Quotations

He had known Miss Abbott for years, and had never had much opinion about her one way or the other. She was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three: there was nothing in her appearance or manner to suggest the fire of youth.

EM Forster  

It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on, to grow older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one’s ages is to get the heart

Quotations

"In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs."

François Truffaut

"Mr. Phoebus liked Lothair. He liked youth, and good-looking youth; and youth that was intelligent and engaging and well-mannered. He also liked old men. But, between fifty and seventy, he saw little to approve of in the dark sex. They had

Can and should Nato survive? The future is gloomy for the Middle East and Western Europe - Romania is sheltered by her location

Judge Andrew Napolitano's Judging Freedom podcast is the best guide to the world crisis there is.

Today Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, agreed with the judge that the supposed Venezuelan drug smugglers killed by the Americans were murdered. 

Obviously they are right. 

Sic transit Angela

I hope the Labour Party elects a left-wing deputy leader to replace Miss Rayner, but maybe I don't as I want half the Labour MPs to defect to Jeremy Corbyn and La Sultana. 

That's the only chance we have of getting rid of this horrible government. 

At least Mr. Corbyn wants peace, distrusts MI6 and dislikes the European Union, Nato and no doubt very much Sir Keir Starmer. 

The Duchess of Kent has died

Buckingham Palace has announced that Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Kent died last night at Kensington Palace, surrounded by her family.

Though I love the monarchy I take very little interest in the royal family but for some reason felt great affection from afar for the Duchess - even before in 1994 she converted to Catholicism.

She is sometimes said to be the first member of the royal family since King Charles II on his deathbed in 1685 but Princess Victoria Eugenie ('Ena') of Battenberg became a Catholic in 1906 and then Queen of Spain.

Quotations

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The bravest thing that men do is love women.

Mort Sahl

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

I am a hippy

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.”
George Orwell

My world view is a rejection of much of my generation's. I prefer in many respects the views held before 1945 or 1914.


Though I quickly leant to despise the decade into which I was thrust at birth I am a very 1960s person, rejecting the rat race, materialism, conformity, wanting to find myself.


I am in fact a hippy.

So was my hero, Pope Benedict XVI.

Though looking back materialism conformity and the cult of celebrities were the main characteristics of that baleful era.

I was right though to hate the architecture, politics, music, clothes and above all the man who for me aged 3 summed it up, Simon Dee, who is now only remembered for having been forgotten.

Eire is lost

I was just informed that 24% of people in the Republic of Ireland are foreign born.

This transformation happened in the batting of an eye. 

Where are nationalists when Ireland finally needs them?

Quotations

"One needs to suffer from an extremely severe case of Western exceptionalism and moral blindness to believe that bombing Belgrade, Baghdad, Tripoli, Gaza, Damascus, Beirut and Tehran somehow upholds “order,” while countries meeting in Tianjin to discuss multilateral governance constitutes a threat to it. I believe there’s a biblical passage about precisely this, something around having a beam in one's eye while hunting for specks in others’ (Matthew 7:3-5)." Arnaud Bertrand

“You don't become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called The Geezers' Paradox.” Unknown

The Fat Man

I watched Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man last night and loved it. 

Dashiell Hammett's most famous Fat Man was Gutman played unforgettably by Sydney Greenstreet but this is his second Fat Man as gourmand detective. 

He's named Runyan. He's not Damon Runyon.

In Romania the word fat is used all the time, but in England in some  circles it is forbidden. I don't know why.

I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man aged 11 on my first foreign holiday, in Belgium as you ask. I wasn't impressed though I had loved the films. Rereading it last year I thought it wonderful which might mean it is or that I am much less highbrow, which I am by several country miles. At 11 I read Sir Thomas Malory and Edmund Spenser for fun.

Rochefoucauld said there are happy marriages but no delightful ones - the one exception is that in The Thin Man between Nick and Nora Charles, but this is fiction.

Strada Academiei, Bucharest, in 1934 via National Geographical. I have walked down this street every day for decades but couldn't recognise it at first.

 

Former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Aharon Haliva: “We need genocide every few years; the murder of the Palestinian people is a legitimate, even essential act.”

Gideon Levy writes that we must thank the former head of the Military Intelligence, Aharon Haliva, for admitting on Channel 12:

“We need genocide every few years; the murder of the Palestinian people is a legitimate, even essential act”. This is how a “moderate” general in the IDF speaks … killing 50,000 people is “necessary”.

A National Debt of £2 million

When Richard Cromwell, Tumbledown Dick, became dictator of England in 1658 he was faced by the problem that the national debt had increased to about £2 million.

He and his father are closer to us in time than you think.

At the usurper William III's death the national debt amounted to £16 million.  (Disraeli in Sybil lamented Dutch finance, Venetian politics and French wars). At his successor Anne's death it was £52 million.

It is now £2.8 trillion (billion in British English until we gave up our usage of the word in the 1970s) and reached 100% of GDP in August 2024, a level seen previously the early 1960s.

VJ Day reflections

I blame FDR for Pearl Harbor. Chamberlain blamed the Americans for our going to war with Germany in 1939. I recently decided, while following the war in Ukraine, that the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender was a huge mistake on both fronts but WW2 is a template for the foolish wars of our day. It is the justification for all the things the Anglo-Americans do.

The invasion of Iraq and its baleful consequences convinced Peter Hitchens that going to war in 1939 was a mistake (by England and France). I long thought so but as of a week or two ago I decided that Lord Halifax, the alternative to Churchill in 1940, would have been a better Prime Minister because he would have spoken to Germany to explore the possibility of a peace, what Donald Trump has done with Russia.

Talking of VJ day here is the late and much missed Duke of Edinburgh talking about being present at the surrender. What a great comedian he was.

To my enormous surprise I discover that His Majesty's Government’s version of the Skripal poisoning case is a wild fiction

'Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.' Ron Nesen, Gerald Ford's press spokesman

Nothing is more annoying than being accused of peddling conspiracy theories, as I was today, because I have always been very dismissive of them, to a fault. 

I even thought the theory that the Covid virus came from a Chinese lab was not true. 

In case you missed these

A Ukrainian has been identified by the Germans as responsible for the sabotaging of the Nord Stream pipeline. He was presumably acting on orders from the top, though apparently Biden ordered Zelensky to cancel the orders and Zelensky did so. The media don't report this.

A poll now shows that more Americans now sympathise with the Palestinian (28%) than Israelis (22%), which is unprecedented.

Australian writer John Macgregor on X

 

Obama came in about the middle of the period in which US presidents were wholly captured by the Israel lobby.

The 'capture' appears to intensify through time.

It has given us the American presidential obsession with endless middle Eastern wars.

When The Lobby has bought both the political class & the media narrative - Biden & Trump, New York Times & Facebook, et al - that's it. The umpires & gatekeepers are captured.

That's why we have the surreal spectacle of a genocide far worse than anything that happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s or Iraq under Saddam—& the entire government structure & media are frozen, as if nothing's happening.

Without the right constitutional protections in place - nobody listened to the Founders about updating the Constitution to match the times - over time the system gets bought.

The Constitution cannot 'see' the gaming & rigging that has grown up around it.

Just about every problem stems from that.

Numerous parties—American & non-American—hold franchises over one part of the government or another.

Under Bush II, the Saudis apparently purchased immunity for their role in 9/11. Under Obama the financial sector purchased immunity for the consequences of the GFC.

Under Biden, the Chinese secured one slice of the southern border racket, and the Mexican gangs another.

The Israel lobby purchased a US war against Syria, & Pharma purchased immunity for the harms caused by its vaccines.

So in the end this isn't an Israel problem, but a state capture problem.

It'll continue till we reform our political architecture.

*Adapted from The Mechanics of Changing the World: Political Architecture to Roll Back State & Corporate Power. (Constitutional structures to eliminate the influence of wealth in government, the economy, science, medicine & war—& to repel foreign manipulation of our politics.)

John Mearheimer explains why the West did not try to deter Russia from invading Ukraine by offering concessions

"And then the war starts and the Russians immediately reach out to the Ukrainians to talk about negotiations to end the war. This is right after it starts. The Russians want to end it. The Ukrainians agree and the famous negotiations in Istanbul start. And as you well know, who ends those negotiations? It's not the Ukrainians. It's not the Russians. It's the Americans and the British in the form of Boris Johnson who come in and tell the Ukrainians that they should walk away from the negotiations. Now, you want to ask yourself, what's going on here? What's going on is we thought that we could defeat the Russians. This is why we didn't try to prevent the war and why once it started, we didn't go along with Putin's efforts to stop the war. We thought we had the Russians and Putin right where we wanted them. We thought that we had armed and trained the Ukrainians to the point where they could hold their own on the battlefield. And furthermore, economic sanctions would deliver a really staggering blow to the Russians. And that combination of economic sanctions plus defeat on the battlefield would knock the Russians out of the ranks of the great powers and it would end up with Putin falling from power.

"....Of course, we were categorically wrong. One could say catastrophically wrong. And the people who are paying the price for our foolishness are the Ukrainians."

The interview from which I quote is here.

Romanians are cynical and ask me if America deliberately provoked this war. I used to say no, it wasn't deliberate, but now I think perhaps, partly.

Although I blamed the Americans and British for not offering Russia reasons to to forego an invasion I only now suddenly see defeat for Russia and regime change in Moscow was the objective of people like Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden and the rest of the crew, probably from before the war started.

This is the same American bipartisan defence establishment that rightly protested about Putin's murderous war but finances the IDF.

In December 1948 Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish intellectuals wrote to the New York Times decrying the visit of 'fascist' Menachem Begin to the US. Netanyahu was Begin's protégé.

New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed



To the Editors of the New York Times:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

Quotations

'The English name for the capital of Ukraine is Kiev.' Peter Hitchens


As Quentin Crisp reminded us, a bejewelled Eva Peron went on to the presidential balcony in Buenos Aires, and raised her arms, diamond bracelets slipping down to the elbow, and began her speech to the crowd below 'We the downtrodden!'

'How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.'

A very famous quotation from Winston Churchill's The River War 

What would Gladstone have said about Netanyahu?

I was just reading what Mr Gladstone wrote in 1876 about the so called Bulgarian Atrocities.

I am put in mind of what the Israeli army is doing now.

"...We now know in detail that there have been perpetrated, under the immediate authority of a Government to which all the time we have been giving the strongest moral, and for part of the time even material support, crimes and outrages, so vast in scale as to exceed all modern example, and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character, that it passes the power of heart to conceive, and of tongue and pen adequately to describe them."

But England has no preeminent statesman like Gladstone to speak out. 

Ilona Schong has been named People Photographer of the Year in the non-professional category at this year's International Photography Awards for her series documenting life inside traditional Romanian homes.

 

Brezhnev offered Transylvania to Hungary

Hungarian Communist leader Janos Kádár's aeroplane pilot told him in 1971 that Leonid Brezhnev had suggested Hungary take back Transylvania. 

"The plan ultimately unravelled because Hungarian leadership feared the dire economic conditions in the region would be too heavy a burden."

In 1968 Brezhnev considered invading Romania after conquering Czechoslovakia and Harold Wilson's cabinet may have gone to war with Communist Russia if this happened. 

(By the way, England previously might have gone to war with Russia over what is now Romania shortly before we went to war with her over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.)

Madness

"Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!" Charles Lamb

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." Robin Williams

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
Hamlet. Putin is not mad (he might be a psychopath but they are abnormally sane). Nor, so far, is Trump.

Quotations

"Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?"
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. 

The definition has recently been widened by progressives to provide backing for the anti-discrimination obsession of our age. It is useful for them because people can sue you if you call them a racist or antisemite and you can't prove it, but bigot implies those sort of things while in a vague way.  The new meaning of bigot is a neologism and to be avoided. 

“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). 

Quotations

Interviewer: "When you were in the trenches, was there one thing you missed the most?" Robert Graves: "Kippers, since you ask!"

“The insides of most Protestant churches resemble courthouses or town halls, and the focal point of their services is a serious exhortation from a man in a black gown. No golden light, no bells, incense, and candles. No mystery upon an altar or behind an iconostasis. But people brought up in this atmosphere seem to love it. It feels warm and folksy, and leads, on the one hand, to hospitals, prison reform, and votes for all, and, on the other, to sheer genius for drabness, plain cooking ungraced with wine, and constipation of the bright emotions—all of which are considered virtues.

“If I try to set aside the innate prejudices which I feel against this religion, I begin to marvel at the depth of its commitment to earnestness and ugliness.” Alan Watts, Beyond Theology

Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson: the Americans got rid of Calin Georgescu

Retired U.S Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in this interview with Glenn Diesen explains that he was told by someone in the US government that the Americans were going to get rid of Calin Georgescu, who won the first round of the Romanian presidential election in November 2024.

"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. 

If any country has a deep state, Romania does.


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.

Journalist Pelle Nethrop Taylor and a number of other Swedes say that Nato is the international deep state and used dirty tricks to persuade Sweden and Finland to join NATO. 

The phrase deep state comes from Turkey (and dates back decades (to the 1970s?)

Nato and the Turkish deep state were entwined from the start.

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. 

Ola Tunander says most of these incursions were NATO hoaxes.

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. 

This sounds extremely unlikely to me.

Still I have read so much about assassinations and coups carried out by the CIA and MI6 that my head spins. 

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. 

That brought about the fall of Victor Ponta's government and I am sure the Americans did not play any part in that.

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. 

Although as USAID is gone perhaps not 

Postscript.

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. 

I don't know about that but Peter Hitchens  thinks the chemical weapons story a fabrication.

Importantly, no word about Syrian chemical weapons has been heard since the fall of the House of Assad.

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.

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.

Yugoslav parallels

I am just back from Serbia and lots of parallels spring to mind thinking about Yugoslav history.

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. 

The Anglo-Americans similarly support autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf today. The stuff about democracies versus autocracies is all my eye.

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.

How differently the Americans and Nato responded to Milosevic and to Netanyahu.

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.

I remember my horror listening to the BBC and realising thousands of Bosnian Muslim men were about to be murdered by the Bosnian Serbs on General Mladic's orders.

I was in Tuzla in Bosnia shortly after the war ended and was in tears hearing an account by a young woman of the Srebrenica massacre. 

I note that Germany is the ardent supporter of Netanyahu's actions in Gaza today. 

I also note that terrible though Srebrenica was it followed Bosnian Muslim massacres of Serbs. 

I cannot call the Srebrenica massacre genocide though. Mladic provided buses to remove women, children and old men. But the Germans and Americans do, while denying that genocide is what the IDF are committing at this moment.

All the killing was a result of Milosevic using national feeling in place of Communism to consolidate his power. 

Netanyahu did something somewhat comparable. He deftly built up Hamas as a guarantee that there would never be a Palestinian state, a project of the Labor Party establishment that he wanted to defeat. 

Hamas is his Frankenstein's monster as Osama bin Laden was the Americans' in the Afghan war before last.

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. 

By the way, Bandera himself was in comfortable quarters in a German camp until shortly before the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine. He wanted to be a war criminal, I don't doubt, but wasn't given the chance.

This isnt a parallel but, dipping into John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War (a book I recommend), I was reminded how in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev and Malenkov had a terrible journey in a 2 propeller plane through a thunderstorm and then a worse boat trip, in which they feared the boat would capsize, before reaching Tito on his holiday island to get his agreement to the invasion of Hungary.

It was otherwise in 1968. Tito and Ceausescu strongly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by Soviet Russia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and East Germany. Brezhnev considered invading Romania after Czechoslovakia. 

Zhivkov of Bulgaria told the plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party on March 29 1968 "There is no need for us to use the Stalinist methods of the past but we are obligated to take measures to introduce order in Czechoslovakia as well as in Romania. Afterwards we will introduce order in Yugoslavia, too."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now a third of Romanians live abroad and immigrants from countries with lower wages are doing the manual work that need doing. Romania needs pizzas delivered and waiters who do not speak either Romanian or English.

Quotations

The number of heinous acts by CIA/FBI is massive. But the two worst scandals involving manipulations of US elections was 2016 (Russiagate hoax) and 2020 (the Hunter laptop was "Russian disinformation" lie). I'm glad more evidence is emerging, but both were obvious at the time. Glenn Greenwald, who is obviously right as I too saw at the time.


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.

Quotations

"Washington has reportedly decided to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny, and the media diligently do their part with the preparations." Glenn Diesen

"The royal family are so powerless that Prince Andrew becomes just about the only person to attend an Epstein party that everyone knows about." Daniel Jupp

“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

"Israel has become the embodiment of its own greatest fear. It has become the Germany of 1940." Richard Willard

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa & other Heads of the Christian Churches in Jerusalem today issued statement condemning what they call “yet another violent assault that targeted the West Bank Christian town of Taybeh,” a “peaceful and faithful community rooted in the land of Christ.” This “grievous incident,” they say, “forms part of an alarming pattern of settler violence against West Bank communities.” The Heads of the Christian Churches in Jerusalem “demand” that the Israeli government “hold accountable those responsible for these crimes,” protect vulnerable communities, and “uphold its obligations under international law.” Full statement here

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.

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.

On Ukraine he repeats an important piece of hearsay that he has told us about before:

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.

I knew this, but many blithely say Britain has always been an immigrant country, because this is what they are constantly told

"There has been more immigration into Britain every single year since 1997 than there was IN THE WHOLE PERIOD from the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries through to the Second World War” Paul Moreland

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".

"According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively. 

Religious interpretations play a key role in shaping these views. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants." 

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, 28 May 2025


"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

"If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference', you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes." Joseph Stalin

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

My university, Cambridge, in its press release (dread words) calls its new (retired left-wing politician) Chancellor Lord Chris Smith, as if he were the son of a duke or marquess.

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.

Luxury hotels in the London Docklands, Margaret Thatcher's great but now dying monument, are now used to house young men without papers who illegally enter the country by boat.

In 2024, gross immigration to the UK was 948,000.

As I said a few days ago, 40% of new births in England are to couples where at least one of the parents is foreign born.

40%.

The right to trial by jury is being restricted. 

Trials are often in secret. 

The ancient double jeopardy rule was abolished to enable what Rod Liddle described as a political show trial to take place.

Abortion which was in effect legal is now completely legal up until nine months.

Euthanasia is likely to become legal.

The three most important things I found on the Middle Eastern crisis in the last year

1. This article by an anonymous British-born Jew who identifies with Israel and may be an Israeli is an interesting series of arguments in favour of genocide, when practiced by the IDF. 

His points are not to be dismissed. 

I have heard many of these arguments made by British people on social media, none of whom are Jewish.

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.

Two graphs I stumbled across today by chance on X

 

Restore Britain is a party led by Rupert Lowe, who was elected last year as a Reform UK MP but left the party.

Quotations

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucidydes, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier." 

Thomas Jefferson writing to John Adams

"Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right. Ukraine is running out of fighting men, its frontline soldiers are exhausted and US military support has narrowed to focus on air defence. The Kyiv government is racked by corruption scandals and purges, public faith in their future and in their leaders is tanking and pressure to make peace at almost any price is growing." 

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" 

Quotations

“In this world, you can search for everything, except Love and Death.
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)

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.” Marcel Proust, “Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

“All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.” Jean de La Fontaine

“Civilisation – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organisation of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance." Evelyn Waugh

"In 1997 the British economy was bigger than that of China and India combined. Today, China’s economy alone is six times larger." Tom McTague

"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)

7 July 2005 and the transformation of England

Twenty years ago on 7 July 2005 bombs in London killed 52 people and injured more than 770 on three Underground trains and a bus.

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.

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.

Austrian-American photographer Inge Morath took this picture in Lipscani in 1958

 

Arthur Miller divorced Marilyn Monroe to marry Inge Morath.

The failure of the EU and the end of civilisation

Great Britain, France and Germany helped broker the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Recent events show what a good deal it was, but the EU and Britain followed the US in imposing sanctions on Iran for human rights violations and aiding Russia in Ukraine.

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.

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.”'

Quotations

"Love is what makes growing up bearable." Eve Pollard


"Kraus' first law:
In life you don't get what you "deserve. "
You get what you can negotiate."
Eric Kraus

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

Low

Churchill is said to have said

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.''

It has been and he did.

Though actually he did not say those words. He said

"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."

John Charmley, perhaps the greatest historian of our time, utterly exploded the Churchillian version of history but the explosion has been ignored.

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.

Quotations

“A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.”  Arthur Schopenhauer

"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.

Quotations

"What is the news ? " asked the bird. Yudhisthira [whose name meant: firm in all battles] replied calmly:"In this cauldron filled with the grease of great delusion, with the fire of the sun and the fuel of day and night, stirring with the ladles of months and seasons, Time the great cook is cooking all of us living beings."
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.

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.

Quotations

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Henry David Thoreau

[What's the price of Facebook and X?]

"No duty is more important than that of returning thanks."

St. Ambrose

“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)

"Interestingly, until very recently the dominant orthodoxy was that the world was a far safer place with a single global superpower - the American Hegemon. How's that working out for you?"

After the storm yesterday by Dan Mihai Balanescu