The Free View - weblog of a presidential candidate

Ottoman Empire interactive; a Brief History (and approximate future) of Iraq

Here is an interesting web page-- it features an interactive map of the Ottoman Empire, as it changed during the 6 centuries it was around.

Ottoman Empire 1300-1922

In the early 1920's after World War I, Iraq was carved from the remains of the Ottoman Empire by the British.

I think the following excerpt from HistoryChannel.com about how things went in post-invasion Iraq back then speaks for itself:

In World War I the British invaded Iraq in their war against the Ottoman Empire; Britain declared then that it intended to return to Iraq some control of its own affairs. Nationalist elements, impatient over delay in gaining independence, revolted in 1920 but were suppressed by the British. Late that year the Treaty of Sèvres established Iraq as a mandate of the League of Nations under British administration, and in 1921 the country was made a kingdom headed by Faisal I. With strong reluctance an elected Iraqi assembly agreed in 1924 to a treaty with Great Britain providing for the maintenance of British military bases and for a British right of veto over legislation. By 1926 an Iraqi parliament and administration were governing the country. The treaty of 1930 provided for a 25-year alliance with Britain. The British mandate was terminated in 1932, and Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations.

In 1933 the small Christian Assyrian community revolted, culminating in a governmental military crackdown and loss of life and setting a precedent for internal minority uprisings in Iraq. Meanwhile, the first oil concession had been granted in 1925, and in 1934 the export of oil began. Domestic politics were turbulent, with many factions contending for power. Late in 1936, the country experienced the first of seven military coups that were to take place in the next five years.

It doesn't get much better after that either. See for yourself.

Great Quotes

Ted Brown (no relation) is a hardcore California LP activist, and is currently running for Congress. He has a page of his favorite quotes on his site that is just fabulous. Fabulous enough that I wanted to share it with you.

Here you go.

I can't lay claim to a favorite quote from that page -- most of them are equally strong, for different reasons...but here's are two that I particularly like:

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

- Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

"Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus -- the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy but our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus -- and to trample under foot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and others."

- Simone Weil, 1945

Reading Assignments

I've got a number of articles that I've been wanting to highlight-- each good enough to deserve its own explorative entry. But then on the other hand, there's reality-- and in reality, I am not going to get around to giving each of these the special treatment they deserve. So instead I am going to just lay them all out here with a brief statement about what I found especially worthwhile in each of them. They all can be assumed to be preceded by the statement, "This is a particularly great article that I very much recommend reading."

Shane Stenfield of PoliticalNonviolence.org posted a dispatch at Bureaucrash a long time ago about his experience being a co-presenter at a College Freedom Tour stop. What makes it great is how he explains the advantages of using economic rather than political power to affect change. He has a cool way of doing it, and he describes how he took the audience through an interactive demonstration to make his point. While I've long touted the benefits of persuasive market activism over coercive political activism, Shane showed me a different way to approach selling it. Check it out here.

In this column by Radley Balko (titled "Bush Pursues Big-Gov Nanny State"), Balko takes President Bush to task for reducing freedom by expanding government, at home and abroad.

James Bovard does a tremendous service with his efforts to document the tremendous overreach of the government, especially when it comes to civil liberties. In a recent article for Reason Online, he bares the soul of the Transportation Security Administration. "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." That's the name of the article-- it was taken from the motto that's posted at the TSA's air marshal center. Wait until you hear how some air marshals decided to live out that motto.

"How to Lose Your Job in Talk Radio" is an article by conservative talk show host Charles Goyette. The subtitle of it is "Clear Channel gags an anti-war conservative". That tells you in a nutshell what the article's focus is. But you should still read it, if just to hear the story in Goyette's own words.

Jacob Lyles, a columnist for Wake Forest University's school paper, wrote a superb column about George Bush called "No Longer a Conservative". It contains this gem:

Big national goals are never easy on the taxpayer. For every national goal accomplished, a hundred private goals lay in ashes to fund it. For every hunk of metal the government puts on Mars, a working mother does not buy school supplies for her daughter, a middle-class family goes without a family car and a billionaire cannot open a new factory.

and this similar gem:

Bush's State of the Union address promises to push forward the era of big government that started under his rule. He is determined to strip people of the ability to solve the problems dearest to them in order that he may solve ones that put him on the pages of history.

I've also got some sites to highlight, but I'll put them in another entry.

Libertarian Movies

Here's a list of Films on Liberty and the State, with mini-reviews for each, from Stephen W. Carson at Mises.org.

The list is long and the reviews are concise and effective. Non-libertarians might be thrown off a little by all the references to Austrians and Murray Rothbard. Austrian Economics is a school of economic thought which is largely held to be the backbone of libertarian economic theory. I must confess to not being very well-read in terms of the Austrian School's big names -- Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. This makes me a bit of an anomaly among hardcore libertarians. The stereotypical libertarian is an economics geek who likes guns. I'm more from the individualist/hippie side of the movement, I guess. It's probably the Ayn Rand influence that kept me from growing up to be a full-on left-liberal. Ayn Rand is sort of Austrian Economics for the Masses. She novelized it, and Americanized it. So without knowing it, I was schooled in Austrian economics when I was 15, reading Atlas Shrugged.

Which explains why I haven't felt a great need to dive into the vast sea of scholarly work on the subject of Austrian economics. When I do dabble in such readings, or when I hear folks refer to the works and conclusions of von Mises or Rothbard or Hayek, most of what I hear and read seems self-evident to me-- as though someone is explaining the inner workings of something I'm already familiar with. It all centers around a few basic premises and theories anyway-- then it's just a matter of trying out the premises, and comparing the theories with the real world.

They are a pretty close match.

But I didn't mean to get into economics class mode, which is what I'm on the brink of doing (the above sentence is a truncated version of what was about to become an extended rant.) I was just trying to point you to this cool page of freedom-oriented movies. They all sound pretty good to me.

The list is far from comprehensive -- there are a zillion more suggestions on this Reader's Suggestions page at MissLiberty.com. (My "review" of the wacky Sylvester Stallone/Michael Caine movie "Victory" is on that page somewhere.) And of course there's the Miss Liberty's Guide to Film and Video, from Jon Osborne (creator of MissLiberty.com, and proprietor of the weekly freedom-based TV guide.

Cuddly TIA Two

You may have heard that Total Information Awareness has been re-named Terrorism Information Awareness, so it's not a scary Big Brother project anymore. (Phew!) They got rid of that spooky eyeball-on-the-world logo a while ago, and now they've decided on a less scary name, so civil libertarians all around the world can breath a sigh of relief.

If my sarcasm isn't clear enough, maybe Mark Fiore's update to his brilliant first TIA animation will suffice. His Flash animations are consistently some of the cleverest political satire around, and I think this is the funniest one I've seen so far.

TIA Two (Cuddly!)