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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Samizdata reader Jim Muchow answers my question about why Tony Blair does not do anything forceful in Zimbabwe
In hopes of resolving your befuddlement as to why Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones, I refer you to your post Our good friends, the Police further down the page.
If Blair (or the British government in general) can’t or won’t protect landowners at home, why would they want to protect British citizens in foreign countries?
Wonderful site, by the way. It is refreshing to read commentary by people who DON’T have their heads up their ass. And using the list of links to other similar sites, I see I stumbled onto their nest.
JM – I used to be disgusted, [but] now I try to be amused
He has a point there.
More, that is, of high-handed Tory paternalism on display here in the Telegraph.
The Tories are not a part of the solution, they are a part of the problem. Oh and by the by, would anyone like to bet that, in the event that the Tories got into power again, their Eurosceptic position would be jettisoned as well?
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
SIR- It is perhaps not surprising to read of the rapid increase in armed crime (report, Jan.3 )
Since the authorities have banned the legal ownership of guns, the market in illegal arms has been stimulated and is no doubt very strong. Also, the treatment meted out by the authorities to people such as Tony Martin and the exhortations of the police to the public to yield passively to armed assault have given criminals the message that the public – unarmed whether it likes it or not – can be expected to be easy targets
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it
In response to an e-mail from a reader that asked me “Why do you distrust the state so much? How else do you expect order to be maintained and property protected?”… I present the following gem from the Daily Telegraph:
A LANDOWNER was arrested by police he had summoned to help him after more than 60 “ravers” had broken open a padlocked gate and started a party in one of his barns.
[…]
“It was like being a farmer in Zimbabwe,” Mr Benton told Radio 4’s Today programme. “The police stood outside the gate while inside people were smashing up my property and they were doing nothing about it.”
Does that answer your question?
Fellows, read Stuart Reid in the Monday, December 31 edition of the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Party supporting daily, for an example of how not all of the most idiotic remarks on September 11 and the aftermath have come from the hard left. This is a good case of how some of the remarks emanating from the paleo-right have echoes of “they had it coming”, only in this case the sins being punished are sexual rather than to do with capitalism. Reid is deputy editor of the Spectator. Let’s hope his editor, Boris Johnson, finds a decent replacement.
Receiving junk snail-mail and spam e-mails can certainly be irritating, particularly when it is yet another pyramiding scam/’teen-slutathon’/debt consolidation/shyster solicitation/weepy group-hug chain letter or whatever the annoyance-of-the-week is. As a result the urge to legislate over what is frankly a pretty trivial matter is on the agenda on both sides of the Atlantic.
Matthew Edgar wrote a worthwhile piece on this as it pertains to the USA. In Britain, ever since 1832, Election Rolls have been for sale and have been used by marketing professionals as a source of information and ‘list cleaning’ ever since. In this age of spam, we sometimes forget that marketing is an essential aspect of capitalist economics. Restricting it with regulations that go beyond anti-fraud measures adds unnecessary costs that we, the consumer, inevitably end up paying in the end via more expensive products.
Under the absurd British Data Protection Act, the recording of marketing data has been made subject to ever more bureaucratic red tape and imposed cost. This has made Election Rolls a particularly valuable source of reliable data. Yet now there are plans to require local authorities to produce a severely edited version of the Electoral Roll, which will be available for sale, whilst the unexpurgated version will be available only to the government and for ‘election purposes’… in other words, parties will have unrestricted access to your personal information in order to market their political candidates, yet people who want to sell you something you might actually need are told to get stuffed. If I dislike a piece of junk mail I can bin it; if I an annoyed by e-mail spam I can delete it… oh how I wish we could remove the intrusions of our political ‘masters’ so easily.
Prominent Libertarian Alliance member Sean Gabb has just produced a very useful and quite lengthy missive called Arguments Against British Membership of the Euro.
Also by Sean Gabb, see A Case Against the European Union and Uniting Europe without the Union
Highly recommended to anyone who refuses to accept the accelerating rate at which authoritarian European principles and institutions are being forced on British society. What is being done by our ‘masters’ with breathtaking extra-parliamentary manoeuvres in the name of European integration would, in less dissembling times, have been called treason.
On the evening of September 23rd 1999, Harry Stanley, a 46 year old Grandfather, was returning to his home in Hackney, East London. He had spent the afternoon at his brother’s house helping him to repair a coffee table
Harry took one of the table legs home with him to work on. He wrapped it up in a plastic bag
On the way home, he stopped off at a pub for a drink. As he left one of the other patrons rang the police and reported ‘an Irishman carrying a shotgun’. (Harry was actually Scottish). The oblivious Harry continued on his journey home until he was some 50 yards from his front door when two policeman from the SO19 Armed Response Unit opened fire on him. One bullet hit Harry in the temple and he died instantly
Today, after a 12 month long enquiry, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the police officers who carried out the shooting acted in ‘reasonable self-defence’ and would not face any charges
In the absence of a private prosecution by the Stanley family, we will never know quite what occured on that evening and why Harry is dead as police and witness statements and reports will remain filed away in the CPS cabinets. However, one doesn’t need to be privvy to these documents to ask some pertinent questions about why Harry Stanley was so ruthlessly gunned down outside his home
Harry was neither a terrorist nor a criminal and it seems highly unlikely that he would not have responded to some shouted warning. It seems even less likely that, confronted with the police, he would have tried to run or fight it out given that he was recovering from surgery for cancer. Is it all plausible that, acting on an unsubstantiated allegation, armed officers made a decision not to take any chances and simply executed him?
We shall never know for the officers in question will not stand trial. What should stand trial though is the policy of victim disarmerment which has left Britain with a duopoly of fire-power between state agents and criminals. If you’re not one you must be the other and holding something that could possibly be interpreted as a weapon gives said state agents a carte blanche to rub you out and call it ‘self-defence’. After all, as far as they are concerned you must be a dangerous criminal, right
The British police have advertised the fact that anyone found in a public place with a gun or something that looks like a gun will be met with lethal force. But such is the depth of anti-gun hysteria that this policy of extra-judicial execution is not only tolerated but demanded and will clearly be acted upon in the event of rumour/allegation/sniff/hint/outright lie. No chances are to be taken and no questions are to be asked
For us in Britain it is now too late to change this state of affairs but for those Americans reading this please remember Harry Stanley when the victim-disarmers tell you that guns are dangerous. Tell them that over here in London, table-legs can get us killed by the very people we pay to protect us
I have already had some peeved e-mails saying I am overstating things by calling Britain a Police State. Well, just yesterday Britain agreed to extradition to any country in the European ‘Union’ simply on the order of a foreign judge or magistrate. On nothing more than their say so that the person in question is a suspect in some crime, you can find yourself arrested and taken by force from your own country. This is regardless of wether or not the alleged crime is even an offence in Britain. You have NO recourse to a British court to prevent your extradition.
Thus British people can now find themselves in courts in which there is a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, under the Napoleonic legal systems that prevail in most of Europe. They will also be without any protection of habeas corpus. Is it any wonder the British state has ensured its population of subjects are well and truly disarmed? Given the option of shooting it out with British police attempting to serve a Greek arrest warrant on me or trying my luck with a corrupt Greek court answering to an establishment that sponsors domestic terrorism, that is not a choice with an obvious answer. In fact by accusing the Greek establishment of actually supporting the N-17 terrorist group, I am probably breaking Greek law and could soon be theoretically liable for arrest here in London.
Another e-mail questioned how any country with a free press could be regarded as a police state. Well, Britain has a free press only if you ignore the Official Secrets Act,the variety of Race Relations Acts and the fact the law will soon prohibit inciting ‘religious hatred’. Many of the anti-Islamic post found on numerous blogs will soon be illegal in Britain. There is no British ‘First Amendment’. And does no one remember the farcical situation of the TV media being prohibited from broadcasting the words of Sinn Fein/IRA leader Gerry Adams? The media responded by showing his image and having an actor dub over the words he was speaking. Free press? Sure, just so long as you don’t say things the state does not approve of. The capacity for self-delusion amongst British people never ceases to amaze me.
The fact the astonishing raft of repressive British laws is only lightly enforced (at the moment) just shows that the liberties of British society is now at the sufferance of the state, rather than by right. Given that it was largely British legal concepts that underpin the American legal system, this should serve as a salutary lesson to people in the USA as to what happens when a culture of liberty is allowed to decay… and please, I do not want e-mails from Americans telling me “Oh, but we have our wonderful constitution.” I have two words for you: forfeiture laws. So much for the 4th and 6th Amendments.
I am a great admirer of Western Civilisation and particularly the Anglosphere’s traditions of liberty. In many ways, we can see very encouraging trends as the communications revolution drives economic globalisation ever wider. Our ability to freely associate and trade outside the bounds of the state grow almost daily. Yet there are also trends in the other direction. As governments lose their largely illusionary ability to ‘control’ national economies, they are resorting to other means of applying power and coersion. Our liberties, regardless of where we live, do not come from judges or democratically ‘legitimised’ politicians or from a sanctified scrap of 200 year old paper. They come from us ourselves and are made real only by our willingness to refuse to let ourselves be the ‘things’ of any state. The best, no, the ONLY defence for liberty is a culture that values it and will fight for it by whatever means are required. There is no other way and there never has been.
We received an e-mail from Samizdata reader Kevin Connors asking why we do not focus more on the dire state of civil liberties in Britain and pointing us at an article in Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (aptly known as RIP) is one of the most draconian Big Brother surveillance laws of its type in the western world and that came into effect in October 2000. Not only is it intentionally worded as to be largely unintelligible (thus providing ‘wiggle room’ for whatever the state wishes to do), but it reverses the burden of proof when the state demands crypto-keys. The key holder, not the state, is required to prove they do not have access to them if they are demanded or face two years in jail.
Whilst on the subject of surveillance, Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in closed circuit television (CCTV), with more per capita than that ‘bastion’ of civil liberties, Israel, which at least has the excuse of a genuine and demonstrable daily security threat.
This government is also attempting to restrict the automatic right to trial by jury. This is one of the fundamental ancient bedrocks of British liberty and yet it is under attack for reasons of crude utility. Although there is opposition to this astonishing assault, it is a testament to British apathy that people are not rioting on the streets at the mere prospect of such a huge diminution of a basic underpinning of liberty.
And civilian gun ownership in Britain? Oh, don’t get me started on that monstrous tale of confiscation and repression. That deserves an article of it’s own.
An article in the Sunday Times today suggests that Tony Blair is exasperated that his wish to see a major deployment of ground troops to Afghanistan is being ignored by George Bush.
Meanwhile, Blair has had no support from America in his efforts to increase the coalition forces on the ground. He is said by military sources to have become “utterly frustrated” that the US “cannot see that it can achieve its tactical goals more quickly is the military, humanitarian and diplomatic strands of this operation run in tandem”. Washington is “myopically focused on Bin Laden and the Taliban”, the sources said.
Sorry Tony, but whilst you and your new best friend George make a fine couple at photo opportunities, there is no disguising that there are two fundamentally different world views at work here.
Tony Blair is the leader of a reformed socialist party who regards it as axiomatic that the role of the state is being ‘my brother’s keeper’. By extension Blair wants to take up ‘The White Man’s burden’ in Afghanistan. He wants stout and resolute British soldiers to prevent those messy Afghans from sliding into barbarism in the post-Taliban order. He presides over a nation which has a realistic view of the realities of war and has fought its last few rather well. As a result, the general British public has quite a high tolerance of combat casualties.
George Bush is the leader of a corporatist capitalist party with a significant anti-corporatist and anti-interventionist wing. He has support for a war of retaliation and the destruction of Al Qaeda and anyone who stands between the USA and Al Qaeda. Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties, and very little interest in open ended military commitments. Whilst images of women in Kabul walking unmolested without burqas causes Americans entirely justified satisfaction, few seriously think that is why their airforces and special ops teams are killing people in their names.
Blair is not just wrong, he is dangerously wrong. An absolute prerequisite for coherent military operations is having clear and unambiguous goals. The Americans have set themselves exactly that: the destruction of Al Qaeda and any who give them succour. What Tony Blair is doing is applying his fuzzy socialist logic to a very simple strategic question and attempting to turn clarity into ambiguity. This is not a peacekeeping operation, it is not a nation building operation, it is not a humanitarian operation, it is a war against Taliban/Al Qaeda in reprisal for the mass murder of civilians in America: to think anything else is just a dangerous distraction. As I have been saying, we simply have no business trying to civilize Afghanistan at bayonet point, not only it is wrong, it simply will not work. Fortunately it seems that Bush and his advisors are able to see that too.
Some habits are just too hard to break. It seems that the British government has more in mind for Afghanistan than the Americans. From Fox News we hear:
A cabinet minister said: “The Americans are interested only in trying to get bin Laden and push the Taliban further back. Tony’s view is that now is the moment to get in there, both in terms of humanitarian aid and the diplomatic front.”
He really should know better. England, like Rome before it and the Russians after it has already gotten its’ nose bloodied in Afghanistan. You simply cannot go into that place and tell them how to live their lives, even if they are making a total bollocks of it. They’ll stop killing each other long enough to run you out of their hills. Then they will get right back to their millennia old sport… of killing each other.
Every child should read Kipling as a part of their education just so they will understand and avoid remaking this mistake. Afghanistan has long been known for its’ quaint local ways of encouraging foriegn armies to go conquer someone else. I remember reading about the days in which the British took their turn learning the same harsh lesson.
Soldiers were told to keep the last bullet for themselves rather than be captured. In those days the Afghan tribeswomen went out after the battles to attend to the wounded. That attention is rumoured to have been rather unpleasant.
Now true, that is a century past and the world is much more civilized today. Would you believe a teensy bit nicer? How about…
What the Afghans do in their own country is absolutely none of our business so long as they don’t harbour those who would kill members of our tribes. The American’s have got it right. Vengeance against those who kill your own is something the Afghan tribesmen relate to and respect. Our lads will get along just fine riding with them and sharing kills of the al Qaeda foreign devils. However… if we start telling Afghans how to live it will just get us into trouble.
Let’s not go there.
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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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