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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Putin suggests EUniks make it official

· Middle East & Islamic

Putin really laid into the EU and reporters about his handling of Chechnya. He’s certainly got a clear idea of what it is he is fighting.

I’d say Russian and American interests are being driven ever closer together at the same time both are diverging from the EU. This is definitely one of the developing features of the geopolitical landscape to watch closely.

It could well be the defining global political feature of the 21st Century.

November 13th, 2002 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)

1st Amendment riots in Iran

· Middle East & Islamic

Glenn Reynolds pointed out an article in today’s New York Times on the 4th day of student riots in Iran.

What? You haven’t heard? Presumably that’s because the news media thinks we’re more interested in whom is buggering whom in Buckingham than in events of real import? Yes. Of course. That must be it.

The Iranian government has given a sentence of death by hanging to an academic, Hashem Aghajari, for what Americans would call an exercise of his First Amendment rights. If profs in the USA think they are losing those rights simply because someone criticises them, they should consider Iran, where the State can make you lose your head instead of just your temper.

The student protests have spread to other cities and seem likely to continue unless the medieval mullahs stomp on them, an action which would just polarize any remaining fence sitters. The Iranian students are living proof there is a liberal, tolerant 21st Century face to Islam crying out for escape from the rule of fundamentalist fruitcakes.

News media everywhere should be pushing this story with as much alacrity as possible. No reasonable person wants to see blanket hatreds grow. This is precisely what al Qaeda wants. If they have any strategy, it is to bring about the war of civilizations in hopes they can win by expending more lives than we in the civilized world have a stomach for. They are not sufficiently versed in history to understand how terribly mistaken they are or exactly how apocalyptic such a war would be for all… but most especially for them.

We must let the average guy on the street know there are Muslims out there who are just like him or her; people who want to live their lives, worship in their faith, exercise basic liberties… and most importantly, allow others to do the same.

My feelings of hope for Iran are not new. Even in the days immediately following September 11th I told friends Iran is different. There is hope for it. It was never as crazy a place as the rest of the Medieval East; it has an educated populace which understands what a civil society is about. One way or the other they will find their way out of the swamp Khomeini led them into.

I do not think their own government is quite so evil as others in the region. I do not believe Iranians will sacrifice their own children to the past and there is no other path but that of massive and violent repression if they are to block reform.

If I knew an appropriate Muslim phrase (other than Inshallah, which is a bit weak for what I wish them) I would say it for those young Iranians who seek the blessings of Liberty.

I guess “good luck and godspeed” will have to serve.

November 12th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Some things never change…

· Self ownership

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all
– Nikita Khrushchev

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual
– Adolf Hitler

At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good
– Ted Kennedy, 2002

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual
– Benito Mussolini

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society
– Hillary Clinton, 1993

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person
– Vladimir Lenin

Thanks to James Knowles for compiling these quotes

November 12th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Vox populi

· European Union · UK affairs

As I checked the on-line version of the Evening Standard, a London daily, for an update on yet more travel chaos in the capital, I ended up in the newpaper’s chat room. The posts covered a range of topics from strikes in the UK to German economy, Gordon Brown, the EU, etc. I was fascinated by the following opinions and encouraged by an unexpected degree of common sense they contained.

On Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer:

Comparatively other European economies are worse off than ours… for now. The strikes [ed.note: London tube drivers, fire fighters, airport staff] were inevitable. As soon as Brown started raising huge amounts of tax (direct, indirect, stealth, overt, personal & corporate) and making such a great play out of how he was intending to chuck vast quantities of cash at public services without insisting on reform, the unreformed public sector was always going to demand its ‘fair’ share.

In a way, we can thank Brown. He has finally proved, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that old-fashioned socialism with a Treasury-centred tax-and-spend doctrine is a failure. In the past, plenty of excuses have been trotted out about how enough money wasn’t spent to really make a difference. Now, Brown has thrown unimaginable amounts of money, particularly at the NHS… and there is no visible benefit.

It is long past the time when Brown should put the brakes on spending until reform has been carried out. He is throwing good money after bad… our money. He intends to raise taxes further and further because his pride won’t allow him to admit that he has got it wrong. He will end up sacrificing British jobs, industries and competitiveness on the altar of his own enormous ego.

Great Chancellor? Ha! The man has the economic instincts and ability of a whelk.

On German economy:

It’s Economy has tanked. Many small Businesses are closing down due to massive tax and bureacracy. The Unions have way too much power here and the cost of employing people is outrageous. We need a Maggie Thatcher here to deregulate everything and make Germany competetive again. The only light at the end of the Tunnel is the success of the Euro.

Reply: Christ, it must a f***king dim light then.

On the EU:

Every new regulation from the EU seems to add to the pile, and the language of the EU is that Britain should become more like these countries, not that Europe should become more competitive.

[ed.note: to a Europhile in the thread] Do you understand? Do you see why so many of us find your seemingly blind adoration of all things Euroepan so laughable?

What we have now [in the EU] is a ‘club’ for failed socialist politicians where ineptitude, corruption and waste are rewarded by monolithic undemocratic structures. The main political agenda is set by France, whose selectivity in implementing the outcomes are legendary and Germany, which is drowning under the very rules it has helped to create.

How sound is that?!

November 12th, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

Computerised libertarianism

· Science & Technology

There is an interesting posting by David Farrer over at Freedomandwhisky, about the now quite familiar experience most of us have had of buying an incredibly cheap airline ticket. David talks of the Edinburgh to London route, because although Edinburgh and surrounding parts is the Freedom & Whisky target-rich commentary environment London is obviously the centre of the universe and he has to visit it from time to time to keep in touch, but of course it’s the same for everyone.

One of the reasons airplane tickets can be so cheap is that buying and selling them has got so much cheaper. You can now buy airplane tickets on the internet at a price that fluctuates from day to day – even hour to hour or minute by minute – according to the vagaries of supply and demand.

This is one of the most characteristic uses of computers in our time. A new business has not in any obvious sense been invented. What’s happened is that an old one – ticket touting – has been re-invigorated. And I think I’m right in saying that the same principle is now being applied to cinema tickets, and of course the package holiday trade has been doing this kind of thing for years.

This experience surely helps to spread libertarianism. Oh, I don’t mean that, as soon as you’ve booked your ticket for your last-minute emergency trip to Athens to get your mad uncle out of jail and been flabbergasted by how little you had to pay for it, you experience an uncontrollable desire then to log in to amazon.com and purchase the collected works of Murray Rothbard. What I do suggest is that several very important libertarian memes, about such things as the fact that prices are a totally subjective matter in no way dependent upon the history of how much it cost for the thing being sold to be made in the first place, and concerning the general desirability of free markets as the best way to coordinate complicated collective activities (such as a hundred or so more people all deciding to share the same plane trip to Athens – tomorrow morning at 6 am) surely are being popularised by these kinds of arrangements.

Note the word “collective” there. Collectivism not only messes with individual activity (because that’s its nature); it also can’t now do collective activity nearly as well as voluntarily co-ordinated individual choice-making.

The plane trip has already been decided upon by the airline, and they can’t now cancel it. The taking-off and landing slots, the crew, the maintenance and the petrol have all been committed to. Whether you are on the plane or not makes hardly any difference at all to the airline’s fixed costs. What does one less empty seat cost them? So if there’s a chance they could maybe fill the plane in a last minute rush by damn near giving away the seats, it makes sense for them to try to do just that. So, you get your bargain ticket.

An airline ticket futures market, you might say. My point is: computers are now turning everyone into Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko’s opinions are accordingly that much more likely to spread to everyone.

That’s not an original thought, but it is quite a thought.

November 12th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)

Who will carry the Democratic banner in 2004?

· North American affairs

Kevin Connors thinks the Democratic Party is in even worse shape than many think

In his National Post article, Matt Welch has the audacity to assert that California Governor Gray Davis, perhaps the most loathsome major office holder in America today, is a front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004. He has a snowball’s chance in hell, but the fact that an idea so preposterous would even have currency is telling of the sorry shape of the party.

At least a plurality of pundits agree that the nomination is Al Gore’s for the taking, if he wants it. because “that’s the way things are done.” But he’d have to totally reinvent himself to be more than a joke in the general election. The same can be said of Tom Daschle, Joe Biden and Dick Gephardt; they represent a Democratic party that the electorate has roundly rejected in this year’s election.

Of those currently in the spotlight, only John Kerry would seem to have the least chance in November of 2004. But, I believe, he still falls far short of the mark. Joe Leiberman, while he has looked good vis-a-vis the War on Terror, is still quite tainted from selling out his moderate principles to share the ticket with Gore in 2000. And, sadly, there’s always his religion to consider.

What the Democrats need at this point is a knight in shining armour. An otherwise unconsidered figure to come riding in out of the shadows and save the day. I assert that The man to fill the bill here is Sam Nunn. At 64 and retired from the Senate since 1996, the Georgia professor and attorney is still quite active in politics and business. His moderate credentials are solid, he is highly respected on matters of education, defense, and foreign relations and is very well liked both in and out of Washington (but apparently not North Korea). Sam Nunn is the last best hope for the Jackass Party.

Kevin Connors

November 12th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata slogan of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle one, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
– C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters

November 12th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)

The beginning of the end?

· Opinions on liberty

Brian Micklethwait once engaged me with an interesting, pet theory of his. It goes something like this: you can always tell when an organisation or institution is about to die because, just before they expire, they spend gargantuan sums of money on a big, swanky, impressive, dedicated headquarters.

Brian has a bagful of interesting theories which may or may not hold water but it is the one above which flagged up for me when I read this:

“On September 30, the U.N. unveiled plans for a billion-dollar, top-to-bottom renovation of its New York headquarters. The plan also includes the construction of a new 30-story office tower, which will displace a public playground next door.

Brian, you’d better be right.

November 12th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)

The disease is global

· North American affairs · Privacy & Panopticon

I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
 (Free registration required to link). Peek is of course a euphemism for ‘spy on’.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to “break down the stovepipes” that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

“We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options,” he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.

“A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one,” said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Once you’ve got it in place you can’t control it.”
[…]
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably…

“What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,” said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

And how will they “detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists”? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem.

November 12th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata slogan of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

I am never in favour of war… but the fact is we are now in a war, so the question is, do we win it?
– David Carr

November 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Authoritarian Europe begins the uncloaking process

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · European Union

As the Council of Europe grows more confident, the authoritarian future planned for all who live under the blue & gold stary crown of thorns is rapidly becoming an authoritarian present.

The venerable Eurocrats have decreed that, “‘racist and xenophobic material’ means any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors.”
[…]
The actual criminal act is “making publicly available, through a computer system” any of the [Council of Europe]’s forbidden thoughts. And be warned; there’s a nice weasel clause for carriers — the CoE castrators are very smart. They know that if they held carriers liable the carriers would lobby this piece of bureaucratic abuse into the dust bin. You are on your own here, and by clever design. You will either take to the streets en masse and sternly warn your government that you will not be told what you can and cannot say, or you will be told what you can and cannot say.

We should like to think that this madness won’t stand long; but as Chesterton noted, it’s the business of Liberals to make imbecilic mistakes like these, and the business of Conservatives to ensure that they never get fixed.

Soon the fact that I regard the EU as a cabal of Transnational Socialist who will turn all Europe into a panoptic nightmare may well be considered ‘xenophobic material’ and thus could get me locked up if I wrote that on Samizdata.net from within the EU. Of course the more likely that looks like becoming a realty, the more you will see pseudonymous postings on Samizdata.net and possibly a change of hosting locale. The state is not your friend… and super-states even less so.

The time is coming for things to start getting nasty. Now that habeas corpus has been made meaningless in Britain, if one of Samizdata.net’s British contributors writing from London upsets a Greek politician by writing something like, say…

All PASOK politicians are a bunch of corrupt socialist bastards who allowed the ’17 November’ terrorist organisation to operate in Greece with impunity for decades because it is actually controlled by elements within PASOK. Recent ‘successes’ against N17 will of course uncover exactly nothing.

Well, merely expressing that view can result in a knock on a door in London by British police with a Greek arrest warrant that cites EU law, and next stop for the person who dared to express a dissenting view is some hell hole jail in the armpit of Europe that was once the cradle of Western civilisation.

This is not something that is the fevered products of wacko anti-EU conspiracy theorists, it is reality and it is well any truly upon Europeans and Britons alike. Transnational fascism of coming, in the guise of anti-fascism, and it is coming right now.

November 11th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

A true British Scandal!

· Monarchy · UK affairs

The British newspapers are agog at rape allegations inside the Royal Household.

Yawn.

The British state daily rapes million of people of billions of pounds to pay for ‘services’ that fail to deliver whilst blighting the economy and distorting civil society… yet the idiot media concentrates of the trivial antics of House of Windsor, who are little more than a bunch of national tourist attractions who at least generate more money than they cost the hapless taxpayer. Now that is the true scandal, not who might or might not have buggered whom in some drafty palace.

November 11th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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