D.J. Webb on Anglo-Irish Relations

British-Irish Relations: “Not Entirely Benign”? David J. Webb

Historical Notes No. 53

ISBN 9781856376501 ISSN 0267-7105 (print) ISSN 2042-2571 (online)

An occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance, Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, Mayfair, London, W1J 6HL.

© 2012: Libertarian Alliance; David Webb.

David Webb studied Chinese and Russian at Leeds University, where he was involved in Marxist politics.  He has since become a conservative writer, contributing to The Salisbury Review and Right Now!, and more recently contributing extensively to the Libertarian Allianceblog.  He lived for four years in China (Tianjin, Kunming and Chengdu) and now writes freelance on Chinese politics and economics.  He is also a student of the Cork dialect of Irish and runs the Cork Irish website at www.corkirish.com.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and not necessarily those of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee, Advisory Council or subscribers.

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY!

I wonder if they did it on purpose

David Davis

[Subsequent edit by author] Further to receiving one-star ( = very poor) I should just rectify my omission, which was clearly observed by the respondent. I forgot to mention the requirement, that will encumber any incoming Libertarian or Revolutionary-Liberalist administration, whether in England, or the UK, or elsewhere, to criminalize and proscribe the existence of any bodies calling themselves “Trade Unions”, which behave in ways shown by the 19th- , 20th-  and 21st-Century British models of same. These outfits have proved themselves, through the deliberate policies and actions of their “officers”, to be far far more insidiously dangerous to life and liberty than any “terrorist” organisation, even the IRA and “Al-Quaeda” (whatever that might be), both of whom might be thought responsible for the deaths of up to 10,000 people each. The deaths probably attributable to the prevalence of “Trade” “Union” and “Workers’ Council” actions within the past 120-odd years probably run into the millions, aside from the planned and avoidable destruction of the UK’s heavy industries, docks, mining industries, railways and shipyards. (None of this needed to happen: the ability to fire all redundant labour upon the advent of better technology, thus keeping wage rates and hours to JapoChindoBraMexican levels, was prevented.)

Roll on the custard pies and rotting tomatoes….but Libertarians ought to begin speaking for real people, not just metropolitan political intellectuals like ourselves.

The coagulation-government is getting stick and rotting-cabbages from various quarters, for seeming to allow Francis Maude (who is, I admit, a bit of a slimy toad at times) to suggest that people should stock up on motor fuels before any putative strike by tanker drivers.

But I wonder…there could be a subtext here. Perhaps some clever Tory strategist thought that by artificially creating a fuel shortage at the pumps before any strike took place, the mass of inchoate but not negligible public opinion could be turned angrily against “UNITE”, whatever sort of GramscoStaliNazi front-organization that might be. I mean to say, it describes itself as a “Trade Union”, although it’s f**k-all to do with trade, and isn’t a union in any meaningful sense with regard to its members’ welfare – only its “officers’ ” wefare, power and prosperity.

Some of this unfocussed but very public mob ire might then rub off against the “Labour Party”, which predictably has failed to come out condemning the “union” – only mouthed platitudes about “the way to solve the crisis is by the negotiations”, as if there was anything meaningful for the drivers’ employers to talk about.

I just wonder if it’s a “cunning plan”. Of course, the predictable mainstream-media-response has been to toast the coagulation for its incompetence and “dangerous advice” (I mean to say! We used to keep old Duckhams 1-gallon oil cans and keep petrol in them for year after year – I always had 6 gallons in the house at any time, when in London years ago – about two-thirds of a tankful). But them the MSM is not on the side of any administration that is not overtly and aggressively GramscoStaliNazi. Perhaps because it thinks that most people viscerally are that, inand to their very bones….and they may sadly be right. Hitler got in, after all, by not misreading the mood of the German general public.

Compensating the British for slavery

David Davis

I have had occasion, this morning, to get very annoyed over at Facebook about what some jumped-up-politicoWoman has been saying over in Jamaica.

It appears that the old lie, told often enough and being a big enough lie, about how the British have been the prime-movers of slavery, persists. Frankly I’m not surprised. Two reasons come to mind:-

(1) We as a people are far, far too busy keeping on doing what we do, which is to keep buggering on and working and doing stuff and inventing things and selling other stuff, to be able to devote much time and energy to defending our reputation. We sort of take that as read. We _/Taught The World How To Live/_  , as I never tire of saying. It should be utterly obvious to all on the Planet that we were, are and will be for always, good people. We are So Unlike GramscoFabiaNazis***, most of whom are British sadly and shamefully, and who do harm out of all proportion to their numbers, and who are axiomatically not good.

(2) Socialism, in its various strategically-morphing-disguises, as is natural for Evil to want to adopt from time to time, is a specifically anti-English phenomenon. To be anti-liberal, as opposed to be anti-English-Civilization-culture-and-thought, is a mere triviality, a mere minor generality by contrast. It’s the various modern forms of socialism that have most orgasmically-jumped, salivating and ejaculating, onto the antislavery bandwaggon, carrying anti-Englishness with them while nobody noticed they’d got it in their swagbags and could take it off them first. We were, as I said, too busy to notice.

Continuing to tolerate this level of libel, slander and malicious defamation without riposte is strategic ideological madness. It does two things:

(a) it causes onlookers to think there may be something in the charges against us. Mud sticks: you can’t help it. Sticking is, after all, what mud is for.

(b) it lulls the attackers into thinking they have kicked and booted us on a weak spot and that they are actually right, even though they know full well that they aren’t.

Does anyone on here, all of you being super-intelligent, have anything to offer about a solution to this problem?

***They will have to go, but it will unfortunately take quite some time, and there may be an Endarkenment Stage in which they’d have to prevent their stray children being killed and eaten by starving mobs who have re-learned how to operate in the dark with rushlights, while their searchlights are out and their Argentinian-plastic-mined gateways are temprarily down.

A Brief Argument for English Independence

A Brief Argument for English Independence
by Sean Gabb

The normal English response to Scottish nationalism is to ignore it, or to see it as an irritation, or to try shouting it down with reminders of all that shared history, or to point out the value of English subsidies and to wait for common sense to win the argument. None of these, I suggest, is an appropriate response. None takes into account that England and Scotland are different nations, and that the loudest and most energetic part of the Scottish nation has decided that the current union of the nations is not in Scottish interests. This does not make it inevitable that the union will be dissolved. It does, however, make this desirable. Scotland may or may not have suffered from the union. But the union has done much to bring England to the point of collapse, and it strikes me as reasonable to say that England can never be safe while there are Scottish members in the Westminster Parliament.

What War with Iran Might Look Like

Note: Most Englishmen who comment on American politics fit themselves into the world view of either the Republican or Democrat Parties. Therefore, most English comment on Mr Obama proceeds on the assumption that what he has done to America is supremely good or supremely bad. But I am not pro-American. I judge American politics purely by their impact on England.

For this reason, I regard Mr Obama as an excellent American President, and very much hope he wins the next election. He may have turned America into more of a police state than his opponents would have done. He may simply have turned it into a different sort of police state from the one his opponents had in mind. I don’t care. I’m not an American. I don’t live in America. What happens there is, in itself, of no more consequence to me than what happens in Ecuador or Nigeria. What I do like about Mr Obama, however, is that he is the first American President in over 30 years who has not started any wars. Doubtless, he has not made the world a safer place. But he has done little to make it even more dangerous than he found it.

Since Ron Paul will not be the Republican candidate this year, the American presidential election will be a contest between a man who has started no wars, and whatever unwrapped mummy has bellowed the loudest that he will go to war with Iran/North Korea/Russia/China/Somalia/Cuba, etc, etc. Unless you really want the world to be blown up because “Jesus would have done it,” I suggest it isn’t much of a contest.

Sooner or later, the dollar will collapse, and America will complete its long transition from barbarism to decadence. We shall all then be able to forget the nightmare of its hegemony, except as a threat to naughty children – “Eat up your greens, or the Americans will come and bomb you!” For the moment, Mr Obama is easily the safest pair of hands in Washington. I may even donate £25 to his re-election fund. SIG

The rot sets in, but be of good cheer, for it usually takes quite some time.

David Davis

The Last Ditch is worth visiting from time to time. Sadly, since Tom Paine’s (that’s his screen name, as it were) wife died, he’s been writing less. I hope he recovers his former zeal for intellectually-flogging the guts out of our enemies, the GramscoStaliNazis.

A recent one is good reading, about the awful slow-motion-descent of the USA into modern British-style post-socialist horror and unredemption.

The deaths of Richard Everitt and Stephen Lawrence: compare and contrast

Note: I am writing a detailed piece on the convictions in the Lawrence case. There is some rather interesting comments in the Macpherson report about the forensic examination of garments etc see http://www.chronicleworld.org/archive/lawrence/sli-25.htm. RH

The Limits of Intolerance

by Guy Leven Torres
16^th September 2011

Our civilisation is slowly but surely collapsing or rather metamorphosing into something else. Let me repeat again my earlier classifications of types of society-

Scottish independence? Yes, but only on these terms

by Robert Henderson
http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/?p=499

The Scots Numpty Party (SNP) has managed to defeat the attempts of the unionists who deliberately devised the electoral system to thwart single party government (and hence leave independence off the practical political agenda) and get a majority in Scotland. The SNP leader Alex Salmond can now call a referendum on independence . However, to have a referendum which is binding, the SNP needs the sanction of the UK Parliament. From his public comments David Cameron appears to accept that such a referendum would be binding because he has stated since this SNP victory that if a referendum was held he would campaign for a NO.

Monarchy, Nation-States, And The Failed Reign of “Elizabeth The Useless”

By Sean Gabb

At the last Royal Wedding, back in 1981, I spent most of the day in bed, listening to Die Meistersinger. This time, I was bullied by my (Slovak immigrant!) wife and our daughter into having a shave and watching every ghastly detail on the telly.

Full article here:

http://www.vdare.com/gabb/110429_monarchy.htm

“Free markets” and “free trade” as a religion, by Robert Henderson – Replies, Anyone?

Anyone fancy responding to this? An obvious response is to ask RH to define the laissez-faire religion he is attacking, and to distinguish this from corporatism, and then to ask if he knows anything about the economics of public choice and regulatory capture, or about the effects on business scale and morality brought about by infrastructure subsidies and the tax and regulatory burden….SIG

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=590

Free marketeers fancy themselves to be rational, calculating beasts. In reality, their adoration of the market is essentially religious. They believe that it will solve all economic ills, if not immediately, then in the medium to long term. Armed with this supposed objective truth, they proselytize about the moral evils and inefficiencies of public service and the wondrous efficiency and ethical outcomes of private enterprise regardless of the practical effects of their policies or the frequent misbehaviour of those in command of large private companies. Their approach is essentially that of the religious believer.

Like the majority of religious believers, “free marketeers and traders” are none too certain of the theology of their religion. (I am always struck by how many of them lack a grasp of even basic economic theory and are almost invariably wholly ignorant of economic history). They recite their economic catechism sublime in the concrete of their ignorance.

The religion has its roots in the first half of the 18th century when there were occasional attempts to suggest tariff reform, but the idea only became a serious political policy in the 1780s with the advent of Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in 1784 who long toyed with “economical reform”.

The 18th century also provided the religion with its holy book, The Wealth of Nations by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. This strongly argued for “free markets” and “free trade”, but Smith also recognised the demands of national security, the need for government to engage in social provision such as road building and maintenance which would not otherwise be done and, must importantly, the nature of a society and its economy. Here is Smith on the Navigation Acts: “…the Act of Navigation by diminishing the number of buyers; and we are thus likely not only to buy foreign goods dearer, but to sell our own cheaper, than if there were a more perfect freedom of trade. As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the Act of Navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.” (Wealth of Nations Bk IV. ch ii)

But Smith and his book suffered the fate of all those who found religions, secular or otherwise. As the decades passed Smith’s cautious approach was redrawn in the minds of his disciples to become a surgically “clean” mechanical ideology in which all that mattered was the pursuit of profit and the growth of trade and industry through the application of the “holy edicts” of open markets and comparative advantage. The disciples, like other religious believers, avidly quoted the passages from their holy book which suited their purposes and ignored those which did not. They also found a further holy text in Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population of 1802, whose predictions, although unproven by events, could be used to demonstrate that economic expansion was vital if widespread starvation was not to occur.

The clinical, soulless and inhuman nature of the laissez faire idea as it evolved is exemplified by the English economist David Ricardo. Here is a flavour of his mindset:”Under a system of perfectly free commerce each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to both. The pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most economically, while increasing the general mass of the production it diffuses general benefits, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse the universal society of nations”. (David Ricardo in The fall of protection p 174).

The Napoleonic wars largely foiled Pitt’s wish for broad reform and placed “free trade” in suspended animation as a serious political idea until the 1820s, when cautious attempts at tariff reform again were made. But underneath the political elite was a radical class who were very much enamoured of wholesale economical reform. With the Great Reform Act of 1832 they were given their opportunity to become part of the political elite. They took it with both hands, their most notable and extreme proponents being John Bright and Richard Cobden backed by the intellectual power of David Ricardo – all three became MPs.

Within a dozen years of the first election under the Great Reform Act’s passing, Parliament had been captured by the disciples of Adam Smith and the pass on protection had been sold by of all people a Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, an action which kept the Tories from power for most of the next 40 years.

Such was their religious credulity that the “free traders” advocated not merely opening up Britain’s markets, both at home and in the colonies, to nations who would allow Britain equivalent access to their markets, they advocated opening up Britain’s markets regardless of how other nations acted. The consequence was, as we have seen, disastrous for Britain.

Disraeli in a speech on 1st February 1849 cruelly dissected this insanity:” There are some who say that foreigners will not give us their production for nothing, and that therefore we have no occasion to concern ourselves as to the means and modes of repayment. There is no doubt that foreigners will not give us their goods without exchange for them; but the question is what are the terms of exchange most beneficial for us to adopt. You may glut markets, but the only effect of your attempt to struggle against the hostile tariffs by opening your ports is that you exchange more of your own labour each year for a less quantity of foreign labour, that you render British labour less efficient, that you degrade British labour, diminish profits, and, therefore, must lower wages; while philosophical enquirers have shown that you will finally effect a change in the distribution of the precious metals that must be pernicious and may be fatal to this country. It is for these reasons that all practical men are impressed with a conviction that you should adopt reciprocity as the principle of your tariff – not merely from practical experience, but as an abstract truth. This was the principle of the commercial negations at Utrecht – which were followed by Mr Pitt in his commercial negotiations at Paris – and which were wisely adopted and applied by the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, but which were deserted flagrantly and unwisely in 1846″. (The fall of Protection pp 337/8″).

Ironically, the “free traders” make the same general errors as Marxists. They believe that everything stems from economics. For the neo-liberal the market has the same pseudo-mystical significance that the dialectic has for the Marxist. Just as the Marxist sees the dialectic working inexorably through history to an eventual state of communism (or a reversion to barbarism to be exact), so the neo-liberal believes that the market will solve any economic problem and most social ills. Neither ideology works because it ignores the reality of human nature and its sociological realisation.

The one track economic mentality of the early “free traders” is well represented by the father of J S Mill, James Mill:”The benefit which is derived from exchanging one commodity for another arises from the commodity received rather than the from the commodity given. When one country exchanges, or in other words, traffics with another, the whole of its advantage consists of the in the commodities imported. It benefits by the importation and by nothing else. A protecting duty which, if it acts at all, limits imports, must limit exports likewise, checking and restraining national industry, thus diminishing national wealth.” (The fall of protection p 174). And to Hell with any social or strategic consideration or changing economic circumstances.

After the Great War and the fall of “free trade” as public policy in 1931, the religion went underground for nearly fifty years. When it re-emerged as a political idea in the 1970s the politicians who fell under its spell were every bit as unquestioning and credulous as those of the 1840s. Tony Blair’ statement on Globalisation, ie, free trade, at the 2005 Labour Party Conference shows that it is alive and kicking today. Scorning any attempt to discuss Globalisation, Blair said of those who wished to oppose it “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”. (Daily Telegraph 1 10 2005.)

None of this would matter very much now if those who believe in “free markets” and “free trade” were without political power. Unfortunately, theirs is the elite ideology of the moment and the past 25 years. In Britain, the Tories may be more fanatical in their devotion to the market as panacea, but Blairite Labour have caught more than a mild dose of the disease. A good example of this is their response to house price hyperinflation where they desperately and futilely attempt remedies within the constraints of what they perceive to be “free market” disciplines rather than opting for the obvious state generated remedies such as restricting immigration, building a great deal of social housing and forcing developers to release land for building.

Both the traditional Left and Right have been duped by globalisation. The Left initially welcomed globalisation as a dissolver of national sovereignty, but they are discovering by the day just how restrictive international treaties and membership of supra national groups can be. As things stand, through our membership of the EU and the World Trade Organisation treaties, no British government could introduce new socialist measures because they cannot nationalise companies, protect their own commerce and industry or even ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in Britain with British firms. A British government can have any economic system they like provided it is largely free trade, free enterprise.

The Right are suffering the same sickness with different symptoms. They find that they are no longer masters in their own house and cannot meaningfully appeal to traditional national interests because treaties make that impossible.

But there is a significant difference between the position of the two sides. The traditional Right have simply been usurped by neo-Liberals in blue clothes: the traditional Left have been betrayed by a confusion in their ideology which has allowed their main political vehicles to be surreptitiously by the likes of Blair.

The left have historically objected to “free-trade” on the grounds that it destroys jobs and reduces wages. But what they (and especially the British Left) have rarely if ever done is walk upon the other two necessary planks in the anti-”free trade” platform: the maintenance of (1) national sovereignty and (2) a sense of national cohesion. The consequence is that the Left has been and are still struggling with two competing and mutually exclusive ends: internationalism and the material improvement of the mass of the people.

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.

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.

 

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

Tail-chasing

David Davis

UPDATE: I note now. 16.12.10, that Iain Dale has handed in his cyberpress and has ceased blogging. It’s a pity: although nobody in his right mind would call Iain a libertarian, he writes well and knows which targets to assault.

The trouble with being retired is that you have so many things you have to do. So, writing has been a bit light, held up here sporadically by Michael and Sean Gabb mostly: they also have family duties and stuff like that.

I wonder if serious blogging is really, in the end, only for people who nobody much likes, such as those fellows at Labourlist or whatever it’s called? Or, else it is for those so powerful and prominent that they can make time to think (it’s not the writing, it’s the thinking that costs time) or have people to do stuff for them while they think/blog, like Guido and Iain Dale and that lot. I have worked out that the “half-life of a blogposting” is somewhere between 20 and 36 hours, depending on the prominence of the writer. This half-life is the time in which the “hit rate” (absolute new page views per unit time) declines to half the value it was at the moment when the first regular stopper-in noticed it. Guido is on about 36 hours. We manage around 20.

Or it’s for people like Brian Micklethwait, who don’t much mind how few or many read their thoughts, but have interesting things to say about cats, cricket, photography, buildings and finer points of liberal philosophy.

Sometimes too, I wonder at the state of the Political Domain of human endeavour, and consider what more it’s worth saying that we have not already said. There are only so may thousand ways you can justify your ire at the scumbags and fascist time-servers that blight our lives in return for taking all our money and using it to oppress us more….

….well, that was exciting…The LA tab I was on, just…well…disappeared right out of the browser, throwing me back to the Waily (“coalition” ) Torygraph. Lucky that WordPress had pre-saved a draft with most of the text on.

I’ll trail the Christmas message though: it’s becoming a LA-Blog tradition, and I’ll be starting soon to try to find time to think of something interesting and relevant to say about this year’s Enemy-Class-machinations. If any of you disgusting and dysfunctional reprobates would like me to talk about something in particular, please state so in the comments!

Sterling and Ireland

David Davis

Interesting take on Sinn Fein voters in Eire.

I don’t like it….it’s too quiet…

Michael Winning

Not much about poor Ireland right now, perhaps the journos are all stuck in the snow.

It says over at Conservative Home blog (HOward Flight, he of the comments about paying the underclass to beget more labour voters) that Germany might leave the Euro. I can’t see a problem myself, the Merkel-Hilda just has to say the word. I think most of “her” people are baying quietly for he to do it.

Carry a Samurai Sword and become invisible to police

Michael Winning

You can see it here.