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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Belmont Club has a couple of fascinating entries that mesh well with my last post on the tranzi menace. Collect the set!
I was particularly struck by the Club’s take on the immediate post-9/11 tranzi reaction:
The curious antipathy of the Germany and France towards unilateral American action following September 11 was driven not by a sudden revulsion for American culture, but by the loss of something they deeply coveted: the means to exercise supranational police power under the aegis of international treaties. In the days following Osama Bin Laden’s attack on New York, hopes ran high in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, that America in her grief would deposit her strength in the hands of the “international community” who, thus armed, promised to put a stop to terrorism and uproot its causes. To provide the violins, the capitals of Europe expressed the utmost sympathy for the American loss and deluged embassies with flowers and letters of support. “We are all Americans now”. For a moment, matters hung on edge, the most critical instant in modern history. Then the haze passed, and America shook the expectant, extended hand and said “I’ll take care of it myself”. The response was immediate and incandescent. The internationalists rounded on America with as much hatred as the sympathy they had professed mere moments before.
As always, Belmont Club’s full analysis of the prospects for the future shape of international order are worth pondering. The Club posits a bottom-up New World Order founded on common law that contrasts sharply with the top-down command-and-control vision of the transnational progressives.
The Toronto Star story is here.
Oh dear. It seems that they have a privacy “czar” in those parts. I don’t think of czarism as being especially good for the rights of the citizenry, do you? Be careful you don’t ever get accused of violating it, no matter how sensibly or blamelessly.
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House, 2002
The author, a (presumably ex-) CIA operative, has written this book, published in the Autumn of 2002, as an advocate of “regime change” in Iraq, listing the various alternative options, five in all: Containment, Deterrence, Covert Action, The Afghan Approach” and (the preferred one) Invasion (p. xxix and Part III, pp. 211-386).
Iraq’s History and Relations with the US to Gulf War I
Part I (pp. 1-108) Iraq and the United States, following a 30 page Introduction, gives a concise summary of Iraq’s history and relations with US, with greater concentration after the fall of the Shah turned Iran from a Western bulwark to Islamic menace. From someone regarded with repugnance, Saddam became the “man we can do business with”, which meant tolerating some ghastly atrocities in the chemical warfare line against rebel Kurds and Iran, which Saddam had rashly taken on after its armed forces had been purged by the mullahs and sabotaged by departing US and dissident technicians. If the US rescued Iraq by supplying weapons, others – China, Russia (still the USSR), France, Germany and Britain – followed suit, many selling the ingredients for the nuclear, chemical and biological programs that have subsequently given so much trouble (p. 19). Officially Saddam could claim a victory and emerged from the 1980-88 war with a large well-armed army, but with 200,000 dead, terribly in debt and his economy badly degraded. His decision to attack and occupy Kuwait for its wealth, in gold, goods and oil, was fortified by his mistaken belief that his army could defeat an American riposte, and not unassisted by misguided pacific overtures and reports by the US ambassador, Susan Glaspie – and what has happened to her, I wonder? → Continue reading: The case for invading Iraq put (before it actually happened)
The Soham murder trial is finally over and Ian Huntley is on his well deserved way to a life behind bars. Should he somehow manage a reincarnation, he will still have a second life sentence left to serve.
What I found most interesting in the news tonight was the telephone poll taken by Channel Five. 94% of the respondents believe there should be a death penalty for those who kill children. If the murders of those two lovely young children had happened in the US, such a public opinion would not seem surprising. But for the UK? My jaw may require wiring.
Now… how many children was it Saddam murdered?
The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway – their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other “international court.” I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology.
The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase – the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens.
The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year’s attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I’m sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control.
For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments.
Of course, being made answerable to the “international community” (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed.
The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician.
Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam’s fate, which got the juices flowing this morning.
GREETINGS!
LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY. MY NAME IS ALI KAMAL BISHARA AND I AM A SENIOR OFFICIAL IN THE IRAQI FINANCE MINISTRY. I WAS ALSO CHIEF ADVISER TO FORMER PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, SADDAM HUSSEIN WHO IS NOW IN THE AMERICAN CAPTIVITY.
WE ARE CONTACT YOU FOR TO ESTABLISH VERY URGENTLY A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP BUT ONLY WITH A FOREIGN PERSON OF MOST HIGH RELIABLENESS AND REPUTATION FOR WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO A FOREIGN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.
LET ME EXPLAIN: BEFORE HIS DETENTION THE PRESIDENT HUSSEIN DEPOSITED THE SUM OF $28,500,000 IN A SECRET BANK ACCOUNT IN A SAFE COUNTRY. THIS MONEY WAS OIL REVENUE WHICH I HAVE PERSONALLY CHECKED AND FOUND AS AN ACCURATE FIGURE.
NOW THE FORMER PRESIDENT HUSSEIN CAN NO LONGER ACCESS THIS MONEY WHICH IS MUCH NEEDED BY MY COUNTRY FOR DISBURSEMENT TO CHILDREN AND HOSPITALS. IF THIS MONEY IS NOT CLAIMED IT WILL BE TAKEN BY AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.
SO HUMBLY WE BEG AN HONEST AND DILIGENT PERSON TO WHO THE UNDISCLOSED BANK WILL TRANSFER THIS MONEY AS TRUSTEE. IN RETURN FOR THIS SERVICE YOU WILL KEEP 30% OF THE SUM AND REMIT TO US THE 70% REMAINING. IN ORDER THAT WE MAY COMPLETE THIS MOST SECRET TRANSACTION YOU MUST SEND TO US YOUR DETAILS BUT MOSTLY YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER AND ADDRESS SO THAT WE CAN ARRANGE THE SUBSTANTIAL MONEY TRANSFER TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.
YOU MUST REPLY QUICKLY WITH FULL DETAILS FOR US TO BE CONVICTED THAT YOU ARE GENUINE AND SINCERE.
YOURS MOST HUMBLY IN GOOD BUSINESS FAITH.
ALI KAMAL BISHARA.
On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:
A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica”, by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …
Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler’s love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little’s posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.
…I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.
See what I mean? Little continues:
Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.
This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.
Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.
That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.
By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. “The best performance I’ve ever heard, I think.”
Interesting argument by noted libertarian and Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra about the capture of Saddam. He argues that because Saddam clearly was determined to survive rather than die in a blaze of glory, this proves he was amenable to force, and therefore deterrable. In short, that we could have deterred Saddam from his monstrous ambitions and did not need to invade Iraq to foil him.
Hmmmm, as they say when confronted with arguments like this. I truly do not know. Is it really the case that a man who defied a hatful of UN resolutions, invaded Iran and Kuwait, consorted with known terrorists, and who threatened to destroy Israel was the sort of guy who could be deterred in the manner of the Soviets during the Cold War? (And by the way, recall how close to disaster we got in the Cuban missile crisis).
I honestly do not know with certainty and I very much suspect that Chris Sciabarra does not know this for sure, either. Deterrence as a foreign policy option has been the mainstay of the isolationist libertarian case since 9/11, as seen here over at Jim Henley’s blog. But the Middle East always struck me as being the place where mutually assured destruction could go horribly, horribly wrong.
And of course if deterrence did work, that still leaves the small issue of whether we could, and should have let Saddam stay in power had we been able to prove clear links between him and terror groups possibly implicated in 9/11.
The fine science fiction writer Orson Scott Card delivers a brutal, and well-deserved, rebuff to the Democratic Party.
[The Democratic candidates] platforms range from Howard Dean’s “Bush is the devil” to everybody else’s “I’ll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil.” Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.
There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.
But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might–because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure–even though by every rational measure it is not.
God knows I am no fan of the Bush administration’s domestic policies, but for the most part the Dems promise more of what I don’t like about Bush. Fine, I can deal with that, I vote for a couple of Democrats consistently because they are sterling human beings, every political system needs to have legitimately competitive parties to keep the bastards in power honest, etc.
However, the truly disturbing development from the Dem side of the aisle is that they have, in important ways, ceased to be a loyal opposition. → Continue reading: If the shoe fits . . .
USA Today reports that face-scanning technology designed to recognize registered sex offenders and missing children has been installed in a Phoenix school in a pilot project that some law enforcement and education officials hope to expand.
Two cameras, which are expected to be operational next week, will scan faces of people who enter the office at Royal Palm Middle School. They are linked to state and national databases of sex offenders, missing children and alleged abductors.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a tough-talking sheriff who has previously gained notoriety for his chain gangs and prison-issued pink underwear said:
If it works one time, locates one missing child or saves a child from a sexual attack, I feel it’s worth it.
Civil libertarians have raised red flags about the idea, pointing to potential privacy violations, and biometrics experts say facial recognition programs are not foolproof.
I made a very brief trip to Belgium at the end of a trip to Amsterdam last year. On that occasion I spent a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. My great discovery on that trip was the extraordinary quality of Belgian beer. I spent a tremendous evening in ‘t Brugs Beertje in Bruges, sometimes referred to as “the best bar in Belgium”, which on that occasion was filled with English beer buffs. (The best kind, quite possibly). On that trip, I passed Antwerp in a train, and from my guide book and what people told me, I got the impression I had missed somewhere good.
And, as it happens, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Ashford opened recently, giving me the chance to travel through Kent at over 200 km/h. I was able to both try this out and see Antwerp last weekend. I had an evening in Bruges and then a day and a half in Antwerp. The drinking in Bruges section of the trip I have documented already.
But the next day I did get to Antwerp.
 → Continue reading: Thoughts on a trip to Antwerp, and legacies of the villainy of King Leopold II
The blogosphere has been pulsating with comment and counter-comment about the dramatic events in Iraq over the weekend. My favourite comment of all on these events comes from Alice Bachini, who yesterday evening put up this posting, which I reproduce in its entirety, on her blog:
I’ve been away …
… and unable to get to any media for the past 24+ hours. Did something happen?
Said her first commenter, of just two so far (but she likes friendly comments so do go over there and add a friendly comment) said:
Alice. We love you.
Indeed.
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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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