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I have had two e-mails asking what ‘our’ views are on the Jenin massacre/counter-terrorist operation (choose one), both of which seem to expect ‘us’ to reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
Firstly, there is no Samizdata editorial position per se on anything in particular. Our contributors write within a libertarian meta-context (i.e. a world view or frames of reference) but other than that, we all have separate views on many issues and air them as we wish on this blog.
My personal views on what did/did not happen in Jenin are… I really do not know. I regard the IDF as no more or less reliable a source of information than the Palestinians. Both lie through their teeth when it suits them. That is what all governments do.
I regard press accounts as something that need to be assessed on the basis of past performance and plausibility. Some bloggers have noticed that UK media reports are similar and have taken this as a sign of either collective hostility to Israel or collusion or whatever. I suspect the fact they were being herded around in a group by the Israeli authorities might have something to do with their similarity of reports and observations. However the mere fact Israel is not receiving collective songs of praise from the UK media is evidence enough for some people of all manner of sinister motives. Sorry but the entire UK media is not represented by Robert Fisk and I for one am far from reflexively supportive of what the State of Israel tends to do. Thus sometimes I think maybe the reason some people write that Israel did something bad was that Israel did indeed do something bad. Do I think the IDF is institutionally capable of wiping out hundreds of Palestinian civilians to get a much smaller group of terrorists as some have claimed? Yes, I don’t doubt they are capable but that is not the same as saying I think they actually did that in Jenin. I simply have no way of knowing one way or the other.
However, the fact Israel wants to control what the media sees and the fact this is going to upset the media is also no evidence that what the Palestinians have claimed the IDF have done is true either. Israel is conducting a military operation and in military operations, security is life. As I pointed out in a post yesterday regarding Antony Loyd’s rather daft remarks about the US and UK militaries keeping journalists in the dark in Afghanistan, there are sound reasons for doing just that which have nothing to do with hiding atrocities or failures. And just because Arafat is howling about atrocities, so what? Most of what the Palestinians do ‘militarily’ are criminal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and as Arafat is bottled up in a room by the IDF, I doubt he has any more idea of what really happened in Jenin than I do… thus anything he says can be safely ignored (plus the ‘minor’ fact history has demonstrated he is a pathological liar). High intensity urban street fighting is a messy business and sometimes innocent people get killed. That is not the same as a cold blooded massacre and professional journalists are just as capable of failing to understand what they are looking at as anyone else. Destroyed houses and the pitiable residue of shattered lives are not in and of themselves evidence of Israeli malfeasance. Maybe there was a guy with an RPG-7 leaning out of a window immediately before the Merkava tank put an H.E. shell into the building. Or maybe not. Context is everything.
And so I have no idea what the truth is about Jenin and really have no desire to venture much in the way of opinions on that. I am sure who is telling the truth will come out (if anyone) but not for a while yet in all likelihood.
In 1909, British prime minister Lloyd George imposed a levy which was transformed by William Beveridge in 1946 into the modern idea of ‘National Insurance’ by which the welfare state would appropriate money from people to fund various socialist objectives. William Beveridge was the main architect of the British model of force based theft by the state of a huge chunk of national private property.
Today, Britain’s socialist ‘National Health Service’ (NHS) is set to consume £184 billion per year soon… which an article in the Times today pointed put was enough to fight the 1982 Falklands War with Argentine 40 times, or about the same at the total Gross Domestic Product of Belgium or twice that of the GDP of Saudi Arabia or South Africa… and this is just Britain’s appropriated healthcare budget.
In the US, the process has not really been all that different, merely started somewhat later. This process really began under FDR during the Depression but did not start in earnest until the ‘Great Society’ programmes of Lyndon B. Johnson. Clinton recently tried to go a more socialist route by moving US healthcare towards a more state-based system of appropriated funding, which thankfully failed.
But it should show that regardless of the example of failed socialist programmes the world over, not even information rich societies such as the USA and UK are immune to the intellectually bankrupt and economically moronic lure of such ideas as nationally directed healthcare. You may be sure than the next time the Democrats are back in control in the USA, such ideas will reappear, suitably re-branded and re-spun.
Due to a major UK routing server going splat, our e-mail is not working at the moment (and neither is that of several dozen UK ISPs apparently). If you sent us any e-mail this afternoon, you might want to resend it to our back-up address.
As it is such a major router which has done down, it will hopefully be repaired quite soon.
Update as of 18:45 GMT: The problem has been fixed!
According to the Washington Post:
“The cause of Israel drew a multitude of Americans yesterday to the historic West Front of the U.S. Capitol, where Israeli flags fluttered by the score, thousands of signs signaled support, and speakers at the podium and in the crowd voiced vigorous defenses of the country’s right to strike back against Palestinian bomb attacks aimed at its civilians,”
According to James Taranto in the Opinion Journal email newsletter:
Local officials estimated the size of the crowd at 100,000, with an estimated 1,200 charter buses carrying out-of-towners to the capital for the rally. The crowd was fired up; a few churls even booed Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, when he observed–accurately–that there are innocent Palestinians among the casualties of the war in the Mideast.
Given that politics is the act of finding the biggest parade and getting in front of it, I’m sure the Bush administration will soon enough get the point. The Israeli’s have every bit as much right to kick the crap out of the people supporting Kamikazi bombings in their cities as Americans do.
And we’d better support them because this time around the Nazis* have someone higher on their killing agenda than those of the Jewish faith.
*= Mein Kampf sales are said to be skyrocketing in Arab communities; Arab newspapers are pulling out 60 year old Nazi disinformation; Arab pundits are saying Hitler didn’t finish the job of the Final Solution. I do not mean Nazi in a figurative term. I mean it absolutely and literally.
Britain’s worst-kept secret is now out in the very public domain. Chancellor Gordon Brown announced his annual budget today and, as widely-expected, has hiked up National Insurance (a type of payroll tax) in order to increase funding of the National Health Service.
This was called the ‘Budget For Health’ by the government. Whose health? Certainly not the health of the economy. The business sector will have to stump up a whopping £3.9 billion a year more in taxes in a desperate attempt by the government to placate its public sector supporters and defer the dark day when the NHS simply collapses.
And it probably will collapse in due course. The NHS is Britain’s version of Yasser Arafat; an odious, Soviet-inspired monstrosity that has caused countless deaths and yet is mysteriously exempt from anything even approaching a critical word. Its status among the British is that of Sacred Cow, nay Red Heiffer. It is the Holy of Holies, the state of which is the barometer by which every government is finally judged. It is hardly a surprise that the press roundly trumpets opinion poll results which overwhelmingly endorse tax rises to improve the NHS when an answer in the negative is probably more outrageous than supporting legalised child-prostitution. The left never miss an opportunity to hector the British public with the admonition that, if they want improved health care, they have to pay for it. I agree, of course. I just think they should cut out the middle-man.
But the cracks have been showing of late. Too many people have been travelling abroad for their health care treatment, forking out for private insurance or watching their elderly relatives expire on trolleys in dank state hospital corridors and you can’t keep that kind of disquiet from spreading. Everybody seems to know or sense that the NHS is crocked and beyond redemption but they are prepared to shut their eyes and wish very, very hard that the government will hose enough money at it to make it all wonderful, gleaming, efficient and keep it free.
It won’t work in the long-term or even the medium-term but the government is gambling that the massive cash boost will tide them over to the next election when they will be able to annouce that they have ‘saved’ the NHS and ensured its future as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. On the face of it, it is a dangerous gamble. The Labour government was elected on the promise that they had put behind them, for ever, their old ‘tax and spend’ policies and it is at least pragmatic to assume that they will be judged harshly for breaking their promise without delivering.
On the other hand, it might just fool ’em by providing a glimmer of ersatz hope. It is almost impossible to underestimate the sacred status of the NHS. The faith it is has traditionally inspired may prove a strong enough medicine to anaesthetise the public’s critical faculties and enable them to go on believing in the Easter Bunny.
In the meantime, we’re all going to get poorer. Poverty is bad for your health.
I can’t go to work today. The voices told me to stay home and clean the guns.
– Seen on a bumper stocker in Colorado last week by a certain nefarious Doctor
In today’s Times, war correspondent Anthony Loyd reports on the current counter-insurgency sweep through an ‘undisclosed’ valley in Afghanistan by British Royal Marines of the 45 Commando battlegroup, called Operation Ptarmigan.
He also moans at some length that [emphasis added]:
Whilst promising greater detail on the operation after it has finished, the coalition’s information policy has been a mixture of assumption and contempt. Morning press briefings at Bagram begin with a US officer stating how many days have passed since the September 11 attacks. He then gives the name and family details of one attack victim. A short statement follows and relevant questions by journalists are quashed as glibly as they are by Pentagon spokesmen in Washington with the words: “I won’t answer that.”
The justification for this silence is “operational security concerns”. In reality it appears that the US and Britain are using the ferocity of the September 11 attacks as carte blanche to be all but unaccountable to press and public.
[…]
This policy will probably work admirably until official silence is revealed to have hidden an unpleasant truth.
So he thinks the US and British military are accountable to the press? Interesting concept. Now Tony Loyd is actually a reasonable reporter (he is certainly a million miles from the ludicrous Bob Fisk and his ilk), but such petulant foot stamping on his part is unbecoming. The newspapers have been roasting the US for allowing Al Qaeda and ex-Taliban forces to slip away, and for failing to achieve operational surprise during Operation Anaconda… and now they are going to roast the coalition military for taking operational security seriously?
Dr. Tim Evans welcomes ‘Red Ken’ to the world of capitalist rationality… sort of
I have long been an advocate of private roads and road pricing. State ownership of public space and its attendant services such as police beat patrols is madness. Indeed, I have long believed that London and all other geographic areas will only get decent integrated roads and transport systems through genuine private ownership and good old free market price signaling.
What I did not expect was that that doyen of the British left and now Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, would be the man to instigate the transition to such an approach. Let me be clear, Livingstone is planning to introduce road pricing into the capital city early next year. However imperfect his plans will be (and my God, they have some glaring holes at present) and however he seeks to dress this move up with all the usual environmental waffle, the long term affect of his policy of “congestion charging” is going to lead to the commodification of public space. By pricing roads, encouraging an income stream down them and therefore deriving revenue, Livingstone will slowly become addicted to the money.
As he becomes addicted and the approach spreads – already Durham, Cheshire, Milton Keynes, Surrey, Warwickshire, Isle of Wight, Cumbria, South Gloucestershire, Leeds, Hampshire, Derby and at least twenty other areas are already talking to the Department of Transport about introducing road pricing – the incentive for a supply side revolution in roads and public space will mount. For as money pours into the coffers and drivers slip into the psychology of becoming consumers of road space, so there will be ever more pressure to find new ways of generating more income and therefore getting the supply side of public space to meet people’s demands: that is – some semblance of a market approach.
It is with this in mind that the utopian ideas so long espoused by the Libertarian Alliance in such glorious pamphlets as:
LA Economic Notes No. 49, Brian Micklethwait, The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use, 1993 *
LA Economic Notes No. 57, Martin Ball, Liberate the Roads! The Benefits that will come from road privatisation, 1994 *
LA Political Notes No. 17, Max More, Private Police and the Free Rider Problem, 1983 *
LA Political Notes No. 40 Chris R. Tame, On the Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing, 1989 *
LA Political Notes No. 58, Sean Gabb, The Case for Privatising the Police, 1991 *
…will begin to become relevant to everyday experience and discourse. And that in turn could well mean fantastic new private roads and even maintenance work being undertaken with the customer in mind and not the producer interest.
Sure, these new roads might be built underground by private sector companies who put in the latest air purification technology. And yes, the owners of X road might well want to contract with a private security company to breath test one in every 10,000 drivers for excessive alcohol. But hell, that is capitalism. The owners of X road will want to tell customers that this road is the cleanest and safest way to travel.
None of this will happen in the short term. But slowly, step by step, the incentives to engage a market in road provision are mounting. Sod the Queen’s nationalised highway. I want it owned by capitalists. As a driver, I want roads to be appropriately priced and to be served as a customer.
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why those most hard-line privatisers at the Adam Smith Institute had Ken Livingstone visit their offices three times over the last year on the subject of roads?
Come on comrade Ken, scatter those libertarian seeds and take us to the supply side!
Dr. Tim Evans
*= (links requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar pdf reader) which can be downloaded for free)
Who would have thought it? Oxfam, the charity normally associated with a fairly leftist view of overseas poverty, has released a big document charting how the best hope for the world’s poor lies in more free trade, not less. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation to Samizdata writers or most of its readers, I am sure. Nonetheless, for such a well-known and prestigious body to have set its face against the anti-globalisation crowd is good news. It looks like this liberal (in the true sense of the word) meme of ours just keeps on spreading.
I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.
Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.
For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN ‘Safe Havens’ to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.
Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O’Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure.
There is also an interesting article (also by O’Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to ‘nation build’ other than en passant… they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan’s domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago.
When the Mafia offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in dark suits around to pay you a visit.
When the State offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in blue uniforms around to pay you a visit.
– Samizdata Illuminatus
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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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