Holocaust Memorial

 

Without evidence

 

Do not trust the BBC

BBC news item about Iran today:

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) says it has so far confirmed the killing of at least 6,159 people since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. It is also investigating 17,000 more reported deaths.

Skylar Thompson, from Hrana, told the BBC the confirmed number of dead was very likely to rise.

"We are really committed to ensuring that every single piece of verified information that we report on sits next to a name and a location," she added.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front organisation. The CIA is trying to achieve regime change in Iran. Hrana is presumably lying. That's what it's for.

The BBC should not repeat Hrana's 'information' but it does so without mentioning the CIA connection, something the Beeb knows about or should know about.

Someone in the BBC should be fired for this but won't be.

Quotations

"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?" "Yes, without doubt," said Candide. "Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character why should you imagine that men may have changed theirs?" Voltaire's Candide

“We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life… This is the real crisis.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"When you return to your homes, when you return to your counties and your cities, you must tell to all those whom you can influence that the time is at hand, that, at least, it cannot be far distant, when England will have to decide between national and cosmopolitan principles. The issue is not a mean one. It is whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, modelled and moulded upon continental principles and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country...." Disraeli, in his famous speech in 1872 at the Crystal Palace.

Politics

“The number one threat to free speech in the West and in the United States are Israel loyalists trying to monitor and police the discourse of Americans to forcibly expel from the discourse criticism of this foreign country...” Glenn Greenwald

'In this light, it is particularly revealing that Carney used his speech to reaffirm Canada’s commitment both to NATO and to the proxy war in Ukraine. ... How can one credibly claim to seek “independence” from the United States while remaining firmly embedded in NATO — the primary instrument through which Washington has long militarily subordinated its Western “allies” — and while actively supporting a proxy war that has been the central driver of Europe’s economic degradation and geopolitical hyper-vassalisation? How can decades of provocations along Russia’s borders, the transformation of Ukraine into a Western proxy, the destruction of the country itself and the massive bloodshed of the past nearly four years be presented as a shining example of “value-based foreign policy”?' Thomas Fazi

What they said

The Iranian Embassy in The Hague, The Netherlands, quoted with approval by Max Blumenthal: 'When U.S. police say, “If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at our deputies, we will kill you,” it’s called law enforcement. But when hundreds of Iranian police & thousands of innocent civilians are killed, Western media calls the perpetrators “peaceful protesters".'

Ralph Schoellhammer: "Why everyone cares about Greenland remaining Danish but barely anyone talks about Belgian cities no longer being Belgian is beyond me. The relevant territory for Europe's future is in Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, etc., but not in Nuuk. That's worth fighting for." 

Professor Jeffrey Sachs: ‘I cannot recall worse political leadership in Europe than now. There’s not one single figure in the major countries of the European Union or Britain that has any intellectual stature or honesty… You had people like Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, Mitterand. These were substantial people. Now there’s Kaja Kallas. Are you kidding?! Von Der Leyen, are you kidding?! Merz, oh my God.’

Owen Jones

@owenjonesjourno

·

16h

So basically Reform UK is now Rishi Sunak's Cabinet, just led by Nigel Farage.

The best information about the Iranian crisis I can find is from an Indian general

This is a programme on the leading Indian English language channel. General Bakshi is a well known military commentator. Please watch to get a lot more information than I found elsewhere about the attempted revolution in Iran.

This sounds very Great Game and very like John Buchan's Greenmantle but whereas Sandy Arbuthnot was a chevalier sans raproche I worry that the MI6 men and women pulling strings at a distance in Iran may be mixed up with murder, like the Mossad.

Maybe it's less Buchan, more Quentin Tarantino.

America is much more of a 'malignant imperialist' than China.

The Daily Telegraph is much worse than useless on Ukraine and the Middle East but not so bad on the EU.

 
Sherelle Jacobs's article headlined

It has finally dawned on Strasbourg’s blob that the European dream is dead

is interesting. 

The effect of the Greenland crisis and Mr Trump's Davos speech have throw the EU into the air, which must be a good thing. 

At the European Parliament she reports 

"Many view Trump as the new enemy. Several I spoke to compared the implosion of US-EU relations to the bloc’s broken relationship with China – as if these two malignant imperialists are in the same category. With Trump having merely paused tariffs rather than taking them off the table, hawks called for the EU to get on a long war footing."

I am a great admirer of the imperialism of the late 19th century, at least British imperialism, but America is much more of a malign imperialist than China. Which countries has China invaded?

Vietnam in 1979 and that's about all - and that one month conflict was in retaliation for Soviet ally Vietnam invading Cambodia. Britain was on the side of Pol Pot and China in that one.

Meanwhile the USA has carried out about a hundred regime changes, not to mention failed regime changes like the one last week in Iran. America invaded Panama, bombed Serbia, invaded Iraq, Syria and ... I forget the others. 

America helped organise revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, with what consequences we see. If they succeed in Iran that may make Iran a failed state, which is what Israel wants.

America has bequeathed the Ukrainian war to the EU and UK who would be sensible to bring it to an end fast on Russia's terms.

Actually another malign imperialist is the European Union itself, utterly undemocratic and corrupt, taking power from elected governments and proclaiming its first priority as being to restrict freedom of speech in member states.

As I said, empires need not be malign. They can be good. Helen Szamuely said Austria Hungary was a European Union that worked. 

A democratic, federal Ottoman Empire ruling the Middle East would have been peaceful and very rich.

The crisis in Europe is wonderful theatre. News is part of the entertainment industry always, even when people are being murdered

Globalism is being smashed to pieces
the illusion is crumbling and the truth has come out.
I love watching it unfold and all the parasites being exposed for what they really are.
Ive waited for an entire life time to finally see this. I have to say I never thought I would.
God is back in the house.

Seen on Facebook

"NATO is running Europe. Europe is not a democracy. It's run by the United States via NATO. It's made sure that the only officials in charge of foreign policy are servants of the United States, not Europe. Their job is to make sure that Europe has no voice independently of what the US wants to do. In order for Europe to develop and to be a democracy, it must dissolve NATO because the purpose of NATO is singular: to attack Russia and to become an Asian power in the South China Sea to attack China as well. It's an aggressive attacking power."


Professor Michael Hudson


"Yet it is fruitless now to complain that our leaders are weak, slow-witted, and negligent: had they been otherwise, they would not have been elevated to their role in Washington’s imperial system.

"A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms. When Nato chief Mark Rutte’s obsequious text message to Trump was leaked by his graceless master, we understood that their current shame is that they are now being made to kneel in public, and not grovel, as before, in private comfort.

"Everything desperately said of Greenland to stave off annexation — that America is already sovereign de facto, and can expand its bases, and pour in troops unhindered — is just as true of Europe, and Britain as a whole. Trump’s repeated declaration that it is not worth America defending territory it does not fully possess implies, as the least alarming interpretation, that Nato’s Article 5 mutual defence clause is already defunct. Yet, showing their customary foresight, European security wonks are celebrating as a victory for European resolve the precedent apparently now being set that US bases on European soil can overnight become American sovereign territory, while European leaders squirm at their helplessness being exposed to world derision. Yet Trump has burdened them with no new chains they have not previously competed for as honours. Europe’s subordination is the fruit of all the glittering prizes and titles, thinktank fellowships and security conferences that Washington offered them. Men will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon, Napoleon remarked. America’s innovation was realising that a continent can be bought with lanyards."

Aris Roussinos in Unherd


"We can see how Europe today is completely encircled: vassalized in the West by the United States in digital, technological, and defense terms; vassalized in the East by China industrially; and subjected in the South to increasingly strong migratory pressures." Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s far-right party National Rally, quoted by Aris Roussinos on X

"You will never convince me, at gunpoint even, that Keir Starmer is making independent decisions about the future of Britain. He is taking orders." Tucker Carlson replying to Eva Vlaardingerbroek who said Starmer, von der Leyen, Merz, and Macron "literally post the same things and push the same agenda: erosion of borders, nation states, and heritage". Actually it should the British cabinet in charge not the Prime Minister but where does power lie? The top civil servants, the Foreign office mandarins, MI6 and CIA and the American deep state, courts in the UK and abroad, a nexus of powerful Europeans and Americans, the web of interests described by Whitney Webb.... the court of Donald Trump which is very corrupt? Who forms the zeitgeist? Where are the political scientists when we need them?

The Iranian regime change attempt was a CIA Mossad Musk plot that failed - there was no mass unrest.

Scott Besant US Treasury Secretary said at Davos that the Iranian currency crisis was created with the aim of inciting protests and succeeded. For two days the protests were peaceful, then thugs and killers, employed presumably by the Mossad-CIA, created mayhem and killed innocent people. This was filmed and is on the net. There is lots of evidence. 

Perhaps 700 rioters were killed by police? I imagine they were mostly the Mossad-CIA thugs. Plus far more people murdered by said thugs. 3,000 in total maybe, which is far more than in the Islamic Revolution, maybe more.

A huge psychops operation is happening to tell us there are 43,000 dead - which is CIA-Mossad disinformation but not the sort the EU objects to. The lies are amplified by pro-Israel people on social media and the traditional media, people who do not do their own research.

This makes me doubt the stories about Kosovo that led to the Kosovo war. The lies that were told by the CIA before the Iraq war we know about and the propaganda that got me to be ambivalent about toppling Gaddafi.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me (Richard II, V.2)

From Bowyer Nichol's Words and Days (1895): the entry for January 25th.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.
I KING HENRY IV. V. 2.


It has been well believed through many ages that the beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life; that the mind which sees itself blameless may be called dead in trespasses— in trespasses on the love of others, in trespasses on their weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which are the image of our own need. 

GEORGE ELIOT.


Get up, get up, thou leaden man!
Thy track, to endless joy or pain,
Yields but the model of a span:
Yet burns out thy life's lamp in vain!
One minute bounds thy bane or bliss.
Then watch and labour while time is!
CAMPION.

I am more worried about the consequences of mass immigration than about Trump, but pretty worried about Trump too.

Elon Musk reposted this on X with this emoji: 

I am more much worried about the consequences of mass immigration than about Trump, but pretty worried about (and revolted by) Trump too.

Erik Dale 

@EuroDale

If you're European and more worried about Trump than the consequences of mass immigration, you have a serious mental illness. Your mind has been captured. Your ability to think independently: subverted. You exist only as a mindless drone in the unwitting service of forces that seek to destroy us. The only reason you think you're smart and good is because the TV told you so. By definition, this post will make zero impression on you. Which is exactly why YOU are a greater threat to Europe than Trump and mass immigration combined. Yet we will defeat you. Easily. Your shame will pursue you to the end of your days. After which you'll be remembered only as a warning to future generations. That will be your entire legacy. Thus spoke Zarathustra

Quotations

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." 

Schopenhauer

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” St. Francis de Sales whose day it is today.

“The Israelis if they want to kill you, they'll blow up the entire city block where you live, they'll kill a thousand people Just to get you and they don't care..” 

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou 

Daily Telegraph: 'Britain is heading for utter oblivion. Here is why. '

This link takes you behind the paywall of the Daily Telegraph to an article by Neil Oliver about the grim future of the UK. It was an open tab on my laptop and I only just got round to reading it but you should do so. 

Here are some excerpts.

"If you go back 20 years and apply today’s spending and tax rates to the demographics of 2004 – changing nothing else, that would give the Chancellor an extra £84 billion a year to play with, enough to cut the basic rate of tax by about 13p in the pound. Unless something is done, every budget will feel like an austerity budget. Taxes per person will go up; public services will crumble under the load of an old population.




"....Demographics are the driver of history. Today, South Korea and Israel are both developed countries. But at current fertility rates every 100 Israelis can expect 210 grandchildren and the Koreans just 15. South Korea has created an economic miracle in my lifetime, but unless they fix this, that’s basically the end of the country.


"If we in the UK had kept the same fertility rate we had in 2010, then for every 100 people we would expect them to have 92 grandchildren. But the rate is dropping sharply: at current rates it would be just 55 grandchildren. Gulp.


"Among private renters in Greater London, around a third are white British. In greater London’s schools just over one in five school children are white British. The old conversations about “integration” and “assimilation” don’t really even make sense any more. In many places people cannot really integrate into the traditional majority culture because it doesn’t exist any more."

Ed West is right talking here about Trump's speech at Davos. Rod Dreher has made the same point.

'What makes it more depressing is that the American diagnosis of Europe’s problems is essentially correct, and the continent’s current leadership are not prepared to do what is necessary to change course.'

Did you read about US behaviour to Iraq in the media?

Yesterday the US was reported to have threatened to freeze Iraq's oil revenues in US banks should pro-Iranian groups be included in the next government.

This week American troops finally left Iraqi government-controlled territory, six years after Iraq asked the Americans (and Iranians) to withdraw their forces, following the Americans assassinating Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani on his way to talks with the Iraqi government.

Trump ignored Iraq's request in 2020 and threatened to freeze $8 billion of Iraq's money then if US troops were forced out. 

US troops remain in the autonomous region of Kurdistan. I do not know on what authority.

The US and Uk had troops in Syria for years much against the Syrian government's will until the Al Qaeda man they backed took power thanks to Turkey.

Meanwhile armed groups loyal to the Al Qaeda Syrian government have today broken the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Kurds, thanks to the support given the new regime by the United States. 

Assad supporters like Syrian Girl on X enjoy the Kurds' comeuppance but they destroyed ISIS at America's request and now are abandoned.

[24 January 2025: Donald Trump threatened to slap a 100% tariff on Canadian goods if the country strikes a trade deal with China.] 

Trump is not all bad

If it sounds as if, after his mass murders, incipient dementia and sheer incompetence, I regard Donald Trump as wholly bad I do not, at all. 

He is also a visionary and there were very good reasons why he won the presidency twice. He is the necessary man. 

As Kissinger said he is a figure that was necessary to show that one historical era is at an end and a new one begins.

He is bringing peace to Ukraine, dismantling Nato and the Anglo-American alliance and moving the Overton window on immigration- all these are very good things. 

His National Security Strategy and Vice-President Vance's speech at Munich were wonderful and long overdue recognitions of reality.

So Trump has done important and courageous things as well as unforgivable ones.

John Mearsheimer thinks that were there another Nuremberg Tribunal Trump and Netanyahu would suffer the fate of the German leaders back in 1945. 

He is a Democrat and omits to include Biden, but Biden would get off on the grounds of diminished responsibility. 

Trump in that unlikely hypothetical situation might try the same defence. It would be worth a shot.

The West doesn't need to fear state actors

Financial Times headline this morning:

US unveils national defence strategy to counter China in Indo-Pacific

Why does the US need to counter China in Asia or do anything in Asia? 

The US got involved in Asia to counter the threat of godless communism after the war, when the US and UK left half of Europe under communist rule.

US intervention in Asia saved South Korea but led to Laos and Vietnam becoming communist as well as Vietnam. On balance a failure, as most US foreign and defence policy has been since FDR.


There is no threat from any country to Canada. 'Canada is the colony that stayed at home to look after mother' (Anthony Burgess) and that's why she went to war in 1939 and why historically she is in Nato. Far from freeloading on US defence expenditure Canada could cut her defence expenditure. Her only enemy is the US but she cannot hope to protect herself from US attack and fortunately the US Congress would bestir itself to prevent that.


Why does Europe need to spend more to defend itself from a Russia that for four years has failed to take Donetsk? 

One answer is that it was the Americans who prevented Russia from taking Donetsk and Kiev, but it is silly to think that Russia has any reason to attack other countries except conceivably but improbably Moldova.

Do Nato countries have  vital interests in Ukraine or Moldova and such vital interests that they need to increase defence spending?


Why doesn't Europe make a deal with Russia instead, create a new security architecture for Europe that includes Russia and use Russia and China to counterbalance dependence on the USA?


The answer to that question might be: the USA is vindictive, lawless and makes a very bad enemy.

When Americans suddenly care about women’s rights in a Middle Eastern country, those women are about to be bombed

Historically, when Americans suddenly care about women’s rights in a Middle Eastern country, those women are about to be bombed.

Annette Mullaney

The US engineered protests in Iran through economic sanctions. They began peaceful. Then MI6 and Mossad infiltrated, armed violence erupted, casualties followed, and Iran was blamed. Western media faked death tolls, and now Trump readies war on a false pretext.

Max Blumenthal

Many US, UK, and EU journalists are in fact intelligence assets, their job is to be stenographers for imperial power…

Max Blumenthal

Greenland

“European leaders stayed silent when the U.S. bombed Iran. Telling Iran, not Washington to show restraint. They accepted the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. But when Greenland was mentioned, they suddenly invoked fairness & international law.” Jeffrey Sachs

"We will protect Denmark, Greenland, the north from the threat posed by Russia." Friedrich Merz Chancellor of Germany at Davos

Mary Trump, the Donald's sister, in her Substack today

'The one thing Donald has always feared most is to be seen as a loser and the humiliation that comes with that. Given the perfect storm of his incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive, and the physical); and the sense that he is losing control—over himself and the narrative—and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn. He humiliates himself on an almost daily basis and often in the most public ways imaginable. It feels like a bit of cosmic poetic justice.'

After that striking and convincing first paragraph her second paragraph talked about the corrupt Supreme Court and I stopped reading.

All of these strike me as brilliant

 

Aris Roussinos

@arisroussinos

 

The precedent now apparently being established that US bases on European territory can become US sovereign territory overnight is a victory for European resolve, and will have no future implications for Europe— very clever European defence analysts.