On May 4, 1626 American Indians agreed to sell Manhattan island to European settlers for $24 in cloth & buttons. As with most free market transactions, all parties involved were satisfied with the deal: the settlers got land to homestead, the Indians received exotic manufactured goods that were beyond their ability to produce.
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One of the great myths about anti-Semitism is that it’s only a problem for Jews. But if you were one of the people walking down the street doing nothing while European Jewry was being rounded up for slaughter during WWII, I hope you would not just have felt sorry for ‘God’s ancient people’ and left it at that. I hope you might have done something positive to help them. To stand by and do nothing while an evil psychosis sweeps your civilisation is not likely to be a very moral option. So maybe you would have felt honoured to risk and even sacrifice your life, like the eighty-three-year-old man I quoted above. Sometimes that is the only way to conquer evil. Anti-Semitism is a problem for us all, because civilisation-destroying evil is a problem for us all. Would Marxist nutters be trying to take over Europe right now if Europe hadn’t annihilated a vast swathe of its own cultural topsoil sixty-five years ago? I wonder.
…as James C. Bennett said in this very good article. It is not just that if ‘they’ start by looking for the Jews ‘they’ will end up looking for anybody and everybody. It is simply that good cultures and civilisations require decent moral human beings, and the destruction of those decent, moral human beings (who also happen in general to be intelligent, freedom-loving capitalist human beings, as you will notice from taking a cursory overview of their societies) by evil crazy ones has massive and terrible ramifications we can not begin to measure. Had the Allies bombed the death camps when they should have, or even (unimaginable!) gone into Germany with the full backing of America sometime in the 1930s with the explicit purpose of removing the dictatorship and instigating democratic rule, Europe might now be far ahead of where it is. Good ideas grow more good ideas. Evil destroys them. We might have evolved the kind of free market European collection of small capitalist democracies that we can only hope might happen in another fifty or a hundred years through some as-yet-unconceived democratic libertarian miracle. And we might not be producing, or nurturing, people like these. Or Tom Dalyell, the Leader of the House accusing Blair of having built his war policy on “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”, rather than on any kind of moral or political substance. As Jack Straw (one of the “cabal”)’s spokesman responded: “If these reports are accurate, these remarks are too unworthy to be worth a comment.” I agree, in theory anyway. But Mr Dalyell also said, “I am not going to be labelled anti-Semitic.” Well, sorry Mr Dalyell, but you are anti-Semitic. Objecting to the influence of British MPs on the basis of their Jewishness can hardly be described as anything else. And I am amazed at the new respectability anti-Semitism has achieved since the growth of left-wing anti-capitalism inspired by the actions of good nations in the war. Life is surely complicated for free countries. No arrest and torture for Mr Dalyell, of course. But when leaflets like ones that say this:
…published in the UK, are found in the Gaza strip, it is clear that the freedom our society offers is being abused. The kind of brain that can turn liberation into annihilation in one fell slander is not the kind of brain we want festering in the UK. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to deal with it, but we are definitely going to have to find ways soon. Otherwise the next suicide bomber might indeed turn up in Oxford Street M&S, and it might be you or me who gets blown to smithereens in the frozen ready-meals section. And the next person who tells me that targets should not attract trouble in the first place can go and live in Switzerland and get citizenship there and then write me an essay entitled, “What would have happened in WWII if the UK and the US had acted like us.” Zionism: it’s not just for Jews anymore. May 4th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 On Channel Four News tonight it was reported that the UK government is to ban childminders from smacking children from the autumn. What I found odd in the report was that apparently the UN thinks the government should go further and prevent parents, not just childminders, from smacking. I don’t have strong feelings either way on whether smacking should be allowed. What gets me is that the UN thinks it is its job to decide whether or not it should be legal. Surely the UN’s role – if it has one at all – is to provide a forum to discuss disagreements between countries, helping to prevent wars. It should not be for deciding the domestic policies of individual countries. May 4th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards. The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I’ve posted tangential comments of my own about the “New Urbanism”, briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far. First, here is “Tom”, replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:
May 3rd, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The chaps who dismiss Bush as a moron forget that what counts is what a guy does when he’s not talking. May 3rd, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I submit that it is a therapeutic, every so often, to remind ourselves about the horrors of communism. A living testament to that horror can still be found today in Siberia. It is the road that runs from Magadan to Yakutsk, otherwise known as the ‘Road of Bones’. It was built by political prisoners and slaves, countless numbers of whom were worked, frozen and starved to death in the process. Because the perma-frost makes the ground too hard to effect any burials, the bones of the cadavers were broken up and used as ballast upon which to build the road. We will never know for sure how many lives were sacrificed to this ‘glorious people’s project’, but by repute, every metre of the road cost one human life. The road is 2000 kilometres long. There are still many people in the world today who subscribe to this terrible, anti-human, homicidal psychosis. Never forget. Never forgive. Remain vigilant and, above all, never ever, ever apologise for fighting back. May 3rd, 2003 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Thursday’s local council elections in England seems to have provided some evidence that the Conservative Party may still be twitching and not yet dead. They managed to pick up a whopping 566 seats nationwide, thus far exceeding all expectations, including my own. The Tories now control more local authorities than both Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined. I am far from convinced that this performance will reflect at parliamentary level but it does mean, for the time being at least, that Iain Duncan Smith keeps his job as party leader. Scotland, though. Scotland is a very different and far more melancholy story. Last Thursday also saw elections to the regional assemblies in both Scotland and Wales but it was Scotland that returned the most worrying results. Even prior to last Thursday, Scottish politics is lock-down between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, both left-of-centre parties. Their main opposition comes from the Scottish Nationalist Party which is also (surprise, surprise) a left-wing operation. There are also a handful of squeaky, apologetic Scottish Conservatives who, it would seem, spend most of the time trying to keep their heads below the parapet (though, to be fair to them, they are seriously up against it). Now one would think that the Scots had more than enough socialists to go round and keep everybody happy but, no. The biggest winner from the Thursday’s regional assembly elections were the Scottish Socialist Party, a class-war marxist outfit, who jumped from having one seat in the assembly to nine seats and a 5% share of the vote. Apparently a growing number of Scots are getting tired of the milquetoast, watered-down version of socialism they have been getting and yearn for the real thing:
The SSP do not control Scotland. Far from it. But they are now an electoral force to be reckoned with in that country and it means that an already left-of-centre administration is going to have to tack much further to the left to appease them and prevent their support from snowballing. The country that gave Adam Smith and Andrew Carnegie to the world, is fast succumbing to the Endarkenment. May 3rd, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
A wondrous row has erupted between two fat, middle-aged, uncouth, bearded geazers, one of them the British Minister of Education, and the other the Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. Mr Clarke is plugging a scheme to get sports clubs to help out with teaching the 3Rs to recalcitrant youth, and Mr Bates’ Chelsea are the only football club not to be cooperating. Mr Clarke slagged off Bates, and now Bates has been slagging off Clarke, pointing out that the British state education system is appalling and getting worse and he, Mr Clarke, should see to it instead of attacking defenceless football clubs. I have dealt with some of the boring educational angles of this story in another place, but the interesting aspect is that Mr Clarke has now said that he wants West Ham to beat Chelsea in their forthcoming and crucial Premiership clash tomorrow. Or, to put it another way, he wants Liverpool and Newcastle (rather than Chelsea) to qualify for the European Champion’s League next year, and even more controversially, Mr Clarke supports West Ham in their desperate effort to avoid relegation, and accordingly he must favour the idea of one of the clubs above West Ham, such as Bolton, Leeds, or Fulham, getting relegated from the Premier League instead. Bolton, did you get that? I can’t remember a Cabinet Minister wading into sport like this. Supporting your own team in a new-laddish, post-modern sort of way is one thing, but to mix this kind of thing with serious politics is new, surely, and frankly rather unsavoury. Since Ken Bates is making trouble for a politician, we here presumably all now support Chelsea against the abominable West Hamsters and the even more abominable West Ham support Clarke. And that’s quite aside from the Samizdata HQ being in Chelsea, and David Carr already being a Chelsea season ticket holder. I’m a Spurs man myself, that is to say, for the benefit of Americans, a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs are never involved either in trying to get into Europe or in being relegated because they come eleventh in the Premiership every year. Very dull. So by now I don’t care what they do tomorrow and am happy to swing into line behind Chelsea also. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Chelsea game tomorrow and keep everyone posted. Go you … Chels? May 2nd, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is often said that free speech does not extend to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. Likewise, actually incitement to violence within the context of civil society is not a matter of free speech at all, but is rather a matter pertaining to violence. In a genuinely free and reasonable society, a category in which I would not include Britain, to betray one’s ignorance by loudly declaring that “All Pakis and Niggers smell bad and should go back where they came from”, should be regarded as legitimate free speech (and of course the answer should be “What? You want me to go back to Croydon?”). Likewise any rather more aggressive replies questioning the racist’s intellect, honour and rationality should be likewise be regarded as legitimate free speech. However to call for the murder of members of those ethnic groups is quite a different matter. And so when the likes of Al Muhajiroun, the much publicised Islamic organisation active in Britain, are found to be again and again to be encouraging the straightforward murder of civilians in various parts of the world, the point of tolerance should long have been passed. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the self-styled “emir” of Al Muhajiroun publically praised suicide bomber Asif Mohammed Hanif and would-be suicide bomber Omar Khan Sharif, both UK passport holders who were posing as ‘peace activists’:
As David Carr previously mentioned, that these lunatics came from Britain’s Muslim community is not an insignificant detail. That Al Muhajiroun is not setting bombs off here in London should not disguise the fact that just as the people in the USA who gave money to pro-IRA fund raisers in the United States were guilty of financing the murder of innocent civilians, Al Muhajiroun is responsible for the slaughter of civilians in Israel by giving aid and comfort to the people who are physically doing the murders. Just as the Irish Republican terrorists who far from killing civilians as ‘collateral’ damage to an attack on a military target, actually targeted civilians for mass murder, the Islamic terrorists supported by Al Muhajiroun’s rhetoric, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and their ilk, actually target pizza parlours and nightclubs, rather than the Israeli army or state. Of course, some will claim that as these acts happen outside Britain, there is no grounds for doing anything. What I wonder would they think of Al Muhajiroun’s British-born lawyer Anjem Choudary’s remarks quoted in today’s Daily Express (print edition) in which he encourages Muslims from overseas to come to Britain and attack targets here? Given that these ‘religious men’ have signally failed to criticise the intentional slaughter of civilians in Israel, I rather doubt any ‘martyrs’ heeding this call will be going after a well protected British military target… more likely we can expect a suicide bomb attack on Oxford Street when it is crowded with people shopping. I would urge members of the Muslim community in Britain who regard these people as lunatics that do them a great disservice to move heaven and earth to disassociate themselves with these people. That the British government tolerates a group such as Al Muhajiroun in our midst is a measure of the decadence at the core of the state. May 2nd, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are having various server problems which are making it difficult for us to post articles. It also seems to be causing error messages when people try to leave comments. Unfortunately the resolution of these difficulties may take a while due to circumstances beyond our control. May 2nd, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Crispin Blunt MP, a frontbench Conservative spokesman on trade, has resigned and called for Iain Duncan-Smith to be deposed as party leader. Having the largest share of the vote, more councillors and more councils than any other party just isn’t good enough. IDS responded to the resignation by sacking frontbench spokesmen called Burgess, Maclean and Philby, just to be on the safe side. May 2nd, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today, it is May 1, the day when we celebrate the greatest thing to benefit the living standards, opportunities and happiness of ordinary working people – capitalism. I could wax lyrical, cite lots of clever books and such like, but I thought this item, via Reuters, surely says it all.
God bless capitalism! May 1st, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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