Quotations

"A deserted library in the morning – there’s something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully. I want to do what I can to preserve this place, keep it neat and tidy. Sometimes I come to a halt and gaze at all the books on the stacks, reach out and touch the spines of a few." Haruki Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore"

Robert Graves, Grotesques:

Starmer betrayed

An anonymous Labour source says Keir Starmer feels "betrayed".

"He gave everything to Labour, including sacrificing much of his children's teenage years to help make the party electable. He feels deeply betrayed, especially by those he believed were loyal to him."

He has been betrayed by the British people, I'm afraid.

Still he has been for two years Prime Minister of England, something no Greek or Roman ever was. 

That must be better than spending time with his children.

I wonder if we'll find out now about the Ukrainian male prostitutes. That story was mysteriously suppressed.

The Israeli press is vastly more informative and critical of the Israeli government, despite the military censorship, than Western media

I actually don't know exactly why except that the information space in most of the world is tightly controlled by America. 

But years ago European governments were mildly sympathetic to the Arabs, who are now called Palestinians.

My guess is that September 11 2001 made people see Islamism as the problem rather than America's record of interference in the Middle East. 

I found observing from Bucharest British reactions to September 11 as strange as their reaction to the death of Diana. 

I was in London for that one and realised I no longer understood most of my countrymen.

There has followed a quarter of a century of American prompted madness.

"Our War Against Russia"

 

  

This framed newspaper hangs on my wall.

Change but no change

Had I had a vote in the Makerfield by-election I'd have been attracted by both the two right wing parties, the Greens for their policy on Gaza, the Conservatives and absolutely not at all by Labour but probably would have voted Labour to oust Sir Keir Starmer and vote against McSweeney and Mandy.

It seems the good burghers of Makerfield, wherever that is, thought like me.

What Great Britain needs is a PM (think Enoch Powell) who isn't an Atlanticist and ideally is an isolationist, but only the Corbynites fit that description and that cure would be much worse than the disease.

Why does UK have so many PMs? Partly because party members who shouldn't be given the choice don't know the candidates or understand politics and choose badly but mostly because in Great Britain and every country centre left and centre right are exhausted, meaningless traditions.

The people who rule the world, the international deep state which includes the media, rule anyway and if people disagree they are ignored or on occasion imprisoned. 

Still Sir Keir Starmer is incapable of leasing the country or much else, even though he was DPP, he got elected Labour leader by lying about his opinions, has expelled anti Israel MPs whom he knows aren't anti-Semites for that offence, is a human rights lawyer who has been an accomplice of Israel's and America's in very illegal things, including piracy, and I want him gone.  

He is also an ardent atheist and insufferably wooden.

I agree with Brian Berletic here who advises "Beware of Triumphalism"

▪️Iran has simply survived the latest round of DECADES of US encroachment, encirclement, containment, and aggression;

▪️Actual "winning" looks like what the US has done in Syria, where one side completely loses, is removed entirely from the regional equation, and there are no "talks" or "negotiations" because the losing side has zero leverage to even get the other side to the table;

▪️The fact there are "talks" with the US in the first place indicates a fundamental lack of leverage on Iran's part;

▪️The US will not be withdrawing from the region, nor will US-backed proxies be rolled back and eliminated - instead the US and its proxies will simply rebuild, rearm, and reorganize their approach ahead of an inevitable renewed conflict, if there is even a significant pause to begin with;

▪️The US has already attacked Iran, paused a year, attacked again, paused a year and attacked again - in 2024 (via Israel), 2025, and again this year - nothing yet has been done by Iran to break this cycle, just survive it;

▪️Iran "controlling" the Strait of Hormuz is moot if the economic damage it causes advances US interests in placing the rest of Asia under energy dependence on the US - the only variable the US seeks to control is the speed & severity of the damage caused - this "MOU" allows the US to manage and slow it down;

▪️A US defeat would look like the full withdrawal of US troops from the region, the elimination of or reconciliation with its most dangerous proxies in the region, and iron clad security guarantees for Iran (via allies like Russia and China) - anything short of this means future conflict is inevitable;

▪️In other words, future conflict is inevitable

Washington Post Claims Israel "Sabotaging" US Attempts at "Lasting Peace" with Iran

▪️Who thinks the US actually desires "lasting peace?" - of course - no one;

▪️Using Israel as a pretext for continued war while affording the US plausible deniability is literally stated US policy repeatedly used by the US spanning the Biden and Trump administrations from 2024 to now to provoke and sustain this war of aggression against Iran in the first place;

▪️As warned about all throughout these "negotiations," as long as the structural realities driving US policy - the pursuit of power and profit over people and purpose - US policy itself will not change;

▪️In this case, not even the lies we're being told are changing as to why US policy won't change...

Holocaust delayed?

Israeli paper Maariv reports that memorandum of understanding makes Iran the strongest and most influential regional power in the Middle East instead of Israel.

That would stabilise the region but Israel intends to destroy the deal.

Most Israelis think all Gazans are Hamas and all Lebanese Shia are Hezbollah and that both groups are intent on repeating the German holocaust of the Jews. Israel therefore wants to do to Southern Lebanon what they did to Gaza, which can also reasonably be called a holocaust.

(Holocaust of course means sacrifice by fire and was used to describe Hiroshima, Dresden and many other things. On August 12, 1982 Ronald Reagan angrily called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the Israeli siege of Beirut and deliberately described the heavy bombing as a holocaust.)

Remember that in May 2025 a classified IDF database listed 8,900 Palestinian fighters as dead or likely dead in Gaza out of at least 73,770 Palestinians reported killed. 

Probably the number of dead Palestinian civilians was very much greater.

A report written by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb for the Harvard Dataverse in June 2025 estimated that nearly 377,000 Palestinians remain unaccounted for since October 2023. 

A report by academics Richard Hil (sic) and Gideon Polya in September 2025 said Israel was responsible for 680,000 deaths by April 2025, 380,000 of whom were infants under 5 and 99,000 children over 5.

Israel has not defeated Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or Iran and has lost younger Americans

Alastair Crooke today quotes Lazar Berman, military correspondent of the Times of Israel.

“The post-October 7 wars, which came with expectations and promises of “total victory,” are over - as are their illusions. Palestinians are not going to leave Gaza. Hamas won’t disarm, nor will Hezbollah. Trump is not going to return to war in Iran, which can now threaten to withdraw from a deal to get Trump to stop any major Israeli operation against Hamas or Hezbollah …The Middle East has certainly changed”.

And leading Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea. 

“There probably wasn’t anyone from Military Intelligence, the National Security Council or the Mossad who raised at the meetings the possibility that the Iranian regime might survive and emerge stronger."

Mr Crooke continues:

"....In this reconfigured Israeli strategic landscape, perhaps even the pusillanimous Europeans might begin some corrective action by insisting on a return to ancient understandings of war — in which de-capitation strikes and multi-assassination campaigns of women and children lie outside of all civilised norms of war, let alone of human morality. Iranian negotiators insisted in the negotiations that any assassinations or killings would kill relations with the US stone-dead.

".....Even amongst American Jews, 61% have concluded that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and 39% regard Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide."

Losing moral superiority to Belarus

Ynet the website for the mass market Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported last night an IDF order "Don't allow Shiites to return to their homes."

Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert:

President Lukashenko of Belarus:

"They have already earned such a reputation in the international community that it can't get any worse, having bombed Gaza to rubble. Many have even looked back at history: 'What Holocaust?! What Holocaust could there possibly be, the one Israelis talked about, when they have killed so many people, and above all women and children?'"

“Gaza was simply wiped off the face of the Earth.” 

“And now they are trying to build a resort on the very land where these people were killed?”

Catholic Mozart

 

Is the American empire contained or recoiling to spring further?

Tucker Carlson: 

You probably never imagined that the end of American Empire would come in a little over a 100-day conflict with a little rogue state on the Persian Gulf that has the 34th largest economy in the world, a country called Iran. You just couldn't imagine that would happen.

I hope he's right but as Adam Smith said there's a lot of ruin in a nation.

Brian Berletic has a very different view.

In the latest phase of the US’ decades-running war on Iran, Iran has simply “survived,” not “won;”

▪️Iran now faces either a possible longer pause it will need to race the US in preparations for the next confrontation, or another immediate disruption of any longer-term peace for the continued psuedo-ceasefire it has agreed to with Iran where it stays just under the threshold of total war with Iran while managing energy prices based on shipping disruptions and the prospect of wider war;

▪️The US already has two excuses ready and waiting to undo any agreement it makes with Iran including its long-established and well-used “Leave it to Bibi” option and the US’ own “intelligence community” preparing to accuse Iran of not abiding by any agreement made;

▪️Both options have been repeatedly used by the US to unilaterally withdraw from previous agreements made with Iran as well as to provoke armed aggression against Iran;

Enemies

We should not consider a country's domestic policies when judging her foreign policies. They are irrelevant. 

England's problems with Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler, the USSR and Argentina were not their internal policies but their invading countries and threatening our interests. By this criterion Iran is not England's or NATO's enemy and the USA is.

What he said

On X

Unreal: the symbolism of Trump signing a surrender agreement at Versailles in which the US agrees to pay massive reparations is just too perfect. Arnaud Bertrand

Handre

@Handre

·

Jun 16

In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament.

Iran now the fourth most powerful country in the world

Is Iran now the world's fourth great power? It looks like it. 

I see it bruited that in 5-10 years Iran could reach the military power of Russia, if they invest a lot and they will have the money to do so!

Israel's downfall began the day the US murdered the Ayatollah Khamenei and united Iran. It's reminiscent of how Saddam's invasion galvanised the Islamic Republic.

Ex-Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon two hours ago:

"The Sodomites lost; their pretense of being a ‘regional superpower’ evaporated into thin air. The Iranians, on the other hand, won a spectacular victory on all fronts. 

"What we observe here is the difference between the people who refer to themselves as 'light unto the nations' (the Israelites) and the nation that proves to be light unto humanity (Iran)…"

Who would have expected that outside America and Israel Iran would be widely supported by the public?

Un englez în Pasajul Englez

 

Iran has won

Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal says US officials have confirmed that Iran will get full access to a total of $100 billion of their money frozen (stolen) by America and $300 billion for reconstruction.

US intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran can now effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will, three sources tell CNN. This is hardly news. “We have now handed Iran de facto control over the strait — a weapon more powerful than any nuke."

Iran has also learned it can leverage targeted strikes against Gulf energy infrastructure and deploy Houthis to close the Bab-el-Mandeb strait as an economic “nuclear option” if negotiations collapse. Again a statement of the obvious. 

Sweet are the uses of adversity, as I quoted before. 

But can Iran get Israel out of Lebanon?

Is there any point in American forces being in the Persian Gulf (the clue is in the name)?

The world looks on without sympathy for America or Israel. Many people have found to their amazement an unlikely hero in the Iranian government. 

As Disraeli said, the unexpected always happens but it's much more true now than during the cold war, which seems like a period of stability.

What were Mr Trump's war aims?

What were the aims of Trump's attack on Iran just at the moment when the Iranian government had offered America a good deal and were meeting to discuss peace? 

His main enemy was not Iran but Obama.

The second target was China.

Then perhaps Iran.

But with Netanyahu and Trump it's a case of Greek meets Greek, two conmen in a folie a deux.

Mossad no doubt has plenty of information about Mr and Mrs Trump but that's not the reason for this war or it would have happened in his first term.

Professor Marandi says that, in accordance with the MOU, the Zionist regime must withdraw from the occupied territories in Lebanon and the US has accepted Iran's right to enrichment. 

This is a humiliation for America but America was humiliated anyway.

Trump was quoted weeks ago saying he could accept any deal because he could sell it as a victory, but the Iranians refused even to talk. 

Now they have.

Ari Benashe who worked with Epstein in Mossad says Netanyahu will release new Epstein files if Trump goes ahead with the deal.

Peace in our time? I have lots of doubts, frankly

The news of a deal sounds wonderful but I do not trust Trump or the US deep state one inch.

Will Netanyahu really withdraw from Lebanon and end the killing in Gaza? I find that hard to believe.

Professor Marandi says Iran wins if the Americans honour the deal and if they don't, in which case the world blames America and Israel.

Brian Berletic this morning calls it "a deal the US had no right to demand be made in the first place, in a region of the planet it has no right to be in, and all while the US continues striking at or seizing ships transporting Russian energy and continues destabilizing Asia ahead of confrontation with China..."

He's right, of course. I hope it's a statement of the obvious but people have been misled by the media and politicians.

Robert A. Pape

@ProfessorPape

·

1h

US-Iran MOU is a Memorandum of Disagreement Rushing to sign Friday, both sides fundamentally split on: • Iran wants $12B upfront; US says no cash • Israel's Lebanon campaign • US force withdrawal Thin ice today, total collapse tomorrow — unless US capitulates

Turkey which is in NATO better look out

 

War and terror

In November 1941 Sir Richard Peirse, then C-in_c of Comber Command, told The Thirty Club 'For a long time the Govt for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call military targets...I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples'. Arthur Harris wrote in April 1942:'We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war'. Attacks were especially directed against crowded working class areas, where they did most damage, so hitting those Germans who had voted against Hitler for as long as it was possible to do so.

Peter Hitchens today

Brian Berletic: There is no US-Iran "Deal"

BB points out that the US signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and Iran and unilaterally resiled from them.

"There are no agreements with the US. 

"Only illusions of agreements the US makes to buy time for itself and to position targeted nations ahead of betrayal planned before any of these agreements were even proposed let alone signed.

"The toppling of Iran using the "Nuclear Deal" was proposed in 2009 by the Brookings Institution then verbatim carried out over the course of the Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump administrations."

Whether I agree or not it seems, as Chas Freeman says, to be impossible to negotiate with the US now. They murdered 49 Iranian leaders just after they made very big concessions to the US.

I do not know what is happening but I hope Iran is very, very cautious. He who sips with the devil must use a very long spoon. I think the negotiations are American trickery.

BB mentions the tale of the scorpion and the frog which teaches children actions speak louder than words and that scorpions have to kill because it's their nature.

He turns to Indonesia.

"When Indonesia turned down US demands for military access to its airspace to better threaten the Strait of Malacca earlier this year, it was inevitable that US-engineered protests would follow;

"...The protests are specifically citing high energy prices as the reason they're in the streets;

"Recall just weeks before these protests started, US-funded propaganda outlets in Indonesia attacked and smeared alternative media exposing US involvement in violent protests last year in Indonesia to get ahead and pre-empt attempts to expose it again this year;

"Everyone talks about military industrial production (including myself) but far too many ignore or underestimate the US' actual superweapon, political capture through organization like the NED, Open Society, and USAID simply hidden better directly within the State Department.."

What the American defence establishment (aka the deep state) is doing to smear opponents and manipulate the media in Indonesia is exactly what they are doing in Europe and Great Britain.

I said months ago that we are all Iranians now. We are all Indonesians too.

Post-Iran War: The End of an Era as a Trigger not to Decline but to Abrupt Change

Alastair Crooke today.

Professor Michael Hudson, in a recent discussion, takes issue with those who speak today of the ‘decline of the US hegemon’. A decline implies something goes up and down, Hudson says, but it always recovers. “But there’s never been any such thing statistically as a cycle … There’s no decline, it’s a crash” —

“We’re seeing the ending of an era, not a decline, but an abrupt change. And this change is not stemming from without: The ending of the American power did not result from any foreign civil war or other war against American dominance. The end came from the United States itself in trying to juxtapose its interest as hegemon against that of every other country”.

Here is Gideon Levy's article "Israel's Solution to the Gaza Problem Is Well Underway" (Haaretz 30 May 2026)

[I was going only to quote from it but it all clamoured to be quoted. I always call him the noblest Israeli.]

The only alternative to Hamas' rule at the moment is anarchy, and the chaos is good for Israel to realize its postwar plan: total social disintegration, and then expulsion

Israel does have a postwar plan for Gaza. The notion that it lacked one was badly mistaken. I wish this plan didn't exist. Far from global and Israeli public attention, the implementation of the next phase of Israel's gradual strategy is already well underway.
Now that the genocide has run its course and the Strip has been destroyed almost completely, Israel is advancing confidently toward the next phase of the plan: making the entire population of Gaza permanently disabled, injured, sick, hungry, homeless and unemployed.

When Katz says that Hamas will not rule the Strip civilly, he knows very well that there is no one to govern Gaza except for Hamas, nor will there be, at least not in the foreseeable future. The only alternative to Hamas' civilian rule at the moment is anarchy. That chaos is good for Israel and the realization of its plan.
Israeli propaganda can continue to scream that Gaza equals Hamas and that Hamas equals terrorists. That's a lie, of course. Not only is everyone in Gaza not Hamas, but not everyone defined as Hamas is a terrorist. Israel knows full well that tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and government officials whose salaries come from the Hamas government aren't terrorists. Defining them as such allowed Israel to kill thousands of them, under the label of "terrorists." Traffic cops, accountants and teachers aren't terrorists and cannot be marked for death. Their killing was, and is, a war crime. So, too, journalists carrying Hamas-issued press cards are not terrorists. They might be propagandists, as are many Israeli journalists, but they are not terrorists.
Israel killed two birds with one stone: legitimacy, albeit false, for indiscriminate killing, alongside an additional stage in the realization of its grand plan. No society can function without teachers, doctors, social workers, engineers and clerks, and without a functioning society, it's easy to expel Gaza's residents to the four corners of the earth.
On Thursday the latest episode of "The Tucker Carlson Show" aired, featuring a two-hour interview with Dr. Nick Maynard, an Oxford-educated British surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza for around 17 years, on and off. The atrocities that he described having witnessed were jaw-dropping: corpses in handcuffs, teenage boys who were brought in for surgery after having been shot in the testicles, babies who died of starvation and preemies left in incubators, on IDF orders, when a hospital was evacuated, and found dead a few weeks later.
Every Israeli, every human being in the world must see or hear this interview. There was one goal to all these atrocities: Israel's "solution" to the problem called Gaza.

[On 29 April Ha'aretz quoted an anonymous source who said that Netanyahu's international affairs adviser Caroline Glick unsuccessfully approached Somaliland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to ask them to accept the Palestinian population from Gaza.]

Donald Trump's psychologist niece Mary says he's a loser

"For decades he has devoted enormous psychological energy to protecting himself from the truth that he is incompetent, unsuccessful, and fundamentally unlovable while simultaneously convincing everyone else that he is brilliant and self made. Those myths are beginning to fail."

Eric Berne said to that when losers win power in countries the countries lose and mentioned Hitler. Enver Pasha of Turkey is another example. His legacy is the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Lenin is a third example. 

US Ambassador Chas Freeman: The Era of Impunity for Israel & the US in West Asia Is OVER

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman's latest podcast impressed me, particularly this which i wanted to bring to your attention. I didn't know about Israeli war crimes in 1967.

"I mean, the things Israel has done are just horrifying to any normal human being. And it didn't start yesterday. If you go back to we now have a lot of evidence previously concealed that the same sort of thing was done after the 1967 war in which Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt and Syria and did other things including sinking the USS Liberty which is something that was covered up but is now out in the open but it's all we also have testimony from settlers in Arab towns and villages is about the massacre of the inhabitants and other cruelties, the rape of Arab women by the IDF. So this isn't just yesterday. This is consistent and it's no wonder that people have been reluctant to normalize relations with Israel, but I think they are if Israel changes its policies and behavior and and I think that includes Iran. It's not an implacable enemy of Israel, nor is Turkey, but it is an implacable enemy of an Israel that is without established borders, no constraints imposed by international law, no respect for the international community, no respect for the UN charter, basically an outlaw and pariah among states."

Netanyahu's Worst Fear Has Come True: Israel Is Dying

Jeffrey Sachs' podcast today.

<The American security state such as it is, which now includes a lot of Silicon Valley, supports the war and why do they support the war? Partly the Zionist lobby, partly they're testing all their weapon systems. This is just the greatest thing going. They're learning how to incorporate AI deeply into their weapon systems. You have a few mishaps. You kill a lot of school girls, but that's part of learning according to these people.>







<So, we have at least three motivations for this war.

One is to bring Iran back to the empire.

Second, more generally is hegemony. The US wants control over the Middle East.

And the third is to subdue Israel's uh opponent because Iran supports the Palestinian cause. I think rightly supports the Palestinian cause in the sense that Palestine needs a state and again it can be one-state solution for everybody. it could be a two-state solution but Israel opposes anything other than complete Israeli dominance.

So here we have this war. There's just one problem. The US and Israel can't win it. They can't win it without causing global disaster.>

Give peace a chance

Personally I think Great Britain spends enough on defence. Illegal immigrants and terrorists are the threat to us. 

John Healey disagreed and wanted is to spend more. He is the first British Secretary of State for Defence to resign. 

John Nott wanted to after the invasion of the Falklands but Mrs Thatcher would not let him.





John Profumo was Secretary of State for War when he resigned after admitting he lied to Parliament about Christine Keeler and Lord Lambton was Under-Secretary of State for Defence when he too resigned because of prostitutes. 

Duff Cooper and Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty. Were there others? I am sure there were many.

The Guardian which peddles MI6 misinformation about Iran including the CIA/MI6 regime change attempt praises Healey who is responsible for my country being guilty of war crimes by helping the IDF in Gaza.

Declassified UK

@declassifiedUK

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Jun 11

Defence secretary Healey authorised hundreds of UK spy flights for Israeli intelligence during a genocide. He was never seriously questioned on this let alone held to account, and now freely leaves office. The real issue here is our governance: one national media won’t tell.

Great Britain should to be neutral, stay out of American wars, in which I include the Ukrainian war, and repeat over and over that we have no interests east of Suez. But despite this the UK should try to build good relations with Iran and China rather than be dependent on America.

America is a big threat to us, China or Iran not so much.

We should use our good offices as a neutral country to try broker a lasting security architecture that leads to peace in Ukraine but that is easy to say and may be impossible to do.