I did discuss all this a few years ago with Norman Tebbit. His response was that the economic mess they took over in 1979 was so big that there was no choice but to deal with it to the exclusion of all other issues. He told me to put aside all benefit of hindsight and see things from the perspective of 1980. Hardly anyone took multiculturalism and ecototalitarianism seriously. But the Soviet Union was still there, and showing no signs of imploding. There was a fiscal crisis and high inflation. The labour market was rigid. The unions were out of control. The Thatcherites saw their job as winning a set of battles that had been running since 1945. They had no time to worry about what might come next.

I can’t say I’m convinced, but it was a good defence. Certainly, when MHT resigned, I retired to the gents at work for a few manly sobs. I don’t propose to go and watch a film that sounds like more lefty triumphalism. One film I would go and see is “The Trial and Execution of Tony Blair.” Mrs Streep would make a good Cherie! SIG

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/the-iron-lady/

An old woman stumbles into the shop of an Asian grocer and peers quizzically at the price of milk. Indian music blares from the speakers as a large African smirks with the usual blend of contempt and hostility at the white slag fumbling with her pence at the counter. She shuffles home through the dirty streets, passing dull-eyed denizens of the metropolis, and complains to her husband about rising prices as they sit to a modest breakfast. Only after another woman enters the kitchen do we discover that Lady Thatcher is talking to herself, a prisoner in her own home and of her own memories. Like Britain herself, she has been buried alive.

The Iron Lady is a film about the ghosts of people, issues, and a nation long since vanished. It has little to do with Margaret Thatcher’s accomplishments, beliefs, or time in office. Instead, most of the movie is spent watching an old demented woman scurry about her modest quarters in conversation with the shade of her dead husband. Occasionally, it shifts from clumsily executed biopic to outright horror. In one particularly disturbing scene, Lady Thatcher frantically turns on all the appliances in her house to drown out the hectoring of her dead husband. Denis Thatcher stares at his wife’s back from within a mirror, as Lady Thatcher desperately pleads with herself to turn away from madness. The camera zooms in and out with one wild cut after another. Such a mood fits The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity. So much for those who came to the theater to see a movie about the Conservative Party.

As a portrayal of a living woman, it is sickening and without excuse. Obviously, this kind of treatment is limited only to someone who is right of center. Can anyone imagine a biopic focusing on a senile Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks? To ask the question is to answer it. Even as the issues Thatcher championed have faded, as “New Labour” and other left-wing parties reconciled themselves to a diminished role for the unions, the rage against the Iron Lady is constant and enduring and the controversy about her continues. Websites have been set up to commemorate her death with a party, the comment boards on videos and articles about her are filled with furious vulgarity and loathing directed at woman who hasn’t been in power for 20 years, and even the Conservative Party has backed away from “Thatcherism,” as much as they can, even to the point of changing the Party’s logo from a flaming torch to a tree seemingly drawn by a child.

The result is that in some way, the portrait of a defeated and dying woman is the only kind of tribute the Kali Yuga can pay to a figure of importance who came from the wrong side. Meryl Streep (whose mimicry is skilled, but what of it?) sets the tone with the usual comment along the lines of “of course, I don’t agree with her evil politics, but this portrayal makes her sympathetic.” Similarly, the chattering class of Britain in the press and online have come to terms with this portrayal of Thatcher precisely because it shows the Iron Lady at her lowest point. Thatcher is, of course, racist, a traitor to woman, an enemy of workers, a woman who made people starve and completely destroyed Britain. As a human being, however, she is sympathetic because she is dying. In a culture where the highest value is self-loathing, this is perhaps the most a conservative can hope for.

The movie also does its best to turn Thatcher into a symbol of identity politics. The young Thatcher lectures her husband (just after he has proposed no less) that “one’s life must matter…beyond the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one’s life must mean more than that.” A young Thatcher dressed in bright blue and heels enters Parliament for the first time and is contrasted with the stereotypically stern aristocratic British men in dark suits who just strolled over from being evil in The King’s Speech. All gaze at her in astonishment, although the first woman in Parliament had already taken her seat 30 years before. Ominously, the “Members” room has urinals, while the “Lady Members” room contains an iron. Obviously, we are supposed to think Lady Thatcher should have forgotten all this silliness about the collapsing economy and championed the sitzpinkler movement. As Steep herself observes, what is important about Thatcher is not anything she did (which was all evil) but that a woman was elected in “gender biased, homophobic, class-ridden England.” Movement conservatives, of course, don’t believe the movie is feminist enough.

What did Margaret Thatcher do? Well, we really never really find out. She confronted the unions…but why this matters or what was the outcome is never really explained. We know it is incredibly controversial but the military-style planning Thatcher used to humble the trade unions is ignored and the entire subject simply peters out. Then we jump straight into the Falklands War, which gives Thatcher the popularity needed to carry out the rest of her program. However, again, why the decision was difficult, why there was opposition, and why Thatcher made the difference as opposed to anyone else being in charge is not explained.

After the Falklands, prosperity magically comes to Britain (again, no explanation why) and Thatcher rules for a lengthy period of time—during which nothing apparently happens. There is a shot of perhaps three seconds of Margaret Thatcher dancing with a tuxedoed Ronald Reagan, but that’s all the mention the “…or maybe even . Even Thatcher’s collapse is reduced to the petty and the personal, as her colleagues seemingly betray her because she yelled at them, not because of any policy differences. Thatcher’s about increasing European centralization and fiscal union, a subject as timely as ever, is all but ignored aside from a brief comment about the UK not being “ready for it.”

Such a treatment is perhaps inevitable because the issues that motivated Thatcher have become all but irrelevant. The best that can be said of Thatcher is that she confronted, and to some extent defeated, the primary challenge of her time by frustrating the British Left’s attempt to turn the sceptered isle into a grim Airstrip One of Brezhnev bureaucracy and overwhelming state ownership of the economy. The Iron Lady contains

one notable scene of an enraptured Thatcher watching her father speak of the virtue of a “nation of shopkeepers”; later, Thatcher speaks of the small businessman’s proud rejection of noblesse oblige.Of course, Thatcher’s libertarian rhetoric about there being “no such thing as society” belied her electoral dependence on a British traditionalism she did not identify with. Despite the fact that she in large partowed her rise to power to a thinly veiled critique of non-White immigration (and spoke even more frankly about the subject in private), Thatcher did precious little to stop the demographic transformation of the United Kingdom, the transformation of the British Empire into a mere satrap of the United States (or even worse, the European Union), and the eradication of the culture and identity of the British people.

Just as American conservatism of even the Russell Kirk variety was gradually replaced with a deracinated defense of “values,” so did Thatcher ground her politics in abstractions rather than in a sense of British identity. When Enoch Powell commented to her that he would fight for Britain even if it were under a Communist government and that values “can not be fought for, nor destroyed” because they exist beyond space and time, Thatcher was literally rendered speechless. Thatcher represented the “Americanization” not just of the British economy but of conservative politics, and the result was inevitable retreat and failure on cultural issues, as in the United States.

Even her economic reforms can be seen with the advantage of hindsight as, at best, a rearguard action. While outright state control over the economy may have been blunted, the fall of trade-union power may have been inevitable. The larger concern is that as with the “Reagan Revolution” and later “Republican Revolution” within the United States, Thatcher’s Conservatives failed to cut the growth of government or the ever increasing share of government spending that went to the welfare state. By saving British socialism from itself but ceding to the hard Left control of the commanding heights of the culture by defining conservatism purely as economic, Thatcher made “Cool Britannia” and its all encompassing political correctness possible.

Even victory in the Falklands may have simply postponed the inevitable, as Britain’s military position has seriously declined and Argentina is simply biding its time to , Thatcher’s call to make “Great Britain great again” seems almost tragic. As London is no longer an English city and the governments of the West are girded for seemingly permanent economic decline, it is hard not to view Thatcher’s story as irrelevant.

One can imagine an alternate British history with Enoch Powell as Prime Minister laying the foundation for a sustainable traditionalist Right that would preserve the long-term existence of British identity, culture, and economic power. Instead, we had the transformation of Toryism to American classical liberalism, and therefore its inevitable (and perhaps intended) defeat. With Thatcher’s accomplishments alternatively co-opted or undone with the passage of time, what is left? To the emerging post-Britain, she’ll be linked to the evil racist past, a bump on the road to Equality, her policies bluntly summarized as supporting the “.”

To the official conservatism of the rump Britain, she’ll be a symbol of the Good Old Days of Conservative victories against unsympathetic statist enemies, with troubling questions about immigration, culture, and the long-term impact of her policies abstracted away and easily avoided. Of course, to official opinion, even harmless nostalgia can not be tolerated. Would that there was a real British Right to come to the same conclusion!

The £1m bonus to be received by Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, 83% owned by the taxpayer, raises interesting issues for libertarians.

The government should not be dictating board-level pay in private companies. But, by the same token, this is not a private company: it is owned by the state.

A lot of unintended consequences have flown from the refusal to allow the collapse of the financial services industry in 2008/09. It was argued that the collapse of financial services was equivalent to the collapse of the real economy. Surely, the collapse of financial services would have entailed a sharp fall in economic output. Nevertheless, we should be wary of any attempt to equate one industry (a vested interest) with the whole economy.

During a financial collapse, the impact on the wider economy is normally less severe than on the financial services industry itself. Iceland is an example: the banks collapsed, and the economy entered a sharp downturn, but the Icelandic economy is now growing again, and the Icelandic state has regained access to the bond markets. In a true systemic collapse, as in Iceland, it is simply not possible to repossess every house in arrears: for a start, there would be no buyers. A true cash-only property market (we are not quite there yet in the UK, as mortgage lending is proceeding, albeit at a lower-than-normal level), the banks simply have to lengthen or alter the mortgage terms, as it makes no sense to do otherwise.

By bailing out the banks, we have ended up transferring huge debts to the public accounts. The end result is a zombie economy, with years of low or no growth ahead of us. The banks remain in crisis, and will not lend, and a large risk is transferred to the national accounts as it remains unclear if the money sunk into outfits like RBS will ever be recouped.

Once the bond markets revolt over the astonishing annual increases in our public indebtedness, then things could get really interesting. A rise in interest rates could force much greater cuts in the state, which would have to devote much larger sums to debt servicing, and mortgage-holders could find their mortgage payments going much higher, in a situation where many are telling surveys even a one percentage point rise in interest rates would see their mortgages pushed into arrears.

It would have been better to take the hit in 2009. A strong downturn in the economy would have been coupled with a quick working through of the debts, mainly in the form of bankruptcies.

This is where Stephen Hester comes in. His task is to get RBS back into the private sector, with the state apparently hopeful of making a gain on its ill-thought-out investment in the bank. I would not query any bonus payments, however high, that shareholders of a private company approved. It is not for us to make rulings on footballers’ pay and financial services’ bonuses generally. But Mr Hester leads a bank in crisis, a bank that foundered and then imposed itself on the national books, a bank that continues to imperil the wider British economy.

We shouldn’t have taken over RBS, but the in the circumstances, I don’t see how a bonus payment can be justified. This amounts to a recycling of the bailout funds in the form of executive bonuses. True, banks need to be able to employ the best personnel, although such bonuses are poorly correlated to individual performance by a chief executive. Is there any evidence that had Mr Hester phoned in sick every day for the past year that bank performance would have been any different?

My solution is that no bonuses—not even a single penny—should be permitted at the state-owned banks. But these banks should be sold off as soon as possible, to return them to the private sector and allow the bank boards to hire and fire and pay bonuses according to their own view of the banks’ best interests.

Waiting for the bank share prices to soar in price seems a little forlorn: these bank stocks are likely to remain depressed, at least compared with the pre-2007 share prices, for a long time to come. Having made the foolish decision to take them over, the state should simply accept that it has to take a hit on these shares. RBS should be prepared to be sold to the private sector at a loss to the taxpayer, with a no-bailout law passed making clear that further trouble at RBS will lead to bankruptcy, not bailout.

Banks should not be told how much money to hold in reserve. All such intervention should cease. However, a full publication of RBS’ exposure to subprime mortgage debts in the US and to euro zone sovereign and private debt should be made, to allow shareholders and depositors to assess the financial position of the bank. There should be no further depositor protection: if the bank collapses, the depositors and shareholders should lose their money. Most people do not have great savings or deposits. However, banks should also be forced to take the hit on repossessed houses sold off at a loss: the non-recourse principle used in the US, which prevents the banks from pursuing householders for the remainder of the debt, should be introduced here, in order to encourage the banks to consider their lending quality, and to prevent the “moral hazard” occasioned by turning mortgage loans into a one-way bet for the banks.

SIIIY JD…..B4 WEE (really)…..B4 14 SUE (conjures up worrying scenarios of interest to social workers, that one.)

Hungary has come under EU pressure to reverse its attempt to bring its central bank under democratic control. I suppose you could say the  EU is consistent in that it wants monetary affairs conducted away from the glare of publicity–there is no democratic input into the European  Central Bank either. Of course, Hungary is not a member of the eurozone and so should be free to do as it pleases in monetary affairs, but, given its financial difficulties, the country is vulnerable to EU pressure not to dismantle the undemocratic technocracy, of which independent central banking is one element.

Interestingly, I once (ca. 2000) went for a job with Business for Sterling and was interviewed by Nick Herbert, the current police minister. I was quizzed on many political issues in the interview, and I mentioned that the independence of the Bank of England was the only good thing Labour had done. Mr Herbert–correctly in my current view–was strongly of the view that the government of the day must be accountable in parliament for interest rate decisions.

I suppose I thought that the Bank of England might correct Gordon Brown’s excesses, by raising interest rates if fiscal policy were too loose. I hadn’t factored in the deliberate stoking of a property boom via the device of linking interest rates to a measure of inflation (the CPI) that did not include property prices. It turns out that the government should be accountable for interest rates to parliament–at least, where official rates are centrally set, and not (as may be more acceptable to libertarians) set by each commercial bank without guidance or manipulation by a central bank–and that the last government quite wrongly sought to blame bankers for a crisis created by the government’s own decision to stoke the boom by ignoring asset  prices.

There is no reason at all why Hungary should not bring its central bank under democratic control. Indeed, Hungary’s proposed reforms to bring the judiciary under democratic control also have positive aspects too, as an independent judiciary only works where the judges interpret the law without making it. It is frustrating for the UK to be a member of a body like the EU, so insistent on imposing unaccountable government on a whole continent.

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1662/881/NL/Shadow_People:_Attacks_On_Humans_Increasing.html

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Legendary radio host Art Bell’s intrigued by them, neurologists dismiss them, psychologists laugh about them. But now grim researchers are investigating startling cases of the mysterious, faceless entities called Shadow People that are relentlessly attacking unwary humans.

Horror-stricken Australian Anne Williams claims a shadow person attempted to rape her.

Photo of alleged Shadow People next to a tree

The appalling incident started years ago with glimpses of something dark hiding behind trees, darting around corners, or fleeing a room as she entered.

The sightings escalated gradually until they became a daily event and her brief glimpses transformed into full views of nightmarish things.

Then her paranormal experiences began to escalate until they reached a crescendo of screaming fear.

The night the shadow attacked

Imagine cowering helpless in your bed, paralyzed with fear, fully awake, helplessly watching something dark and silent creeping inexorably towards you. That’s what Williams claims she encountered.

Some have dismissed her nocturnal attack as nothing but sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming, but she insists the bizarre attack left her bruised, scratched and emotionally shaken. She swears she didn’t imagine the sinister thing fondling her, tearing back the bed covers, and roughly groping her.

Even as it happened she knew she was being sexually molested and while the experience terrorized her then, it completely sickens her now.

Shadow People often appear when least expected

According to researcher Jason Offutt Williams testifies that “One early morning I felt so strongly that there was a presence standing next to my left as my bed was right in the corner of the wall. I felt as though I was blocked, like something was standing over me or wanted to scare me.”

This is a classic encounter with an entity that appears in the middle of the night.

“As I opened my eyes to see what the hell it was, there stood on my left side of the bed a black cloaked hooded figure.”

The ghastly thing leaned over her, pinned her to the bed and grabbed her neck when she attempted to scream. When she tried to push it away it savagely pinned her to the bed and then began groping her and hurting her.

“I felt that it shoved its arm down [on] my neck and was choking me as nothing came out of my mouth,” she explained. “Like no noise. I could not even hear myself scream, but I was.”

Finally, after what seemed an interminable struggle, the being left. After the attack, Williams felt enraged, soiled, and frightened. Upon learning the details of the incident, Williams’ mother speculated that the entity may have been the evil ghost of a dead rapist.

But the being Anne Williams encountered in her bedroom was no ghostly entity; it was a shadow person.

Photo of a shadow person standing in doorway

Other witnesses encountering Shadow People also describe physical attacks leaving them with scratches, bruises, even burns.

Attacks by Shadow People on human victims can range from being stalked and chased to being attacked with weapons.

On rare occasions Shadow People stalking a victim have been witnessed by friends and family.

Not all Shadow People are the same

Paranormal researcher, Rosemary Ellen Guiley says of the phenomenon, “There are different types of Shadow People. The core, dominant experience is the nighttime bedroom visitor: a tall silhouette of a man, often dressed in a coat or cape, and a brimmed hat. The figure is blacker than black and 3D, obstructing light and blocking the view of objects. There are no facial features or eyes (sometimes red eyes are reported), but the experiencer knows he is being observed with great intensity. The figures do not communicate, but often radiate a malevolent, trickster, or evil intent.”

What are Shadow People?

The perception of Shadow People differs depending on the researchers and their specialties.

Some experts believe that the sightings have little to do with reality, but are simply people’s minds playing tricks. Others think seeing a shadow person is evidence of a neurological anomaly in the region of the brain that governs sight.

Imagination may play a role in some Shadow People experiences, argue other experts, while those with strong religious beliefs assert that the appearance of these things are nothing less than manifestations from the dimension called Hell: demonic creatures sent by Satan to torment and terrorize humans.

Victims often report that calling on God or Jesus to help them wards off an attack.

Although experts disagree over exactly what Shadow People are, where they come from, and how they manifest themselves, strangely witnesses from every culture and throughout history tend to describe something similar. Certain traits repeat themselves.

The most ubiquitous feature present in many of the reports of Shadow People encounters describe a tall, mannish-looking entity that, curiously, wears a wide-brimmed hat.

A faceless entity that wears a hat is high strangeness indeed.

Famed paranormal researcher Heidi Hollis says she created the name “Hatman” to differentiate sightings of dark, featureless entities seen wearing hats. She says those beings are often described as wearing long dusters or trenchcoats and 1940s style, or Hispanic gaucho type hats.

If the beings actually exist, and witnesses swear they do, then the likely source of their origin is a nearby universe or parallel dimension.

The present historic epoch is one of transition from authoritarian institutions like states and corporations, to a society of self-organized networks and voluntary associations. As in any historic transition, second-order variables introduce high levels of turbulence to the process.

One such source of uncertainty is internal divisions within the authoritarian camp. That can only be expected. The very existence and function of authoritarian institutions is zero-sum in character. States are instruments of economic exploitation, through which ruling classes extract their wealth from producers. The wealth of parasitic corporations consists of rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcities extracted from the consumer. It’s no wonder a gang of thieves might fall into quarreling internally as each attempts to put one over on the other.

On the other hand networks, non-capitalist markets, and other voluntary associations among free individuals have no reason for dissension because they’re predicated on positive-sum, cooperative relations among equals.

Among the instabilities of the authoritarian side is dissensions among states in the global system. We’ve seen this in recent years with states aiding (and frequently attempting to co-opt) dissident movements within competing states. Hence the American policy of encouraging the use of encrypted routers in Iran and China, and its limited support for the Arab Spring uprisings (except in Bahrain and the other conservative Gulf monarchies, of course).

Compared to the Arab Spring, the US had somewhat better luck co-opting the so-called “color revolutions” of the former USSR, using them as disposable tools for installing neoliberal regimes. In Egypt, in contrast, the Tahrir Square movement seems ill-disposed to settle down, accept the new military regime, and take orders from the World Bank and IMF. And the US is on the whole hostile to movements like those in Spain and Greece, because of their much stronger anti-neoliberal focus.

It’s a truism of geopolitics that the emergence of a single, overly strong power will be countered by the emergence of coalitions of smaller powers against it. One early sign of such a counter-tendency was the Shanhai Cooperation Organization, a loose security alliance between Russia, China and several former Soviet republics in Central Asia. We can expect such attempts to solidify and enlarge if the United States attacks Iran. Such an attack will have the same effect on the world system that Hitler’s aggression had on the European Allies.

Recently India announced it will pay for Iranian oil with gold rather than the US dollar. China is likely to do the same shortly.

The Empire is extremely vulnerable to mass, nonviolent — and coordinated — defections by the global South: Abandoning the dollar as reserve currency, repudiating foreign debt, withdrawing from “intellectual property” accords, and transforming themselves into free information havens, etc. And I think we’re very close to the tipping point at which a significant number of countries hit on this idea as a way of restraining the Empire’s power. Perhaps the attack on Iran will be what triggers it.

The most important question is whether the Empire will collapse. Will America retreat into managing its own affairs without trying to take the world down with it? The worst-case scenario is Washington fighting a world war against “failed states” and “terror states” engaged in what it calls “economic terrorism,” with hunter-killer drones operating in Iceland, Spain, Greece, Venezuela, and other states which either fall to networked uprisings or attempt to secede from the global corporate system.

Even in the latter event, though, we can expect the emerging free world to defeat the dying superpower in the end. Networks and other free associations run circles around authoritarian hierarchies. They’re more agile and react to situations more quickly. Because they are not divided among themselves by mutually exclusive interests, because they can trust each other, their local nodes and individual members are free to react to emergent situations on their own initiative and take up promising innovations from other nodes without having to follow endless bureaucratic rules and standard operating procedures in order to get permission to act.

A global superpower founded on the principles of information control and fear and distrust of its own people cannot long endure. We already saw one superpower so founded collapse from the weight of its own internal contradictions. I expect the second one to fall within our lifetimes. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Mrs Gabb and I watched the whole of The Boy Friend on telly last night. All else aside, it may be her only collaboration with Ken Russell in which Glenda Jackson keeps all her clothes on….

I don’t know really how people who have stuff to do can find enough time to blog. At least it’s rather easier today than trying to keep a “diary”. Does anyone remember those? And you couldn’t even publish them. Not easily anyway.

We are embarrassed by the lack of content put up by us this last few days, but there are always other things that need to be done.

Privatisation of services – which is basically what libertarians are calling for, along with an elimination of personal taxation – suffers from the key flaw that the bureaucratisation of our society extends to the private sector too: just because they are privatised, services do not have to be efficiently run, with lean management teams.

US healthcare is a prime example: as a percentage of GDP, expenditure on healthcare in the US is very high, and although health outcomes are better than in the UK, it is still true that relative to the low expenditure as a percentage of GDP, healthcare in the UK is relatively productive compared with the US system.

Why is that? Well, ambulance-chasing laws and compensation payments account for a good deal of that. Even privatised services are infested by the same managerial culture as in the public sector, with health-and-safety and the compensation culture taking a big toll. Telephone number salaries for healthcare professionals are another factor, pushing up the ultimate cost, although we have found that even under the state-funded NHS, we are funding extremely lavish pensions for bog-standard GPs.

I am convinced that some kind of law limiting the compensation culture has to be part of the privatisation of healthcare package. After all, the managerial culture in healthcare, and the fact that healthcare is an essential service that operates like a cartel even in privatised systems, means that all hospitals and surgeries do is to take out insurance against compensation suits – passing the bill to their patients in a privatised system. This is part of the reason the US system is so expensive. A “rip-off Britain” privatised healthcare system is not really what I want to see.

I am toying in my mind with the idea of not having any compensation payments at all for healthcare misinterventions. That means no insurance for doctors or hospitals, and no increase in the medical bills as a result. I basically tend to believe that most doctors are not going to try to kill off  their patients, and that we have to trust them to do their best. There is a considerable body of anecdotal evidence that doctors from the Indian subcontinent operate in a more careless cultural framework, and they are much more frequently involved in newspaper reports of medical mishaps. I would like to see all medical personnel in the UK eventually chosen from the native British community: I am convinced that medical mishaps would decrease greatly in proportion as a result.

But where mishaps occur, there should be no lottery-style wins. If your baby dies because of mistakes by the doctors, there need be no multi-million-pound payments. People always claim that it is not the money they are after, but the principle, but when offered a smaller sum, say “are you saying my baby is only worth X?”, showing that it is not the principle, but the money, that they are after. Instead of money, they should be able to sue the doctors – take the decision themselves to sue, without intervention of the Crown Prosecution Service – with the courts liable to cancel the doctor’s medical practice licence as a result of mishaps. That solves the “principle” without offering any money: a doctor who causes the death of  a baby is simply barred for life from practising. No money changes hand. If some smaller compensation payments were thought necessary, they should be limited to the doctor’s private assets (his house, pension fund, etc), with the hospital never having to pay compensation. Manslaughter charges and other criminal charges could also be brought against doctors, but in no cases leading to financial rewards.

We could possibly refine this approach by allowing compensation in the relatively small number of cases where someone has been paralysed for life and relies on life-long care as a result, but in general there would be no payouts. Having an operation go wrong would not be like winning the lottery, and patients would not have to pay astronomical sums as the doctors cynically passed the bill for their negligence onto other patients. My approach contains a strong presumption that failing doctors be struck off in every case. This is the only way to pressure the doctors into performing well.

This approach could be more widely adopted. For example, we hear regularly of how the Metropolitan Police use taxpayers’ money, ostensibly being made available to fund crime prevention, to pay compensation for various types of police malpractice – including politically motivated “compensation” cases, such as the award of a telephone number payout to Doreen Lawrence for their failure to solve the murder of her son. I would like to see the right to any type of compensation payout from public bodies abolished: if the Met behave badly, the police officers involved should be sacked, and could be pursued through civil courts for their own private assets, but in no case should public money be wasted on compensation.

By extending this principle to privatised semi-monopoly services, such as healthcare, we could gain cheaper and better healthcare. Why should libertarians be aiming to enrich lawyers, after all? We need a debate on this.

K4MAL (must be a Lebanese restaurateur), K9REN (seen a few weeks earlier but forgotten), WI6AN M, followed closely by another similar WW Beetle called WI6AN W (driven by a girl.) Hint: think famous coalfields.)

No: we are interested in the interesting ones. KEN 699P does not cut the cake, nore does J233 RON, or P333 SHE. These are merely unimaginative and cheap.

I have just heard that Nadine Dorries has withdrawn her Sex Education (Required Content) Bill. If passed, this would have required schoolgirls to discuss abstinence in the classroom. The summary of the Bill taken from the UK Parliament website is as follows:

A Bill to require schools to provide certain additional sex education to girls aged between 13 and 16; to provide that such education must include information and advice on the benefits of abstinence from sexual activity; and for connected purposes.

In her blog entry following the first reading on 4th May 2011 (which passed 67-61), she explains the reasons for presenting the Bill:

“I am not seeking to diminish sex education as taught at present, but to include the empowering option that young girls can just say no. In school, children are taught to base the decision whether or not to have sex on their feelings and wishes. I don’t believe young girls under the age of 16 have consistent feelings and that they can change from day to day. My bill was about making boys wait being an empowering and cool thing for girls to do and that it should be taught as a viable, if not preferable option for girls aged 16 and under – especially as sex at that age is unlawful.”

The Libertarian Alliance is not an organisation that regards itself as judgemental. Our policy has always been one of perfect love and good will to all. This being said, we cannot resist quoting a Daily Telegraph article from the 7th January 2011:

“Nadine Dorries, the outspoken Conservative MP, has confirmed that she has started a new relationship with a married man who has been a family friend for 13 years…..

“Mrs Dorries, 53, said that she begun a relationship with John Butler, a 55-year-old father of two and devout Christian, in December shortly after he left his wife of 30 years….
“Mrs Butler, who found out about the relationship on Friday morning, added to the Daily Mail: ‘Because she’s an MP people think of her as a pillar of society but in fact she’s a marriage wrecker.

“’I’m shocked and hurt. I know it takes two to tango but she shouldn’t have gone after a married man.’”

We cannot find it in ourselves to praise Mrs Dorries for wanting young people to be hectored by their teachers into continence at a time when sexual intercourse is at its most pleasurable. But we do look forward to her denunciation of women who, in late middle age, get into bed with married men. Surely, at this time in a person’s life, abstinence is both easier and more reasonable to expect?

Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium

This is the first biography of Heraclius in over a century, and the first ever in English. That a biography was worth writing should be clear from the book’s cover note:

This book evaluates the life and times of the pivotal yet controversial and poorly understood Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (AD 610-641), a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. Heraclius’ reign is critical for understanding the background to fundamental changes in the Balkans and the Middle East, including the emergence of Islam, at the end of Antiquity.

Though few in England know of him, Heraclius is one of the most astonishing figures in history. Except they are true, the facts of his life read like something out of legend. He seized power in 610 just as the Persians were turning their war with the Empire from a set of opportunistic raids into an attempt at its destruction. During the next ten years, every Imperial frontier crumbled. After a thousand years of control by Greeks, or by Greeks and Romans, Persia and Egypt fell to the Persians.. The Slavs and Avars took most of Greece. The Lombards and Visigoths nibbled away at the remaining European provinces in the West. Africa aside, the Empire was reduced to a core that covered roughly the same area as modern Turkey.

Suddenly, after a decade of seeming inactivity, Heraclius went on the offensive and struck deep inside the Persian Empire. In a series of brilliant campaigns, he shattered the Persians and won everything back. In 629, he went in triumph to Jerusalem and restored the fragment of the True Cross that had been taken by the Persians. It seemed to be the start of a new age of Roman greatness, in which its absolutely triumphant Emperor – the new Alexander – could remake the world as he pleased.

Five years later, and without warning, the Moslems streamed out of the desert and took Syria. Another few years, and they took Egypt. By the time he died, Heraclius had lost nearly every one of the regained territories. And these were now permanently lost. From the ashes of the Eastern Roman Empire would emerge the Byzantine state and society in much the same form as they preserved down to 1204.

You can hardly go wrong in telling the story. Gibbon did it well. So did Finlay. So did Oman. So did many in the 20^th century. I have now written six novels set in seventh century Byzantium, and you really have to work hard not to convey something of how remarkable the age was. Yet, for all his undoubted mastery of the sources in at least four languages, Walter E. Kaegi makes an embarrassingly good effort at draining all sense of wonder from the story.

First, there is the writing of the book. It begins well enough – even if the discussion of possible Armenian origins soon outstays its welcome. After a few dozen pages, though, the narrative breaks down into a mass of repetitions. Look at this:

Both antagonists remained on the battlefield after the combat. Byzantine cavalrymen watered their horses to arrow-shots’ distance from the Persian horsemen, who watched over their dead until the seventh hour of the night. (p.162)

At the end of the battle of Nineveh, after the stripping of the dead, and while the Zoroastrian Persians watched over their dead for a minimal observance of respect, the Byzantines, at a distance of two arrow-shots (approximately 266 or 600 meters), watered and fed their horses. (p.163)

After defeat, the Persians, in what was a kind of standoff, having lost 6,000 men, kept a watch over the corpses of their dead…, following Zoroastrian strictures, but for a more limited duration, for one-fifth or so of a day (probably an abbreviated watch for military exingencies). (p.169)

These repetitions are carried to the point where I suspect that Professor Kaegi, over many years, jotted his thoughts onto postcards, and wrote his book by arranging the cards into loose order and not revising anything at all. Apart from looking incompetent, he manages to ruin any sense of narrative.

Then we have continual assertions of what might have been, but for which we have little or no evidence. For example:

Heraclius probably used the threat of abandoning Constantinople for Africa to help persuade the Patriarch Sergios and the clergy and the Constantinopolitan public to accept, or be resigned to, the forced loan of ecclesiastical plate and to accept other extraordinary governmental measures. (p.111)

This might have happened. There is nothing wrong with asking what might have been in history. I do this all the time in my novels. I see no reason why historians should refuse to speculate. For Professor Kaegi, however, it seems to have crowded out many things that should have gone into his book.

He does not give a clear overview of the Orthodox and Monophysite dispute about the nature of Christ. Nor does he show how the Monothelite compromise was an attempt at shutting down almost two centuries of rancorous debate. The omission is a grave fault, as there was no boundary in this age between religion and politics. Possibly one reason why Syria and Egypt fell so easily once the Persians broke through the frontiers was that the Semites largely believed in a single nature for Christ and the Greeks did not. Each side saw the other as heretical. This may also have allowed a shared outlook with the Arabs when they invaded. Why Greek hegemony collapsed so easily in Syria and Egypt cannot be explained by any single cause. But religion was one of the important causes.

Again, there is no systematic or ultimately meaningful discussion of how the Empire twice managed to survive the loss of Syria and Egypt. These had always been rich territories, contributing much in taxes and manpower. And Egypt, for over 600 years, had been sending around seven million bushels of corn every year, first to Rome, then to Constantinople. The corn was sold or given to the people. It fed armies on campaign. It was handed out as bribes to allies or enemies. How did the Empire get over this loss? What effect might it have had on the population of Constantinople? How far might the numbers have declined? To what extent might the Imperial capital have become less parasitic?

Above all perhaps, there is the brief mention of an anomaly that I have long wondered about, but no discussion of how this might transform our understanding of Byzantium during and after the reign of Heraclius. Back in the third century, the undivided Empire had faced increased pressure on two fronts – the arrival of the Goths on the Rhine and Danube, and the Persian revival in the East. By and large, the frontiers were held. But there was a fiscal crisis that led to debasement of the silver coinage. Though the frontiers simply collapsed after 602, the gold coinage was not debased. Indeed, in 615 – between the loss of Syria and of Egypt – the silver coinage was stabilised for the first time, and the new standard lasted for centuries. What was going on? The established narrative is one of catastrophic decline, only briefly arrested, and only finally overcome by internal recovery and the decay of Islamic power. But hard money has no place in this narrative. Professor Kaegi writes much about forced loans of plate from the Church, and secular confiscations. But I do not see how these could account for a bimetallic stability that lasted though all the interlocking crises of the seventh century and beyond.

Now, my credentials for announcing new theories are slight. I am a novelist. I have not spent a lifetime studying Byzantium. On the other hand, I am reasonably competent in the two classical languages, and have read all the Greek and Latin literary sources, either in the original or in translation. I have read my way through most of the Dumbarton Oaks conference papers, and dozens of other journal articles. I have read many of the relevant archaeological reports, and the main overviews of the numismatic and epigraphic sources. In saying what I think, I have some right to a hearing.

I suspect is that the seventh century was far less disastrous than the subsequent historians have claimed. The real collapse happened in the middle of the sixth century, when bubonic plague killed over a third of the Mediterranean population. It was now that Syria and Egypt lost their Greek elites, and ceased to contribute anything meaningful to the Empire. They remained attached only so long as no other power was able to detach them. The Empire itself retreated into its “Turkish” core. Within this, a largely Greek and mostly Orthodox population slowly recovered. It was barely touched by the Persian and Arab wars, and was always able to provide sufficient armies and taxes to defend the core. Syria and Egypt could be recovered from the Persians because they were overstretched, and Heraclius was clever enough in the end to defeat them inside Persia with minimal forces. Recovering territory from the Arabs was another matter – but the Arabs never broke for long into the core.

If we assume that the mediaeval Byzantine Empire had already come into being by the time Justinian died in 565, the reverses of the next century were less a disaster than somewhere between an embarrassment and a blessing. Perhaps the currency was never debased because no one in government was that concerned about the lost territories.

But let me return to the book in question. It would have been useful had it contained a discussion of the decay of Latin in the Empire, and its replacement by Greek as the official language. Professor Kaegi does mention the change in the Imperial titles from something long and pompous and very Roman to the simple Pisteuos en Christo Basileus. But there is no sense here of how one civilisation is giving way to another. George of Pisidia is used as a source. But we are not told that he wrote his epic in iambic trimeter rather than the traditional hexameters. That would have led us into the interesting matter of how Greek was spoken in the seventh century, and the relationship between the living and the increasingly distant exemplars on whom they tried to base themselves. I suppose you can find all this in Warren Treadgold. You can certainly find it in the Dumbarton Oaks papers. But a biography of Heraclius without any of the cultural background is of doubtful value.

To be fair, the book does have its good points. There are excellent notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Also, Professor Kaegi tells me things about the campaigns in Persia that I did not know. He locates and describes the battlefields. No one else has done this. Also, I had supposed that Heraclius won annihilating victories. In fact, he won a series of what amount to skirmishes, relying on diplomacy and the terror of his name to bring an already exhausted Persia crumbling into dust. And, better than anyone else has, this explains why he failed to stop the Arabs. Unlike the Persians, they needed annihilating defeats that were not possible given the resources available. Or their generals needed to be bribed or tricked into treason against the Caliph in ways that the fellowship of early Islamic civilisation made impossible. If you persist with this book, you will not come away empty handed.

On the whole, however, the book is disappointing. It could have been so much better. Perhaps it will be – if only it can be rewritten for a second edition.

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

Article by Philip Giraldi.

Back in September 2007 I wrote an article for Antiwar.com called “What World War III May Look Like.” The article, which presumed that an incident involving U.S. troops on the border between Iraq and Iran could easily escalate into what would eventually become a global conflict, was widely replayed in the alternative media and even in the mainstream. Well, I am pleased to report that no such war has yet started, though there has been a disturbing expansion of U.S. military activity through the deployment of drones to hit targets in assorted countries without having to worry about American casualties or niceties like declarations of war. Other geopolitical elements that figured in my 2007 analysis have also changed, so I believe that the time has come for an update.

Iran is clearly the target of choice, just as it was in 2007. Despite President Barack Obama’s assertion that he would open up avenues to talk to the Iranians, he has failed to do so, he has rejected Iranian initiatives to start a dialogue, and he is showing every sign of unwillingness to negotiate on any level. Congress has even moved to block any contact between American and Iranian diplomats. The sanctions that recently took effect against the Iranian banking system can be construed as an act of war, particularly as Iran has not provided any casus belli. Further sanctions that will restrict energy imports are impending and will bring the country’s economy to a halt. There are already signs that the Iranian government feels itself compelled to demonstrate to its people that it is doing something about the situation. That “something” might well be a confrontation with the U.S. Navy that will have unfortunate results. In light of all that, it might be useful to imagine just how war with Iran could play out if the Iranians don’t roll over and surrender at the first whiff of grapeshot.

It might start with a minor incident, possibly involving an Iranian armed small craft manned by the Revolutionary Guard. Though the Strait of Hormuz is generally considered an international waterway, the Iranians claim that half of the strait is within their territorial waters. Tehran, in response to intensified sanctions, declares that it can determine who can use the strait and says that it will take steps to keep American warships from entering. The frigate USS Ingraham, patrolling off of Bushehr, is confronted by the small craft and ordered to heave to, an order it rejects. The Iranian commander, ignoring instructions to back off when confronted directly by the U.S. Navy, opens fire with rocket-propelled grenades. The frigate’s Phalanx rapid-fire battery immediately responds by blasting the Iranian boat, killing the entire Revolutionary Guard crew, but two American sailors are also killed in the exchange and four are wounded.

Fighters from the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis are immediately launched under standing orders, and they devastate the naval base that the Iranian boat departed from. President Obama holds a press conference and calls the incident an act of war and vows to do everything necessary to support U.S. forces in the region, but he stops short of a commitment to stage a full-scale attack on Iran. A hastily called meeting of the U.N. Security Council results in a 17–1 vote urging the United States to exercise restraint, with only Washington voting “no.” In the General Assembly, only the United States, Israel, Micronesia, and Costa Rica support possible military action.

The United States is effectively alone, but Israel takes advantage of the growing war fervor in the United States to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. The recently completed nuclear reactor at Bushehr is destroyed, killing 13 Russian technicians working on the site, and the aboveground buildings at the Natanz nuclear research facility are leveled. Russian-supplied Iranian air defenses shoot down six Israeli aircraft. Washington receives no prior warning of the Israeli attack, though it does pick up the signal traffic that precedes it and knows something is coming. It makes no effort to stop the Israelis as they fly over undefended Iraqi airspace.

Congress and the media rally behind the Israelis and demand war. A bill in the House of Representatives calling on the White House to take military action in support of Israel passes 431–4. A similar bill in the Senate receives only two nays. President Obama hesitates but then approves a limited offensive, directed against Iran’s military, its nuclear sites, and, most particularly, its Revolutionary Guard installations. In the first few days, overwhelming American air and naval superiority destroys Iran’s principal air, naval, and army bases. Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities are obliterated, as are the known Iranian nuclear research and development sites. The limited offensive soon becomes anything but that, with strategic bombers dropping 30,000-pound Big BLU bunker-buster bombs to strike underground labs and processing centers. Population centers are avoided, though smart weapons are used to destroy communications centers and command and control facilities. There are nevertheless large numbers of civilian casualties as many of the targeted nuclear sites are close to or within cities and large towns. Infrastructure is also hit, particularly bridges, roads, and power-generation stations close to known nuclear research centers and military sites.

There is a pause in the attacks, and Iran strikes back. With nearly 10 years to prepare, Tehran has successfully hidden and hardened many of its military and nuclear facilities, a large percentage of which are undamaged. The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis operating in the Gulf of Oman is hit by a lucky strike by a Chinese Silkworm cruise missile that comes in low and successfully evades countermeasures. The Stennis retires to port in Bahrain. Three other support vessels are also hit and severely damaged when they are attacked by waves of small craft manned by suicidal Revolutionary Guards, not unlike the kamikaze attacks in the Second World War. The Iranian attackers are annihilated, but the Pentagon refuses to say how many American sailors have been killed in the exchange.

Pro-Iranian riots break out in Beirut. In the south of Lebanon, Hezbollah fires salvos of rockets into Israel, striking Tel Aviv and killing several hundred Israelis. Israel responds by bombing Lebanon and Syria, which it blames for supporting the attacks. Upgraded Iranian Shahab-3 missiles also strike Israel, killing more civilians. The Israeli Defense Forces are fully mobilized, and troops are sent to the northern border. Syria and Lebanon also mobilize their forces. Rioters in Baghdad attack the American embassy, which demands that the Iraqi government “do something” to protect it, but Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shrugs and says that the situation is out of his control. Large public demonstrations demand that Iraq support Iran in a fraternal struggle against the United States.

Shi’ites sympathetic to Iran sabotage Saudi Arabian eastern oil fields. Hundreds of alleged saboteurs are shot dead by Saudi security forces. An oil tanker out of Kuwait is hit by a Silkworm and runs aground to keep from sinking. Another hits a mine. Insurers at Lloyd’s of London refuse to cover any tankers transiting the Persian Gulf, claiming that damage incurred during a state of war is not covered by the policies. Oil shipments from the region, one quarter of the world’s supply, stop completely, and oil goes up to $300 a barrel. Wall Street suffers its biggest loss in 20 years, with the Dow Jones index plummeting more than 900 points.

The United States offers Iran a cease-fire, which Tehran rejects. Two days later, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is assassinated by a Shi’ite bodyguard under orders from Tehran. Pakistan declares that it is neutral in the conflict and orders the U.S. embassy to reduce its staff by 50%, including the CIA station chief and his deputy. Order breaks down in both countries, and the Pakistani army declares a state of emergency, closing the border with Afghanistan. NATO calls an emergency meeting and decides to begin the evacuation by air of the multinational force trapped in Afghanistan, leaving many weapons and heavy equipment behind.

In the power vacuum, NATO troops withdraw to their bases while Taliban-backed militias take over much of Kabul and Kandahar. Afghanistan’s Mazar-i-Sharif, which is largely Shi’ite, declares itself a part of Iran. The government resigns in Beirut, and Hezbollah forms a new one. A salvo of Iranian Silkworm missiles sets the Saudi Arabian eastern oil fields ablaze. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates send an urgent diplomatic message to Tehran declaring that they will be “neutral” in the fighting and will not assist the United States in any way. Kuwait sends the same message, while Egyptian volunteers gather along the border with Israel in Sinai, demanding that Cairo take steps in support of their Arab brothers in Lebanon. Kuwait refuses to allow the United States to use its men and supplies at Camp Doha against Iran. In Bahrain, rampaging Shi’ite crowds depose Sheikh Khalifa al-Khalifa and set up an Islamic Republic, forcing the U.S. Fifth Fleet to abandon its only secure base in the region. The Dow Jones index loses another 1,000 points.

The United States attempts to get China and Russia to mediate with Iran to end the fighting, but they refuse to do Washington any favors, noting that they had opposed the attack in the first place and also citing their countrymen killed in the U.S. attacks. Suicide bombers attack in London, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. The attacks are poorly planned and inflict only a few casualties, but panic sets in and the public demands that the respective governments do something. The United States tells the Iranian government that unless resistance ceases, nuclear weapons will be used on select targets. India and Pakistan are alarmed by the U.S. threat and put their own nuclear forces on high alert, as does Israel. Russia and China also increase their readiness levels to respond to the crisis.

Iran refuses to concede defeat, and the Iranian people rally around the government. The U.S. public is clamoring for action. Oil prices continue to surge, and the long-term viability of petroleum supplies is in question as the Strait of Hormuz continues to be closed. Another U.S. ship is badly damaged by suicide attackers in the Persian Gulf. American embassies throughout the region are attacked. Anti-American rioting takes place in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Mindanao, and in Dhaka. The United States consulate general in Karachi, Pakistan, is sacked and burned. Forty Americans die along with scores of Pakistanis when the Marine guards open fire.

There are frequent terrorism scares in a number of American cities, which are under red-alert security lockdown, though there are no new attacks. Domestic air travel declines by more than 50%. As a preventive measure, there are mass arrests of American Muslim leaders. Some antiwar activists are detained at military prisons, including Guantanamo, under the provisions of the Military Commissions Act and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. Israel continues to be bombarded from inside Lebanon. Its air attacks inflict massive damage on civilians but are unsuccessful in stopping the rockets. Its government falls and is replaced by a hard-right regime headed by former Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman. Rioting rocks the West Bank and Gaza, forcing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to resign and flee to Paris. Hamas forms a provisional government. India threatens to attack Pakistan if there is any question about the security of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.

The United States uses a neutron-type bomb against the main Iranian nuclear research center at Natanz, which both Washington and Israel had already bombed conventionally and destroyed. It vows to bomb again if Iran continues to resist. Iran is defiant and fires another wave of Silkworms at U.S. ships, hitting one. Russia and China place their nuclear forces on high alert. Pakistani militants assume control of the government, aided by radical elements in the army and the intelligence service. India launches a preemptive strike against the main Pakistani nuclear centers at Wah and Multan, where the country’s arsenal is believed to be concentrated. Pakistan has some of its nukes moving around on trucks to avoid such a scenario, however, and is able to strike back by bombing New Delhi.

A minor engagement between American and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf has ignited World War III.

Read more by Philip Giraldi

• We Are All Humanitarian Interventionists – January 4th, 2012
• A Tale of Two Cities: Weimar and Washington – December 28th, 2011
• Meet the Republican Chickenhawks – December 21st, 2011
• The Inevitable War With Iran – December 14th, 2011
• Washington’s Secret Wars – December 7th, 2011

To begin with, the idea that you and the rest of the “bleeding heart libertarians” on this blog are libertarians is the result of a misunderstanding. Are we really supposed to take seriously a “libertarian” who proposes licensing parents by the State? Puh-leeze.

Secondly, your “argument” in favor of the “trickle down” theory — that libertarians must convert “the intellectuals” in order to make any long lasting change — is dishonest, self-serving, and just plain false. After all, since jobs in the realm of ideas are rare and much sought after, and since most of these coveted positions are financed by money-bags with an agenda of their own (often in conflict with libertarianism), “intellectuals” are easily bribed, and the majority naturally tend to act as apologists for power. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Third, your argument is incredibly self-serving: since you are doubtless the recipient of financial largesse from IHS, what you’re saying is: “Please don’t give any money to the Paul campaign: instead, you should give it to me.” That is your argument, boiled down to its essentials: why not come out and say it?

What has your panties in a bunch is the indisputable fact that Paul’s success is due precisely to the incredible success of the Rothbardian-Rockwellian “right wing populist” strategy which you and your fellow “bleeding hearts” despise: all those “yahoos” snot-nose Jeffrey Friedman hates are rallying around Paul’s libertarian banner! Horrors! Well, isn’t that just tough: you and your “left-libertarian” cronies don’t own the libertarian label, and never did.

“Bleeding heart libertarianism” is a device whereby a bunch of spoiled Kochotopus-funded nonentities hope to get tenure by convincing your commie colleagues in the faculty lounge that libertarianism is just another form of leftism. Well, good luck with that, because you’ll need it. In the meantime, you’ll pardon the rest of us as we ignore IHS and give our support to the Paul camaign.

Oh, and by the way: your efforts to reach out to the “left” are being surpassed by the Paul campaign, as progressives like Tom Hayden, Glen Greenwald, John Walsh, and a host of others defend Paul from the vicious attacks you and your ilk are promoting. So please

The idea in a nutshell: the value of a producers’ good depends on the value of the consumers’ goods to which it contributes. Hence in deciding among alternative production methods, the most efficient choice is the one that economises on those producers’ goods that are needed for the most highly valued consumer’s goods.

But there’s a difference between technical efficiency and economic efficiency. (The following way of explaining the difference is indebted to David Ramsay Steele’s From Marx to Mises.)

Suppose we’re comparing two ways of making widgets; method A uses three grams of rubber per widget produced while method B uses four grams of rubber per widget produced (with everything else being the same). In that case method A is clearly more efficient than method B; that’s a case of technical efficiency, because we can figure out which is more efficient just by looking at quantities expended without concerning ourselves with any economic concepts like demand.

But now compare method C, which uses three grams of rubber and four grams of steel per widget, with method D, which uses four grams of rubber and three of steel (with all else remaining the same). In this case neither C nor D is more technically efficient than the other. To figure out which is more economicallyefficient, we have to figure out the comparative value of rubber vs. steel – i.e., which forgoes a more highly demanded alternative use, a gram of steel or a gram of rubber? As per Mises and Hayek, that’s something there’s no clear way to figure out except through market competition and a price system, whereby consumer valuations of first-order goods get translated, by means of prices, into varying demand for their factors of production (as reflected in, say, a higher price for steel than for rubber, thus prompting producers to economise on steel). State ownership of the means of production means no market in, and thus no prices for, producers’ goods, and so no way to transmit this information.

But why couldn’t a state-socialist central planner have access to this information? Well, first, most of the relevant information about preferences is local, inarticulate, and constantly changing; it can be expressed through the actual consumer choices that embody it, but there’s no easy way to collect it otherwise. (This is the aspect of the problem stressed by Hayek – who also included other kinds of local, inarticulate, and constantly changing information – besides that concerning preferences – in his focus.) Second, even if you could get this information, it would all be in the form of ordinal rankings, and without translation into cardinal prices there’s no way to combine the ordinal rankings of different people. (This is the aspect of the problem stressed by Mises.) Finally, even if you could get the information into cardinal form, in order to use it to plan the economy you’d have to solve millions of simultaneous equations at rapid speed. (Critics of Mises and Hayek often write as though this third problem is supposed to be the main problem – and thus have supposed, for example, that fast enough computers could substitute for the price system – but from the Mises-Hayek perspective it’s a relatively minor afterthought.)

If central planning is as hopeless an endeavour as the calculation argument claims, then why haven’t state-socialist regimes like the Soviet Union been even less successful than their actual record (which, while lousy, was not as completely chaotic as one might expect the Mises-Hayek argument to imply)? The reply is that the Soviet state, like similar regimes, was never completely insulated from the price system, since it had access to international prices (to say nothing of its own internal black market). Hence the information transmission mechanism, while seriously hampered, was able to function to some extent. (Most forms of governmental intervention merely distort the price system rather than suppressing it entirely. Of course the effects of these distortions can be serious enough – as when, per the Austrian theory of the business cycle, state manipulation of the money supply artificially lowers interest rates, sending investors the signal that consumers are more willing to defer consumption than they actually are, thereby directing resources into longer-term projects (boom!) that prove unsustainable (bust!), as in 1929 – or 2008. But the application of Austrian price theory to the current financial crisis is a story for my next post.)

The Mises-Hayek account of the limits of state centralisation was subsequently extended, by Mises’s student Murray Rothbard, to cover the limits of private cartelisation as well. In his 1962 work Man, Economy, and State (see especially here and here):

In order to calculate the profits and losses of each branch, a firm must be able to refer its internal operations to external markets for each of the various factors and intermediate products. When any of these external markets disappears, because all are absorbed within the

province of a single firm, calculability disappears, and there is no way for the firm rationally to allocate factors to that specific area. The more these limits are encroached upon, the greater and greater will be the sphere of irrationality, and the more difficult it will be to avoid losses. …

[I]f there were no market for a product, and all of its exchanges were internal, there would be no way for a firm or for anyone else to determine a price for the good. A firm can estimate an implicit price when an external market exists; but when a market is absent, the good can have no price, whether implicit or explicit. Any figure could be only an arbitrary symbol. Not being able to calculate a price, the firm could not rationally allocate factors and resources from one stage to another. … For every capital good, there must be a definite market in which firms buy and sell that good. It is obvious that this economic law sets a definite maximum to the relative size of any particular firm on the free market. Because of this law, firms cannot merge or cartelize for complete vertical integration of stages or products. Because of this law, there can never be One Big Cartel over the whole economy or mergers until One Big Firm owns all the productive assets in the economy. The force of this law multiplies as the area of the economy increases and as islands of noncalculable chaos swell to the proportions of masses and continents. As the area of incalculability increases, the degrees of irrationality, misallocation, loss, impoverishment, etc., become greater. Under one owner or one cartel for the whole productive system, there would be no possible areas of calculation at all, and therefore complete economic chaos would prevail.

Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration increases.

What happens when a firm grows so large, its internal operations so insulated from the price system, that the diseconomies of scale begin to outweigh the economies? Well, that depends on the institutional context. In a free market, if the firm doesn’t catch wise and start scaling back, it will grow increasingly inefficient and so will lose customers to competitors; markets thus serve as an automatic check on the size of the firm.

But what if friendly politicians rig the game so that favoured companies can reap the benefits associated with economies of scale while socialising the costs associated with diseconomies of scale? Then we might just possibly end up with an economy dominated by those bloated, bureaucratic, hierarchical corporate behemoths we all know and love. (For some of the ways that state intervention contributes to the Dilbertesque nature of today’s business world, see Kevin Carson’s article “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” – and for more detail, his online books Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective.)

The good news, then, is that the unlovely features of the economy that often get blamed on the free market (or on something called “capitalism,” which means either the free market, or plutocracy, or somehow magically both) are in fact the product of government intervention. We can embrace the free market without embracing big business.

But it’s not just opponents of the free market that get markets and business interests mixed up. All too many libertarians still rush to defend giant corporations like Microsoft and Wal-Mart (two firms whose whole business model in fact depends heavily on government intervention – via, e.g., IP protectionism for Microsoft, eminent domain plus socialised transportation costs for Wal-Mart, and general suppression of competition from the less affluent for both) as though such a defense were part and parcel of a commitment to markets. As libertarians we can hardly complain when we’re accused of being apologists for corporate plutocracy, so long as we’re actually contributing to that perception ourselves by allowing ourselves to lose track of the basic facts about the price system that we of all people should remember.

So long as the confusion between free markets and plutocracy persists – so long as libertarians allow their laudable attraction to free markets to fool them into defending plutocracy, and so long as those on the left allow their laudable opposition to plutocracy to fool them into opposing free markets – neither libertarians nor the left will achieve their goals, and the state-corporate partnership will continue to dominate the political scene.

That’s why we need a left-libertarian alliance.

Cultural Notes No. 57

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

ISBN 9781856376440

ISSN 0267-677X (print)
ISSN 2042-2539 (online)

© 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 Alliance blog. He lived for four years in China (Tianjin, Kunming and Chengdu) and now writes freelance on Chinese politics and economics.

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

Marxism and censorship

I am interested to see the views on the Stephen Lawrence case published on the Spiked website by Brendan O’Neill¹ and Mick Hume.²  Before discussing those articles, I should explain why I have mixed feelings about Spiked and associated groups, including the Institute of Ideas.  My feelings with regards to them are mixed, but largely positive.  They are one of the few groups standing up for freedom from state control in an intelligent way, and we need all the allies we can get.  So I welcome their regularly updated website, www.spiked-online.com, which holds articles on an astonishing array of subjects.  One can with profit spend many hours on that website, and in a day when Internet browsing can easily become a bored surfing from site to site, that cannot be said of many sites.

My mixed feelings relate to the fact that in an earlier incarnation I was a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which published a well-argued and interesting magazine, Living Marxism, later LM, before having to close down as the result of a libel verdict pursued by ITN (the details of which are well worth examining; personally, I feel that LM was unlucky to have lost the case, but all such cases are rather unfairly adjudicated).  The decision that the objective circumstances for revolutionary politics did not exist in Britain (apologies to LM or anyone else if I have poorly remembered the reasons for the closure of the party in 1997) showed this group was rather unusual in being able to “think outside the left-wing box” and draw interesting conclusions from the changes in the world in the early 1990s.  Following the final closure of  LM magazine in 2000, the online magazine Spiked was set up, giving the  group a new platform for their views, and in the years since then Spiked has gained something of a reputation for libertarianism.

Despite its opposition to the bourgeois state, freedom from the state is not a logical consequence of Marxist thought.  I remember one of the members of the RCP arguing that “after the revolution”, all sorts of censorship and repression would be used to reorient social discussion and close down opposition.  Lenin himself was unabashed about the use of state power.  And yet for around two decades, the people who are now grouped (very loosely) around Spiked have argued against mindless calls to give “no platform” to anyone who could be painted as “Fascist and Racist” (Fascist with a capital F and Racist with capital R because these are contentless labels), partly because such calls allow the authorities to direct social discussion, and if they bar one group’s political ideas, then they can bar another’s.  They also appear to believe that the “Racists and Fascists” hold viewpoints that are scarcely credible and easily defeated in the full glare of argument, and so there is little to be gained from not thrashing out ideas; indeed, the failure to do so can allow non-progressive assumptions to reign unchallenged.

From a people to a population

There is some confusion in Spiked’s ideas: their assumption seems to be that it is possible to argue for immigration and anti-racism without enforcement by the state or other official bodies exercising a censorship over self-expression on the subject.  In fact, state intervention is crucial to the project.  To create a society with no common culture, where groups are enabled to replicate their ancestral cultures and carry on as if they were not in England; to create a society where violent crime by immigrant groups may not be openly discussed; and to insist that no ethnic group has a prior claim to the country: all this requires state repression.  I lived for four years of my life in China, but it never occurred to me to claim that China does not belong to the Chinese, or that all human beings have an equal claim to every square inch of the earth, regardless of the achievements of long-standing settled societies there.  To do so would be to express racial prejudice in fact – to deny others the right to claim their sods of earth and to create societies in their territories that reflect their cultures.

Of course, Spiked would claim that it does not support the politics of identity, and that it stands for humanism, rather than narrow nationalism.  However, this is either a coy support for the dispossession of the English nation, or it is a nonsense trussed up as theory.  No one can love the whole of Humanity (capital H required here too) equally.  The Human Race is just an abstraction, or, to use the terminology of the far left, it is a social construct.  If nations are imagined communities, based on real cultural connections and allegiances, then how much more illusory is the imagined Human Race?  What unites the Human Race?  Simply that we all have two legs?  If our cultures are distinct, then a common identity across the Human Race has to be a thin thing indeed, as many have noticed with the multiculturalism promoted by bureaucracies in the West.  “Humanity” has too much of a whiff of synthetic and sanctimonious piety about it.  Even those who claim to support Humanity could not feasibly warm to all human societies.  Place Mick Hume or Brendan O’Neill next to a barbaric “female circumcision” ceremony in Somalia, and they might find it within themselves to object to Somali culture (and thus, logically, given that cultures are the values of the people that adhere to them, to Somali people themselves).

It is, of course, likely that there is no way back to a society united on the basis of England’s traditional identity, but that is a problem that in itself stands in the way of freedom in England today.  Reduced from a people to a mere population, there is nothing that unites England today, other than our exposure to intervention by the same bureaucratic machine.  Where there is no society, the state grows to assume a dominant role, arguing that social fragmentation forces it to intervene to regulate the fragmented lower orders.  No one should suppose that a loss of a country’s identity is the natural consequence of a globalised world.  Hong Kong is one of the most globalised economies in the world: Hong Kong has strong trade and investment ties with all other economies; people from all over the world work in Hong Kong; and people from all over the world visit Hong Kong, a free port, without the inconvenience of having to apply for visas.  And yet Hong Kong remains 97% Chinese.  Maybe it is because Hong Kong does not promote multiculturalism, requires overseas workers to be highly skilled and does not allow the entire Indian subcontinent to apply for welfare upon arrival in the territory.  Ditto for Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc.

The decision to become a multi-ethnic society is a policy choice, and it is one that Spiked supports.  They have the society they always dreamed of: the right has been vanquished; the demographic realities on the ground have been totally altered; and those opposed to these developments have no voice, and indeed are subject to prosecution where they speak out!  What is there not to like for the likes of Spiked?  Apparently, official anti-racism has become a moral crusade that has taken the place of what Spiked sees as the erstwhile official promotion of racism, amounting to a new form of class prejudice, the despising of the Racism of the lower orders.  According to this analysis, we seem to have successfully moved the cultural basis of the Establishment’s rule on to new territory, but this time the role of democracy, free speech and freedom of expression seems to have been excised.  A technocratic society has little need for popular participation.

Racism and power

Mick Hume explains that his earlier opposition to Racism was directed towards the ‘official’ kind, that racial prejudice was used to back up the rule of the British capitalist class in order to create ideological support to ‘cohere’ society under the rule of the powers-that-be.  Hence, the reinvention of Racism as a viewpoint found only in the lower classes is a perversion of his concept: anti-racism was meant to weaken the hold of the authorities over society, not strengthen it.  Brendan O’Neill echoes this viewpoint, claiming the authorities want to “redefine racism as a disease of the brain rather than as a relation of power”.

There is so much wrong with this, it is difficult to know where to begin.  The assertion that Racism is a “relation of power” is pure Marxist rhetoric; without this assertion, the Spiked viewpoint would disintegrate.  Neither of the Spiked writers stop to examine whether support for the society around you is actually ‘racism’ (a word I can only understand as “hatred of those of other races”) or a healthy phenomenon implying no hatred for others, and akin to the average person’s support for his family’s interests over those of strangers.  Neither of them shows that Racism has its origin in an earlier period of promotion of the ideology by the British ruling class.

First, you would need to go back a long while to find a period when the state promoted racism, if it ever did.  True, Britain was an imperial power, and the logic of imperial rule was in the inequality of the governed races, not in their supposed equality despite the disparity in their social, economic and cultural achievements.  It was probably true that in the 19^th century, imperial rule did give a sense of pride to lower-class Britons.  But the state was so small – at times accounting for just 7% of GDP in the late 19^th century – that you would be hard-pressed to show that the British state worked overtime to promote prejudice against the subject imperial nations among the lower orders.  The working class had little interaction with the state in those days.  There was no TV and no BBC, and while treason and sedition were crimes on the statute books (as they remain today), there was no attempt to officially enforce racialist views.  Race was in fact an abstract category when England was more than 99% European in terms of its population.  We are meant to believe that the British state was frenetically promoting prejudice against people in far-off countries who most English people would never come across.  A more logical view is that pride in the British Empire was derived from its fact, the fact that a small dot in the North Atlantic had conquered one-quarter of the world, a feat that it could not have accomplished had Britain not been centuries ahead of the developing countries.

In the early 20^th century, Antonio Gramsci argued that all societies have ruling elites and that all societies have cultures that prop up the rule of their elites.  No ruling class can rule by a monopoly of violence alone, he argued, but by cultural hegemony, which induces society as a whole to support the elite’s rule.  These ideas were not new, being broadly in line with the ideas of Niccolò Macchiavelli in The Prince.  However, it is one thing to show that an elite obtains social acceptance of its rule by supporting, or feigning support for, the society’s culture – and quite another to show that that culture is created out of whole cloth in order to induce support for minority class rule.  Historically, no society before Soviet Communism was able to develop the propaganda resources and means of social control to create a truly unfree state.  Only in the modern period do you have states large enough to be able (as with multiculturalism in Britain today) to seek to reinvent society.  If elites ruled by virtue of their support for the society around them, that represented the natural evolution of a society with cultural connections internally.

Patriotism and society

You have to presume that there is an essential antagonism in class society – a precept of Marxist dogma – before you begin to explore how a society creates compliance with the rule of an elite.  Yet there is a fundamental distinction between a society with hardly anything in the way of a state structure – late 19^th century England – where some people were rich, and a society where the state accounts for half of the entire economy, and the state bureaucracy is in itself a key means for personal self-advancement for a parasitical minority.  The 19^th century bourgeoisie – an economic elite whose position in society derived from their entrepreneurialism and not from their political propaganda – did not cast around in an artificial way for cultural theories with which to “cohere” society.  People made their own luck, in a society with considerable social mobility and no means for government promotion of “opportunity for all”.  While strikes and labour unrest among the disadvantaged were of concern to the government, the ultimate tendency of capitalism was to raise average living standards.  The advent of democracy aimed to give all Britons a stake in society, and as revolutionaries such as Gramsci found out internal cultural connections in most European countries made violent revolutions rare and unlikely events.

Patriotism, far from being a tool for the bourgeoisie to dominate society in its own interests, was a means whereby society kept a hold on its rulers.  Demands for social reform were a demand for patriotism among the ruling elite.  If we consider how the White Australia policy was supported by generations of workers in Australia, we can see that patriotism sought to keep the rulers operating in the interests of society as a whole, rather than bringing cheap labour to undercut the working man and divide society.  If we see today how our rulers have abandoned support for our society, often encouraging immigration, rule by foreign bureaucracies and pointless adventures to “spread democracy”, it is clear that patriotism and other moral values used to be a binding force on the so-called bourgeoisie, and not a binding force to keep the lower orders in line.  Mick Hume explains:

Thirty years ago when I joined a group called Workers Against Racism, there was no sympathetic media coverage or mainstream political support for the Asian families being burnt out of housing estates or the black youth being routinely brutalised by the police.  The national debate was all about the scourge of ‘immigrant scroungers’ and black ‘muggers’.  Those who fought against racists were branded extremists, the flipside of the fascists.

This presentation requires heavy subtext.  The national debate was about immigrant scroungers, because immigrant scroungers were flooding in in large numbers, although it must be admitted that the numbers back then in the 1980s were a small fraction of the numbers that have been flooding in ever since.  The debate about black muggers reflected … (surprise, surprise) the high proportion of muggings by black youths.  Support for England’s being English was something that working men traditionally sought in their ruling classes, not because they were duped into not being internationalist by a ruling class that sought to divide up Humanity in order to rule us, but because a decent society needs to conduct its affairs on the basis of a recognition of common origin and common interests by the rulers and the ruled.  Where the rulers can allow the ingress of millions of unskilled labourers, they are showing as plain as they can that they are not accountable to their own lower orders.  They will keep the wages low, and there is nothing the workers can do about it.  And they will culturally divide the ruled in a way that allows for an industry in social propaganda to install itself in every workplace, school and even living room.

Immigration and propaganda

Immigration is not just about cheap labour, of course.  It is also a moral project.  Communism, atheism, the rise of the developing world – all these have weakened elite belief in the national cultures of Western societies.  Multiculturalism began to be implemented, not because patriotism no longer worked as a cohering value with which to con the workers, but because the Establishment no longer believed in society’s values.  As O’Neill says, “the Lawrence murder became a significant turning point in the way in which the white working classes were discussed and understood – and feared”, precisely because large swathes of the ‘white’ working class would still be interested in England’s being a nation-state, which is in turn because the elite’s project of multiculturalism runs directly contrary to the interests of the English working class (dubbed “white” by left-wing commentators, although the point is not that we are white, but that this is our country).  The workers have been brought along more sullenly into the multicultural paradise that increasing numbers of senior state personnel have sought to promote, until today, where the promotion of this cultural shift is now compulsory for all state bureaucrats.

Democracy becomes impossible where the political elite is united in a project to reform society demographically.  Much of social policy is off-limits to political debate.  Public broadcasting is used for the strong promotion of tendentious views.  As every single workplace, school and club of any type is now required to promote the multicultural agenda, people are strongly deterred from expressing themselves on cultural topics.  The elections still take place, but the content has been removed.  One example of the way in which politics is constrained is the prevention of social discussion of the ethnic involvement in crime.  It has become apparent that the police only exist in England today to promote the great experiment of creating a multi-ethnic society, and the suppression of crime is no longer really on their agenda.

Given that the immigration we have had to absorb has been to the detriment of the long-standing population, in terms of welfarism, crime, our subjection to constant propaganda and the ruthless excision of anything revealing England to have a culture (which would also reveal the English to be an ethnic group, and not just “white” people), it is unsurprising that at a slightly less extreme phase in the demographic shift there was a national debate about the scourge of immigrant scroungers and black muggers.  We have now moved on to the more advanced phase, where we cannot even discuss what is happening to our society.  The fact that the police were – in Mick Hume’s words – “brutalising black youths” merely shows that, back then, there was still some social pressure on the police to fish where the fish were, to prevent black crime from having a greater impact on the host community, whereas, by now, we are expected to have become accustomed to a decaying social fabric and hence to keep quiet.  Mick Hume’s article is devoid of any explanation as to why PC Blakelock’s killers roam free, while two men who are not proven to have had a connection to the killing of Stephen Lawrence are behind bars.

If Mick Hume is right that in the 1980s there was “deliberate, politicised and vitriolic racism, popularised from the top down and enforced by the state as a weapon to divide the working class and consolidate white support for the authorities”, it is only because white support was only available for the authorities when they showed themselves to be on the side of the existing community.  In fact, contrary to what Mick Hume claims, the government has long been opposed to the nationalism of the English working classes, and a firmer stance against black crime has long been coupled with policies to allow refugees and secondary immigrants to arrive in Britain unchecked in terms of numbers, at the same time that propaganda units in all state bodies to promote “anti-racism” were being set up.  Is Mick Hume unaware that so-called Racism had been outlawed under the Race Relations Act of 1965?  Back as far as 1965, before my birth, the state was already trying to force the population to accept a planned demographic change.  Those like Enoch Powell who claimed there might be three million people of New Commonwealth descent in Britain by the end of the 20^th century were vocally condemned (by Mick Hume, along with the Establishment press) for Racism.  And yet the official figure is north of nine million today.³  How does Spiked explain this?

Mick Hume goes on:

What has happened over the past two decades is that Britain has undergone a major cultural shift as the old politics of nationalism and race have lost their grip on public consciousness.  This would have happened whether or not Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists.  Indeed, the fact that his killing remains the benchmark for racist violence 19 years on shows how rare such incidents have become.

It is difficult to deny that the younger generation are not captivated by what Hume claims was the “old politics of nationalism and race”, although support for the demographic change is more sullen and passive than Hume admits.  Hume does not tarry to investigate whether state propaganda of an almost blanket nature has driven acceptance of the state’s agenda.  Has he ever watched Eastenders or noted how most television programmes seem to be used as a vehicle for the state’s cultural messages today?  Marxists used to speak of “false consciousness”.  Well, is it not false consciousness for official figures to show the heavy and disproportionate ethnic involvement in crime, when the average English person instantly blurts out that it is not true when confronted with the facts?  Is it not false consciousness to force yourself not to notice that it is the English and English culture that are on the receiving end of prejudice in England today?  Many are afraid to think of inconvenient facts lest they end up thinking the wrong thoughts.  It is only an abuse of state power that can make an untruth stick.  It is true that many of the young are prepared to mouth the nostrums of multiculturalism, but it is not the case that an integrated new society, with a new common culture, has been created – which is what Hume needs to show in order to praise the “major cultural shift” that has happened.  If we were gradually creating a new culture that united society on a new basis, attempts to oppose it by conservatives would be quixotic.  But in the end all Hume shows is that the technocracy has had its way and created a society that requires constant state management of inter-cultural issues.

As Hume says, “racist” killings of ethnic-minority individuals are extraordinarily rare – and there is no reliable evidence that Stephen Lawrence was killed on account of his race.  Racially motivated killings of British people are considerably more frequent, but I do not think Spiked will be launching campaigns to publicise this.  Richard Everitt, Ross Parker, Kriss Donald, Gavin Hopley and others are among the unknown victims.  I personally would feel uncomfortable for English people to take up the victim mantle – as I think it is more appropriate for us to claim England as ours because we are English than to claim it because we are victims, but it is worth pointing out that there are many English victims of extreme racial prejudice whose names and cases are of no interest either to Spiked or to the Establishment press.

Hume continues:

The truth is that the less overtly racist British society has become in recent times, the more the authorities have started preaching about the evils of racism and launching new crusades against it.  What has altered most is the perception of racism.  Where once it was society’s guilty secret, now there is a concerted effort to trawl for and publicise any hint of racially incorrect language or behaviour from the school playground to the football pitch.  The less racism is in evidence, the more everything appears to have been racialised.

When Hume says that British society was “overtly racist”, he could just as easily have chosen to say that Britain was a free society, where free expression of the view that the authorities should not be trying to change the ethnic identity of the population was common.  That is not racism; that is the normal expression of solidarity with one’s society expressed by any normal person.  Even racially inflammatory comments and behaviour amount to merely an inchoate reaction to what is happening to our society, although genuine racial hatred is rare among the majority English community (and far from rare among the ethnic minorities, whose unjustified sense of grievance is officially fostered).  By tolerating everything culturally, we stand for nothing.  We are being asked to become cardboard cut-outs of people, with no views or loyalties, rather than people with genuine passions and adherences, along the lines of the becalmed population created by the authorities in the film Equilibrium.  In a free society, people are more than walking-and-talking tolerance machines: they have real views and express them, and it is this that Hume describes as “overt racism”.

Along with millions of other English people, I have no axe to grind against individual people of other ethnicities, as long as they remain in their own countries and are not trying to take over England.  It is absurd to claim that this expression of “ownership” of England is itself motivated by prejudice.  Does Mick Hume open his home as a hostel to all the homeless?  If not, is that because he is denying the equal worth of all human beings and expressing contempt towards them?  Is he violating his own expressed support for Humanity with a capital H?  Or is it simply because he needs his space as a human being to live the way he chooses to live and wishes others well to find their own spaces and ways of life without intruding on him?  The same principle applies to the nation.  People who come here – ideally, people who arrive here with strong democratic support for their arrival, which can only be obtained where a frank national discussion on the issue is permitted – should join our culture, not bring theirs with them.  Logically, they will recreate their cultures in England if their numbers reach critical mass, which means only a low number of immigrants can be easily integrated.

O’Neill says Racism has been “thoroughly reconceptualised, turned from an ideological thing into a kind of instinctive tick, from a tool of the powerful into a disease amongst the powerless”.  What about the “powerless” – among whom I have to number myself – who do not feel any “hatred” for people of other races, but for whom a nation-state is an ideological thing, because I want to live in a democracy and in a society that feels like a society where there is something in common between ruler and ruled?  In a society where instinctive support for the country and people around you is not penalised by the state?  Where the rulers also feel instinctive support for their own lower orders?  Where freedom of speech, expression and association are taken for granted?

Perhaps beaten, but never silent

Of course I realise that there is little likelihood of a reversal of the state’s cultural policies, which means that a divided society has been successfully created, apparently giving the technocracy a permanent role in society.  But the fact that what has been done will not be reversed does not mean we should surrender our right to freedom of expression on the subject for ever more.  I would like to see official promotion of  multiculturalism stop, all the discrimination tribunals closed down, and the ethnic minorities told they will no longer be allowed to be “more equal” in our society.  If the demographic change could be stabilised at current levels, with an end to the propaganda element and the constant negativity of the discussion of race and culture, I suppose many English people would see that as an improvement they could live with.  Ironically, if this happened and people felt free once again to voice their views on a range of racial and cultural issues, Spiked might find that support for multiculturalism had been more superficial than they had supposed, leading them to editorialise about an upsurge in Racism once again.

So while I rave over the majority of Spiked articles, I cannot do so over the ones on race and immigration that still try to promote the anti-racist agenda while claiming to oppose the moral crusade against the Racist ‘white’ working class.  The real reason Mick Hume and LM promoted the idea that Racism was a state-backed ideology to con the workers was because, as Marxists, they believed that the workers of all nations had more in common with each other than with their rulers.  Workers of the world, unite! and all that.  Yet Humanity is an abstraction, as proven by the failure of the international revolution to take place in the early 20^th century.  A Humanist agenda with no plan for international revolution, as still plugged by Spiked, seems like a stance on race and immigration that has forgotten its original rationale.  Hume and O’Neill clearly back the state’s views on race and immigration, while posing as opponents of the way race has become a moral crusade against the workers.  And yet, without the state’s adoption and enforcement of this agenda, the cultural shift Spiked welcomes would not have happened.  Without state propaganda, the somewhat passive acquiescence of the young would not have happened either.  The only way that multiracialism could have been enforced is via the ideological interests of the ruling minority supported by an over-large state.  It’s called preventing democracy and preventing liberty, with a cast of hangers-on made up of moralising enthusiasts and advocates for cheap labour in tow: to support the technocratic agenda, but not the technocracy, is simply confused, and yet that is where Spiked is.

References

(1) Brendan O’Neill, ‘Lawrence verdict: this isn’t justice – it’s politics’, Spiked, 4^th January 2012, retrieved 13^th January 2012, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11951/

(2) Mick Hume, ‘Official anti-racism: the new nationalism?’, Spiked, 5^th January 2012, retrieved 13^th January 2012, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11947/

(3) Simon Rogers, ‘Non-white British population reaches 9.1 million’, Guardian, 19^th May 2011, retrieved 13^th January 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/18/non-white-british-population-ons

“Bad teachers should be sacked within weeks”, it says in the Daily Mail which didn’t print my comment, probably because I broke “Godwin’s Law” and used the N-word. But I said it on Facebook anyway:-

The main problem is not “bad teachers”. Bad teachers are “a” problem, but not “the” problem. “The” problem is bad, mendacious, self-important, twaddle-laden, Nazi “syllabuses”, set by governments that think they ought to be “delivering” education. This is compounded and entrenched by making today’s teachers all pass a qualifcation in practical Marxism, provided during “teacher training”, otherwise they can’t become “accredited”, whatever that means….

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=293042434077087&id=662052517

All observed in the last month or so, in Lancashire and Liverpool.

X 4 DC X….BI6 ROB….MI55 CDW….STO3 LEN (really)….PI MMP (yes really)….MAR6E (I think)….J8YNE….others to follow when I can find the scrap of paper on the dashboard.

On Defending “The Indefensible”
by Sean Gabb

During the past month, I have spent much of my time as Director of the Libertarian Alliance speaking up for the rights of Emma West – theSouth London“Tram Lady” – and of the alleged murderers of Stephen Lawrence. Because of this, I have received several e-mails of denunciation. I normally ignore criticism. However, since I may spend at least the next few years defending the rights of people who are regarded as unspeakably evil by the ruling class and all who stand in awe of the ruling class, it may be useful if I say something in my own defence.

I discovered that I was a libertarian in 1977. Since then, I have written over a million words on libertarian issues. Compared with all the novels and poetry and diaries and letters and other things, this is a minority of my output. However, it is still a large mass of words, and its mass often obscures individual pieces. Add to this that many of the things I wrote before about 1990 were published in obscure magazines, and have since disappeared. But among the causes I have taken up over the past 35 years are the following:

In 1981, I wrote and spoke in support of the trade unions, which were being threatened with state supervision of their internal workings. The supposed justification was that the unions had been privileged since 1906, and that it was necessary to check abuses of this privilege. I answered that the privileges themselves should be taken away, but that the unions should be free to organise as they pleased.

In 1984, I wrote in support of the striking coal miners, who were stopped by the police from moving about the country. I may at the time have believed that the miners were Moscow-inspired wreckers – perhaps they were. But I also believed that people should be free to go where they pleased in their own country, and should be punished only after they had committed actual crimes against life or property.

In 1988, I wrote against the shooting of probable Sinn Fein/IRA terrorists inGibraltar. I argued that, while these men had almost certainly been up to no good, it was absolutely unacceptable for the State to run South American style execution squads.

Again in 1988, I wrote against the law that excluded members of Sin Fein/IRA from the broadcast media. I called it censorship, and said that, bad as it was in itself, the law set a very bad precedent. A short summary of a longer piece, now lost, can be seen here.

I wrote much after 1985 against police ill-treatment of black people alleged to have committed public order offences. It is a pity, bearing in mind recent accusations, that most of these writings have perished. But this brief passage has survived from 1989:

“In 1985, following the Broadwater Farm riots, a boy of thirteen was interrogated alone in a Police Station for three days. Wearing only underpants and a blanket, he eventually confessed to murder. He might possibly have been guilty. But the judge was so aghast, he felt he had no choice but to direct an acquittal. This, however, was a use of discretion, not, as inAmerica, the application of a fixed rule. For lack of one, it stands to reason the Police will go on pressuring suspects too young or ill-informed to be worth being frightened of.”

In 1990, I wrote in support of the right of consenting adults to commit incest. I began by describing an old case I had found in the law reports, and continued with a critique of the various arguments for the criminalisation of incest between consenting adults.

In 1991, I wrote the earliest and perhaps the best defence of the fifteen men who had been found guilty of taking part in private sado-masochistic orgies. I made the usual argument that no one has any right to interfere in what consenting adults do in private. When people even at Libertarian Alliance meetings sniggered at me, I paid no attention. Instead, I returned to the subject several time more – finally in 1993.

In 1995, when we still had a Conservative Government, and this was going through the motions of persecuting sexual minorities, I wrote generally in favour of defending anyone who was oppressed, regardless of what others might think.

In 1999, I wrote in defence of Gary Glitter, who had been sent to prison for having pictures of naked children on his computer. He had also been acquitted of sexual molestation of a girl in the 1970s. I argued that, while it was legitimate to use such images as evidence of actual offences, it was wrong to make possession in itself an offence. When nothing else but possession had to be proved, the law made it easy for the police to plant evidence. It also set a precedent for criminalising possession of other images or even writings.

As for the failed charge of sexual abuse in the 1970s, I argued that it was oppressive to drag people into court for alleged offences so old. By all means, let someone stand trial for a murder committed in the 1960s, or even earlier – so long as there was no doubt that there had been a murder, and there was some objective evidence of guilt. But it was wrong to prosecute in cases where even the existence of the offence was one word against another. I added that the evidence of allegedly abused people so long afterwards was inherently suspect. When this brought a flood of hysterical denunciations, I made sure to write again on the issue – here and here, for example.

Oh – and, though I do not normally go out of my way to distance myself from the people whose rights I am defending – I will say for the record that I do not approve of sex with children. Nor do I approve of child pornography. What I do not like is breaches of due process and natural justice in the prosecution of child molesters and child pornographers.

In 2004, I wrote in defence of a Christian preacher in Sweden who had been punished for quoting Biblical condemnations of homosexuality. This was a clear matter of freedom of speech, and I was beginning to grow alarmed at the tendency of formerly persecuted homosexuals to seek and to use criminal laws against those who disapproved of them.

In 2010, I put out a news release denouncing the banning of Islam4UK. This organisation was exactly what you might expect from its name. But I said this:

“The rights to freedom of speech and association are fundamental to a free society. So far as these rights are diminished, that society becomes less free. I was born in a country where these rights had been enjoyed for centuries. I have reached middle age in a politically correct police state where the Government is now trying to criminalise dissent”

In 2006, I had sent out a news release defending the right of Abu Hamza to preach “hate.” Sadly, this news release seems to have disappeared in my reconstruction of the Libertarian Alliance website. However, until I can upload it again, here is evidence that it was sent out.

In 2011, I wrote an attack on the growing official intolerance of Christians in this country. This was prompted by the refusal of a local authority to let a Christian couple foster children – on the grounds that they might say unkind things about homosexuals. Again, bearing in mind what is currently said against me, I will mention that the couple in question was black.

Again, in 2011, I wrote a general defence of the right to discriminate. This branched into a longer analysis of an issue in dispute between libertarians. But it managed to insist that the landlord of a public house had every right to throw two men out for kissing each other.

Of course, I have written at greater length about all the usual libertarian things – drugs, guns, porn, kinky sex, taxes, regulations, war, and so on and so forth. But none of this is controversial. What is presently controversial is all that I have written over the years in support of “racists” to have their say and be left alone. I cannot be bothered to link to all the various essays written since 1993. But there was my defence last month of Emma West, and my defences last week of the men convicted of the Stephen Lawrence murder. Miss West has now been charged with assault. I cannot comment on this, but I will say that all she was filmed saying on that tram came under the heading of freedom of speech.

As for theLawrenceconvicts, I would never argue that they were nice men. But I do argue that their trial was not fair. Most of the evidence looked fabricated. I suspect the jury was packed – and, however the jury was composed, the men had been so demonised since 1993, that a fair trial would have been impossible. Above all, one of them could only be put on trial by abolishing the ancient and essential rule that no one should be made to stand trial more than once for any one alleged offence. It is a disgrace that the entire “liberal” establishment did not explode with outrage. They would never have put up with this sort of trial for a Sinn Fein/IRA terrorist, or one of the Brixton rioters – and rightly. The long, collective orgasm with which they received news of the convictions will bring them one day into the same universal disrepute as those who cheered the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, or who mobbed people with German names in 1914.

In all this, and much, much more over the past thirty years, there is what ought to be an obvious consistency. I am a libertarian activist, and I see it as my duty to stand up for freedom of speech and freedom of association and due process of law – and for much else – whenever they are denied. And, since I do not have unlimited time or money, I make my biggest noises in those hard cases where other “libertarians” choose to sit on their hands. Sometimes, I have found myself speaking up for people who have become lifelong friends. Sometimes, I have defended people I would normally cross the road to avoid. That is not important. What is important is that, if we do not defend freedom in the hard cases, there will eventually be no freedom at all.

I said earlier that I expected to spend the next few years defending people like Emma West. It is possible, however, that the more totalitarian homosexual activists will bring on such a reaction, that I shall find myself going on the radio once more to defend the right of consenting male adults to use each other as they please in private. I do not know. All I do know is that I – and, so long as I direct it, the Libertarian Alliance – will continue to defend whatever uses of freedom may currently be seen by those who rule as indefensible.

And that is all.