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.
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“How and by whom do you wish to be governed?”.
Such was the simple and sharp question posed to a mostly grey-haired audience of eurosceptics at a meeting of the UK’s Bruges Group in London this evening by noted thriller writer, journalist and former RAF pilot, Frederick Forsyth. Your humble correspondent turned up to a packed audience to hear about Forsyth’s and noted EU legal expert Martin Howe on the subject of a possible new Constitution for Europe. It made for alarming hearing.
While partly overshadowed by the recent war on terror and the Iraq campaign, a group of senior European politicians and bureaucrats have been working to set up the framework for a new European Constitution, which would effectively destroy the present EU member states as sovereign self governing nations. There can be no doubt about the outcome. The result would be an undemocratic, unaccountable monster.
Here are some of the comments by Forsyth which I particularly liked: “I always took the view (during the development of the EU) that there was something to come, some finality, some point to be reached. We have now reached the stage….a single European nation state.”
Martin Howe: “It (the constitution) will destroy the sovereignty which the UK parliament ultimately possesses.” Another: “It is very difficult to see how any democratic control can be exercised over the organs envisaged in this Constitution.”
Howe said that the draft of the treaty for a new Constitution should be ready by the late summer of this year and could be ratified by member states in about two years’ time. That is right – just two years.
My impressions: well the audience for the two men last night was packed and I would imagine that about 99 percent of those present agreed with more or less everything said by the speakers. I heard no dissenting voices there.
Where does the libertarian meta-context relate to all this? After all, the desire for Britain to remain a parliamentary self-governing democracy is not the same thing as being, say, a minarchist libertarian who wants to get the State off his back. However, I would say from a pragmatic point of view, we have more chance of pushing forward our libertarian ideas within the framework of a common political entity underpinned by a shared culture and history than in a multi-lingual, multi-national behemoth headed by bureaucratic institutions with very sluggish lines of accountability. Hence I support the Bruges Group folk, even though my nose my wrinkle in distaste at some of the more reactionary language employed by some of its members.
I don’t get much impression that the issue of the EU Constitution is grabbing a lot of attention in the mainstream British media, although some of the tabloid press (let’s not sneer at them) are beginning to get on to this. No doubt Prime Minister Tony Blair is betting that he can sleepwalk us into his European nirvana. Let’s not let him get away with it.
I don’t know if I’m more impressed by these people’s tenacity in defending their position even as it circles the drain, or horrified that they’re willing to grab up weapons like these in order to avoid having to admit they were wrong.
– Brian Tiemann commenting over on Cold Fury regarding comments on Gabriel Syme’s recent post.
The hunt for the fugitive Texas Democrat legislators has intensified with a set of playing cards being issued to troops in Iraq in case any of them turn up there.
[Alan K. Henderson rocks]
Although details are still sketchy, it seems that Algerian government forces have rescued some of the European tourists taken by Islamic terrorists of the ‘Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’, who are part of the Al Qaeda network. Some reports indicate that both Austrian and German special forces (perhaps GSG 9?) were involved in the operation assisting the Algerians.
This is very good news indeed!
One of the news headlines today was about the discovery of mass grave in Mahawil area in Iraq. So far remains of more than 3,000 people have been found but Iraqis fear up to 15,000 people reported missing in the area may have been buried there during Saddam’s government crackdown on Shi’ites when they launched an uprising in 1991. Reuters reports:
Many families stood silently behind a ring of barbed wire coils separating them from the excavation in an attempt to preserve the site but others walked through the piles.
As an earthmover scraped heaps of rich brown earth from the site, bones protruded from the dirt. Once extricated, skulls and what look like the bones from the rest of the bodies were heaped into crumbled piles or stuffed into plastic bags. Clothing hung from the bones. Some skulls were cracked.
Since Saddam’s fall in the U.S.-led war on Iraq, mass graves have been unearthed in Najaf, Basra, Babylon and other areas and are still being found as Iraqis feel free to recount tales of arrests, torture and killings once too risky to tell.
To all those protesters whose righteous hatred for the United States and Britain was declared out of self-proclaimed desire for peace. Is this the kind of ‘peace’ you wanted to preserve when you cried “not in my name”?
Araya Hussein carried the remains of her husband in a bag away from the site weeping.
He went missing in 1991 when we had 10 children. I thought he was a prisoner and would one day come home. I never imagined I would be carrying his bones home.
Explain to this woman why your righteous wrath was directed at Bush and Blair but not at Saddam. Explain how according to your warped view of the world Saddam has ‘the right’ to rule Iraq and kill thousands without any fear of retribution. Explain how you can end up supporting an evil and oppressive regime and distance yourself from the long awaited liberation.
Damn you and your coddled, self-centered and twisted minds. You have caused enough misery and suffering by your irrational and irresponsible opposition to anything that might bring freedom to those parts of the world where free expression is an unknown concept. Perhaps you should change your slogans and cry for ‘peace of mind’, your minds that is, in the face of the gruesome truth emerging from Iraq.
The mass murders in Iraq have been stopped… but not in your name
The Al Qaeda terrorists who attacked western civilian workers in Saudi Arabia are nothing more than a timely reminder that the overthrow of Ba’athist Iraq was not the end of the matter which blasted into the public consciousness on September 11th 2001. Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorism were related subjects but were never the same. I was starting to detect a “Game over, now it’s Miller Time” attitude in some newspapers and blogs after the triumph in Iraq, but I think this shows that if there is ever a time for complacency, it sure as hell is not now.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this atrocity leads to a mass movement of Westerners out of the accurséd Kingdom. If the risks posed by terrorism means the Saudis become unable to induce western technicians and specialists from working there at any price, I suspect the impact on the Arabian economy will be quite dramatic. No doubt within a couple years infrastructure and certain essential functions will decay beyond the point where the regime’s spin doctors cannot hide the truth that Saudi Arabia is not an internally viable nation-state in any modern sense.
And if the Saudi Wahhabist regime’s ability to use petrodollar funded patronage to buy off the disparate elements of its indolent society grinds to a halt, what happens then?
Would a monstrous and tyrannical fundamentalist regime take over? And would that regime be a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism? Well considering that the current regime already is a monstrous and tyrannical fundamentalist regime, and it is from Saudi Arabia that most of the September 11th terrorist hailed, so frigging what if it collapses?
The House of Saud is built on sand, so let it go down the toilet of history and let’s see what comes in its place. After all, if we like the look of what comes next even less than the current tyranny, it is not like the 3rd Infantry Division has to travel all the way from the United States to do something about it… and that self-evident fact alone should concentrate the minds of those who would be the new rulers in Riyadh.
The US will not be in the region forever but at the moment the peoples of the Middle East are very aware that they are living in the shadow being cast by that 900 foot tall gorilla currently standing astride Iraq… for a short while at least, that might not be such a bad thing just so long as the gorilla knows when it is time to go home.
I detect a distinct air of despondency in the ranks of the libertarian camp in ever seeing any point in voting for, or co-opting with, right-of-centre parties such as the Conservatives in Britain (see David Carr’s remarks) or the Republican Party in the U.S. (see Jim Henley in similar vein).
I see no reason for being surprised. Even if you support Bush on the war, as I do, albeit while detesting the Patriot act and the Dept. of Homeland Security, what is there to like? The vast increase in the budget deficit is a real worry – and I say that as a supply sider, not as a ‘deficit hawk’ – we have had the steel tariffs, the Farm bill, etc. Okay, the first tax cut was better than nothing, but not as good as a cut to marginal tax rates across the board. Oh, Dubya did at least stiff the Kyoto Treaty. But while he is probably a tad better than the likely alternatives, his GOP makes an unlikely suitor for libertarians.
As for the Tories, I despair utterly of them being in a fit state for any outreach to us. With the sole and erratic exception of shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, there is not a single top-ranking Tory MP I come across who seems to have a thorough grasp of the extent to which our civil as well as economic liberties have been crushed.
Which leaves us with the usual cul-de-sac of a possible new party. And I cannot see how that is going to work.
Iain Duncan-Smith relaunched the Conservative Party yesterday, announcing that a future Conservative government would abolish tuition fees. Of course, political parties have to reach out to those outside their traditional supporters. But IDS is going about it the wrong way.
Margaret Thatcher got lots of people living on council estates to vote for her. It was not by being left-wing, but by applying her free-market principles to make their lifes better. By giving them the option to buy their houses from the state, she helped them to rise up the ladder of economic prosperity. By allowing parents to have a say in which state school their children could go to, power was taken away from government bureaucrats, enabling parents to take their children to away from failing schools. Her strategy for getting non-Conservatives to vote Conservative was entirely consistent with her principles. Voters believed her policies because they saw their consistency.
By simply adopting socialist policies – and moving the Tories to the left of Labour – IDS is alienating his core support. But worse, he is unlikely to gain the votes of those who support his policies anyway. There aren’t many Old Labour opponents of tuition fees that are going to jump ship and vote Tory. They are much more likely to vote Lib Dem, a rather more convincing party of socialism.
I believe I am guilty of taking the latest Conservative proposals on education out of their context. As a result, I made the mistake of regarding them as an aberration; a singular folly.
However, I should have examined these proposals in the round of their ‘Fair Deal for Britain’:
“The Conservative Party’s fair deal for everyone is built on a unifying commitment to ensure that no-one is held back and no-one is left behind…”
Seen in that context, a return to old socialist education policies makes perfect sense. After all, in a society where you won’t be able to turn round without running smack dab into the dead hand of the state, shoving you along a line of pre-determined ‘fairness’, you cannot expect higher education to be the exception, can you.
Just who is advising the Conservative Party these days? Who was it that convinced Iain Duncan Smith that Clintonesque pain-feeling was the wave of the future? What premium do they think they will derive out of being Labour-lite? What, precisely, is the unique selling point of socialism with a Tory twist?
If I thought it likely that I would get any answers I would put those questions on the back of a postcard and send it off to Tory HQ. As it is, I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m too busy adjusting myself to the next 20 years of New Labour.
I just came across this bit of news :
Assailants have gouged out the eyes of three brothers in central Pakistan in revenge for a similar incident 16 years ago. The brothers were kidnapped by 14 members of rival clans from the village of Kabirwala in the central province of Punjab on Monday night, police quoted relatives as saying, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) reported.
They were taken to another village where their eyes were gouged out “with a knife one by one…the brothers were in critical condition in hospital. …The attack was apparently in revenge for an attack 16 years ago blamed on the brothers’ family. No one had so far been arrested.
I do not know whether such incidents get reported mainly because of the spotlights directed at islamic and muslim societies or whether they are normal ocurrance, part of the fabric of society. I find such acts abhorent, although in principle I support individual’s taking justice into his own hands where the state or appropriate authorities fail him.
Also, the right to retribution should not diminsh with time, so 16 year delay would not necessarily bother me. But exacting revenge in the form of mutilation that is sponsored by a clan and carried out in the context of collective guilt, undermines the right of individual in that society to fair trial and proportionate punishment. It is barbarism, pure and simple.
In what is perhaps one of the greatest examples of political farce I have seen in quite a while, 53 Texas legislators from the Democratic party have fled the state capitol to avoid a vote that could cost their party seven congressional seats.
So let me get this right… it is okay to be a member of an elected assembly of lawmakers that passes laws compelling people to do this or that, but if you don’t like the laws being passed because it interferes with your party political agenda, well, screw democracy, just quite literally run away and prevent there being a quorum.
Okay, that works for me. Anything which bring into disrepute the elected bodies at the very heart of the system is just fine by me… I can think of few ways to de-legitimize the public face of democratically sanctified force which robs and regulates its ‘citizens’ that by having them act like petulant school children taking their ball home because they don’t like the other team’s rules. No quorum means no voting and no voting means no new laws on anything, at least for a while. Excellent.
It is pretty funny that they call themselves Democrats though, eh?
[Thanks to Shannon for the link]
Just under a year ago, the Prime Minister’s wife Cherie Blair expressed her sympathy with the plight of ‘suicide bombers’:
Speaking at a charity event in London, Mrs Blair said young Palestinians felt they had “no hope” but to blow themselves up.
Her steaming pile of wisdom was delivered just hours after one of them had murdered 19 Israelis.
But that was then. This is now:
The prime minister’s wife Cherie Blair was forced to pull out of a London charity event following the threat of a suicide bomb attack.
Assuming the threat was genuine, it looks like Mrs.Blair’s outreach exercise was a waste of time.
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