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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There is an excellent article on Rantburg about Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. It quotes some of his remarks as printed in a London based Arabic newspaper
Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are justified because they live in democracies and are directly responsible for government policies that anger Arabs, Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant implies in the latest excerpt of his memoirs. In the passages that appeared Tuesday in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Ayman al-Zawahri says the West understands only “the language of self-interest coupled with oppressive power. If we want to make them understand our rights we have to speak to them in the language they understand,” he said.
Well he is correct in one respect: the West, particularly the Anglosphere, does indeed understand that language. The problem is, we are considerably better at expressing it than they are. If they want this ‘dialogue of civilisations’ to be conducted at 3000 feet per second, ok, we can do that. That is not a dialogue we are going to be on the loosing end of.
The Islamists like poor deluded Mr. Al-Zawahri are actually in a no-win situation. If they elect to fight us, which they obviously have, we are richer by several orders of magnitude and much, much better at the whole ‘directed violence’ thing than they are… but if they do not fight us, they are still doomed. In the long run the sheer joyous banalities of globalised capitalist consumer culture will snow them under with a blizzard of addidas shoes, MP3 players, porno DVDs, air conditioning, satellite videophones and silicon enhanced actresses in very short skirts. Worst of all, we can quite happily tolerate and actually absorb the Islamic world’s best and brightests in ourcivilisation. In the final analysis either way they’re screwed.
An article in New Jersey Online (NJO link here no longer works) reports that President Hugo Chavez‘s ongoing strategy of bankrupting Venezuela and ensuring only a moron would invest their capital there is gathering momentum.
Chavez says his land reform law will correct the injustice of only 1 percent of the population owning more than 60 percent of the country’s arable land. But business leaders says it violates private property rights by forcing farmers to conform to a national agricultural strategy or risk having their land confiscated. Fedecamaras is also protesting a law that requires the state-owned oil company to own a majority stake in all future joint ventures with private corporations.
Now this, boys and girls, is what is known as fascist economics. Nominal ownership is retained in private hands but de facto control over the means of production is in the hands of government agencies. The term ‘fascist’ is often used as an epithet meaning ‘bad guys’ or ‘statist’ but that merely devalues the term, leaving us with fuzzy stereotypes of Nazis á la ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Understood properly, fascism or ‘right-socialism’ is a form of socialism that concerns itself with control of assets rather than ownership. Often there is a mixture of outright left style nationalisations of ‘essential’ industries (such as oil companies), but a fiction of private ownership persists at lower levels.
To understand Chavez, and any number of other modern ‘socialists’ in Latin America, Europe or elsewhere, it is important to understand they are a mixture of left and right socialism… naturally modern socialists or ‘social democrats’ dislike being told some of their economic policies are fascist but there you have it. Whilst there is vast body of definitions of what constitutes fascism, most are written by self-described leftists keen to differentiate ‘nice’ socialism from ‘nasty’ national socialism/fascism. Yet as early as 1940, Fred Hayek in The Road to Serfdom exposed fascism for what it was… a variant of socialism. The often quoted slogan that ‘Fascism is late capitalism’ is not just wrong, it is incoherent. An economic system in which the means of production are allocated by the state’s commands, regardless of who ‘owns’ the bloody things, is not, by definition, capitalist, late or otherwise. The defining characteristic of CAPITALism is that CAPITAL is allocated via markets in accordance with the priorities of owner of the capital.
So let’s call Hugo Chavez what he really is: a fascist.
Starved for intelligence?
There is a very interesting article by James Ostrowski at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, pertaining to spending by the US intelligence services. The bit that caught my eye was:
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the combined budget of these agencies is at least $30 billion annually. Officially and unofficially, the U.S. and its allies probably have more than 75,000 intelligence personnel. This army [is] larger than the Army of Northern Virginia, and spends twice as much as the entire Chinese defense budget…
Fascinating stuff, though I do wonder if we actually know what China spends on its defense budget in economically meaningful terms. The history of various Western intelligence agencies’ estimates of the Soviet defense budgets during the 1970’s and 1980’s does not exactly fill me with confidence.
Once more, Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit takes conspiracy theorists and the ludicrous Tony Benn to task for incoherent thinking
I am having a bit of an argument with a friend at the moment. Among a number of other things, he insists that the U.S. is fighting this war for oil, as stated some time ago by Tony Benn. This latest conspiracy to do the rounds is getting really irritating. For I thought that perhaps we are at war simply because the Al-Qaida terrorist network, which we understand to be aided and abetted by their puppet Taliban regime, were the cause of the attacks on the WTC on September 11, not to mention the Pentagon attack, and a possible attack on the White House through Flight 93.
However, should Adil mistakenly think such convoluted interpretations are the exclusive preserve of Islam’s wacko fringe and their secular socialist counterparts such as Anthony Wedgewood Benn, that is not the case. Alas similar dark prognostications can be found in the more loopy eddies of libertarian thought as well.
One example is Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One, who is a well thought out, largely coherent quasi-libertarian who writes a lot of very good and insightful stuff. Yet it seems to me he become unhinged at the first whiff of US or UK military involvement in pretty much anything. I realise he thinks me far too trusting of the state (a novel concept for me) but I regard his approach, like that of many Muslim conspiracy theorists, as a ‘theory of reflexive disbelief’ rather than one of skeptical rational analysis.
Of course the irony of sharing some aspects of world view with Emmanual’s strain of libertarianism might be lost on Muslim extremists, unless they also have a sense of humour. I certainly think it is funny.
Christian Michel sees Israel’s problems as rooted not in geography but in what it is.
It has been said that Israel is ‘a state in the wrong place’.
But Israel’s problem is not that it is a state in the wrong place (where else should it be?), it is that it is a State. Because it was artificially established from the outside, its sovereignty is questioned inside (as is the case by minorities of so many states set up by their colonial powers, notably in Africa and the ex-Soviet Union).
But Israel’s problems only anticipate those to be faced sooner or later by Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, to name a few in Europe. A modern State, all the more so if it claims to be democratic, is viable only when it rules a totally homogenous, uniform, undifferentiated population. Yet, whether we like it or not, populations will get more and more differentiated, by fortune, by education, by new ethnic awareness, by culture. States will either have to level down differences through brutal ethnic cleansing and economic intervention, with the risk of stifling innovation and prosperity, let alone human rights; or withdraw.
In my childhood liberal Christian environment, Jews were regarded as the “chosen people”, our “elders in the faith”. When anarchist issues became of interest, Jews appeared to me as the obvious model of a God-given historically proven example that human beings’ social identity is not attached to a land, it is not dependent on some bureaucracy conferring citizenships. We can live collectively without these artificial constructs. Jews managed to do it despite persecutions for 2000 years.
This constant and admirable refusal to be assimilated and reduced to the single dimension of a subject attached to a land and a state is a root of anti-semitism. It is not the ‘deicidal people’ that Hitler hated, but the ‘wandering’ one. Hitler’s fight, his ‘Kampf’, was not so much against Jews as such, as against cosmopolitanism. The Communist was an enemy (the name USSR with no reference to a land was a statement of the internationalist nature of communism at the time), the Capitalist was another one, so were the landless Gypsies and Jews. It is no coincidence, of course, that Jews were so heavily represented in both capitalist and communist elites.
An extraordinary paradox of our time, then, is that Israel is established just when the world is discovering the absurdity of social organizations based on the junction of a territory, a people and a government (ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer). Inherited from the French Revolution, the dogma that all three had to go together led to the Versailles Treaty and its disastrous consequences. It is still causing today ethnic cleansing through forced assimilation, deportation or elimination.
The creation of a State of Israel after the Holocaust might have seemed a good idea to some. Jews wanted a country of their own where they would be safe and not dependent on the goodwill of alien governments. It turns out that Jews are safe everywhere except in Israel, and Israel survives only thanks to the goodwill of a few alien governments.
Sacred texts, whether the Bible or the Koran, are metaphors. The universe was not created in 6 days and the Promised Land is not 20,000 sq. km between Eilat and the Golan. Land belongs legitimately to individuals only, not States, and the only Promise to look for is that it will remain your property to enjoy until you give it away, sell it or die. It matters little then that neighbours are Palestinian and Jews, provided they respect property rights. And provided they don’t need to get control of a government, either because no government exists, or it is powerless anyway to redistribute their wealth, subsidize their business, educate their children, run their police, ban what they will eat or drink, dictate how they should dress and when they should fast and close their shops… compare Palestine before the State of Israel and today.
That is the lesson Jews had been teaching us throughout History, how to remain yourself among others. They have discharged themselves of this mission with terrible consequences. Maybe that torch has passed on to Libertarians.
Christian Michel also writes on liberalia.com, one of Europe’s leading libertarian websites. All texts available in English and French.
Back on December 6th, we reported in Grim tidings in blogland, that Natalie Solent was hors de combat with a busted brain box. However the world is once more running in well oiled grooves: she is is back in action and blogging her heart out!
…He chortled in his joy.
Over on Matthew Edgar’s blog, you can hear the sound of grinding teeth every time mustachioed Rivera prances across the screens at Fox.
As an aside, I was watching the news with my extraordinarily bright grandmother the other day. She was surfing through the cable channels and came to Fox News. As Rivera is completely unknown in Britain, she was unaware he is a fairly well know, even if not widely respected, ‘investigative reporter’ across the puddle. She watched him declaiming about the situation in Kandahar for a few minutes and then turned to me:
“I think this is an American version of one of those news parody shows like ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News’… can you get me a real news channel?”
…whereupon she handed me the remote control.
She was rather perplexed when I started rolling on the floor laughing uncontrollably.
It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for
– Will Rogers
Hurrah! Someone must have poked Adil Farooq with a sharp stick because because the excellent Muslimpundit blog has once again started loudly proclaiming some common sense from the minarets.
He is in effect pointing out the absurdity of ‘multiculturalism’ (which is of course nothing of the sort) and puts the boot in where it is sorely needed. The fact such self-evident remarks are even controversial is a testament to the degree of stupidity often heard on the subject
I would have thought that any attempt to accelerate the integration of citizenship-seeking immigrants into Britain, thereby preparing such people at the outset to take advantage of more opportunities to help increase their welfare, would have been welcomed by all. After all, this is what immigrants come for – to increase their living standards through seeking jobs. Taking English classes would make this easier
It is a dark marvel that there are people who cannot understand that!
Muslims often claim that their religion is misunderstood by America and others in the West. Well, in the aftermath of September 11, that is no longer the case. Non-Muslims have bent over backwards to understand Muslims, their history, their religion, even the source of their grievances, in an effort to understand what they are dealing with. The onus is now on the Muslims to do the same, and to actively throw off the shackles of ignorance and misunderstanding that they persistently have had have of America and others in the West. It will not be easy, but then serious introspection never claims to be, especially in the Muslim World, where vast hordes of people are almost always wrong almost all the time.
Now if that is not a brutally objective critically rational perspective, then I don’t know what is!
A highly recommended blog for all, but particularly those who mistakenly think the merest whiff of Islam invariably causes homicidal dementia and an urge to take flying lessons. Now all we have to do is hassle the hell out of Adil to update the blog more often.
In my earlier article, as I think Natalija noticed, I spoke primarily of what I think are realistic options on what will happen. My own views are of course imbedded in what I write, but perhaps a clearer statement is in order.
If Mr. Walker is a member of al Qaeda, then there are no options. He should be tried for Treason.
If he is not an al Qaeda member he should be given the option to stay in Afghanistan. He would be handed over to the Northern Alliance with the other foreign Taliban soldiers.
If he wishes to retain his American citizenship and to ever return there, he must take his chances with a Treason trial. If ten years from now he finds he really wants to return, the answer is the same.
There are some rules you must keep to if you chose to be a member of a society. It is one thing to wish to change the society you exist within; it is quite another to work to bring about the deaths of fellow citizens while simultaneously partaking of its’ liberties.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Over on Daimnation there is a good piece that he has picked up about the feelings of a Muslim American from New York who is with the US 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan.
Those two towers were special. Me and my family, we used to take the ferry, go to Staten Island, and on our way back, you could just see the skyline, at night time, it was just beautiful.
His views come as no suprise to me and should shame the ‘kill all towelheads’ crowd into silence.
Last night I was in lovely Prague but tonight I am in more exciting but less lovely Belgrade. So let me tear myself away from my new biMac «hehehe» and give you a Balkan perspective on the articles by Dale Amon and Perry de Havilland regarding hairy John Walker in Afghanistan.
As a person who is not from what Perry interestingly calls the ‘Anglosphere’, maybe I see this matter of John Walker slightly differently. In what used to be Yugoslavia, people split along largely ethnic lines when the civil war ripped us apart. Yet many people made decisions to not let an accident of birth choose who they stood by. There were Serbs who joined the Croatian HV Army, there were Croatians who supported the Krajina Serbs, there were Croatians who joined the Bosnian ‘Muslim’ Armia rather than the Croatian HVO. There were Serbs in Yugoslavia who supported Milosevic and the paramilitaries and others who opposed them. Still others everywhere decided to support ‘none of the above’ and either refused to take up arms against anyone or moved abroad.
It seems to me, a person who turns his back on their ethnic origin and joins with another culture during a conflict is either a person of principle or a traitor. Which you are judged to be is only decided when it is all over. So for example, Croatians who supported the Serbian regime in Krajina are ‘traitors’ and Serbs who supported Tudjman’s Croatia are ‘principled’.
Why? Because if anyone can be said to have emerged the ‘winner’ in the Balkan Wars, it is Croatia. It is that simple. As the US has won the war in Afghanistan, it will be decided that Walker is a traitor. The winners make the rules and they write the history books. The winner is always right. Perry takes a position of pure and very good libertarian principle in this matter, but what Dale says is what will actually happen: the US will throw him in jail regardless for exactly the reasons he says.
It may not be fair or just or moral or even reasonable. But it is the truth. That is how the world works.
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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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