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The story is here.
I wonder if the Ukrainians blew up the North Stream pipeline. Fiona Hill said it was possible and that it wasn't the Americans or else their responsibility would have leaked out. In fact a source did tell Seymour Hersch that the Americans did it. On the one hand it's deeply shocking that the story has been suppressed - and censored on Facebook! - but on the other hand I don't think it's true. A clever man who knows Russia well and who is strongly pro-Ukraine read Oliver Alexander's rebuttal and was not impressed but it seemed persuasive to me.
By the way, at the best Christmas party of my life in Bodrum in 2020, I was with an eclectic bunch of people including a Venezuelan (with a Slavic name) who lived in Minsk. He said he couldn't understand what the protestors were unhappy about. 'Everything works fine in Minsk!'
Owen Matthews in the Spectator makes a very important point I hadn't heard before and which I'm sure is true.
"It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.
"To Putin and his inner circle of ex-KGB colleagues – notably Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service head Aleksandr Bortnikov – the Minsk protests were, like the Maidan revolution that brought down a pro-Moscow leader in Kyiv in 2014, entirely directed and produced by Washington. Lukashenko narrowly survived the 2020 revolt, aided by lots of Russian brute force and only after arresting tens of thousands of protestors who were systematically beaten, raped and tortured. But the chain of events that led Putin to invade Ukraine was directly triggered by fear that supposedly western-backed people-power protests that had so nearly toppled Lukashenko could be repeated in Moscow."
Literary historian George Watson cited an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and commented that "entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution against the bourgeoisie, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." One book review criticized this interpretation, maintaining that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is ... at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." Talking about Engels' 1849 article, historian Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide." Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book On Lenin and Leninism. My source for all this is Wikipedia.
Romanians were certainly one nation Engels considered unfit, as Larry Watts explains in his 'With Friends Like These'.A.E. Housman: “I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.”
Derek Turner: "After a short and frantic storm, the sun has come back out, and cherry blossom lies in deep pink and white drifts like slain chivalry.""‘Russia,’ the Russian said, ‘must be isolated. Utterly walled off. Let the world forget Russia.’ There was no murmur of protest, so he continued: ‘The state must be declared rogue, a terrorist organisation. You don’t deal with it. Because when Putin falls, and he will, the new regime will be the same as the old one, with another figurehead.’
"Russia missed its chance to change in the 1990s and what the Estonian MP called the ‘Chekist state’ would rule Russia forever; the people are too miserable, poor and ill-educated to protest."
"... it has to be said that royal births, weddings and deaths are probably the one time most contemporary Britons encounter religion."
"It [the Gold State Coach] may be traditional, and it may look impressive in an antiquated, grotesquely ostentatious, fountains-of-gold-leaf-kind of a way. But by all accounts it is monstrously uncomfortable for its
It's a classless, feminist multicultural coronation. How does Welby have such a classless voice? He went to Eton. I want belted earls and dukes in ermine.
The King says ahmen. I say aymen. But he is the King so is therefore right. Perhaps it's right for Protestants.
'Perhaps the most impressive sight I came upon was when I emerged from the tube station at Piccadilly Circus. I found a little table with a pile of newspapers and a box of coins and notes with nobody in attendance. You take your newspaper, toss in your coin or put in your 10-shilling note and take your change. I took a deep breath - this was a truly civilised people.
'After three months of London, I abandoned life in a bed-sitter in Swiss Cottage, for the university town of Cambridge where survival skills were not necessary, because the university, which catered for 10,000 gentlemen, and a few young ladies, assumed they did not have such menial skills and so ministered to their needs.
'That Britons are better off materially than they were is visible everywhere. But that quiet pride and self-confidence, that national cohesiveness that marked out the British people after victory in World War II, has dissipated. Many of my British contemporaries believed that the loss of empire caused that loss of elan. The mirage of Commonwealth unity beguiled the British people from facing up to the hard reality that Britain was no longer the heart of an empire.
'Looking back at those early years, I am amazed at my youthful innocence. I watched Britain at the beginning of its experiment with the welfare state; the Atlee government started to build a society that attempted to look after its citizens from cradle to grave. I was so impressed after the introduction of the National Health Service when I went to collect my pair of new glasses from my opticians in Cambridge to be told that no payment was due. All I had to do was to sign a form. What a civilised society, I thought to myself. The same thing happened at the dentist and the doctor.
'I did not understand what a cosseted life would do to the spirit of enterprise of a pe ople, diminishing their desire to achieve and succeed. I believed that wealth came naturally from wheat growing in the fields, orchards bearing fruit every summer, and factories turning out all that was needed to maintain a comfortable life.
'nly two decades later when I had to make an outdated entrepot economy feed a people did I realise we needed to create the wealth before we can share it. And to create wealth, high motivation and incentives are crucial to drive a people to achieve, to take risks for profit or there will be nothing to share.'
"After a private walk with the Queen he suggested to officials that she had delicately planted, without saying so explicitly, the idea of talking to Varadkar to solve the impasse.” From Sir Anthony Seldon's (disapproving) book on Boris Johnson.
'Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma “lights up the room”, but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.
'Of the 57 people who have held the highest office, Seldon suggests, Johnson was probably unique in that he came to it with “no sense of any fixed position. No religious faith, no political ideology”. His only discernible ambition, Seldon says, was that “like Roman emperors he wanted monuments in his name”.
'“To those many people who say, ‘Of course he believed in Brexit’, the evidence is absolutely clear,” Seldon says. “From the beginning it was striking that he believed that there was a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests, than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world, than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.”'
'“There has never been a prime minister who has been so weak to have ceded so much power to a figure like Cummings. Here was someone who went ahead and removed the chancellor of the exchequer, to replace them with someone more biddable. Who knocked out the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, appointing someone unable to assert himself. Who tried knocking out and appointing his own person as governor of the Bank of England, and as head of MI6. While all the time expressing contempt for Johnson.”'
Yes, true. This was not cabinet or parliamentary government. It was disgraceful.
I think Dominic Cummings, who has never been a Tory, was a very good thing, all the same.
Compare him with Theresa May's advisers who ruled her as much as he did Boris.
He blazed like a meteor and is gone and now the Conservatives are empty of ideas or talent.
Boundaries and borders are essential. They make freedom and civilisation possible.
