Saturday, 23 August 2025
Madness
“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
Hamlet. Putin is not mad (he might be a psychopath but they are very sane) and nor, so far, is Trump.
Friday, 22 August 2025
Quotations
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
“If you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid?”
John Cleese
Please people use the word bigot correctly
Progressives are as often bigoted as the far right.
Dr Johnson's dictionary defines a bigot as "a person whose opinions are blindly attached to a party or creed". The definition adds that they are "ignorant of other men's opinions, and obstinately prejudiced against them".
In the early 17th century English adopted the word from French to mean a religious hypocrite. The meaning expanded to include anyone who is closed minded and stubbornly attached to a particular system of beliefs, often mistaken ones, like Disraeli's Mr Kremlin, who had only one idea and that was wrong.“One who is unreasonably and blindly attached to a particular creed, church, or party: one who is intolerant of opinions which differ from his own” (Webster’s New Peerless Dictionary, 1954).
“A person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, 2024).
Saturday, 16 August 2025
Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson: the Americans got rid of Calin Georgescu
"As I said in Georgia we just messed up. In Romania we didn't mess up we [I] don't know exactly how we did it but I know we did it because someone called me and told me they were going to do it and we did it."
I assumed when the election was cancelled that America had ordered it but some people I spoke to think it was the Romanian deep state acting spontaneously.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says America has been using dirty tricks to spread Nato to every country in Europe west of Russia. This is the background to the Kiev revolutions in 2004 and 2014 and the present war in Ukraine.
Swedish academic Ola Tunander borrowed the expression for Sweden. (It was then adopted by Americans in 2017.)
A number of incidents involving Russian submarines entering Swedish waters occurred in the 1980s.
Classified documents support the theory and Royal Navy submarine captains have admitted to carrying out top-secret operations in Swedish waters.
With the Russian invasion of the Ukraine the Anglo-Americans finally got what they wanted when Sweden and Finland joined Nato.
Pelle Taylor was told by a retired South African spy that MI6 was responsible for the murder of Olaf Palme.
A source I cannot name but whose authority is absolutely unquestionable told me that the Americans used bribery to put in their man Sali Berisha as president and later in 1997 organised the collapse of pyramid schemes that wrecked the economy, causing vast hardship, so that they could get rid of him.
$1.2 billion was lost by Albanians as a result of this American scam.
I was in Serbia until Tuesday and spoke to some people about President Aleksandar Vukic. He has been masterful about being friends with Putin but also with Macron and other Western leaders.
The latest demonstrations against him started the day I left.
No doubt corruption and incompetence has kept the railway line from Belgrade to Subotica closed so long.
I well understand why the death of 17 people when the roof collapsed at the new Novi Sad station has created a revolutionary situation.
Something similar happened in Bucharest when 64 people died in a nightclub which had not been checked for fire safety for many years.
But after what we know now from so many sources about CIA regime change operations, and remembering Biden saying Putin had to go, I would be rather surprised if the Americans are not involved to an extent in Serbia too.
Wilkerson said in an interview on the BBC's Newsnight, on January 17, 2007, that an Iranian offer to help in stabilising Iraq, in return for lifting sanctions, was turned down by Donald Rumsfeld. Why?
In March 2009, Wilkerson wrote on The Washington Note blog that it was soon known by the Bush administration that some captives in Guantanamo were innocent but they were held anyway in case they had useful information.
He also suggested the Ghouta chemical attack was an Israeli false flag operation.
Friday, 15 August 2025
How much US policy to Ukraine changed in thirty years
"Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred."
President George H W Bush speaking to the Ukrainian parliament on 1 August 1991, trying to persuade Ukraine not to leave the Soviet Union.
This is something I just read in John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War.
William Safire called it the Chicken Kiev speech.
I remember I was disgusted by it and thought the USA should want the Soviet Union to break up.
Bush the Elder was a much smaller and duller man than Reagan.
Had Kissinger not dissuaded Gerald Ford from accepting Reagan's invitation to be his running mate in 1980 Bush wouldn't have been president and we'd have almost certainly been spared his disastrous son as President.
How much better that would have been for everybody.
Thursday, 14 August 2025
Another Yugoslav parallel
A British journalist friend living in Belgrade was told by his taxi driver that Yugoslavia was an EU before the EU. He is a very keen believer in the EU and didn't find this parallel made him cheerful.
It does me.
I thought back at the time of the Brexit referendum that the EU was fine for Europe, just not for the UK. I now see that it is bad for every country except the Eastern European member states which get a lot of money from it and markets.
"Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced" as Professor Robert Tombs has said.
A couple of intellectuals I spoke to in Serbia think the same.
Perhaps it will take a war to do, far in the future I hope.
Yugoslavia was the embodiment of a post-national state, as was the USSR. The USSR was called Russia by foreigners but it was not the Russian empire renamed. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a greater Serbia but Communist Yugoslavia was not.
Multi-ethnic states only work if they are federal and power is very diffused, as in Switzerland. Even then Yugoslavia didn't - and Belgium is a mess.
Great Britain has worked very well but now has separatists, happily ones who are losing influence and hope of secession.
Wednesday, 13 August 2025
Yugoslav parallels
King Alexander instituted a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia in 1929 that enjoyed the full support of Yugoslavia's ally France as did the Polish dictatorship (three joint dictators after Pilsudski died) and King Carol II's royal dictatorship in Romania.
Slobodan Milosevic, I was told by a historian friend while in Serbia, planned in 1999 on pushing the Albanians out of Kosovo and replacing them with Serbs forced out of Croatia as the result of the war in Croatia that he had initiated. This is different from the story we were told at the time, that he intended to slaughter Albanians, but he would have killed them had they stayed.
This put me in mind of the behaviour of Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank today.
Srebrenica was thirty years ago last month. Germany sponsored the UN General Assembly resolution designating July 11 the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.
All the killing was a result of Milosevic using national feeling in place of Communism to consolidate his power.
The Communist partisans killed eight (?) thousand ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina when they took the region, simply for the crime of being Hungarian, which reminds me of the killing of maybe a hundred thousand Poles and many Jews in Ukraine by the supporters of Stepan Bandera.
Monday, 11 August 2025
Travel in August is not for weaklings
I reached Belgrade smoothly last night, sharing a car with the Secretary General of the liberal party who told me about the mafia involvement in Serbian politics and the way the President dominates the media. It sounds like the deep state in America. It was 38° here after dark last night and humid and I trudged for 38 minutes through ill lit empty streets looking for my hotel without any Internet. The ill lit run down area was in fact the centre of the city where the 19th century government buildings are, which is a bit odd.
Serbia is as corrupt and poor as Romania before she joined the European Union but in some ways much freer and more democratic than England or European Union states. People smoke blithely anywhere in restaurants. Caps on plastic bottles, as I said before, come off easily.
My companion rightly wants EU accession for Serbia, but says joining Nato is necessary too. I argue that Nato is a tax on the poor to enrich American companies. No Serbians see Russia as a threat and I wish Romanians were equally wise.
Sunday, 10 August 2025
100 degrees in Subotica. The air feels thick with heat.
Mortal hot.
My Hungarian friend who comes from here says though he's sorry Szabadka is no longer in Hungary the Hungarians brought their fate on themselves by letting the Dual Monarchy grab Bosnia, which was obviously in Serbia's sphere of influence.
Yes, good point.
Spheres of influence are out of fashion except when the influence is American, but they are useful.
Serbia is accused of falling short of being completely democratic. This may simply be because she has good relations with Russia and China and the US Nato deep state wants to regime change her.
In fact Serbia is more democratic than any European Union country and especially than Starmer's island prison island.
A joyful reminder of this is my plastic bottle of water, the cap of which came off without the least resistance.
As if on cue two teenage boys just walk past speaking Serbian but using, clearly as a joke, the very rude English word for black person.
I finally on my fourth visit see the synagogue. Of the roughly 5,000 Jews who lived here when the Hungarians invaded most were murdered by the Germans. 1,000 came back.
This weekend is an enjoyable cultural festival. The folk dances remind me of the ones Michael Redgrave recorded in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
When I first came here the town was mostly Hungarian but now it's half Serb and the festival reflects this. Many Croats too live in the area. They seem to get on well.
Demographics (and theology) drive history.
Saturday, 9 August 2025
My tour of the Banat reaches Subotica
I love Subotica/Szabadka. It's just as I remember it. The hot summer air seems solid with a Spanish lethargy. The dark streets where the trees completely shut out the sun and sky. It makes Hungarianness seem weird and tropical, quite unlike other (ex-) Hungarian towns. I came here first at the recommendation. of a very sinister but very well travelled American debauchee who lived in Budapest in the 1980s and owned a sado-masochistic nightclub in Vienna. He correctly predicted that I wouldn't like Belgrade. This is my fourth visit, all in August in the upper 90s.
Thursday, 7 August 2025
And so farewell Băile Herculane
And so farewell, Baile Herculane, Baths of Hercules, Aqua Herculis, Herkulesbad, Herkulesfürdő, a beautiful Hapsburg thermal resort where the Empress Sissi met shepherds in fhe forest and rediscovered Heine. The baths as renovated in the 1850s are a symbol that the Empire had suppressed the Hungarians and their mad leader Kossuth. Actually Romanians, Slovaks and mostly the army of Tsar Nicholas I did so. The Austrian Chancellor Schwarzenberg said "We shall astonishing the world by our ingratitude" and so they did. Liberal opinion in England, Europe and America thought Kossuth a hero.
Now the town is entirely Romanian except for one Hungarian family and in a state of dereliction I irresponsibly find attractive, though much has been renovated in the last few years.
Ion Iliescu has died
I missed the old swine's death tilll yesterday afternoon. (I am travelling.) He won the "competition" to outlive Queen Elizabeth II, Gorbachev and Dr Kissinger. He also outlived King Michael, an infinitely better man.
Only two people defeated the Securitate: Ion Iliescu and Doina Cornea.
In Romanian fashion I plagiarised that remark.
Iliescu's forthcoming state funeral reminds me of Belloc's little squib:
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
If you seek his monument, Romanians, look around you.
My journey begins, upon the midnight
Gara Băneasa after midnight in darkness, the station shut, resembles a Scooby Doo episode. A dozen people in a splash of light on the platform are waiting for the 00.38 to Timișoara. Someone is playing manele, a musical genre I fortunately always enjoy. I have left my deracinated central Bucharest and find the Romania that made me love her. Now the train arrives and the search for my compartment.
Sunday, 3 August 2025
Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity
Nicolae Bălcescu, the Romanian revolutionary of 1848: “For me, the question of ethnic solidarity is more important than the question of freedom. A people can use freedom only when it’s able to survive as a nation. Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity.”
In South-Eastern Europe the French revolution and Robespierre's revolutionary principle of Liberté was understood as national freedom or at least, for those Greek Phanariots like Alexander Ypsilantis who wanted to revive Byzantium with the Tsar's support, freedom from rule by infidels. Ypsilantis's revolt was defeated after failing to win the support that he expected from Romanians, who cared not a fig about Greeks. Thereafter Balkan history was about ethnic solidarity and identity.
Thursday, 31 July 2025
Quotations
Reason Ukraine is so dangerous even when it's settled, is because it's a defeat for the West, and we have been humiliated and lost a major war we were so deeply committed, and this will give people incentive to try to reverse the tide. John Mearsheimer. I am not sure why Russia managing to take 13% of Ukraine after 3 years of hard fighting is a defeat for the West.
The US punished India for trading with Russia, Iran, China, and for its BRICS membership. None of these countries ask India to stop trading with the US. The US ultimatum to India: 'choose us or the world'... Glenn Diesen
In the East, the memory of hardship remains. People know the state doesn’t always show up. Trust is local. Help comes from relatives, neighbours, friends. Responsibility is not abstract—it’s lived. You are expected to care, to intervene, to share, even when it's inconvenient. That instinct survived communism. It did not survive liberalism. One stripped people of power. The other stripped them of duty. In Eastern Europe, the link between freedom and obligation still exists. In the West, it has been replaced by rights with no anchor. Daniel Foubert. This is very true in Romania.
The CIA and MI6 exert their powerful influence in Western media in a number of ways, via political influence and via personal relationships with individual "journalists" and media oligarchs. They also use blackmail, threats, and the outright purchase of influence. Be aware. Chay Bowes, an Irish journalist who lives in Moscow and who, like Max Blumenthal, addressed the U.N. Security Council at Russia's invitation. The first of those two sentences is certainly true.
Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past. G.K. Chesterton. Milton Friedman also said that a free society was a traditional society, or something like that.
Wednesday, 30 July 2025
Quotations
“The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.” Carl Jung
"The [European] Commission awaits you like a spider in its web .... Gigantic sums will accumulate, and to whom will they be entrusted? To individuals appointed by governments but who immediately swear not to take any instructions from them, and who therefore are not even accountable to those governments. We’re about to create a completely arbitrary and technocratic power, with insane amounts of money; and to control it, we’ll have an institution as artificial as the Strasbourg assembly. What does that mean in practice? Basically, a club of parliamentarians who are accountable to no one. Before building an institution, national or otherwise, one must first know who is responsible for what, and to whom." Charles de Gaulle, Volume 2 of "C’était De Gaulle"
“The fact of the matter is the Palestinian cause is an evil one. The only end of the conflict [in Gaza] is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror. In world war two, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.” US Representative Randy Fine (Republican, Tallahassee, Florida) on Fox News in May, 2025
Sunday, 27 July 2025
Patrick Cockburn is the person I trust to explain Middle Eastern news
People on the left like him (he is the son of the Communist Claud Cockburn and pretty left-wing) are usually best on world politics because they do not follow the FCO line but think.
They assume that the US, UK and Nato lines are self-interested, misleading and untruthful, which is a wise starting point.
By comparison Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph on Friday felt obliged to say "...the Russian economy is a long way from the abject collapse many Western commentators seem to imagine. I’m trying to be careful in expressing myself here, because commentary like this is open to misinterpretation, and I don’t want to come across as a Russian apologist."
Left-wingers (and dissident conservatives) don't worry about coming across as Russian apologists, though if they come across as Hamas apologists they can be imprisoned for up to 14 years in England.
England is not a free country.
This is from Mr Cockburn's latest article in iNews.
On Ukraine he repeats an important piece of hearsay that he has told us about before:Israel is today super-confident, not to say hubristic, in exercising its new sovereignty in the region. It has bombed Gaza, Damascus, Sanaa in Yemen, Beirut and Tehran with impunity. It forbids the Syrian army from advancing into south Syria. It has effectively annexed all of the Golan Heights. An Israeli minister has even threatened al-Sharaa with assassination and, without conscious hypocrisy, Israel has accused him of proposing to massacre and ethnically cleanse the Druze in Suweida.
Israel’s new-forged hegemony in the Middle East is real, but it has been forged by airpower alone and can only be maintained by its continual destructive use, which in turn requires unstinting US military supply and political backing.
Israel appears to have no other plan except war without end. In Syria, this will probably mean Israel offering military protection to minorities such as the Druze, Alawi and Kurds in order to ensure that no centralised Syrian state with a significant army is ever reborn. From Israel’s point of view, post-Assad Syria should be like a larger Lebanon with a patchwork of local powers loosely controlled from the centres.
As regards the Palestinians, Israel is visibly moving closer to penning survivors in Gaza into a smaller and smaller area with a view to expelling them in the not-too-distant future. And after Gaza, the West Bank will be next for Israeli resettlement and potential annexation.
A Ukraine expert told me that an Ukrainian official had sought to deposit $350m in an Italian bank, but the bank had rejected the money. The Italian government said privately to the bankers that they had done the right thing, but to keep quiet about it.
Friday, 25 July 2025
I knew this, but many blithely say Britain has always been an immigrant country, because this is what they are constantly told
Thursday, 24 July 2025
Quotations
"We are going to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing it off with Iran." An American general talking to General Wesley Clark "about 10 days after 9/11".
"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have." Daniel Defoe
Glenn Diesen makes a very good point
'It has been several months since Assad was removed from power by our proxy. Where is the chemical weapons stockpile? The political-media establishment seems to have lost all interest in the alleged chemical weapons as soon as Assad left the country.'
It sounds like the European Union and the US State Department want a Colour Revolution in Ukraine
The one in Georgia having failed, Pascal Lottaz and many others would add.
I don't know enough and mistrust the information about Georgia that we are fed.
Clearly Trump wants Zelensky gone.
For some time the FT and Economist have been attacking him and despondent about Ukraine's chances - this is MI6 and the CIA talking.
Europe is more powerless than when the Turks besieged Vienna but the European Union seems to trying to build an empire eastwards.
It was the EU not the USA which struck the match which led to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and to the war we have now.
Ukraine is being invaded by Russia but Europe is helping Ukraine. Europe is once again being invaded by Asians the EU does not help or try to stop the invasion - which would mean resiling collectively from the ECHR and stopping taking in refugees.
Instead the EU worries about misinformation, hate speech, inequality and the climate.
And Donald Trump.
Yasser Arafat did not turn down Barak's offer of a 2 state solution to the Palestinian question
I am ashamed to say I misremembered Arafat failing to grasp Ehud Barak's generous offer of a two state solution in Palestine.
He did not.
Sharon did.
If you don't remember this believe Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser.
Change and decay in all around I see in England
The British police knelt for Black Lives Matter and looked on when a statue to a Bristol dignitary who was in the slave trade was thrown into the sea but a police car deliberately ran over someone protesting against asylum seekers.
Wednesday, 23 July 2025
The three most important things I found on the Middle Eastern crisis in the last year
Tuesday, 22 July 2025
Two thirds of Romanians think Ceausescu was a good leader
Two thirds of Romanians think Ceausescu was a good leader according to a poll this week.
56% of Russians thought Stalin a good leader in 2021 and this month 42% of Russians put him in the top ten figures in world history.
The news that many young people in England would like a dictatorship was misreporting by incompetent journalists.
How can we suppress the Neo-cons? I have no idea.
From today's Daily Telegraph:
The files show that in December 2002, Sir Christopher Meyer, then ambassador to Washington, wrote to the Cabinet Office with an “annual review” of the US, in which he noted that Mr Bush was keen to topple Saddam and felt it was his mission to rid the world of evil.
“More than anything else, he fears another catastrophic terrorist attack on the homeland, especially one with an Iraqi connection,” he sent in a diplomatic cable.
“His view of the world is Manichean. He sees his mission as ridding it of evil-doers. He believes American values should be universal values. He finds the Europeans’ differentiation between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein self-serving.
“He is strongly allergic to Europeans collectively. Anyone who has sat round a dinner table with low-church Southerners will find these sentiments instantly recognisable.”
I always argued that Bush 2, though the worst president since the 1860s, was not stupid - but clearly he was and clearly his sort of stupidity is thriving, despite Donald Trump. Now instead of Saddam it's Putin, Xi, Hamas, Iran.
Protestantism is at the heart of the matter though American Catholic and Jewish neo-cons are also very culpable.
People should not take very much notice when anybody who supported the invasion of Iraq talks about foreign policy.
If only the Americans would give up their empire and let Asian nations from Jerusalem to the Yellow Sea look after themselves.
Monday, 21 July 2025
Two graphs I stumbled across today by chance on X
Quotations
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:
Quotations
"Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.” René Girard
"Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” René Girard
"If the mass of contemporary authors were really individualists, every one of them inspired Blakes, each with his separate vision, and if the mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of individuals there might be something to be said for this attitude. But this is not, and never has been, and never will be. It is not only that the reading individual today (or at any day) is not enough an individual to absorb all the ‘views of life’ of all the authors pressed upon us by the publishers’ advertisements and the reviewers, and to be able to arrive at wisdom by considering one against another. It is that the contemporary authors are not individuals enough either. It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable; it is simply that this world does not exist." T.S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature"
Thursday, 10 July 2025
Quotations
They find you when the time comes.”
Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at the age of 30 (though it has been suggested that the OGPU murdered him)
"Of course there are other multinational states [in addition to the USSR] where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification. The English dominate their state as Britons even though they unconsciously conflate Britain with England, much to the irritation of the Scots, Welsh and Irish."
John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (1994)
Monday, 7 July 2025
7 July 2005 and the transformation of England
British media had told the public after 9 September 2011 attacks in New York that something of the sort was inevitable in Great Britain but not that the murderers would be British citizens, mostly second generation immigrants, trying to restore the Caliphate.
Sunday, 6 July 2025
Quotations
"Objectivity went out the window in Yugoslavia and that's very much with us today. So much of what, if you look back at Yugoslavia, both the tone and the substance so much of this evokes what's happening now in Ukraine, again the disparaging of negotiations - you don't negotiate with evil men you pulverise them through military force. There's also a personalisation. In the cold war it was never personalized. It was communism we were fighting. Even under Stalin it was never 'We're fighting Joseph Stalin'. That wasn't done, that wasn't said. But with the end of the cold war you had incredible simplification of analysis. Why do we have problems in the world? They're evil men out there with names like Milosevic or Gaddafi or Putin, because you have these evil men who come just out of nowhere, out of pure evil, no social context, no depth of analysis, nothing. Evil men. It's amazing people educated people would talk this way but of course they did and do on a regular basis today." Professor David Gibbs talking to Pascal Lottaz. How odd it is that people call Putin or Hamas or Al Qaeda as evil with no pause to analyse their motivations. It's linked to the contemporary obsession, 80 years on, with Hitler.
Saturday, 5 July 2025
The failure of the EU and the end of civilisation
After President Trump left the deal Europe renewed sanctions on Iran. Europe is ignored now by Iran and Trump. British, German and French leaders are divided by the unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran.
Friday, 4 July 2025
Was Lucan right?
Gerald Harper was very famous in England long ago for playing a suave, upper class villain in a successful television series.
He has just died at the age of 96. The Telegraph obituary quotes his insight into talking to staff.
'Always dismissing his butler with a terse “Thank you, Sutton”, Harper based his on-screen master-servant relationship on his close observation of Lord Lucan during a game of golf. “While I was chatting my head off to my caddy, there’s old Lucan waving his hand imperiously and treating his caddy as if he wasn’t there. I realised there and then the difference between acting a gent and being one.”'
Tuesday, 1 July 2025
Quotations
"Kraus' first law:
In life you don't get what you "deserve. "
You get what you can negotiate."
Eric Kraus
Monday, 30 June 2025
Douglas Macgregor: The War Machine Is Out of Control — And It's Coming for YOU
Another interview with Douglas Macgregor. He thinks since the end of the Second World War things have been set up for the benefit of America and the private fortunes of various people. He expects Japan and South Korea will ask American troops to leave, he thinks the threat to Taiwan is clearly non existent, that Israel is an artificial creation which at one time might have done good for the Middle East. This looks less likely now. He expects a collapse in the bonds and derivative markets and this will make the increase in the American defence budget impossible.
Meanwhile the Middle Eastern monarchies are terrified of their populaces who are angry with Israel.
Iran turned out to be much more cohesive than we thought and may get the bomb.
R.I.P John Charmley who exploded the Churchillian version of history
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.''
"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
Douglas Macgregor: Middle East Crisis Could Spark Global War, U.S. Dollar Losing Reserve Status
Iran is not close to getting the bomb and if they did the Middle East would be safer. Has the North Korean bomb made the world dangerous?
What is interesting is the larger numbers of Israelis who are leaving Israel. A Cypriot politician is complaining about the numbers. The Palestinians will sympathise.
Douglas Macgregor explains in this interview that America's attack on Iran was to use the cant word, performative. The Iranians knew the attack was coming and signalled their retaliation.
The Iranians did better than was widely expected and regime change is not going to happen. Israel will of course want to instal a puppet regime there.
This article in the Spectator from 2017 by John R. Bradley
Forget our misguided friendship with Saudi Arabia: Iran is our natural ally is still very relevant. Iran is not the West's enemy.
Wednesday, 25 June 2025
Quotations
"I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Benjamin Jowett
“Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.” George Orwell
Nearly 377,000 Gazans died since October 2023?
The official overall Arab death toll in Gaza now stands at 56, 077 but it does not include people missing trapped under the rubble. A report written by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb for the Harvard Dataverse estimates that nearly 377,000 Palestinians remain unaccounted for since October 2023.
A British writer who knows Gaza well said a year ago in a book serialised in the Times that the official figures were a considerable underestimate, oddly enough since they come from what Israel reminds us is the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health.
Thursday, 19 June 2025
Quotations
The Mahabharata
“The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” Frederic Bastiat, the French economist.
Wednesday, 18 June 2025
How right Obama was about Iran and Ukraine
The only man who comes out well from the Israeli attack on Iran is Obama. How wise his agreement with Iran now looks.
He was also right not to arm Ukraine or fight a proxy war against Russia in 2014 but very wrong to help overthrow Yanukovych and Gaddafi.
Had Hillary said days before the 2016 general election that her top priority would have been "regime change in Syria".
She lost and the word dodged war but only for a time. It sees that the neo-cons are the undead.
I can't see any American, British or European interest at stake in the Middle East, now the Soviet Union has gone.
Monday, 2 June 2025
Quotations
"No duty is more important than that of returning thanks."
“In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.”
George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (1998)
Saturday, 31 May 2025
Wednesday, 28 May 2025
Anthony Burgess deliciously described Canada as the colony that stayed at home to look after mother
In 1885, by the way, the great Canadian Tory Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed …”
Monday, 19 May 2025
Quotations
“I don’t have fun. Actually, I had fun once, in 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 powder-blue Lincoln Continental to a James Brown concert with some Mexican friends of mine. I haven’t had fun since. It’s just not a word I like. It’s like Volkswagens or bellbottoms, or patchouli oil or bean sprouts. It rubs me up the wrong way. I might go out and have an educational and entertaining evening, but I don’t have fun.”
Tom Gallagher's reading of the Romanian election
In Romania twenty years of presidential elections show you are doomed if you win the first round.The success of the underdog, Nicusor Dan, with no party affiliation, and fighting a David v - Goliath battle as mayor of Bucharest, rested on the fear of city-dwellers that his uncouth opponent would wreck everything.The main city in counties won by George Simion - Arges, Braila, Botosani, Neamt, Tulcea, Vilcea etc swung behind his moderate opponent because of the fear that material progress of the last few decades would disappear in an era of international confrontation and domestic strife .Romanians are fed up and definitely keen to punish rulers who stole systematically and neglected to fix elementary problems. But they are also keenly aware how fragile their economic well-being is.Simion's failure to speak about economics showed him to be dangerously unreliable among hardheaded voters who liked all or some of his nationalist message.His zest for travelling up and down, and across Europe during the campaign, showed the super-patriot to be bored by the condition of the country.This was an electrifying moment for Romania after 35 years of mainly stagnation by politicians, the kindest word to describe them being insipid.A real debate about the direction of the country and what should be the priorities to focus on in troubled times and a war-torn part of Europe ensued this spring .Behind his gentle demeanour, President Dan is a tough cookie, stubborn and resourceful.He needs to bury the sense of betrayal left by his predecessor, the parasitic Saxon from Sibiu, Mr Iohannis and use his powerful office as an engine of renewal.Otherwise, the ultras will soon be back, next time with a performer far more slicker and dangerous than the wretched Mr Simion.
The sovereignists will be certainly be back with someone better. Their time will come but it has not come yet.
I posted Tom's remarks on Facebook. The reply that impressed me was this from a young Romanian novelist.
Nicușor isn't an underdog, a tough cookie nor an independent. He's the puppet of the establishment. The elections are illegitimate after the December '24 cancellation. He represents the fiercely pro war EU establishment, and acts upon his commands obediently. He's also been an exceptionally bad mayor of the capital city.
I agree with most of that but also with most of the comments of Tom (who is fiercely pro-[continuing the Ukrainian] war, although fiercely anti-EU).
I know nothing about what sort of man Nicusor Dan is. Mr Simion called him autistic. I understand what made him say that but it is not true and anyway who cares? Elon Musk says he has Asperger's syndrome and he's very effective.
I do know that the presidency is not usually very important but it is now, when the Prime Minister has resigned and the President has to arrange a new coalition government.
Saturday, 17 May 2025
Romanian presidential election
By 7 p.m. local time 610,000 Romanians abroad had voted, almost double the number at the same time during the first round. 100,000 (sic!) have voted in the United Kingdom and almost that number in Germany.
This makes me think Dan Nicușor will win. Most voters who want Simion voted last time.
Thursday, 15 May 2025
Quotations
"The administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya...for which the US would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars that the US froze over a decade ago." NBC news item
"Ukrainian intelligence officials said Russia appears to be gearing up for a larger offensive, moving forces to key hotspots on the battlefield..." Financial Times four days ago
"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72." Mark Twain
William James thought people become old fogeys at 26 but I think intelligent people aged between 28 and 30 are what make every country.
"If your government invites people in who are dangerous, or makes no effort to distinguish between the dangerous and the safe, doesn’t that show that they don’t care about you in the least?" Kathy Gyngell
"To be alive at all is to have scars." John Steinbeck
“Only as a man surrenders himself to Divine Love may he hope for salvation, and salvation is open to all who surrender themselves.” Dante Alighieri
"All in all, the Romanian situation exposes a terrifying truth at work in European politics today: democracy is celebrated only when it produces the "correct" results. When voters choose candidates deemed unacceptable by the political establishment, suddenly the democratic process itself becomes suspect, allegedly compromised by "foreign interference" or other conveniently vague threats." Arnaud Bertrand talking about Romania
"Netanyahu wanted to attend Pope Leo XIV's inauguration ceremony but decided against it due to concerns over enforcement of the arrest warrant issued against him by the ICC." Ynet, Israeli news site
“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky