Thomas Jefferson on gun control

David Davis

I quote:-

Carrying of arms

Jefferson copied many excerpts from the various books he read into his “Legal Commonplace Book.”^[82] One passage he copied which touches on gun control was from Cesare Beccaria‘s Essay on Crimes and Punishments. The passage, which is written in Italian, discusses the “false idea of utility” (false idee di utilità) which Beccaria saw as underlying some laws. It can be translated, in part, as:

A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility … who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. … It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.^[83]

Jefferson’s only notation was, “False idee di utilità.”^[83] It isn’t known whether Jefferson agreed with the example Beccaria used, or with the general idea, or if he had some other reason for copying the passage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson

What an extraordinarily articulate and educated man this was: I never knew. You learn something new and exciting every day, as you get older and older – I only looked him up out of interest as I was arguing with a student about the exact contents of the USA’s Declaration of Independence.

A re-arrangement of the deckchairs

David Davis

Estonia, strangely, is going to join a sinking currency.

Bradley Manning: One Soldier Who Really Did “Defend Our Freedom”, by Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5587

When I hear someone say that soldiers “defend our freedom,” my immediate response is to gag. I think the last time American soldiers actually fought for the freedom of Americans was probably the Revolutionary War — or maybe the War of 1812, if you want to be generous. Every war since then has been for nothing but to uphold a system of power, and to make the rich folks even richer.

But I can think of one exception. If there’s a soldier anywhere in the world who’s fought and suffered for my freedom, it’s Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning is frequently portrayed, among the knuckle-draggers on right-wing message boards, as some sort of spoiled brat or ingrate, acting on an adolescent whim. But that’s not quite what happened, according to Johann Hari (“The under-appreciated heroes of 2010,” The Independent, Dec. 24).

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans. When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.” The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government. When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam: trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.

For exposing his government’s crimes against humanity, Manning has spent seven months in solitary confinement – a torture deliberately calculated to break the human mind.

We see a lot of “serious thinkers” on the op-ed pages and talking head shows, people like David Gergen, Chris Matthews and Michael Kinsley, going on about all the stuff that Manning’s leaks have impaired the ability of “our government” to do.

He’s impaired the ability of the U.S. government to conduct diplomacy in pursuit of some fabled “national interest” that I supposedly have in common with Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Disney. He’s risked untold numbers of innocent lives, according to the very same people who have ordered the deaths of untold thousands of innocent people. According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Manning’s exposure of secret U.S. collusion with authoritarian governments in the Middle East, to promote policies that their peoples would find abhorrent, undermines America’s ability to promote “democracy, open government, and free and open societies.”

But I’ll tell you what Manning’s really impaired government’s ability to do.

He’s impaired the U.S. government’s ability to lie us into wars where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners are murdered.

He’s impaired its ability to use such wars — under the guise of promoting “democracy” — to install puppet governments like the Coalition Provisional Authority, that will rubber stamp neoliberal “free trade” agreements (including harsh “intellectual property” provisions written by the proprietary content industries) and cut special deals with American crony capitalists.

He’s impaired its ability to seize good, decent people who — unlike most soldiers — really are fighting for freedom, and hand them over to thuggish governments for torture with power tools.

Let’s get something straight. Bradley Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state. But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals. And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.

So if you’re one of the authoritarian state-worshippers, one of the grovelling sycophants of power, who are cheering on Manning’s punishment and calling for even harsher treatment, all I can say is that you’d probably have been there at the crucifixion urging Pontius Pilate to lay the lashes on a little harder. You’d have told the Nazis where Anne Frank was hiding. You’re unworthy of the freedoms which so many heroes and martyrs throughout history — heroes like Bradley Manning — have fought to give you.

Release — Wasted: Carson on the Political Class versus Leisure

I hope KC is right – SIG
http://c4ss.org/?p=5585

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
12/29/10
POC Thomas L. Knapp
media
530-618-C4SS

WASTED: CARSON ON THE POLITICAL CLASS VERSUS LEISURE

Per the conventional wisdom, big government and high tax rates reduce the incentive to work. And that may be true — to a degree. But, shows Center for a Stateless Society Research Associate Kevin Carson in a new research study, the modern corporate capitalist economic paradigm utilizes an ethos of waste to enrich the privileged by artificially promoting work over leisure.

“The historical evidence,” writes Carson in “The Great Domain of Cost-Plus: The Waste Production Economy,” “is that people do indeed prefer, on the whole, to work less when their wages increase. Therefore it makes perfect sense from the employer’s standpoint to extract more labor from people by reducing the share of their output that they keep, and by compelling them to support idle rentiers in addition to themselves.”

Carson traces overt political class propaganda on the need to increase the portion of labor earnings extracted as rent to at least as far back as Bernard Mandeville’s 18th-century _Fable of the Bees_. Wrote Mandeville:

“[I]t is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get …. Those that get their living by their daily labour … have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure …”

Or, as the anonymous author of 1770s “Essay on Trade and Commerce” put it:

“[O]ur manufacturing populace … do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week, unless provisions happen to be very dear. … The labouring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors …. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.”

But, writes Carson, there’s good news for today’s workers: “[T]he ability to manufacture scarcity does not follow from the need. The rentiers and managers are confronting the harsh reality of their increasing inability to manufacture scarcity. The productivity of new technologies of abundance is outstripping their ability to suppress them.”

By reducing scarcities long artificially maintained through political force, the new economic paradigm — horizontally networked distribution and what Carson calls “the Homebrew Industrial Revolution” in production in a book so named — is pushing the political class into obsolescence.

-30-
about 390 words

The Great Domain of Cost-Plus: The Waste Production Economy

http://c4ss.org/content/5580

Paul Marks agrees

David Davis

…about the left’s hegemonic control of education, schools and the Universities, and what needs to be broken or else we are in a New Dark Age.

Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link — Enforcement, by Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5564

Liberal goo-goos and “good citizens” of all stripes are fond of saying that “We must continue to obey the law while we work to change it.” Every day I become more convinced that this approach gets things precisely backwards. Each day’s news demonstrates the futility of attempts at legislative reform, compared to direct action to make the laws unenforceable.

The principle was stated most effectively by Charles Johnson, one of the more prominent writers on the libertarian Left (“Counter-economic Optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009):

“If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform … then … you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.”

Far greater success can be achieved, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Johnson wrote in the immediate context of copyright law. In response to an anti-copyright blogger who closed up shop in despair over the increasingly draconian nature of copyright law, he pointed to the state’s imploding ability to enforce such laws. The DRM of popular music and movie content is typically cracked within hours of its release, and it becomes freely available for torrent download. Ever harsher surveillance by ISPs in collusion with content “owners” is countered by the use of anonymizers and proxies. And the all-pervasive “anti-songlifting” curriculum in the publik skools, in today’s youth culture, is met with the same incredulous hilarity as a showing of “Reefer Madness” to a bunch of potheads.

The weakest link in any legal regime, no matter how repressive on paper, is its enforcement.

I saw a couple of heartening news items this past week that illustrate the same principle. First, a judge in Missoula County Montana complained that it would soon likely become almost impossible to enforce anti-marijuana laws because of the increasing difficulty of seating juries. In a recent drug case, so many potential jurors in the voir dire process declared their unwillingness to enforce the pot laws that the prosecution chose to work out a plea deal instead. The defendant’s attorney stated that public opinion “is not supportive of the state’s marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear available under any circumstances …” The same thing happened in about sixty percent of alcohol cases under Prohibition.

Public agitation against a law may be very fruitful indeed — but not so much by creating pressure to change the law as by creating a climate of public opinion such that it becomes a dead letter.

Another morale booster is the rapidly improving technology for recording cops, which Radley Balko (a journalist whose chief bailiwick is police misbehavior) describes in the January issue of Reason Magazine (“How to Record the Cops“). Miniaturized, unobtrusive video cameras with upload capability can instantly transmit images for storage offsite or stream content directly to the Internet — which means that the all-too-frequent tendency of thuggish cops to seize or destroy cameras will result only in video of the very act of seizure or destruction itself being widely distributed on the Internet. “Smile, Officer Friendly — you’re on Candid Camera!”

The practical implication, according to Balko, is this:

“Prior to this technology, prosecutors and the courts nearly always deferred to the police narrative. Now that narrative has to be consistent with independently recorded evidence. And as examples of police reports contradicted by video become increasingly common, a couple of things are likely to happen: Prosecutors and courts will be less inclined to uncritically accept police testimony, even in cases where there is no video, and bad cops will be deterred by the knowledge that their misconduct is apt to be recorded.”

As such technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous, police will increasingly operate in an atmosphere where such monitoring is expected — and feared — as a routine part of their job. Even the most stupid and brutal of cops will always carry, in the backs of their minds, the significant possibility that this might be one of the times they’ve got an audience.

New technology, empowering the individual, will soon deter cops in a way that decades of civilian review boards and police commissions failed to achieve.

So the goo-goos have it backwards. Don’t waste time trying to change the law. Just disobey it.

Smoking bans, and not

Michael Winning

Over at Samizdata there is a discussion going on about different smking bans in different European countries. The Spanish solution seems good to me, if you have to have the State interfering at all in what people put into their bodies.

North Sea Oil

dj

I think investments are on-topic here, as we need a nation of people providing for themselves and not relying on the state. I said earlier (http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/another-masterpiece-by-richard-blake/) that Xcite, an oil company with a prospect in the North Sea, was a good punt.

That was on September 16th, when the price fluctuated between 80.3p a share and 92.5p, where it closed. On December 21st, they announced the result of their oil flow test, which proved the oil, 200 miles to the east of the Shetlands, to be commercial. The price fluctuated between 356p and 431.65p yesterday, closing at 384p. If you invested the day I mentioned it on the LA site – you would have quadrupled your money.

Tips in the newspapers are useless. The FTSE shares do not go up that much – you would get a 5% increase if you were lucky and think you had scored a hit. The AIM market shares are for developing companies and you can easily double your money in a year, even during a recession.

I am not a wealthy person, so I am not “bragging” of success here. My house is very small and cheap, and I may be living in a house that no one else on this blog or in the LA would contemplate living in. So I am not richer than you people here. But I am living cheaply and trying to invest. But I believe in trying to better yourself via investment and have been feeling my way this year.

First, always do your own research. Don’t rely on bulletin board comments or anyone’s recommendations. You need to fully understand the company and what it is doing.

Second, make sure you have a detailed knowledge of upcoming newsflow. You need to know if the company is announcing a drill result in the next week – and possibly consider buying in beforehand. On the other hand, if you invest in a company with good prospects, but no upcoming newsflow for several months, you will just see the stock dive and dive and dive, before eventually making good on your hopes for it.

Third, an investment mistake needs to be recognised immediately. Don’t sit for weeks on a plunging stock. Take the hit and find a better investment.

Fourth, don’t panic over fluctuations in the share price, especially very close to news results. The Xcite share rose to 330p and then plunged to 226p in the week before results, before rising on results to 431.65p (intraday high). You need to decide if the price is being manipulated and, if you still believe in the stock, hold, or sell with an aim of buying back cheaper, if you think it will be possible to do so (but you run the risk of not being able to buy back in).

Fifth, the AIM market is illiquid. You can’t just roll up with £1m and buy shares in Xcite. There are not enough shares being sold for that. You would need to buy in stages, or get a negotiated price with a market maker. You frequently find you can’t sell on a price spike. The price goes up, but the market makers are not accepting your sell offer. Don’t bank on being able to sell £100,000 of stock in one go.

Sixth, be careful how you time your purchases. If the Sunday newspapers tip a share, 8am on Monday is going to be the worst possible time to buy. A lot of people will ask their brokers to buy in on Monday morning, and the price will spike dramatically, before falling back. You will normally find 11am a more better time to buy in, although no hard and fast rules apply. You need to get up at 7am every day to check for news on your shares, as companies can issue Regulatory News Service (RNS) information bulletins from 7am in the morning, and often do so at 7.01am. Alternatively, you can get text messages sent to your mobile phone if one of your companies issues an RNS.

Seventh, try not to give the state money. If you open a SIPP, a self-invested pension, you get tax relief on investments, and any money you make is free of tax. You can’t access the money till you’re 55, when you can take 25% tax-free and draw the rest as a pension. There is a limit of £1.8m on how much you can build up in a SIPP, but you can ask the Inland Revenue for “enhanced protection”, whereby the limit is removed but you can’t put more money in. ISAs are tax-free too, but you can only put £10,100 in a year, although you can let the shares you invest it in build it up as high as you can go. Note: not all shares can be put in an ISA: I know libertarians will agree that the state should not try to tell you what to invest your money in. AIM stocks can’t normally be put in an ISA, unless they are dual-listed on a recognised exchange. In the case of Xcite (XEL:LN), it is listed on Toronto, and so can be put in an ISA.

Broker reports have upgraded their price target for Xcite to £6 a share (compared with the close of £3.84 today), and the company is expected to upgrade its oil in place estimate in Q1, and the target price could go up to £8. The Competent Persons’ Report on their oil reserves, which may double oil in place estimates, is expected to come by the end of January, or in the first quarter, and could see the price hit £6 or more. Xcite are starting production in late 2011, when the share price could (probably will) go into double figures – and that is if the company is not taken over by then. The company has a mechanism in place to prevent hostile takeovers, so any T/O would only be at a good price. Nothing is certain in life, but this share is a probable two-bagger, or three-bagger, in 2011. Note that some analysts, such as those who write the FT Alphaville blog, have egg all over their faces today. They poured scorn on Xcite, only to see the small private investors win here.

Other good prospects:

GKP: Gulf Keystone Petroleum – they have billions of barrels of oil in Kurdistan and only the murky Iraqi politics are holding this share back. The Iraqi government is on the verge of being formed, and this should lead to clarity and the eventual passing of an oil law ratifying the oil contracts given out by the Kurdistan Regional Government. Of course there is a theoretical risk they will expropriate, but the Kurdistan parties in the parliament are insisting on a resolution of the oil question as a price of joining the coalition. This share could treble in price in 2011, and go even higher in 2012.

CNR: Condor Resources – they have silver and gold investments in Nicaragua and El Salvador. If you believe that quantitative easing will boost precious metals, this would be a good punt. They are expected to issue an official upgrade of their reserves imminently, which could put the price in orbit. El Salvador has a moratorium on drilling in place: if that is lifted the orbit of CNR could go stratospheric. Some punters expect this price to treble or sextuple in 2011.

Another silver share that could double in 2011 is Arian Silver Corporation (AGL) – this is one of those that can be put in ISAs.

BLVN: Bowleven – an oil company exploring in Cameroon – a number of newsflow items expected imminently and throughout the first quarter should boost this price.

EO. : Encore Oil – have started a drill in the North Sea and the results are expected ca. January 7th. This company has a number of prospects and is a good long-term hold (but you still need to find a good entry point even into shares that have prospects). This share could be taken over early in 2011… which would be very positive for the share price.

NPE : Nautical Petroleum – also prospecting in the North Sea and expected to rise in 2011.

RKH: Rockhopper – expected to rise in 2011 as they drill more in the Falklands and prepare to start production from their Sealion prospect.

It is very much “caveat emptor”. DES (Desire Petroleum), drilling next to RKH, has caused a storm by announcing an oil discovery, only to say it was only water a couple of days later. A lot of investors lost their shirts on that (which is why spreading investments is a good idea). I personally would not touch DES with a bargepole after that stunt.

Too much buying in and selling out of shares, chasing spikes and the like, can be a waste of money and lose you a lot of money. I recommended Xcite to a friend when it was at 130p, saying it could treble in price. It has trebled in price, but she did not invest until it hit 259p, and kept selling when the price fell and getting back in when the price rose again. Suffice it to say she lost a lot of money, and is now blaming me, despite the fact that the price has trebled as I said I thought it would. Even good shares can lose you money if you play them with stupidity.

Finally, I have to say, if you lose your shirt, don’t complain. Be like the Englishman in Rudyard Kipling’s If, who lost everything on one game of pitch and toss and never breathed a word about his loss!

Back in the USSA, by Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5477

Politicians and talking heads, of both the mainstream liberal and conservative persuasions, commonly refer to this as “our free market system,” or maybe “free enterprise.”

But we haven’t had anything even remotely resembling a free market for over 150 years. (For that matter we didn’t have one before, what with Enclosures, the Combination Law, mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.) Since the mid-19th century, what we’ve had is massive collusion between big government and big business. The corporate economy was created almost whole-cloth through a monstrous act of top-down government intervention, with the help of such things as the railroad land grants and other infrastructure subsidies, the exchange and pooling of patents, tariffs, regulatory cartels, and union-busting by uniformed thugs. The New Deal was just corporatist icing on the cake.

What we have is not a free enterprise system, but an interlocking directorate of giant, centralized government and corporate bureaucracies. The same personnel circulate, through a revolving door system, between senior corporate management and government political appointees. The same person who is now Assistant Vice President for Such-and-Such at So-and-So Corp LLC, is apt in five years to be Deputy Undersecretary for the Other Thing. And vice versa, of course. It makes about as much sense to treat a Fortune 500 corporation as a “private business” as it makes to treat a count in fourteenth-century France as a private landlord.

Within the large corporation, management bears more resemblance to the Soviet Nomenklatura than to free market entrepreneurs. They justify their power in the name of shareholder value, but in fact shareholders exercise almost no control over corporate management. Proxy fights almost never work, and corporations are typically controlled by inside directors. After a brief period of hostile takeovers in the ’80s, management quickly acted to restore insider control and nullify the threat of such attacks through measures like poison pills and greenmail; today, most takeovers are friendly and carried out by the management of both companies in collusion. If some seats on the board are occupied by institutional investors, it’s more accurate to describe it as a coalition between interlocking corporations. Bond issues are reserved mainly for financing mergers and acquisitions, and most new investment is financed by retained earnings, so the external control exerted by the capital markets is largely mythical.

American corporate management claims to represent shareholders as a legitimizing ideology, just as the Soviet bureaucracy claimed to represent the workers or the people — meanwhile having dachas, private cars, and shopping privileges in the luxury department stores reserved for Party members. In both cases, though, what you really had (and have) is a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a free-floating mass of unowned capital.

The typical Fortune 500 CEO invests money that she didn’t contribute from her own past savings, but that lacks any external owner capable of exercising any genuine control over it. Corporate management spends other people’s money, amounting to de facto owners of it. Shareholders are conventionally regarded as residual claimants, because in legal theory they have a claim on all revenue that’s left over after after all contractual claims are paid. But in the real world, it makes more sense to say that the shareholder is a contractual claimant with even fewer rights than a bondholder, and that management is the real residual claimant. A shareholder is entitled only to whatever dividend management sees fit to issue, if any. But senior management is entitled to whatever salaries and bonuses they can get, through mutual logrolling with the board of directors.

A lot of establishment libertarians, when they call for a “free market,” really seem to mean the present corporatist system without the welfare or the health and safety regulations — a world owned by Wal-Mart and Halliburton.

But when you hear a call for a freed market by someone at the Center for a Stateless Society, or anyone else on the free market left, please be aware that we mean something completely different by it. What we want is a society in which corporations are deprived of all the subsidies, privileges, protections, and artificial property rights they currently enjoy. What we want is a society in which all market activity consists of free exchange between equals, without anyone paying monopoly rents to the privileged and powerful. What we want is a society in which all functions of the state are replaced by voluntary association, whether by market transactions, mutual aid associations, or gift economies.

In short, the free markets we talk about have nothing to do with those of Dick Armey and FreedomWorks, the AEI, or the Heritage Foundation. We’re not talking about socialism for the rich and a Dickensian work house for everyone else.

When we say we believe in free enterprise, we mean it.

National Security is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels, by Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5470

At National Review Online (“WikiLeaks What-Ifs,” Dec. 17), Deroy Murdock once again illustrates the tendency of statists to compartmentalize the criminal activities of the state into a separate category of things that aren’t crimes because the state is doing them.

Murdock starts out with a rather clueless analogy to the Revolutionary War. He suggests that Bradley Manning, had he been alive back then, might have forwarded Washington’s battle plans for Trenton to Julian Assange, who in turn would have galloped through the streets of Trenton hollering “The Yankees are coming!” Well, that’s a great analogy, except for a few little quibbles: First, George Washington was a traitor who’d violated his sworn oath to the crown as a British officer. Second, Washington’s army was fighting to overthrow their own legal governments, under the terms of assorted colonial charters. And third, they were fighting a war against a global colonial empire and the greatest military power in the world, to stop it from intervening in our local affairs. In short, Washington was at war with the United States government of his day.

Murdock complains that “WikiLeaks will snuff out innocent lives, if it has not already,” and calls for Manning and Assange to be sent to the firing squad (after a fair trial) in order to “persuade Americans to stop flapping their gums about things that will enable murderers.”

Interesting. Consider the hundreds of thousands — no, the millions — of innocent lives snuffed out by the U.S. government since WWII, by U.S.-trained death squads, military dictators installed in CIA-backed coups, and the like. It’s Murdock who’s flapping his gums to enable murderers. If you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole goes, if you want to confront all the lies you heard in civics class about the generosity and benevolence of U.S. foreign policy, just read “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII,” by William Blum. It’s a heavily footnoted prosecutor’s brief, organized country by country, of all the utterly filthy things the U.S. national security state has done around the world.

Oh, but wait — none of that counts as murder because it’s the government doing it. And because it’s the U.S. government, by definition it’s doing it to “protect our freedoms” — no matter how many union organizers or landless peasants it has to butcher (cough cough United Fruit Company cough).

Murdock also bloviates a lot about “our enemies,” implicitly assuming (oddly enough for someone who professes to fear big government) that the U.S. government’s interests and ours are one when it acts outside American borders. Apparently when government officials make foreign policy they transform into those “angels” that Madison wrote about in The Federalist, and don’t promote corrupt interests or aggrandize their own power.

But from the standpoint of the American state and its ideological water-carriers, “our enemies” include the American people. The functionaries of the American national security state, for all their public rhetoric about “democracy,” really want a free hand to do things the way they want without any popular interference gumming up the works. And the real enemy, the American people, are potentially a far greater threat to their power than any foreign government.

Back in 2004, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said of the growing unpopularity of Bush’s war in Iraq: “We have too much at stake in Iraq to lose the American people.” That really says it all. Next time some liberal goo-goo tells you “the government is just us,” quote Berger to them.

“National security” is the last refuge of scoundrels. If you license government to decide what we do or don’t need to know, based on the “national security,” you’re trusting the fox to decide how much we need to know about what’s going on in the henhouse. If government could be trusted, there would be no need for transparency. If you trust the government — the government over which we’re supposedly expected to exercise popular vigilance — to decide what we’re allowed to know about its actions, why even bother with all that pretense about a Constitution?

When government officials are allowed to decide, in the name of “national security,” what the allegedly sovereign citizenry is allowed to know about its actions, don’t be too surprised when information that sheds light on government malfeasance and corruption or on the falsehood of government’s justifications for its policies wind up being classified for reasons of “National Security.”

Libertarian Alliance Christmas Message 2010

What is liberty for, and why should people be free?

David Davis

Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen. May God rest you merry, and perhaps tight this year. Get tight while you can still afford it – for governments, specially this one, would like to think they can “combat drinking” by over-taxation, freely and cheerfully admitted to.

Well, this year, among other things, the awful and totally-unelected Gordon Brown zeppelin-thing-in-the-ether, foisted on us by Tony Blair and possibly his worst single act, imploded finally. We voted, and guess what? Nobody won, and the Government got in, again. This may be a good thing in the short term, in that the coalition can’t actually do anything to hinder people much more, let alone help. But strategically in the battle for universal individual freedom, we here are certainly no better off than before.

In fact, a little worse, for some of us like me and Sean see the Clock ticking…. We know that however relatively more slowly than before we are being marched to the living-gas-chambers of sustainable socialist greenery, and to the concentration-camps of more intricate and closer repression, the available decades of living people’s lifetimes in which they might do something to reverse The Big Modern Managerial State, are slipping away like sand in a glass. Time, literally, is running out for liberty in the UK for sure, and so it would seem also for other Anglosphere nations. I gather that you can get fined for speeding in Australia, if you are tracked by a police helicopter…I thought helicopters were foreign-policy-war-winning-weapons, for machine-gunning GramscoStaliNazi “freedom-fighters”, until I researched Australian Policing.

So, what’s wrong with liberty? Why exactly are we under assault? And given the seeming consensus ranged against individual freedom, not only among the governing Enemy-Classes of the world, but also among populations who you think should know better, what is the point of freedom? Why should people be free?

If slavery seems to make so many people happy, why should bother to resist? Why continue to accept the nonplussed opinions of our contemporaries? Why bother any more to bear their frank uncomprehension at our persistent criticism of statist ideas and outcomes? Why should we endure the perpetual status of outsiders and deranged wierdos?

We do have the comfort of course, of knowing that everyone else is mistaken. We know we are right: we also know there is objective truth, about why liberty is good, and all the alternatives are evil.

But, why is it that in the presence of large measures of individual liberty, Men seem to advance and the nett sum of human comfort – not to mention the absolute amounts of energy able to be deployed – go up? Along with life-expectancy, freedom from hunger and want for more people than before, and the like? And that the converse is true: tyrannies actually produce cars, such as the Trabant, whose specification actually _declined_ as the years went on?

The world must thus divide between those who think as we do, and those who think that progress is a zero-sum-game. We know that market-based co-operation of Men produces absolutely more wealth, able to be spread by trading and money. To do this fairly, money must be “sound”, which is to say: unable to be corrupted and debased by outsiders and agencies (such as monopoly government issuers, which see a way to “have more” to spend, on “projects” or on themselves.) We also know that we think the Enemy-Class knows that for one man to succeed, many must fail. That’s why they have abolished failure in education, schools, and increasingly, non-Olympic Sport. (They like the medals, you see, “for the People”….)

What’s wrong with liberty, as seen by our Enemy-Classes the world over, is exactly that it makes Enemy-Classes redundant. There can be no purpose in such a Class, so long as individuals can sink or swim by their own efforts and forge, or fail to forge, their own destinies, by their own considered efforts and also while happy to accept the outcomes as they fall. Furthermore, many of the Enemy-Class are against what they call “religion”. Specifically this means Judeo-Christianity, for they do not seem to be against other ones although I bet you 5p this will change, before too long, say about 5-15 years. And they’re only “against the Jews” because the “Palestinians” being exotic and phantasmal have captured the imagination of those that shape public perceptions, and also because the Holocaust has now almost faded from living memory, and Europe is returning to its traditional 16-century-old let-out of Jew-hating.

I give British Muslims until about 2025 before they suddenly find themselves physically inside real enclosures looking out, rather than outside the hegemonic-discourse-enclosure looking in. And it won’t be liberals and libertarians who put them there, it will be their erstwhile friends in the Political Enemy-Class, and they will cry “foul!” and there will be nobody left to speak for them.

As for Christmas? I always like to make the point that Liberty is not the daughter of order but its mother. For those libertarians who believe there is a God, well that’s fine, and I just remind the others that He gave Man free will, as a gift. OK, OK. We all know the concept evolved along with an ever-increasingly-ramified brain and the ability to comprehend self-hood, accumulate Memory, and use Learning, in the fulfilment of the brain’s biological brief, which is to “do what you think best in the next seconds of time, all the time, to keep us other cells alive, using what you know”.

As in 1.John i:- In the beginning was Order. Order was God, (which means God exemplified Order), and Order was “with” (which is to say “by” or “created by”) God. In other words, Order pre-existed everything observable in the Universe, which of course makes perfect sense to any good scientist. (The “science” is settled! Ha ha…) Now, we say that Liberty is Order’s mother, which is logical in a political sense and is always and everywhere shown to be true in history. This makes liberty the greatest of all gifts. So, all Men should be free, for in that state a civilisation founded on Order, freely arrived at, not needing “police”, or “cameras” or DNA datatbases, or other such low stuff, can arise.

 

Chapter One of The Churchill Memorandum by Sean Gabb

Chapter One

“Of course,” he said, dropping his voice so it could be heard only half way down the queue, “the Americans have never changed over. They still call today March 6^th 1959. Their custom is to put the month before the day. It makes good sense, as the month is more significant than the day.” As if looking for support, the old bore pointed up at the calendar that hung just beside the concrete statue of the President. It was a wasted gesture. The departures hall of Anslinger International may have its excellences. If so, these didn’t extend to its calendar. Through dust-covered glass, it was still showing a date from January.

“Next!” the check-in clerk snapped. The New York accent is never friendly. New York bureaucrats, I’d long since found, go out of their way not to sound friendly. Somebody muttered, from a few places behind me, about the interminable wait. We shuffled forward another eighteen inches. One of my coloured porters strained with his box. Since the others didn’t think it worth the effort of moving theirs, he scraped it an inch or so across the uneven floor, then went back to sitting on it. I took a new standing position as I came to my own halt. It didn’t do to scratch in public. Even so, my left buttock was itching again like mad. Had I been bitten by something? I wondered. I’d been told you might pick up some nasty things in America.

“Mind you,” the bore struck up again beside me, “the computer chappies go one step further. They put the year in front of it all. They write today as ‘59-03-06’. That lets them put dates into a numbered list where they follow each other in fully logical sequence—most significant number first. Just before I retired in ‘56, we had a new computer fitted in Calcutta. The Marconi people had shipped it out in pieces for fitting together in situ. Big thing, it was—needed its own building, you know.” He took out his pocket handkerchief and, holding it in his left hand, blew his nose hard enough to start an echo round the cavernous dump where we’d all been shivering half the afternoon. I was one place from the check-in desk, and I saw the clerk look up disapprovingly from her inspection of yet another exit visa. Unimpressed—or perhaps unaware—the bore sniffed loudly and rearranged the very large and very white moustaches that covered his very large and very red face.

“I did ask the boy in charge,” he went on, “what would happen when the century number changed—what would he do when ’00 came after ’99? Gave me a fishy look, the little blighter, and muttered something that boiled down to ‘sufficient unto the day’.” He chuckled. Would he drift into recollections of his Indian days?

I could have kicked myself. Buttonholed—and even before check in—by the voyage bore is bad enough. Buttonholed by a bore who’d served in India was surely as bad as things could get. Unless I was to spend the next three days locked in my cabin, all my thoughts of a pleasant flight home were looking decidedly iffy. I looked again at his tie to see if it gave any indication of what he’d been doing before he retired. But the nearest fluorescent lighting was on the blink, and I couldn’t see the details of its pattern.

There was a loud crash behind us. Fifty bored, impatient faces turned to see who’d got the double doors unlocked that led back out into one of the less ghastly areas of New York. It was whole squad of Republican Guards. In their regulation fedoras and trench coats, they paused at the entrance and looked round. Most carried hand guns. A couple had sawn-off shot guns. One of them pointed in my direction and held up a folded sheet of paper. Coming at a brisk march, they set out across the fifty yards that separated us.

I fought to keep a blank face. Even so, I could feel my guts turn to vinegar. Forget voyage bores. Things had just gone horribly to the worse. And this wouldn’t be the end of it. For what it might be worth, I put a hand up to reach for my passport.

“Hands out of pockets, dear boy,” the bore breathed into my neck. His voice had a soft urgency wholly different from his calendar monologue. He was right. I’d been here long enough to know the drill. Trying to control their trembling, I stretched out my fingers and pressed my hands against the fabric of my trousers. Looking neither to right nor left, on the men came through the now silent hall. I thought of the permit I’d bribed out of the Repository Office in Chicago. Would it mean anything against these people? I prepared to clear my throat, and tried for an easy smile.

But it wasn’t me they were after. They stopped beside me. But it was the man right at the front of the queue they were surrounding.

“Alan Greenspan?” their officer snarled. He unfolded his sheet of paper. It was covered in typewriting, and there was a photograph in its top right hand corner. “You are Alan Greenspan—enemy of the people!” The little Jew in front of me cowered backwards and got out a few words in the sort of English accent you hear in Hollywood films from the old days. The officer laughed unpleasantly and took up the British passport the clerk had been in the process of stamping. Holding it in his left hand, he rubbed one of the pages between the thumb and forefinger of his right. He sniffed at his fingers and held them out to show how blue they’d turned. “Take him down,” he said to one of his men. The man’s face took on a gloating look as he put a hand on the Jew’s collar.

“I’m a British subject,” Greenspan squealed in an accent that now said he clearly wasn’t. He looked at me as if for confirmation. I forced myself not to step backwards, and looked steadily down at the floor. “You can’t touch me,” he cried again, desperation in his voice. “I’m a British subject.” A hard poke in the stomach sent him to his knees. The officer turned to face the flight representative who was hurrying over to protest.

“He’s none of your concern,” he said in the cold voice of authority. “He’s not a British national.” He put a hand on the holster that bulged through his trench coat. The young representative opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of saying anything at all. It was now that Greenspan found his own proper voice.

“Free Ayn Rand!” he shrilled quickly. “She’s been in solitary for a year now. They’re killing her with neglect.” He was taking in breath for another slogan. But a knee in his face sent him straight down on the floor. The officer snapped an order to his men. They pulled Greenspan to his feet and three of them began dragging him back towards the doors. “Restore the Constitution!” he managed to shout. “Anslinger’s a tyrant!” But that was it. With a last despairing wail of “A is A!” from Greenspan, the doors closed behind him and his keepers, leaving the rest of us in total silence.

“I can smell a Jew at five yards,” the officer said, now looking directly at me. He smiled and flexed backwards, showing still more prominently the bulge of the metal in his pocket. “And I can smell subversion. You were beside him. You were with him?”

I wanted to tell the man very smartly I’d never seen Greenspan before in my life. It was the truth. He’d pushed in front of me not half an hour before, and had been giving me funny, sideways looks ever since. I thought of claiming friends in high places. Instead of all this, though, I opened my mouth and found that I couldn’t even breathe out. The officer was looking triumphant. Already, I could fear, he was turning to give orders to more of his men. Before I could open my mouth and try for gibbering, the bore had an arm on my shoulder.

“My dear fellow,” he said to the officer, “you’ll find this young man really is a British subject. He had nothing to do with your felon.” The officer’s face turned a kind of puce. I thought for a moment he’d pull out his gun and try some pistol whipping. But he controlled himself. He took the bore’s offered passport and looked long and closely at it, comparing face with photograph.

 “Stanhope,” he said at length to the bore, separating the syllables into Stan Hope, a slight emphasis on the second syllable. He twisted his thin face into an apology for a smile. “Reginald Stanhope. Do your friends in England call you Reggie?”

“They call me Major Stanhope,” came the reply in a tone that avoided all hint of rebuke. The officer turned the pages of the passport.

“Well, Major Stanhope,” he said, now mockingly, it says here you’re subject to Imperial immigration control. You sure don’t look like no nigger.”

“British bred,” came the now breezy reply, “though born in Cyprus. The law is very strict, you know—doesn’t just apply to Her Majesty’s coloured subjects. One law for all and all that.” The officer continued looking at the much-stamped pages.

“What was the purpose of your visit?” he asked with a lapse into the official. He pointed at the dense mass of previous visa stamps. “Is it family business?”

“Not in so many words, dear boy,” Stanhope said with a wave. “But there’s a brotherhood among those of us who served in the War that’s very like blood.” I tried not to look at the black glove that covered the stillness of his right hand. He saw my attempt and laughed softly and held the hand up. “I got this on the fourth day at Paschendaele,” he said. “Jerry machine gun bullet—went in through the knuckles, lodged in the elbow. Whole lower arm had to come off in the end.” He waved the artificial limb and looked the officer in the face. “You might say I was lucky. Whatever the case, life goes on. You learn to get by with the other hand. I can’t complain.

“I sit on the Veterans’ Relief Board in London,” he said, pulling himself back to the main subject. “Not many Americans in the War, of course—came in too late for that. But they took quite a few casualties. All old men now, those still with us—some older than me. But American war pensions don’t buy much with all this inflation. We do what we can. You’d be surprised the difference a few shillings a week can make between want and dignity.”

“They fought in England’s war,” the officer said with quiet contempt. “It’s only right that England should look after them now.” He gave Stanhope back his passport and now took mine. “Anthony Markham,” he said with the same division of syllables. “Born in Rei-gate, January 17^th 1930?” I nodded and managed a feeble smile. I wondered if Stanhope was laughing inwardly at the unconscious reversal of the dates. I could feel the sweat running down my back. “And the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m an historian,” I said, trying and failing to match Stanhope’s easy assurance. “I’m researching a biography of Winston Churchill. You—you may have heard of him. He was half-American—his mother’s side. He left all his later papers to Harvard. I was out here to consult them. I—I…” The officer had lost interest, and I trailed off. Avoiding his face, I looked up at the statue of Anslinger. It had been cast in the early days when he was modelling himself on Mussolini, and there was still black paint on areas of the uniform. Somehow, the artists had got a smile on the man’s face. He was looking down at the little girl he held in his arms. She looked back adoringly. I tried to think of something flattering to say about my trip.

Just then, though, the sound of a gunshot came though the doors. Stanhope raised his eyebrows. “Well, really!” someone said from far along the queue behind me. All about, there was a buzz of quiet outrage. I looked past the President’s statue, though the single sheet of plate glass that gave a view over the landing field and the huge body of the airship that quivered two hundred feet up in the breeze. The cabin was painted in the Imperial Airways colours, and had a Union Flag at each end.

I felt a hard bump in my chest. It was the officer handing back my passport. Before I could gather any words for thanks, he and his men were already heading back for the doors.

“Next,” the clerk grated. It was my turn. Still trembling, I put my passport on her desk and pulled out the paper copy of my exit visa. She ignored the documents and pointed at the five wooden boxes my coloureds were still attending. “There’s a forty pound weight limit for non-stowed luggage,” she said. I pointed at the handwritten amendment on my ticket. She waved it aside. “There’s a forty pound weight limit for non-stowed luggage,” she repeated in exactly the same tone. I stared up at the ceiling and tried to pull myself together.

“I am a personal friend of the British Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan,” I said with an attempt at firmness. “These boxes contain papers for a project in which he has taken an interest.” She gave me the dead look that only officials in a down at heel police state can give.

“There’s a forty pound weight limit for non-stowed luggage,” she replied, for all the world as if there were a gramophone record in place of her mind, and the needle had stuck in a groove. I smiled weakly. Normally, I’d have called the representative over and got him to explain things. Now, I was even willing to leave the boxes behind. For all they meant to me, the safety of that cabin hovering in the sky outside meant more.

“If I might be so bold, Dr Markham,” Stanhope whispered conspiratorially from behind, “I would suggest the offer of a supplemental fare. £2 should do the trick.” I swallowed and reached into my pocket. There was obviously no point offering any of the thousand dollar bills that still bulked out the paper section. Instead, I took out one and two half sovereigns, and pushed them quietly across the desk. The clerk stared at them. She took up one of the smaller coins and bit into the gold. She covered all three coins with a sheet of paper. Without another word, she stamped my documents. Well she might. That must have been a month’s salary for her.

“Next,” she cried. I glanced at my coloureds and pointed at the boxes. There were hours still to go till boarding. But I could at least get out of this bloody queue.

To read more, you’ll have to buy a copy:

Now Available: The Churchill Memorandum by Sean Gabb

 

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-churchill-memorandum/14310600?showPreview

A Libertarian Approach to Family Values

dj

We live in the era of so-called “women’s rights”. I am not sure that women’s rights could only have been interpreted in a way that has weakened the traditional family. But that is the situation that now obtains in England today. My interest lies not in opposing women’s rights, as far as the latter is a self-sustaining ideological movement and not achieved via state fiat, but rather in the traditional family, and, in particular, in the role that it has in supporting the social fabric.

While I do believe that, ideally, all children should be brought up by parents that are committed to each other and to their children, I don’t see that the state can mandate the traditional family as the sole household arrangement. However, by the same token, it should not be funding the breakdown of the family either. It is simply anti-social for the state to allow single mothers to apply for and get social housing. The result has been an upsurge in the numbers of women who see single parenthood as a career choice.

I should add that I do not agree there should be any social housing available at all. Social housing distorts the property market, and allows large numbers of people to live essentially parasitical lifestyles. The recently leaked US embassy cable referring to the fact that 28% of Muslims present in the UK live in social housing also highlights the fact that social housing is being used to promote the government’s anti-British demographic objectives.

I would like to see all social housing privatised and all levels of government withdraw from housing policy. As a libertarian society would scale down (and ultimately eliminate) social security, one feasible way of withdrawing from social housing and slashing social welfare payments would be to give all present social housing to their present occupants, giving them a safety net in life, but being accompanied by a large cut in social welfare payments too. I would strongly support this in the case where social housing is inhabited by people of British or Irish descent; in other cases, social housing could be sold in job lots to private landlords, thus allowing the state to withdraw from the sector.

This would mean there was no social housing for single mothers—which is how it should be. No single mother should be able to casually assume that the broad mass of the population wished to fund her parasitical lifestyle. But the other aspect of this moral/social question I wish to comment on is relations between the sexes, and in particular the impact on the fathers of the children being brought up by mothers outside wedlock of the mothers’ decisions to proceed with the pregnancies.

While I do not necessarily approve of abortion—and serial abortion as a means of contraception is even more repugnant to me—there is an interesting social question regarding who makes the decision to proceed with an unplanned pregnancy. At present, the decision is 100% the woman’s to make—not unreasonably considering the fact that an operation on her own body would be required to accomplish an abortion—and yet the man is left in the situation where he will be called upon financially for 16 years thereafter if the woman decides to proceed, regardless of whether he wants the child or not.

This is manifestly unjust. The Child Support Agency is also a manifestly unjust organisation that doesn’t even ensure that the monies it garners from the fathers are given to the mothers/families involved. Quite simply, if a man has not entered into a legal agreement to support a woman and any children she bears—and this is the definition of “wedlock”—it is unjust for him to be required to financially support the upbringing of children who do not live with him and whose birth he did not agree to. A thirty-minute liaison after a drunken night out does not create an agreement of lifelong commitment to the woman—or to her future children. While people will say that a man has to honour his responsibilities, he is not involved in the decision whether to proceed with the pregnancy or not. He therefore has no responsibilities in the matter.

Why would any man want to pay for children who don’t live with him and with whose mother he has never entered into any agreement of commitment? A glance at The Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV shows that most working-class men who are interested in their children want the mother and the children as a package—and where he wishes to have a relationship with the woman, but she doesn’t reciprocate, he rarely wants to fund the lifestyles of either the mother or the children. Most of the DNA testing done on that show relates to the idea that a man has a responsibility to fund the upbringing of children who are genetically his, but who he may not even know, or with whom he is allowed only brief and supervised contact, and who are often the results of only a thirty-minute relationship with the mother.

The Child Support Agency should be closed down. Where children are born out of wedlock, and bearing in mind that the mother’s decision to proceed with the pregnancy is final, there should be no legally enforceable obligations on the father. In such circumstances, and given that I support the withdrawal of all benefits to unmarried mothers, the woman could only proceed with the pregnancy had she a private income or where her parents were happy to help to finance the child’s upbringing. The father might be prepared to help out, but given that he was under no moral or legal commitment (i.e., “no bond of wedlock”), it would be his free choice whether to do so or not.

Of course, a decision to proceed with a pregnancy is irrevocable once the child is born. It should be possible for parents who are not married to agree that the pregnancy go ahead, with the man signing a legal contract agreeing to take on the obligation of supporting a child born to a mother to whom he is not married. Such a legal agreement would give a cast-iron guarantee to the mother that she could proceed with the pregnancy and would be able to sue the father for maintenance were he to go back on the agreement. In the absence of such an agreement, she would not be able to look to the father or to the state for help. (Were it later shown via DNA testing that the child was not his, this could create a legal justification for his backing out of the agreement; ultimately, a mother does know if she has been having sex with numerous men and she has to take responsibility for herself too.)

This policy would lead to a large reduction in unmarried motherhood, with positive implications for crime, delinquency, child abuse and the quality of child rearing. It would create a situation of genuine equality between the sexes, which is after all what the rhetoric surrounding women’s rights is all about.

How Do I allow Someone Else to Post to this Blog?

Now for a cold and dark Britain

Michael Winning

The buggers don’t like us you see. Chris Hoon or someone of that name wants to close all our power stations, the ones that work actually, and build a load of bloody useless non-functioning wondmills. Don’t know about you but out driving today I saw many wind turbines as one does round here, and they are all stationary…..except some.

Werry odd as there’s no wind. I expect the grid’s being used to turn a pile of them so all the sheeple think they are producing some power, eh?

Why’s nobody doing some thinking around here?

 

Another Libertarian Novel

Sean:

    Congratulations on publication of your libertarian novel.  You might be
interested to know that I also had a libertarian novel published very
recently.  It is a near future science-fiction novel called RAPID TRANSIT: A
NOVEL OF TELEPORTATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

    It can be found at Lulu.com, or purchased from any of the big on-line booksellers.  I think that you and any of your readers would like it.  I am
hoping to get some libertarians to read it and do on-line reviews.

    Again, congratulations on your own successful efforts.

Jim
James Rolph Edwards
Professor of Economics/Political Science
Montana State University-Northern

New Book by Sean Gabb

Various matters in addition to my new and wonderful novel.

1 Free Food and Drink

The Committee of the Libertarian Alliance request the pleasure of your company at:

Happy Free Market Christmas 2010: The Libertarian Alliance Christmas Reception for the UK’s Free Market and Civil Liberties Movement

Wednesday 22 December 2010

Drinks and Canapé Reception 6.00-9.00pm

National Liberal Club

One Whitehall Place

London SW1A 2HE

The dress code for this event is lounge suit or smart casual. RSVP Dr. Helen Evans at hsevans@btinternet.com

2. Christmas Greetings

Please accept my best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. If you celebrate some other festival at this time of year, do enjoy that one instead. Bear in mind that, if you think the world is already an awful place, it will be worse come next Christmas. So tuck into that turkey while it’s still in the shops and you can afford it.

3. The Churchill Memorandum

Now to the main reason for my message. Though I promised it for the 20th January 2011, copies of my new novel, The Churchill Memorandum, are now available – or are subject to postal delays. Anyone who wants to buy a copy, anywhere in the world, can expect to have it delivered within three to five working days.

But why should you want to buy The Churchill Memorandum? The short answer is that it is probably a very clever and entertaining story, owning much to John Buchan, to Sapper, and to the early Ian Fleming – and with a few ironic bows to George Orwell. If you like this sort of thing – or if you are just a very conservative English nationalist – you will enjoy The Churchill Memorandum.

Let me turn now to a longer answer. All through my life, nearly everyone has  accepted the Churchill Myth. This is that Germany in the 1930s was crying out to be crushed, and that only one man had the wisdom and resolve to do this. And so, by some act approaching the providential, once we were properly at war with Germany, Winston Churchill came to power. During the next five years, he was the most determined and implacable enemy of German aggression. At the end of that war, his country was bankrupt and the place it had held in the world for the previous quarter millennium was now unsustainable. But so what? This had, after all, been our “Finest Hour”. And if England was now to decline, America was there to pick up the fallen torch of world power. After a slight rearrangement of positions within it, the “Anglosphere” would continue through the 20th century, spreading right, truth and justice.

I first realised what crap all this was in 1981. I was an undergraduate, and had accidentally agreed to write my dissertation  not about the Byzantine Empire, but about the Second World War. I began my research in no doubt of the Churchill Myth. I was surprised to see how quickly and completely it fell apart. Germany was never a threat to England. The War ruined us financially and morally – not least because the deal Churchill made for fighting it was that the left should be given control over domestic policy. It massively aggrandised a morally corrupt and viciously Anglophobic America, and brought about a Bolshevik occupation of Eastern and Central Europe. As for the crimes committed by the National Socialists, these were made conceivable only once a total war had been fought and lost.

Anyone who thinks the Second World War was “the Good War” is deluded. It was a catastrophe from which our civilisation may never recover.

The Churchill Memorandum helps advance this case by imagining what might have happened if Hitler had died in 1939 and there had been no War. My own view is that, alive or dead, he was no threat to England. But I make this much concession to the established wisdom by assuming that the man is dead. No War means no collapse of British or Japanese power, and no breakout into the world of the comparably if differently evil Soviet Union and United States. It also means the cooling of German National Socialism into something half-Franco, half-Hapsburg.

Go forward twenty years, to 1959, and England is still England. The Queen is on her throne. The pound is worth a pound. All is right with the world – or with that quarter of it lucky enough to repose under an English heaven.

Rejoicing in this happy state of affairs, Anthony Markham takes his leave of a nightmarish, totalitarian America – an America where Alan Greenspan is summarily executed as an enemy of the people, and Harry J. Anslinger is the President. Markham has a biography to write of a dead and now largely forgotten Winston Churchill, and has had to travel to where the old drunk left his papers. But little does Markham realise, as he returns to his safe, orderly England, that he carries, somewhere in his luggage, an object that can be used to destroy England and the whole structure of bourgeois civilisation as it has been gradually restored since 1918.

Who is trying to kill Anthony Markham? For whom is Major Stanhope really working? Where did Dr Pakeshi get his bag of money? What connection might there be between Michael Foot, Leader of the British Communist Party, and Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan? Why is Ayn Rand in an American prison, and Nathaniel Branden living in a South London bedsit? Where does Enoch Powell fit into the story? Above all, what is the Churchill Memorandum? What terrible secrets does it contain?

All will be revealed – but not till after Markham has gone on the run through an England unbombed, uncentralised, still free, and still mysterious.

You can buy copies of The Churchill Memorandum for a mere £9.99. Order yours now from here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-churchill-memorandum/14310600?productTrackingContext=author_spotlight_91479272_

or here:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/seangabb

The EU Euro stability fund draft press release…

Christopher Houseman

Found in the memory hole.

In the wake of widespread pessimism and protests in Europe regarding the very existence of the Euro, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers have agreed that a permanent Euro stability fund will be established shortly.

All Eurozone members will be expected to pledge impressive sounding amounts of money, which won’t in fact be anywhere near enough to cover the gaping hole in the heart of our wonderful would-be global reserve currency. And we won’t actually expect them to pay anywhere near as much as they pledge – unless they urgently have to.

The existence of a permanent Euro stability fund will reassure the gullible citizens of our glorious Union that all is well – until they actually have to buy something more valuable than our promises about their future earnings and productivity. In fact, the very existence of the stability fund means that:

1) We have no intention of trying to turn the Euro into a sound currency, and we probably wouldn’t know how to do so anyway.

2) We won’t be able to stop Eurozone members overspending in the future. Why else do you think we need this fund? Besides, we know every such crisis provides the justification we need to centralize even more money and power in our hands, so why would we even bother to try?

3) We will pay no attention whatever to calls for repudiation of national debts and a return to national currencies by Eurozone members. Any politician who tries to do this had better have very good life insurance and first-class bodyguards. Our message to the little people is simple: Shut up, pay up, and trust us to spend more money than you can possibly imagine. We’re a government – what else do you expect?

We note that UK citizens have been assured that non-Eurozone countries won’t have to contribute to the fund. We’re glad you like the eyewash, and rest assured that we’re working hard to address this state of affairs.

Next Year’s News on Health…

Christopher Houseman

From a possible future near you.

In the wake of the Coalition Government’s pledge to fine hospitals which persist in using mixed-sex wards, it’s emerged that the NHS has produced an unwritten 2-step plan in response:

1) Leave more people in the corridors – patients will be selected for this form of accommodation based on the gender of whichever patient is put in a ward first. Calls for the majority gender in the hospital to receive first dibs on the beds will be dismissed with the response that NHS staff are far too busy meeting government performance targets treating patients to keep shuffling people in and out of wards on the basis of periodic recounts.

2) Refuse to admit patients for treatment, and refer them to a neighbouring hospital instead. This will head off attempts to invoke sex discrimination legislation to abolish step 1. A Government report will then recommend sex-segregated hospitals, which will be discussed ad nauseam while hospitals quietly get on and implement the idea wherever possible until the mixed-sex ward fine is abolished.