Banning the Burqa Would be an Affront to our Heritage

January 26th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Burqa_EnglandA six month-long French Parliamentary report concluded that Muslim dress should be banned schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices.

From the Jakarta Globe:

“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic. This is unacceptable,” the report said. “We must condemn this excess.” The commission however stopped short of proposing broader legislation to outlaw the burqa in the streets, shopping centres and other public venues after raising doubts about its constitutionality.

…the commission called on parliament to adopt a resolution stating that the burqa was “contrary to the values of the republic” and proclaiming that “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil.” The National Assembly resolution paves the way for legislation making it illegal for anyone to appear with their face covered at state-run institutions and in public transport for reasons of security.

[...]

Women who turn up at the post office or any government building wearing the full veil should be denied services such as a work visa, residency papers or French citizenship, the report recommended. Critics of the “burqa debate” have warned the measures risk stigmatising France’s six million Muslims who are already bristling at the government’s launching of a national identity debate that has exposed fears about Islam.

The Parallax Brief may not know enough about the “values of the Republic” to argue whether the burqa is contrary to them or not, but he does know that the authors of the report have produced a conclusion that is contrary to the values of western-style liberal democracy.

Western democracies are founded on a tiny clutch of magnificently simple and irreducible values, perhaps the primary of which is that a private individual has the right to do just about whatever he pleases as long as he is not infringing on the rights of others. Obviously, that’s something that is permitted to differing levels in different democracies, and which can have a variety of interpretations, but it is a belief which is integral to our way of life.

This belief even extends to activities which we view as damaging or immoral. Having unprotected sex with a great many partners is both dangerous and, many would argue, immoral, but we don’t pass a law to make illegal the activities of the nation’s lotharios.

An example more pertinent to France’s burqa debate is that we allow fascist parties to exist, despite the fact they stand against much of what we believe, and, if they ever gained power, would likely abrogate many of our freedoms: They may stand against our liberal beliefs, but our liberal beliefs lead us to conclude that we must tolerate their existence.

Similarly, in Britain, we believe that people are free to wear what they want, and free to practice their religion, and just because the burqa is a physical manifestation of a culture that is neither western nor liberal, doesn’t mean that we should ban it. Indeed, despite the fact that the Parallax Brief sides with the standard feminist view that forcing the burqa on women — or bringing up girls so they ‘want’ to wear such a thing, whichever way you want to phrase it — is absolutely against western liberal values, he also knows that our western liberal values demand we permit it. There’s no right not to be offended by clothing. A woman has the right to wear what she wants, whether that be a tiny miniskirt and top which covers barely more flesh than a bikini, or a burqa at the other end of the spectrum.

Our culture is not defined by a specific set of clothes, but by the freedom to wear virtually whichever clothes one wants. Within this context, wearing the burqa in a land with a Judeo-Christian heritage is as much a part of Western culture as kids dressed like Sid Vicious.

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Johnson’s Decision to Ban Islam4UK is Flat Wrong

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The Guardian’s Michael White today used his daily column to argue that Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s decision to proscribe Islam4UK may be against his own prejudice not to ban political organizations “unless absolutely necessary, but you have to draw the line sometimes, partly to show there is a line”.

This view is plain wrong. There’s no other way to put it if you value freedom or democracy: it’s plain wrong.

The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is not that a dictatorship has ruthless, unpleasant sorts like Stalin and Hitler who do ruthless, unpleasant things, whereas democracies has nice, good looking chaps like Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama who, whether we agree with them or not, do things with the best possible of intentions. It’s that a free democracy tolerates criticism, allows the voters to kick out the government on a whim, and enshrines the right to say whatever you want about whichever subject you want, whereas a dictatorship does not tolerate criticism and refuses to let the voters hold it to account.

The true test of a democracy isn’t its ability to protect the rights of those from the mainstream — a dictatorship does that. The true test of the strength of our rights is how they protect those from the extremes; those that the majority finds distasteful. No matter how loathsome Islam4UK may be, it’s impossible to take away it’s members’ right to free speech without weakening our own.

Besides which, even ignoring the important matters of what it says about the strength of our democracy, Islam4UK must be one of the best recruiting agents for the fight against Islamic extremism.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Thoughts of Freedom and Revolution at Christmas

December 29th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Several days ago, over a Christmas drink in Moscow, the Parallax Brief was talking to a Russian friend about corruption in the Moscow’s mayor’s office. “But, really,” asked my Russian friend. “What can I do? Protest? They’ll just use the OMAN [special, paramilitary police] to break it up and I’ll maybe get arrested. And getting in touch with local politicians and writing letters won’t work at all. They’ll just not listen.”

This is likely true enough, and it made the Parallax Brief realize that real political change comes only when people are willing to take big risks. Yet doing anything, let alone risking arrest, is beyond most people. How many of you have grumbled but not written to a politician out of sheer laziness? How many of you have felt strongly in the past about a specific issue but have in the end not protested or even joined activist groups?

The Parallax Brief knows he falls into this category.

If this is the case in a liberal democracy like ours, think of the incredible bravery it must take to stand up to a brutal and cold-hearted regime like that in Iran. Young Iranians are currently risking everything for freedom and the right to hold to account those who rule their country. For this, they are being beaten, arrested, tortured, and killed. And still they will not be silenced.

These Iranian freedom fighters are heroes, and we should remember this as news from Iran develops over the holiday period.

Yet, the nascent Green Revolution should also have taught us in the west an important lesson.

The Parallax Brief thinks it’s fair to say than when John McCain danced onto stage singing “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys hit Barbara Allen, most sensible people would have felt a combination of juddering horror at the depth of geopolitical aggression in some quarters in the US and mirth at the senile, slobbering old warmonger.

That may be, but there was then, and there is now, a growing chorus of US foreign policy hawks arguing that — at the very least — tactical bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is now, or in the very near future will be, necessary to deal with the threat that Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions.

The Iran protesters are making apparent just what folly that thinking is. If US or Israel had dropped bombs on Iran, those young man would be currently venting their not insignificant frustrations at the west, rather than their own, disgusting government — and worse, their government would have a rallying call to unify the country.

Meantime, Iran isn’t the only place in which revolution may be formenting. That most oppressive regime of all — the one which was seemingly named with a nod to George Orwell — the “People’s Democratic Republic” of Korea, is also in trouble. For those who haven’t heard, Kim and his cronies have decided to devalue the currency. First, this serves the useful purpose of lopping a few zeros off the Won, but more important, it will flatten the entrepreneurs who have set up black markets in a variety of goods — taking away their savings and cutting the incentives to enter into free-marketeering. But North Koreans with access to the markets often relied on them as the only reliable source of certain essentials, such as food and clothing, and are therefore unhappy with the devaluation.

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post explains:

Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them….

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force.

There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority.

“The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”

Orwell may have proven in his crushing masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four that there is nothing logically finite about dictatorships, but experience tells us that they all fall eventually.

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Nothing Wrong with Swiss Minaret Vote, But A Darker Truth Lurks

December 1st, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Ignore what the opinion and editorial columns tell you: there is nothing wrong with Switzerland’s decision to ban the construction of minarets. First, no matter what reason individual citizens had for voting no, a vote is a vote and an expression of freedom and democracy. Second, those reasons don’t necessarily have to be racist. The Swiss are notoriously conservative and protective of their picturesque environment and urban areas, and it doesn’t take too much of a leap to imagine that minarets could be viewed as an architectural pollutant. Think Prince Charles and his London carbuncles. The vote does not mean curtailing freedom to practice Islam or a restriction on the construction of mosques. Noise pollution laws already outlaw the call to prayer, the main purpose of a minaret.

In and of itself, then, there was clearly nothing wrong with the vote.

More worrying are the dark emotions inevitably stoked by votes like this.

The Swiss People’s Party might have been labelled “populist” in a lamentably (willfully?) naive opinion editorial in the Telegraph praising the decision, but this obscures a more disreputable truth: the party is racist. What else can one conclude from its campaign poster (left), which depicts a black sheep being kicked off a Swiss flag by three white sheep? And the party’s referendum campaign poster (above, right), depicting a woman in a burkha in front of minarets drawn to look like missiles over a Swiss Flag, shows it was playing on sinister populism again.

The danger of such votes, then, is twofold: First, that dark human emotions will be brought to the surface when they are inevitably stirred by the populists willing to use any tactic to win, but second, and not to be forgotten, that well meaning people, who are more interested in maintaining the architectural image of idyllic Switzerland, are duped into passing judgement on a whole culture that can later be used to justify all kinds of insidious acts.

Beyond this, the vote also shows the limitations and the plain wrongness of unlimited direct democracy. It may sound like a good thing; but taken to extremes, and unlimited by a constitution, it is not. Switzerland may be usually held up as the exemplar of direct democracy, but California might be its archetype. There, direct democracy has forced votes which have between them hamstrung the state’s legal system, where there are men in prison for the rest of their lives because a combination of a petty theft in youth and driving offenses much later in life put them in violation of three strikes and out laws. Meantime, the state’s parlous finances are in part due to referendums which have hobbled the legislature’s ability to either raise taxes or cut spending.

Britain might well benefit from more direct democracy, but California and Switzerland show its pitfalls.

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Defenders of IngSoc-ization of Britain Miss the Point

November 25th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Sean O’Neill, the crime and security editor at the Times, really ought to think harder about this:

If the civil libertarians, the conspiracy theorists and the Conservatives had their way, Abdul Azad would probably never have been caught. Azad was convicted of a brutal stranger rape in Stafford in July 2005 after fragments of his skin were recovered from under his victim’s fingernails and yielded a DNA profile matching his record on the national database.

But critics of DNA retention, the latest being the Human Genetics Commission, would not want Azad’s profile to be on the database to provide the crucial match. His DNA had been taken five months before the rape, when he was arrested and gave a DNA sample after police were called to a violent incident at his home in Birmingham.

Azad was, however, released without being charged. Under the current British rules his DNA was retained on the database and provided the crucial piece of evidence that would convict him of rape months later.

Under the DNA rules that exist in other countries and which opponents of the database want replicated here, however, Azad’s profile would have been expunged when he was released without charge for the domestic violence incident.

If we curtail the use of DNA, slash the number of CCTV cameras and abandon the collation of phone and e-mail records then we are asking detectives to try to catch the most dangerous criminals with one hand tied behind their backs.

Like they did before we had CCTV on every corner and all phone calls were monitored, perhaps?

On a less glib note, this argument is similar to the ticking time-bomb scenario used to defend the torture of terrorists, which justifies that despicable act by creating an imaginary situation where the victim knows key evidence about a bomb about to explode and kill many innocents. Of course, Mr. O’Neill’s example is real, but it is logically just as fatuous.

The point is this: Laws are not, and should not be, made with specific examples in mind.  An example can be conjured to justify or condemn literally any law.  And therefore specific examples should not be accepted as a logically valid argument in favour or against specific laws.

Even if we accept that keeping phone records, emails, permanently monitoring people on the street via CCTV, and keeping records of their DNA does help the police — so what? Giving them the powers the KGB had in Soviet Russia, and putting Telescreens in everyone’s house would do that as well.

It bears remembering what the police and security services are there to do: not to catch criminals, but protect our liberty.

And how can they protect it by abrogating it?

As Alex Deane wrote so eloquently for the ConservativeHome’s Centre Right blog in a critique of Mr. O’Neill’s op-ed:

“[The state] ought to treat us as innocent citizen subjects, free to go about our business without let or hindrance unless and until we do something wrong, rather than treat us as perpetual suspects. It’s a distortion of the primary aspects of our relationship with the state as free people to say otherwise. That the crime and security editor of the Times doesn’t feel such concerns says less about those concerns than it does about the Times.”

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Categories [ Crime and Justice, UK Politics ]

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Police Arresting the Innocent to Obtain DNA

November 24th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Those who take the “I’ve got nothing to hide, so if it helps the police/security services…” approach to the pernicious assaults on the civil rights which seem commonplace in this increasingly police state should take a look at reports in the Times and the Independent today that the police are now arresting people with the sole motive of expanding their DNA database.

According to the Times, a report by the government’s watchdog for such matters, the Human Genetics Commission (HGC), criticises the paucity of government oversight which has allowed the police to expand functions and reach of DNA sampling and the database itself. It also contains evidence that police officers now routinely arrest people with the motivation of collecting DNA, which is stored permanently on the database irrespective if the person was found guilty, or even charged, with a crime.

The Independent quotes:

The report received testimony from one senior police source, a retired chief superintendent, who said it was “the norm” for officers to arrest someone to obtain their DNA profile.

“It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained,” said the source, whose identity has been kept secret. “It matters not whether the arrest leads to no action, a caution or a charge, because the DNA is kept anyway.“

This is a classic case of “mission creep”: Well meaning politicians or bureaucrats introducing a law or policy that is fundamentally against the principles of liberty but which seems innocuous and small enough to let pass given it will help the security services. At a pace so slow it is almost imperceptible, however, the reach of the policy or law expands until it is a genuine threat to freedom.

But at that stage it’s virtually too late to do anything about it.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Is the EU Living Up to the Cliches?

November 19th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief read this afternoon a fascinating insight into the EU presidential race on Charlamagne’s blog on the Economist’s website. About half way through, however, the slight thrill of being privy some insider information on the backroom deals and political horsetrading gave way to a queasy feeling. Heads of state, their diplomats slyly maneuvering to get the best deal for politicians, are deciding on two representatives with great power over hundreds of millions of people.

“…what takes me aback is the level of “distrust” out there about Mr Reinfeldt, to use the word chosen by a senior figure from one EU country. There are veiled hints that he is using his role as chairman of the selection process in a way that is not wholly straightforward.

Specifically, there is grumbling about Mr Reinfeldt’s decision to seek a very short list of candidates to put to EU leaders at their emergency summit, consisting of one or two names who enjoy near consensus before discussions even start. The thing about this system, it is alleged, is that it gives Mr Reinfeldt extraordinary power over the process, because once a candidate attracts any opposition, that candidate can be chucked off the shortlist as “failing to create consensus”. The accusation from some camps is that candidates are being chucked off too quickly, when the opposition to them might not be as hard and fast as all that. Nobody is quite accusing Mr Reinfeldt of using this system to kick people off the shortlist who he himself does not favour, but they are coming pretty close.”

Now, what does that sound like to you? It’s all well and good criticising as shrill extremists those who sound the alarm bells about the EU, comparing it to Soviet Russia, Fascist Germany, or any other totalitarian, illiberal, undemocratic society one might care to conjure, but reading this, perhaps they have a point?

It’s astonishing that even the Parallax Brief, who loves the idea of Europe and who isn’t really concerned about losing British sovereignty, should be driven by the bureaucratic morass and brazen circumvention of democracy to take this view.

Why, for instance, isn’t there a vote for EU President? Why aren’t we even considering this? Have we really become such a supine, venal people?

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Hitchens: The Best Thing for East Germany Would Have Been to Let Disney Take it Over

November 11th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Love or loath Peter Hitchens, one has to agree that his work is fantastically recalcitrant and written in wonderfully muscular English prose. The Parallax Brief’s twelve readers should follow this link and read his whole article on what he views as the fake joy which has manifested during the celebrations for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; however, one particular section, on freedom, caught the Parallax Brief’s attention.

“…there were admirable aspects of East German society, as many former East Germans will now tell you. The trouble is that the price paid for them was much too high, and that the East German system, which is well described in the book Stasiland and the film The Lives of Others, was cruel, often to the point of being actively murderous, intrusive, corrupt, wholly dishonest and power-worshipping.

Well, there are lots of governments like that, and ours is slowly but alarmingly turning in that direction. Would that have happened if the Cold War had continued to keep the domestic left out of political office, and if the warning of the real existing Big Brother state over there had continued to exist? I wonder. I have often thought that the best solution for East Germany would have been for it to be taken over by Disney, and run as a vast theme park in which people could see the otherwise unbelievable operation of socialism in action. I saw East Germany at first hand, and even I find it difficult to believe what I know to be true. How will the next generation learn from this awful mistake? They won’t credit that it actually happened.”

Whether or not one agrees with Hitchens’s now familiar doomsaying about the current levels of liberty in Britain and our trajectory for the future, these two paragraphs illustrate something that people all to often forget.

The temptation is often to dismiss movements like Nazism by arguing that ‘we’ would never fall for something that that, and making disdainful comparisons between the freedom loving people of the west and those dupes further east willing to sacrifice liberty for prosperity.

But such thinking is slothful.

Tyranny need not come via revolution, or be imposed on an unwilling nation by a ruthless demagogue, but may actually come via popular consent.

There are many situations in which tyranny may be welcomed by a population, most of which, such as grave social and economic disorder and hardship, are well understood. However, most of the time, tyranny creeps upon a society: the population doesn’t notice, politicians act with the best intentions, police, soldiers and secret services just want to protect the country, and the press feels it can’t criticise.

Perhaps, for instance, we should think about that in relation to the news yesterday that every single website you visit, phone call you make, and email and text message you send will now be saved by the communications provider for a minimum of one year, and will be accessible by the government.

The same goes for free speech. Making an overtly racist speech, or hurling anti-semitic insults, or criticizing harshly a religion may be distasteful — and it is clear any reasonable society would scorn people who do so — but that same reasonable society would permit them, because free speech is absolute.

Yet we have now lost this right in the United Kingdom. And we all think it’s jolly reasonable, because can’t these hateful people be shut up? Well, yes, they can, but then we won’t be free to say what we think anymore.

Who has the right to make the decision about what is can be said and what cannot? Who decides what political views the Parallax Brief can hear and which are too insulting for him to be exposed to? Who has that authority in the UK? And what happens when everyone then thinks you’re saying something unpleasent?

Our country and way of life is precious, but one cannot protect freedom by taking it away.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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The Shining Lights of Libertarianism

October 26th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Libertarians sure know how to pick ‘em. First there was the 2006 Ludwig Von Misus institute report on Somalia, “Stateless in Somalia and Loving it”, which detailed just how Adam Smith’s invisible hand is working it’s magic in prosperous and pleasant East African nation. Of course, the US State Department had a different view of what happens when the influence of government is removed (via Mike Tomasky’s Guardian Blog):

The country’s poor human rights situation deteriorated further during the year, exacerbated by the absence of effective governance institutions and rule of law, the widespread availability of small arms and light weapons, and ongoing conflicts… Human rights abuses included unlawful and politically motivated killings; kidnapping, torture, rape, and beatings; official impunity; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; and arbitrary arrest and detention.

In part due to the absence of functioning institutions, the perpetrators of human rights abuses were rarely punished. Denial of fair trial and limited privacy rights were problems, and there were restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.

The Parallax Brief knows all three of his readers would jump at the chance to escape the dead hand of government in socialist hell-hole Britain for the sunnier climes of Somalia, where they would be free to be beaten, kidnapped, raped, tortured or killed without the nefarious agents of state bureaucracy interfering.

Or is it that Libertarians believe that Somalians clearly don’t value liberty and justice, because they haven’t set a price for the private sector to provide those goods?

Whatever the reasons, the bat-shit crazy libertarian examples of the ’successes’ of libertarian policy continued today with the Adam Smith Institute blog offering a glowing recommendation of Georgia as just the place that “libertarians could move to” if “Britain is indeed going to the dogs”.

“Their flat-rate income tax – initially set at 25% – was cut to 20% in response to the economic downturn, and is set to be further reduced to 15% by 2013. The tax on interest and dividends will be phased out by 2012. VAT is 18%. Corporation tax is 15%,” gushes blog editor Tom Clougherty. “What’s more, it looks as though the government will soon pass into law one of the best pieces of legislation I’ve ever seen: The Liberty Act. This act, which is going to be incorporated into the Georgian Constitution, caps government expenditure at 30% of GDP, budget deficits at 3% of GDP, and public debt at 60% of GDP.”

Ah, yes, the Georgian government. At first the Parallax Brief thought that the Somalian example was an aberration.  But it seems that many high profile libertarians and libertarian organizations place far greater import on economic liberty than personal. Somalia was great because of its free telecom markets — and damn the fact it severely curtailed what should be core values for any self-respecting libertarian: freedom of speech speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.

Yet here is the phenomenon again. To be sure, Georgia has low-ish, flat taxes, a sparse social safetly net and has passed all kinds of laws to restrict regulation of the markets — all of which which probably makes the economic side of the country sound great to a libertarian. But the idea that Mikheil Saakashvili’s government is remotely democratic or in favour of genuine liberty is preposterous. (Although the Parallax Brief does understand that this is a myth perpetrated in the western media.)

In September 2007, Georgians, for some bizarre reason the Parallax Brief can’t quite put his finger on, began protesting at the libertarian policies of Saakashvilli’s government, which had caused mass unemployment, severe privations among even those who were employed, and, among other policies, removed utility subsidies for all. Instead of permitting the protests as the inalienable right of his citizens, the president ruthlessly crushed them with riot police using rubbler bullets while shutting down pro-opposition television stations. The subsequent elections were savaged by the OECD, whose monitors reported ballot box stuffing, vote counting and tabulation which did not match procedures, turnout in certain areas considerably higher than the national average, as well as courts which responded to complaints by stretching “the law beyond reasonable interpretation and without regard to its spirit in favour of the ruling party candidate”. Further, courts “did not fully and adequately consider and investigate a considerable number of complaints regarding irregularities, some of which were of a serious nature. A large number of complaints were also ruled inadmissible or dismissed on technical grounds.”

Yes, Georgia: home of the free.

To be fair to Mr Clougherty, he did mention that a small problem might be the looming presence of Russia. But he needent worry! He’ll be happy to know that things will only get better when Putin sends the T90s into Tbilisi:  Russia has flat taxes, too — and set at an even more libertarian 13%.

Happy days!

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Categories [ Economics and Finance, International Affairs ]

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