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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I still cannot say the word ‘blog’ in any non-blogger company without being confronted by blank faces and puzzled expressions. The medium isn’t really ‘out there’ yet.
But gradual recognition in the circles of orthodox journalism gathers apace although I am not, perhaps, as wildly enthusiastic as I ought to be about this BBC editorial:
“Weblogs, for those of you still outside this ever-increasing loop, are personal web sites, updated frequently, and increasingly interlinked and interconnected to such an extent that some people have started to think of them as a kind of “hive mind” for the internet community.
As American technology writer Dan Gilmor, who first reported the Google/Blogger story, has realised and publicly stated many times: with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists. And the journalists had better remember that.”
The hook of the editorial is the acquisition of Pyra by Google but I suppose that it’s a good sign that they’ve been interested enough by blogging to write about the medium in fairly glowing terms.
They do mention one or two blogs specifically and, naturally, both are left-wing but then the BBC can hardly be expected to even acknowledge the existance of anyone or anything that isn’t.
Do you think they’ve noticed this one yet?
So, the human shields arrived in Baghdad already! Well, most of them. One of the three red London buses broke down in Italy, and several activists dropped out after being dug out of snow drifts near Istanbul, but, heroically,
“The rest endured bitterly cold weather, illness, poor living conditions and a great deal of bickering.”
Well, you need mental toughness and nerves of steel to become a Human Shieldster, of course! Just ask Ken O’Keefe, Shield Leader: he used to be in the American Marines. Although you might have trouble finding him, as sadly, he has now gone nuts and is no longer part of this brave Western anti-war protest:
“Ken O’Keefe, their informal leader and a former American marine, burned his US passport and designed himself new travel documents proclaiming him a “Citizen of the World”. As a result, he was detained in three countries.
Mr O’Keefe has yet to arrive in Baghdad and Mr Joffe-Walt last heard of him in Syria.”
Mr Joffe-Walt mentioned various other hardships and tribulations which the Shield had suffered in its crusade to save human history from itself:
“Very few people knew each other. I did not know any of them and it was difficult to organise it. There were lots of different ideas on when to go to bed, how long to spend on the bus.”
Shield-members will apparently be camping
“inside hospitals, schools, power stations and other buildings “needed for basic human living”.”
Erm, I wonder if they’ve negotiated that with the Iraqi humans planning to be living inside them already? If bombing starts, numbers of safe buildings available for human living could possibly be reduced. I can tell the Shield has considered the possibility of bombing, because one of them said,
“the presence of vegans and spiritual healers would shield the buildings from harm if war broke out.”
Of course. And equally predictably,
“Saddam Hussein’s regime, which normally admits westerners with great reluctance and treats them with deep suspicion, has granted the human shields three-month visas and given them freedom to go where they wish.”
It takes a nutter to know a nutter, I suppose.
(Thanks to the Telegraph)
Stephen Zunes, Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, writes:
It was the United States, through its Central Intelligence Agency, that overthrew Iran’s last democratic government, ousting Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. As his replacement, the U.S. brought in from exile the tyrannical Shah, who embarked upon a 26-year reign of terror. The United States armed and trained his brutal secret police – known as the SAVAK – which jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iranians struggling for their freedom.
The Islamic revolution was a direct consequence of this U.S.-backed repression since the Shah successfully destroyed much of the democratic opposition. In addition, the repressive theocratic rulers that gained power following the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah were clandestinely given military support by the U.S. government during the height of their repression during the 1980s. As a result, there is serious question regarding the United States’ support for the freedom of the Iranian people.
I have two observations to make about this:
- There is no mention of the support given to Ayatollah Khomenei by the French government before 1979. No doubt French politicians including Valéry Giscard D’Estaing and Jacques Chirac had no thoughts whatsoever of obtaining oil concessions once the hated US puppet was ousted.
- To the extent that what Chair Zunes writes is at all plausible, outside the USA, the last sentence is undoubtedly true. However, I suspect that there really is a change of view in the US administration, to the effect that simply finding more efficient despots won’t do. If this is the case, I believe that saying so publicly and repeatedly, will be somewhat disarming.
This Iraq business. Every few weeks I sit down and try to write something short and sweet on the subject and it soon grows long and ugly. Yesterday I did it again. Today I’ll try it yet again. (And hurrah! Here it finally is. But long and ugly, I’m afraid.)
So. Iraq. Blah blah blah, cut cut cut. And then this:
The USA is not just squaring up to Saddam Hussein because he is a big bad threat, although I’m sure that’s part of it. It is also going to take out Saddam’s Iraq because it is a good place to set about influencing other important places from, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and because it is takeable. Iraq is nasty, but it is also weak. Saddam Hussein is a monster and is known to be a monster, which makes him weak. Arabs aren’t nearly as opposed to the USA taking out Saddam as they would be if it attacked another of their countries, which makes him weak. Even the UN has resolved various things against Saddam over the years. So he’s vulnerable as well as threatening. The benefit of taking him out is big, while the cost of taking him out, by the standards of your average piece of conquest is quite low. I mean, imagine if the USA was instead trying to conquer Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Nightmare. Couldn’t happen.
The point is: USA thinking isn’t only about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq, liberating the Iraqis, and stopping Saddam-bossed or Saddam-assisted future terrorist attacks. They have many other dishes on their menu besides him. The purpose of taking out Saddam is not just to take out Saddam, but to wrench the whole balance of power in the Muslim world into a different state, a state far less helpful to Islamofascist (and other) terrorists. → Continue reading: It won’t end with Iraq
When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty
-Thomas Paine
Yesterday evening I was present at a very interesting gathering that took place in the City of London.
It was, or at least appeared to be, a joint venture between the American NRA and the NRA of Great Britain (yes, we do have one).
I have not attended anything like this before. The format was that of a TV chat show which was hosted by a representative of the American NRA who fielded questions to, and took replies from, an almost entirely British audience. The event was filmed by an American production company and will, in due course, be edited into an info-mercial for distribution in the USA designed to press home to an American audience the folly and dangers of apparently ‘reasonable’ gun control measures.
It was a remarkably well-informed audience. Many of them were former shooters and gun-owners and, without exception, they were able to recount, by reference to both historical data and relevent legislation, the way victim-disarmament had started in the 1920’s as merely sensible measures to remove the ‘most dangerous’ weapons from society and, over the years, chip by chip, step by step, measure by measure, the disarmament programme advanced up to 1997 when all handguns were prohibited along with every other potentially life-saving tool (e.g. pepper sprays). Emphasised too, was the political and legal slippery slope which has resulted in a situation in Britain today where acting in genuine self-defence is classified as serious crime.
On the face of it, this is an exercise which will benefit Americans not Britons but, on a deeper level, it will benefit Brits as well because events like this bring together those too-few Britons who still believe in a right of self-defence and spurs them on to greater levels of mutual education and political activism. That is how things change.
I detected not the merest hint of a defeatist atmosphere last night. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the self-defence movement in Britain, albeit still small, has been galvanised to an unprecedented degree.
The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.
How much is an Iraqi life worth? To me personally, about zero. Here’s why:
– I have no friends in Iraq (and doubt I ever will by the end of this post)
– No Iraqi signs my paycheck
– No Iraqi makes anything special that I can’t buy anywhere else (oil?)
– Iraq is on the other side of the globe
“But they’re being killed” you say. So are many other people. What about the North Koreans? What about the people who will effectively be killed because they cannot afford medical care due to this war? What about third world countries where parents have more children than they can afford to feed? Please make an objective, logical argument why the life of an Iraqi rates above (not just equal to) these others.
There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question “Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?” We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It’s long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what’s left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy.
The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata’s eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state.
More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)?
I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every ‘utopia’ has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the ‘mountain of skulls’ left behind.
 
Savonarola’s Florence, Robespierre’s France, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq, note that there is an individual’s name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to ‘care’ about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence. → Continue reading: Old style morality…
Nicolas Chatfort write the obituary of the UN, an organization whose statist premise makes its impending passing something few at Samizdata.net will shed a tear over
We are witnessing a major historical turning point in history. The world order envisioned by the UN is on its deathbed and unlikely to be revived. The world order I am referring to, however, is not the one enshrined in the lofty words of the UN charter. No, that vision died long ago, in fact as soon as the signatures were given in San Francisco. The idealistic vision of an international community working harmoniously toward common ends died stillborn when despotic regimes, whose very existences were alien to the goals set out in the charter, were allowed to join. The idea that the legitimacy to US actions is dependent on the views of countries such as Angola, China, Guinea, or Syria is absurd.
Realpolitiks, on the other hand, have underpinned the UN for over half a century. The myth behind the UN is that it an organization designed to maintain international peace through collective security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the UN has always rested on a grand bargain between the US and the other democracies of world. On the one side, the US would agree not to return to isolationism after WWII and promised to use its military force to provide a protective umbrella to its weaker partners. On the other side, the democracies would provide political support to US actions around the globe, thus enhancing the legitimacy of these actions. The Security Council has been effective only when it has been aligned with the interests of the United States, on whom it has been dependent for military strength with which to impose its will. No other country or collection of countries can adequately substitute for the US military.
This bargain has now been broken. France and Germany no longer feel that they have an obligation to support the US. In fact, it now appears that France views the weakening of American power as one of its major diplomatic goals. Although in the past French posturing has been a nuisance for the US, it had always returned to the side of the US when it mattered. The recent French actions in the UN, however, are unprecedented in that Paris is now working actively to undermine the US position. The obstinacy of the French position suggests that Paris is more interested in bringing the US to heal than Iraq. Chirac is mistaken if he believes that the US will acknowledge UN paramountcy over US security interests. The UN cannot function without the US military power to back it up and the US will not long remain a member if it comes to view UN more as an impediment to US security rather than as an aid.
Nicolas Chatfort
Many of the anti-war protesters has been carrying placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’. Well if you voted in the UK, regardless of whether it was for Labour or Conservative or LibDem, then you gave your consent to the system which taxes me without my consent, so I suppose I am robbed in ‘your’ name. I was disarmed (by a Tory government) and forbidden to effectively defend myself in ‘your’ name. My rights to own property and control my own labour and capital are abridged into meaninglessness in ‘your’ name.
So when you say say about a war against the Ba’athist socialists of Iraq “Not In My Name”, please forgive me if I really do not give a damn if something gets done by the state that you do not like.
I do not think George Bush and Tony Blair want to topple Saddam Hussain due to an abiding concern for the Iraqi people, but frankly I really do not care why the statists who tax me are going to do it, just that they do it. Provided there is a net gain in liberty in Iraq, and it is hard to see how that could not be the case post-Saddam, then I am in favour of the violent and hopefully fatal removal of the Ba’athist thugs.
Do it for ‘Freedom for Iraq’, do it ‘because Saddam is a threat’, do it ‘because of links to Al-Qaeda’, do it ‘because the voices in my head told me to’… I do not care. Just do it!
You can even do it in my name if you like.
David Goldstone has written in with Why Libertarians should be for the liberation of Iraq but against the war. I have replied to his thoughts afterwards
Dear Perry,
I have every sympathy with those on Samizdata who support the forthcoming war. The thought of Tony Benn telling an Iraqi women why it is wrong for her people to be freed from tyranny is skin-crawlingly repellent. And as for the marchers yesterday, well if they against the war that is almost reason enough for me to be for it.
Almost reason enough, but not quite. In the final analysis, I still believe (and I say this with all respect to those who disagree), that the pro-war libertarians are wrong.
Let me say clearly that this posting is not addressed to those who believe that the war is justified on the grounds of pre-emptive self defence. I disagree with them but the debate between us is not a debate of principle, merely one as to the weight of the evidence. Rather, this posting is directed at those who would justify the war on the grounds that it will bring liberty to millions of Iraqi’s.
Let me also say clearly that I fully endorse the goal of bringing liberty to Iraq and I would willingly contribute some of my own money to pay for a military effort to bring about that end.
But others would not. And therein lies the contradiction for libertarians. How can we justify using force (viz tax revenues) to make others pay for a war that they oppose? If the U.S. or U.K. governments were to conscript people to fight to free Iraq, I am sure we would be loud in our condemnation. Yet taxation is at only one remove from conscription. Whether we like it or not, millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. disagree with the war. We may disagree with them, but how can we as libertarians justify forcing them to pay for it? The implications are obvious and run counter to everything that libertarians stand for.
I would dearly love to see a compelling answer to this question because I would dearly love to be able to support the war. But so far, I have yet to see any answer to this question on Samizdata, let alone a compelling one.
David Goldstone
Well David, I actually agree with you more than you might suppose! Although I am less convinced than you seem to be that Saddam Hussain poses no actual threat to me, my primary reason for wanting to see the overthrow of Ba’athist socialism in Iraq is that I wish to see an end to tyranny, the death or imprisonment of its perpetrators and an increase in liberty for Iraq’s hapless people.
For me the only argument against this being done by the militaries of the USA and UK is that this requires the theft of tax money from US and UK taxpayers.
However…
What is done is done. I have been robbed by the US and UK states (the two places I have been paying taxes) for a great many year and the lavishly equipped volunteer militaries capable of overthrowing Ba’athism are already in existence.
As selling off the military equipment and returning a huge pot of my stolen tax money to me is going to happen when pigs fly, I am left with either watching the proceeds of my robbery slowly depreciate as they sit in military bases scattered across the world, or instead demanding that I at least get some value for my stolen money!
Just as I would rather have privately own roads, private police forces and private healthcare, in the here-and-now I at least what the state owned roads to have no potholes, the state owned police to prevent me being mugged and the National Health Service to fix me up when I am injured. I am after all being forced to pay for all these things!
And so… please take this volunteer military I was forced to pay for and go and kill Saddam Hussain. The state made me pay for the weapons and salaries, so bloody well give me some value for my money!
This was posted today to the Libertarian Alliance Forum by Nigel Meek.
“Although generally always pro-War – I accept the case that Islamic Jihadists and bandit states such as Iraq and North Korea might ultimately have to be confronted and put down by relatively large, well-equipped armed forces, and it’s one of the reasons that *in practice* I’m a minarchist rather than an anarchist – like any libertarian with a right to be called by that name I’ve nevertheless always been somewhat hesitant about fully committing my meagre support to the whole thing. Whether it’s the prospect civilian casualties, of increased taxation to pay for it all, or a lasting diminution in domestic civil liberties – in short, a growth of the State’s reach and power – it is not good news for our way of thinking.
And yet the marches in London and elsewhere yesterday have as near as it’s possible so to do obliged me now to side with Bush and Blair effectively unequivocally. I peeked at the TV screen every now and then on Saturday – and thanks, too, to Perry de Havilland and David Carr for their reporting on the event in Samizdata -and even if one knew absolutely nothing about Saddam Hussein, his family, his supporters, the Ba’athist regime, and the actions of all of the forces under their control nationally and internationally over a great many years, simply looking at those who attended ought to be enough to make any sane person opt for Bush and Blair and to support a military invasion of Iraq, not just in the absence of any formal support from the UN but in complete indifference to what the UN says.
For what did we see on Saturday in London and elsewhere? Warmed-over Cold War moral equivalencers and Communist fellow-travellers; various latter-day Marxoid sectarians; geriatric Aldermaston veterans and other one-sided nuclear
disarmers; ‘smash Anglo-Saxon civilisation’ multiculturalists; assorted celebrity egotists; outright pro-Saddamites; anti-globalisation nihilists; re-invigorated public-sector trades unionists; UN-supporting single-world-governancers; full-time protesters-without-a-cause; liars and fantasists; pan-Arab socialists; Green nature worshippers; anti-Semites; ‘nice’ middle-class people who are “worried about their children’s future” and who voted for the Greens in the 1980s and latterly and ironically for Blair and New Labour; insolent purveyors of an alien and wicked Islamic creed; immigrant welfare-spongers; those who simply think that evil is good and vice-versa; and Lord alone knows who else. Saddest of all – however small in number -capitalist-libertarians whose hatred of Statism is so great that they would apparently look with more favour upon a ‘private’ mugger the a State-employed policeman coming to the victim’s aid.
In short: a march-past of Those Who Are Wrong. This is not a black and white issue. No libertarian could think so. But I believe that it’s fair to say that it’s a black and rather-grimy-off-white-grey issue. The very real faults of Bush
and Blair personally, their political views overall, the parties that they lead, and the only semi-free countries that they run simply must not blind us to the demonstrable truths not only of the nature of Saddam Hussain et al but that those who oppose them here in the UK and elsewhere are (at best) mistaken and (at worst) a fairly representative cross-section of every wicked creed to have recently assailed the world, certainly since the end of the Second World War.
What we witnessed was a March for Evil.”
I think that was worth re-printing.
If “International Law” is more important than saving the lives of innocent people now and in the future, by:
- Liberating the Iraqi people,
- Preventing Saddam from invading and attacking any other places in the future,
- Making sure he can’t develop nukes, not even in secret, and can’t give them to international terrorist organisations…
… then all I can say is, fuck International Law.
– Alice Bachini
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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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