Stardate 20020908.1424

(On Screen): No language in history has ever had as rich a vocabulary as modern English. One of the biggest reasons why is that few languages in history have ever had less concern about borrowing words from other languages; we do it freely, almost eagerly. For those from other places who move to the US to learn English, the generally free and relatively unstructured syntax of the language, coupled with a lowered degree of redundancy (due to the lack of gendered articles and adjective endings) and the amazing variety of verb tenses we use and the general lack of regularity of English are a major problem. But what usually causes them the most grief is the sheer number of words in common use. I heard a statistic once, a factoid: disregarding technical use, normal German has about 120,000 words, and a typical speaker uses about 30,000 of them commonly. English has in excess of 600,000 words, and a normal speaker uses in excess of 150,000 of them. (I don't know if this is true.)

And yet, we still need more. I have encountered something for which I have no name. What term should I use to refer to someone whose viewpoints are so extreme that even the lunatic fringe can't see him from where they are standing? Short of resorting to insult, how do I describe someone who is so far outside the common view of the world that he's in danger of falling off the edge entirely?

I guess I'll have to create a word: hyperfringe.

I receive many mails from people asking me to come read what they've written; sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Today I received a message as follows:

Subject: European declaration of war on the United States

European declaration of war on the United States
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/warusa.html

That was it. It could, of course, have been nearly anything, but it was, at least, a bit more specific and intriguing than the more usual, "I have a blog; would you please come read it?" that I get several of per week.

So I looked at it. I puzzled. I became confused. I wondered, and then I wrote back:

I'm not sure if you're being serious or satirical with this.

He has now answered me, not with any direct answer, but with an additional URL. In the mean time, it seems I'm not the only object of Mr. Treanor's attentions. Charles Johnson received the first link in the mail, and also reports that he's received other letters from him, one of which demanded that the US remove the gravesites from Europe of all our soldiers who died fighting in European wars and are currently buried in military graveyards all over Europe. And at least one of my readers sent me the link to Treanor's main site, and she has not yet responded to my question about where she saw it.

The problem with extremist writings is that they approach self-parody, and it's often not easy to tell whether they are serious, or elaborate spoofs. By far the best parody site of that kind I know of is the Landover Baptist Church. The material there is superb, pushing the limit beautifully without crossing the line. They give away the game two ways. First, they have a store, and what they're selling there is far more likely to be of interest to apostates than to true believers. Second is that at the very bottom, in quite fine print, there's a link to a page where they print the mail they've gotten from people who have been taken in. For example, in the wake of an article condemning Wicca, there was a predictable rush of letters from Wiccans and supporters of religious diversity.

Of course, hoaxers like Landover Baptist, and the hyperfringe, are riding the same fine line between plausibility and total absurdity, but they're coming at it from opposite sides. It can be really hard to tell whether what you're looking at is sincere or a truly elaborate hoax.

I became intrigued, so I spent a couple of hours looking at his larger site and reading some of the rest of what he's posted. It soon became apparent that, hoax or not, we have something truly special going on here.

I still can't be sure, but the weight of evidence for me leans in favor of the hyperfringe. I really wanted to believe that it was a hoax, if for no other reason than because it would be difficult to conceive that anyone could actually believe the kind of thing posted here. And though there is more than a passing overlap between the views espoused on Treanor's site and the overall agenda of Transnational Progressivism, Treanor goes well beyond that and I think that even most leftists supporting TP would disavow any support for him. I also assume that his views are not remotely mainstream for Europeans. (I sure as hell hope not.) He's certainly not even remotely like any other Dutchman I've ever met, or gotten to know online.

Treanor is not an archetype of anything except for a demonstration of just how far off the edge it's possible for someone to be without being diagnosably schizophrenic. I am expressly not holding him up as somehow indicating anything about any other group or political movement. He's himself, and he's truly unique.

Or else I've been taken in by a monumentally skillful work of political satire, the troll to end all trolls, a piece of performance-art to change my mind about the worthlessness of that medium. But I don't think so, and from here on out I'm going to act on the assumption that Treanor is sincere.

Before even approaching the original document whose link he mailed me, a more general review of his site and the politics expressed there would be instructive. His political leanings can't easily be summarized, but if one needs labels, about the best you could do would be: fascistic anarchist. Which seems a contradiction in terms, but much of what Treanor writes approaches the incomprehensible.

Treanor writes an article titled, "Don't work hard!". Of all the articles on his site, this is the one which furthest crosses the line from hyperfringe to self-parody, and it is the one which makes me the most uneasy about my assumption of sincerity. But I've chosen that position and I shall forge ahead: if one must take the hook, one should also take the line and the sinker to get one's money's worth.

Treanor contends that when we in Europe and the US work hard in our employment, we act unethically. By so doing, we make our nations commercially strong, and thus harm people in the less developed countries. "When neoliberal politicians, such as Tony Blair, call for a strong and competitive economy, they are calling on you to crush the economy of the poorest countries and regions." (I should probably point out that "liberal" has a specific meaning in Treanor's writings; more about that later.) He presents six bullet items:

1. Don't work hard. Try to reduce your productivity.

2. Don't work long hours. Reduce your working week to the minimum necessary. A new media software developer, for instance, earns enough to live comfortably on 10 hours work per week.

3. If you work in 'industry' (i.e. production of transportable goods), ask your employer to relocate the activities to a poor country. Even with half the present production, EU countries will still be rich.

4. If the employer refuses, make high wage demands. That is the quickest way to undermine competitiveness, and force relocation of employment. High wage demands are the best form of development aid.

5. Inform potential foreign investors of your high wage demands. Ask them not to invest in your country, but in a poor country.

6. Best of all would be, to abolish the present world order, in which rich and powerful economies compete with poor and weak economies. But that would mean the end of 200 years of market liberalism - and that is unlikely to happen in the short term.

The reason this makes me uncomfortable about my assumption that he is hyperfringe is because it's difficult to see how anyone could actually advocate, and be expected to be taken seriously doing so, that others should demand that the factories in which they work be closed and moved overseas, laying off everyone who works there.

Treanor's writings show a strong streak of belief in redistribution, and a firm dedication to equality of result, especially worldwide.

To Treanor, "liberalism" is wrong. It's even unethical. He is using the term in a way which approximates its old more general meaning, as it is used in the phrase "liberal democracy", rather than in its more modern usage, as in the phrase "bleeding heart liberal" or "Berkeley liberal". (The two meanings are actually nearly contradictory, in fact.) As a general principle, he himself describes liberalism as the process of increasing the ability of individuals to make their own decisions within society rather than subordinating themselves to larger structures, either willingly or unwillingly. But as seems to be the case with much of his writing, he begins with a statement with which I agree and then proceeds to build a structure on top of it that I find totally unrecognizable and damned near incomprehensible.

As such, I'm not sure I can do it justice. (I'm not sure I even want to try.) He argues that liberalism has to some extent failed to manifest its true ideal because it has made common cause with nationalism and coexists with it, whereas a full expression of liberalism would lead to destruction of all national identity, a desirable goal. To that end, he sees liberalism as having been corrupted by elements of conservatism, because it has ceased to be radical, ceased to be revolutionary. The principles of liberalism (freedom for the individual) and conservatism (maintenance of the existing order) have merged. As liberalism has attained control over large areas, it has become conservative to maintain its own zone of control. And the worst aspect of liberalism as it now stands is its potential for making the world uniform because liberalism by its nature is evangelistic. Or at least that's what I think he's saying.

He writes an article about how the Internet as it currently stands is the greatest weapon of classic liberalism. In that he's right; it is. Those of us who believe in classic liberalism agree, and we're pushing it as hard as we can and using it for that purpose. Treanor thinks this is evil. He also sees the Internet and its supporters as actually being something of a political movement, which he labels "Net-ism".

Net-ism is wrong because it is coercively expansionist. There is no inherent or inevitable technical or historical trend to a single communication network. On the contrary: never before in history, have so many separate networks been technically possible. Linking all networks together is a conscious choice by some people, a choice then imposed on others. The logic is identical to that of colonial governments, which forced peasants into the agricultural market, by imposing cash taxes. (To pay the tax, the peasants had to sell cash crops such as sugar). This logic says in effect: 'no one is free to stay outside the free market'. Today, not just governments, but business, social movements, intellectuals and artists, all want to impose the Net. This broad movement is obviously more than profit-seeking (and a non-profit Net would also be wrong). It is an ideological movement seeking ideological imposition. That imposition itself, the universalism, the expansionism, their involuntary nature, the basic unfreedom to exit - that is what makes liberal structures wrong. That applies to the free market, and it applies inherently to the Internet.

The basic model for the Net is taken from classic liberalism: it is an electronic 'laissez-faire, laissez-aller' free market. Activists in the US quote explicitly from the Anglo-American liberal tradition - see any issue of Wired, the most influential periodical for the new media world, www.hotwired.com. That tradition determines their attitude toward the state: they want a night-watchman state in electronic form, minimally regulated. (And classic problems of liberal societies, such as the conflict between sexual morality and 'sex as product' have appeared again in cyberspace). This entire model is ethically untenable. The Net affects others, beyond its users, so the users may not make the rules themselves. No internal regulation (or lack of it) can be justified a priori, as a substitute for external regulation. Internet users cannot decide to exclude the state (or anyone else) as regulator, just because they do not like that regulation. There are other people and other issues to consider, not just the Internet users themselves.

It is useful at this point to summarise the characteristics and goals of liberalism: it seeks to (a) maximise interaction; (b) to maximise the number of those interacting; (c) to maximise the number affected by each transaction; and (d) to maximise the zone where interaction takes place. By creating chains of interactions, it transmits cause and effect - it collectivises action. A concrete example: the ethics of global distribution of wealth and income. You (as an individual) cannot correct global inequalities, by buying one pack of coffee - not even if you check every purchase for trade inequalities. You can not (for instance) improve the condition of the rural poor in Ethiopia, by individual purchasing strategies. You have no individual control over the economy you live in, and therefore no individual control of your life. Similarly, you have no individual control over the Internet, and can therefore take no moral decisions concerning it. This is what makes liberalism and its structure unethical: they destroy the moral autonomy of the subject. If the Net can be proved liberal, it can be proved unethical.

I quote at length because no fragment can do this justice. It begins with a false statement, includes a few questionable axioms, and proceeds to a totally wrong conclusion.

The false statement is that there is no trend towards the creation of a single network. That's exactly wrong; he ignores the mechanism of network effect. Despite the name, and despite the fact that most networks are subject to network effect, it is not an inherent property of networks. What it means is that for some kinds of products or decisions, the value of certain choices for you individually is influenced by the number of other people who have made that same choice.

A language is a means of communication, and the extent to which a given language is useful to you can be influenced by many different factors. (If you want to read the Iliad in its original form, you must be fluent in classical Greek.) But for most people the strongest contributor to the value of any given language is the number of other people who speak it, and the amount and kind and value of material published in it. If you speak Ukrainian, you're far less likely to find a fellow speaker in any given random city of the world than you are if you speak French, and with English you maximize your chances. English is a "second language" for more people on Earth than any other, and it is the nature of network effect that it is self-reinforcing, for every person influenced by it increases its value to the next person facing the choice.

If there's a phone system, and if there are only two phones on it and you've got one, then it is of minimal use to you because you can only use it to talk to the other guy who's got a phone. Add a thousand more subscribers, and it's a lot more valuable to you. Make it nearly universal and it becomes essential. (And then let telemarketers start to abuse it and it becomes a pain in the ass.)

So it is with computer networks. Back in the day, there was only one: ARPANET. Then there was a period where there were several which were disjoint, run by separate companies each of whom built their own infrastructure. Some were regional; some were national; some were overseas. Some belonged to governments, and many were private. The entire point of a computer network was to permit subscribers to transmit information to each other, and the value of a given network was not drive by the technology it used as much as by who else was on it. Eventually, a couple of those companies decided that by putting in a gateway between their networks, both could be made more valuable than any of the others. Soon you got more and more such gateways, and eventually everyone was gatewayed and you could network from anyone to anyone else.

The Internet wasn't planned. It just happened. It wasn't the result of any formal decision by any single centralized cabal; it was caused by the inevitable result of a series of individual decisions made in a vacuum, motivated by network effect. The Internet existed before that word did; the word was created to describe the fact that every major commercial network had now connected together.

He argues in favor of several disjoint networks, but each such network would be far less valuable to its subscribers precisely because they would have limited access to material not on that network. It is no longer commercially possible for any network to not be gatewayed into the Internet, unless it's a network which is proprietary and for which being disjoint from the Internet is actually considered an advantage (because of the requirements of security, for example). A good example of that is the networking that banks use with each other to transmit electronic monetary transactions to each other; the last thing they need is a million happy hackers with direct access.

Treanor's problem with this is that he wants to control access to information. He sees the Internet as being "imposed" on some because the Internet is beyond the ability of individual nations and political organizations to filter, and he opposes the Internet because he sees it as a great leveler, a way of forcing the world to become liberal, a way to spread liberal democracy and capitalism. By his lights, that's unethical.

And through a sequence of turns and switchbacks that lost me early, he concludes that the problem with global liberalism is that it prevents individuals from seizing the property of other individuals against their will in order to give it to the poor. As such, those who would like to do the seizing are not free, since they don't have the ability to perform seizure. Liberalism has instead made property rights paramount over seizure-and-redistributing rights, and obviously seizure-and-redistribution should come first. And the Internet helped (somehow).

Just a survey of the titles on his page suggests how hyperfringe his beliefs are: Why democracy is wrong, I renounce my human rights, and so on.

But before we get to the original article that he sent me, there was one other I wanted to talk about and to provide some idea of the basis for it. He has written what he thinks should be the Constitution for Europe. What's odd about it is all the things that are lacking. There's no explanation of what kind of legislative body there should be, nor how courts should be formed, nor of whether and what kind of executive there should be. There's no mention of taxation authority. There's no description of individual rights. There's no delineation of citizenship. His proposed Constitution is a charter for anarchy, which destroys the old but proposes nothing new to replace it.

It mainly consists of a long sequences of ideas and principles which will go up against the wall come the revolution: this will be abolished; that will be abolished. There is no mention, of course, of just how it would be that you would abolish things like "ethnic identity". Would it be a prison offense to say, "I'm Irish"?

Of all the odd statements in here, easily the most strange one is this:

The authority of the state derives from its goals.

That goes totally contrary to my political belief, which is that the authority of a state derives from a mandate granted by those who are part of it. This statement turns out to be the key to understanding Treanor's fundamental politics: he doesn't see states as being permanent entities, nor as being ones associated with physical locations.

And indeed he sees the goals of a state as justifying its existence. We should be permitted to do things because what we're trying to do is good, even if no one else likes what we're trying to do. We should be permitted to do it to them, even if they don't want us to.

As best I can determine, Treanor believes that a state should be sort of like a political party. They form spontaneously any time that someone wants to form them, they are motivated by some political goal, and when that happens they don't necessarily have either a location or a population. Instead of voting, people choose which state they will be part of, and the power of a state is then based on how many people at any given time agree with its program. As they become larger and more influential, they will (somehow) spontaneously gain a location, and supporters will then move to where they are. In order for this to work it must be worldwide, and so Treanor believes in tearing down all national borders and removing all controls on population migration, permitting anyone, anywhere in the world, to move anywhere else that they wish, any time they want.

This kind of idea about the meaning of a political state is itself quite a foreign point of view, but he then goes further. Within the context of any given state, democracy is dangerous. It's not clear exactly why it is that he feels there should, or even can be, a set of metarules which apply to all these nations which spontaneously spring up everywhere all the time, but he seems to. Somehow or other they're autonomous, but not totally autonomous.

Some of those metarules are particularly bizarre. One of the problems he sees with democracy is that the franchise is too wide, and he wants to limit those who would be permitted to vote. To begin with:

Just in passing, he claims that this would exclude no more than 5% of existing European voters. If one accepts the value of one's home as part of one's personal wealth, I think you'd find that a substantial number of Europeans would be found to have personal wealth in excess of a hundred thousand Euros. I suspect it would exceed half, and it would be disproportionately concentrated among those who are older and who have been accumulating investments over their lives in preparation for retirement.

Actually, though, if Treanor is permitted to implement his political program, it's unlikely that many would exceed his limits. That's because Treanor wants to seize anyone's personal wealth in excess of certain limits (to distribute to the poor) and wants everyone to work less, and earn less. As such, he may well be right about that 5% number after all in the newly-impoverished Europe which would result. It may even be less than 5%.

Proceeding onward, he then proposes banning all "conservative" organizations, or any political movement based on religion. There's no mention of how that would be evaluated, nor of who would do the evaluating, nor of how it would be enforced. He also proposes that a breathtaking list of items not be subject to democratic approval at all:

What with all this spontaneous creation of nations, popping up all the time, and with people being able to choose which nation they're part of, nonetheless they're all going to be subject to severe taxation by something which is going to use the power of taxation for the specific and deliberate purpose of redistributing wealth, within society itself and from the rich nations to the poor ones. Evidently the wealthy can't opt out of this by forming their own anti-tax nation.

What's never fully explained is who is doing all this. If nations are all destroyed, if the new concept of a nation is more like a political party, and if they're not permitted to operate in these areas, then who is actually doing all this stuff? What organization is it? Where does it's mandate come from? What areas does it control? Are there any limits at all on its powers? There's really only one answer: it's a world-wide authoritarian meta-state, a benign non-racist dictatorship. It controls the process of state formation; it imposes those taxes used for redistribution of wealth; it dispenses the resulting money to those who need it, and because its authority is justified by its goals, it needs no other mandate.

That's why I find myself thinking of Treanor as both an anarchist and a fascist. He proposes to totally eradicate all existing national and international political structures (including the UN and NATO and WTO, in case you're curious) and to prevent anything similar from replacing them, and at the same time he proposes truly mammoth efforts by what can only be the most powerful and pervasive dictatorship in history to deal with things like a high-speed rail network in Europe, and major redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. If you look closely, you'll find several places where he speaks with approval of something referred to as a "non-traditional dictatorship".

Having thus gained at least a passing idea of the attitudes Paul Treanor presents on his web site (or purports to present as a form of political satire) we come to the original article.

On behalf of Europe, Treanor declares war on the United States.

It's true that this is beyond bizarre, but in some ways it isn't quite as strange as it looks, if that be possible. Remember that to Treanor, nations can pop up any time, even without controlling any territory or having any populace. I believe that the "Europe" making this declaration is Treanor's new-Europe, not any aspect of the existing one, so far as I can tell. It matters little that for the moment it has no population and controls no territory; those things will come due to the justice of its cause. For the moment, the only member of this Europe is Treanor himself, but that matters not, because the goals of his Europe grant it authority. (On the other hand, it doesn't grant it power, a distinction apparently lost on him.)

In every other way, this approaches insanity. Treanor declares that Europe must unite, arm, and defeat the US militarily because no other conceivable power on Earth is capable of doing so. And if that doesn't happen, then the consequences are too great to bear: Liberal democracy might come to dominate the world, spread by the US.

The United States is the only remaining superpower. It has sufficient military force at its disposal to eliminate resistance by any existing nation state to its hegemony. Only a European continental state can inflict a military defeat on the United States. No other non European coalition can do this. The United States is expansionist in nature. It has - again as a result of its specific origins - developed into a crusading state. The internal isolationist tradition in the United States is in long-term decline. It is very probable that the United States will attempt to create a world order which it finds minimally acceptable: a world order of liberal market-democratic nation states.

In other words - unless Europe stops the United States - no other economy than a free-market economy will exist on this planet, no form of state other than a nation state will exist on this planet, and no form of social life other than a liberal society. No political ideal or innovation, which can not secure majority support in a democracy, will ever again be realised. All humans will live in a liberal market democracy, no human will ever experience any other way of life, and no artefact or social form will exist, except those which are compatible with a a liberal market democracy. That does not necessarily mean, that there will be a McDonalds in every village. But the prospect of indefinite planetary stagnation is far worse anyway, and the possible preservation of cultural diversity can not justify it.

This is the primary moral justification for a war against the United States: to prevent it from fulfilling what probably is its historical destiny. Once a state such as the United States comes into existence - an expansionist ideological state with unipolar hegemony - it is inevitable in the long term, that it will remodel the world according to its ideology. Unless it is stopped, that is. There is no guarantee that its 'success' in this respect will ever be reversed.

(Highlighting mine.)

Europe must fight and defeat America to make the world safe for socialism and dictatorships. Otherwise all there will be is liberal democracies with capitalistic economic systems.

Europe must fight to defeat classical liberalism and all it stands for: free speech, rights of the individual, and participation in political decisions by the broadest possible range of citizens. Europe must fight to make the world safe for censorship and the suppression of politically dangerous speech (like, say, "conservatism" and "religion"). Otherwise eventually the American values embodied in the First Amendment will be adopted by everyone in the world.

Europe must fight democracy because democracy is inherently bad. Democracy doesn't permit those who are wise to force the right decisions on the masses who are stupid and foolish. No political ideal or innovation, which can not secure majority support in a democracy, will ever again be realised. Europe must fight to make the world safe for the rule of an enlightened elite, without interference from the unwise masses who would misuse their franchise to oppose what the elite has decided needs to be done.

Europe must fight capitalism because capitalism inevitably causes uneven distribution of wealth, and actively works to preserve it. Europe must fight to make the world safe for socialism and forced confiscation of excess wealth so that it can be redistributed to the poor.

Europe must unite, organize, build up militarily and then fight to prevent the evil represented by the US: the right of the individual to live with the least possible interference by governing authorities. Spread of this philosophy is the worst evil facing the world now, and soon it will become impossible to eradicate it.

Then he skips forward a few years. One has this image of the background music in the movie swelling, and a quick series of flashes of war scenes, and then the war is over and Europe wins and the music fades down again.

He proposes what must be done about the US once it's been defeated, and here's where he doesn't merely teeter over the edge, but takes a deliberate swan dive into the void:

One is to preserve the United States, with its values, but ensure it can not impose them on others - a strategy of containment and demilitarisation. The second option is to break up the United States, in such a way that it can not easily be replicated, even if its territorial integrity is restored. It would however be futile to try to re-make the United States as a 'European' entity a possible third option. History has made the United States distinct from, and hostile to, Europe. It is no longer possible to go back to the beginning, and start again with a non-hostile version.

He's got that right, at least. Ain't no one gonna remake the US in Europe's image. If Europe could somehow defeat the Navy and cross the Atlantic, and then fight against the Air Force and Army and Marines and beat all of them, they still have the problem of tens of millions of American civilians who would spontaneously form "well armed militias" and would use pistols and hunting rifles (and a lot of other interesting things) to resist any attempt at foreign occupation. There are legitimate reasons why no one has even considered an invasion of the US for the last 185 years.

Before Treanor starts worrying about how he's going to divide the US into a series of smaller and less dangerous nations, or otherwise make it cease to be a danger to the world, I recommend that he first work out just how he's actually going to get Europe to unite, and what Europe would have to do to actually defeat the US militarily, not to mention occupy it afterwards. And he'd do well to include in those plans some consideration about how Europe would rule the US when all of the major cities in Europe have been transformed into glowing radioactive craters.

Perhaps a nuclear disarmament treaty would help.