Libertarian Alliance quote of the day

From our own comment thread on here.

David Davis

Ian B // 7 April, 2010 at 2:42 am (edit)

Sean, I don’t think voting makes much difference at this stage, but as I said before, better to vote counter-hegemonic (UKIP, LPUK, even BNP) than pro-hegemonic. Cameron’s entirely a creature of the Enemy- indeed his plan for 5000 state activists, funded via the Proggie Network, will just broaden and deepen their power. A Tory government certainly won’t help us a single jot. A Tory lose however may throw that useless bunch of quislings into terminal disarray.

I also don’t think Chris Tame’s worthy plan- of influencing the ideological hegemony- is going to ever work. It simply isn’t in their class interest to listen to us, even if the occasional maverick does. The reality is that the Gramscian methodoloy works for people seeking to expand state power, in their own interests. We need a better political strategy that will work for people trying to abolish the ruling class.

So one way of looking at it is, we have to achieve what the Marxists failed to achieve, which is the mobilisation of the proleteriat- in our case, our proleteriat being everyone outside the government, rich or poor. The big problem is that over the past century the state has expanded into every area of life. It’s not going to be easy.

One thing in particular libertarians have to stop doing is attacking weak people. You mentioned in your book the political error of banging on about welfare recipients, and I entirely agree. The Enemy succeed because they always, always, ally themselves with some perceived weak group (the poor, blacks, gays, etc) so that even when they’re doing something ghastly, it’s “in a good cause”. Attacking poor people etc is equivalent to being seen kicking a cripple in the head. Even when you explain he stole your wallet, people will still think you’re a bastard. No wonder the “right”, or the non-left, or whatnot, have consistently lost with such dunderheaded ignorance of human nature.

We may need to rebrand ourselves. We certainly need to start working under non-libertarian banners. Greenpeace may be a socialist group, but they don’t call themselves that. We need to pump out philosophy and propaganda, we need to make whatever alliances we can, and we need to pull together realistic programmes that show how a society can transfer from state dependence to liberty without millions collapsing into poverty, rather than the libertarian habit of arguing constantly about what the Glorious End State will be after some miraculous transformation. We’re in the position of wanting to free some poor desperate population from a ghastly Victorian institution. But the fact is, they’ve lived there their whole lives. They don’t know how to cook, or get a home, or go to the shops. If we threaten to fling the doors open and turf them out onto the streets, we’ll just get terror, not gratitude.

Five more years of Labour, or five of the Tories, it makes no real difference. Whichever we get, things will be more desperate and ghastly in 2015 than they are now. But, things are better for us than they were five or ten years ago. The message is getting out. The Methodist State is reaching its apotheosis, the political class become more transparently fascist and disconnected with every day.

And, we must always remember that the State we’re in is not the inevitable consequence of government. It has the form it has because of specific politicking by specific groups that stretch back a century and a half or even two- kicked into gear by evangelists from nutty sects (Methodists, Quakers etc here, Yankees in the USA (Rothbard wrote a lot on this without quite following it through)). They are our enemies, and they have to be rooted out of the nests they’ve built. The dumb politicians who do their bidding are barely of consequence. Their grotesque schemes nearly fell to bits in the twentieth century, and it was only the marxists who saved them. Well, the marxists are gone now. Once people have lived a while under the new progressive puritanism, that’ll start collapsing too (it’s cracking in places already) and this time there are no marxists left. This time, it must be us who are waiting to take the opportunity.

We can win this thing.

The Queen cares more about being “Head of a Church” than…

…looking after her Subjects’ sovereignty.

David Davis

This actually upset me as well as making me realise that the Queen must have deliberately given assent to things like ROME, the SEA, Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon.

If a “Senior Adviser” to the Queen has asked for a meeting with the Asse-Hatte “Rowan” Williams”, then it must mean that the Queen asked for it to take place.

The Pope is perfectly entitled to try and “poach” “Anglicans” from England into the Universal Church, if he can. He’s a classic aggressive campaigning battling Christian Pope of the Old School, and good luck to him: he’s also fun to watch, and smiles often, which makes you want to like him as a person.You can imagine him on a destrier, in full armour, wielding his flanged mace (so as not to shed blood while killing) in the middle of the Battle of Hastings.

Equally, by sovereign constitutional precedent and settlement, the Queen as the Anglican Boss is entitled to try and hold on to her “farm animals”. She might also care to think about defending our liberties sometimes. But what she’s clearly doing right now is a harmless game that has no bearing on how we real individuals live our lives, which are our own: this is one of the few real comforts available to us in a darkening and less free world.

But the Queen – rather than get exercised about playing harmless games – ought to have spent most of the last 50 years resisting far far more dangerous and important threats, both to our status and hers: such as the encroachment of the fascist EU upon especially and in particular British Sovereignty – no?

Climate Change, and what people really think

Update:- Good physics-based demolition of the CO2 myth over at Counting Cats….h/t the Devil

David Davis

I was intrigued just now by something Bishop Hill has done, in placing different strands of opinion about AGW and climate change generally, on a sort of Johari Window.

Here it is, but do read his piece.

Watch out: here come the GramscoFabiaNazi eugenicists

David Davis

This is just the beginning, and they won’t stop now.

They’ll be “taking children into Care” next.

London Underground strikers are…..

….not necessarily c***s, or not all of them anyway. Officially as individual workers, they have every right to go on strike, subject to whatever the law says at present, but which right is usually usurped by their “Trade Union(s)” and invoked unilaterally. This is of course where the problem lies.

David Davis

But this, spotted via the Devil, is really funny:-

Personally, if it is illegal for “producers” to “combine”, as I believe it is, then it makes sense for it to be illegal for employees to combine also.

Mr Eugenides on Madeleine Bunting (who she?) is a must-read, now.

Please!

David Davis

Bentleys and “bio Ethanol”: the trouble with all modern cars is that Green-fascism has made them look identical.

David Davis

The new Bentley looks suitably impressive and expensive. But hardly different from any other executive-express. It also can run on “E85″, available at Morrisons, no less! I doubt that buyers of this car shop there much… This stuff is an 85% mixture of bioethanol with petrol. So when using that fuel instead of nice, famine-free fossil fuels, you can be sure you’ve just starved a few more Africans.

 

I'll have it in British Racing Green please

The trouble with big modern car firms like VW (yes it owns Bentley I think, so really this is a re-bodied Phaeton or Bugatti Veyron but who cares?) is that they feel bound to emply phalanxes of PR “executives” in various “communications” departments. This makes them vulnerable to assaults by greenazis, with whom the PR chappies and chappesses went to “uni” probably, and may well have shagged each other while students.

If they didn’t bother to employ these useless wastes-of-rations, in “communications”, then they’d be…

(a) functionally deaf to media-assaults about “non-renewable fuels”, and about “polluting the environment” by not using “bio fuels”

(b) able to afford more engineers and guys at draftsmen’s tables, producing even nicer cars,

(c) not make all their cars look like one another, by passing the desings through fascist-filtering wind-tunnel-software,

(d) able to bring the crypto-terrorist inclinations of the greens out in the open: frustrated as the greens would become, they would turn to terrorism and destruction of car plants, and THEN we will see where “governments” stand. Placate the greenazis or the labour unions?

Let’s give some tyrant or other another tiny kick downhill

It is not suitable to shoot women. Only communists, Gramsco-Marxians and the Prussian general Staff (as a tactic to be used in the terrorising into passivity of occupied regions) sanctioned it. Stalin learned it, rather quickly.

Sorry. It’s just that our strategic-focus-video-incorporation-outreach-Chimpanzee-Typewriter-Group-deputy-chief-assistant-activities-co-ordinator, er, pointed out that, we had not thrown rotting cabbages at Kim Jong-Il for some time, and it was high time we did. At least 9% of the duty-Chimps on this shift found themselves involuntarily typing about him, even without pre-briefing.  

Just so he knows we have not forgotten him, and all his works.

The Devil re-savages Monty Don, and the New-Britain-Fascist State, equally and beautifully

Here. Read the thing in full, you need to follow the argument and I have work to do!

Oh, for f*** ‘ s sake…..

David Davis

Biohazard, envirocrime, HP sauce. What the hell are these people thinking they are doing?

More on Sean Gabb speech to Conservative-Future: trenchant comment

David Davis

I take the liberty of using this comment (freely available on the thread for this post) as a new post:-

And here’s me been trying to impose a commenting moratorium on myself. Oh well, here I go again.

Sean’s prescription for what to do when power is gained, while perhaps or perhaps not perfect in the detail, is a good one, and is the kind of thought experiment which may bring one temporary cheer. However it does not (nor, one must absolutely acknowledge attempt to) answer the question of how such a position may be gained. As such it is much like discussing which stars to visit in a starship, while ignoring the hard problem, which is how to build a warp drive.

The problem is that by not discussing in the same breath the gaining of that position, we overlook the fundamentally recursive nature of the discussion. If a government of libertarians, or of “the right” (I dispute that label, but let us let it pass for now) or of “real conservatives” (I dispute that even more as I said before) has gained office in our thought experiment, then the war is already won. That which should be done by such government then becomes a trifle, as it will have the authority to do whatever it wishes.

Unless it has gained power by subterfuge, rather than gained office by honest campaigning, this imaginary government has already told the populace that it will slash government to ribbons, immediately leave the EU, abolish the BBC, hound the enemy out of local government, strangle all the quangos and so on. It can only thus gain office if it has the support of the majority of those citizens who care. To achieve that, it must have gained a cultural hegemony and, more significantly a moral hegemony.

It will have become moral to support small government and immoral to support big government. It will have become moral to support tax cuts, to despise the enemy class, and so on.

To achieve the initial conditions for such a libertian cultural revolution, the public morality must have already become libertarian, rather than the current secular evangelical statism.

This is the Hard Problem, and it would seem at this juncture to be entirely intractable, since altering the moral hegemony requires cultural hegemony, while the cultural hegemony is driven by the moral hegemony.

What is oft mistakenly believed is that the statists/Left/whatever invaded the institutions- government, education etc, from outside. This is not true. There were always socialists inside the elite; indeed it is an elite project and always was. We, on the other hand, have no insiders; and the defenders against whom we wish to move are entirely alert to the possibility of any counterhegemonic entryism and are thus able to nullify it before it gains purchase. The Hard Problem is thus profoundly hard. 

Vaclav Klaus scragged by walk-outer-MEPs, while a guest in “his” own EU “parliament”

…amd a good plug for Sean Gabb’s speech to Conservative Future, from these good people over there.

There are no videos of Klaus himself being shouted at and with grasping, totalitarian, trough-pigging-socialist-scumbags walking out, but we’ll put them on as soon as possible if they appear.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/02/19/meps_walk_out_when_vaclav_klaus_questions_european_integration

Sean Gabb: Speech to Conservative Future

Groan:- I don’t know what that smiley is doing there, but I can’t remove it. It’s none of my doing.

UPDATE3 lease read this response-post, and _in particular_ the comment posted thereupon by an informed member of the blogateriat.

UPDATE2:- Here’s Sean Gabb’s thoughts earlier this year on holocaust denial, a hot subject.

Earlier comment from Blogmaster just after main post filed:-

(1) A direct link from the young Conservatives, who were kind enough to report the event charitably, is here.

(2)  This post by Sean is not for the faint-hearted: that is to say, those who may quail when the real assaults finally come. The prognosis for liberty in the UK is not currently good, and may not get better.

I have just read this on another forum, and would have published it unilaterally had not Sean Gabb done so already. You will find, on reading down, that the floor-response to Sean’s address was not as positive as a rational person would have hoped from today’s Tories, in Britain, embattled as they seem not to realise – or else prefer not to know, and pretend that all will be well if only they take power.

I think we can expect that, on ZanuNewLieborg being thrown out, as they will be, but not decisively (as we fear) then the British Conservative Party will remain a less certain but still definite enemy of individual liberty. this was not always the case as Sean points out. But it is now.

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 181
16th February 2009
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc181.htm

Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009
by Sean Gabb

I’d like to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight to speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard during the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative Party. The Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for Marc-Henri Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others, when it looked as if libertarians might do the same to the Conservative Party as the Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party. Sadly, our efforts failed. Since then, the Conservative Party has become more watchful of people like us. It has also, I must say, made itself progressively less worth trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that would be a poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your party leadership has consistently ignored my advice during the past twelve years – and has, in consequence, been out of office during this time – there is no point in dwelling on what might have been. We are where we are, and I think it would be useful for me very briefly to outline my advice to a future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be formed within the next year or so my David Cameron. I may be wrong. It is possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more Machiavellian man that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to make radical changes once in office. But I do not think he is. I think what little he is promising to do is the very most that he will do. In any event, he is doing nothing to acquire the mandate without which radical change would lack legitimacy. And so this is advice that I offer to some future government of conservatives, rather than to any prospective Conservative Government. It may even be a government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your enemy. If you come into government, you will be in at least the same position as Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour Government in the 1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly conservative. The administration, the media, the universities, big business – all were hostile to what it was believed he wanted to do. The first Labour Governments were in office, but not fully in power, as they were not accepted by the people with whom and through whom they had to rule the country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson faced the same constraints. A future Conservative Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class has emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business interests. These are people who derive income and status from an enlarged and activist state. They have been turning this country into a soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a Labour Government. But their natural political home is the Labour Party. They will accept a Conservative Government on sufferance – but only so long as it works within a system that robs ordinary people of their wealth and their freedom. They will never consent to what should be the Conservative strategy of bringing about an irreversible transfer of power from the State back into the hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try coexistence with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out to fight and defeat an earlier and less confident version of the Establishment – but only on those fronts where its policies were most resisted. It won numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost the war. For example, I well remember the battle over abolition of the Greater London Council. This appeared at the time a success. But I am not aware of one bureaucrat who lost his job at the GLC who was not at once re-employed by one of the London Boroughs or by some other agency of the State. And we know that Ken Livingstone was eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: �the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people�s revolution�.�

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down – and shut it down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection – I mean much of the public sector – these should be shut down. If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from their backs – though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember to campaign against the Thatcher “cuts”. There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from the the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts – and be prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a return to freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor ever will, vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point is worth making. This is that we need to look again at our constitutional arrangements. The British Constitution has always been a fancy dress ball at which ordinary people were not really welcome, but which served to protect the life, liberty and property of ordinary people. Some parts of this fancy dress ball continue, but they no longer serve their old purpose. They are a fig leaf for an increasingly grim administrative despotism. I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to admit that the Queen has spent the past half century breaking her Coronation Oath at every opportunity. The only documents she has ever seemed reluctant to sign are personal cheques. Conservatives need to remember that our tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the Cavaliers, but also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an age where it is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have much to say in response. I therefore thank you again for your indulgence in having invited me and the politeness with which you have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having ignored you for twelve years. From what you have just said, it is a good thing you were ignored. Under David Cameron’s leadership, we have a Conservative Party that is now positively desired by the people. Your advice is and would have been a recipe for permanent opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire for a Conservative Government. If there were, the polls would be showing a consistent fifty point lead or something. What we have is a Labour Government that is so dreadful that I have trouble thinking what could be worse.

[In a private conversation before my speech, I said that the Labour Party had turned out to be about as bad in government as the Green Party or the British National Party or Sinn Fein.]

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying means that the country would be without protection against obvious evils. With no child protection services, children would be abused and murdered. Without planning controls, the countryside would soon be covered with concrete. Without planning controls, cities like Manchester would be far less attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your reference to Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You cannot approve of this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the Establishment’s propaganda. This is to insist that we live with vast structures of oppression, or that we must accept the evils they are alleged to curb. I say that that these structures do not curb any evils, but instead create evils of their own. We have, for example, seventy thousand social workers in this country. They appear to have done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few children who need protecting. instead, they are taking children away from grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof. None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws have created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be filled. I say let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in our system of government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to say: As for Oliver Cromwell, he was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. It is partly thanks to him that we have just had around three centuries of freedom and political stability. When you refer to his actions in Ireland, you are repeating Fenian propaganda. What he did in Ireland has been exaggerated by the enemies of England, and in any event was in keeping with the customs of war universally admitted in his own time. If you want to throw an offended fit every time an Englishman in London praises an English hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving to Dublin where all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring green, and your own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the destruction of enemies. Yet you are willing to consider keeping the welfare state. You are nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker. Thank God the Conservative Party no longer has any place for people like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour Government we had under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would be right. However, we have an Establishment that has already given us the beginnings of a totalitarian police state. Today, for example, the authorities will start collecting details of every telephone call, text and e-mail sent in this country. Children are about to have their details stuffed into a giant database that will enable them to be monitored by the authorities until they are adults – and probably through their entire lives. We live in a country were privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly unfree. The police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly worse, and it is easy to see the end state that is desired, or total control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it will have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and focussed actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will fail. I am suggesting a revolution – but this is really a counter-revolution against what has already been proceeding for at least one generation. If we are to beat the heirs of Marx, we must learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this radical preaching. People do not want to hear about how they are oppressed by the Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What they want to hear is that taxes are too high, that the money is being wasted, and that there are ways to protect essential public services with lower taxes. That is why the Taxpayers’ Alliance has been so much more prominent than the Libertarian Alliance. We must have nothing to do with the ranting lunatics of the Libertarian Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral success that I do not share. But I am the better politician. All debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes. If the Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the relevant spectrum would simply reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers’ Alliance at one extreme, and the centre would be still less attractive than it now is. Since most people consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest – regardless of whether I am right – to say what I do. It makes you and your friends moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was a fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

[I normally like to comment on these events once I have described them. I think, however, the above stands by itself.]

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3

Terrorism and a Police State: now Dame Stella Rimington speaks out…

….but not here – in Spain.

David Davis

As we say often, “Sean Gabb has often said that….”

Libertarian Alliance Bulletin

Director’s Bulletin
14th February 2009Introduction
Libertarian Alliance Publications
Media Appearances
Speaking Engagements
Libertarian Alliance Events
Libertarian Alliance Book Recommendation
Libertarian Alliance Conference
Negative Scanner Needed

It is cold. I am working hard to finish a book before April. My Baby Bear is now running about the house with more hands than the average Indian goddess. The other Officers of the Libertarian Alliance are also busy. Even so, there is something to report.

Our first publication of 2009 is Anthony Flood, Is Anarchy a Cause of War? Some Questions for David Ray Griffin, Philosophical Notes, No 81
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philn081.htm
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philn081.pdf

Our Editorial Director is working on several other publications at the moment, and we expect to bring out at least as much in 2009 as in the past few years.

While on the subject of publications, I will take the opportunity here to announce to the whole world what I have been telling people for several years in e-mails of response. If there is anything published by us that you want to republish, on the Internet or in hard copy, please feel free to do so. We do not ask for payment. We do not require to be asked in advance, or to be sent copies of republished material. In return for this general licence, we ask the following:

• That the Author and the Libertarian Alliance should receive full attribution in any republication;
• That the Author’s words should not be edited to bring him or the Libertarian Alliance into hatred, ridicule or contempt;
• That if a work is republished by any organisation that normally pays for material, the Author should receive fair payment.

I am on the radio sometimes three times a week. Sadly, I am usually too disorganised to record the event. Here are details of the only two recordings I have been able to make this year:

4th February 2009, BBC Radio, “Was the BBC right to suspend Carol Thatcher for racist language?”
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2009-02-04-sig-thatcher.mp3

I wrote at some length on this issue in my essay “On Golliwogs, One-Eyed Scottish Idiots and Sending Poo Through the Post“, available at:
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc180.htm

12th February 2009, BBC Radio, “Was it right for the British Government not to admit Geert Wilders to show his anti-Islam film?”
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2009-02-12-sig-islam.mp3

This one needs a little explaining. Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has made a film that claims Islam to be an intolerant religion. He was supposed to come to England last week to introduce a showing of his film in the House of Lords. However, after protests and threats of mass protests by various Moslems, the Home Office told Mr Wilders he would not be allowed into the country.

The BBC is a pro-ruling class propaganda organisation that masquerades as a public service broadcaster. This usually means that it will support the Labour Party on any issue. When it thinks it can get away with it – for example, in claims about “climate change” – the BBC will openly lie and then refuse to give airtime to dissenters. In other cases, it will set up token debates that can be waved at anyone who complains later about bias, but that do not allow opposing points of view to be fairly put. My 12th February debate was of this second kind. A lawyer who is also a Moslem and a woman was allowed to speak about three times longer than I was. She was able to claim without any pretence of hard questioning that Islam was a religion of love and peace and that this was evidenced in The Koran. She insisted that the Gert Wilders denial of this was deeply offensive to Moslems and that his film should be banned.

I was finally allowed to make my response, knowing that I might be cut off at any moment. I made two rapid points: first, that modern public order laws are a blank cheque to anyone able to put a mob on the streets; second, that if this woman wanted to live in an Islamic state, she should consider moving to Iran or Pakistan. I added that, as a woman lawyer, she might get the occasional bucket of acid thrown in her face, but would never have to feel upset about her faith.

Why do I take part in these Potemkin debates? I do so first because they sometimes turn out to be real debates. The BBC is an increasingly totalitarian organisation, but not every minute of airtime is yet controlled. I do so second because, however compressed or bluntly, it is possible to utter truths that the listeners might not otherwise hear. The listeners, of course, already know the truth. But it can brighten their day to hear it put from within the lie machine itself.

Sadly, while I am in continual demand for programmes like Drive Time Cumberland, I am never allowed on Question Time and hardly ever on Newsnight. Such, however, is the nature of the BBC.

I have agreed to speak at the following meetings:

Monday, 16th February 2009, 7:30pm – Conservative Future meeting, Westminster. I will probably denounce the Conservative Party. If I do, I shall certainly receive a polite hearing. The difference between the two main parties in this country is that Labour is evil in root and branch, while the Conservatives are just too stupid to understand what has been done to us since 1997. I think this is a closed meeting. If not and you wish to attend, you should contact Lauren Mc Evatt <lmmce86@hotmail.com>

Sunday, 22nd February 2009, 2pm – Marlborough Group meeting, The Town Hall, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1AL. I will speak about the need for conservatives to bear in mind that all the things they have defended for the past hundred years have now been destroyed or co-opted, and that conservatives must start to think how conservative values in the future can be embodied in what may have to be a revolutionary settlement. If you are interested in attending this meeting, please contact Robert Francis <remfrancis@googlemail.com>

Thursday, 26th February 2009, The Oxford Union. I shall oppose the motion “This House Would Restrict The Free Speech of Extremists”.I think these meetings are restricted to members of the Union, and I do not know if they are recorded. But I am to speak at one.

Tuesday 17th March 2009 between 6.30pm and 8.30pm – The Second Annual Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture and Drinks Reception, at the National Liberal Club, One Whitehall Place, London SW1 (nearest tube Embankment). Professor Kevin Dowd: Lessons from the Financial Crisis: A Libertarian Perspective. Full details at:
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/conferences/crtmemlec09.htm

Society for Individual Freedom

I often refer to the Society for Individual Freedom as a “sister organisation” of the Libertarian Alliance. Since the LA is actually a breakaway organisation from SIF, it is more correctly our mother organisation. Whatever the case, its quarterly magazine, The Individual is now out. You can find SIF at:
http://www.individualist.org.uk/index.htm

My very dear friend, Richard Blake, has now had his second novel published by Hodder & Stoughton. The Terror of Constantinople has been received with universal applause. You can buy copies from Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/bgx5a2. You really should buy a copy – preferably two or three dozen copies.

I also recommend the following from Civitas: Nick Cowan, Total Recall: How Direct Democracy Can Improve Britain, Civitas, London, 2008. This is one of the few Civitas publications that I can wholeheartedly recommend. It suggests radical democracy as a cure for the New Labour dictatorship. You can order it from Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/c93jr6

This has been set for the last weekend in October 2009 at the National Liberal Club in London. As yet, we are unable to make any announcement regarding speakers or subjects. However, bearing in mind the continuing economic collapse, we have decided for a second year to keep the conference fee at the old rate of �85. So many of our friends have now lost their jobs and are facing hard times in the year ahead, that we feel obliged to dip further into our reserves to subsidise the conference. Do stand by for more detailed announcements.

I have several thousand negatives from the Chris R. Tame collection of photographs. I want to have these scanned in for upload to the Internet. Is there anyone out there able and willing to lend me a good negative scanner?

–
Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance
sean@libertarian.co.uk
Tel: 07956 472 199

http://www.libertarian.co.uk
http://www.seangabb.co.uk
http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com

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CASTRO DEAD! At last!

David Davis

His head has been photoshopped into here. He’s with the President of a nation, so he must be dead: this sort of thing is a great honour, so he must be dead….at last.

Let’s all offer a Prayer to God (who is all-merciful and all-powerful) that the murdering mountebank Castro should rot inthe outer-void outside Hell, along with his friends Ernesto Guevara, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Vissarionovich Dugashvili, Mao ze Tung, and V I Ulianov – oh and Jean Monnet, I almost forgot.

Hell is too full for these buggers already. they’d take up too many “policing resources”.

Remember: you read it here first.

Geert Wilders speaks on Fox News about his film “Fitna”

It is sad, and a bit unfortunate, that there are now fewer and fewer people who either believe, or want to say, that there is such a thing as an absolute scale of goodness or evil.

It is not shameful to believe, and to believe it strongly enough to defend the same, that the values and achievements and liberal civilisation of the Classical liberal West indeed  _are_ better than all other competitors for the honour of showing The World How To Live.

It is distressing that there are not more chaps like this strange-looking Dutchman, who reminds me of one of my maths teachers in the 1960s.

RAEDWALD added

David Davis

Added here.

Cuba and showing the world how to live: a window, or a wind-up?

David Davis

Here it is. I can’t tell. You decide. “Particularcuba”…weird. I spotted it using a thingy called alphainventions, which shows you loads of weird blogs about all sorts of inconsequential stuff which does not matter a monkey’s toss, but some gems also, now and then.

Like mining, really.

Eurovision “song” “contest”: there will be no reason to be forced to watch it at all (at-all-at-all-at-all) now that Sir Terry Wogan is not performing.

David Davis

I have always wondered what the point of the Eurovision “Song” “Contest” was.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were some fairly good Beat Groups, such as ABBA, and even some soloists, such as Cliff Richard, who sang fairly musical stuff, which was kind of about something or other that people cared about. (I count ABBA as honourary British since they could (a) sing, (b) write music, (c) they were Swedish, kind of,  and (d) they sounded quite good most of the time.) The times were pre-the-rise-of-the-EUSSR-supersoviet, and so people tended to vote for the best song, and never mind whow their awful neighbours were whom they had to be seen to publicly-placate-on-EUSSR_wide-TV, so that they would not get into trouble with the authorities Gestapo afterwards and have their benefits EU handouts withdrawn.

Then, we were dragged more firmly into the EUSSR EU, and we started to stop winning. This in itself didn’t totally matter, as we had Sir Terry Wogan to compère it and be suitably cynical about everybody on there, in his charming way, the good Englishman that he is, so he is, to be sure, to be sure.

Now, there is no point in being on. Not only do we not win, or even come next-to-bottom as opposed to absolutely totally and utterly bottom, but we absolutely tank. This is because nobody feels they have to pretend to like us any more, as we are Maritime-liberals with no land borders and they are Euro-authoritarians with very very long borders with other scratchy neighbours.

But the worst thing culturally speaking, about it, is that nobody even pretends to vote for the best music any more. They vote for whoever is the most powerful neighbour, or the one with most “clout of the day” in the corridors of Eurofascism power.

Furthermore, dear old cynical, funny Sir Terry is going. What’s the point of the thing? Why don’t we just read some books instead, while the blasted thing is on?

I don’t think that Libertarians would object in any way if the European subject-peoples of the EUSSR want to self-flagellate publicly to “music”, on the Wireless Tele Vision once a year, while pretending to sing songs which they think will be “for” “Europe”. But I guess that most liberals, being somewhat puritanical (unlike socialists) about time and resources wasted on pointless acts such as flag-waving, parading and collectively performing – especially acts which are only designed to get the “act-or” into the Public Prints, will think twice about this fascist smugfest in future.

Goobye and good riddance (I hope!) Let’s hope against hope that we get “invited” to “not participate”.