A. J.P. Taylor

"He [Bismarck] only considered the interests of his own country - always the worst offense that a statesman can commit in the eyes of foreigners."

“Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.”

"Once men imagine a danger they soon turn it into a reality."

Quotations

"I am.” 

G.K. Chesterton's two word essay answering the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” 

"In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."

From a wonderfully fizzing article by philosopher John Gray that attacks everyone.

 "In Europe, including Britain, the chief beneficiaries of the eclipse of humanism are Islamism and ethnic nationalism. Woke is not a sustainable successor ideology. Hyper-liberalism is still deeply embedded in our ruling institutions; but for most of its followers it is a career strategy, and the institutions – universities, quangos and the like – are unlikely to survive coming fiscal crises intact. Suppressed in the Gulf States and other Muslim-majority countries, radical Islamist movements spell the end of the British experiment in multiculturalism and French republican laïcité. Just as globalisation was supposed to spread “democratic capitalism”, mass immigration was meant to result in conversion to liberal values. The opposite is happening. In a generation or so, if current trends persist, an Ottoman-style millet system – in which different religious communities are governed by their own laws – may coexist uneasily with nationalist governments. A Europe of equal freedom for every religion, under a rule of law that applied to all, would soon be a distant memory."

The future of Europe, Neagu Djuvara and Bernard Lewis said, is to be Muslim, part of the Maghreb. Not Russian or Chinese as Gray thinks is possible. 

De Gaulle, quoted today by Arnaud Bertrand

"No nation worthy of the name has friends—only interests." 

It reminds me of Bismarck's remark:

"The nation that copies another is lost."

My old China

"Because if you starve a blast furnace, there is no easy way to start it up again. Such things cost tens of millions of pounds. Quite why Jingye was planning this remains a mystery. The company never seems to talk to the media. It hasn’t explained its rationale. The most plausible theory is that it plans to relocate most of the operations in Scunthorpe to existing mills (and new ones) in China. Another more outlandish theory, not entirely dismissed by officials in Whitehall, is that it could be acting under orders from Beijing, who would welcome the demise of another leg of British industry. For the time being, though, no-one really knows." 

Quotations

 "The notion that democratic countries are peace loving because they enjoy strong support from populations whereas autocratic, authoritarian countries are necessarily warlike.... because they are fragile, do not enjoy support of the populations and so they tend to look for foreign wars to maintain their hold over the population. That's a very simple notion. Dead wrong of course but try to find people in the European political classes who would disagree with that. This is the whole European values story.... To bring them back to common sense is a vast, vast task." Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, talking to Glenn Diesen

From the blog of John Helmer, Australian correspondent in Moscow since the Soviet era

Several hours after Witkoff had left meeting with Putin, Trump implied that he is blaming the Russians for the failure of the talks so far, and is planning a new ultimatum. “Russia has to get moving”, Trump tweeted.  

Source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114319592702753512 

A well-informed source in Moscow says that Trump and his subordinates have been surprised by the Russian terms for ending the war. “The Russians have told Americans they will have Odessa and a land corridor to Moldova. They have offered ports on Dnieper River for access to the sea for the Ukrainians. There has been no demand about Nord Stream. Money is being discussed on the sidelines but not in the main talks. In the main room [in Riyadh on February 18] Lavrov and Ushakov brought no papers and asked Americans [Rubio and Waltz] to dust off the December 2021 treaty draft. The Russian positions shocked the Americans. They were told the Ukraine will be demilitarized and its forces will be turned into paramilitary and police. The Americans were also surprised how little Russians cared about Zelensky or his British and Europeans backers. The Americans were told there will be no Ukrainian paramilitary force east of the Dnieper – only police. A new Russian demand was tabled for autonomy of eight Ukrainian oblasts, with Kiev army forces removed. In general, the Russians propose turning the Ukraine into a genuinely federal structure with provisions that Banderites can never take power in Kiev and that the central forces will be limited in their capabilities, supplementing the police if and when Banderites take to the streets. The main purpose of any such force will be de-nazification and keeping it that way. There are demands also about the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.”

If they want Odessa the Russians must first capture it, obviously. I hope to God they don't.  

The Daily Telegraph today says 'experts' say Russia has no chance of gaining Ukrainian territory this summer. 

You have to read a long way to find out who the experts are. They are Ukrainians plus a neo-con think tank in the USA. 

British media are pure propaganda propagating misinformation that emanates from MI6 about Ukraine and Gaza. The Telegraph and Times are the worst culprits but all mainstream media are propagandia. It's the same in Romania and probably in most Nato countries, Hungary and Slovakia excepted.

The experts are not interested in the truth but in winning arguments and power. One expert Fiona Hill so misunderstands what is going on that she thinks the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a 'land grab' (why isn't Mongolia in danger if land is what Putin wants?) and that 'globalist' is 'an antisemitic trope'. 

I am not sure what to make of Helmer, who thinks the Skripals were set up by MI6 and thinks the CIA were behind the Moscow concert hall attack, for which Islamists were blamed, but at least he isn't an expert. 

His lifelong hostility to England and America makes him view things in interesting ways, rather as I hope my dislike of modernity, progress, groupthink and cant does. 

The war in Gaza 'serves mainly political and personal interests, not security interests'

Nearly 1,000 current and retired members of the Israel Air Force Reserve published a letter yesterday calling for the return of all hostages and an end to the fighting in Gaza.

They wrote: "Currently, the war serves mainly political and personal interests, not security interests. The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its declared goals and will lead to the deaths of the hostages, Israeli soldiers and innocent civilians, and to the attrition of the IDF reserve forces."

Unfortunately newspaper readers in Europe are often unaware that this fighting has never been about destroying Hamas, something which is impossible and which Netanyahu is not even trying to achieve. Yet it was common sense from the start.

The IDF Chief of Staff said that most of the signatories were not in the active reserve list but those that were would be dismissed if they did not retract. 25 signatories did so.

Netanyahu blames the letter on foreigners. I wonder whom he has in mind. Soros? Could be but probably it's a spontaneous plea for common sense and humanity.

Quotations

Quotations

Oliver Cromwell the Timelord

My readers will be pleased to know that one of the grandsons of John Tyler (10th U.S. President, 1841–45) is still alive, although his brother died a few years ago.

Here is an excerpt from an article Simon Jenkins wrote at the turn of the millennium headlined “Oliver the Timelord (An extraordinary memory reminds us of the ambiguities of time)".

A man of my acquaintance was addressed, when a child, on the subject of Oliver Cromwell. The speaker was a lady of 91. She told him sternly never to speak ill of the great man. She went on: "My husband's first wife's first husband knew Oliver Cromwell - and liked him well." It was an admonition my friend has not forgotten.

Quotations

'One of the many insane things about modern day America:
Tell me what someone thinks of vaccines - and I'll tell you with 95% predictive accuracy what he thinks of the war in Ukraine...'

Eric Krause today

John Mortimer said he was unusual in supporting hunting foxes and abortion but come to think of it why should people who think killing unborn babies is permissible think killing foxes should not be?

I am 5 or 6 removes from King Charles II

After writing that I am four removes from Napoleon (that don't impress me much) I did a few moments more research. 

I met Harold Macmillan, who links me to lots of people, including Thomas Hardy who knew and corresponded with Frederic Harrison. 

Probably there were a myriad other links between Macmillan and Harrison, but as Harrison's books were published by the family publishing firm Macmillan & Co I think it very likely that Harold Macmillan met Harrison himself. After all, he knew well other famous authors whom the family firm published, like Hardy, Kipling and Conrad.

In any case, Harrison died in 1923 and it is possible that in the 1980s I met someone else who met him.

Harrison went up to Oxford in 1848 where he met Martin Routh, who was then still President of Magdalen College, despite having been born in 1755. 

When Routh was a little boy he met an old lady who, as a girl, saw King Charles II walking his spaniels in Magdalen Grove. 

I, who this morning read the news about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, am either five or six removes from the King of England who hid in the royal oak tree with Henry Wilmot to avoid being found by the Parliamentarian soldiers below, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Had they seen him he would have been tried and executed, like his father in 1649.

McCarrick is dead. He was a part of a much bigger evil

Mr. (formerly Cardinal) Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick has died. 

His predatory sexual advances to seminarians were well known even in the 1980s, apparently, but he became one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church. 

Pope Francis was his protégé and cancelled the restrictions that Pope Benedict XVI had placed on Uncle Ted. 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote: Chaucer and Margaret Thatcher

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...

My favourite poet began his most famous work in the springtime of England, when we were devout Catholics. What would Chaucer think of us could he see us now, as I hope he can?

He'd certainly be pro-European as his England was half French, still essentially ruled by Norman French and indulgent of sexual sins except for men on men. 

I read in the early 1990s A.W. Ward's Life of Chaucer (1909) in the Macmillan Men of Letters series. Ward said that even though Chaucer's England was very different from ours the English were already very enterprising and good at business. 

I suddenly saw with much pain that I had been wrong about Mrs Thatcher. She was a conservative (In her time I had never thought she was) and trying to restore England.

I am one person away from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy, four from Napoleon

 

From 'The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-Maker: The Story of Britain Through Its Census, Since 1801' By Roger Hutchinson (2017)

I wrote before in this blog that Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery in 1837 and saying,

'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'

Good advice

 

Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

The Ukrainian forces are far closer to US high command than the Houthis are to Iran

I think, gentle reader, that you assumed the American forces are very closely involved in the Ukrainian war but this article from the NYT shows how closely. 

Fred Weir, veteran Canadian journalist in Moscow, shared it (to public) on Facebook today with these words. 

Oh great, this will really help to counter the Kremlin's mendacious claim that Russia is fighting a war in which Ukraine is just a proxy for the US and NATO efforts to crush Russia. Putin may have the Russian people totally bamboozled, thinking they're up against the united West, but fortunately we've got the NYT to investigate and reveal the Truth:

Lord Skidelsky explains the Ukrainian war very well

Please watch this short interview with one of our two or three best living historians. 

Key points:; Ukraine has not been defeated but done well; Russia expected to instal a subordinate government quickly; if Ukraine needs security guarantees so does Russia; if Russia is a threat to her neighbours why is she not a threat to her democratic neighbour Mongolia? (Because Mongolia is not going to join Nato?) 

We have a post-imperial reflex that uses the words 'we must' all the time - we must not allow the Chinese to mistreat the Uighurs for example - when we don't have the power to do anything about it! 

Jack Matlock: Kosovo gave Putin 'an almost perfect precedent' for Crimea

Jack Matlock was the penultimate US Ambassador to the USSR. In a very insightful and profound discussion published yesterday with Glenn Diesen, he compares the war against Serbia in 1999, in which Nato "killed over a thousand men", with the bloodless Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. 

"That gave Putin a precedent, an almost perfect precedent, for the taking of Crimea." 

He says the 2014 revolution in Kiev 'was actually a coup d'état'. People said this in 2014 and I did not see it, but yes it was a coup  in which the Americans' involvement was crucial.

How splendid the US old school diplomats were before, as Mr. Matlock says, the neo-cons 'took over the foreign policy of both our political parties' to justify heavy defence spending.

I think he is right that it was the military industrial complex wanting money that was to blame.

He says that "when we tried to spread democracy by military force or economic compulsion we failed and ended up losing a lot of our democracy at home".

'O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world.'
(As You Like It Act 2, Scene 3)

Dominic Cummings retweeted this

 

CBDC means "central bank digital currency", a digital currency issued by the European Central Bank on behalf of the European Union.

Margaret Thatcher could have ended John Major's premiership in 1995 and possibly aborted New Labour

Sir Julian Seymour, who has died aged 80, ran Margaret Thatcher's private office from 1991 until he retired in 2001. From his obituary in the Daily Telegraph:

When John Major, exasperated at the machinations of the Eurosceptic Right, called a leadership contest in 1995, Lady Thatcher was tempted to back John Redwood. Seymour told her that for a former Tory leader to publicly back a challenger to a sitting leader would be a step too far. “I told her I always thought JR a bit odd, and an impossible bet for PM at any time,” he recalled.

He got no reaction, “other than that look when you know either that she privately agreed or was thinking about it, but was never, ever to be drawn into agreeing out loud. In summary, heart will have said Redwood, head will have said No.”

John Major later revealed that had he won two fewer votes in that leadership election (only MPs could vote in that more civilised era) he would have resigned. 

Had Lady Thatcher backed him he would have won at least two fewer votes and history might have been different. 

Who would have been his successor? John Redwood, Michael Portillo, Kenneth Clark, Michael Heseltine?

Would Great Britain have been spared Tony Blair?

Acknowledgments Lakshmi Kapoor for the first three

"There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't."

John von Neumann, autodidact who pioneered the modern computer, operator theory, game theory, learned calculus and differential equations at age 6.

The neo-cons, who want the US to dominate every part of the world, have still not gone away.

From June 20, 2014, Stephen M. Walt, writing in Foreign Policy. 

"What, if anything, might reduce the neoconservative influence to its proper dimension (that is to say, almost nil)? I wish I knew, for if the past ten years haven’t discredited them, it’s not obvious what would. No doubt leaders in Moscow and Beijing derive great comfort from that fact: For what better way to ensure that the United States continues to lurch from crisis to crisis, and from quagmire to quagmire? Until our society gets better at listening to those who are consistently right instead of those who are reliably wrong, we will repeat the same mistakes and achieve the same dismal results. Not that the neoconservatives will care." 

More US war crimes

 'Rules of engagement that permit destroying an entire civilian apartment building to kill one alleged terrorist is part of Joe Biden’s legacy. It’s still a war crime though, and Waltz’s text is a confession.' Matt Duss, who was Bernie Sanders' foreign policy adviser.

'Obama and John Brennan drone-bombed wedding parties repeatedly, and even groups of people standing around, if they suspected that one "legitimate target" was in the vicinity. It's of course a war crime, and if anyone applied this logic to the US, they'd be branded "terrorists."' Glenn Greenwald

The US attack on the Houthis is a much bigger scandal than the group chat

The best way to stop the Houthis attacking shipping is to give them what they want, which is a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. 

Max Blumenthal calls the Houthis "the one force mounting one of the only principled humanitarian interventions in my lifetime". 

You know not to trust a news source when it refers to the Houthis as 'Iranian proxies'. They obviously are not. They are as Blumenthal says 'fiercely independent'.

I wonder if there are any Iranian proxies as opposed to Iranian allies. 

The mainstream media wants us to believe Russia, Iran and China are the threats to the West. 

In fact the West is the main threat to the West.

It seems from the discussions in a group on Signal, in which they added by mistake the editor of the Atlantic (I am not making this up), a man that hates Trump, that the purpose of the very high level committee that decided to attack Yemen was to protect shipping, not just Israeli shipping. 

They obviously do not read John Helmer's blog and do not know it was only Israeli shipping that the Houthis targeted, until the US and UK intervened against them when they not unreasonably targeted American and British ships too.

27 March footnote. Houthis are still firing missiles after 12 straight days of US airstrikes.

The Munich Agreement was a fatal mistake by Hitler

Years ago it seemed no-one was talking common sense. 

That was because I took my news from the mainstream media. 

Now thanks to the internet you can follow Jeffrey Sachs to understand what is happening and Christopher Caldwell and John Mearsheimer. My work here is almost done.

No incident ever resembles Munich 1938. In this short clip Professor Sachs points out that America has used analogies with Munich for 50 years for a series of things and, even if they were apt, which they never were, Hitler thought the Munich agreement had been a trap into which he fell. 

By disregarding his promise of no more territorial demands in Europe, when he invaded Czechia in March 1939, he exposed his hand and brought down disaster on his head.

Churchill said 'History will be kind to me because I intend to write it'. So he did and so it has been, but his view of the period between 1933 to 1939, as you would expect of the view of any politician talking about his record, is very partial and very misleading. 

It is a myth (Chamberlain as Vortigern to Churchill's King Arthur) which I learnt at 8 and it is a myth that everyone still believes. 

It's the foundational myth of the American empire, though it was not America but only Britain and France (Chamberlain  and Deladier) who, in historian Maurice Cowling's words, were 'crazy enough to go to war with Germany without having to'. 

The history of the Western world since 1945 is a meditation on the powerful legend of Munich and Hitler. 

Had Churchill died in 1941 he'd have died an eccentric failure. Had Franklin Roosevelt left office in 1939 after two terms as President of the United States he'd have been a failure too. The New Deal was a failure. Instead they have been transmuted.

It is worth playing fair with Russians or not playing at all (Bismarck)

Don't expect that once you take advantage of Russia's weakness, you will receive dividends forever. The Russians always came for their money. And when they come - do not rely on the Jesuit treaties you signed and which you hope will get you acquitted. They are not worth the paper they are written on. Therefore, it is worth playing fair with Russians or not playing at all. Otto von Bismarck 

Denmark, which controls Greenland, is not doing its job, it’s not being a good ally. If that means that we need to take more territorial interests in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do. Because he doesn't care about what the European scream at us. J.D. Vance two hours ago. I loved every word of his speech at Munich and his more recent thoughts on Europe committing suicide, but this is utterly appalling. This is the veil off and the America that has ruthlessly taken over the world seen clearly.

Quotations

Samuel Johnson did not worry about problems. He did not use the word "problem", for at that time that word was used specifically for mathematics - not about the concerns of his era.

Jorge Luis Borges

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

Otto von Bismarck


The first rule of politics is : never invade Afghanistan.


Harold Macmillan

Water

“You cannot see your reflection in boiling water. Similarly, you cannot see the truth in a state of anger. When the waters calm, clarity comes.” 

Is this from a film I never heard of called Kung Fu Panda?

"Calm the muddy water, 

It becomes clear." 

Tao Ti Ching

In Haaretz, the Israeli centre left newspaper, today

More from the article:

Donald Trump's attack on the Houthis

American journalist Dan Perry is perversely mistaken today.

Trump 2.0’s approach to domestic reform, trade and alliances has been reckless. Trump's tariffs disrupted global markets; his handling of Ukraine and Russia emboldened adversaries; and his treatment of allies left many questioning America’s commitment to global leadership. But in the Middle East he's made some right moves, understanding what Biden seemed to miss: Peace through strength is sometimes the only way. Such is the long-overdue assault on the criminal hashtagHouthis.

The Houthis are no more criminals than other actors in the drama, but then grave crimes are being committed by the other parties, including or especially the US. 

Many countries have deep states but not Israel, it seems

The EU is set to exclude the US, UK, and Turkish arms companies from its €150 billion defence fund if their respective countries don't sign agreements with Brussels. That is of course. 

Why did the UK not threaten to leave Nato as a bargaining chip during Brexit negotiations?

Because the UK is ruled by what Dominic Cummings calls the Blob and Messrs Trump and Vance consider is the transatlantic deep state (think William Hague).

Many countries have deep states. Romania (cancelled election) and the UK (Brexit struggle) are two obvious examples.

Some do not, such as Israel. Netanyahu is able to swat away, so far, the opposition of the courts, the generals and the secular Ashkenazi left-of-centre establishment that ruled the country after 1948 until Begin and the Likud (successors to the Irgun) took power.

Quotations

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy." Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan Experience two weeks ago

 

"While the Army has 108,000 personnel, since 2018 more than 155,000 illegal migrants – most of them young men from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran — have entered Britain on some 4,300 boats." Matt Goodwin on Saturday

 

 

With countries and marriages, some unions work, others don't

The anti-system, pro-EU party USR (Save Romania Union) is the anti-system party that young Romanians with degrees and the Western European media like. 

But to many Romanians the EU and the Nato seem the system from which Romania needs saving, so there is another sort of anti-system party, the so called sovereignists. 

Election Bureau: Opposition to Romania’s membership of the EU and NATO makes a candidate unfit to stand in the presidential election

After rejecting the candidacy of Calin Georgescu, who came first in the cancelled presidential election in November and stands at 40% in the polls, on Saturday Romania’s Central Election Bureau went on to reject the candidacy of a another right-wing "sovereignist" politician, Diana Sosoaca. The decision was upheld by the Constitutional Court (CCR).

According to the Associated Press:

The CCR argued that her public discourse, including opposition to Romania’s European Union and NATO memberships, made her unfit to uphold the constitutional obligations of the presidency.

Quotations

'If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.'

Nietzsche


'I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.'

Said recently

Russia is already menacing our skies, our water, our streets.

Sir Keir Starmer yesterday

Try seeing Ukraine as a second attempt by the people who brought you Iraq. Instead of ‘Fascist Saddam has WMD!!!’ you have ‘Nazi Putin’s going to invade Poland then march to Paris!!!’ 

Peter Hitchens 

I wrote this exactly one year ago to the day but did not post it - now Trump is making war on Lennonism at home and abroad

"The world has now been diminished completely. There is no variety anywhere. You go off to the Congo and in the forest will find an advertisement for Coca Cola."  

The explorer and writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger said this in an interview he gave in his nursing home in 2001, a couple of years before he died. 

This was why I always wanted to be in Eastern Europe before the end of Communism. I wanted another world. I sought a kind of ecstasy, ex stasis, standing outside myself. 

The Emperor Donald

I am not accusing Donald Trump of trying to make money out of the presidency (that's very much more the Clintons and Bidens). I am implying that he's a barbarian, when I say he reminds me of A.E. Housman's one great poem, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Oscar Wilde, child abuser

Wilde was a wonderful playwright and aphorist, but he should not be admired for cheating on his wife with rent boys (male prostitutes).  

He was probably also a paedophile, as Lord Robathan (as he now is) pointed out in the House of Commons in 1999:

'We should be careful about romanticising Oscar Wilde, as the placing of a statue of him in the Strand last year did. Clearly, he was persecuted by the father of his male friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, the Earl of Rosebery [he meant Marquess of Queensbury, of course]. He wrote some fine plays and was quite a good poet. However, those who are concerned about paedophilia and sex tourism should know that Oscar Wilde was a paedophile and a sex tourist--[Interruption.] Labour Members shake their heads. Let them read the biography--[Hon. Members: "We have."] I can quote from memory that Alfred and Oscar competed for Neapolitan boys in 1897. What is that if not paedophilia and sex tourism? Let us hear no more nonsense about Oscar Wilde being a martyr to homosexual equality.'

I recommend E.F. Knight's Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel (1880)

The book is here and for free.

One day last autumn I was sitting in my Temple chambers, wondering what I should do with myself in the Long Vacation, when I was aroused from my reverie by the entrance of my clerk...

And so begins for E. F. Knight the journey that led him to write 'Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel', which he published in 1880. A friend showed me a first edition of the book a couple of years ago. I loved the flavour of Oxford, Cambridge, public school and England at the zenith of her imperial self-confidence. In

Why do European governments want the war in Ukraine to continue? Genuine question.

Old fashioned left-wingers are more insightful than "conservatives" when it comes to foreign policy.

I miss the anti-war left (the formerly pacifist German Greens are now the most warlike party in Germany, etc), yet its heart is still beating. 

Here is left-wing feminist Almut Rochowanski, in Responsible Statecraft today, on the mood in the chanceries of Europe 

"A closer look at Europe also shows that a new bellicism has swept up the continent’s elites and gone into cataclysmic overdrive in recent weeks. Nowhere has this new martiality been more pronounced than in Germany, where political leaders and a new crop of “military experts” egg each other on.

"The latter have been abysmally wrong in their predictions of Ukraine’s certain victory and Russia’s imminent collapse again and again, but nevertheless dominate the country’s much-watched primetime debate shows. Last week, Germans were told that the coming summer will be the last one we will be at peace, because Russia will, under cover of war games in Belarus, invade NATO territory."

China's Belt and Road initiative does huge good

At last someone says the obvious: Jeffrey Sachs in this short clip says China's Belt & Road initiative does huge good.

I have been waiting for one person in the newspapers to say this, even in a subordinate clause of a sentence, for years without success. 

“If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby

“If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”  Kaja Kallas, the first female prime minister of Estonia until 2024 when she took charge of the European Union's Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

I really wish the Ukraine War enthusiasts would pick between "Russia will easily march through Europe if American taxpayers don't finance the war forever" and "ACKSHUALLY Russia is losing" instead of flipping back and forth every day. Mollie@MZHemingway 

“Putin will invade Europe” is the new “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”. Thomas Fazi

"If we have learned anything from the NATO experience...it is the rediscovery of an old truth: Dependency corrupts and absolute dependency corrupts absolutely. To the degree that Europe has been dependent upon the United States, the European will has been corrupted and European political vitality has diminished. A reconstructed NATO could reverse that process. But it would have to be an all-European NATO, with the United States an ally but not a member." Irving Kristol, "What's Wrong with NATO?", in the New York Times of Sept. 25, 1983.


Niall Ferguson, December 9 2018:

Calin Georgescu has the support of over 40% of the voters but is not allowed to stand in rerun of the presidential election

The Electoral Office decided last night that Calin Georgescu, who won the first round of the cancelled Presidential election in November, will not be allowed to stand in the postponed election. It's a brave new world. Frau von der Leyen and the panjandrums of the European Union will be pleased, so will the Soros people in Bucharest, but in Washington DC there will be another view.

Would there be an uprising like in December 1989? No, though I was told there would be. I thought of walking over to see but could not be bothered.

Some demonstrators appeared as a result of messages on social media, seemingly for the sake of letting pictures be sent around the world in seconds on X.

Almost everyone I know will be relieved except the waiters, porters, taxi drivers and shop assistants, the forty percent of the electorate who would vote for Georgescu and many who wouldn't. 

I think absolutely any citizen should be allowed to stand in an election, even if in prison. Eugene Debs the Socialist contested a US presidential election from behind bars in 1920.

A poll carried out by Verified for the ruling coalition’s presidential candidate Crin Antonescu showed that, if the 2025 presidential elections were to take place next Sunday, 40% would vote for Călin Georgescu, a big increase on the 23% he won in the cancelled election in November. He is followed by Crin Antonescu on 18.5% and the Mayor of Bucharest Nicușor Dan (anti-system independent) on 12%, Libertatea.ro reported.

Saint Mina's church, Strada Coposu - founded in the early 18th century but rebuilt in the mid 19th

 

Give peace a chance

In three years of throwing everything they have at Ukraine, the Russians have taken 13% of a country on its own border (in addition to Crimea and Donetsk taken in 2014). 

Yet absurdly Macron and the Western European leaders think Putin will be at Paris if he is not stopped now.

To eject Russia from its entrenched positions would require a ground assault that might kill several hundred thousand more Ukrainians. 

A negotiated settlement involving a combination of massive investment in Ukraine and loosening of embargos on Russia is the obvious best option. The only option in fact.

Donald Trump has common sense on this issue and common sense is rarer than genius, as Emerson said. 

Donald Trump might be a genius too but you, gentle reader, have your opinion about that. Emerson would certainly have loathed him.

I have a good track record

The CIA/MI6 run mainstream media backed the Islamists and justify their slaughter yesterday of 'pro-Assad forces'. I am glad I regretted the fall of Assad.

I wish there was a reasonable trustworthy source of information abut the news but there is not.

I have a good track record.

I saw the Cold War was unnecessary. I opposed the invasion of Iraq and at first of Afghanistan, though then I went along with it.

I thought on September 11 2001 that something like that was inevitable.

I wanted Ukraine to resist Russia in 2022 when invaded. I wanted negotiations to bring peace in Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

I should have followed Ukraine before the invasion. I'd have seen how the Americans were playing with fire. The Ukrainians got burnt.

It took me years though to understand that it is America that has been the big threat to world peace, not Russia, China or Iran.

I was probably wrong not to like Mrs Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. They were lesser evils than the progressives and to some extent their concern for freedom was genuine. They were the last conservatives to know that equality is a bad thing if you are on the right.

Mrs Thatcher did almost nothing that was conservative but she did raise British morale.

Backing the Democrats before Bill Clinton was a mistake but the mainstream Republican party was and is repulsive.

My big mistakes were cheering on the colour revolutions and not becoming Euroseptic and Natosceptic earlier. I should have backed Patrick Buchanan. I did back Ron Paul.

I should have followed the Arab Israel story and had Netanyahu's number but it bored me to pieces until 7 October 2023.

Elon Musk is right about Ukraine

Elon Musk@elonmusk:

What I said over 2 years ago was that Ukraine should seek peace or suffer severe loss of life for no gains.

The latter was Zelensky’s choice.

Now, he wants to do that again.

This is cruel and inhumane.

Elon Musk@elonmusk Oct 3, 2022
Ukraine-Russia Peace:

- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

- Water supply to Crimea assured.

- Ukraine remains neutral.

Jeffrey Sachs, Fred Weir and Anatole Lieven explain the Ukrainian war

Of course Europe and Great Britain must make a settlement along with the USA with Russia, rather than rearming. How can the chanceries of Europe be so obtuse? 

You probably know some of what Jeffrey Sachs said in his brief speech at the European Parliament by now, if you don't form your views from the reporting in the traditional media, which are propaganda vehicles for CIA and M16. 

Professor Sachs is invaluable on most subjects and very succinct. One of the best minds in the world. He is incapable of being dull.

Here is Fred Weir who is a veteran Canadian correspondent in Moscow.

'We know that Donald Trump perfected his schoolyard bully persona, shouting "you're fired!" over and over during 14 seasons of an awful reality TV show that he co-created. It's quite apt that the Times of London headline this morning reads: "Trump fired Zelensky like he was a loser on The Apprentice." 

So it's unsurprising that he brings the same public grandstanding, hectoring style to diplomacy. I suppose he thinks it will work. But Volodymyr Zelensky is the elected leader of Ukraine, and publicly humiliating him is going to alienate the people he represents. I'm a Canadian, and I'm pissed-off, on principle, over the way he belittles our prime minister and ruminates about annexing Canada. Even in Moscow, where wrecking the US-Ukraine relationship should have a popular following, I don't think anyone is much impressed by that spectacle.
It's bad, bad, very bad diplomacy

'But someone has to set the histrionics aside and calmly analyze the underlying dynamics and suggest what, if anything, can be salvaged for the sake of the peace process. So, here's a good stab at that by Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.'

I asked Mr Weir did Zelensky up the ante in Donetsk in November 2021 provoking a reaction, as some people tell me?

He gave me permission to quote his reply.

I have no special knowledge about all that. I know what the Russians say, and can make some general observations from having been talking with them, and watching events, for years. First, Zelensky was elected on a clear peace platform. I was in Ukraine to cover the election -- I went to Mariupol to take the temperature -- and there is no doubt that people voted for Zelensky on the belief that he would implement Minsk II and negotiate peace with Russia. The Russians began to give up on him, and any hope for Minsk implementation, in the months after Putin and Zelensky met in Paris in December 2019. Second, the refusal of the West to negotiate a new security architecture for Europe, which would have kept Ukraine neutral, among other things, was probably the final straw for Putin. I'm not advocating for him -- I would have thought he had lots of options short of war -- but at some point in late 2021 he and a small circle of advisers clearly made the decision to invade, in the belief that they could effect a quick regime change and solve all their Ukraine problems at one fell swoop. That failed, in an epic way, and Moscow negotiated that abortive peace deal with Ukraine. He keeps referring to it. So, the main terms would have been Ukrainian neutrality, substantial demilitarization, and rights for Russian speakers. I'm guessing those will be the same bottom lines now, plus territory.