Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Gaza and Israel: It’s As Complicated As It Is Brutal And Simple, With No Answers.


I deliberately left my last post ‘on top’ for a long time because it sums up almost all the themes of this blog relating to the Orwellian nature of our tax surveillance states, and the fallacies of both the common good and the social contract held by statists of both Left and Tory hues: that post is a précis of classical liberalism so I hope you might want to read.
 

That said, Gaza. On Twitter this morning someone assumed I might want to join this weekend’s protest march against the Israeli campaign in Gaza. This was my response.
 

















To expand: the current Israeli operation in Gaza is brutal - as war always is - and sickening: being the next thing to a pacifist myself, I hate what is happening. On the other hand, every Islamic neighbour of Israel is on record as wanting to, quote, ‘obliterate’ Israel, and there are again anti-Semitic marches in Europe where the neo-Nazi far right are strengthening out of the ruined lives of dependence from Keynesian, big brother state economic chaos, meaning Israel has done the simple, ruthless arithmetic and realised if it loses even the once, there will be a holocaust of WWII scale, not the scale of Gaza. Every Hamas rocket truly threatens the survival of an entire nation of people.  And the important fact here being lost in the fog of emotion in the West, is that Hamas chooses to keep firing its missiles, and chooses to fire them from hospitals and schools, and unlike the Israelis does not ring through fifteen minute warnings, nor set up field hospitals – I’ve seen the pictures – to treat the wounded of both sides.
 

Because Israel cannot afford to lose even once, the mathematics further mean meeting force with overwhelming force. If the position is taken as many on today’s protest march do, that the height of supposed Israeli evil is measured by the difference in body count, well during WWII something over ten times the number of German civilians were killed by the British bombing raids, than the reverse, so does your algebra end you up on the British high command of that time being evil also? Albeit, especially in one of the Israeli sniper incidents I've seen on video, there should certainly be war crimes investigations of some things that are happening in Gaza.


 

Are there solutions? No. It’s religion, stupid, we’re not dealing here with an enlightened, reasoned humanism. In the fundamentalist Islamic vacancies between the ears of Hamas, Israel is dealing with people who have renounced their humanity by renouncing their responsibility to think, indeed, whom decapitate, regularly, those who do.
 

How do you plan to encapsulate all that in a protest march?
 

As for my tweet reference, that was to the inimitable Milas Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

 

When she told her French friends about [why she would not attend a street protest against the communists], they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.
 

I reckon those fundamentalist blokes in Hamas – sorry to my women readers, but no equality to be found here – would enjoy a good fist clenching march. To paraphrase this quotation, I would further say that I lied above, there is a solution, being individualism, but the West is moving further away from me being able to make you understand that either. Which is why I say please count me out of your marches and your boycotts of all you don’t like, it’s complicated, and I’ve grown up.
 

(Oh, and just before the conservatives who read this get all excited, no, my position on welcoming multi-culturalism and – mutter, spit, cringe – moderate Islam, hasn’t changed, and I hold to first principles and an open immigration policy. That position is explained on this post. We won’t break down the unenlightened nature of that faith below the fundamentalist level by isolating it. Wars are best won peacefully, where possible, a mind at a time, and I love difference.)

1 comment:

  1. Its politics with a religious facade as it always is. Clearly you have no understanding of how Islam works - there is no moderate Islam as the utterances of the prophet get more brutal with time and the later utterances are preferred to the earlier. Islam has no place in the west - it conflicts with the western democratic mindset by being centered on family, tribe and so on. There is no concept of a greater good and Islam is never going to respect your enlightened secularism.

    That doesn't excuse the Zionist movement for their bad behaviour but, as you note, how do you respond to a group whose stated aim is to kill you?

    3:16

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