It would seem that evil retreats when forcibly confronted.
– Yarnek of Excalbia, “The Savage Curtain”, stardate 5906.5
Hey, even that fountain of marxist science fiction, Star Trek occasionally gets it right
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April 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Last week, immediately after returning from my trip to France, I visited St Andrews University in Scotland, courtesy of the Liberty Club guys, to speak at a meeting they’d organised. It was all a great pleasure, and not just because the lodgings they shared with me for the night after the meeting are so nicely situated right by the sea or because they are such nice people or because the weather was so nice. Even nicer is that the Liberty Club is doing so well. Universities are vitally important places if you’re in the idea spreading business. You’ve got a clutch of bright people relatively early in their lives, selected for their brightness and put together into a community. And, for once, community really means community. As I wandered about the town with Alex Singleton on the day after the meeting, he kept greeting familiar faces. Messages sent out in one part of the place don’t just meander off into the wild yonder. They double back on themselves, and if you keep on with them you can very quickly dose the entire place. Universities are, to use a word libertarians are particularly fond of, meme machines. So, if you do what the Liberty Club does, and hold a series of different meetings on different topics, and if you get thirty people to each meeting but not always the exact same thirty people, and if libertarianism is the meta-context of the people organising all this, then pretty soon everyone in the university with any interest in such matters gets to hear about libertarianism. You don’t agree with it necessarily, in fact you may disagree with it all the more fiercely on account of understanding it all the better. But for the rest of your life the libertarian attitude is fixed in your head as an attitude that you can have, that other intelligent people do have, and that you could switch to if you ever felt like it. The Liberty Club is one of the most if not the most active student organisation on the entire St Andrews campus. It is (a) definitely libertarian. It is in particular (b) not conservative. And it is in general (c) not stupid. Its leading lights are not thoughtless, unfunnily self-mocking posturers, of the “we don’t mean this really we’re just students arsing about” variety. They give off vibes of philosophical and political passion and intelligence. Their Liberty Log is a modest operation, with bits appearing only every day or two rather than every hour or two as here. Before leaving I contributed a piece to it concerning the meeting I spoke at, and there’s only been one further posting (by Marian Tupy) since then. But that’s a pace they can sustain, and their web activity (see also their website), is but the seasoning of the philosophical and intellectual dish they are serving up to their local target community. The meal itself is face to face contact and face to face argument and public debate. What their internet activity does is add a few more libertarian memes to an already meme-rich environment, and supply heavyweight back-up for any who want to pursue libertarianism further, either to agree with it or to attack it. Like all capable people, the St Andrews Liberty Clubbers worry that they could be doing better. Couldn’t we all? Alex mentioned setting up some kind of organisation for reaching students everywhere, and that might make sense if it could be done without too much strain. But I’d say that what they’re already doing is a model to libertarian groups in colleges and universities everywhere. And thanks to the internet, others really can look and learn. My bet is that they’ve already “infected” several other campuses without even realising it. April 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world. Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be. The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it? The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn. But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions. There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation? Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet. April 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
In protest at the electoral success in France of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French EU commissioner speaking in Brussels, Bertrand Maginot has expressed his outrage and concern.
April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
So why am I grinning? Simple. It shows that the entire edifice of the French Fifth Republic is rotten to its kleptocratic statist core. This is what the European Union’s amen chorus wish Britain to tie its political, economic and cultural fortunes to. Yet in fact this is a salutary lesson where statism inevitably leads… to ever more profound forms of statism, such as the nationalist racism of Le Pen. The non-assimilative post-modern collectivism of Jospin leads to the even less assimilative atavistic collectivism of Le Pen. And to think the one thing Jospin, Chirac and Le Pen’s supporters all have in common is that they all look down on the Anglosphere. From people like that I take that as a compliment. April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
No link I regret to say but the BBC is reporting that exit polls in France indicate that fire-brand nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen has edged out the socialist Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin into second place in the presidential elections behind front-runner Jacques Chirac. At the moment it appears as if Chirac and Le Pen will be contesting the presidency in a head-to-head fight. This could get very….well, interesting. April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars, and taxes, an observer, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes. April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
And, what’s more, he’s a talentless, pretentious wanker. For those who have never heard of him (consider yourselves fortunate), he is a former stand-up ‘comic’ now-turned novelist who rose to fame in the 1980’s with his fiery brand of allegedly funny invective. In reality, his routine was a barely-concealed vehicle for his bone-headed left-wing polemic which he played out in front of adoring and similarly-minded audiences at a time when comedy cabaret was the spearhead of the left-wing resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain. All young Ben had to do was to call Mrs.T a ‘mad old cow’ to have his monolithic audience shrieking with delight and appreciation. Hardly the mark of comic genius. What made it even more galling was his cynical adoption of a painfully fake working-class cockney accent just to ensure that his ‘cred’ with the comrades wasn’t sullied by any admission of his rather comfortable middle-class origins and first-rate education. He coupled his ‘comedy’ career with a full-blown activist agenda, shouldering his way to prominence in every trendy lefty/green campaign imaginable from benefit gigs for striking miners to marches against cruise missiles, you name the cause, Elton was there and sounding off. He is every inch a bedsit-Che Gueverra who got lucky. Still, it worked for him and he ended up with his own series on the BBC (natch!) but when the current Labour government was elected, Elton mysteriously left our TV screens. Job accomplished I suppose and, with that, he more or less retired from life as Doyen of Anti-Establishment Radicalism to marry, sire and settle down as a sort of ‘grand old man’ of the British left whose opinion is still canvassed by a new generation of ‘meeja dahlings’ who seem to regard the wretch as some sort of Oracle. An example is this interview in the Al-Independent where readers are treated to an opportunity to submit their fawning questions and, in response, get drivel like this:
Well, it’s reassuring to know that Elton’s ‘personal line’ stops short of doing adverts for banks but is far enough advanced to enable him to utilise those same banks as repositories for the considerable personal fortune he has amassed from his showbiz career. I wish I had known about this question-and-answer session a little sooner, then I could have logged on and posed my own burning question: ‘Ben Elton, why are you such a wanker?’ [Update. How very rude of me to fail to acknowledge that the above-mentioned link comes courtesy of excellent fellow British blogger Peter Briffa] April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
And it’s getting closer to home. A man in his 20’s has been shot dead on the dancefloor of a North London nightclub. The club is situated about 400 yards from my front door. April 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
There has been a big demonstration in Washington D.C. which was referred to by Dale Amon in a previous post. Radley Balko of The Agitator followed the going on in person and reported:
Now this is wonderful news. The sight of groups holding up signs saying ‘a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16’ standing next to an anti-globalization protestor is just about the most sublime sight I can imagine. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This public conflation of toxic idiocies is providing people who are pro-capitalist or pro-Israel or pro-war-on-terrorism, or any combination thereof, with what can only be described as a ‘target rich environment’. Juicy. April 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I started out my political life as a bedwetting liberal. Young, idealistic and dumb. Then I started paying income taxes… April 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Undercover operative Radley Balko is going undercover at the anti-globalist demonstration in Washington. If he survives and doesn’t get strung up on a pair of Golden Arches, expect some interesting tales to appear on The Agitator later this evening Zulu Time. All evil globalists like us should use ‘Zulu’ when discussing our nefarious plans. It sounds so appropriate for the articles in the Secretive Underground Publication of the Samizdata Terran Planetary Cadre of Elite Anarcho-Capitalist Conspirators! Give ’em ‘ell and fire when ready Radley! April 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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