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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Perhaps it is just sloppy editing or slipshod reporting that turns what is supposed to be a serious news article into an exercise in bladder-evacuation. Or perhaps it is meant to be funny?
Who knows? Just enjoy the results:
The leading showbiz lights of the anti-globalisation movement descended on Venice this weekend, amid complaints that the world’s oldest film festival has sold out to the Hollywood glamour industry.
Surely, if they wanted to oppose globalisation they would be better off staying put?
Actor Tim Robbins and author Naomi Klein will tomorrow launch the Global Beach, an alternative “festival” down the road from the main event, which is expected to get the backing of actor-director Spike Lee and gay indie-punk star Gregg Araki.
Oh, that Gregg Araki. Illustrious star of such notable films as…er, give me a minute here…
Both Robbins and Klein are noted critics of Hollywood mores and of the failure of actors to criticise their corporate bosses.
That may have something to do with the lear jets and limos provided by those corporate bosses.
Naomi Klein flew in yesterday morning to promote her film The Take, an account of a co-operative business set up by Argentine workers after the 2001 economic collapse, directed by radical Canadian journalist Avi Lewis.
With action, adventure, thrills, spills, ingenious plot twists, dazzling special effects and a stellar cast, ‘The Take’ is set to be the blockbuster hit of 2004. A total sell-out everywhere. Queues of film-lovers round the block. Get your tickets now!
Supporters of the Global Beach project caused disturbances at the premiere of The Terminal, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, which opened the festival on Wednesday. Members of the group parked a car disguised as a pirate ship near the red carpet, a protest, one of them claimed, against “ostentatious show of Hollywood wealth and power”.
Wow! A car disguised as a pirate ship. That is so…significant: a devastating critique of crass commercialism that will really force people to sit up and take notice.
They are not actors, they are clowns.
The hardening of the Frankenreich arteries is now so obvious that it cannot be ignored by even the likes of Will Hutton:
With all eyes fixed on the American presidential elections, the scale of the looming crisis in France and Germany has gone largely unremarked. But it may so change the political geography of Europe that British arguments for and against the EU will be made redundant. A pervasive sense of decline in both countries, only partially justified but none the less virulent, is destabilising not just the structures of the EU – but the political systems of France and Germany.
Only in the Guardian could someone express these views and still be welcomed in polite society. Having a column in that journal is like possessing a magic amulet. Say them anywhere else and you are ‘xenophobic, racist and right-wiiiiiinnnng‘.
It could all turn ugly; an unratified European Constitution, stagnating economies, new dark nationalist politics and a fragmenting European Union.
It all sounds most ominous. Britain should leave now while it still can, yes?
To imagine that Britain will be immune from this is absurd; what happens in mainland Europe will directly impact upon us as it has throughout our history. What is needed is an understanding that if European states don’t hang together they will hang separately – and that because the European Union is the best we have, we’d better make it work.
The citadel is crumbling and the best way to save ourselves is to stand beneath the battlements and wait resolutely for the boiling oil to be poured over our heads.
Mr Hutton may have a magic amulet but that does mean that he is of any use in a crisis situation.
The European Union was the only diplomatic actor to sound a dissonant note after the atrocities in Russia. Whilst the chaotic information shed some light on the indifference of the Russian bureaucracy, Bernard Bot, the Dutch Foreign Minister, requested information on how the siege was handled by the authorities. Blasted as “odious”, “insolent” and “blasphemous” by Russia, the EU has attempted to clarify this request as a mere fishing expedition for information, though it sounded critical, given its release in the aftermath of the atrocity. The BBC provide more information, including the telling note that the EU has adopted their methods by deleting the request from their official statement. Of course, the BBC provide a voice for the “insolent” Europeans.
But Andreas Gross, the Council of Europe’s rapporteur on Chechnya, told the BBC he thought Mr Bot actually had a point.
“The Dutch minister was totally right because what we just heard on the news, that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to enforce more security troops, he wants to have a new crisis management, that’s not the point,” he said.
“They have to understand what the people are who do not share their own point of view. And this is a political task they have to learn.
“And in this sense the Dutch minister made a very, very soft attempt to make them think about this, too,” he added.
This is part of a telling pattern in the European Union’s response to terror and genocide. There are no sanctions targeted on the regime of North Korea. The EU webpage on external relations with the DPRK shows that no action has taken place since 2002 and that Brussels has proved unable to condemn a regime that shoots, starves and gasses its own citizens in a slow-motion Terror. The entire relationship is a transfer of funds from the European taxpayer to the Korean communists for varied “humanitarian” projects. One detects the shade of Palestine wagging a finger, as another regime with the blood of innocents, is partially propped up with Euros.
The Russians may have shown a traditional indifference to human life. In Europe, it is clothed with the sweet stench of hypocrisy.
Much has been and will be written about the appalling tragedy of Beslan school and its children held hostage by Chechen terrorists that came to a bloody conclusion two days ago. What I want to remind the western observers just how different the world is on the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. There is much disregard for human life and for individual suffering or fate. We often complain here about the state’s natural tendency to override the individual and point out where the balance between the two needs to be redresses. But what happens in Russia (and many other non-Western countries) is beyond the finely tuned scale we apply to western governments.
The contempt in which the Russian government and the ruling class in Russia hold individual life is profound. Perhaps contempt is the wrong word since one would need to recognise something has value in the first place in order to deny it to someone out of contempt for them. Individual human life is not intrinsically valued by the Russian society. The lives of the family members, relatives and the loved ones, of course. But it is not expected that the faceless collective will or even should take heed of others’ suffering.
My brother and his two children are in there. His little girl, Lera, is three. His son, Shamil, is nine. They really didn’t have to do this. To storm the building. With all those children inside. They shouldn’t have done it. But they are the government and we are just ordinary people.
This was a cry of one of the relatives waiting outside the besieged school when the Russian troops starting firing their machine guns. Whether he was right or wrong on the Spetsnaz tactics in particular or hostage situations in general is beside the point, it was the acceptance of his or anybody’s powerlessness in the face of the Government.
The ruthlessness of the Russian state and its President is echoed by Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6, in his opinion piece.
Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn’t even bother to interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: “It went to the bottom.” About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.
The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don’t move him in the least. He regards them as “normal wastage” – a hardly noticeable price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember all too well from my own days in the organisation.
Western governments offered sympathy to Mr Putin and the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the massacre had tested his faith. But the European Union called for an explanation of how this tragedy could have happened. The Russians described the request as blasphemous.
For once, I agree with the Russians. Sort of.
There is an interesting article in The Telegraph, which is a translated reprint of an article which appeared in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. The author is Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel and he gives a cri de coeur about the state of the Muslim world:
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim. What a pathetic record. What an abominable “achievement”. Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?
[…]
We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.
We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.
I can only hope this sort of discussion sweeps across the Islamic world. Western civilisation has so much introspection going on that some commentators regularly vanish up their own arses during absurd Sartre-esque displays of posturing left wing ‘analysis’ of bourgeois capitalism or the ‘root causes’ of why some people actually set out to slaughter other people’s children. What we really need is muslims doing a great deal more public soul searching with frank discussions of modern terrorism: without recourse to the word ‘but’…
To initiate terrorism is to justify your very own apocalypse, many more Arabs and Chechens are going to die than Americans, Europeans and Russians, because our ability to carry out terrorism is greater than theirs.
– Dalmaster
The situation in Beslan in Russia has ended in predictable horror. Whilst Russian behaviour in Chechnya has never been a model of surgical restraint, I have yet to hear plausible accounts of Russian forces rounding up children, blowing them up and then shooting survivors as they try to flee.
The horrors of September 11 2001 have receded into being little more than a ‘televisual curiosity’ in many circles in the USA. However the Russians have been getting regular reminders about the nature of the enemy with whom they are at war, an enemy by no means unconnected from Al Qaeda.
In Beslan, one of the surviving terrorists was kicked to death by enraged civilians after being dragged out of an ambulance and I suspect this is just a hint of what is to come on a far greater scale. The political pressure on Vladimir Putin to move against anyone even suspected of sympathies with Chechen Islamists will now be overwhelming.
Coming on the heels of the destruction of two Russian domestic airliners, a great many Russians will probably see the extermination of Chechnya as simply a matter of survival and I fear Chechen innocents will be given about as much consideration as those Chechen terrorists gave the innocent Russian children of Beslan.
I am attending a wedding tomorrow, of the daughter of a school friend (the other daughter is my god daughter), and this got me thinking about Muslims and Muslim weddings, which are, or so I have been persuasively told, not like our weddings.
When we marry, we marry outside our family, and our weddings are thus gatherings involving and uniting two families, and what is more two families who probably had nothing to do with one another until the bride from one and the groom from the other brought them together. Our marriage customs are, in the patois of the anthropologists, “exogamous”. We marry outside the clan.
Muslims, on the other hand, by custom, marry within their own clans, and a Muslim wedding is thus a gathering of and a celebration of just the one family, together with its various friends and hangers-on. Arab marriage customs are “endogamous”.
As one of my favourite intellectuals – a French anthropologist called Emmanuel Todd, known to the Anglo-Internet mostly for his bizarre opinion that the Euro-economy is racing ahead of the US economy, but better than that at anthropology, trust me – puts it, in his brilliant book (which fully lives up to its amazingly confident title) The Explanation of Ideology:
From Morocco to Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, a single family form dominates, its unique trait being preferential marriage between paternal parallel-cousins. Typical of the Muslim world and not simply of the Arab one, this characteristic can be observed in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and among Berbers of Algerian or of Morocco. …
This does not apply to all Muslim societies, because Islam conquered some non-endogamous societies on its perimeter in its early time of military supremacy. But it does apply to the Muslim heartland.
Here in the West, alliances and cooperative ventures that go beyond mere clan membership are commonplace. You may not like, for example, the Labour Party, but at least its upper echelons are not confined to people who are all related to one another. Yet Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take one particularly famous example, was ruled by a clan all of whom lived in one town, and old habits die hard.
One result (among many) of this peculiar fact is a society in which them and us remain permanently divided. Islam, in Islamic minds, is irreconcilably divided from the rest of us, and similar them/us divisions afflict Muslim society itself. We in the West indulge in plenty of themming and ussing, so to speak. I am, after all, doing it in this posting. But the Islamic version of this habit is now, I think it is fair to say, far more absolute.
This could have been a very, very long posting, but I will keep it short and just say that I think this explains a lot.
George Will, dorky docent of American conservatism, detects a return to the libertarian stylings of Barry Goldwater at the Republican national convention.
Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism within the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism – muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural question – is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person reaching the party’s highest echelons.
For structural and probably cultural reasons, it is highly unlikely that America will ever have anything other than a two-party system. For this reason, pragmatic libertarians will have to learn how to work the two-party system. For all their manifest shortcomings, the Republicans seem to be a more hospitable environment at this point.
But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives — libertarians and religious skeptics, among others — feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs — Republicans in name only — did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats’ and media’s caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.
For all the rending of garments coming from the Democrats and the secular left, I see remarkably little in the way of actual state action implementing the allegedly theocratic cravings of the social conservatives since their rise to influence in the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with them on a number of points, but a careful reading tends to show that a great deal of what they want falls into the area of civil society, not state action. They have, of course, been infected to some degree with the virus of statism, but cries of alarm from the statist left that the Christian conservatives are attempting to implement state-mandated mind and social controls smack more of projection than anything else. Much of the social/cultural conservative agenda is defensive and reformist – they are animated by a desire to roll back what they see as a state-facilitated and noxious cultural of radical relativism and secular radicalism. Even their current flagship issue – the “defense of marriage” – boils down to preventing change from being imposed by state organs without democratic approval.
Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.
ADDENDUM: A few additional thoughts whilst standing in line for lunch.
In discourse, terminology is destiny. As a legal drafter, I always go first and foremost to the defined terms of a contract, regulation or policy. In bashing out the paragraph above on cultural or social conservatives, I mistakenly adopted some of Will’s terminology.
The bugaboo of the left (and their organ the Democrats) in the US is the “religious right,” and my comments in the paragraph above are directed primarily to this bugaboo. Aside from religiously driven moral concerns, though, the major driver of real social/cultural conservatism in this country is the puritan streak that has been handed down through the ages as the antithesis of the hedonistic American thesis.
In recent decades, this puritanical impulse has been mated to the statist impulse, yielding such unholy offspring as the radical environmental movement, the anti-smoking crusade, the nascent anti-fat crusade, and of course the drug war. You will note that the puritans reside comfortably all across the political spectrum in America, and have had a much greater impact on state activities than religious devotees. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats has really made any effort to take on the puritans, who in many ways have become a major bulwark for the cult of the state.
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
– Oscar Wilde
The mighty Dissident Frogman is in typically excellent form and has produced a marvellous gonzo masterpiece to help John Kerry get a better grasp of geography… so go to The Frogman’s Propaganda Bureau, scroll down to the bottom of the article, click the red button and find out just where the hell is Cambodia?
Since Hollywood studio bosses are famously averse to ‘downbeat endings’ for their movies, perhaps it was their clandestine intervention that resulted in this script change:
Kidnappers in Iraq have handed two French journalists to another group said to be prepared to free them, one of the men’s editors told the BBC.
The second group, said to be from the Iraqi opposition, is “in favour of releasing them”, Charles Lambroschini, Le Figaro deputy editor, told BBC News.
France’s foreign minister said earlier that both men were alive and well.
The kidnappers had linked the men’s fate to France’s move to ban Islamic headscarves from schools.
No, probably not the handywork of Hollywood executives but a rather surprise ‘ending’ nonetheless given the grisly fate that has been meted out to just about every other hostage in Iraq.
If (as it appears) these two men are to be sent back home to their families in one piece, then I am very pleased. There are plenty of people in this world to whom I bear an extraordinary degree of ill-will but these two French hacks are not among them. However, I find myself unable to dismiss the question of whether there ever really was any risk that they would end up six inches shorter.
When Hamas, Hezbollah and a bevy of otherwise insanely violent Caliphascists are falling over themselves to denounce the kidnappers and call for the hostages release, you know that this is not business as usual. There could be any number of explanations, but the sudden materialisation of a ‘caring, sharing’ side is, I submit, the least likely of them.
Events may overtake this and I may yet be forced to recant, although that is hardly an important matter. But, until then, the impression I have formed is that this was not so much a hostage crisis as an elaborate pantomime.
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