Ukraine Peace Negotiation proposal by Professors Peter Brandt, Horst Teltschik and Hajo Funke and General Harald Kujat

The proposal is here. I quote from it.

"The war could have been prevented, had the West accepted a neutral status for Ukraine – which Zelensky was initially quite willing to do – renounced NATO membership and enforced the Minsk II agreement on minority rights for the Russian-speaking population. The war could have ended in early April 2022 if the West had allowed the Istanbul negotiations to be concluded. It is now once again, and possibly for the last time, the responsibility of the “collective West” and especially the USA to set a course towards a ceasefire and peace negotiations." 

Retired German General Kujat predicted the Afghan occupation had dailed and that the Taliban would return to power back in 2011. In 2016 he praised Russia for enabling peace to come to Syria. He is a lot more prescient than Mrs Victoria Nuland. 

I heard of this in this interesting discussion with Colonel Douglas MacGregor at 14.5 minutes. 

I don't listen often to Colonel MacGregor but should do so. He and Alistair Crooke seem the most interesting people discussing the war in Gaza. Colonel MacGregor is also often good on Ukraine though he thinks too kindly of Putin and has no evidence for the huge estimate he makes of Ukrainian casualties.

Ireland is in grave trouble

Ireland is in a disastrous situation. Tim Stanley says today in the Daily Telegraph that Irish President Michael Higgins suggested climate change played a role in the massacre by Boko Haram of 40 Nigerians attending Mass on June 5th last year. More than 126 people were injured.

Googling I found that President Higgins did indeed warn against “any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change” for it. He called for solidarity with “all those impacted not only by this horrible event, but in the struggle by the most vulnerable, on whom the consequences of climate change have been inflicted”.

In a statement on Facebook, Bishop Arogundade of Ondo described as “incorrect and far-fetched” the climate change references in President Higgins’s statement condemning the massacre.

At least England has a king, not Higgins with his peasant face that resembles a chamber pot, but King Charles III is also woke. He is equally distraught about climate change and reportedly found the idea of sending refugees to Rwanda "appalling".

Ireland is in very grave trouble but so is the West and so is Christendom, a place Pope Francis says no longer exists. 

The n-word

Free speech in the UK has been more and restricted since 1965 (before the Race Relations Act 1965 the country had as much free speech as the USA) but the misuse of the word 'antisemitic' by conservatives, who have suddenly become leading advocates of cancel culture, is remarkable. it now covers all sorts of criticisms of Israeli government actions that are not anti-Jewish, let alone anti-Semite. 

I wish people would stop talking about Nazis, but they won't. This is what I wrote about flinging around the word 'Nazi' four years ago.

Allison Pearson is now on the other side of the argument.

What is not normal is the wave of sympathy for Anna Soubry, the Remainer Tory MP, whose attempts to be interviewed outside (note this) the purlieus of the Palace of Westminster have been incommoded by  a handful of protesters shouting 'Nazi' at her. 

In the strange world of political correctness the worst thing you can be is a Nazi and the second worst thing is to call someone a Nazi when he has the politics the media like. 

Calling someone who wants England to be free from foreign rule a Nazi is fine, naturally. People like that have it coming to them. Miss Soubry herself has often accused Leavers of being racists and fascists.

Quotations

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality”

Gilles Deleuze

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places.'

W.H. Auden

Everyone burns his life and suffers for the desire for the future, for the disgust of the present. But the one who exploits every hour for himself, who manages every day as a life, does not want tomorrow nor fears it. No time can bring a new kind of pleasure. Everything is already known, everything is enjoyed to the fullest. After all, fate decides as it pleases: life is already safe. You can add them, not subtract them, and add them like food to an already satiated and full person, who no longer wants it but still has the capacity to. There is therefore no reason to believe that one has lived long because he has white hair or wrinkles: he didn’t live long, but he was in the world for a long time. How can you believe that it sailed a lot who caught the storm at the exit of the port by taking it here and there in a turbine of opposite winds and making it spin in a circle within the same space. He didn’t sail much, but he rose a lot.”

SENECA, De brevitate vitae.

Empire

It's strange that Americans owe their country's existence to colonialism but are so prejudiced against it. Other people's colonialism, that is. They have their own colonial empire.

AJP Taylor, the greatest 20th century British historian, said: 

“If the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbors as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation."

I haven't heard that the 'insurrection' was organised by elements in the US government, unless by that President Trump is meant, but shall make enquiries

But the media seem to have become the enemy of truth.

Daily Telegraph: 'Fragile ceasefire still could provide the mould for a longer peace'

A surprisingly good article in the Telegraph today. Most of its coverage of Ukraine and other foreign wars is simplistic, one-sided and, to be honest, propaganda, but occasionally they publish something incisive.

Israel, too, must face reality, military and political. At the start of the conflict, it estimated there were 30,000-40,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza.

It has since killed an estimated 14,000 people in its stated military objective of “ending” the organisation and its infrastructure in Gaza but, of those, just 4,300 were adult males, according to the Hamas controlled Gazan health authority.

The hard truth Israeli military strategists now face is this: for the most part, Hamas, like legions of terrorist insurgents before them, have stashed their grab-bags and vanished into the general population in the south of the Gaza strip.

Most will go unnoticed for what the vast majority of combatants the world over really are: poor and uneducated boys led by cultish thugs and grasping psychopaths.

Trying to kill them within a zone that Israel itself has asked civilians to move risks collateral damage on a scale that even the cold legal logic of proportionality in war would struggle to justify. The incremental military gain will be too slight to justify the likely civilian carnage.

Israel also has a unique humanitarian crisis on its hands, and one that could yet prove its undoing.

In most wars of the type being fought in Gaza, much of the potential humanitarian fallout is mitigated by people fleeing. But in Gaza, mass migration is not possible. Some 2.3 million people are sealed into a crowded hellhole into which only a trickle of food, water and power is currently flowing.

Israel’s hardmen like to say they don’t care what the world thinks when it comes to protecting the Jewish homeland. But if Gaza’s ragged millions start to starve or succumb to infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid this winter it won’t be long before commentators like me start to recall the ghettos of Poland and Ukraine that our great grandparents died in.

R.I.P. Nick Brind

'You know you've been in Romania too long when you can tell someone's star sign from their date of birth and talk animatedly about it.'

Nick Brind, one of the funniest and wisest men I ever knew, said that. He died on Thursday, I think, and will be very much missed. His was the best firm of architects in Romania for many years. He had previously worked in Africa and been manager of Steeleye Span.

The rules based order that America champions

From the Pakistani English language newspaper Dawn, May 5, 2008.

The United States had threatened to use force against Saudi Arabia in 1973 after King Faisal and other Arab and Muslim leaders imposed an embargo on oil shipments to western countries which supported Israel during the October War, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, said in an interview with the Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat.

In the interview that appeared ahead of a seminar on King Faisal, Prince Turki, son of the former Saudi king, shed light on important events that took place during his father’s rule.

Prince Turki, who was an adviser at the Royal Court in 1973 when King Faisal took the oil embargo decision, said the king was not shaken by the US threat and stood firm.

He added that the embargo was instrumental in encouraging the US to find a quick and just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. “King Faisal and other Arab leaders were forced to take the decision as a result of America’s unprecedented support for Israel during the (1973 Arab-Israel) war,” the prince said. The embargo resulted in almost quadrupling of the world oil prices in what is termed the ‘first oil shock.’

Daniel McCarthy in the Spectator today

'Westerners are a minority in the world just as Israelis are a minority in their region. The conceit of liberalism has been that the rest of the world — after centuries of chafing at European and American dominance — would spontaneously adopt the West’s values and way of life once the West proclaimed the gospel of liberalism and democracy. For a time, such was the prestige of Western power that newborn states such as Turkey, India, Israel, Pakistan and post-Soviet Russia did indeed try to conform to Western models.

'Today, however, they have turned back toward their own pre-liberal roots. Will the West do the same, or will it ultimately “decolonize” itself — becoming instead what Senator Eugene McCarthy called “a colony of the world”?'

In Praise of Stupidity

William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” (1920),

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.”

That was true in Ireland and elsewhere then and now. It was quoted by Roy Jenkins when he left the Labour Party and is the cry of the centrists.

On the other hand, this famous remark of Bertrand Russell’s, from his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity", seems to me not true at all.

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

I would say now the opposite is much more often true. 

Stupidity is close to common sense, cleverness to silliness. 

The stupid by not thinking for themselves embody the wisdom of ancient peoples, while the cocksure intellectuals ignore them.

I am the exception to my rules, naturally.

The Ukrainian war is an old fashioned great power conflict. Gaza is a rebellion against the American empire. .

America is an empire, as candid Americans admit. 

All European countries are US satellites except Hungary, Serbia, Belarus and Russia. 

Empires often do much good. The world would be a better place if the Habsburg, Czarist and Ottoman empires had not been broken up. 

The American empire has unfortunately not been much of a force for good since the First Gulf War.

"The Gaza conflict, so long as it is confined to the narrow strip of scrubland on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean that is home to two million Palestinians, is unlikely to disrupt global energy markets to the same extent as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused a dramatic spike in prices. Given the broader threat Putin’s aggression poses, Western military support for Ukraine has been motivated as much by the desire to give the Russian military a bloody nose as the principle of defending territorial integrity."

Con Coughlin today in the Telegraph admits that the Anglo-Americans are not backing Ukraine for Ukraine's sake. He is right and right too that NATO countries have no real selfish interests in the Gaza war.

Why do the UK and EU countries back Israel?

I can only think that it is a form of vassalage they pay to their American masters. 

Why the British Labour leader, the wooden Sir Keir Starmer, is firing frontbenchers who vote for a ceasefire is beyond me.

Why does it matter what their views on Gaza are? 

Why should it be illegal in Great Britain, come to that, to express liking for Hamas, a bunch of unsavoury fanatics on another continent? 

And why should RIGHT-WING conservatives like Mrs Braverman, who has been called 'a pound shop Enoch Powell' despite being a British Indian, be calling for bans on pro-Palestinian marches? 

Enoch Powell, a passionate believer in freedom, would be horrified. 

He'd be horrified by a lot of things. 

This cannot go on

From the Sunday Telegraph. 

America bestrides the world, but so did Europe in 1939 yet it was cankered. By 1945 it was in ruins and ruled by America and Bolshevik Russia. 

Now America is in very grave trouble and Biden is given the task of handling two wars in which America's standing, but not her real interests, is at stake.  

 

From Catholic daily newspaper La Croix international - this has been ignored by the English language press

 

The press is hopelessly unreliable on the Middle East, pretty unreliable on Ukraine and worst of all on the papacy, because the Catholic and non-Catholic press likes the Pope. In the cases of Grassi, Barros, Zanchetta, Rupnik and Gisana Pope Francis is accused of failing to help alleged victims of wrong doing but protecting the alleged wrongdoers. You wouldn't know this from the press. I know it from following Damian Thompson on Twitter.

Madness of crowds

The English newspapers are incomprehensible to me today. 

I cannot imagine anything more appropriate than a march demanding an armistice on Armistice Day. 

Any protest is fine on Armistice Day, or any day, if it's within the law. 

The Home Secretary Suella Braverman is right that the police are soft on left-wing demonstrations and hard on right-wing ones but Sadiq Khan the Mayor of London is, I think, right when he says she has encouraged far right protesters to make trouble at the pro-Palestinian protests. 

Now the trouble has occurred.

Gaza and Ukraine are part of a larger war

"We must fight terrorism as if there's no peace process and work to achieve peace as if there's no terror."

Yitzhak Rabin. As Rabin tried to achieve peace and a Palestinian state, Likud rallies involved depictions of Rabin in an SS uniform or in the crosshairs of a gun. In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin". The chief of internal security then told Netanyahu of a plot on Rabin's life and asked him to moderate the protests, which Netanyahu declined to do. Rabin was then assassinated by a supporter of Netanyahu. Netanyahu did not press the trigger of the assassin's gun.

The truth about October 7

I found the October 7 atrocities very puzzling. Why did Hamas do this? 

Is the Israeli account completely to be trusted? That would be rare in the fog of war. 

This blog post by left-wing journalist Jonathan Cook explains what we know and suggests very many of the dead were Israeli soldiers killed by other Israeli soldiers. 

The Western media display the sublime lack of curiosity about this which is their hallmark. 

There is no evidence that any women were raped.