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’m sure that Hugo Chavez has done some good. Much more bad than good probably, but some good. And Ken Livingstone is certainly not totally evil. But when the two of them get together it is very implausible that it is good news for the world on average.
Though if Mr Livingstone spends a lot of time in Venezuela, that will be pleasant both for him and for Londoners, I am really quite puzzled what Latin America, or even Mr Chavez, gets from this deal:
Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital’s policing, transport and other municipal issues.
“I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years. I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this,” he told reporters at the presidential palace after meeting Chávez.
But the most puzling thing of all is that use of the phrase “first-world city”. I was under the impression that the ‘first world’ was the capitalist western countries, the ‘second world’ the realm of state-socialism, and the ‘third world’ the unindustrialised rest, not clearly part of either. Continuing the metaphor of separate worlds – and wishing away trade and travel and telegraph – the Rev John Papworth has even coined “Fourth World” for the poorest of the poor and those rejecting economic development altogether.
I cannot believe Red Ken was trying to suggest that the Bolivarian Revolution will fail, and that in 20 years Venezuela will be fully part of the capitalist first world again. Surely Mr Livingstone means he wants Caracas to be a second-world city?
So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on – as Bush refers to him – the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.
“Well, so Bush reads history”, one might reasonably observe at this point. “Isn’t it more important to find out how he uses it?” It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested – as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time – in how the past can provide guidance for the future.
– John Lewis Gaddis
Darryl Watson wrote in with something that is indeed a topic worthy of pondering…
I am not sure if this is a worthy topic of discussion, but the issue is gnawing at me right now, and thought I would share:
I have a ten-minute walk to my preferred parking spot, from where I work in downtown Denver. The parking lot is in a less savoury neighbourhood. While I was on my way to my vehicle, half a block away, I saw a man come around a corner quickly, pushing a bicycle. He was moving too quick to simply be going from point A to B, and I immediately knew something was wrong. As he hopped on the bike and started pedalling toward me, another man came around the corner, grizzled, a biker type, with a big beard and leather hat. He was shouting, ‘Hey! Hey!’ at the man on the bike, who started to increase his speed.
It was clear that the man on foot wanted the man on the bike to stop, and that the man on the bike was fleeing. And both were approaching me quickly.
I was immediately conscious of the motorcycle helmet in one hand, my bag of work sundries in the other, and the distance between us. There was no one else anyone else within a block. I immediately moved to block the fleeing man’s path on the sidewalk; he saw me and swerved sharply out into the street, trying to stay out of my reach.
This is the instant where I disappointed myself. If I had not hesitated, I would have been able to clothesline him and bring him to a stop, but instead I was thinking:
- This situation might not be what it looks like… a bicycle theft
- I knew without a doubt the fleeing man would have to be knocked off the bike to get him to stop
- I had my cowboy boots on (yes, I work in an office in cowboy boots… it is Denver) and they were terrible for running
- If I injured the guy, I could get charged with battery
It was option ‘4’ which caused me to hesitate and let the thief slip by. He got away, and the man on foot ran after, calling for police to no avail.
I imagine the threat of criminal charges for being decent and willing to apply a little violence to better one’s neighbourhood is a sore topic in this blog. We in Colorado have not quite gotten as bad as England, but, I fear it will come to that as people increasingly rely on authorities to rescue them when there is trouble. I would be interested in reading commentary on the issue.
One of the blogosphere’s brightest lights, Michael Totten, once again finds himself up the sharp end and brings some interesting reportage from Georgia. If you are interested in the real chronology of events and understanding why Russia, not Georgia, is the prime mover of this regional tragedy, check out his article.
Freedom of movement is a simple principle and some countries are more attractive than others. Britain may have some 77 million by 2060, overtaking Germany as the most populous country in Europe . A happy result as this adds more energy to our mongrellous mix. Get rid of the welfare state and we may attract even more economic migrants, even more entrepreneurs and get even richer faster.
Still, good news brings out the illiberal. We have the Tories aping Labour, adding stasis to their statist hungers, with a po-faced limit on all immigration.
The Conservatives are demanding an annual limit on immigration, to take “into account its impact on the public service infrastructure” as well as a broader policy “to tackle other issues like family breakdown” and ageing.
The prize for chumpdom extends to greenery: with their wistful carry trade of ecocide and dreaming spires, with cyclists trading organic marrows between villages of happy farmers:
Rosamund McDougall, policy director at the Optimum Population Trust, has called “for stabilisation and gradual decrease to five million fewer people in Britain by 2050”.
“This population growth is absolutely unsustainable, in environmental terms, energy terms and food production. It will make life for British citizens significantly worse,” she said.
“Even if we comprehensively greened our lifestyles, the UK could only support 27 million people – less than half its present population – from its own resources.”
The green response to freedom of movement is illiberal restriction cast in a PC lexicon:
OPT supports immigration. We want to go on doing our share of protecting persecuted refugees as well as welcoming additional skills and cultures to our already rich mix of people. The problem is how many? Since we believe that our population density is now too great for our resources, we think that a just solution is to balance immigration with emigration to help reverse population growth. As around 350,000 people leave our shores each year, we suggest limiting immigration to similar numbers, to produce a neutral effect on our population growth. More asylum seekers could be accommodated if there is a corresponding reduction in the number of economic migrants.
This fundamental divide between liberals and greens has not been grasped by the general populace. If the greens are unable to attain the carrying capacity of the United Kingdom by voluntary means, where will they go in their quest for sustainability?
I like this, from a blogger I have only recently discovered, Will Wilkinson:
Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision.
Well said. The rest of Wilkinson’s blog, which goes by the name of The Fly Bottle is well worth a regular look also, in the event that you need telling.
One of the things that irritates me about propagandists on my side is that they are often reluctant to spot a great victory, even when they have just won one. Wilkinson’s point is not just that climate chaos-ism is nonsense, a claim that I increasingly find myself agreeing with completely, not least because the now undependable notion of “global warming” has been replaced by the idiotic phrase “climate chaos”, or, even more idiotically, “climate change”. When was there ever a time when the climate did not change? What Wilkinson is also noting is that the hysteria whipped up around the changeability of the climate was whipped up because these lunatics came to realise that they had no other arguments against a more-or-less capitalist, more-or-less-free-market world economy. They have now conceded – not in so many words, rather by changing the subject – that capitalism works, and the only nasty thing they have left to say about it is that it works so well that it ruins the planet.
I do not want to suggest that this is a dazzlingly original observation. I merely thank Wilkinson for clarifying something that most of the regular writers of and readers of this blog all know, in the sense of agreeing when they are told it, but which they might not have said to themselves with absolutely clarity before. One of the reasons I noticed this posting of Wilkinson’s was that I had made precisely the same point in something else I was recently writing, about how well I think capitalism has been doing lately, both in practice and in the ideological enthusiasm sense.
Wilkinson continues:
I think the point is that the clock really is ticking. If we don’t “do something” soon, we’ll probably see that we don’t really need to do anything really dramatic, and then the window for radical social change will be closed. So I expect the volume to get much louder.
Exactly. As and when it comes to be agreed that capitalism is not now ruining the planet, that will be another huge victory for the forces of sanity. Two-nil to us, that will make it. What idiocy will the lunatic tendency think of next, I wonder (comments welcome), to take everyone’s minds off that huge defeat?
I know I know. The incorrigibly pessimistic part of our commentariat will now want to say that the damage has been done, etc. Maybe so. But although ideological shifts do not necessarily have immediate consequences, they do have consequences, and these shifts will have good consequences. They already are, I would say.
However, I do agree with the point that Johnathan Pearce makes from time to time that it would be good for us to ponder what would be the least-worst arrangements for if and when capitalism ever does start ruining the planet for real. I favour technical fixes rather than global regulations, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
Comrades! – and revisionist Hillary supporting scum. Only a little joke, Hillary comrades – your support is really most welcome.
I stand before you today to tell you that Now is Our Time. The pathetic remnants of Western Civilization are ripe for destruction, and we will be the generation of revolutionaries that will finally achieve the goal of creating the new society. Outmoded institutions like private property will be swept away, and a new progressive order created.
And this will be achieved without once mentioning such words as “socialism” or “Marxism” in public. Indeed it is our very care to avoid scaring those mislead by capitalism, the ignorant who still cling to their guns and religion, that will help us achieve total victory. Ultimate power is within our grasp.
No longer we will have to pretend to be “proud of our country”, for as the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution our country is the whole planet.
We have the children and young people already. It is true that most children are still given such outmoded and old fashioned things as birthday and even “Christmas” presents. Few children are given the intense political education that these two children receive [at this point Comrade Speaker is to wave the two girl props], or that the Great One himself received – the three hours of political education per day that our Beloved Leader was given by his mother, the untypical white person, from his most early years.
However, such intense political education is only needed for the leaders, for the Community Organisers – for the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution. For the masses the level of conditioning provided by the progressive media and by the public collective schools and even some of the “private” schools, is enough. With minds clear of experience or information, the young can be taught that all problems are due to the greed of big businessmen (we need not even use word “capitalists” ) and can be solved by enlightened collective power.
It is true that we have made compromises and sacrifices, but look at things have turned out:
For example, only forty years ago our Comrade Revolutionaries were fighting on the streets with the corrupt Chicago Machine. We decided not to fight that Machine – but to cooperate with it, using our family ties to the Machine when we had them. And look at the results.
Now the machine is ours. It is our instrument – the instrument of the Revolution!
Today many of the largest corporations fund our organizations – just as Saul Alinksy predicted they one day would. But it is more than fear – the infiltration and, more importantly, the permeation of ideas (as Gramsci taught) means that many of the largest corporations are managed by people who are in whole or part in sympathy with us. The transition will be easy -for the managers of such corporations as General Electric hate the whole concept of share OWNERS already.
This is what pragmatism has given us – power, ultimate power. And soon this whole stinking Imperialist country will fall to us. And when this place falls, so will the whole world!
This is the secret of our success – our flexibility. If the “liberals” with their bourgeois humanitarianism are against the death penalty then we are against the death penalty – whilst they are useful to us.
But as soon as it is more useful to be in favour of the death penalty then we are in favour of it – indeed more in favour of it than anyone else. Indeed we truly are in favour of the death penalty, although not for the offenses the deluded reactionaries are – pause for laughter and shouts of “kill them all”.
Comrades, Comrades – we must remember Comrade Lenin’s teachings.
If it is for the good of the Revolution we should kill off nine tenths of the population of the whole Earth, but if it is for the good of the Revolution to resist our urges and kill no one at all – then that is the policy we should follow.
The only morality is the Revolution – the new society. There must be no more self indulgence in killing than in anything else.
Just as living children may be used as props to attract the votes of sentimental idiots – the kind of people who give “Christmas” presents [pause for more laughter], so they may be killed out of hand after they are born, or used for experiments [pause for laughter]- experiments the capitalists and their dupes are so weak as to be forced to fund with their taxes – pause for wild laughter.
There is no contradiction – for the only truth is the Revolution and its needs. For this end we may even set up Churches to take over the “God” nonsense.
Of course this is more than “we may” – for we already have, this is what Liberation Theology is about.
For whilst religion is the opium of capitalism – it can also be the energy of the Revolution!
When the new society is achieved, and it will be soon comrades, we will get rid of this “God” concept for the only true God is the Collective – not some mythical individual. Just as we will get rid of other things we pretend to hold in high regard, such as the “family” [wave prop children again – to wild laughter] – but till then these absurdities are of use. We will even use the idea of the pathetic Bush of capitalist taxes to subsidize religous groups – our religious groups. Indeed we have so ordered things that we get most of this money already!
Wild laughter – and shouts of “the capitalists fund the rope with which we will hang them”, other shouts of such things as “Warren Buffet and …… do this without being forced to” more laughter.
Comrades, Comrades we must not indulge ourselves even by too much talk – there is still much to do in the campaign.
So I will conclude by telling you that I think that our traditional private chant of “Death-to-America” is too narrow – too much in the spirit of narrow bourgeois nationalism and counter nationalism. Indeed it is has even been taken up by Islamic radicals, although of the more anti imperialist and useful kind, and they are even stupid enough to chant it in public.
So I propose a new chant. I was inspired by some of our more weak minded, but useful, comrades at Stamford University – with their “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho – Western Civilization has got to go”. But I propose something that is shorter and less flippant.
[At this point the speaker leads the crowd in the new private chant].
Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West!……….
I vote for the fifth option, which is “There should not be a drinking age”, on the basis that it is none of the government’s damn business.
This story will not help the blood pressure of our regular readership, I am sure:
A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a “shocking” extension of its original purpose.
How marvellous. Makes one’s heart swell with pride.
ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers.
Tremendous. I almost want to sing “Land of Hope and Glory” (sarcasm alert).
The £224 million computer system was announced in the wake of the death of Victoria Climbié, who was abused and then murdered after a string of missed opportunities to intervene by the authorities, as a way to connect the different services dealing with children.
The death of this girl, like that of all children in the care of monstrous parents, is a terrible story but the creation of this database is not the answer. Punishment of the offenders surely is (I’ll leave it to the commentariat for what those punishments should be).
It has always been portrayed as a way for professionals to find out which other agencies are working with a particular child, to make their work easier and provide a better service for young people.
No doubt.
However, it has now emerged that police officers, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care workers will use the records to search for evidence of criminality and wrongdoing to help them launch prosecutions against those on the database – even long after they have reached adulthood.
And this, of course, is the nub of the issue. Governments down the ages, whether in the real world or in the dystopias of fiction writers, have sought to spot criminals ahead of their actually being criminals. I remember watching the Spielberg movie “Minority Report” – loosely based on the old Philip K. Dick novel – and wondered just how long it would take for NuLab or its equivalents to come up with an attempt to do stuff like this. Now it is becoming reality. But although the creators of such databases may like to kid themselves that they are protecting the little ones, in truth, they are placing dangerous power in the hands of state officials that can be used against people for the rest of their lives.
I am glad the Daily Telegraph is creating a stink about this. Question: will the Tories pledge to shut this database down? (Cough, nervous laughter).
A few days back, I watched a programme, or least about 15 minutes of it, that speculates on what the Earth will look like once humans disappear. There is lots of stuff about how houses, roads, bridges, airports and sewage systems start to crumble, how rats and other animals take over. There are lots of photographs of wrecked cars with plants growing out of the windows. On one level, if you are into wildlife or the study of botany, some of this is pretty interesting. The programme is very slickly put together.
There are two ways to view this film. Perhaps it taps into a very powerful theme amongst what I might call the dark Greens – the idea of Homo Sapiens as a disease, almost a curse, on the “pure” Earth. While the narrator has a civilised tone of voice, it is hard not to miss a sort of gloating at the demise of humans and their artifacts.
On the other hand, it is quite useful to be reminded of what happens once the basic infrastructure of modern civilisation goes into decline, such as electrical power, clean water, mass transportation, and so on. Which is why it matters a great deal if we forgo important sources of power generation, for example, all because of coming to the wrong conclusions about supposed Man-made climate change, for example. So maybe one perhaps unintended consequence of this sort of film is to sharply remind us of what happens when we take our modern civilisation for granted and flirt with “going back to nature”.
We have of course already alluded here to the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Here is another tribute to this great man, from Theodore Dalrymple twelve days ago, which I think is spot on:
Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.
Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising – and, of course, quite right – on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.
But I suspect that this may also be right:
The problem for Solzhenitsyn’s literary reputation is that the subjects his books address no longer seem so compelling to younger readers. Astonishing as it may seem to people who lived through the time when Solzhenitsyn appeared as a colossus, many people younger than 30 – not only in America and Western Europe but in Russia itself – have never heard of him or do not know what he did. Of course, literary reputations wax and wane; but his disappearance from the consciousness of young people at least raises the question of whether his achievement was more political and moral than literary.
Ever since I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (out loud on the University of Essex radio station as it transpired), I always had Solzhenitsyn clocked as: Great Writer? – not sure; propagandist – all time great. In this respect, I particular recommend his memoir called The Oak and the Calf, which is about how he did his propagandising, which was all mixed up with how he managed to keep himself alive to go on propagandising, which was a mighty achievement in itself under the murderous circumstances that he described and publicised so well.
Quite aside from the fact that I don’t read Russian, this judgement of mine surely has much to do with the fact that I have no very definite idea what a great writer is in any language (although I know very approximately what I like) and am myself scarcely a published writer at all. I’m not saying he was a great writer of literary fiction, and I’m not saying he wasn’t. On the other hand, I know quite a lot about propaganda and have myself done it with some glimmerings of success. In rather the same way that if you actually play football in some very lowly division you are an order of magnitude better than I am at knowing just how good Pele was or Ronaldo is, I can tell you that Solzhenitsyn was, when it came to spreading ideas, awesomely good, and that this was no accident. He brought skills like those of a chess grandmaster to the ideological struggle between him (and all his Samizdat allies) and the USSR. and his industry and attention to detail (to say nothing of his sheer courage) was extraordinary. The notion that he won his ideological battle without any hard graft besides the hard graft of just writing it down in some isolated dacha is quite wrong. He was the spokesman for an entire generation of other writers and record keepers. He was the leader of an entire underground movement. He created a fact-shifting machine as surely as any Western press magnate. He quite consciously set himself the task of destroying the USSR using only the power of the written and published word, and more than any other man – with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who also had the awesome military clout of the USA at his disposal – he succeeded.
Not that Solzhenitsyn was himself indifferent to or ignorant of military affairs. Towards the end of his life he wrote several novels about the First World War. He was in the artillery before being swallowed up by the monster that he named the Gulag, and he thought of all the truths that he gathered about the Gulag as ammunition, and the publishing of them as the launching of artillery barrages. If Dalrymple is right, it will be for the war of words that Solzhenitsyn conducted against the USSR, and for the fact that it succeeded so brilliantly, that he will be most admiringly remembered. But now that he is gone, fresh looks will surely be taken from the purely literary point of view at Solzhenitsyn’s achievement, and posterity may arrive, as Dalrymple says, at a somewhat different conclusion.
Lynne Doucet, talking at the Edinburgh International Television Conference, gave a speech on the complexities of reporting in Afghanistan. She lamented that she was unable to convey the complexities of the conflict or the perspective of the Taliban factions. Whilst some may view this as a criticism of television reporting in general, snippets of her speech show the quest for impartiality. Let us consider what she says within that framework.
Doucet wishes to show the motives and perceptions of the Afghan population, yet uses the term Taliban rather than Afghan: her true target is those who resist, not those who support:
“What’s lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans.
“In the Prince Harry coverage for example, there were all these people out there you never really saw them.
“You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.”
In further detail, she notes the factionalism of the Taliban, yet does not move beyond her original goal of giving the opponents a voice or conveying their ‘humanity’. Doucet understands that part of her moral mission is to explain the complexities of the conflict, but her method is to give the mic to the other side.
Her impartiality is already flawed by her admission that journalists in Afghanistan support the troops through coverage of the Prince Harry mission:
Canadian-born Doucet said: “It probably did bring a lot of people to think about Afghanistan who normally wouldn’t ordinarily think about Afghanistan. If the Prince Harry story can bring more people to think about Afghanistan then that’s a good thing.
“There was a lost opportunity. There was hardly any mention of Afghans, even of Afghanistan … (just a) sense of ‘I went to a country far away’.
But she added: “Viewing figures went up, Prince Harry got a hero’s welcome and recruitment for the British Army went up so an objective was achieved. Did that mean people knew more about why Britain was there? I don’t think so.
Doucet wishes to be the gatekeeper for explaining the conflict: living up to her perceived concept of impartiality by maintaining a position of neutrality and providing access to all parties fighting in Afghanistan. But her freedom to report is bounded by the protection that the Western forces provide: the Taliban would neither respect her as a woman or as a non-Muslim. Without this understanding of her own limited freedom of movement, she is unable to provide a rounded understanding of the limits to reporting in Afghanistan.
Journalists find that they are unable to report voices where values are incommensurable and their own position is at risk, since they are viewed as the enemy. Underneath all the verbiage, Doucet’s unspoken lament is that the Taliban consider her the enemy too, when all she wishes to do is understand them. Poor lamb.
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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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