A Political Refugee From The Global Village
An Englishman in love with Bucharest's blowsy charms
Thursday, 13 August 2026
Arrogant ignorance
Samuel Daniel's Elizabethan poems about the rivers of England haves always made me wonder if people whose forbears come from abroad have the same feeling for our rivers as the indigenous people. I then reflect that I have a lot of Irish blood.
“To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson thinks over 1.5 million Ukrainian military died in action as opposed to fewer than 227,000 on the Russian side
In this podcast, entitled "This Doesn't Add Up About Ukraine War Casualties...", using his skills acquired in the CIA for finding correct information (as opposed to inventing disinformation) Larry Johnson disputed Western media reports and estimated:
Ukrainian Military Killed in Action (KIA): Over 1.5 million deaths.
Russian Military Killed in Action (KIA): ~227,000 deaths.
He claims that the body repatriation data show that for every one dead Russian soldier returned 35 to 39 Ukrainian bodies were returned.
Some good news
UAE government jets have been coming and going to Tehran for the past 2 days, staying less than an hour each time. They are likely to be carrying banknotes and gold.
Wednesday, 12 August 2026
Sweden's lost empire and Lithuanian arcana
Democracy is feared now because of the notion it was responsible for the rise of Hitler. By the way, Hitler invaded 14 countries. The U.S. has attempted about a hundred regime changes and nearly 500 military interventions
'I mean, John, what we've got to understand is that the left has captured words and when it captures words, it inverts them. It stands them on their head. The word democracy no longer means. You and I know what democracy means. It means majority rule. Oh no, it doesn't. This new-fangled thing called liberal democracy, which is neither democratic nor liberal, you know, like the Holy Roman Empire. What it means is the control of the majority in favour of the minority. You stood the thing absolutely on its head. And the explanation of course is the notion that democracy was responsible for the rise of Hitler.
'Therefore you have to do everything you can to limit direct democracy. Of course you need it as a kind of symbol. You need it as a fig leaf but what you do in practice is deliberately limit it in two ways. You transfer as much power in one direction to the judiciary and quangos and in the other direction to deliberately irresponsible, unaccountable committees of experts. And that is what the Blair years did in an astonishing fashion.'
The history of Eastern Europe is not. It is a meditation on the nation, freedom, Marxism, Christianity, what Unamuno called the tragic sense of life, on many things but not on Nazism or Hitler.
This is why a highly intelligent Romanian woman from an old boyar family recently complained to me, "I am tired of hearing about the Holocaust. It was 70 years ago."
He writes,
"The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives define the postwar era.">
'Trump's Main Policy Is Making Himself The Centre of Attention' and other things I recently read
'Trump's main policy is making himself the center of attention.' Michael Wolff
"Israel has unveiled its vision for Palestine-which is none. No Palestine between the river and the sea. The genocide is a state enterprise. The apartheid is a state enterprise. There is no good Israel and bad Israel -it's all Israel. Sanction Israel. Isolate Israel. Cut trade. No more arms. The Nakba has never been over." Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories
'When the entire EU/French establishment tells you that the Russians want to manipulate the next French election you know *for sure 100%* that they’re planning to do that themselves.' Thomas Fazi
Three surprising things I just learnt
“For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.” -Michael Parenti, The Nobel Peace Prize for War (2012)
"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform, not the plight of Kosovar Albanians, that best explains NATO's war.” John Norris, who served as the communications director for Strobe Talbott the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State during the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia in Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005). Strobe Talbot wrote the introduction. Odd that a retired senior State Department diplomat I know says even now that NATO is a purely defensive organisation.
Tuesday, 11 August 2026
The Second Crimean War like the first is an attempt to contain Russia
Wonderful astonishing breakthrough amidst so much bad news
Professor William Marx posted this on X 22 hours ago.
The news went almost completely unnoticed in the French media, overshadowed by the World Cup and the wildfires: artificial intelligence has succeeded in fully deciphering a charred papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, as fragile as cigarette ash, without unrolling it or even touching it! It revealed a philosophical treatise on Stoicism. It took a wealth of ingenuity and technology to achieve this result. The dream has thus become reality: soon, we’ll be able to read in record time the hundreds of scrolls from that library incinerated by Vesuvius 2,000 years ago, and Greco-Latin literature will be enriched by that many unpublished texts—new tragedies or epics, perhaps. In this depressing summer, here’s a true ray of light. Long live science!
Monday, 10 August 2026
Elizabeth Lane wants Trump to take Greenland
I came across Elizabeth Lane being interviewed about American propaganda by Tucker Carlson and did some research on her.
She is a Georgian-American actress who admires Vladimir Putin. Her boyfriend or former boyfriend or close friend is in the FSB.
But her being an admirer of Vladimir Putin (I am not one, just so you know) or even her being close to the Russian secret service doesn't mean what she says should be dismissed.
This post on X today makes good sense but the reason why I copy it here is because it made me see that the Cold War served US interests by scaring Europe into obeying Washington.
I worked out at the time that it was unnecessary because Russia and America were in the 19th century parlance satisfied powers.
Today fear of Russia makes Europe obey the USA, a much more murderous country than Russia, one that has invaded far more countries than Hitler's Germany.
I do feel that Denmark that has supported so many illegal and unnecessary American wars and actions is on thin ice on this one.
Things they said
Tony Blair, by then out of office, one month before NATO met in April 2008 to promise future membership to Ukraine. Acknowledgements to Glenn Diesen.
The American hegemon is an unprecedented threat to world peace because it wants to rule the world
Sunday, 9 August 2026
Quotations
JD VANCE: "Iran could be the richest country in the Middle East if they trust United States."
[Isn't the fall of Assad in Syria more Turkey's doing?]
The US should accept the Iranian peace proposals and Ukraine accept Russia's but this will not happen
Iran has issued these demands before she opens the Strait of Hormuz. Her demands are very reasonable and do not rule out Israeli and US vessels using the Strait but will not be accepted. The USA is talking about negotiations but is playing some game. Nothing the Americans say can be trusted, of course.
Ukraine should of course accept Russia's demands, make peace and keep her coast, but will not.The West is utterly lost if it continues to fight unwinnable (and in the case of Iran unjust) wars and if the USA wants to rule the world and threaten China, Russia, Iran and all the other states that do not accept US hegemony.
Meanwhile let's remember the continued fighting in Lebanon and Gaza.
I happened to reread today what former deputy chief of Mossad and retired IDF Major General Amiram Levin said in August of last year: "The orders the government is giving the army today are a crime... To give an order to shoot at hungry children and parents looking for a piece of bread... This is a crime, this is genocide."
Read yesterday and today
Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
What if one reason Israelis are so happy is that brutality has become pleasurable? … Today, violence is not only liberated from the trap of “shooting and crying” … or from acceding to the call of Naftali Bennett ... of “no more apologizing”: It is also becoming joyful. Probably the clearest manifestation of the ostensible joy of violence takes the form of what’s referred to as “happy Jews.”
In 2015, journalists Akiva Novick and Chaim Levinson explained in their report, “The Complete Hilltop Lexicon,” that happy Jews are those “who are not bound to the archaic conventions and rules of morality, and carry out ‘price tag’ [retaliatory operations against Palestinians] with a smile on their face” … Invitations to carry out pogroms are circulated on colourful, cheerful posters that look more like flyers for an open-air rave than calls to violence …
Thursday, 6 August 2026
Deliberately killing a civilian is a war crime
Wednesday, 5 August 2026
Quotations
"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." George Orwell
"The story of France is a story of gradual irrelevance." John Mearsheimer at the 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego, California.
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
There was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square in 1989, according to US Government cables
James Titcomb, Technology Editor of the Daily Telegraph which is very close to MI6, wrote this in an article on 6 June.
'If you ask ChatGPT what happened at Tiananmen Square, it will provide a brief history of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on protesters in 1989. Ask DeepSeek, one of China’s top AI systems, and it is far less forthcoming.
'“I am sorry, I cannot answer that question based on the information I have,” the bot answers.
'It is not that DeepSeek is incapable of answering the question. The AI will answer almost anything you throw at it, from obscure sports trivia to complex scientific questions.
'Instead, the system has been neutered by its developers so as not to fall foul of Beijing’s censors.'
No doubt this is true but I was astonished some time ago to find the Telegraph itself published an article on June 2011 under this headline:
Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim
Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago.
Monday, 3 August 2026
Veteran CIA man Ray McGovern today reminded us that Iran never tried to develop a nuclear weapon
How nice to see the dear man here ten days after he retired from Judging Freedom.
'All your audience knows the background of the Iranians are on record as not seeking a nuclear weapon. The CIA and othe reputable agencies when they were telling the truth reiterated that judgment since 2007 having said that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon at 2003. Okay. Were they working on a nuclear weapon before 2003?
'My best friend Gareth Porter, who wrote the book on this literally, says no. It was all from Israeli intelligence for God's sake. They persuaded the CIA to say, "Well, they could get a nuclear weapon in five years." That was 1990.
'In 1995, well, they could maybe get it in four or five years. It was laughable until this honest manager of intelligence came in. His name is Tom Fingar. He's from the State Department. He shepherded the estimate that was honest and said that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon. That was 2007. Okay?Unanimous. All 16 intelligence agencies at the time expressed with high confidence and that there was no indication that they had resumed work since 2003.
'That was reiterated. I know this is tiresome for those who have heard it before, but isn't it important? every estimate and this is why I thought we wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater being the operations part of CIA, the baby being every now and then they got something right and prevented the war that Bush and Cheney planned on their way out in 2008. It's on the record. It's in Bush's memoir for God's sake. Okay.
Books
A woman is like good literature, accessible to all but incomprehensible for limited people. Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down. Virginia Woolf
Sunday, 2 August 2026
Truth is the first casualty of war
Retired Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani
Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy
'The worst case of imposter syndrome in history'
Saturday, 1 August 2026
Today Alastair Crooke says 'America has effectively lost the war with Iran' and quotes 3 devastating things said by Israelis
'Former IDF Ombudsman Maj. Gen. Yitzak Brik predicts (Ma’ariv, 26 July) that the crisis engulfing the Israeli intercept inventory “is only the prelude to the catastrophe that is looming over us”.
'"In the coming wars with Iran, the threat will increase tenfold to the point of a complete loss of the ability to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles. These missiles are expected to hit us: in population centers, strategic targets, production and economic infrastructure, science and technology institutes, educational institutions, hospitals and vital industries, and completely crush us”.'Friday, 31 July 2026
Tucker Carlson and Justin Trudeau
Tucker Carlson yesterday.
“We all know people who are a little hesitant (about vaccination), and we’re going to try and convince them, but there are also people who are fiercely opposed to vaccination; who don’t believe in science, who are often misogynists, who are often racist as well … There, one must make a choice as a national leader, do we tolerate these people?”
Justin Trudeau during a French-language interview on the Quebec talk show La Semaine des 4 Julie on September 16, 2021. I didn't see this back then.
People often forget that England was awarded Palestine by the League of Nations in trust for her people, 90% of whom were Arabs
“Will you at least admit that Iran murdered, in cold blood, as many as 50,000 innocent protesters? And would you admit, if that’s true, that that comes close to the genocide? That anything that Israel is confused of doing in self-defense after its people were raped, kidnapped, murdered on October 7th, would you at least admit that the Iranian regime has killed many, many, many thousands of people?”