I have no comment to make

 

Alleged British war crimes in Afghanistan

A British soldier testified about British war crimes in Afghanistan, a country which we should have left well alone. One of the several military idiots who are  Tory Members of Parliament thinks this should have been discussed privately rather than made public. The same man talks about Russian war crimes but never about Israeli or American ones. 

What a way to run a country. 

Let's make the British nuclear deterrent independent of the Americans if we can and stop assisting the Americans. No need to make waves by leaving Nato. "Quiet quitting" will be better.

Gideon Rose explains in early 2014 that the West wants to get Ukraine ("basically Robin to Russia's Batman") away from Russia and in the Western camp

Glenn Diesen

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In February 2014 (before the US-backed coup), Gideon Rose gloated about how the US was taking Ukraine over while Russia was distracted by the Sochi Olympics. He left out that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. They spoke more open about the US intervention before it triggered a war

Please watch this short clip in which Gideon Rose, the editor of the US defence establishment's premier magazine Foreign Affairs, explains breezily before the fall of Yanukovych that the West wants to get Ukraine to change sides from Russia's to Nato's.

An old fashioned East German historian's view of the Ukrainian war makes sense

Speaking on Neutrality Studies, East German military historian Dr. Lothar Schröter sounds like an old fashioned Communist apparatchik, but he is obviously right when he says the USSR never intended to attack the West any more than Putin does now. Here is an excerpt where he makes great sense. 

And I'll say it quite openly on fundamental issues, the North Atlantic Alliance, to put it mildly, has always told untruths. And the biggest lie was the one about the threat from the east. 

It never existed. There's never been a threat from the east. If the Russians had really intended to take over Western Europe, they would have marched to the Atlantic in 1945. They didn't do that. 

Melanie Phillips says Israel will always be at war

Please watch this, people

David Hearst foresees an endless war between Israel and Islam.

It is not possible to make war on an abstract noun, as Michael Frayn said about the war on terrorism.

The Israeli right acknowledges that Israel will be perpetually at war.

Yet there are people who still think the Balfour Declaration was a good idea.

Netanyahu this year compared Israel to Sparta, forgetting that Sparta lost in the end and while it existed was not a pleasant place to live.

Patrick Cockburn this week

Quotations

"Now people say that the toughness of Ukraine's investigation of corruption shows what a great country it is. Yet people had to take to the streets to stop Kiev's anti-corruption squads from being muzzled by the current govt."


Peter Hitchens yesterday on X. And these investigations are caused by decisions in Washington DC.

Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby”

John Mearsheimer talks very well here about the attempt to suppress his and Stephen Walt's book. 

(The last thing his adversaries wanted, he says, was a public debate. Tucker Carlson found Mark Levine did not want to debate with him either. Once refusing to debate meant conceding the debate but that was long ago, before cancel culture and words being violence.)

Ryan Grim

@ryangrim

In 2006, two academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a paper called “The Israel Lobby,” which argued that a loose group of Israel supporters used their connections and financial resources to tilt US foreign policy in Israel’s direction. One of them, Stephen Walt, was academic dean of The Harvard Kennedy School, which put him at the pinnacle of his profession. The savage response to the paper was like nothing academia had ever seen. We can now report that Jeffrey Epstein helped coordinate the counterattack with Alan Dershowitz, while Larry Summers was Harvard president. And Les Wexner was one of the largest donors to the Kennedy School, if not the largest. Epstein controlled Wexner’s money. In other words, a loose group of powerful supporters of Israel used their financial resources and connections behind the scenes to destroy the reputations of two academics who wrote a paper arguing that a loose group of Israel supporters was using their connections and financial resources to shape American foreign policy. Story here

Professor David Gibbs sees Kosovo as a precursor for Ukraine

I recommend this wonderful talk.


"So much of what, if you look back at Yugoslavia both the tone and the substance, so much of this evokes what's happening now in in Ukraine. Again the disparaging of negotiations - okay you don't negotiate with evil men you pulverize them through military force. There's also a personalisation. In the cold war it was never personalised. It was communism we were fighting even under Stalin, it was never we're fighting Joseph Stalin that wasn't said at all, right, but with the end of the cold war you had incredible simplification of analysis. Why do we have problems in the world? There are evil men out there with names like Milosevic or Gaddafi or Putin, all right? And so because you have these evil men who come just out of nowhere, out of pure evil, no social context, no depth of analysis, nothing, evil men. It's amazing people, educated people, would talk this way but of course they did and do on a regular basis today."

This evil men or homicidal maniac theory of history goes back before Kosovo. It is the reason why Hamas, for one example, is seen as a demonic force. 

Demonic and evil are words that do not throw light on politics but extinguish it.

A picture I found on Google+ in 2014 that makes me feel very happy and excited to live in Bucharest.

 

Quotations

"Something must be done. This is something therefore this must be done." I heard Michael Stewart say that to the House of Lords.

".... today, Phnom Penh once again has a population of about 2m, as it did in 1974 before the Khmer Rouge. However, 80 per cent of these people are “newcomers”, with no ancestral, cultural or generational link to the old Phnom Penh. The original population that was kicked out in 1975 has never truly returned.
Setting down my beer, I started taking notes, hoping to find a way to illustrate this astounding change. I wrote the lines “imagine if this happened to London, if most of the population was replaced in two generations, how incredible it might… And then I stopped.

Europe and the UK seem determined to continue the war in Ukraine. Will Russia win or will it continue for many years?

John Mearsheimer thinks there will be no peace until Russia wins the war in Ukraine, because Europe and Ukraine are determined to prevent one.

Andrew Napolitano: Will the war in Ukraine end on the battlefield or in a conference room?


Retired Col Lawrence Wilkerson: Neither. In my view, it will not end. We're going to have a low burning conflict probably for the next decade or so. and the forces in Ukraine will be principally responsible for that with possibly some support from certain characters in Europe if they're not completely cast out of office in the next 9 to 12 months. So I don't think Ukraine is going to do anything but go down to a low simmer that Europe and the West in general can tolerate, but we're not going to get a conclusive end to it.

Happy Thanksgiving

To my American friends celebrating Thanksgiving I wish them a happy occasion and remind them of a joke of Garrison Keillor, whom I love. 

"My ancestors were puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time."

I am not sure what Thanksgiving is about but it is about puritans landing in America. G.K. Chesterton said,

"The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England."

Puritanism runs through American culture like Southend through a stick of Southend rock. 

The puritans, even more than the Pharisees, get a rather unfair press. I, for one, shall be sorry when the USA loses its Protestant religiosity which is what makes the country what it is. But even if Americans cease to be religious they will still be puritans, albeit, as they are now, debauched puritans. 

Political correctness is all about puritanism. One of the most attractive things about Orthodox countries, like Romania, is that they do not have puritans. It is Protestant countries like England and America that are bedevilled with them, like wasps in summer. 

On the other hand puritans are much better at book-keeping and probity in general than other faiths. It is no coincidence that Orthodox countries score above Catholic and Protestant ones in every index of corruption. 

Calvinism and puritanism flourish even after belief in God dies. When the left likes homosexuality and sexual freedom it does so for puritan reasons, not cavalier ones. 

Mr. Obama today likened the Syrian refugees whom he wants his country to accept to the pilgrim fathers. He has a point. Muslims are puritans as well, of course, Calvinists plus polygamy, so maybe Muslim immigrants in America will fit in. I am sure that, unlike the original puritans, the Muslims will not displace the natives. They may, however, cause quite a few changes.

 

First posted 2015.

The suspect in Wednesday's Washington D.C. shooting of two National Guardsmen is a 29-year-old Afghan national. Bill Kristol is a leading neo-con who started the Never Trump movement.

Max Blumenthal

 

Max Blumenthal

@MaxBlumenthal

·

Nov 25

Sympathy for Israel among registered US voters has cratered, and it's never coming back Most Republicans under 29 favor Palestine over Israel, and the number surges among those who identify as "America First" That's why Israel is demanding a 20 year MOU to lock in military aid

Woman is born free and is everywhere in chain stores

"When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favourite things in the world were, I answered, “smoked salmon and Bach.” (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)" Oliver Sacks

"Woman is born free and is everywhere in chain stores."

Spectator cartoon.

The end of an old song - as Lord Chancellor Selkirk said when the Act of Union passed the Scottish House of Lords

 I hate this so much. 

Anti-Israelism

Pro-Palestinian Jews seem never to complain about antisemitism, as they would if it were a big problem. 

So I presume it isn't much of one. 

It may become one as Israel becomes a pariah state, 'the West's North Korea', as a half-Jewish friend of mine predicts.

Jews in the British and American media who support the Israeli government's actions complain a lot about antisemitism but infuriatingly they conflate being anti-Israel with antisemitism.

The Daily Telegraph is the worst offender in this regard. Unfortunately I was conned by the paper into renewing my subscription but I can't be bothered to read it.

It's equally propagandistic about Ukraine.

Netanyahu said he would destroy Hamas but didn't really try and anyway it was always obviously impossible. 

I have to feel Hamas's existence helps him.

Pro-Israel people follow Middle Eastern news starting from the presumption that Israel and its well-being is a good thing - for disinterested bystanders, especially in former European colonies, the news looks very different.

Pro-Israel people, however, don't necessarily understand this and some make the mistake of thinking Israelis are fighting for values when they are fighting for land.

Quotations

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’ Robert Frost,The Death of the Hired Man.

'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.' Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

'I would say to the Taiwanese: Do you really want to be the Ukrainians of East Asia?'

"I said to the Ukrainians do you really want to be the Afghanistan of Europe? I would say to the Taiwanese: Do you really want to be the Ukrainians of East Asia? The answer is absolutely no. Be careful, the United States cannot save you. In fact all it can do is get you destroyed because Taiwan will be safe and secure if the United States stops its provocations … [It] doesn’t care about Taiwan, I’m sorry to say. It cares about its competition with mainland China, and Taiwan is a piece of the game." Jeffrey Sachs