some very appropriate response to peevish Egyptian press claims that Muslims have not been hostile towards any particular trends in Christianity, so why all this Western hostility to some trends in Islam? Moira Breen replies
He’s right. I don’t know any Muslims who object to any particular trend in Christianity or Judaism. There are of course some Muslim governments that object to Christianity and/or Judaism period.
But hey, when Jehovah’s Witnesses or Unitarians, or our resident Christian criminal nutbars, start hijacking your planes and trashing your cities, we’ll attend to any objections you’ve got against our non-mainstream types, OK?
Yes, it is a funny thing but we do tend to get a little grumpy when people try to kill us. Obviously a flaw in Western Christian civilisation. But maybe it is something in the water in some western countries because there are Muslims who live in Britain seem to see things that way too because they are also grumpy about the whole annoying mass murder thing.
Here are yet more insights sent in by Samizdata reader George Guttman , who has not finished with us yet.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar is planning to give up? Didn’t he tell his people to fight to the death?…I guess he meant their death, not his…
Didn’t Omar want to become a martyr and cavort with 72 virgins in paradise???…Well, maybe he is gay and the virgin stuff is not for him…
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