[NON BLOG] Several More Uchronias

Some items that I forgot to mention from yesterday's gathering:

• The potential for Trudeau, following a sudden conversion, to pioneer neoliberal/Thatcherite thought in mid-1970s Canada.


• pauldrye referred to John Keegan's argument that the conquest of Greece and the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great and the hillpeople of Macedonia would be an achievement roughly comparable to that of the Scots conquering Europe to the Elbe. That is a difficult challenge. It does seem quite possible, though, to either advance Scottish crossbow technology or retard English crossbow technology in order to all Scotland a victory over England.


• schizmatic suggested that a Europe where the Huguenots successfully took over France might be a very dour and reactionary Europe indeed. He raised the spectre of a Calvinist-run Western Christendom meeting a Wahhabi-run dar al-Islam, constituting two mutually genocidal realms united by, among other things, a common death penalty for the possession of musical instruments.

[BRIEF NOTE] Some News Items of Note

• The Iraqi government wants to arrest Ahmed Chalabi and his nephew for high crimes. It's interesting how quickly he has gone from a position of unchallenged prestige with full American support; but then, it's more interesting how he got to that point in the first place.


• Just a thousand kilometers to the west, Israel wants to keep the Maaleh Adumim settlement, in order to bolster a declining Jewish majority in Jerusalem. That retaining the community would neatly bifurcate the West Bank apparently doesn't matter. What I wrote back in June seems still more appropriate now.


• Monica Bellucci criticizes the Italian government and the Catholic Church for their reactionary attitudes towards fertility treatment and reproductive technology. And how.


• The separatists of Québec might have the ethnic vote now.

[BRIEF NOTE] Thoughts on the State

Yesterday, discussion was given to the topic of anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the role of the state in these two related ideological complexes. I've recently posted briefly on this, in this post referring to Abiola Lapite's criticism of the situation as fundamentally unstable. The discussion was continued by ladyfelicity over at her livejournal.

creases, in commenting to the post on my livejournal, made four comments that I'd like to specifically address.

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All social structures need to be governed by rules. In the absence of a state, traditional customs apply; in the presence of a state, legalistic structures apply. Without a state, customary traditions--family ties, religious structures, neighbourhood organizations--will be left to take over. I still have no idea what will keep them from aggregating into new states anyway. Leave that aside.

The major problem with anarchist visions of a stateless future is that non-state entities in Europe have a very bad record in regards to the defense of the rights of their constituents. The Scottish clans not only failed to resist the extension of Scottish and later British state power into the Highlands, but they were willing to turn upon one another, the most notorious example being the Glencoe massacre. Iceland was absorbed into the Norwegian polity just four centuries after the first settlement, weakened by incessant internal feuding that, at one point, reduced the survivors to eating their sheepskin manuscripts. The Basque fueros not only failed to persist on their own merits, but helped lay the prerequisites for an exclusionary and illiberal definition of Basque nationalism and identity that is only now being superseded. The Swiss cantons, despite their prosperity, are quite closed bodies, excluding immigrants even unto the third generation. In North America, local communities have too frequently been very exclusionary and hostile towards unpopular minorities--the very need for a civil rights movement in the United States, complete with intervention from the supralocal level, speaks volumes about the serious issues with unchecked local governments.

In the end, the elimination of the state would. Consider what happened to England after the Norman Conquest. The Normans came in, with their superior force, destroyed or coopted the native factions which contined to resist after Hastings, ordered the composition of the Domesday Book in what must be the perfect demonstration of Foucault's ideals of the state as an unchecked regulatory body, and then proceeded to create an Anglo-Norman state without any opposition. Unless, somehow, people manage to prevent the idea of the state from being recreated, I suspect that the state would be quickly recreated, this time in as brutally and directly exploitative a manner as possible. (Remember what happened to the anarchists of Barcelona in the 1930s.) Anarcho-capitalism, at least in its relationship to the state, may well be as fundamentally unattainable as Marxism or Islamism, all three pointing towards a brilliant future that can be reached--but only if, ah if only if.