Rats or New Barbarians?

Posted by: Ian Angell

According to today’s newspapers, WPP, the advertising giant is considering a move to Eire in order to escape the UK’s increasingly complex and expensive tax regime. This comes fast on the heels of the non-dom tax fiasco. A decade ago I was warning that a time was soon approaching when companies would be jumping ship in large numbers to escape penal taxation. All taxation is theft, and if firms tire of being ripped off then they will simply move! When will British idiot socialist politicians realize they do not have the power to intimidate global corporations. Escaping ‘UK Inc.’, these companies are not rats leaving a sinking ship {although it is sinking}, they are simply taking on the role of New Barbarians.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from my book The New Barbarian Manifesto:

A spectre is haunting the Globe – the spectre of New Barbarians. All the Powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre of enlightened self-interest: churches and monarchies, capitalists and socialists, populists totalitarian nationalists, militarists, and spies for the state.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as self-interest by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of self-interest, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:
I. The New Barbarism is already acknowledged by all World Powers to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that New Barbarians should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of New Barbarians with a Manifesto.
{With apologies to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto.}

“We all have two choices: follow ‘new barbarians’ and advance to an uncertain future, or obey ‘old barbarians’ and their fundamentalist gospel of a false past. The new barbarians represent the winners in the new economic reality, leaving the losers to circle their wagons around old values and rituals, easy prey for the old barbarians. The outcome of their coming battle will be a world of three zones. The First World is the libertarian realm of new barbarians that supports the rights of the individual, not of the tribe. The Second World is an uneasy compromise between old barbarian ideologies and the modern world. Their mode of governance focuses exclusively on the rights of the collective. Might is right in the Third World, a place of terror and repression. Putting it brutally, the three worlds are an open society, a closed society and no society.

If trapped in the two lesser Worlds, you will be forced to conform to old barbarian rituals. Therefore, you must throw in your lot with the new barbarians. The alternative is to be left to the mercy of the masses, forced to accept the mind control of religious, political and ethnic bigotry – or suffer the consequences. The history of every human society has been of the tension between the individual and the collective, between the self and the tribe, between private aspirations and social norms. Today you are again faced with the three evils of religion, ethnicity and socialism. You must flee to the First World of ‘Smart Regions’, to prosper in a climate of individualism and of intellectual and financial freedom. Should such individuals fail to escape in large enough numbers, then a new Dark Age will engulf us all.

Welcome to the future. Welcome to the ‘Brave New World’ of The New Barbarian Manifesto.”