Sean Gabb's Blog, page 6

Review of Richard Blake’s “Curse of Babylon”

The Curse of Babylon
by Richard Blake

Amid the plotting, revolts and wild hedonism of the remains of the Roman empire at the beginning of the seventh century, English adventurer Aelric faces his hardest challenge as he tries to stop a Persian invasion – and deal with a determined and dangerous woman.

Review
If anyone produces historical thrillers more completely over the top than Richard Blake’s adventures of Alaric, the Kentish boy who lies, charms, cheats and murders his way the very heart of the collapsing eastern Roman empire, I’d love to read them.

His characters are always vivid, his wild plots devious beyond imagination and with lashings – probably literally – of steamy sex to suit absolutely all tastes and blood by the bucketful, these convoluted, but always fast-paced tales are absolute classics of their kind. Part of their charm is a choice of period unfamiliar to most readers. What little is known of the dying convolutions of the eastern Roman empire based on Constantine’s great city at the junction of two continents indicates Blake has picked fertile ground.

With Rome’s western power only a legend and the Holy City sacked and ruined, ineffective eastern emperors came and went with monotonous regularity – some lasted only days. Constantinople was a hotbed of conspiracies as nobles and functionaries fought each other for control – plots and political murders were a way of life, matched only in their intensity by a hedonistic lifestyle in which all kinds of excess was the norm.

In this sixth adventure, Aelric, to give him his proper English name, has conned and charmed his way to a position of high rank in the court of the emperor Heraclius. His northern distaste for the life of the pretend Romans – the eastern aristocracy was largely Greek – is matched only by his all too obvious enjoyment of their liberal sexual practices.

In what is a blend of conspiracy thriller, laced with some high Roman and Greek philosophy which disguises some sordid and brutal passages and never short of the vulgar comedy which appeals to every generation, Aelric doubles-deals then deals again, to thwart at least one plot against the emperor, mobilises a militia of farmers and peasants to halt a major Persian invasion – and meets the determined and dangerous aristocratic woman who is to be the love of his life.

You never quite know what you’ll get with an anti-hero like Aelric. There’s plenty of darkness in his character, but some surprising light. He’s unbound by any rules other than those of survival and pleasure, and can put personal considerations aside to produce badly-needed civic and financial reforms, treat his slaves like members of his own family and often behave like the legends of the old Rome that he admires.

Great writing, powerful characters, detailed and accurate backgrounds, superbly crafted and unexpected twists make this often dark story a welcome change from the norm. With a lead character like Aelric, you’re never totally certain of what you’re going to get – but what you do know is that it will be a lot of fun finding out.

Reviewed 26 July 2014 by John Cleal

John Cleal is a former soldier and journalist with an interest in medieval history. He divides his time between France and England.

 

 

Filed under: Book Review, Libertarian Fiction, Liberty

Comment on Jihad Watch

by Ahmet the Turk

Original Post: Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, July 25, 2014

Response:

I wasn’t aware that Geller had written an equally length refutal. Sometimes there is a section header titled message history, which hides the message instead of the history. I didn’t click to expand it, that’s why I didn’t see what Geller wrote, which is also lengthy. If you want me to discuss any part of it in detail please point it out, otherwise I am responding to the general drift of these accusations.

Turkish uses plenty of Arabic and Farsi vocabulary in exactly the same way English uses Latin and Greek words. I looked it up in the 1890 edition of the Redhouse dictionary. This dictionary was published when Turkey’s emperor officially had zimmi subjects and it was published by an American lexicographer, Sir James Redhouse, who was working for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. A zimmi (feminine zimmiye) is simply defined as “A non-Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire or of a Muslim state.” Full stop.

There is a very commonly used word that comes from the same root, zimmet. Zimmet (pl. zimem) is defined here as follows: 1. A responsibility or obligation resulting from a trust, contract or promise; a duty. 2. The duty of tribute and obedience owed to the State of Islam by a non-Muslim subject. 3. Indebtedness. 4. A debt. 5. The debtor side of an account. “Zimmette kalmak” For a sum of money to remain owing or due. “Zimmete geçirmek” To pass to the debit of a man (in present day Turkish, embezzlement) etc. I am only going to save space by listing just the idioms connected with our subject “Ehl-i zimmet” A non-Muslim subject of the State of Islam or the Ottoman Empire. “Kabul-ü zimmet” An accepting the status of a non-Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire. I can supply a scanned image of that page if requested.

As you can see, there is absolutely nothing insulting about the term zimmi. Let’s get that out of the way. I don’t know where Geller is getting her information from. Sometimes words change meaning when transferred from one language to another. The Turkish language title of the Australian movie “the Passion of the Christ” was initially translated incorrectly for this reason and was fixed only after loud protests. In Russia “Kuma” is your child’s godmother. In Turkey, it is your mistress living in the same house as your wife. In Germany “was ist das?” is a question, in Turkey it is a window pane that is hinged to the frame at the bottom edge. Arabic is a very complicated language, maybe Geller is confused or she has discovered something about the language that we don’t know in Turkey. After all we are not native speakers ourselves.

The zimmis are not drafted into the army but they pay poll tax. This practice was changed in the 19th century so that they were given the same status as Muslim subjects and paid the same tax and were drafted into the army, too. There were always complaints about them being treated as second class subjects. I was surprised to learn that churches were not allowed to ring bells until mid 19th century but then Switzerland is still struggling with the Muslim call to prayer so it isn’t fair to say that Muslims are very intolerant. The Zimmi communities and their churches were not under attack until Isis took charge of Syria and Iraq. Those monasteries and churches were still standing until Isis blew them up, Weren’t they?

On the subject churches, I have an interesting anecdote to say. During the Great War or the Great Jihad as it is sometimes known in Turkey, the Turkish army passed through Jerusalem. A derelict church caught the attention of Enver Pasha, the Deputy Commander in Chief. The Church of Nativity had fallen into disrepair because the clergymen responsible for its maintenance, each loyal to a different church, couldn’t agree on whose privilege it should be to carry out the repairs. Enver Pasha ordered them out, sent the engineers and had the church repaired. Even so, the war went badly for him, so perhaps that is something for you to think about, as a Christian I mean. On the other hand, several Christian churches in the Ottoman Empire, particularly the Haghia Sophia was converted to a mosque by decree. many Greeks still think it was a bad decision. Greece itself has demolished Turkish cemeteries, inculding the Turkish cemetery in Salonica after the last Balkan War. We still have “zimmi” cemeteries all over Turkey, including several in densely populated areas and the one that Australians love to visit. Some of them are not all being taken good care of

 

Filed under: history, Liberty

“Economic Patriotism”: The Last Refuge of a Tax Scoundrel

by Joel Schlossberg

http://c4ss.org/content/29571

“Economic Patriotism”: The Last Refuge of a Tax Scoundrel

In mid-July, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew proposed that Congress prohibit US-based companies from moving offshore in search of more favorable tax climates, citing an ostensible need for a “new sense of economic patriotism.”

The resort to “patriotism” theater stands out as the most egregious aspect of legislation whose retroactive status would blatantly violate the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws.

Underneath the veneer of common interest between the government, big business, and the general public provided by the legitimizing ideology of “patriotism,” there is and always has been a symbiotic corporate-state alliance parasitic on the latter. The state provides corporations such favors as liability shields, regulations keeping out new competitors, and labor laws preventing workers from holding out for higher wages. In return, the corporations — as Martin Short’s satirical lobbyist Nathan Thurm put it when pressed to defend the vast amounts of corporate welfare received by his clients from the government — “give a lot of that money back.”

Crucially, corporations collect such revenue for the state by passing their tax burdens on to the consumer via stealth de facto “taxes” hidden in the above-free-market-level shelf prices of their products. Thus, any tax on corporations initially favoring Washington eventually comes out of your pockets and mine.

The corporate-state symbiosis is so close that it’s difficult to keep track even of which members of the elite are part of which entity and when. Charles “what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa” Wilson went from heading GM to spearheading the interstate highway system as Secretary of Defense. Supposed muckraker Lew is himself a perfect example of that revolving-door phenomenon, his career alternating between various departments of the federal government and Citigroup — including (ahem) its subsidiaries in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong.

It is true that the corporate-state alliance has been strained by the panoply of neoliberal economic policies. But “globalization” requires doing away with borders only very selectively, when it suits corporate purposes. The American superstate and its international “trade partners” are more than willing to ignore borders when corporations benefit by moving goods from low-cost labor centers to high-profit sales centers. But that same state and those same partners consider borders of paramount importance when it comes to capturing the tax revenue that pays for all the perks their corporate symbiotes depend on for their continued existence.

Thus, corporate attempts to avoid paying taxes deserve little sympathy, since they amount to offloading the bill for the perks they still receive from the state, instead footed by the public directly. But the appropriate response is not to redouble efforts of the decaying nation-state to tax them, but for the public to refuse to be bamboozled into being the “patriotic” third leg propping up the corporate-state stool.

As the example of Wilson proves, corporate influence skews the implementation of even public services as seemingly neutral as roads in a direction that benefits corporations first and the public second. Thus, the means to fund essential public services is not “economic patriotism,” but consistent free markets and free trade.

Note: This article was written in collaboration with Thomas L. Knapp.

 

Filed under: Economics, Liberty

Perverted Science and mineral water

David Davis

Having “done” tobacco, being in the process of killing alcohol, and with sugar almost lynched, what are the GramscoFabiaNazi slave-resouces-management-prescription-directors starting on now? Water of course.

The level of scientific understanding of both the journo and a number of the commenters is frightening to behold.

Filed under: Anglosphere, anti-smoking nazis, British Media, carbon footprint, Celebrities, Chavs, cheeseburgers, Culture War, de-civilisation, diet, food, Groan, Humour, knickers, politicians, poor people, Practical Coal Mining, sawdust and rat droppings, Science and Engineering, water

I Robot by Robert Anton Wilson

http://www.rawillumination.net/2012/02/i-robot-by-robert-anton-wilson.html

I, ROBOT by Robert Anton Wilson

(This short essay, another of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Illuminating Discords” columns from New Libertarian Weekly. It’s from issue No. 80, July 3, 1977. — Tom).

Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?

– Gurdjieff, 1918

Last year in Oui magazine, Dr. Timothy Leary and I published an article ghoulishly titled, “Brainwashing: How to Fold, Spindle and Mutilate the Human Mind.” I would like to summarize our basic positions here, preparatory to a more general discussion of neurological relativism.

Human beings, Leary and I propose, are basically giant robots created by DNA to make more DNA. (So are all the other multi-cellular organisms on this backward planet.)

Of course, there is nothing new about the robot theory of biology. The Sufis and yogis knew about it centuries before Pavlov, or even before Mark Twain wrote his stunningly prescient essay, “Man, A Machine.” Nonetheless, it is so patently offensive to human narcissism that almost everybody recoils from it “as the devil would from holy water.”

(Incidentally, you can get a quick estimate of a person’s intelligence by asking them how much of themselves is robotic. Those who say “not at all” or “less than 50%” are hopeless imbeciles, always. The few who say “about 99%” are worth talking to; they are quite intelligent. Dr. Leary, who is the freest human being I have ever known, estimates he is 99.9999 percent robot.)

The circuitry of the human robot, like that of other primates, is wired to take imprints at crucial moments of what ethologists call “imprint vulnerability.” These occur on a pre-programmed schedule: the bio-survival imprint is taken as soon as the mother’s breast is offered; the territorial imprint as soon as the infant is able to walk about, yell, and generally meddle in family politics; the laryngeal imprint as soon as the DNA-RNA signals trigger the talking stage; the sexual imprint at the first orgasm or mating experience, etc.

For literary convenience, we can think of the bio-survival imprint as Will and personify it as Scotty, brooding over the life-support and weapons technology. The territorial or emotional imprint, then, is Ego, or Dr. McCoy, the mammalian moralist. The laryngeal (symbolic) imprint is Mind, or Mr. Spock, the linear computer. And the sexual imprint is Adult Personality, or Captain Kirk, the father-protector.

Each of these imprints exists in the nervous system as a separate circuit or network. Any one of them can be kinky or odd, since the biocomputer imprints literally anything at the moment of imprint vulnerability.

A kinky bio-survival imprint may take such forms as anxiety, phobias or outright autism. A weird territorial-emotional imprint can be either overly submissive, in which case the subject suffers, or overly dominant, in which case those unfortunate enough to associate with the subject do the suffering. A bizarre symbolic imprint is, at this stage of evolution, the norm: almost every society educates the  young for stupidity, dogmatism, intolerance and inability to learn anything new. As for the sexual imprints: everybody can see how compulsive and weird everybody else’s sexual imprint is; but, alas, few can see that about themselves.

Brainwashing consists of creating artificial imprint vulnerability. You can do this either with drugs, or with prolonged isolation (“sensory deprivation”), or with terror (new imprints are always taken at the point of near death, which is what most shamanic initiations rely on), or with a combination of drugs, isolation and terror.

The priests, pedagogues and shamans of all tribes and nations know enough, on the empirical level, about imprint vulnerability. All the crucial transition stages of life are surrounded by ritual, repetition and redundance — and frequently with terror and isolation, and sometimes (in many societies) with drugs — to ensure that the local belief systems and “morals” are heavily imprinted.

In short, the process of acculturation is itself a brainwashing process.

Thus, the Samoan lives inside an imprinted Samoan reality; the German inside a German reality; an American inside an American reality. That’s why a crowd of Americans are immediately recognizable in a street full of Turks or Hindus or even in a street of Englishmen or Irish. The naive chauvinism of a traveler who says “all foreigners are crazy” is actually quite valid; indeed, foreigners are crazy; the chauvinist merely lacks the insight to realize that his imprint-group is crazy, too.

(As mentioned in previous columns, there are four other imprints, intended for future evolution off this planet and therefore only appearing rarely thus far in our history. These are the neurosomatic imprint, which we call Hedonic Engineering or the art of staying high; the neuroelectric imprint, or Magick; the neurogenetic imprint, or DNA consciousness; and the metaphysiological imprint, or “cosmic consciousness.”)

Leary’s idea of Intelligence-squared thus does not mean merely an increase in linear I.Q. on the third circuit. (Super-Spockism). It means learning how to “brainwash” yourself; that is, to selectively tune, focus and serially reimprint all 8 circuits, beginning with as many of them as you can handle. (It is unwise, for instance, to attempt any 6th circuit psionic operations until great skill has been attained in self-metaprogramming the bio-survival, emotional, mental, sexual and Hedonic circuits).

The plain fact is that most bio-survival anxieties are phobic are irrational, most emotional games silly and infantile (they are imprinted in infancy, after all), most mental sets rigid and nearly blind, most sex-roles as robotic as the mating dance of the penguin. At the same time, the ultimate sophistication is to avoid laying your own bio-survival needs, emotional cons, belief systems and sex games on others, which elementary courtesy is really what libertarianism is all about.

Unfortunately, libertarianism as a third-circuit idea (laryngeal signal) has no more effect on this backward planet than any other third circuit reality-map. The other circuits continue their robotic trips, anchored in the neurochemistry of the imprinting process. Intelligence-squared, or self-metaprogramming, allows libertarianism to become more than an idea. This is what the Neurological Revolution means; this is what the Great Work of the alchemists aimed for. When the robot awakens and becomes a self-programmer, it can easily have all the goals promised by the alchemists: The Stone of the Wise, the Medicine of Metals, True Wisdom and perfect Happiness. All of those traditional terms are metaphors for the awakening of Intelligence-squared.

Usually people are libertarians or fascists or snake-worshippers or Republicans or nudists or whatever, because of conditioned networks that fit smoothly into their imprints. People achieve Intelligence-squared, and become effective libertarians, only if they work for it.

                                                                     – Robert Anton Wilson

 

Filed under: Liberty

Interview with Richard Blake, Circa Magazine, July 2014

Interview with Richard Blake
Posted on July 23, 2014

by Jennifer Falkner

Richard Blake has so far written these historical novels, all published in London by Hodder & Stoughton, and all set in the Byzantine Empire of the seventh century:

Conspiracies of Romeby Richard Blake (2008)

The Terror of Constantinople by Richard Blake (2009)

The Blood of Alexandria by Richard Blake (2010)

The Sword of Damascus by Richard Blake (2011)

The Ghosts of Athens by Richard Blake (2012)

The Curse of Babylon by Richard Blake (2013)

What was your original inspiration for Aelric? 

Based on the similarity in their names, is there any special connection readers are meant to draw between Aelric and the historical figure of Alaric, the Visigoth who sacked Rome in the fifth century?

I think the first idea came to me in the February of 2005, when my wife took me for a long weekend break in Rome. This was my first visit to the City, and my first at that time of year to anywhere in the Mediterranean World. In both senses, the visit opened my eyes. It was cold – much colder than England. Though I “knew” otherwise from the sources, I’d had a fixed notion of the ancient world as a place of omnipresent sun and warmth. Stumbling round the Forum in thick overcoat and gloves brought everything closer to my own experience, and set me thinking about what the Romans wore in winter, and how often most of them really bathed, and what the air must have been like in a place where a quarter of a million houses were heated with charcoal.

More important perhaps was the state of what remained from the past. The Forum had a melancholy grandeur. The Colisseum was vast even by the standards of London. The Basilica of Constantine must have been bigger than St Paul’s. But, excepting the Pantheon, and those parts of buildings made into churches, everything was in ruins – noble ruins, I’ll grant, but ruins even so. Everywhere I looked, there was the sense of something that was over and done with.

But I found many churches than I’d expected going back to the sixth or fifth or even fourth centuries. Though always added to, or changed in other ways, these carried me back – far more effectively than the broken stones of the Temple of Jupiter – to the days of Antiquity. And they were often astonishingly lovely in their own right. Take, for example, the Church of St Mary Maggiore. Built in the early fifth century, and more or less unchanged in its interior, this was a place where the senatorial aristocracy had come to worship, and had been used in unbroken sequence ever since for worship.

If surprised, though, I wasn’t disappointed. Ever since my first reading of Gibbon as a boy, my interest had been as much in the end of Antiquity as in its great days. At university, I’d focussed so far as possible on the early Middle Ages. Since then, if in a desultory manner, I’d been going through the history and literature of the Byzantine Empire. Finding so many connections to it in Rome was an unexpected bonus to the visit. By the second day, my wife and I had given up on the usual monuments. Instead, with a new and bigger guide book, we explored Rome from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Every time we came out from somewhere grand and wonderful, we asked each other what it must have been like to visit or live in a Rome when these buildings were new, but still surrounded by the intact if decaying remains of the Imperial City. That, I think, was the first inspiration for my Byzantine novels.

A few months later, my mother lent me half a dozen assorted thrillers set in Ancient Rome. I won’t say who wrote these, though none was by Steven Saylor – the Grand Master of the genre. A couple were excellent. I thought the rest were dire. “Can you do any better?” she asked when I’d finished sneering at the blunders of fact and atmosphere and plotting and characterisation. “Bet you I can,” I said straight back. “Go on, then,” she laughed. “Bring it round when you’ve done it.”

A few days later, I opened a new file in MS Word, and sat staring at the cursor. I was going to write a novel. I’d already written two novels in my twenties. But these had been about as dire as the ones I’d denounced to my mother, and were trapped on 5.25” floppies formatted for an obsolete computer. I was going to write an historical thriller. It would be set right at the end of Antiquity, and would take place in Rome. Where to start?

My answer was to make an Englishman the hero and narrator. You can give the lead in historical fiction to a complete foreigner. All you need is someone reasonably attractive to the readers. But I wasn’t sure how much ability I had. Besides, one of my favourite historical novels is Cecelia Holland’s City of God, which has an Englishman as the lead character. When I was a boy, I enjoyed Paul Capon’s Artor series, which, even in the volume set in Minoan Crete, has a leading character with some connection to this island. Also, when at university, I read a very good novel, written for children, about the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The lead character in this was a boy from Bristol. So it was be a thriller set c600 in Rome, and the lead character would be an Anglo-Saxon. What next?

My answer here was to Google a list of Anglo-Saxon names. I didn’t fancy names like Edmund, Edward, Alfred, and so forth. Nor did I fancy names that no one would be able to pronounce. At last, my eyes stopped on Aelric. Almost but not quite familiar, and not impossible to pronounce. So I had my character. Now, what to do with him?

Here, I feel obliged to discuss how I write. Some novelists make up a detailed plan in advance, listing all the characters, and summarising each part of the story, or even each chapter. I can’t do this. After ten novels, I no longer feel ashamed to say that whatever plan I make will become obsolete within a few pages. Sometimes, I’ll start with an image of where I want to end. In Terror of Constantinople(2009), I started with the idea of Aelric, beautiful in white, standing on a boat as it moves across the shining but filthy waters of the Golden Horn. In Sword of Damascus(2011), I started with a vague idea of a climax in the Syrian desert. But that’s the best I can ever do. For the rest, I make the story up a chapter at a time. If it comes quickly, as it normally does, I can write a novel in four months. If it dribbles out like an old man’s urine – as happened with Curse of Babylon(2013) – I’ll take nine months.

The critics often say that my plots are unpredictable, but still manage to follow a logical course. The reason for this is that I generally write without knowing what will happen next, but keep going back to change what I’ve already written. Give me a pen or a typewriter, and I’d never get anything written. Let me die before finishing a novel, and anyone brought in to finish it for me would find a chaotic mass of words. The nice thing about living at the start of the computer age is that everything can be sorted as it approaches the end. The readers see only the finished product, and this is a coherent structure that looks as if it was all written to plan. When I read one of my novels, what I see is paragraphs and block of paragraphs, or just single sentences, that were written for one purpose and used for another. For me, It’s like looking at a set of geological strata that have been pressed and buckled by endless movements of the earth.

Back, however, to the first novel. I began with the idea that Aelric would be telling his story in extreme old age, and that he’d be writing about himself in his early or middle teens. I wanted someone of astonishing beauty, who’d be ruthless and uninhibited in his tastes, and who could be lusted over by monsters of both sexes. But early and middle teens didn’t work. I needed him also to be very strong and reasonably well-educated. Because I still needed youth and beauty, I spent the whole novel dithering over his age. I finally settled on nineteen. Except in Sword of Damascus, where he’s pushing a hundred, the whole series follows Aelric to the age of twenty five.

Once I’d realised the plot would reveal itself, I wrote the first novel six weeks. I wrote so quickly because I fell in love with the project, and worked on it on railway trains and even replacement busses. It took over my life, and I almost lived in seventh century Rome. Then there is the sad story of a friend’s terminal illness. He’d been complaining for several months about aches and pains legs and lower back. Everyone put this down to the fact that he was getting old – he was 55 – and his insistence on jogging and roller skating as if he were still in his twenties. But I felt an increasing sense of dread every time we met or spoke on the telephone. I couldn’t see it at the time. Looking afterwards at the photographs, however, it was plain that he had the mark of death on his face. I completed my draft two days before he told me that he might have bone cancer. My first Byzantine novel, then, was a kind of moral anaesthesia.

But you ask about Aelric’s double name. Here is the passage in Conspiracies of Romewhere it begins:

“Martin handles all my correspondence with the East” the Dispensator explained. “Though growing up in Constantinople, he is originally from an island to the west of Britain. I can assure you, however, he is neither a Celtic heretic nor a Greek semi-schismatic. He is a true son of the Church. He has my trust in all things. He has drawn an entry permit for the young man to our own library.”

Martin handed over a sheet of parchment covered in the smooth, clear hand of the Roman Chancery.

The Dispensator continued:

“He has also drawn an introduction to Anicius, an elderly nobleman of eccentric views who still has a library in his house. You’ll not find much there of spiritual sustenance. But one must read the pagan classics for their style.”

Martin handed over another sheet drawn in similar form.

The Dispensator paused, looking at Maximin. Martin remained where he was and coughed gently.

“Oh, yes. The young man”—he squinted at my name on the report—“Alaric, is it not? Is that a Gothic name?”

I didn’t correct the error. So began my life as Alaric rather than as Aelric. (Chapter 8)

Don’t ask me why I did this. It just came out as I wrote. Nor ask why, having done it, I left it in. Had I known this was the start of six novels, I’d have cut it out. On the other hand, Aelric is a name most Greeks and Romans would have had trouble pronouncing, and they’d have changed it to something else. Also, it comes in handy to mark when Aelric and Martin are speaking as friends in a language no one else can understand.

What, if any, are the challenges for you as a fiction writer in depicting historical figures as opposed to your own invented characters?  How do you overcome these challenges?

I don’t know how I’d write a novel about Hitler or Elizabeth I. With them, you’re stuck with known personalities. Showing them as other than wax dummies can be difficult. In my Churchill Memorandum(2011), written under another name, I bring in much of the mid-twentieth century British political establishment. But this is an alternative history satire, set in a world where the Second World War hadn’t happened. I can do as I please with my characters. In the real world of 1959, Michael Foot wasn’t a strangler who got rid of the evidence in an acid bath, and Harold Macmillan wasn’t a traitor and camp homosexual. In my alternative 1959, I could turn everyone who actually existed into a grossly defamatory caricature.

In my Byzantine novels, there are only half a dozen characters who really existed. The main ones are the Emperors Phocas and Heraclius, the General Priscus, and the King of Persia. Except they were rather unpleasant, we know very little about any of them. There was no Herodotus or Suetonius or Tacitus to tell us how they behaved or what they said. This means I can treat them as I please. Phocas is a kind of Stalin. Heraclius may be a clever politician or a dithering fool. Chosroes is a raving maniac. If Priscus were brought back to life, he might be flattered by what I’ve done with him. But the main answer to this question is that your problem doesn’t arrive. The real characters might as well be fictional for all I need to pay attention to my sources.

When it comes to researching the period, what are your main sources?  Are there any specific challenges in researching Late Antiquity?

The main challenge for my period is a lack of sources. Our main sources for the sixth century are Procopius and Agathius, who were first rate historians in the Classical tradition. For the early seventh century, our main source is Theophanes, an indifferent chronicler from a few hundred years later, George of Pisidia, an indifferent court poet, and a mass of fragments and ecclesiastical writings. Whether in translation or the original, you can master all the Greek and Latin primary sources in a couple of days. Throw in everything in Armenian, Arabic and Syriac, and you may need another week. The secondary sources are much larger in volume, and often useful. But you don’t have the shelf miles of books and newspapers and government records you need to go through to write a convincing novel about life and death in the trenches or the Blitz or the American Civil War.

What this means is that I have to use the more detailed records of adjoining periods to extrapolate. I need to write according to the spirit of what emerges from the sources. This gives me great freedom. At the same time, those facts that we do have, or can reasonably guess, must be given full respect. I can justly say that I know my stuff. I have read everything available in English, Latin, Greek and French on the period. Even hostile critics have never accused me of ignorance or deliberate inaccuracy. Indeed, I can promise that, if you are an undergraduate who needs a good introduction to the world of the seventh century, my Byzantine novels are a good place to start.

Do you do the bulk of your research before you begin writing the story or do you research as you go along?

In my case, it’s the latter. In Blood of Alexandria, for example, I read hundreds of pages on the government of Egypt and the various shades of the Monophysite heresybefore I started work. But I then read hundreds more as I worked.

Indeed, every now and again, a stray fact picked up while looking for others has found its way into the structure. In Ghosts of Athens, I found that I needed to know whether the Long Walls existed into the early Middle Ages. While going through a dozen journal articles, I noticed that, though part of the Eastern Empire and Greek-speaking, the See of Corinth answered to the Pope rather than the Patriarch of Constantinople. This gave me the idea of using Athens as the venue for a closed council of the Eastern and Western Churches.

Of course, the volume of research diminished as the series continued. In Conspiracies of Rome, you won’t believe the number of maps and chronologies I had open on my computer as I wrote. By the time I reached Curse of Babylon (2013), I had nearly all the factual background in my head. All I distinctly remember looking up was what people believed about astrology, and whether women could serve in the bureaucracy – oh, and reams of stuff about the reform of the silver coinage in 615.

It is a truism that historical fiction has more to say about the contemporary world than about the period in which the work is set.  Nevertheless, do you see any meaningful parallels between Aelric’s world and the present? 

I could write at length on this question, but won’t. I am monstrously opinionated about politics and economics, among much else. Everything I write has some connection with my libertarian-High Tory view of the world. I try to keep this under control in the novels. The trouble about political novels of any ideology is that they too often veer across the border between entertainment and propaganda. But I am an ideologue, and this shows through in my fiction. I believe that government is, in itself, a bad thing, and that most other bad things are made worse by government. The world would be a better place without all the vast structures of control that now constrain our lives. I hope you will see this belief in my fiction. I also hope it doesn’t hit you over the head.

What do you think is the biggest misconception among readers about Byzantium?

The biggest misconception appears to be that the Byzantine Empire was a sterile, gloomy place, devoid of interest to anyone but Orthodox Christians or historians who are the scholarly equivalent of train spotters. There is enough truth in this charge for it to have stuck in the popular imagination for the past few centuries. With exceptions like Cecelia Holland’s Belt of Gold, there is no Byzantine sub-genre in historical fiction. I can think of no British or American films set in Constantinople after about the year 600 – and few before then.

Undoubtedly, the Byzantines made little effort to be original in their literature. But they had virtually the whole body of Classical Greek literature in their libraries and in their heads. For them, this was both a wonderful possession and a fetter on the imagination. It was in their language, and not in their language. Any educated Byzantine could understand it. But the language had moved on – changes of pronunciation and dynamics and vocabulary. The classics were the accepted model for composition. But to write like the ancients was furiously hard. Imagine a world in which we spoke Standard English, but felt compelled, for everything above a short e-mail, to write in the language of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. Some of us might manage a good pastiche. Most of us would simply memorise the whole of the Bible, and, overlooking its actual content, write by adapting and rearranging remembered clauses. It wouldn’t encourage an original literature. Because Latin soon became a completely foreign language in the West – and because we in England were so barbarous, we had to write in our own language – Western Mediaeval literature is often a fine thing. The Byzantine Greeks never had a dark age in our sense. Their historians in the fifteenth century wrote up the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the same language as Thucydides. Poor Greeks.

But you really need to be blind not to see beauty in their architecture and their iconography. Though little has survived, they were even capable of an original reworking of classical realism in their arts.

Above all, Byzantine history is a record of survival and even prosperity in the face of terrible odds. Between about 540 and 720, the Byzantines were hit by wave after wave of catastrophe. First, there was the Great Plague of the 540s, that killed around a third of the population. Then, in the first decades of the seventh century, they were attacked on every frontier by the Persians and the Barbarians. They saw off these challenges, but had no time to recover before the first eruption of Islam from the deserts. In almost a single bite, the Arabs swallowed up the remains of the Persian Empire. They conquered vast areas of the East, and, within less than a century, pushing into Southern France. But, if they took Syria and Egypt and North Africa, they never conquered the core territories of the Byzantine Empire.

The reason for this is that the Byzantine State was ruled by creative pragmatists. The Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.

During the seventh century, the Byzantines scrapped almost the entirety of the Roman heritage. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the landed estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, the death penalty was rarely used.

The Byzantine Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Byzantium fought like tigers in defence of their country. Now, this was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople itself was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Byzantium faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries.

Don’t tell me this isn’t an inspiring story. I could have written yet another series of novels around the Persian War or the murder of Julius Caesar. But, if you can take the trouble to master your sources – and never let them master you – I really can’t think of a finer background than the early flowering of the one of the most remarkable, and effectively democratic, civilisations that ever existed.

What other writers inspire you, in terms of genre, craft or both?

Where historical fiction is concerned, I grew up on Mika Waltari and Mary Renault and Robert Graves. More recently, there was Gore Vidal and Patrick O’Brien and Steven Saylor. But I can’t say how many historical novels I’ve devoured. When I was in my teens, I could read three or four a week. For other novelists, I admire Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard. Oh, and there’s Rafael Sabatini and the Baroness Orczy. But there really are so many, living and dead.

But what I like in a novelist or whatever kind is a good story and a sense of realism – even when, as with Rider Haggard, the story is pure fantasy. This is my chief objection to literary fiction. I simply can’t enjoy D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and all the others. Their stories are depressing and unrealistic. Their style is obtrusive and self-referential. For all her later faults, I think Barbara Cartland was a better writer than Iris Murdoch.

Readers and aspiring writers are always interested: what was your path to publication?

I’ve said I wrote two novels in my younger days. Full of hope, I sent these off to dozens of publishers and agents. Of course, I got nowhere. Most didn’t reply. Most who did got my hope up by asking for the manuscript only so they could drop it in the nearest bin and keep the return postage.

I could have tried self-publication, but this was too expensive. Even if I avoided the vanity press sharks, and went to a reputable printer, it was expensive. It involved various kinds of typesetting and proofing, and printing and binding. Once these fixed costs were taken into account, you had to order several thousand copies to get your unit costs close to a viable retail price. And how was I to sell these? Newspapers and magazines didn’t review self-published books. The main booksellers didn’t stock them. Getting into the bibliographical databases was beyond me. Without an ISBN, a book couldn’t be ordered. I’d have had a hundred heavy boxes to store, and a marketing strategy that was confined to lineage advertisements and taking a dozen copies at a time to conferences and other meetings where I might find readers.

Since no one would publish me, I gave up on fiction, and turned to political pamphleteering. Then, in the 1990s, I took to the Internet, and published about a million words on my own websites. This was all rather controversial, but it got me a name and an audience, and it was free. I didn’t realise at the time that I was getting ready for my next entry to the fiction market.

When I wrote Conspiracies of Rome,I took it for granted that no one else would publish it, so decided to bring it out myself. By now, the information technology revolution had brought down unit costs even in small runs. I had already published out several books of my Internet writings, and was pretty good at formatting in MS Word, and in designing covers in MS Publisher. So I called my novel The Column of Phocasand sent it off to a printer in the West of England.

Oh, the arrogance of doing that! I’ve said I wrote the novel in about six weeks. I sent it off to the printer after the briefest and most negligent proofing. It came back with missed full stops and dropped speech marks. There were fragments of sentences that I revised as I wrote and left undeleted.I had an eccentric taste in punctuation. In particular, I didn’t see the point in putting a comma before a closing speech mark in an unfinished sentence. I was also rather hazy about whether full stops should be inside or outside closing speech marks. Note: they can be either – but you must choose one standard, and stick to it.

Worse, its pace is variable. Unless you’re a genius, this is something learned by practice. The story in a modern novel must be told almost wholly by way of dialogue and action. Speaking about novels in general, every sentence must contribute to the plot. Digressions that don’t somehow contribute must be ruthlessly cut out. I didn’t know this at the time. I told myself I was writing fiction set in a virtually unknown period, and that the occasional digression was needed if readers were to understand the plot. I do this better now. When I started, I barely understood the difficulties.

And there is too much swearing. Yes, I know that characters in an historical novel must speak mutatis mutandis as if they were alive now – “’Gadzooks,’ quoth he, ‘thou hast thyself well-acquitted this day,’” is unacceptable. But did I need quite so much effing and blinding? I think the answer is no. Since then, I’ve become more varied in my dialogue. In my latest novel. The Break, there is no swearing at all.

Nevertheless, the book was a hit. I sold a thousand copies to my mailing list, and got some good reviews. One day, feeling more than usually pleased with myself, I dashed off a letter and sent it to a few dozen publishers. I explained that the novel was doing well, and it might do better still with a real publisher behind it – and that we might all make a tidy profit from this. Within a week, I had three replies and two offers. I signed with Hodder & Stoughton, and Conspiracies of Romeis a substantial rewrite of The Column of Phocas – a rewrite in which I was nagged into correcting all the faults I now find in it.

I’ve now done six novels with Hodder. These have all had nice reviews, and have been translated so far into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Slovak, Hungarian, Indonesian and Chinese. Other languages will follow. I used to feel embarrassed about calling myself a writer. But If this doesn’t make me one, I don’t know what else will.

I got my break into the mainstream by lucky accident. My letters arrived at just the right time. I don’t know if the strategy I adopted will work for someone else – though I’ll not discourage anyone from trying it. I got in before the big financial crash, and before the publishing market began to turn upside down in response to the rise of e-books. Times have fundamentally changed even in the past few years.

But times have changed fundamentally in the interests of authors. I won’t knock Hodder & Stoughton. My editors there have taught me many things I might not otherwise have realised I needed to learn. The company has exposed me to a much wider audience, at home and abroad, than I’d ever have been able to reach by my own efforts. All the same, we live in an age of disintermediation. Authors are no longer obliged to beat themselves against the door of the corporate publishing industry like flies against a window pane. We can do it ourselves. Between two of my Hodder novels, I wrote my alternative history satire, The Churchill Memorandum. I didn’t even think to offer it to a publisher. It went straight to Kindle, and has been doing well ever since. My latest novel, The Break is a post-apocalyptic thriller which is also a brutal satire on our leftist managerial state. This also I brought out myself. It came out in July 2014, and has already been nominated for the 2015 Prometheus Award.

So, good luck if you can get a juicy publishing contract. But you probably won’t, and the future is to do it yourself.

Are there other historical periods that you want to write about someday?

I’ve been considering a thriller set in 1690s London – another underused period full of excitement and colour. The protagonist will be a woman playwright caught up in a mystery about a sealed package of documents. Depending on other commitments, I may start work on this next year.

What question do you wish I had asked but didn’t?  How would you answer it?

Bearing in mind the length of the answers I’ve given so far, it may be for the best if I pass on this question.

Filed under: Libertarian Fiction

Anarchism and Crime

‘Anarchism and Crime’ by Wilson and Shea

(This article ran in Green Egg. I could not find a date, so all I can say is it was in the 1970s. It reads like one of the missing appendices for Illuminatus!, but I can’t think of anyone I could ask to test my theory. My thanks to Mike Gathers for making it available to everyone. — Tom.)

Anarchism and Crime

By Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

Because anarchists aim at the abolition of government, the first question they are usually asked is, “What about murderers, thieves, rapists? The government protects us from them. Would you just let them run wild?”

The answer, first of all, is that government does not protect us. Its claims are a total imposture, like the fraud of a primitive shaman who claims to bring rain and warns everybody, “If you abolish me, it will never rain again.” Thus, the major crimes are all legal; the thieves who have stolen the land and the natural resources from under our feet operate with a government franchise. These huge banks, corporations and land monopolies finance both political parties, train the corporation lawyers who become Congressmen or Presidents, and can never be successfully resisted in the courts because they own the judges, too.

Second, the next level of crime, the so-called Syndicate or Mafia, is also in cahoots with big government and big business, and only token arrests and light sentences are ever imposed on “gangland leaders” — usually rebels who have become unpopular with the higher-level mobsters. In every big city, the links between the mayor’s office and the Mob are well-known and often “exposed” in the press, but no reforms are permanent and never can be under this system. The links between the national Mob and the national government are less well publicized, but books like The Politics of Opium in Southeast Asia, the recent Harpers magazine issue on the CIA and heroin, etc., show that the heroin syndicate could not operate without high-level Federal protection.

Finally, the small-time free-lance criminal — the rapist and sneak thief — can be arrested and prosecuted in this system; but is he, usually? In New York, in 1972, there were 300,000 burglaries but only 20,000 arrests for burglary. The police are too busy protecting the high-level criminals — as we will explain — to have the manpower to really battle the small independents.

Do you deny this? Well, of course, you have been trained by the State-run schools and the mass media to deny it, do you believe your own denial? How safe do you feel in a large American city, especially after dark? Do you honestly think the government can and will protect you?

IS MORE LAW THE ANSWER?

Many admit that they are frightened and appalled by modern American life, but they think the answer is more laws, tougher laws, an evolution toward the total Police State.

This is, of course, the natural direction of government. The more honest (and misguided) a politician happens to be, the more laws he will write — to prove to himself that he is “working” for the people. Obviously, every time the legislature meets, the honest politicians will introduce more laws, to show how hard they’re working. Eventually, nothing will remain that is not covered by some law or other. Everything not compulsory will be forbidden, and everything not forbidden will be compulsory.

Stop and ask yourself if you really want that kind of Nazi- or Communist-style tyranny.

Now, even if we (or most of us) do want it — to be protected from criminals — and even if we escalate our progress and pass a billion new laws a year, arriving at Total Law in say five or ten years, what then? How will such a system be enforced? Kinsey estimated that to enforce our sex laws alone, 95 percent of the population would have to become either police or jail-guards — except that they would all be in jail themselves. This is already impossible, but suppose we tried to enforce the anti-drug and anti-gambling laws, also? We would all spend our lives in Federal prisons, spending part of the day guarding others and part of the day being guarded by them.

This is absurd, but within the framework of government and law, how can we stop short of such a total prison-society?

And remember: each step in this direction — each new law, and each new bureaucracy to enforce the new laws — raises your tax burden. Already, you are working from January 1 to May 23 for the Federal government, to pay your IRS bill for the year. For a few months thereafter, you are working to pay nuisance taxes, state taxes, and various other concealed taxes on every item you buy, every movie you see, every drink you take. Already, it would probably be cheaper to just let yourself be robbed every week by a casual sneak-thief. Government may be more genteel than a mugger (occasionally) but it usually ends up taking more of one’s money.

THE FUNCTION OF LAW

There are three kinds of laws on the books today, and to understand them is to understand the State.

The first kind of law declares the State’s power over you. It says: we may rob you of this much per year (taxation), we may enslave you for this period of time (the draft), we may do this and that and the other thing to you, and you cannot resist because we are your Masters. This is the earliest kind of law and was originally imposed on conquered people by conquerors. No attempt to justify it has ever been convincing to anyone bold enough to question it in the first place. It is based on mere Force; its only argument is the gun.

The second kind of law is coercive morality. This makes the State into an armed clergyman. It says you can enjoy yourself this way, but not that way; you can smoke this, but not that; you can drink this, but not that. Thou Shalt Not Play Parchesi On The Night of the Full Moon. Thou shalt not gamble on Sunday. Thou shalt not make love to your wife the way you and she both like, but the way the legislators like. Four million arrests a year, and an incredible expenditure of time and manpower and money, go into enforcing these laws.

These are the laws that establish crimes without victims. These are the laws that everybody occasionally violates and some people violate constantly. Their only justification, as with the first type of laws, is sheer brute force. That is, without force, a man who believed in, say, the Seventh Day Adventist vegetarian diet would still obey that diet’s rules; with force, the Adventists, if they get into government, can make all of us obey it. The day is not distant when pot-smokers will take over, and if they are vengeful, anti-booze laws will come back on the books. This stupid bullying can go on forever, each group getting its turn to impose its own prejudices on others. Anarchists say: stop it now, get off your neighbor’s back, get him off your back, and let everybody enjoy his or her own lifestyle.

Finally, there is the third class of laws — the class that every decent person wishes society would live by. No killing. No stealing. No rape. No fraud. Anarchists, just like you, would like to see these laws really functioning. We just don’t believe that government can do that job. We think government is, always has been, and always will be preoccupied with the first two kinds of law. Read on and we will explain this.

THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT

Government was instituted to guarantee that property would remain stolen. The chief function of every cop, every judge, every bureaucrat is to see that property remains stolen.

The first kings were conquerors. They stole the land by shot and shell, period. Then, they settled down to rob the survivors at a certain rate per year, called taxation. Next, they divided up the land among their relatives or officers in the army, who all became lords-of-the-land, landlords, and were empowered to rob the citizens at a certain other rate per year, called rent. When science and industry appeared, other satraps and sycophants of the royal families received charters to monopolize the resources and means of production, and to rob at a certain rate per year, called capital interest or profit. When banks were formed to circulate the medium of exchange (money), other charters were handed out to others in the bandit-gang, who became bank directors with a license to rob at another rate per year, called money interest or economic interest.

It soon became evident that those not in the gang, the majority of the population, were inclined to rob back as much as they could. The Robin Hood hero appears in all societies at this point, and most of us still admire him, although shamefacedly, since the schools and mass media tell us not to. (Still, who doesn’t heroize Jesse James or John Dillinger a little?)

Anarchists say that the first crime was the crime of the conquerors/governors, who seized a whole land, cut it up among themselves, and proceeded to rob all of us forever by taxation, rent, corporative profit, money interest, and various sub-classes of the same basic fraud. Anarchists say that the Earth belongs to its inhabitants, not to this small “owning” and “governing” class of less than 1 percent of the population.

Anarchists say that the way to stop crime is to stop the primordial crime, the State, and administer the land through voluntary associations (syndicates) of all the people.

Anarchists say that if people could work for themselves — if they received the full product of their labor through a syndicate of fellow-workers — almost all motivation for crime would disappear. If you didn’t have to pay taxes and rent, starting tomorrow, your purchasing power would be more than doubled. If other forms of exploitation and robbery, through the financial-interest system, were also abolished, your purchasing power would more than quadruple. How much envy, how much worry about money, how much irrational fear, ulcers, nightmares, headaches and other motivations to cheat a little or steal a little would survive after this simple economic justice was achieved?

THE OTHER CRIMINALS

“But, but — how about the violent criminal types? How about the thrill-killers, the nuts, the psychopaths or sociopaths or sadists? How about those who simply enjoy being evil and destructive?”

We are not evading that question. It is absolutely necessary, however, to put it in perspective by explaining the Major Economic Crime of capitalist government (and feudal and other governments) and how other, lesser crimes mostly derive from that primordial injustice.

Now, after economic justice is achieved and voluntary associations of all sorts (labor unions, credit unions, consumer-owned co-ops, people-owned insurance companies, rural communes, tribes, any type of free human grouping) have taken over the functions of government, some persons, due to sickness or perversity or one damn thing or another, will still make trouble. Rape. Pilfering. Attempts to defraud. How will anarchists deal with these remaining no-goodniks?

EDUCATION AND THE FAMILY

The first step in solving any social problem, like any medical problem, is prevention. Other remedies are necessary only when prevention fails.

Anarchists claim that the violent-nut-type of human being is produced by our current methods of child-rearing. This claim is hardly radical or extreme: every psychiatrist, every sociologist, every anthropologist, in one way or another, admits that this grave charge is true. We would not have so many rapists and other violent nuisances if our society were not, in some way, training them from birth onward to behave like that. For instance, Sweden has only a few rapes per year; the United States has one every seven minutes. One rape every seven minutes is not natural male behavior (whatever Womens Lib may say); it is a function of the sexual misery in this society.

Anarchists believe that the repressive, authoritarian, coercive, brutal and degrading practices currently used in the family and the school are only necessary to condition the young human to live in a government-run society. Children must be beaten or otherwise terrorized and bullied in the home and the school in order that they may “adjust” to the terror and brutality of government as they mature. In short, a State-run society must be repressive because repression is the essence of the State.

Libertarian, free-form families and schools — the open family, the Summerhill school, the free association of men, women and children without authoritarian control — will not produce the deformed, mentally twisted, violent and “mean” and “crazy” types so common in our authoritarian society. So anarchists aim, first of all, to prevent violent criminals by changing the child-rearing methods that produce them.

THE DEMONIAC OR MONSTER

There still remains the inexplicable criminal — the guy who enjoys harming others for reasons nobody today can understand. The superstitious say he is possessed by demons; the naturalists imply that maybe he has bad genes or is a throwback to an earlier stage of evolution. Whatever the explanation, he will appear, presumably, in anarchist societies, as he has appeared in all other societies, even after economic injustice and mind-warping education are abolished.

Human-centered societies (as distinguished from governmental or property-centered societies) have dealing with this problem for thousands of years. Tribes, clans, bands, free communes, have existed outside, before and alongside the States which get all the attention from historians. Anthropologists have investigated these free human groupings and have found a variety of methods of dealing with “demoniacs,” many of them as good or better than the State’s traditional jails, tortures or executions.

Ostracism should not be underestimated. One critic of anarchism, George Orwell, actually complained that ostracism was so cruel that most people would rather fall afoul of government and go to jail than be the sole ostracized person in an anarchist community.

Exile, widely used by governments before jail became popular, is also effective. At least, it solves the problem for the community that uses it (while, alas, passing the problem on to the unlucky community that next gets the offensive nut.)

The Quakers have widely practiced a form of moral forgiveness which sounds impractical to most of us, but which is murderously effective. Bertrand Russell was so impressed with this that he suggested it as a fit punishment for Stalin. Until you have seen a group of Quakers reciting somebody’s sins in public, weeping over them loudly, and then forgiving and praying for the culprit, you can’t imagine how much psychological impulse-to-change this generates.

Many anarchists believe the private defense groups are legitimate; some even are willing to allow such groups to use traditional Vigilante methods. Clarence Lee Schwartz, an American anarchist who observed this system first-hand in the old West, thought it both more humane and more effective at peace-keeping than the government law system back East. Other anarchists fear this as the possible source of a new State.

Most anarchists believe that criminals should not be caged under any circumstances, due to the overwhelming evidence that every prisoner comes out of a cage worse than he goes into it. Others believe, however, that punishment in a form of indemnification is compatible with libertarian ideas and should be rigorously enforced by anarchist syndicates. Under the indemnity system, every criminal must pay in cash or work or some needed good to compensate his victims (or their survivors). This certainly does the victims more good than having the criminal put in a cage and fed at community expense, to say the least of it; and is probably just as discouraging or more discouraging to every nut with even the remnant of an ability to forsee the probable results of his actions.

Finally, we must mention miscellaneous solutions. Just as crime in an economically just and free community will be freaky and sporadic (rather than the steady hour-after-hour terror that it is in this mad, unequal and unfree society), the remedies will also be individualized and peculiar to each situation. In some cases, undoubtedly, an anarchist community will decide the “criminal” was right and the community was wrong; for this reason, anarchists do not believe in unalterable laws, but only in general policies.

The acme of anarchist theory is the principle of non-invasiveness or non-coercion — Mind Your Own Business — and those found to be violating this will be given, usually, some method of compensating those whose lives they have damaged. If they refuse, methods like the boycott-ostracism-exile or general cold shoulder need not always be deliberately organized against them. The good sense, the social bonds, and the sense of humor of the organic community will find some way to make them known that human tolerance, even under anarchy, is not infinite. In the Old West, men booted through town with a skunk tied around their necks, and then shoved onto the highway, often became valuable, co-operative and productive citizens in the next town, after some time to figure the likelihood of a repetition of that public amusement if they were to try similar modes of behavior again.

 

Filed under: Crime, Law, Liberty, MARKET CIVILISATION

ISIS: Yes, Mr. Blair, You Did Build This

by Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/content/29482



ISIS: Yes, Mr. Blair, You Did Build This

Last month, in a tone which might best be called unlikely insistence, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reassured the public that “we” — the UK and United States — “have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we caused” the destabilization of Iraq by the ISIS insurgency. Well, actually you did.

Let’s go back to the Versailles peace conference at the end of WWI, when Britain — with the agreement of the other Western powers — carved the mandate of Iraq out of three former Ottoman provinces. These provinces — Sunni Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia marsh Arab — were about as unwieldy as any other artificial country the imperial powers of Europe cobbled together around the world and displayed high potential for instability from the beginning.

In the 1930s the United States supported unification of the Arabian peninsula under the House of Saud, whose official religion was an ultra-fundamentalist Sunni sect known as Wahhabism (coincidentally shared by the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11).

In 1953, the United States gave powerful impetus to Islamic political fundamentalism by overthrowing Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, a secular democratic socialist, restoring the Shah to power. This created a state of affairs in which fundamentalist clerics constituted the primary opposition to the Shah’s autocracy, leading eventually to the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a theocratic regime.

Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration quietly backed still another fundamentalist movement, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, as an alternative to Nasser’s secular socialist model of nationalism.

In the 1960s the United States helped engineer the Baathist military coup in Iraq, thus bringing to power the same regime it eventually went to war with twice.

In the late 1970s the US created the conditions which eventually gave rise to al Qaeda, deliberately destabilizing a stable, secular Soviet client regime in Afghanistan by providing aid to fundamentalist insurgents and provoking a Soviet invasion and decade of bloody civil war. Al Qaeda emerged from among the Islamic fundamentalists fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the ’80s, an insurgency the United States armed and trained heavily. The Carter administration destabilized Afghanistan; Reagan poured gasoline on the fire, because giving the Russians their own Vietnam was just too delicious an opportunity to pass up.

In 1990 the United States — perhaps eager for a “splendid little war” to demonstrate the continuing need for a large “defense” establishment in the post-Cold War Era — basically instigated Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. US Ambassador April Glaspie reassured Saddam that the US took little interest in minor affairs like one Arab country invading another. Meanwhile, with US encouragement, Kuwait engaged in practices like slanted oil drilling on the Iraqi border that inevitably goaded Iraq to invade.

But despite the devastation of Iraq by massive US air attacks and an ensuing decade of sanctions, Saddam’s dictatorship remained a secular regime where most people paid little attention to sectarian differences. Marriages between Sunnis and Shia were about as unremarkable as marriages between Baptists and Methodists in this country. The one force in the Middle East that most objected to this secularism and sectarian peace was al Qaeda — America’s baby. And by overthrowing Saddam and creating a power vacuum, the United States did the one thing guaranteed to give al Qaeda an opening in Iraq. After defeating and dissolving the Baathist regime, the Coalition Provisional Authority established a puppet government organized along sectarian lines, with religious sects rather than ideologically oriented parties as the main axis of political division. That kind of divide-and-rule strategy made it a lot easier to auction off the country to Halliburton, see.

And ISIS itself? Well, as resistance to Assad in Syria turned into an all-out civil war, the United States and American proxies like the Saudis (you know, that country whose Wahhabi oil aristocracy included Osama Bin Laden) armed anti-Assad rebels — some of which went on to become ISIS, a Sunni fundamentalist group so extreme even al Qaeda disavowed them.

So yeah, Tony. You, Bush and Obama — and all the other swine who’ve used the world as their chessboard for the past century — did cause this. All this bloodshed is yours. You own it.

 

Filed under: Liberty, Scumbags, War

What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity

What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17

Rep. Ron Paul, July 21, 2014

Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim – even before an investigation – that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible. His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same at the UN Security Council – just one day after the crash!

While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.

They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.

The media has reported that the plane must have been shot down by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists, because the missile that reportedly brought down the plane was Russian made. But they will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons.

They will not report that the post-coup government in Kiev has, according to OSCE monitors, killed 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 killed as government forces bombed the city center the day after the plane crash! Most of these are civilians and together they roughly equal the number killed in the plane crash. By contrast, Russia has killed no one in Ukraine, and the separatists have struck largely military, not civilian, targets.

They will not report that the US has strongly backed the Ukrainian government in these attacks on civilians, which a State Department spokeswoman called “measured and moderate.”

They will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians.

They will not report that the Ukrainian government has much to gain by pinning the attack on Russia, and that the Ukrainian prime minister has already expressed his pleasure that Russia is being blamed for the attack.

They will not report that the missile that apparently shot down the plane was from a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system that requires a good deal of training that the separatists do not have.

They will not report that the separatists in eastern Ukraine have inflicted considerable losses on the Ukrainian government in the week before the plane was downed.

They will not report how similar this is to last summer’s US claim that the Assad government in Syria had used poison gas against civilians in Ghouta. Assad was also gaining the upper hand in his struggle with US-backed rebels and the US claimed that the attack came from Syrian government positions. Then, US claims led us to the brink of another war in the Middle East. At the last minute public opposition forced Obama to back down – and we have learned since then that US claims about the gas attack were false.

Of course it is entirely possible that the Obama administration and the US media has it right this time, and Russia or the separatists in eastern Ukraine either purposely or inadvertently shot down this aircraft. The real point is, it’s very difficult to get accurate information so everybody engages in propaganda. At this point it would be unwise to say the Russians did it, the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it. Is it so hard to simply demand a real investigation?

 

 

 

Filed under: Liberty, War

Groomed by Labour – Screwed by Tories?

by Anna Raccoon

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnnaRaccoon/~3/jup-DvW8oCg/



Groomed by Labour – Screwed by Tories?

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Lord Denning described the Magna Carta as ‘the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot’.

David Cameron sends out e-mail invitations to an 800th anniversary reception describing it as the ‘Magna Carter’. Then insists that British children (that’s Iqbal and Abdullah to you and me) should be taught what it means. Or at least how to spell it.

This ‘greatest constitutional document of all times’ stood proud and undiluted for six centuries until the Offences against the Person Act 1828 repealed Clause 26. Successive governments ripped away all but three sections of the charter over the next 140 years. It is a moot point as to whether any of the original protection against the excesses of the Crown remain since the Human Rights Act, by which Blair’s government imposed the supremacy of the European judiciary. Critically, the Act abrogated to Government and to Government alone, the power to determine what constituted a ‘right’. And therefore also the power to suspend or abolish those rights.

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned – Tell that to fellow blogger Graham Mitchell. I wrote of his extraordinary battle to get out of prison after the Portuguese government insisted that Britain jail him for a ‘murder’ that allegedly took place 20 years ago – eventually I discovered the murder victim alive and well, playing championship basketball in Germany! Tell that to Stephen Neary. I wrote of his battle to escape the draconian arm of the state as his Father tried to retrieve his son from the ‘positive behaviour unit’ where he had been imprisoned for over a year under the Deprivation of Liberty clauses in the Mental Capacity Act. Eventually that case led to the slight chink of sunlight that currently falls over the Court of Protection – something the Independent newspaper was snide enough to claim credit for – Grrr!

So much for Habeas Corpus.

Or be disseised of his Freehold…unlesse it be by the lawfull judgment - That one bit the dust last week. Read on Macduff.

Last Thursday royal assent was granted to the Finance Act 2014, which gives HMRC the right to impose ‘accelerated payments’: what this means is that if there is an unresolved tax dispute, the individual will now be compelled to pay up the entire amount claimed by the state, even before the case has been heard by a tribunal.

One of the first casualties was Andrew Mitchell. A man who has already had his reputation ‘stolen’ by that arm of the state known as the ‘media’.

Back in 2005 the Labour Government announced tax breaks for British films. The government said that previous legislation on film tax relief was vulnerable to abuse.

In September 2009, the UK Treasury released new figures which claimed to demonstrate the success of the new tax relief scheme.

Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms, said: “The government is committed to supporting the British film industry and the important role it plays in our economy. Today’s figures are excellent news for the industry, highlighting the success of the UK’s film tax relief which is helping to stimulate investment in domestic film production. Film tax relief will continue to provide valuable assistance to this vibrant sector over the coming years.”

Now, following the success of the ousted Labour government in persuading the media to highlight alleged unfair tax avoidance by large corporations, the Coalition government has brought in a measure by which it can retrospectively decide that you, the man in the street, have ‘unfairly avoided tax’ (i.e. followed the advice of a previous government) and demand that you pay up before discussing the matter. Even Lord Waldegrave, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, has found himself labelled a ‘tax avoider’ for investing in the same ‘stimulation of domestic film production’ that they were encouraged to support by Labour.

That is bad enough – but at least these are only demands for payment. They are hitting wealthy investors – and wealthy investors are like celebrity comedians, nobody minds the law being bent to see them in prison. Wait for the next bit.

George Osborne announced a proposed new system during the 2014 Budget that would allow HMRC to seize assets from anyone that owes more than £1,000 in tax or tax credits. That in itself isn’t really anything new, HMRC can already seize property or cash if they go through the Courts, but these changes would allow HMRC to simply take money from a taxpayer’s bank account with no Court approval!

Frank Haskew, head of the tax faculty at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, says “it is a fundamental tenet of our English law and our democratic society that money cannot be grabbed from somebody’s account without a judge agreeing to the move”. He said the change, which could come into force in just 12 months’ time, would be “unprecedented in the UK”.

We live in dangerous times – you can be thrown into jail on the basis of untrue evidence from a foreign government; be locked up for a year because a care worker says you tapped her on the shoulder to attract her attention; loose your reputation because of the mass publicity of an unproven allegation; have your estate plundered because of more unproven allegations (allegations initiated from the very heart of Magna Carta country); be expected to repay disputed tax bills before appealing – and now the taxman will just ‘take the money anyway’.

It is not just the ‘rich and famous’ who will be subject to these latest moves – but all of us. Every last one of us.

In any other country, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta would be a national monument.

In Britain – it is for sale. £4,000,000. It will probably be bought by some refugee from a ‘repressive government’. Like Russia, for instance.

 

Filed under: Law, Liberty, politicians, Scumbags