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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Paul Joyal, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin has been shot in the USA. Does this remind you of anything?
Of course it could just be another random street crime, but if not and this turns out to be another (hopefully just attempted) assassination of an overseas political enemy living in the west, then it is clearly well past time to start loudly demanding the state does one of the few legitimate things it taxes us for… protecting us all from the armed servants of a foreign government.
Could it be time to start threatening Putin in the most literal way? If he keeps killing people in the west then not only should Russian embassies be closed forthwith, those expensive security services we pay for should start motivating the Russian security services to behave via whatever means come to mind. I can certainly think of a few.
I will watch with interest to see what information comes out about this case. It could, after all, have just been a robbery.
Vladimir Putin, the former KGB member who runs Russia as if the Soviet Union was still alive and well, does not like the fact the US is prone to take military action outside its own borders, claiming it is causing a new arms race.
Arms race? With who? China is certainly arming itself but sclerotic Russia? I would love to see some figures for Russian arms procurement over the last ten years to get some insight into the true strength of Russia as a serious military power. The Russian GDP is about $1.7 trillion… i.e. slightly less than Italy… and does anyone really loose much sleep over what the President of Italy thinks?
Still, it seems a bit perverse for a man who seems keen to sell technology to Iran to be complaining about all those things the pesky Yanks are doing which are not in his interests.
Last night I and several other assorted bloggers and Samizdatistas dined at Chateau Perry, at a gathering hosted by Jackie D. The guest of honour was Mr Squander 2. Of course we all asked after Mrs and Baby Squander 2, and the good news is that mother and child are doing much better.
For me the most memorable thing that got said last night was when Mr Squander 2 told of how, during the Brezhnev era, poor old Mr Brezhnev apparently consumed an annoyingly large amount of Soviet and in particular KGB man hours trying to get various of his minions to answer for him the question: “Who runs capitalism?”
Presumably so that they could take him/her/it out, in some way or another, and score a cheap and quick victory in the Cold War, although sadly that wasn’t part of the story as told last night.
Or, maybe the idea was for Brezhnev then to able to sit down with this controlling mastermind, and to ask him/her/it: “How can we do it?”
Knowing the damn Bolsheviks, it could well have been both. First find out how they do it, then kill or enslave them all, starting where it makes most sense, with whoever is in charge.
Anyway, (1): Heh. And (2) does anyone know anything more about this? I tried googling: Brezhnev “Who runs capitalism?”, but that yielded nothing. It is such a great story that it is the kind of thing people believe because they want to believe it. I know I want to. But, is there any truth in it?
It is fair to say not many Englishmen live in the more remote parts of Russia. Thus when someone gets an e-mail from an Englishman called Tim Newman, living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, who is an oil business professional discussing the Royal Dutch Shell’s operations, and there is a Tim Newman working for Shell in that part of the world, it will be one and the same person, right?
Nope.
Take a look at this for a real life comedy of errors.
A great thing about capitalism is that people pay for the consequences of their own stupidity. So staying on the topic of Russia as per my last article, I have no sympathy with Shell Oil now that they are getting shafted by the Russian state after making vast investments in that country. The word of the Russia government (even more so than most governments) is worth less than nothing. As a result, anyone who makes agreements with that government and puts big money into a place which has for years clearly been a kleptocratic sink hole is the author of their own misfortune when things inevitably go pear-shaped.
So now that odd organisation Interpol has joined the ever more multi-national hunt for Alexander Litvinenko’s assassins. This all completely pointless. If the Kremlin or anyone else had wanted Alexander Litvinenko dead with no one knowing who had killed him, they would have simply have hired some thug in London to push him under a bus or stick a knife in him. But no… instead the murderers chose an absurdly sophisticated method of assassination by using an exotic toxic isotope only available to someone with access to the resources of a nuclear industry. The conclusion to draw from this is screamingly obvious: Vladimir Putin wants his critics to know who killed Litvinenko in order to frighten them into silence. I can see no other plausible explanation.
So why keep pretending it is a mystery who murdered this man? He was killed in London by agents of the Russian government and as a result the only discussion needed is how to react to a foreign government using violence to decide who can say what about people in Britain. At least the sort of response directed at Iran in the aftermath of the Salman Rushdi affair must be implemented. At the very least.
A BBC journalist this morning informs us that the death in highly suspicious circumstances of a former Russian KGB official could lead to a “potential diplomatic incident” between Britain and Russia.
You think?
I must admit that the stuff about the Russian poisoning story is reminding me of when the Cold War was pretty chilly. It is also, its perverse sort of way, a reminder of what the world was like when a former naval officer, journalist and stockbroker began to churn out thrillers at his Jamaican holiday home back in 1953. Casino Royale, the first and one of the best James Bond adventures has been turned into a film that yours truly will be seeing on Thursday night. I admit that when Daniel Craig was first cast in the role, I had my doubts, but the reviews so far have been mostly favourable. Craig, even though he looks like a well-groomed football hooligan, seems to have conveyed the darker side of Fleming’s creation, showing that Bond is a bit more than a dude in a suit, as well as keep most of the bits that cinema viewers have come to expect, such as amazing stunts, special effects and the odd witty one-liner.
Putin, a former member of the KGB, became the leader of Russia in 1999, eight years after the fall of the USSR. Would anyone have considered it acceptable for a former member of the Gestapo to be leading West Germany in 1953?
– David Emami
The attempt assassination in London of a critic of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, almost certainly carried out by the Russian intelligence services, highlights that it is long past time to stop treating Russia as ‘just another European government’.
But there is another rather interesting twist to this story that I did not spot in the media yesterday, courtesy of the UKIP.
Update: sadly it is not longer an ‘attempted’ assassination.
The senior Russian central bank official who was shot dead this week was a prominent campaigner against money-laundering. No matter what one thinks of some of the more oppressive laws against money transfers – as a libertarian, I find a lot of such laws counter-productive and intrusive of privacy – there is no doubt that Russia has a terrible reputation for financial skulduggery. By going against financial hoodlums, it sadly appears this guy signed his death warrant.
Funnily enough, this story does not appear to have caused much of a stir outside the business sections and some of the foreign bits of the press. I find that a bit odd, if not chilling. A senior central bank official gets murdered. Imagine the reaction if a top official working for the Bank of England or the Fed got killed.
Russia has a long, long way to go before it becomes a place in which civilised people will want to do business.
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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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