I find it bizarre that there’s been even so much as muffled or murmured comment, even by the BBC itself, on the findings of the most recent BBC World Service poll. Apparently, after questioning 22,000 people across 21 countries, they’ve found that most people accept the anthropogenic climate change theory, and that most people believe that the government should take drastic interventionist action to prevent climate change.

As bizarre as it is, I find it entirely believable that they did so. This is the BBC, after all, and they’ll make a big deal of anything that supports their political beliefs and objectives: that evil humanity is responsible for past and potential climate change, and that only the white knight of government can save us all from drowning under water levels raised by our own materialistic greed.

And they sell it so well, too. The press release of the poll is titled “All Countries Need to Take Major Steps on Climate Change: Global Poll“. By doing this, not only do they attribute expert status to off-the-cuff public opinion - which is a fallacy regularly committed of worshippers of the twin Gods That Failed - but they only attribute this as an after-thought: as if it doesn’t matter that it’s only a poll, so long as it agrees with the BBC editorial line.

Furthermore, their website describes the ‘news’ as “Humans ‘causing climate change’“. As above, this is a pathetic journalistic trick committed to pass op-ed as fact. As an ex-reporter for the Sun, I know enough about dressing sewage up as something more appetising. I could just as easily title this post “BBC makes big deal out of ‘insignificant snivelling little’ poll that is statistically and political ‘irrelevant’“. Bad example, I know.  After all, what’s more truthful than that?

Whatever one’s opinion on climate change, it can hardly be seen to be just for the government to use its propaganda-broadcasting arm to lower journalistic standards by presenting its own editorial stance, on its own poll, as a newsworthy item of factual content. That is does so indicates how unfree discussion of this issue has been, and how most Western governments have decided to close this debate before it even opened.

It’s a rare day when we get much good news emanating from Afghanistan. We’ve had a continuation of a brutal twenty-year-long civil war, a reversion of large swathes of the countryside to the control of bandits, and little progress in finding the elusive Osama bin Laden, with what little goods news being interspersed with the odd assassination, terrorist attack, or earthquake.

However, today was most certainly a good news day. Afghanistan’s opium production is now at an all-time high. That’s right, Afghanistan now has more land under drug cultivation than Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have between them.

“Huh. That’s a… novel… spin. I’m sure the BBC wasn’t quite as positive.”

No, of course they weren’t. Besides the BBC being possibly the most incompetent media outlet in the world (this is what they do), it, along with all the other major players, buys into the statist consensus on drugs far too easily. The fact is that taking drugs affects oneself and oneself only, and is therefore one’s own choice. The state really has no right, never mind a responsibility, to tell the people what they can and can’t do to themselves.

So, let’s look at that BBC story again, in the context of drugs not being bad.

Opium production in Afghanistan has soared to record levels, with an increase on last year of more than a third…

If you replaced the word ‘opium’ with something nice and wholesome - like steel, maybe - you’d get a very nice boast indeed. Imagine it’s the 19th century, and all that matters to the British government is the steel production figures (or, imagine it’s the 19th century and all that matters to the British East Indian government is the opium production figures). Doesn’t that make for a good headline? If I ran a company that increased production by one-third, I’d be looking for a slice of those record bonuses I’ve been hearing about.

… Helmand province is now the biggest single drug-producing area in the world, surpassing whole countries such as Colombia.

Helmand is becoming a competently horizontally-integrated production centre, benefiting from mass economies of scale. What they need to do now is focus on the verticality, preferably looking to get some of the jobs refining the opium from the UK. Isn’t that just called offshoring?

Afghanistan now accounts for more than 93% of the world’s opiates.

OK, that part doesn’t sound good. That sounds like a monopoly to me, which could lead to artificially-raised prices. We’ll have to break up Afghanistan into little pieces to promote competition. Fortunately, I think the warlords have done that for us.

Despite billions of dollars of aid and tens of thousands of international troops, the report says 193,000 hectares of opium poppies are being grown in Afghanistan.

Who said foreign aid doesn’t achieve anything? At several hectares of poppies per soldier, that sounds like a bargain.

“The results are very bad, terrifyingly bad, because cultivation has increased by 17% to an historic level, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, “No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities.”

Thank you, Signor Costa, for that here is the crux. Does it matter if it’s illegal? What matters is if it’s immoral. Stalin devoted tens of millions of hectares of prime Siberian real estate to promoting rural development. It used mostly political dissidents as labour, but it was legal, so it was OK, right? So implies Signor Costa.

What we need to do is ask ourselves whether our resources are best deployed in Afghanistan fighting farmers, when they could be fighting terrorists. Worse than that, by hunting down farmers that engage in entirely moral business, we are turning them into terrorists by depriving them of their means of sustenance and survival. That’s why the Taliban has turned Helmand into a fortress, and that’s why British servicemen are dying on an increasingly regular basis. To quote the campaign of the man that presided over half of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, it’s the economy, stupid. And that’s why, if we want to win the War on Terror, we have to put an end to the War on Drugs.

The BBC Russian Service radio station, which has been designated one of the BBC’s top global priorities in the years ahead, has been ordered off the FM airwaves by the country’s regulators. The last of the Russian Service’s three local distribution partners, Bolshoye Radio, was ordered to remove the BBC from its programming or face being shut down itself.

This, by itself, is a gross abuse of state power. The Russian state has ordered the BBC out of business to prevent the propagation of foreign and free ideas that might prove dangerous to the neo-Soviet Kremlin. This abuse of state power is done under the pretext of defending local producers (itself an despicable act of protectionism), which makes it even harder to fathom.

But there’s another side to the argument, and one that hasn’t been lost on the Russians. In defending the removal of the BBC from its station’s programming, Bolshoye Radio spokesperson Igor Ermachenkov said:

Any media which is government-financed is propaganda. It’s a fact - it’s not negative.

Surprisingly enough, this Russkie gets it. The state has no role to play in the media - broadcast, printed, online, or otherwise - and that applies to state broadcasting as it does to state censorship. Two months ago, the BBC admitted that it’s institutionally biased: that it abuses its remit of ‘public-interest’ broadcasting to propagate the civil service’s left-wing ideas. And since the BBC extracts its revenue by taxing its rivals’ services, its bias is funded by what (in the economic short-term) amounts to monopoly power.

The sad thing is that both Russia and the United Kingdom fail to apply the principle of non-involvement with any consistency or morality, with any respect for the underlying reason for our opposition. It’s fashionable for everyone - left and right - to oppose Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical government, and, as it is fast becoming one of the most unfree countries this side of Zimbabwe, that criticism is justified. Just as justified is criticism of the BBC, which applies Putin’s principles with a smug smile on its face, confident that neither this country’s people nor government understand why it must be shut down, just as it has been in Russia.