Musk: 'Hard to view this as anything other than abuse of the law for political purposes'

The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice. -Montesquieu

 

Dave Smith

@ComicDaveSmith

·

May 31

I have been a sharp critic of Donald Trump, and unlike the corporate media, for good reasons. This is an utter disgrace to a professed free society. This conviction is the result of one thing: The shadow government attempting to stop him from becoming President again.

 

Libs of TikTok

@libsoftiktok

·

May 31

Obama illegally spied on Trump's campaign while he was in the Oval office. No charges, no trial, no conviction. YET.

I think this will convince you, even if you hate him, as you probably do, that Donald Trump's conviction was the result of a very dirty political game by a Democrat judge.

Iris Murdoch

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”

How far we are from hurling insults and dead cats: the conservative war against free speech

Ten or fifteen years ago very few people seemed to be talking about the real world, apart from Ron Paul and Patrick Buchanan on the right and Patrick Cockburn on the left. 

From around the time it became obvious that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was a blunder and a crime, and then when Donald Trump happened, people started to do so. 

This is is why Ursula von der Leyan says free speech on the internet is the biggest danger the European Union faces. 

She is right.

Quotations

“The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalisation of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement…” Sir Roger Scruton

"Art is the proper task of life." Nietzsche

"When I say I'm suicidal, I get: well, the hospital has a program that can help you with that." Roger Foley, a Canadian man in hospital with disabilities, who says he's been offered euthanasia "multiple times".

A British veteran says Dresden bombings were a 'war crime'

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483604

I've come to agree with the old man.

My father told me, when I asked him about this, that people in England were delighted by news of British raids on Germany.

Naturally they were.  

When shortly after England and France declared war on Germany in 1939 Tory MP Leo Amery approached Kingsley Wood, Secretary for Air, with a proposal to firebomb German forests 'Kingsley Wood turned down the suggestion with some asperity. "Are you aware it is private property?" he said. "Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!"' 

By 1976 the CIA had taken over the world's English language media and were expanding into other languages

If you remember one thing from reading this blog please let it be former CIA man John Stockwell testifying to the Church Commission in 1976 that the CIA had taken over the English speaking media and were on their way to completing the takeover of French and Spanish speaking media. 

That includes mainstream left-wing papers.

I was always sure whenever I bother to read Con Coughlin, the executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph, that I was listening direct to the voice of MI6. 

I now discover that this has been admitted by the Telegraph in evidence in court.

Having only contempt for every existing political party

T.S. Eliot: “Having only contempt for every existing political party, and profound hatred for democracy, I feel the blackest gloom." Letter to Richard Aldington, 7 April 1921

Otto von Bismarck: 'Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."

Quotations

“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.” Harry Patch (1898-2009), briefly the oldest man in Europe, and the last surviving trench combat soldier of the First World War from any country.

"Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?" Harry Patch, November 2004

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Scott Fitzgerald

Quotations

 

'As my brother Larry rightly points out, we can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us.'  Gerald Durrell, paying tribute to his mother, Louisa

Romanian-Israeli holocaust survivor thinks Israel will never enjoy peace

Ha'aretz carries an interview with Liku Rifca Carmi (née Marcovici) who grew up in a rich Jewish family in Sighetu Marmației, a Romanian town now on the Ukrainian border, that had been assigned by Hitler to Hungary. 

In April 1943 all the Jewish families in Sighet were ordered to report to the town's train station in ten days' time. Her father, Shlomo Marcovici, turned to a coal miner he knew who took them to an abandoned gold mine in the forest, with potable water running through it. 

'The end of a superpower'

Googling, I just saw 'Masha Gessen: The end of a superpower' and thought it referred to the USA, but then saw that it was a video about the collapse of the Soviet Union.W Documentary

Masha Gessen: Biden is sacrificing the election for Israel

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American who once wrote a brilliant book about Putin.

Gessen told a Ha'aretz interviewer today that Biden's support for the attempts to suppress student demonstrations in favour of Palestinians will cost him the election.

"If he doesn't have the youth vote he has no hope of beating Trump. So that's another brick in the case for the incredible support for Israel. That Biden and his administration are willing to sacrifice the election to ongoing engagement with Israel is heartbreaking, shocking."

There is little point in reading the papers. Twitter is a much better source, now that the CIA no longer controls it

The silly idea that Ukraine can push Russia out of Crimea, as opined by a Chinese 'expert' is relayed uncritically in the Economist, where it is read by people who matter. 

Reuters tells us that 

US intelligence believes Putin probably didn't order Navalny to be killed, Wall Street Journal reports

I had the gravest doubts at the time. It was not in Putin's interests just after the successful (from his point of view) interview with Tucker Carlson.

Values are not a reason to go to war

Two very good articles, worth your time.

This from the wonderful Arnaud Betrand, whom God preserve:

'I won’t retell the history of the Ukraine conflict with NATO expansion, the Maidan coup, the non-respect of Minsk, etc. The fact is that history will be extremely clear: the Ukraine war was anything but “unprovoked”, as you always hear. Same thing with Oct 7th: you have 70+ years of history leading up to it, and first and foremost a dereliction of duty by the West with its largely unconditional backing of Israel against the Palestinians. And guess what: when you back one actor vs another in a confrontation, both wrt Ukraine and Gaza, it obviously heightens tensions and ultimately leads to hot conflict where the party whose adversary you support sees you as an adversary too… It’s basic common sense. As such this “ring of fire” Europe is surrounded by is of its own making to an immense extent.

Quotations

"Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilisation, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.” Malcolm Muggeridge


“Life is like the Vīṇā, when it is strung too taut, the strings break, when it’s too loose, no sound comes out. The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.” The Buddha

Swiss magazine Blick spoke to half a dozen anonymous commanders on the Ukrainian Eastern Front

'The tenor was that Ukraine would lose the war. “The Russians will conquer the Donbass by October, then the conflict will freeze and we will have to negotiate with Putin,” predicts Serhiy, an officer in a brigade that is holding out in the embattled Chasiv Yar. “The Russians will force us to attack you Europeans as part of their army,” says Ihor, commander of an engineering company in Donetsk.

Do these things apply to Romania too?

From an interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph by Jeremy Warner.

Poland's GDP could for various reasons overtake that of Great Britain, France and Germany. Could is the key word but Poland has already has a Western standard of living.

"If we instead take purchasing power parity as the measure, which attempts to adjust for the fact that the cost of living is substantially lower in Poland than Britain, then Poland is already richer than the UK – $49,000 per capita against $47,000. That gap is forecast by the IMF to widen further over the next five years to $63,500 against the UK’s $50,000.

Quotations

"It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."
John Updike

Sir Gerald Kaufman `My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza'

 

'My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam deputy speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.'

Please do watch an excerpt from Anglo-Jewish politician Sir Gerald Kaufman giving the speech of his life on January 15, 2009 (a pity he was reading from notes) or read the transcript below. It really is worth it.

My previous low opinion of him has shot up to the ceiling. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

He was on the right of the party, by the way, a lifelong Zionist and stalwart of the Labour Friends of Israel.

Vanity Fair plot spoiler alert! Please do not read this until you read the book.

'It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife,' Rebecca thought. 'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'

I just finished rereading Vanity Fair, which I found superficial at twenty. I felt the same about all the many books I read by Thackeray, but Vanity Fair this time was electrifying. 

I have always admired and sided with free spirits, as did Thackeray when young, when he was one, but a lot of them are parasites, crooks or whores. Becky Sharp is all three and a murderess. 

The good old days, consule Planco

King Abdullah I of Jordan had been a member of the Turkish parliament and won the parliamentary seat of Mecca in a contested election before the Great War. I wonder if you could get a drink there. He became king of an impoverished scrap of land, lost Mecca and was outraged by the Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

How can one not but miss the Ottoman empire?

Is England moving away from our traditional close friendship with the Arabs towards siding with Israel? 

I suppose we have to obey American orders.

What a shocking story but the US press asks no questions

I came across this curious story by accident. This so called Syrian terrorism group is apparently allied to Nato member Turkey. America and England have both had men in Syria illegally for years trying to bring down the legal Syrian government but this woman gets 18 years inside. Surely there should be protests?

"Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton in 2011, as revealed by Wikileaks. This poor woman however is on the side of terrorists who are out of favour. 

What they said

'The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.'

Aldous Huxley

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”

Chicago sports writer Hugh Keough, quoted by Damon Runyon. 

Hengist and Horsa were illegal immigrants and look what happened to them

Hengist and Horsa arrived in Kent as mercenaries at the invitation of the British King Vortigern (though here history and myth elide) and became the first English kings - I am astonished that many English people do not know this

Even the least educated Romanian knows about the earliest Dacian kings, Burebista and Decebal, but an English friend who took a First at Cambridge in Modern History asked me who they were. Which shows you Romanian National Communist schools taught pupils better than English pupils who care nothing for their (key word) medieval history.

The American empire dates from just after the end of the Second World War

American historian Howard Zinn was a Communist fellow traveller and exposed as a KGB agent, but these words of his on the Allied victory in 1945 are accurate. 

"The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work – without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of 'socialism' on the one side, and 'democracy' on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques – crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States – to make their rule secure."

England, France and Nationalist China's victories were, of course, Pyrrhic. Since 1991 only the United States' empire remained but now, as was inevitable, it is being challenged.

Quotations

Dud: 'You're a loony.'

Pete: 'They called Galileo a loony.'

Dud: 'They also called a lot of loonies loonies.'

What is so very depressing is that the EU vote - and the Scottish Referendum before it - has revealed how "patriotism" (my god, I feel old fashioned and archaic just typing that word) has not only been expunged as a virtue in the public consciousness and is now seen positively as a vice. This has been the relentless work of - in my opinion - left-wing politicians and academics since the war who have always recognised that by breaking up the unity of one community into smaller, sometimes artificial groupuscules ('working class', 'youth') they can then create political majorities which can be used to give them power. I mean who today can say, loudly, 'I am proud to be British' except old ladies in racist rants on buses or Sun columnists or madmen on the internet?

Quotations

"If she measured her own feeling toward the world she must have been pretty well able to gauge those of the world to herself and perhaps she reflected that it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody."

Miss Crawley in Vanity Fair by Thackeray, which I am rereading.

“Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.”

Neville Goddard, Barbadian mystic

Quotations from De Maistre and Burke in praise of prejudice

"Nothing is more vital to Man than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to Man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Individual reason is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions." Joseph De Maistre. I remember my supervisor Robert Tombs looking askance when I told him that I found De Maistre's ideas attractive, all those years ago at Cambridge before life began.

Quotations from J.R.R. Tolkien

“The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air."

Treebeard in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

'Military idiot and bar'

It is tempting to think that retired army officers are stupid. The ones who become British Conservative MPs, for example, or the ones who write for the papers. The explanation for the things they say must be more nuanced, that they are trained to be soldiers not geopolitical analysts. 

Colonel Richard Kemp was in charge of the British troops we sent to Afghanistan (why didn't we know better, after losing three Afghan wars?) and writes in the Daily Telegraph  In February of last year he hoped that Ukraine could take back the territory lost to Russia the previous year and part of Crimea, 'but only with our support'.

A total Russian collapse is surprisingly close

"Sunak unveils biggest military spending increase in a generation"

Why is Rishi Sunak increasing defence spending massively when Great Britain is not threatened by any state actors? Why should we care what China does or what happens in the Middle East? Does no British politician understand anything about foreign affairs?

Will there always be an England? No.

For Saint George's Day a tweely expressed but devastating thought by Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former Telegraph and Spectator editor (and former boss of Boris Johnson), Charles Moore. "Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

Travel

Laurence Durrell got it right. Travel is one of the most interesting forms of introspection. And Mircea Eliade when he said one travels to foreign countries to explore ones unconscious mind.

Quotations

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on : no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke


"In a general way it's very difficult to become remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know." Joseph Conrad, quoted by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his memoirs.

'The least eventful war ever'

This is how wars generally begin, rather than because of plots by evil men. 

The Portuguese banknotes scandal of 1925 and the end of the first Portuguese Republic

This is the fascinating story of Alves Reis that could have been written by William Le Queux, Edgar Wallace or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, never dreamt of BUYING the Bank of Portugal with forged notes.

I am staying in the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where Reis stayed until he had enough "money" for the Hotel Alvenida Palace.

In the story of Aladdin the Chinese empire is gripped by massive inflation because Aladdin was turning so many things into gold. Reis's forgeries created a boom and bust in Portugal which led to a coup against the First Republic and the benign despotism of Dr Salazar. 

Reiss became converted to Protestantism in gaol and converted many other prisoners.

The pursuit of happiness

Five suggestions for how to be happy, based on replies to questionnaires by people who had completed the Bristol University 'science of happiness' course:

Talk to strangers

Spend more of your money on others

Spend time in nature

Count your blessings

Be kind to others.

Quotations

"Real love simply means being able to say to someone else, 'What are you going through right now?'" Simone Weil

“Everything about this [English] society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables”. Portugal’s greatest novelist, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), was a Consul in Newcastle and Bristol. He was one of the fairly few famous men to have lived and died in Queen Victoria's 63 year reign: Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell are two others that spring to mind.

Franklin Foer says the Golden Age of American Jews began in 1967 and is drawing to a close

Subscribing to centre-left Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz provides me with a critique of IDF actions and the Israeli government that is absent in the UK and Romanian press and leads me to all sorts of interesting things.

Like this very interesting audio discussion with Franklin Foer about how liberalism benefited American Jews after 1967, as set out in his recent Atlantic article The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. The Ha'aretz interviewer and he agree that American Jews believe in liberalism as a creed but also as a means to protect Jews.

This sense of security ended when Donald Trump became President. This was despite Mr Trump being the most philo-Semitic and Zionist of American president ever, President Biden possibly excepted.

From the Atlantic article:

10 Commandments of Propaganda

A summary by Belgian historian Anne Morelli of Lord Ponsonby's 'Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War' (1928).

1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves!

2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!

3. Our adversary's leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil

4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!

5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention

6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons

7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable

8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause

9. Our cause is sacred

10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Quotations

"I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth. Your entire policy consists of provoking the Palestinians." Jacques Chirac, 'red with anger', talking to Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant." Sir Roger Scruton

"Love and do what you like." St Augustine

Before progressives were progressive about race

The Progressive movement in the USA in the first quarter of the last century were not like modern progressives. Carrie Chapman Catt was an American Emily Pankhurst - a leading suffragette who founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904. She argued that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage" because more white women than black ones would vote.

Quotations

Amnesic 

@_amnesic

It may be slightly inconvenient to remember Extraordinary Renditions, or US ambassador to Tashkent John Herbst being "livid" at the rogue UK ambassador, Craig Murray, for publicising the "not uncommon" practice there of boiling people to death

"Modern man is painfully confused.
He spends his vacation visiting the wonders of what the old world built, yet hates the beliefs that inspired them to build it."
I,Hypocrite (Twitter/X)

Christ is risen!

 

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world.

The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but this seems to be a legend.

The resurrection is the most significant event in the history of not only the West but the world, whether or not you believe it happened.

Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'.

Quotations

Ah! there is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor monarchy; a crowd of people is of no account in exchange for a noble friend.

Euripides, Orestes 1155-1156 (translated by Edward Coleridge)

Question the world, the furniture of the heavens, the brightness and arrangement of the stars, the sun providing for the day, the moon which comforts the night; question the earth bearing its yield of herbs and trees, full of animals, completely furnished in every respect; question the sea, full of so many and such a variety of swimming creatures; question the air, pulsing with so many flying things; question them all, and see if they don't answer you, after a fashion in their own way, "God made us." Serious and great-minded philosophers have inquired into these things, and have come to a knowledge of the artist through the works of art.

Interroga mundum, ornatum caeli, fulgorem dispositionemque siderum, solem diei sufficientem, lunam noctis solatium; interroga terram fructificantem herbis et lignis, animalibus plenam, hominibus exornatam; interroga mare, quantis et qualibus natatilibus plenum; interroga aera, quantis volatilibus viget; interroga omnia, et vide si non sensu suo tamquam tibi respondent: Deus nos fecit. Haec et philosophi nobiles quaesierunt, et ex arte artificem cognoverunt.


St Augustine, Sermons 141.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 776; translator Edmund Hill)


I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He" and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not Thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God." I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us."

interrogavi terram, et dixit, 'non sum.' et quaecumque in eadem sunt, idem confessa sunt. interrogavi mare et abyssos et reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt, 'non sumus deus tuus; quaere super nos.' interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis suis, 'fallitur Anaximenes; non sum deus.' interrogavi caelum, solem, lunam, stellas: 'neque nos sumus deus, quem quaeris,' inquiunt. et dixi omnibus his quae circumstant fores carnis meae, 'dicite mihi de deo meo, quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid,' et exclamaverunt voce magna, 'ipse fecit nos.'

St Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9 (translated by E.B. Pusey)


Thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti for the classical quotations.

An outside caterer preparing the nave ⁦of St Edmundsbury Cathedral ⁩ for a Masonic fund-raising dinner tonight

 

This is normal now in Protestant cathedrals in England. A silent discotheque took place in Canterbury Cathedral recently, which was the shrine in Catholic times of St Thomas a Becket, and the nave of the ancient Rochester Cathedral was used for crazy golf in 2019.

'Israel Is on the Brink of the Abyss'

'The Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence "completely failed" to detect what Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, had planned, one defense official acknowledged. "It's also true that a few days before October 7, the consensus of all the intelligence agencies was that Hamas was growing only moderately stronger and hadn't found an alternative" to the cross-border attack tunnels Israel blocked.

'"Nevertheless, the defense establishment's expectation was that if the government continued the judicial overhaul, Bezalel Smotrich continued his life's work of erasing the Green Line [between Israel and the West Bank] and Itamar Ben-Gvir heated up the Temple Mount and the West Bank, it would end in rivers of blood," he added.'

Vladimir Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club in September 2010

'But I would like to remind you that in the wake of Kosovo we did not recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We stopped short of that. As I said in public quite recently, we "swallowed" it. The only thing that I did at the time was to sign a decree on the development of economic relations with these territories. By the way, that was in line with United Nations requirements, because the UN was against the economic isolation of these territories. That was all. In principle, we were prepared for further dialogue.

'And yet armed forces were used. Some quarters are so fond of shooting and bombing that they thought they would succeed here too. Why did they think that they would succeed here when they had no success elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East? They failed here as well, and those who believe that it is the most effective instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again.

'...One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor.'

“Six times in the past 12 years Netanyahu rejected plans to eliminate the Hamas leadership”

“Six times in the past 12 years [Benjamin Netanyahu] has rejected plans proposed by the heads of Israel’s secret security agency, known as Shabak, to eliminate the Hamas leadership.” 

So writes former Israeli PM and general Ehud Barak this month in the American defence establishment's house magazine, Foreign Affairs. 

Macron the Jacobin

"Today’s not the end of the story, it’s the beginning of a combat. If France has become the only country in the world whose constitution explicitly protects the right to an abortion in all circumstances, we will not rest until this promise is kept throughout the world. We will wage this battle on our continent, in our Europe, where reactionary forces first and always attack women’s rights, before going on to attack the rights of minorities, of all the oppressed, of all freedoms.”

Macron on 8 March 2024.

"We are convinced that Russia’s defeat is essential for the security and stability of Europe… Europe is at stake."

Macron on 26 February 2024

Charles De Gaulle was a Catholic who believed passionately in France, usually took a foreign policy distinct from that of America and the United Kingdom, in order to preserve France's identity wanted no more than a few Muslim immigrants and during the war talked to the Comte de Orleans about restoring the monarchy. Macron, on the other hand, represents the universalist, anti-Christian spirit of the French Revolution. I wonder if De Gaulle were he alive today would support the Gaullist leader agreeing to collaborate with Marine Le pen.

Saudi Arabia's missing princes

'For God's sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.'

Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.

I missed, in August 2017, these astonishing accounts on the BBC site - they read exactly like a thriller - of three Saudi princes kidnapped in Europe, taken back to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and probably executed.

They scarcely made the news and I don't remember them being mentioned when Adnan Khashoggi was murdered.

This is England and America's gallant ally, whom we armed to fight the Houthis.

That sometimes silly former British Ambassador Craig Murray wrote about the cases well.

As he says, Mohammed Bin Salman no doubt thought the death of Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, would go equally unnoticed, but he wrote for the Washington Post and journalists do not like their colleagues being killed. Meanwhile Erdogan, unlike his European allies, was not prepared to tolerate Saudi political murder in his country.

The Yinon Plan is not important, but Israel wants to be surrounded by failed states and with US help has partly achieved this goal

Ten days after declaring the existence of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish army's general staff: “We must immediately destroy Ramle and Lod. ... We must organize Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for the Jordan Valley. ... Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, with the aid of bombing Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. ... Yigal Allon must attack in Syria from the east and from the north. ... We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani. We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the [Arab] Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.”

Israel did some of those things eventually. 

A 'western military source' quoted by John Helmer, the senior Western journalist in Moscow

“I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability); and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”

1984

The body charged by the European Union with restricting freedom of expression on the internet is called the  Agency for Fundamental Rights.

Today is February 29th

Today is February 29th, the day when in England by tradition women are permitted to propose marriage to men. 

I intend to stay home and not answer the telephone or read messages until the danger period has passed.

It must have been on 29 February 1976 that I read in the Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph, over breakfast before school, that it was the 21st birthday of Frederick, hero of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty. 

We have met the enemy and he is us

"The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability."

Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished America economist. The whole article is

Admiral Collingwood is right

 

A still from the film ‘The Zone of Interest’, showing Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s garden and, beyond the wall, the camp

Massacres in Palestine have continued since 1921, thanks to A.J. Balfour

The Jews lost 6,373 people, about 1% of the Jewish population of Palestine, in the 1948 war. 

I read that 4,000 were soldiers and the rest were civilians but elsewhere that Arabs killed 346 Jewish civilians and POWs.

According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris the Yishuv (which became the Israeli army) committed twenty-four massacres in which they killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. 

I read that 1,732 Arabs civilians were killed by Jews but I have no idea if this is true. The total number of Arab soldiers and civilians who died is said to be somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000. 

More than 500,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed.

There were between ten and eighty massacres committed in total by both sides, according to Wikipedia, which is not very precise.

Dreadful war crimes were committed by Jews in the 1948 war, including murdering babies, to which people who sympathise with the Arabs rightly draw attention, comparing them with the false stories of babies beheaded or burnt alive spread recently by Israelis. 

Such people are disingenuous if they do not add that Arabs also did plenty of dreadful things. 

The massacre by Hamas of up to 600 or more civilians in October last year and the slaughter of at least 2,000 Arab civilians in Gaza since are part of a story that goes back to 1921. 

This is what the media do not mention and which the public does not understand, unless they have looked into and studied the tedious issue.

One country is completely to blame - mine, England, and the all too languid, over-intelligent Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour. 

Quotations

"The war in Ukraine is just a diversion from the real war against us." Laura Ghisoni, last summer

"Every day is once in a lifetime." Ayesha. No, I don't know who she is. Also coined by Mac McAnally

“I think that Meghan must have been incredibly envious and then jealous of Kate. I heard Meghan actually thought she was going to be a princess and live in Windsor Castle. Instead, there’s William and Kate with this beautiful house, while they are stuck in Nottingham Cottage which Harry used to call ‘my hovel’.” Ingrid Seward, editress of Majesty magazine and royal biographer