An incredibly telling paragraph in the Guardian obituary of Peter Snape

"He was also a skilful political tactician, a natural for the Labour whips’ office, in which he served in the difficult days of the Wilson and Callaghan governments before 1979. On one occasion, he was profoundly shocked, when sitting on the government bench as the “duty whip” during a late-night debate, to be unexpectedly joined by the prime minister, James Callaghan, who asked him conversationally (and sotto voce) if he had ever thought of emigrating because “this country is finished”. Snape was still a relatively new and young MP and discreetly kept this exchange entirely private."

Ecstasy: entry for August 26 from 'Words and days : a table-book of prose and verse' by Bowyer Nichols (1895)

Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs,
Yet from mine ear the templing tune is blown
Venus and Adonis

 
THE ideal, cheerful, sensuous. Pagan life is not sick or sorry. No ; yet its natural end is the sort of life which Pompeii and Herculaneum bring so vividly before us, — a life which by no means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the understanding ; but by the very intensity and unremittingness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing and revolting us ; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of oppression, — with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion, and relief. 

Matthew Arnold.

I FLUNG away, and with full cry 

Of wild affections, rid 

In post for pleasures, bent to try 

All gamesters that would bid. I played with fire, did counsel spurn, 

Made life my common stake ; 

But never thought that fire would burn. 

Or that a soul could ache. 

Henry Vaughan

Patrick Craig Roberts talking to Dr Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works

Paul Craig Roberts says that Iranian leaders are mistaken if they view a pause in U.S. attacks as more than tactical. Washington is not interested in peace but is focused on maximum pressure to control the region, making any negotiations insincere. 

"I was 25 years in Washington essentially at the top, and those people they can't accept defeats."

"When you agree to a ceasefire before you finish off the enemy, the war's not over. And the longer this thing goes on, the more the Americans can come to the conclusion: 'We have to win this, our national prestige is at stake, America's military reputation, we can't let Iran prevail,' and they'll talk themselves into using nuclear weapons. That's the danger I've always seen, I pointed it out at the beginning, it still worries me."

"Weaponising the US dollar through sanctions is the true threat to its global reserve status."

Back in November talking to Iran's Pars Today he said:

"I was surprised that Iran did not make greater use of the Iron Dome’s ineffectiveness, as it was unable to intercept Iran’s attacks. Iran could have continued the assault and destroyed Israel.

...A ceasefire is usually proposed by the side that is losing its military advantage. In this case, Israel was able to gain an opportunity to recover by requesting a ceasefire. By accepting this pause, Iran gave Israel time to rebuild.”

I used to think he and other people like Pepe Escobar and Alastair Crooke were pretty crazy but the last few years have taught us all a lot about America. 

I always trusted John Mearsheimer from at least 2014 if not long before. The Syrian war taught me to trust Alastair Crooke. I remember enjoying but distrusting Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter when friends sent me their broadcasts and continuing following Sir Lawrence Freedman etc etc, time thrown away.

Said yesterday

I asked a prime minister of one of the major countries back in 2023, I said, you know, the Ukraine war is absurd. You know, it’s a dead end. Why don’t you say something in Washington? And he said to me, “Jeffrey, they treat us like children in Washington.” And then we were in a room, suddenly the meeting started, so I didn’t get a follow-up. But I have thought ever since, 3 years onward, how could a leader of a major country of Europe allow himself and his colleagues to be treated as children? And that taking that as an explanation why you don’t speak up in Washington, it’s stuck with me very, very painfully, that remark.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs talking to Glenn Diesen

We are like kids, and we keep maintaining this climate of hate. This is worrying because it’s also a matter of maturity—not just political maturity, but also the maturity of individuals. And what we see today are people who behave like teenagers.

Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud

The answer to the question “Why is that terrible thing happening?” is usually “Because it makes some rich white guys wealthier” or “Because it helps shore up US planetary domination” or “Because Israel wants it,” and it’s often some combination of all three.

Caitlin Johnstone

As the prime minister described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Toronto Star article

Iran is fighting for much or most of the world

Trita Parsi is interesting on 'Why so many countries around the world quietly root for Iran':

'There is relief [among officials from a wide variety of countries who spoke to Mr Parsi] that aggression and violations of international law did not pay off for the US and Israel in Iran, just as they didn’t for Russia in Ukraine. Venezuela was, in the eyes of many, a terrifying case. Regardless of one’s views of Maduro, the idea that a superpower could surgically kidnap the head of state of another country, install its favored ruler—who must now get her social media posts approved by the US Secretary of State—and gleefully announce that Venezuela is now American territory was petrifying to a lot of countries. So was the fact that European leaders praised the regime-change operation while dismissing concerns about its legality.

'Europe, which had by and large stood against the George W. Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq, was now enthusiastically onboard with regime change in Venezuela, all while insisting on the sanctity of international law in Ukraine and Greenland. That lack of resistance made the cost of a US neocolonial rampage all the more manageable. And given Donald Trump’s proclivities, both friends and foes of the United States feared they could be next.

'...As one official from a traditional American ally told me: “Had it not been for the resilience of the Iranians, Trump would likely have attacked Cuba by now and perhaps even annexed Greenland.”'

Caitlin Johnstone goes much further and says this (presumably it's about the letter from leftists in the Guardian criticising the Iranian government):

'It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. 

'If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under.'

'....Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order.'

I disagree with her on this - I think we should criticise Russia and any country that attacks or invades another country, but at a time like this we should leave the ones that do not alone. 

Said in the last day

It feels like what happened at Cambridge has been a sort of Chernobyl moment for academia. It’s revealed the incompetence, corruption and stupidity of those running the system and its hard to unsee once seen. Trust in the system has been destroyed.
Nick Longrich, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath.


Again, we have no strategy [with Iran]. We haven't had a strategy really since the Soviet Union collapsed and the state system went with it. I think what we adopted was something we called the rules-based liberal international order which was really an attempt to consolidate American political, military, economic hegemony over the world behind the façade of something that was going to spread democracy, human rights, goodness, love and truth which was all nonsense. What we did was we began a series of interventions ultimately designed to edge out and suppress anybody who could be a potential competitor.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor

US officials suppressed internal assessments that Al Qaeda’s Syrian wing had an “advanced” sarin production cell even as the US publicly blamed the Assad government for a 2013 chemical weapons attack, a report reveals.

Antisemitism and islamophobia

"We're cooperating with the European and US far right against Islam because we have a common struggle. Antisemitism no longer works for us because it doesn't grab attention among Westerners, but Islam we can exploit to get them to support us."

Amichai Chikli, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs.

American casualties

The number of U.S. servicemen and women reported wounded or killed in the Iran war has jumped to 774, according to the Washington Post. All those casualties are the fault of Trump, Netanyahu and the Mossad as are the far greater number of Iranian casualties, mostly civilians. 

I wonder if that Washington Post number is still an underestimate and wonder how many Israeli casualties there have been. 

Don't mess with Turkey

Turkey is the largest and most heavily armed state in the region with an army ten times bigger than the IDF.

Douglas Macgregor, whom I learn much from, has been expecting a Turkish intervention in Israel's war for years but so far it has not happened. He has also been expecting a Ukrainian defeat for years.

He compares the current situation of Syria to the 1939 fourth partition of Poland between Germany and Russia.

Netanyahu needs to defeat Iran to allow his Greater Israel project to succeed but antagonising Turkey as Israel did by striking a military airbase in Syria close to the Turkish border, that the Turks were considering using,  could lead Turkey to respond with severe military force if Turkish troops or direct assets are targeted again. 

Alastair Crooke and Chas Freeman say much the same except they say the Greater Israel project is now impractical in any case.

Clearly this incident happened to win the Likud support in the forthcoming election.

Why do Erdogan and Arab and European leaders not fly to Tehran and organise a peace? 

This should be Andy Burnham's priority.

MI6/CIA deception about hacked (unnamed) power plant

My nose tells me the story in the very MI6-adjacent Sunday Telegraph that Iranian hackers disabled a British power station for a time is not true. 

The article gives not one scintilla of evidence. 

Looking on X I see someone has posted this which saves me the trouble of writing it.

Per GROK more fear mongering and false flags. What proves it was Iranian linked? There is no publicly released technical forensic evidence (such as specific malware samples, IP addresses, code signatures, or detailed TTPs unique to this incident) that independently “proves” Iranian linkage in open sources. The attribution rests primarily on the following:

"Short term pain, long term gain"

"The rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence." Samuel Huntington's remark is a statement of the obvious but it is worrying that it was quoted with approval by Palantir co-owner Alex Karp who is doing so much to help the IDF in Gaza.

"This mob that is not a people, that they call themselves a Palestinian people but they are not a people. They have never been a people and have no rights. The rights are ours. We say these things unequivocally.....Gaza is the Land of Israel, Gaza is ours, Nablus is ours, Jenin is ours, all of them are ours".
Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Yosef in an address at West Jerusalem’s Gush Katif Museum on August 20th

"Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge — universities, media organisations, publishing houses — are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought" Kathleen Stock

This is funny - innumerable Americans on political TV programmes on TV repeating "short term pain, long term gain" about petrol prices.

Weather Underground leader and convicted bomber Bernardine Dohrn rears her head again, to condemn Iran

The letter to the Guardian by leftists criticising Iran is signed by the infamous communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, 'retired professor of law' (I wrote here about her praising Charles Manson's followers' murder of Sharon Tate) and her almost equally dreadful husband Bill Ayers.

Mr Obama's political career was launched in a fundraiser in their drawing room, just so you know.

I am certainly no admirer of hers but rereading this post I see she was quite right when she said in 2010 in an interview:

"The real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world."

But her anti-imperialism has softened.

Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi-born British academic and leftist, said this about the letter.

A famous victory by Iran

Larry Johnson was first to report that Iran disabled a base that cost $1 billion according to his sources in Bahrain.

This has forced the US Navy to move its supply operations 2200 miles away to Diego Garcia and caused the hardships being faced by US sailors in the Gulf some of whom are committing suicide or trying to, but Mr Hegseth kept quiet about it.

It is shameful that the UK is complicit in this unprovoked war by letting the US use Diego Garcia.

Germany at the brink

Germany is in a crisis, her greatest crisis since Khrushchev offered to permit a united democratic neutral Germany and Adenauer at Eisenhower's suggestion said no.

Germany is facing deindustrialisation because of the breakdown of its economic model: reliance on inexpensive imported energy to manufacture high-value export goods. It exports are undercut by cheap Chinese competition and impeded by EU regulations.

Whatever one may think of the German AfD party (Elon Musk and JD Vance love it, many Germans want to ban it as extremist and may succeed) its energy policy seems to me to make sense: to go first to the USA and then to Russia to obtain cheap energy and to go back to fossil fuels.

Back in 2022 I read people saying the Americans were using the Ukrainian war to separate Germany from Russia and China and make her dependent on expensive American liquefied gas. 

I dismissed this Machiavellian thinking then but don't now. Of course, the State Department certainly does thinks this way. 

What a steep learning curve the last four years have been.

What is the truth about the Beirut barracks bombings on October 23, 1983?

The Iranians do not seem to me to have given Donald Trump any reason let alone justification for his attack last year or this year.

America has wanted to overthrow the Iranian Islamic republic since the Shah was overthrown and for no clear reason that I can see except desire to dominate the Middle East and take revenge for the seizure by Iranian students of the American diplomats in 1979. (In fact they were not diplomats but working for the CIA and presumably working to undermine the new government). 

But Americans often mention their 220 marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers on a peacekeeping mission who were killed in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, they claim by Hezbollah under the direction of Iranian Intelligence. 

When I come across this on two occasions I looked up the account of the incident in John Ghazvinian's magisterial book America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present – I can't recommend it enough-  and am writing this as an aide memoire.

The bombing was in retaliation for the US 6th Fleet shelling Shia villages and killing innocent villagers. 

Hezbollah and Iran always denied responsibility, while Islamic Jihad admitted responsibility. Casper Weinberger always said to the end of his life that it wasn't clear who was behind it and said this was why the US did not retaliate against Iran or Syria.

The US troops were in Lebanon as peacekeepers but also very much to support the Israeli invaders and pro Israeli Christian-led government. It seems to me that they had become combatants when they shelled the villages.

This is Max Blumenthal's view, that this was not the start of Muslim terrorism but part of the civil war in which Reagan had allowed US forces to become embroiled.

The families of the victims later sued Iran in a civil lawsuit and their lawyer uncovered, according to Wikipedia,  a U.S. National Security Agency intercept of a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to Hojjat ol-eslam Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. As it was paraphrased by the judge "The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him ... 'to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines"'. 

'Musawi's Islamic Amal was a breakaway faction of the Amal Movement and an autonomous part of embryonic Hezbollah. According to Muhammad Sahimi, high-ranking US officials had a different interpretation from that intercept, which stopped them from ordering a revengeful attack against Iran.'

The US does not seem to have had any role in inciting Saddam to invade Iran in 1980 but supported Iraq. 250,000 to 500,000 Iranians were killed in that unprovoked war. Iran had no reason to love the US.

In 1982 Hezbollah came into existence with Iranian help to defend Lebanon against the invasion by Israel, which Israel launched to expel the PLO from Lebanon. 

And so it goes. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

A piece of advice: don't rely on AI to research topics like this. It is very biassed in favour of the American official line. Instead research and use common sense.

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

As the Iran war drains vital stockpiles of missile interceptors, American allies increasingly question Washington’s capacity to wage multi-front conflicts

By 

Yaroslav Trofimov

"Ever since President Trump’s return to office, America’s allies have been fretting about Washington’s intentions. Now, after the inconclusive war against Iran has eroded U.S. weapons stockpiles and laid bare the limits of American hard power, they also worry about American capabilities.

"Can America still defend its friends, if it wants to?"

"The question that officials in allied—and adversary—capitals are asking themselves is whether industrial decline, strategic incoherence and political dysfunction have weakened the U.S. to the point where it would no longer wield decisive force in a multi-front conflict that may encompass Europe, the Middle East and Asia. It is a concern shared by many in Washington, too." "

How they misinform us

David Miller says that a unit in the British government coordinates misinformation about Russia including the story of the poisoning of the Skripals, which I discovered to my great surprise thanks to former British ambassador Craig Murray is clearly a pack of lies, and the war crimes at Bucha. 

I have not studied what he says properly but post it here for you to see.

What is certain is that all we read in the mainstream media is what MI6 and the CIA etc want us to think. 

I wonder whether Michelle Haslam, whom I knew when she was posted here in Bucharest, is involved. I expect so.

Even though it was obvious to any informed person when the invasion of Iraq went wrong that America was the great danger to the world the habit of thinking well of America took a long time for me to break. 

I only reluctantly came to the obvious conclusion that Biden was worse than Putin but Biden is guilty of financing a holocaust.

Trump has less blood on his hands so far but is much worse.

As the man said, we have met the enemy and it is us.

A close friend of mine once said to me 'The poets do not sing of friendship' but breaking up with friends is as painful as breaking with a lover

In fact Shakespeare did when he made Orlando in As You Like It deplore 'violated vows/’Twixt the souls of friend and friend.'


“They parted—ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;—
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel


If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.
St John Henry Newman

Gideon Levy: 'There is no good Zionism and no bad Zionism. There is one Zionism, which established the Jewish state by forcibly expelling the Palestinians.'

'There is no good Zionism and no bad Zionism.
There is one Zionism, which established the Jewish state by forcibly expelling the Palestinians.
It did this in 1948 and in 1967, and it has been doing so to this day.'

The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, whom I think of as the conscience of Israel, wrote this in Ha'aretz January 18, 2020, in an opinion piece titled "Religious Zionism? The Secular Zionist Left Is the Mother of the Occupation." He makes the indisputable point to his secular liberal Israeli readers that today's Israeli religious settlers and religious right are continuing the Zionist project that was started by atheists, secular progressives and socialists.

Many of the most fanatical Zionists came from the Russian empire and quite a few Russian Jewish Bolsheviks also distinguished themselves by fanaticism.

How Intelligence Services Captured Academia and Journalism

This is from a transcript of an informative podcast about how the media and academics are used as instruments to spread the line of governments and secret services, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

GLENN DIESEN: I was wondering, have you seen academics and journalists emulate the language of the state? I find it interesting — Orwell wrote very much about how propaganda creates a separate language for “us” and “them.” I see this in academia as well, especially in political science. For example, we have “policies,” but our opponents have “behavior.” There’s this pedagogic framing where our job is to socialize them. This was very much built into the idea of the EU and NATO after the Cold War — that the role of the West was to socialize everyone else, like a new civilizing mission.

I noticed in academia all the language is organized accordingly, the way politicians speak — they argue that others will threaten us, but we don’t threaten, we punish or reward, like a teacher would. That’s NATO: it will reward good behavior, it will punish bad behavior. This whole assumption of a socializing role gets incorporated into the language, and it’s used very uncritically by many academics as well. If the Chinese refuse to compromise — when we refuse to compromise, we’re principled. Others interfere in domestic affairs; we promote democracy. They go to war; we intervene. The Russians seek influence in neighboring states; we’re just promoting the “European path.” You have this kind of language where you don’t have to make arguments anymore — the wording replaces arguments, which is strange, because the whole point for academics should be to unpack these words, to discuss them.

America has lost its moral authority and also has been shown to be weak

America's allies are observing the weakness. 

Perhaps they will come to agree with Douglas Macgregor that alliances are do not protect counties in an age of cheap drones and missiles produced using AI and kept underground. 

They certainly don't protect against non state actors or migrants nor from being involved in America's foolish and/or illegal military adventures.

Nato was created for the Europe of the 1940s just as the European Economic Community, now renamed the European Union, is very much a 1950s 'big is beautiful' invention. 

Both organisations are about preventing another Hitler, as so many things since 1945 have been. 

At the present time Russia, China and Iran are considered Hitler by our rulers, along with anti-immigration politicians and people who march in sympathy with the Palestinians. Iran has been an evergreen Hitler since 1979, despite defeating much more Hitlerian figures like Saddam whom the US backed and supplied.

"Time serves Iran, not America.. A shortage of weapons, ammunition, and supply chains, along with crises facing the US Navy and Army, may make the continuation of the confrontation more costly for Washington." Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst 

"America used to be the policeman of the world. Now it's become the pirate. In the short term, the strategy works. In the long term, the world will unify against this piracy." Jiang Xueqin

“I say with all my heart that we truly won this war, both militarily and politically. This does not mean that we destroyed the U.S. military. What I mean is that the United States and Israel attacked us with nine specific, declared objectives, but failed to achieve any of those nine objectives at any level. This was the greatest absolute defeat for the United States and the Zionist regime. In the diplomatic sphere as well, the agreement is a source of pride and a victory on the diplomatic battlefield.” Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

The recent past is the most obscure historical era

I just reread The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991, by British historian Robert Service, who found in the Soviet archives a conversation in January 1989 between former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, sent as the unofficial envoy of the newly elected President Bush, and Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev. Kissinger argued against a complete withdrawal of American military forces from Europe, suggesting that the U.S. needed to remain stationed there as "a guarantee against the adventurism of Europeans themselves" and it might be difficult for them to return if they left.

I also enjoyed being reminded that on August 1, 1991, five months before the USSR dissolved, President George H.W. Bush delivered to the Ukrainian parliament the "Chicken Kiev speech" in which he warned against pursuing independence from the Soviet Union, cautioned against "suicidal nationalism" and urged them to support Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

Trying not to die

"Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die. I am not arguing we should be careless of the needs of struggling people and places such as Clacton. But I am arguing — if I am honest — that we should be careless of their opinions." Matthew Paris in the Times September 2014

"In 2014, when Douglas Carswell ignited the civil war by leaving the Tories and winning a by-election for Ukip, the columnist Matthew Parris uncharitably painted the seat as aged and irrelevant, a town at the end of the line. Well, Clacton has had the last laugh. Britain has been remade in its image and its old, white, working-class voter is everyone’s target demographic." Tim Stanley today in the Daily Telegraph

"We did engineer successful regime changes. In the case of Afghanistan, I think our mistake was leaving. We’ve been in Germany for 80 years. By the way, speaking of regime changes, that was a successful regime change." John Bolton

"I suppose we could end up visiting the likes of Cambridge in the future as a beautiful ruin, as we visit Fountains Abbey." John Gilliam

Cenk Uygur

@cenkuygur

·

2h

If tomorrow we weren't allies with Israel, all of our wars in the Middle East would end immediately. Remind me again how being allies with the bullies of the region who oppress and humiliate their neighbors is helpful to American interests. Why is this fiction pushed on us 24/7?

The US war to suppress a multipolar world (Chas Freeman prefers the word multinodal)

Brian Berletic says the "Ukrainian" strikes on Russia's  Progress Rocket and Space Center in Dmara are US strikes  "simply laundered through "Ukraine," depending entirely on US ISR for target and up to date Russian air defense posture and positions. Through such strikes, the US succeeds in degrading Russian capabilities, while Ukraine takes the full brunt of Russian retaliation = proxy war."

"If Russia is determined to avoid wider war with the US or its European proxies - eliminating any real deterrence against such attacks, it must at least ensure it eliminates any single point of failure for critical economic, industrial and military capabilities - hardening and dispersing critical processes, assuming ALL of them will eventually be targeted.

"Hopefully China and other potential targets of US war and proxy war are taking notes..."

US novelist Joyce Carol Oates on X

“A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. This is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’”

The rule of Satan made manifest, as Mr Gladstone misdescribed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

'A story that Varoufakis heard from someone at Palantir. If it's true, they should be burned in the hellfire right now. They fed the AI the movements of Gaza's people frantically fleeing with their smartphones when 🇮🇱 bombs densely populated areas in Gaza—"panic imprint"—to train it, and sold it to the UK NHS as "panic prevention AI" for 1.4 billion dollars.'

Fyodor Lukyanov on Glenn Diesen's podcast talking about "Russia's Strategy as the World Order Collapses", yesterday

Fyodor Lukyanov is Chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a leading Russian NGO think tank and editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, which is linked to the US journal Foreign Affairs. He reveals in the podcast that he has been banned from entering the EU.

“Ukrainian conflict and confrontation with Russia... it's not anything which actually interests much the big majority of people in the world. They see it as another... strange conflict between those white... former colonial powers.”

“Europeans believe that through this [conflict with Russia] they might... come back to this... central position in international affairs. They will not do it, it's... impossible.”

The real history of the cold war is not what we thought - nor are current events

“Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.” Francis Cornford, the classicist

Last night I reread John Lewis Gaddis's very good history of the Cold War - I highly recommend it – but it repeated the received version of the Tiananmen Square massacre (I must find time to research this but the received story is wrong) and it did not mention this, posted on X by Sony Thăng whose tagline on X is: "Born in Vietnam. Grew Up in Europe. Live in Asia."

'In 1954, President Eisenhower said something at a public press conference that almost nobody remembers. Speaking to 197 journalists about Southeast Asia, he described the region's significance in terms of tin, tungsten, and rubber. Of access to raw materials. Of what would happen to Japanese and European economies, American allies, if those resources came under the control of governments not aligned with Washington. Not

The first paragraph of a mixed review

Anthropologist Matt Cartmill’s 1991 International Journal of Primatology review of Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

Quotations

For, to touch on only one point among many, there are in England nymphs of divine appearance, both engaging and agreeable, whom you would certainly prefer to your Muses; and there is, besides, one custom which can never be commended too highly. When you arrive anywhere, you are received with kisses on all sides, and when you take your leave they speed you on your way with kisses. The kisses are renewed when you come back. When guests come to your house, their arrival is pledged with kisses; and when they leave, kisses are shared once again. If you should happen to meet, then kisses are given profusely. In a word, wherever you turn, the world is full of kisses. If you too, Fausto, once tasted the softness and fragrance of these same kisses, I swear you would yearn to live abroad in England; and not for ten years only, in the manner of Solon, but all your life long. Erasmus, Letters 103 to Fausto Andrelini, 1499; trans. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson. My college Queens', Cambridge claims him as a member but in fact he only stayed there for a while but we did have St John Fisher.

This passage from Dostoevsky’s "The Brothers Karamazov" aptly describes the situation in which the U.S. system of governance & foreign policy regarding Iran and the region finds itself due to its extreme reliance on 'lies': 

Is Trump America's Charles XII?

King Charles XII of Sweden is one of those immensely impressive and tragic men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and are forever associated with failure, rather like Neville Chamberlain. 

His defeat at Poltava by Peter the Great meant Sweden ceased to be a great power that dominated much of Europe and Russia became one, all because of Charles XII's fateful decision to invade Russia (in fact what is now Ukraine). 

His war, unlike Trump’s with Iran, seemed to serve his country's interests but like Trump's it was a war of choice, unprovoked, illegal and absolutely disastrous. 

Unlike Trump Charles XII was a heroic man who understood well the science of war.

Had he taken Moscow.... but Napoleon did and little good it did him.

Russia is too big to defeat. 

So thankfully is Iran.

As Trump has learnt too late.

A very shameful terrifying fact

Tucker Carlson points out that Great Britain throws three times as many people in jail for social media posts as Russia does... and Britain’s population is less than half the size.

Michael Hudson explains why Trump attacked Iran: his Napoleon complex

'It seems that he Trump had a very abusive father and he really felt his ego was injured and he wanted attention and he wanted approval. And so when he came into office, I think in this last time certainly, he said what he wanted to be was a famous US president. He wanted and he said he wanted to be like Napoleon, somebody famous. Everybody he thought looks up to Napoleon, famous guy.
I mean that was the character that he'd mentioned. Well, he also knew that every American president who's greatly admired, the most admired presidents won wars. Washington won the Revolutionary War. Lincoln won the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt won the Spanish American War and [Franklin] Roosevelt won World War II. Those were the days. Trump knows that, you know, if you read world history, all the world leaders and kings throughout history, the ones that people know, are the kings that have made great, the emperors that have made great conquests and built empires. And Trump thought he could do the same thing. .... But his sort of either or way of thinking led him to forget that Napoleon lost the war in Russia. He lost at Waterloo. He was known for being exiled to Elba.'


It is clear that Trump is motivated by vanity and love of money. It is also clear that the enemy he wants to overcome in his war on Iran is Obama.

A lot of the problem is American historiography.

I have quoted before Professor Paul Gottfried, the palaeo-conservative American political thinker, saying in The Managerial President, "All the major conflicts into which our leaders thrust us from the Civil War on, with the possible exception of Vietnam, are seen as morally desirable actions. … The U.S. is a land of morally driven, energetic presidents who have made us into the envy and dread of the world."

Though to be fair nobody thinks Trump is morally driven.

Europe is occupied territory

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte on 9 April on European countries helping the USA in its unprovoked war against Iran:

“They have done what they promised before in a case like this because they know that when it comes to NATO, it’s there to protect the United States because US needs to secure Atlantic and secure Arctic and secure Europe to stay safe here in the US mainland but it is also there to make sure Europe is safe and to be this platform of power projection for the United States. So, what the US did with Iran, they could do because so many European countries lived up to those commitments."

A wise Israeli I recently lunched with told me England and other Nato countries get many small advantages from alliance with America to make up for the large humiliations. I wonder what the advantages are to counterbalance being involved in unjust wars, but we know America is very vindictive and dangerous so no doubt American vassals are scared not to obey. 

Arrogant ignorance

Nor can it touch but of arrogant ignorance, to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains and affects that order of society which is best for his use, and is eminent for some one thing or other that fits his humour and the times. Samuel Daniel


Samuel Daniel's Elizabethan poems about the rivers of England have always made me wonder if people whose forbears come from abroad have the same feeling for English rivers as the indigenous people. I then reflect that I have a lot of Irish blood and I feel the same intense love for English rivers and countryside as any other Englishman.


“To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticiseideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.”
Rowan Atkinson

"We can starve the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa" - First Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, December 1947


"We'll deprive Gaza of water, and the Arabs will leave" - Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, 1967


People nowadays seem to think the British colonies in Africa a Bad Thing, as Sellars & Yeatman would put it, but we did enormous good. 

Even South Africa, which was run by Dutch South Africans, who in 1948 invented the horrible apartheid system, was a lot more benign to her indigenous people than the Israelis (excepting the Arabs who had the good fortune or fortitude not to be expelled in 1948).

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:

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.