Ed and David Miliband are not the first brothers to be British Foreign Secretary

Ed and David Miliband are not the first brothers to be British Foreign Secretary.

The Marquess Wellesley and his younger brother the Duke of Wellington both were, the latter very briefly. He held all principal ministerial offices concurrently for three weeks in November–December 1834 while England waited for Sir Robert Peel to return from Italy, where he was on holiday, and then remained Foreign Secretary under Peel till the government collapsed in April 1835.

Austen Chamberlain and his half brother Neville were both Chancellor of the Exchequer and both leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party (both being Liberal Unionists originally).

Edward and Oliver Stanley were both First Lord of the Admiralty.

Ed Miliband in his first remarks overseas as Foreign Secretary at ASEAN condemned Russia's "aggression", but not the USA's or Israel's, and spoke vaguely of the "suffering" of the Palestinians. 

I suppose Great Britain is not a free agent but has to toe the American line. How different things were when Wellington or Wellesley were Foreign Secretary.

Avoid the words terrorism and genocide

I try to avoid the words genocide and terrorism and wish everyone would. The word terrorism is impossible to define - the word genocide has a definition but discussing it changes the subject from what happened to a legal dispute. I read a left-wing historian recently saying the word genocide is used for polemical purposes not for spreading understanding. The word holocaust on the other hand means a burnt sacrifice so that word is straightforward.

My country is going to war on the wrong side on the orders of foreign governments and the advice of the deep state

Of course the new British cabinet has to do what it's told.

Israel apparently is going to take part in what may be a big and disastrous war. We as so often will be on the wrong side. Meanwhile the British Chief Rabbi wants it to be illegal to wish death on the IDF though not on the IRGC.

Achieving immortality

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Shakespeare's Sonnet LV  

Europe cannot afford to have Russia as an enemy, nor China, nor Iran

Dissident opinions on the internet are the shaft of sunlight in the dungeon we inhabit.

The European Council and the rest of the international deep state wants to block the light.

I recommend this podcast by Ian Proud former senior British diplomat in Moscow.

He points out that NATO is not a defensive organisation, something proven by the fact that member states account for 52% of total global military spending, a proportion that will increase.

Ed the Red

Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary is an inspired appointment.

It stops his net zero reign of terror, gives us a Foreign Secretary who prevented the UK intervening militarily in Syria because of dodgy allegations and he is one of the very few senior British politicians left who has been outspokenly critical of Israel.

The fact that Stephen Pollard and the Daily Telegraph are furious is reassuring.

Better not to have redbrick Prime Ministers in future?

Mr Burnham is only the 15th Cambridge Prime Minister and the first to kiss hands since Stanley Baldwin who first did so 103 years ago and was one of the best ones.

31 went to Oxford. 8 went to Scotch universities, 2 to European ones and one, the unlamented Sir Keir Starmer, to Leeds. 

Better stick to Oxbridge and Scotland in future?

Actually Lloyd George and Churchill didn't go to university. An equally great one, Pitt the Younger, went to Cambridge at 13.

The new PM read English which is a very much better preparation than PPE or Law. In an age when so many of the people who rule us have no cilture he has read poetry. 

I expect he'll be terrible but what a pleasure to see the back of the mendacious, murderous Mendelson-McSweeney protégé Starmer.

I suspect we're really ruled by the international deep state and the secret services whichever party is in power.

He is a cradle Catholic who said he is not participating religious. He is the first Catholic Prime Minister unless you count Boris, who was baptised a Catholic but brought up as a nominal Protestant.

Eyeless in Gaza

 

Unfortunately very many children are buried under the rubble whose names are known only to God.

Remember that America financed this and the RAF lent assistance.

Alon Mizrahi

@alon_mizrahi

You may not believe it, but 95% of Israeli Jews have absolutely mo ides what they have done wrong. In their book, they are hated because of rampent antisemitism. And they really genuinely believe it. It's a clinically insane aociety

It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder. America is violent, lawless and inept

"We just had no military strategy for winning against Vietnam. We had no military strategy for winning in Afghanistan. We had no military strategy for winning in Iraq and we have no military strategy for winning here. But the point is that once you get into these things, it's very hard to get out. No question. And you look for ways to escalate and it's kind of like a wing and a prayer. You know, maybe something will happen that we don't foresee. And if we just double down, maybe, you know, we'll be lucky." John Mearsheimer yesterday talking to Chris Hedges

Quotations

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live."
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

"We like someone because. We love someone although."
Henry de Montherlant

"You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman….It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity."
Carl Jung, The Red Book 

Fox News: "What happens to Ukraine if it does not receive the help it needs?"
Lech Walesa: "It won't just be Ukraine that is affected. The United States will be in danger. Russia wants to attack the U.S. Right now it's too weak to do so, but if it is let to defeat Ukraine, the U.S. will be next. So, it is in the interest of us all, including the U.S., to deal with Russia once and for all." 

February 22, 2024

The hardest part of a 14 day war is the first 140 days

Iranians and Americans see deaths differently. The Americans kill civilians without qualm but do not have the fortitude to sustain losses on their side whereas with Iranians it's the other way around.

2 US servicemen were killed in Jordan by Iranian missiles, at least 3 to 5 more soldiers aboard the medical evacuation flights will ‘probably not make it’ and there are 15 more soldiers with life-threatening, very severe injuries whose fate is also still unclear. I hope American public opinion forces an end to this unprovoked and unnecessary war. 

Americans do not take much interest in the foreigners they kill but they do dislike their own soldiers dying, though the price of petrol which they call gas matters to them more and therefore to their politicians.

Meanwhile Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the US State Department has said this:

‘We do not want anybody to remember the Palestinians as they disappear into that dark night underground under rubble, to be soon turned into whatever it is Jared Kushner and his boys have planned for them.

'But we've all forgotten about that. And that is fundamentally evil that we have done that.

'This is not the equivalent of Hitler's Holocaust, but it's very close. And if it keeps on at the present rate, and it really is 250,000–300,000 Palestinians under that rubble, and I think Ralph Nader's right about that, I think it is, this could match anything that's happened in the last century….'

British people are siding with the enemy

From a Daily Telegraph story.

"Not only would 24 per cent apparently side with hostile foreign actors [China, Russia, Iran], but 61 per cent appear to believe that the contract between citizens and the state is “broken”, largely because politicians fail to deliver on their promises. This disillusionment cuts across age, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Almost a third are open to the view that non-white people can never be as English, Scottish or Welsh as white people."

Reminder: the United Kingdom is not at war with China, Russia or Iran.

Britain has no political interests in the Far East, the Middle East or even, come to that, Ukraine beyond wanting a durable peace and the Strait of Hormuz reopened. 

Reminder: the Strait was open before the USA attacked Iran, it became a war zone and Lloyds of London closed it.

One reason for wanting NATO dissolved in 1992 as was said at the time was that it would expose Europe and Canada to getting involved in American adventures.

Gaza changes everything

The Guardian scooped the world on 27 June 1944 with the news that a hundred thousand Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and put the story near the top of page 4. The liberation of Auschwitz was on the back page of The [London] Times the next year. Auschwitz grew rapidly in importance and changed the way the world thought, changed politics and even changed Christianity. The killings in Gaza and now Lebanon will change everything too though this is not yet widely apparent.

Gaza and Epstein (the two things are connected) have already removed Sir Keir Starmer from office.

I recommend this article by Paul Holden about his ascent to power and defenestration here. It starts thus.

'It’s hard to hear exactly what the heckler shouts to Sir Keir Starmer from the floor of Labour’s September 2024 conference, but snatches are caught on the ambient mics. “Does that include the children of Gaza?” is heard before the camera zooms in on the delegate. He is young, only a teenager, and he’s quickly moved out of the conference hall after saying something about “bombs” and “Palestine”.

'It’s the first Labour conference since Starmer was elected as the first Labour prime minister in 14 years, and it is conducted with the swagger and brio one would expect of a triumphal political project. Even so, Starmer’s response was extraordinary.

'“This guy’s obviously got a pass to the 2019 conference,” Starmer jokes.

'The hall erupts in laughter and applause, some rising to their feet. Starmer, who has so often been criticised for failing to show that he enjoys politics, basks in the response, plainly savouring the moment. “We’ve changed the party,” Starmer explains in a sing-song tone.

'The day after the heckler interrupted Starmer, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 41,495 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s assault on the Gaza strip. 11,355 were children. A week before, the Gaza health ministry published a 649-page document listing every identifiable person killed in Gaza. The first 12 pages are exclusively of babies under one year old.'

Alon Mizrahi, an ex-Israeli Arab Jew, on X

No military in history has hit US forces with the efficacy and precision of Iran's armed forces (notable historic exception: Vietnam's heroic Vietcong). Americans don't even know what it means to take on a proper military. And they are being destroyed (if we only knew how many US soldiers already collapsed mentally). Every position in West Asia known, every base targeted, every installation surveilled. Iran fights like a modern superpower with the spirit of a holy, native Islamic military. What a crazy spectacle. 

And they are still using only a small part of their capabilities. The escalation ladder has many, many steps to climb. We are witnessing the grandest and most epic battle since the Red Army vanquished the Nazis in WW2

All Romanians I speak to think this, but I haven't asked many

I asked the bank teller, a women in her fifties, who do you want to win the war, America or Iran? Iran she answered unhesitatingly. "America makes wars all over the world and doesn't care for anybody." 

I don't think she is a particularly good teller but as a political analyst I can't fault her.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. (Matthew 11:25)


He might have added unto bank tellers and cab drivers.

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman this week

"Zionism is as incompatible with non-aggression as Nazism was." 

"It takes a lot longer to build a missile interceptor, two or more years, than it does for the Iranians to build missiles. So they [Iranians] are actually increasing their supply of missiles and drones while the US is depleting its."

An unanswerable question seen on Facebook

Can someone explain to me why if Israel protects itself from hostile Muslim neighbours that somehow does something good for the West?

Quotations

"Dostoevsky sacrificed a great deal of knowledge for a new humanity and told this new humanity his deepest secret, his last formula, his most memorable saying: 'Love life more than the meaning of life'." Stefan Zweig

George Kennan who in his Long Telegram of February 22, 1946 said the US should contain Soviet Russia and later opposed the cold war, Nato and the arms race

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented." In his foreword to the book The Pathology of Power by Norman Cousins (1987).

Bastille Day reflections

A former Spanish PM has been condemned for saying the French world cup team isn't French. Trevor Noah said the same thing amusingly years ago and J-M Le Pen.

De Gaulle, who begins his memoirs saying he always had a certain idea of France, opined: "It is very good that there are yellow French, black French, brown French. They show that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France."

This is not 1938 but 1939

Nothing made me so angry for a long time. 

British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood just proscribed the IRGC, bowing to the Israel lobby.

I support Iran in defending herself from an unprovoked war as do most people I know.

I think I can say that here in Bucharest sipping my coffee in the boulevard.

Saying so in the UK might get me 14 years in prison.

I am not making this up, gentle reader.

I might be arrested when I land in England like an American writer was recently for things he had written abroad.

What reasons can America have for the attack on Iran?

Iran's internal policies are no justification for attacking her, are they? 

The Iranian government has done bad things but Saudis have committed worse crimes, as has Israel.

Mr Trump could claim that Iran finances Hamas and is responsible for what Hamas does, but that's simply not true.

Anyway Israel has killed probably hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians and by the IDF's own admission in August 8,900 Hamas fighters in Gaza supposedly in order to vanquish Hamas.

Hezbollah? Hezbollah came into existence to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which happened so Israel could fight the PLO, who were attacking Israel because.......  and if you go back far enough you get to the British decision to give Jews a homeland in 1917.

I am a huge admirer of the British empire but this was not our finest moment. It was probably our most fateful mistake.

Israel's actions in Gaza and now in Lebanon where since March more than 4,200 people have been murdered, over ten thousand wounded and roughly a fifth of the population been displaced seem to make Israel a much worse actor than Iran.

In a logical world the Americans should go to war against Israel if protecting peace and human rights is what motivates America. 

If putting America first does America should take her troops out of West Asia and I'd argue out of the whole of Asia.

The truth is that America has wanted to overthrow the Iranian government since it came to power in 1979, replacing the American puppet regime of the Shah.

Israel has been worried about Iran only since the 1990s, producing propaganda about Iran getting the bomb as a means of keeping the alliance going with America.

Yesterday Trump said the US is protecting the Strait of Hormuz for China. "I don't mind protecting it for China but it's unfair that we aren't somehow compensated." 

Remember that the Strait was open until Trump attacked Iran without giving a reason.

Meanwhile the war in Russia continues. 

Podcasters like Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs etc say Russia is winning and that Western help to Ukraine may provoke a world war. 

These ideas seem contradictory. 

We do need America and her vassals or allies to give up struggling against Russia, Iran and China. Ceasefires are not enough. We need a new settlement and America to go home. America is the problem, not Iran or China. Even Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, worse than a crime a blunder, was provoked by American behaviour.

Remember that the precedent the world has to avoid at any cost is not Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 but Chamberlain going to war in 1939, a war that cost 70 million lives, left half of Europe ruled by Communists and destroyed the British empire.

This time a world war will presumably mean a nuclear war.

Israel might use nuclear weapons even in the present limited war.

'Israel Eyes Two Fronts: Iran Today, Turkey Next' - Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia

'There's a quote from Bezalel Smotrich who said that Witkoff told him the Palestinians in Gaza 'are Nazis and I'm not going to allow Israel to have to live alongside Nazis'. This is an indication of how insincere and incompetent and biased and ineffectual Mr. Wickoff is, if he did say that. It shows that he is a bloodthirsty Zionist. Of course the people who are behaving like Nazis are not the Palestinians but the Israelis. They are the ones conducting genocide. They are on the offensive. They are trying invading neighbouring countries. Palestine is defending itself to as best it can which is not very well.'

'He said the Islamic Republic of Japan attacked us with 111 missiles and we have to respond. ....This is a typical of someone who is suffering mental deterioration. He is clearly in the grips of dementia.'

Lindsey Graham

"I like the structural path we are on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and economic support, they will fight to the last person." Lindsay Graham (2022)

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said at the weekend that Israel is destroying everything in Southern Lebanon

“I said that Southern Lebanon would become Gaza. We would apply the Rafah model.

We would destroy everything there. We would deal with them in exactly that way.

And that is what we did.

The infrastructure has been destroyed.

Homes in 24 villages along the border, villages that had existed for hundreds of years and were used by Hezbollah as military outposts against Israel have been demolished.

The army systematically flattened the villages with bulldozers and explosives.

Ninety percent of the houses are gone.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 homes have been destroyed.”

Lindsay Graham - I don't remember where I read this

In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.

Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.

By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.

....In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.

On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.

He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."

A very bad man has died

Lindsay Graham is dead.

The Politician, dead and turned to clay,

Will make a clout to keep the wind away.

I am not fond of draughts, and yet I doubt

If I could get myself to touch that clout.

(Belloc)

Deploring the joy expressed at Ann Widdicombe's murder I feel a hypocrite but I feel absolutely no sadness about Lindsay Graham's death.

I never disliked a politician more.

He called for the US to attack Iran in 7 October 2023 and wanted Iran flattened like Hiroshima.

I do not rejoice but Clarence Farrow put it best when he said "I have never wished a man dead, but I have read many obituaries with great satisfaction".

Not many in my case. Very few but his yes.

Actually I am lying to myself and you. I am pleased he is dead, simply because while he lived he was doing enormous harm. Though if he was murdered this I strongly condemn like the murders of Arabs and Persians. 

Miss Widdicombe by contrast was a retired spinster living in a cottage in the countryside who did no-one any harm and who stood by Harvey Proctor when he was accused wrongly of paedophilic crimes. Homosexual lobbyists let him hang in the breeze.