Month: November 2006

I thought it amusing that Fiji’s military chief, Frank Bainimarama, gave the prime minister a deadline to conform to the military’s demands before he would set a coup in motion. “I think I’ll schedule the coup for Friday…mmm…sometime after lunch.”

The demands include the nixing of new laws, one of which would forgive participants in the last coup. Bainimarama has even produced a new demand: that Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase sack his entire government. It seems the PM has agreed to all the military’s demands, in order to stave off a coup. But isn’t giving in to all demands a de facto coup, whether or not the leader changes?

Wednesday, December 6, 2006, the Independent Institute will be hosting the Thomas Szasz Awards and “Liberty and Leviathan: An Evening with Robert Higgs.”

Gala reception and book signing at 6:30 p.m., program at 7:00 p.m.

Originator of the term, “ratchet effect,” to describe increases in State power, Higgs is the author of Crisis and Leviathan, Against Leviathan, Resurgence of the Warfare State and the brand new Depression, War, and Cold War.

Thomas S. Szasz will present Robert Higgs and Robert Spillane with the 2006 Szasz Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Liberty, and then Dr. Higgs will address some of the most important questions of America’s past crises:

• What accounted for the extraordinary duration of the Great Depression?
• What about “wartime prosperity” and whether World War II “got the economy out of the depression”?
• How does war alter relations between government and the leaders of business and labor?
• How do military economies alter the business cycle, as during World War II and the Cold War?
• What is Congress’s role in the military-industrial-congressional complex?

Thomas S. Szasz, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry State University Medical Center Syracuse, is the author of numerous books defending liberty against psychiatric coercion. The renowned author of such seminal works as The Myth of Mental Illness, Pharmacracy, and Ceremonial Chemistry, Dr. Szasz has distinguished himself as the preeminent defender of individual rights for nearly five decades.

The Independent Institute Conference Center
100 Swan Way
Oakland, CA 94621-1428
For a map and directions, click here.

Tickets are $15 per person ($10 for Independent Institute Members)
Reserve tickets by calling (510) 632-1366 or ordering online here.

“If named the Liberal Party’s leader this weekend, Michael Ignatieff would be a candidate to become [Canada’s] next prime minister.” Read all about it over at the Christian Science Monitor, if you like. Why should you care? Well, this is the same Michael Ignatieff who wrote, in 2004:

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

Mind you, this is the prospective Liberal leader.

Another Russian “dissident” gets sick, and guess who is blamed. As I said in my column the other day, Russia is getting the same treatment these days as Syria, a bona fide member of the “axis of evil.” A Lebanese taxi driver put it this way:

“‘It’s very clear,’ said the Beirut taxi driver, a Sunni Muslim. ‘They blame everything on Syria. If a man divorces his wife, they blame it on Syria.'”

 

Via Daniel McCarthy, an excerpt from The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, by Russell Kirk and James McClellan (1967):

War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. His natural conservatism made him a man of peace. He never had served in the army himself, and he did not relish the prospect of compelling others to serve. Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, break in upon private and public morality. The constitutions of government in America were not made for prolonged emergencies; and it might require generations for the nation to recover from a war of a few years’ duration.

If these would be the consequences of war to America – even though no hostilities should occur within American territory – the damage inflicted elsewhere in the world would be graver still. Even though war might be inevitable in the last resort, men must not expect large benefits to result from victory. From the Second World War, as from the First, no increase of liberty and democracy would come: on the contrary, in most of the world a host of squalid oligarchs must be the principal beneficiaries, whatever side might win. For the United States, then, war was preferable to conquest or to economic ruin; but if those calamities were not in prospect, America should remain aloof. The blood of man should be shed only to redeem the blood of man, Taft might have said with Burke: “the rest is vanity; the rest is crime.”

Taft’s prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions – and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, an intolerant “democratism” imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America’s domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the “garrison state,” a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.

“If it’s newsworthy, it gets on the air, whether it’s Bush or bin Laden.”

So began the first few days of Al-Jazeera‘s English language news channel, a stream of glitzy slogans and swirling views of the Doha newsroom, punctuated by the occasional ad for a Qatari development corporation or Gulf state-based airline.

The news reports show footage that in the United States one could only get watching sensational Spanish language shock shows. On the day Pierre Gemayel was assassinated (undoubtedly a “good” break for Al-Jazeera English’s kick-off), I must have seen the Lebanese minister’s brains splattered in clumps on his passenger seat 15 times.

But supported by the impressive production quality are news and analysis shows which seem to still be trying to find their groove.

One of the touted strengths of the channel, for example the fact that its Middle East experts would actually be from the Middle East, seems to also be a weakness: the guests many times can’t seem to finish articulating the answer to a question before, due to time restraints, the host must interrupt them to move on to a new subject or point of view.

My favorite shows so far are Riz Khan — sort of like Larry King but not obnoxious — and People and Power, a magazine-style news program. A recent show on the Palestinian government and political prisoners was fascinating and in-depth, if only because it showed and told me things I’d never have seen or heard on CNN. And for those of you who saw Control Room, former US mouthpiece Josh Rushing is now refreshingly “with them.”

There is also plenty of non-Middle Eastern coverage. Just today I saw exclusive Al-Jazeera footage of battles in Chad, and a fluff piece on a show called 48 about Havana, which was (irkingly) light on the Castro regime. Last week I saw disturbing footage from 1994 of Argentine Jews staring in horror at the pile of rubble and bodies that was made of their community center in Buenos Aires.

There’s a lot I am leaving out because I simply don’t have time to watch TV all day, but also because I want you to go to Al-Jazeera today and subscribe to the broadband service for $6/month. Of course, this is only if you’re in the US — most other countries have companies which have agreed to provide the channel to their subscribers.

The verdict is: Al-Jazeera rocks, and for now, I’m addicted. There’s definitely room for improvement, but at least it’s not full of the puke-inducing blatherings of self-important morons like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough.