Quotations

“It is the perversity of the Tory party to want to get us out of the European Union when, of course, we’re much more than ever unlikely to be able to look after ourselves as an independent state because of the quality of our political system. The people who want to get us out are obviously of an undesirable kind. That the future should depend on Farage is part of the sickness. The real horror is for him to have any influence at all.” Peregrine Worsthorne quoted in the New Statesman in 2016. His friend Auberon Waugh supported the UK  belonging to the EEC and EU for the same reason.

Auberon Waugh was appalled when he went up to Oxford, he recalled, “by how few public schoolboys there were, appalled by the number of earnest, working-class youths whose humourless faces betokened young men on the make.”

"The greatest damage to the Western liberal democracies may be the utter discrediting of their claim to be opponents of the mass killing of civilians in wartime. For over a year, they have stood by while mass graves are filled first in Gaza and now Lebanon.

"....Whatever Sinwar may have thought he was doing, he precipitated a course of events – thanks to the merciless communal punishment of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Israel – which is sending a wave of hatred through the region, capsizing for decades any bid for compromise and reconciliation." Patrick Cockburn last Friday in the Indy

"A Western diplomat recently told me that the only way to stop the war is to have the players who forced President Biden off the Democratic ticket in July repeat their feat by forcing Biden to stop Netanyahu." Trita Parsi, Responsible Statecraft, October 21 2024.

"I am not arguing that Iran does not cause any trouble in the Middle East but the country that is principally responsible for the trouble in the Middle East is not Iran. It is Israel." John Mearsheimer in this talk.

"The United States supports Israel, almost no matter what it does. It’s unconditional support. It’s truly remarkable. And all sorts of people have said that there is no equivalent relationship between any two countries in recorded history." John Mearsheimer in this interview.

"Oct. 23 marks the anniversary of Hungary's 1956 uprising against Russian occupiers. I just finished Scott Anderson's 2020 book "The Quiet Americans." The story has been told often, but Anderson tells it well. Washington incited the rebellion and then left the Hungarians to be crushed by Russian tanks. Thousands died and 200,000 fled to the West. A shameful episode in American history: We sacrificed the Hungarians the better to wag our fingers at the beastly Russians." David Goldman