Quotations

 "But even toward nightfall, as soon as the candles are lit, the mind, like the eye, no longer sees things so clearly as by day. It is a time unsuited to serious meditation, especially on unpleasant subjects. The morning is the proper time for that—­as indeed for all efforts without exception, whether mental or bodily. For the morning is the youth of the day, when everything is bright, fresh, and easy of attainment. We feel strong then, and all our faculties are completely at our disposal. Do not shorten the morning by getting up late or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." Arthur Schopenhauer

The American Empire and the Fall of Europe

Did FDR want Pearl Harbor to happen? He did everything to make it happen. He also did a lot to persuade England and France to go to war with Germany in 1939. Chamberlain said his role was crucial. 

The results of WW2: America ruled most of the world except for poor crucified Eastern Europe, Europe ceased to matter and Israel was created.

Thus (in 1943 to be precise) began the web of connections that Whitney Webb has exposed between the CIA, MI6, the Mossad, organised crime and numerous other power centres and brokers. We are ruled by Anglo-American secret services and deep state to which Israel has been added, plus organised crime plus Big Tech, etc, etc. 

Epstein swam effortlessly in this sea.

AJP Taylor said that in 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end because of Wilson and Lenin. 

Not quite true: the USA withdrew from European affairs thanks to the Republicans and Europe was saved by Poland from the Communists for 25 years in the Miracle on the Vistula. 

Europe had a second chance and it ended in Europe effectively committing suicide, to quote the title of a book by Prince Michel Sturdza, a former Romanian Foreign Minister who belonged to the Iron Guard. (I haven't read it.)

Since 1956 the UK has played the role of Bulgaria to America's USSR. 

All that has to change now and it is good that it is so. Unfortunately the British and European leaders or their defence establishments, with honourable exceptions like Hungary and Slovakia, want to continue the thinking that got the world into this mess.

A friend of mine, a Cambridge educated liberal Tory, welcomed the Ukrainian war as a means to strengthen the EU and Nato at not too much cost in blood or treasure. 

I thought he was probably right but a prediction was rarely less accurate.

I doubt the end of the war will mean in the medium term the end of Nato or the EU, but they will be utterly changed. 

While Trump is president the USA is in Nato in name but not in spirit.

And Nato has always been the American empire.

Do European leaders have the wisdom to find a modus vivendi with Putin? 

It looks like they prefer to arm against a non-existent threat from Russia while paying Russia vast sums.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

While the British and European leaders rightly talk about Russian war crimes their silence about Gaza is deafening, but you know that.

I am not a pacifist but going to war was a big mistake in 1914 and 1939. I don't know enough about Louis IV or Napoleon.  

Wars and revolutions are usually disastrous mistakes. Look at Ukraine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Gaza.

I met an English architect in his late 60s in Lviv two years ago, who was bringing aid to Ukraine. He said that that war was the first wholly just war in his lifetime. Perhaps. I mentioned the Falklands but he disagreed. 

The Ukrainian cause is wholly just, as was the Poles' in 1939, but  the 2022 war could and should have been avoided. 

Whether England and France could have avoided war in 1939 you, gentle reader, can decide.

AJP Taylor

"The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round." 

"In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction." 

 "In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world." 

Eric Kraus, who headed several Russian investment banks, this morning

He and the 'dissident' podcasters like John Mearsheimer and Pelle Taylor seem to have been right. MI6, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and State Department et al all the defence establishment supporters in Chatham House and King's College London have been wrong.

For the past couple of years, like some Casandra with a toothache, I have haunted these pages, warning that:
1. At least since Russia regrouped and settled in for a long war of attrition, the defeat of the Former Ukraine and its NATO-sponsored armies was inevitale. CHECK
2. That, following the failure of the counter-offensive, for Kiev to fight on would simply increase the depopulation and devastation of the Rump – though it might prolong a few European political careers, it would almost certainly lead to an ultimately fierce reaction again the craven and incompetent European elites. HALF-CHECK, underway.
and, somewhat more speculatively:
3. That the end-game would come when donor-fatigue set it…very probably in the US first. CHECK
4. As the ossified European political system could not adapt to changing realities, the change in the hostility toward Russia would most likely come from Washington – the Americans are capable of turning on a dime. DOUBLE CHECK

Gideon Levy: Israel Has No Place at Eurovision While Committing Atrocities in Gaza

Famous journalist Gideon Levy is the noblest Israeli. 

He said everything that needs to be said about Israel taking part in in Eurovision here.

Haaretz
Opinion | Israel Has No Place at Eurovision While Committing Atrocities in Gaza
Gideon Levy
Sep 17, 2025

A nation that is perpetrating genocide cannot continue to sing. And a world that sees a nation perpetrating genocide cannot sing with it. Nor can it accept the fact that this nation wants to continue singing as if nothing had happened.

The fact that Israel can even imagine that it would participate in a singing competition, with all its sequins and special effects, at the height of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, while its soldiers are killing and destroying without mercy, shows that it has lost its way. It should have understood on its own that it has no place in any international celebration right now.

It's that time of year again

 The Bear, an ancient pagan tradition. 

The headline 'Europe should listen to the Baltic States when it comes to Russia' would be true were the word NOT inserted before listen

Owen Matthews is Anglo-Russian, strongly anti-Putin and an adherent to the received Western ideas about the origins of the Ukrainian war but said this in the very belligerent Daily Telegraph yesterday.

'Many will agree with Kallas’s deep suspicion of the Kremlin and share her hopes for victory, reparations and for Putin to be brought to trial. But none of those things are, in practice, achievable – not least because Europe has consistently sent far more money to the Kremlin in payment for oil and gas than it has given to Kyiv to defend itself. The time for ideology is over. At this point many, maybe most, Ukrainians would prefer an unjust peace to a forever war.'

I agree about the need for an unjust peace now before the Russians take Odessa but I think the negotiations will drag out. Russia may well take the Black Sea coast, alas.

I wish the Telegraph or other regime media mentioned Larry Johnson's allegations that Ukraine has has stolen fifty billion dollars and bribed foreign politicians with many millions of dollars, much laundered in Estonia. 

He wonders if Miss Kallas knows. 

Imagine choosing an Estonian to be head EU diplomat at a moment like this.

Her father was a right one. He was a Soviet apparatchik accused of much corruption after 1991.

Of course Johnson might be falling for a Russian deceit - but we know about a hundred million allegedly stolen by Zelensky's right hand man and probably much more than one billion has been stolen.

 

A journalist friend who lived in Estonia in 1992 reminded me yesterday that the secret services in the Baltic States are descended from the KGB and therefore very formidable. 

Estonia holds many secrets.

This short clip of George Galloway is interesting.

Israel's tentacles reach far

 

Colonel Wilkerson explains that Israel is closely involved in Trump's antipathy to Venezuela.

Israel is closely involved in Latin American politics in general. So it is in North American politics. Also it is important in African politics, Australian politics, et al. 

Colombia's left-wing president hates Israel for reasons. 

I think I heard Max Blumenthal say Israel is the most powerful country in the world.

It's no longer David but Goliath.

Paul Keating, the former Australian PM, he who put his arm around the late Queen, was right about NATO: "Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague on itself".

 

Fred Weir yesterday

 Some things shouldn't fall completely through the cracks, even if the pace of current news is intense and momentous.

In that spirit, let me draw attention to the final report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which has just been issued. I only scanned it -- I, too, have other priorities at the moment -- but enough to realize that its findings are even more appalling than we might have expected. Apparently the US spent more on Afghan "reconstruction" in adjusted dollars than it did on European recovery after W.W. II. It spent $90 billion on creating the Afghan security forces, a force that evaporated within days after the US pulled the plug. The amounts of money SIGAR found to have been wasted or stolen make the current corruption scandal in Ukraine look picayune by comparison. [But pause to consider just how much corruption has been a regular feature of US-backed wars since, and including, Vietnam].

What they said

"Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague on itself."

"Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg... Stoltenberg conducts himself as an American agent more than he performs as a leader and spokesperson for European security.”

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating talking about expanding NATO to Asia (2023)

Millions given by Ukraine to US and European politicians?

Larry Johnson on Thursday night talking to Pascal Lottaz said the US and Europe are going through a divorce or at least a trial separation. 

He goes on to say this.

'The corruption story has gotten legs and then the corruption issue is far far larger than just the hundred million that's been reported. It's it's in the billions: close to $50 billion out of 360 billion. Yeah. With a B. But the corruption issue is pushed by the Americans. The Americans control NABU. So this is this is the US side that says let's cut them off. We're starting to give the Ukrainians a little push over the cliff, you know, say, "Hey, come up here. Look at this." And then you give them a little shove and off they fall. I think the the realization for Trump's reading polls and there is not widespread support like there was four years ago for supporting Ukraine. In fact, the corruption story, I believe, in part is being put out there deliberately in order to help further muddy the waters because one of the things is not really widely known publicly, well not known is there are at least 23 members of Congress that have received millions of dollars. I know a particular Republican senator that got 16 to 17 million. a particular Democrat senator got 23 million. 

'So this is money that we gave to Zelensky, they went to the Ukrainians, then got diverted into banks up in the Baltics. 

'And, gee, I think we'll be shocked to discover that one foreign minister with the EU named Kaja Kallas may have had some actual financial incentives to be such an ardent supporter of Ukraine.

'You'll find that this money was gone out to lubricate a variety of politicians on both the US side and European side.'

This is from a Republican US congressman.

Quotations

 "Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?" "Yes, without doubt," said Candide. "Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character why should you imagine that men may have changed theirs?

Voltaire, Candide

Peace at last seems possible before Russia takes the Ukrainian coast. The EU will deservedly be humiliated

This is very good news and an achievement for Trump to set against his war crimes in Gaza and his bellicosity (his completely illegal attack on Iran and the murders in the Caribbean).

The role of the EU and the UK in this has been malign and completely ineffective, as is its role in Gaza. Since the creation of the EEC in 1957 Europe has declined markedly in importance not grown into a superpower.

Fred Weir, doyen of foreign correspondents in Moscow, yesterday had an encouraging view of the US Russian talks.

Specifically, these talks are the first real stab at genuine negotiations, and they are making real progress. A deal may be imminent. The Europeans have been sidelined and, in any case, do not seem able to rise above the level of spoilers. Russia is winning on the battlefield and no amount of magical incantations will change that fact. It's a war, and wars always finish with the victors spelling out the terms.

Back in 2014 Eric Krause's support for Putin seemed absurd, but I came to see that he is often right

 

Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine!
She also invaded France - as far as Paris - following the defeat of Napoleon, and then Germany - all the way to Berlin - in 1945.
In short
Never poke the Bear!

Young and old

“Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72." Mark Twain


Grok helpfully says that this is "not a statistical fact. It is a metaphorical observation.."

The KGB instigated the East European revolutions of 1989, the CIA instigated the colour revolutions

Col. Laurence Wilkerson was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State. Today talking to Glenn Diesen he gave the most convincing explanation I have seen of the origins of the Ukrainian war. He says capture of Ukraine was long planned from the turn of the century by the US, using NGOs as a weapon of war. 

The CIA, Mossad and MI6 captured Ukraine.

"In 2002 and 3, I saw the CIA in league with the military, particularly the four star and couple of three stars in European command recruiting and talking about how they needed the help of everyone in Ukraine and they viewed the so-called Bandera group, the Azov Battalion, others like them, as the most stalwart rugged fighters in Ukraine. At the time I wondered what the hell are we doing and why are we doing it? And then when I left the State Department, I kept my eye a little bit on what was happening in Ukraine. And I realized that up to 2014, we were doing the same thing, but in spades. And I realized that Mossad was there, MI6 was there, and they had a tag team going with developing Ukraine to be not just a member of NATO, but the formidable power in NATO and at the same time rape, pillage and plunder its resources, which is always an imperial desire. 

"I mean, it started very early, very early. The same time, very much the same time, as a matter of fact, we were buying newspaper editors, we were buying newspapers, we were buying television stations, we were buying communicators in general, we were setting the NGO's on them without their knowing it lots of time (they'd been infiltrated by the CIA). And we were teaching them, we were weaponizing liberal democracy. We did it in Georgia. We did it everywhere. And we were very successful.

"We were very successful. I remember some people asking me, "Why do you think these people suddenly cast aside neutrality and wanted to be members of NATO?" Would you like to know why? We built their governments. We paid for their governments. Just as surely as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon paid for the labor union heads, the newspaper editors, the business leaders in Chile to get rid of Santiago."

As early as 2001 USAID-backed Internews was forming Ukraine’s media landscape, training 1900 journalists and working with 203 TV stations and 126 radio stations. This is about pro-US propaganda. I admit I hadn't realised how much the US did to bring about the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. 

I was in Kiev shortly afterwards and did not hear about this. 

Instead Ukrainians asked me why John Laughland had written an article criticising the revolution. 

I mentioned this to a British freelance journalist who said he did not understand what ideological position Laughland held, since he seemed to sympathise with Venezuela and Iran. 

It's clear now what Laughland's position was: opposition to American expansionism. 

He has been very amply vindicated.

An analogy occurs to me. The East European revolutions of 1989 were probably instigated by the KGB and the colour revolutions of the early 21st century by the CIA.

What a pity the CIA was not wound up, as was proposed by Republicans, after the cold war ended - and Nato too.

Who in Europe stole from Ukraine?

Very large sums have been stolen by Ukrainians close to Zelensky. We know this because Donald Trump used his leverage over the Ukrainian anti-corruption bureau (NABU) to expose it. No doubt to push Zelensky to do his bidding.

The FBI has people in the agency. The West set it up to prevent its aid being stolen (hah!)

Who outside Ukraine got a cut?

Why is nobody asking?

What are the journalists doing? 

Why did the EU not talk about Ukrainian corruption or the Biden administration?

Senior British diplomat in Moscow has the perfect description for the BBC

Ian Proud was a senior diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. Here he talks to Judge Andrew Napolitano.

IP: But of course, the problem is that even if the war ends, Judge, the Europeans will still be on the hook for over a hundred billion dollars, you know, because Ukraine's army isn't going to shrink overnight. They're still going to spend a vast amount next year, far more money than they actually have in their possession. They will need that money from Europe, you know, because they won't get it from the US. So actually whether or not peace happens is separate to the fact the Europeans have a massive bill on their hands to pay in the next two, three, four years to keep the Ukrainian finances in the black. And nobody's asked European citizens whether they're happy about this at the time of de-industrialisation and cost of living crisis.


AN: Does the revelation - we all knew about it but does the revelation of the massive corruption scandal in Kyiv resonate in European capitals?


IP: I don't think it does enough you know, quite frankly, and it's reported, certainly on the BBC which is kind of the UK's version of Russia Today, in a very kind of toned down way.

Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast

'Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial...meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.' (Aldous Huxley)

This prediction was amply fulfilled but the internet partly freed us. 

Now the elite intend to put a stop to that - you see what France did to Durov - but though they can censor lots of things they cannot force us to get our news from regime sources.

The great hope for the world is the US First Amendment because what is published on the net in the USA can be read in most countries in the world. The USA is the last developed country to have retained free speech.

Quotations

"Ukraine is not losing, but the front is moving in the wrong direction." Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, in April 2025.

“I was actually in Monaco earlier this summer … and every other car there was an Italian supercar, like a Pagani, Bugatti, and they all had Ukraine plates … They didn't just all magically get

I have no comment to make

 

Alleged British war crimes in Afghanistan

A British soldier testified about British war crimes in Afghanistan, a country which we should have left well alone. 

One of the several military idiots who are Tory Members of Parliament thinks this should have been discussed privately rather than made public. 

The same man talks about Russian war crimes but never about Israeli or American ones. 

What a way to run a country. 

Let's make the British nuclear deterrent independent of the Americans if we can and stop assisting the Americans. No need to make waves by leaving Nato. "Quiet quitting" will be better.

Gideon Rose explains in early 2014 that the West wants to get Ukraine ("basically Robin to Russia's Batman") away from Russia and in the Western camp

Glenn Diesen

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In February 2014 (before the US-backed coup), Gideon Rose gloated about how the US was taking Ukraine over while Russia was distracted by the Sochi Olympics. He left out that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. They spoke more open about the US intervention before it triggered a war

Please watch this short clip in which Gideon Rose, the editor of the US defence establishment's premier magazine Foreign Affairs, explains breezily in February 2014, before the fall of Yanukovych, that the West wants to get Ukraine to change sides from Russia's to Nato's.

An old fashioned East German historian's view of the Ukrainian war makes sense

Speaking on the always interesting Neutrality Studies, East German military historian Dr. Lothar Schröter sounds like an old fashioned Communist apparatchik. 

But he is obviously right when he says the USSR never intended to attack the West any more than Putin does now. Here is an excerpt where he makes great sense. Of course the USSR was never going to invade Western Europe. 

Of course the arms race and cold war were unnecessary.

And I'll say it quite openly on fundamental issues, the North Atlantic Alliance, to put it mildly, has always told untruths. And the biggest lie was the one about the threat from the east. 

It never existed. There's never been a threat from the east. If the Russians had really intended to take over Western Europe, they would have marched to the Atlantic in 1945. They didn't do that. 

Melanie Phillips says Israel will always be at war

Please watch this clip, people

David Hearst and Melanie Phillips foresee an endless war between Israel and Islam.

It is not possible to make war on an abstract noun, as Michael Frayn said about the war on terrorism.

The Israeli right acknowledges that Israel will be perpetually at war.

Yet there are still people who think the Balfour Declaration was a good idea.

Netanyahu this year compared Israel to Sparta, forgetting that Sparta lost in the end and while it existed was not a pleasant place to live.

Patrick Cockburn this week

Quotations

"Now people say that the toughness of Ukraine's investigation of corruption shows what a great country it is. Yet people had to take to the streets to stop Kiev's anti-corruption squads from being muzzled by the current govt."


Peter Hitchens yesterday on X. And these investigations are caused by decisions in Washington DC.

Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby”

John Mearsheimer talks very well here about the attempt to suppress his and Stephen Walt's book. 

(The last thing his adversaries wanted, he says, was a public debate. Tucker Carlson found Mark Levine did not want to debate with him either. Once refusing to debate meant conceding the debate but that was long ago, before cancel culture and words being violence.)

Ryan Grim

@ryangrim

In 2006, two academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a paper called “The Israel Lobby,” which argued that a loose group of Israel supporters used their connections and financial resources to tilt US foreign policy in Israel’s direction. One of them, Stephen Walt, was academic dean of The Harvard Kennedy School, which put him at the pinnacle of his profession. The savage response to the paper was like nothing academia had ever seen. We can now report that Jeffrey Epstein helped coordinate the counterattack with Alan Dershowitz, while Larry Summers was Harvard president. And Les Wexner was one of the largest donors to the Kennedy School, if not the largest. Epstein controlled Wexner’s money. In other words, a loose group of powerful supporters of Israel used their financial resources and connections behind the scenes to destroy the reputations of two academics who wrote a paper arguing that a loose group of Israel supporters was using their connections and financial resources to shape American foreign policy. Story here