Tucker Carlson and Justin Trudeau

"We just turned Iran into a global power, and it will remain a global power for the rest of our lives, at least."

Tucker Carlson yesterday.

"Netanyahu says he defends Western civilisation. No. He’s its enemy — literally its main enemy." Tucker Carlson on the Shawn Ryan Show, November 24 2025

[America has become an enemy of the West, exactly what Trump wanted to change but has made worse.] 

"He [Netanyahu]’s not the only world leader who’s evil and destructive by the way again, but he is. And he’s hurting the United States and he’s destroying his own country. And I think he imperils the world. Okay, so I think that clearly they’re going to try and blow up Al Aqsa Mosque, I believe that, on the Temple Mount to build a third temple, and then you’ve got global war." Tucker Carlson talking to Elizabeth Lane, October 16 2025

“We all know people who are a little hesitant (about vaccination), and we’re going to try and convince them, but there are also people who are fiercely opposed to vaccination; who don’t believe in science, who are often misogynists, who are often racist as well … There, one must make a choice as a national leader, do we tolerate these people?”

Justin Trudeau during a French-language interview on the Quebec talk show La Semaine des 4 Julie on September 16, 2021.  I didn't see this back then.

People often forget that England was awarded Palestine by the League of Nations in trust for her people, 90% of whom were Arabs

Alan Dershowitz, lawyer to OJ Simpson, Epstein and Trump, on Piers Morgan's show:

“Will you at least admit that Iran murdered, in cold blood, as many as 50,000 innocent protesters? And would you admit, if that’s true, that that comes close to the genocide? That anything that Israel is confused of doing in self-defense after its people were raped, kidnapped, murdered on October 7th, would you at least admit that the Iranian regime has killed many, many, many thousands of people?”

'Ukraine War Narrative collapses. Europe Starts Panicking.'

Here's a good Neutrality Studies podcast in which former British diplomat Ian Proud (in Moscow 2014-2019) talks to Pascal Lottez.

It's worth hearing. I agree with both these men.

Mr Proud points out that European leaders have completely abandoned real diplomacy, demanding an unconditional Russian ceasefire while refusing to talk directly to Russia or address her long-standing concerns—such as Ukraine's NATO ambitions. 

The US 5th fleet is an Iranian hostage. America's humiliation in Iran 'empowers China and the BRICS forever'

Former British spy Alastair Crooke delivers a blunt assessment of the Iran conflict on Daniel Davis's YouTube podcast Deep Dive. I thought this summary on X deserved quoting in full.




What was long treated as unchallengeable American military power has been exposed as brittle and limited. The consequences reach far beyond the region and are already strengthening the rising influence of BRICS.




THE SHREDDED US STANDING

➡️ This war is shredding the standing of the US military presence.

➡️ It was thought to be invulnerable, unable to be contested or attacked. That has all been proved wrong.

The Trump Administration is an idiotocracy, as an insider told Michael Wolff

As all informed observers knew except Donald Trump, the US does not have enough missiles. 

It therefore has had to pause its agression against Iran. 

The Pakistanis are trying to get Iran to agree a ceasefire, I presume at the USA's request. 

I hope Iran does not fall for this ruse again.

US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz admits on TV that the weapons stockpiles are heavily depleted but he blames Biden for that.

“We have to take a step back here. A lot of our stockpiles were depleted because of Biden."

He then says they are not depleted but he also adds that people leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.

It's like a black comedy film except it is not funny.

Quotations

"We're seeing the ending of an era, not a decline, but an abrupt change. And this change is not stemming from without: The ending of the American power did not result from any foreign civil war or other war against American dominance. The end came from the United States itself." Professor Michael Hudson

"Nobody can take us back to the 1970s, but for millions it was a time of plentiful jobs, affordable housing and safe streets. The Tories shouldn’t knock it." Peter Hitchens (Conservatives accuse the current and last Labour Prime Ministers of wanting to take Great Britain back to the 1970s). 

"Like love, faith is also, more often than not, a mess-making force." Lamorna Ash

“Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.” Peter Hitchens

Samuel Ramani: Trump can stop the war now. He’s already won

'While the US’s next steps remain unclear, Trump could end the war today and credibly claim victory. Although the Islamic Republic remains in place, its grip on power has eroded and Iran’s military capabilities have been severely degraded. After years of one-sided nuclear negotiations and passivity in the face of Iranian regime repression, Trump has restored deterrence and asserted American power in a way that will resonate with other adversaries.'

Dr Samuel Ramani wrote this in the Daily Telegraph on 10 March 2026 when it was already clear to people who listened to Max Blumenthal, Professor Marandi or Douglas Macgregor that it was very wrong. 

Almost the whole of Iran is now united, the government was not so strong for decades and American power is at last in what could be steep decline. 

These things are surprising but clear and it is also surprising but clear to most people that American decline is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

"After years of one-sided nuclear negotiations" - Obama's nuclear deal was a good one and Trump tore it up saying he could get a better one and couldn't. 

"And PASSIVITY in the face of Iranian regime repression" - what business is it of America's on the other side of the world - or any foreign country - to be active if the Iranian government represses Iranians? 

Hezbollah is not passive when Israel attacks Lebanon - they fight, which is their business since they are Lebanese and is within international law - but people in high places in London call them terrorists.

Dr Ramani continues to spill out propaganda about Iran and Russia. 

He teaches Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and he contributes regularly to The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Al Jazeera and CNN.

People who have power take this man seriously. 

The future elite at Oxford do. 

Everything else at Oxford is woke but Politics and International Relations sounds as if it is taught from the point of view of Anglo-American governments. 

But this is not in fact as contradictory as it sounds at first - the Anglo-American empire is woke. 

The head of MI6 complains about lack of LGBQ rights in Russia.

Woke is what we are if not fighting then paying Ukrainians to fight for 

Please stop reading the Daily Telegraph or Washington Post or believing the BBC or CNN, if you do.

Al Jazeera is better by some way but equally biassed against Iran, the Houthis and the Shia.

Chas Freeman on the American sphere of influence, a more subtle form of dominance than an empire

The former US Ambassador to KSA is a very acute analyst. This is from a talk he gave to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University on 2 April 2016. He explained ten years ago what is happening today.

Americans like to forget we ever had an empire or to claim that, if we did, we never really wanted one. But the momentum of Manifest Destiny made us an imperial power. It carried us well beyond the shores of the continent we seized from its original aboriginal and Mexican owners. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But the American empire was never limited to that sphere.

In 1854, the United States deployed U.S. Marines to China and Japan, where they imposed our first treaty ports. Somewhat like Guantánamo, these were places in foreign countries where our law, not theirs, prevailed, whether they liked it or not. Also in 1854, U.S. gunboats began to sail up and down the Yangtze River (the jugular vein of China), a practice that ended only in 1941, when Japan as well as the Chinese went after us.

Lawrence Wilkerson doesn't think the Jewish state will survive in the long term

'I think from every indication that I have, there is no more division in Iran. It is wrong to say that there are hardliners, moderates, soft ones, whatever. There is no IRGC. There is no Iranian military. There is no Guardian Council. There is no Ayatollah. There is no Majlis. They are one. They are Persia, if you will. And they are 93 million strong, being killed every day by us in war crime after war crime after war crime, about which Hegseth said nothing. But they are resolute.


'And here’s what I said earlier. With the help of a very sophisticated Chinese satellite, and probably backups from Russia, Iran has the capability to deliver some of the most sophisticated ballistic missiles in the world on targets throughout the region at their direction. In other words, you have a first list of targets that they have hit now. You have a second list of targets that they have hit a number of. And then you have a third list, which they’re just starting on. I think they have a fourth and a fifth list, and I think those are the lists that will throw the world into global depression.

Quotations

Elon Musk: 

Money won't matter in 2036. What do you want money for? You want money for goods and services: food, housing, transport, entertainment. If robots and AI are providing more goods and services than any human could possibly consume, what do you need money for in that case?

Brian Berletic:

India... has maintained a balancing act between West and East - but of course the US will settle for nothing less than full submission and servitude.

What are the PRIMARY tools the US uses to change the direction of a targeted nation's policies? Of course - "color revolution." 

Ray McGovern's last Judging Freedom podcast

Ray McGovern, 86, a very loveable former CIA man, and another former CIA man of a much more recent vintage, Joe Kent, agree that 99.44 percent of the intelligence the US receives about Iranian nuclear capacity comes from the Israelis 'and this was the same with Iraq'. 

Israel invented fears of an Iranian bomb in the 1990s to keep the US in the region. 

I doubt they believed in the Iranian nuclear weapons threat until the current war, but it's probably going to be a self fulfilling prophecy now.

I have seen several former intelligence officers say Israel is the main reason the US invaded Iraq and that this has been hidden since the consequences were what they were.

Ed and David Miliband are not the first brothers to be British Foreign Secretary

Ed and David Miliband are not the first brothers to be British Foreign Secretary

The Marquess Wellesley and his younger brother the Duke of Wellington both were, the latter very briefly. He held all principal ministerial offices concurrently for three weeks in November–December 1834 while the country waited for Sir Robert Peel to return from Italy, where he was on holiday, and then remained Foreign Secretary under Peel till the government collapsed in April 1835.

Sir Austen Chamberlain and his half brother Neville were both Chancellor of the Exchequer and both leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party (both were Liberal Unionists originally).

Edward and Oliver Stanley were both First Lord of the Admiralty.

Ed Miliband in his first remarks overseas as Foreign Secretary at ASEAN condemned Russia's "aggression" but not the USA's or Israel's, and spoke vaguely of the "suffering" of the Palestinians. 

I suppose Great Britain is not a free agent but has to toe the American line. How different things were when Wellington or Wellesley were Foreign Secretary.

Avoid the words terrorism and genocide

I try to avoid the words genocide and terrorism and wish everyone would. The word terrorism is impossible to define - the word genocide has a definition but discussing it changes the subject from what happened to a legal dispute. I read a left-wing historian recently saying the word genocide is used for polemical purposes not for spreading understanding. The word holocaust on the other hand means a burnt sacrifice so that word is straightforward.

My country is going to war on the wrong side on the orders of foreign governments and the advice of the deep state

Of course the new British cabinet has to do what it's told.

Israel apparently is going to take part in what may be a big and disastrous war. We as so often will be on the wrong side. Meanwhile the British Chief Rabbi wants it to be illegal to wish death on the IDF though not on the IRGC.

Achieving immortality

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Shakespeare's Sonnet LV  

Europe cannot afford to have Russia as an enemy, nor China, nor Iran

Dissident opinions on the internet are the shaft of sunlight in the dungeon we inhabit.

The European Council and the rest of the international deep state wants to block the light.

I recommend this podcast by Ian Proud former senior British diplomat in Moscow.

He points out that NATO is not a defensive organisation, something proven by the fact that member states account for 52% of total global military spending, a proportion that will increase.

Ed the Red

Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary is an inspired appointment.

It stops his net zero reign of terror, gives us a Foreign Secretary who prevented the UK intervening militarily in Syria because of dodgy allegations and he is one of the very few senior British politicians left who has been outspokenly critical of Israel.

The fact that Stephen Pollard and the Daily Telegraph are furious is reassuring.

Better not to have redbrick Prime Ministers in future?

Mr Burnham is only the 15th Cambridge Prime Minister and the first to kiss hands since Stanley Baldwin who first did so 103 years ago and was one of the best ones.

31 went to Oxford. 8 went to Scotch universities, 2 to European ones and one, the unlamented Sir Keir Starmer, to Leeds. 

Better stick to Oxbridge and Scotland in future?

Lloyd George and Churchill didn't go to university. An equally great or greater one, Pitt the Younger, went to Cambridge at 13.

The new PM read English which is a very much better preparation than PPE or Law. In an age when so many of the people who rule us have no cilture he has read poetry. 

I expect he'll be terrible but what a pleasure to see the back of the mendacious, murderous Mendelson-McSweeney protégé Starmer.

I suspect we're really ruled by the international deep state and the secret services whichever party is in power.

The new Prime Minister is a cradle Catholic who said he is not particularly religious. He is the first Catholic Prime Minister unless you count Boris, who was baptised a Catholic for some reason but brought up vaguely Church of England.

Eyeless in Gaza

 

Unfortunately very many children are buried under the rubble whose names are known only to God.

Remember that America financed this and the RAF lent assistance.

Alon Mizrahi

@alon_mizrahi

You may not believe it, but 95% of Israeli Jews have absolutely mo ides what they have done wrong. In their book, they are hated because of rampent antisemitism. And they really genuinely believe it. It's a clinically insane aociety

It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder. America is violent, lawless and inept

"We just had no military strategy for winning against Vietnam. We had no military strategy for winning in Afghanistan. We had no military strategy for winning in Iraq and we have no military strategy for winning here. But the point is that once you get into these things, it's very hard to get out. No question. And you look for ways to escalate and it's kind of like a wing and a prayer. You know, maybe something will happen that we don't foresee. And if we just double down, maybe, you know, we'll be lucky." John Mearsheimer yesterday talking to Chris Hedges

Quotations

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live."
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

"We like someone because. We love someone although."
Henry de Montherlant

"You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman….It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity."
Carl Jung, The Red Book 

Fox News: "What happens to Ukraine if it does not receive the help it needs?"
Lech Walesa: "It won't just be Ukraine that is affected. The United States will be in danger. Russia wants to attack the U.S. Right now it's too weak to do so, but if it is let to defeat Ukraine, the U.S. will be next. So, it is in the interest of us all, including the U.S., to deal with Russia once and for all." 

February 22, 2024

The hardest part of a 14 day war is the first 140 days

Iranians and Americans see deaths differently. The Americans kill civilians without qualm but do not have the fortitude to sustain losses on their side whereas with Iranians it's the other way around.

2 US servicemen were killed in Jordan by Iranian missiles, at least 3 to 5 more soldiers aboard the medical evacuation flights will ‘probably not make it’ and there are 15 more soldiers with life-threatening, very severe injuries whose fate is also still unclear. I hope American public opinion forces an end to this unprovoked and unnecessary war. 

Americans do not take much interest in the foreigners they kill but they do dislike their own soldiers dying, though the price of petrol which they call gas matters to them more and therefore to their politicians.

Meanwhile Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the US State Department has said this:

‘We do not want anybody to remember the Palestinians as they disappear into that dark night underground under rubble, to be soon turned into whatever it is Jared Kushner and his boys have planned for them.

'But we've all forgotten about that. And that is fundamentally evil that we have done that.

'This is not the equivalent of Hitler's Holocaust, but it's very close. And if it keeps on at the present rate, and it really is 250,000–300,000 Palestinians under that rubble, and I think Ralph Nader's right about that, I think it is, this could match anything that's happened in the last century….'

British people are siding with the enemy

From a Daily Telegraph story.

"Not only would 24 per cent apparently side with hostile foreign actors [China, Russia, Iran], but 61 per cent appear to believe that the contract between citizens and the state is “broken”, largely because politicians fail to deliver on their promises. This disillusionment cuts across age, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Almost a third are open to the view that non-white people can never be as English, Scottish or Welsh as white people."

Reminder: the United Kingdom is not at war with China, Russia or Iran.

Britain has no political interests in the Far East, the Middle East or even, come to that, Ukraine beyond wanting a durable peace and the Strait of Hormuz reopened. 

Reminder: the Strait was open before the USA attacked Iran, it became a war zone and Lloyds of London closed it.

One reason for wanting NATO dissolved in 1992 as was said at the time was that it would expose Europe and Canada to getting involved in American adventures.

Gaza changes everything

The Guardian scooped the world on 27 June 1944 with the news that a hundred thousand Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and put the story near the top of page 4. The liberation of Auschwitz was on the back page of The [London] Times the next year. Auschwitz grew rapidly in importance and changed the way the world thought, changed politics and even changed Christianity. The killings in Gaza and now Lebanon will change everything too though this is not yet widely apparent.

Gaza and Epstein (the two things are connected) have already removed Sir Keir Starmer from office.

I recommend this article by Paul Holden about his ascent to power and defenestration here. It starts thus.

'It’s hard to hear exactly what the heckler shouts to Sir Keir Starmer from the floor of Labour’s September 2024 conference, but snatches are caught on the ambient mics. “Does that include the children of Gaza?” is heard before the camera zooms in on the delegate. He is young, only a teenager, and he’s quickly moved out of the conference hall after saying something about “bombs” and “Palestine”.

'It’s the first Labour conference since Starmer was elected as the first Labour prime minister in 14 years, and it is conducted with the swagger and brio one would expect of a triumphal political project. Even so, Starmer’s response was extraordinary.

'“This guy’s obviously got a pass to the 2019 conference,” Starmer jokes.

'The hall erupts in laughter and applause, some rising to their feet. Starmer, who has so often been criticised for failing to show that he enjoys politics, basks in the response, plainly savouring the moment. “We’ve changed the party,” Starmer explains in a sing-song tone.

'The day after the heckler interrupted Starmer, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 41,495 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s assault on the Gaza strip. 11,355 were children. A week before, the Gaza health ministry published a 649-page document listing every identifiable person killed in Gaza. The first 12 pages are exclusively of babies under one year old.'

Alon Mizrahi, an ex-Israeli Arab Jew, on X

No military in history has hit US forces with the efficacy and precision of Iran's armed forces (notable historic exception: Vietnam's heroic Vietcong). Americans don't even know what it means to take on a proper military. And they are being destroyed (if we only knew how many US soldiers already collapsed mentally). Every position in West Asia known, every base targeted, every installation surveilled. Iran fights like a modern superpower with the spirit of a holy, native Islamic military. What a crazy spectacle. 

And they are still using only a small part of their capabilities. The escalation ladder has many, many steps to climb. We are witnessing the grandest and most epic battle since the Red Army vanquished the Nazis in WW2

All Romanians I speak to think this, but I haven't asked many

I asked the bank teller, a women in her fifties, who do you want to win the war, America or Iran? Iran she answered unhesitatingly. "America makes wars all over the world and doesn't care for anybody." 

I don't think she is a particularly good teller but as a political analyst I can't fault her.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. (Matthew 11:25)


He might have added unto bank tellers and cab drivers.

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman this week

"Zionism is as incompatible with non-aggression as Nazism was." 

"It takes a lot longer to build a missile interceptor, two or more years, than it does for the Iranians to build missiles. So they [Iranians] are actually increasing their supply of missiles and drones while the US is depleting its."

An unanswerable question seen on Facebook

Can someone explain to me why if Israel protects itself from hostile Muslim neighbours that somehow does something good for the West?

Quotations

"Dostoevsky sacrificed a great deal of knowledge for a new humanity and told this new humanity his deepest secret, his last formula, his most memorable saying: 'Love life more than the meaning of life'." Stefan Zweig

George Kennan who in his Long Telegram of February 22, 1946 said the US should contain Soviet Russia and later opposed the cold war, Nato and the arms race

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented." In his foreword to the book The Pathology of Power by Norman Cousins (1987).

Bastille Day reflections

A former Spanish PM has been condemned for saying the French world cup team isn't French. Trevor Noah said the same thing amusingly years ago and J-M Le Pen.

De Gaulle, who begins his memoirs saying he always had a certain idea of France, opined: "It is very good that there are yellow French, black French, brown French. They show that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France."

This is not 1938 but 1939

Nothing made me so angry for a long time. 

British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood just proscribed the IRGC, bowing to the Israel lobby.

I support Iran in defending herself from an unprovoked war as do most people I know.

I think I can say that here in Bucharest sipping my coffee in the boulevard.

Saying so in the UK might get me 14 years in prison.

I am not making this up, gentle reader.

I might be arrested when I land in England like an American writer was recently for things he had written abroad.

What reasons can America have for the attack on Iran?

Iran's internal policies are no justification for attacking her, are they? 

The Iranian government has done bad things but Saudis have committed worse crimes, as has Israel.

Mr Trump could claim that Iran finances Hamas and is responsible for what Hamas does, but that's simply not true.

Anyway Israel has killed probably hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians and by the IDF's own admission in August 8,900 Hamas fighters in Gaza supposedly in order to vanquish Hamas.

Hezbollah? Hezbollah came into existence to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which happened so Israel could fight the PLO, who were attacking Israel because.......  and if you go back far enough you get to the British decision to give Jews a homeland in 1917.

I am a huge admirer of the British empire but this was not our finest moment. It was probably our most fateful mistake.

Israel's actions in Gaza and now in Lebanon where since March more than 4,200 people have been murdered, over ten thousand wounded and roughly a fifth of the population been displaced seem to make Israel a much worse actor than Iran.

In a logical world the Americans should go to war against Israel if protecting peace and human rights is what motivates America. 

If putting America first does America should take her troops out of West Asia and I'd argue out of the whole of Asia.

The truth is that America has wanted to overthrow the Iranian government since it came to power in 1979, replacing the American puppet regime of the Shah.

Israel has been worried about Iran only since the 1990s, producing propaganda about Iran getting the bomb as a means of keeping the alliance going with America.

Yesterday Trump said the US is protecting the Strait of Hormuz for China. "I don't mind protecting it for China but it's unfair that we aren't somehow compensated." 

Remember that the Strait was open until Trump attacked Iran without giving a reason.

Meanwhile the war in Russia continues. 

Podcasters like Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs etc say Russia is winning and that Western help to Ukraine may provoke a world war. 

These ideas seem contradictory. 

We do need America and her vassals or allies to give up struggling against Russia, Iran and China. Ceasefires are not enough. We need a new settlement and America to go home. America is the problem, not Iran or China. Even Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, worse than a crime a blunder, was provoked by American behaviour.

Remember that the precedent the world has to avoid at any cost is not Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 but Chamberlain going to war in 1939, a war that cost 70 million lives, left half of Europe ruled by Communists and destroyed the British empire.

This time a world war will presumably mean a nuclear war.

Israel might use nuclear weapons even in the present limited war.

'Israel Eyes Two Fronts: Iran Today, Turkey Next' - Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia

'There's a quote from Bezalel Smotrich who said that Witkoff told him the Palestinians in Gaza 'are Nazis and I'm not going to allow Israel to have to live alongside Nazis'. This is an indication of how insincere and incompetent and biased and ineffectual Mr. Wickoff is, if he did say that. It shows that he is a bloodthirsty Zionist. Of course the people who are behaving like Nazis are not the Palestinians but the Israelis. They are the ones conducting genocide. They are on the offensive. They are trying invading neighbouring countries. Palestine is defending itself to as best it can which is not very well.'

'He said the Islamic Republic of Japan attacked us with 111 missiles and we have to respond. ....This is a typical of someone who is suffering mental deterioration. He is clearly in the grips of dementia.'

Lindsey Graham

"I like the structural path we are on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and economic support, they will fight to the last person." Lindsay Graham (2022)

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said at the weekend that Israel is destroying everything in Southern Lebanon

“I said that Southern Lebanon would become Gaza. We would apply the Rafah model.

We would destroy everything there. We would deal with them in exactly that way.

And that is what we did.

The infrastructure has been destroyed.

Homes in 24 villages along the border, villages that had existed for hundreds of years and were used by Hezbollah as military outposts against Israel have been demolished.

The army systematically flattened the villages with bulldozers and explosives.

Ninety percent of the houses are gone.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 homes have been destroyed.”

Lindsay Graham - I don't remember where I read this

In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.

Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.

By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.

....In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.

On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.

He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."

A very bad man has died

Lindsay Graham is dead.

The Politician, dead and turned to clay,

Will make a clout to keep the wind away.

I am not fond of draughts, and yet I doubt

If I could get myself to touch that clout.

(Belloc)

Deploring the joy expressed at Ann Widdicombe's murder I feel a hypocrite but I feel absolutely no sadness about Lindsay Graham's death.

I never disliked a politician more.

He called for the US to attack Iran in 7 October 2023 and wanted Iran flattened like Hiroshima.

I do not rejoice but Clarence Farrow put it best when he said "I have never wished a man dead, but I have read many obituaries with great satisfaction".

Not many in my case. Very few but his yes.

Actually I am lying to myself and you. I am pleased he is dead, simply because while he lived he was doing enormous harm. Though if he was murdered this I strongly condemn like the murders of Arabs and Persians. 

Miss Widdicombe by contrast was a retired spinster living in a cottage in the countryside who did no-one any harm and who stood by Harvey Proctor when he was accused wrongly of paedophilic crimes. Homosexual lobbyists let him hang in the breeze.

Conspiracies

Max Blumenthal has repeatedly talked about how American NGOs pretended that a US Israeli regime change psychop in January was spontaneous and grossly exaggerated the numbers of dead.

Here is Ana Kasparian telling the story.

I knew this because I read the news with a sceptical historian's eye and have continuously said so since it happened. People have been disbelieving and even accused me of diffusing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

This was the moment when I completely gave up on the mainstream media and on the American British defence establishments. Only the Financial Times mentioned mysterious men in black involved in the riots.

I used to dismiss conspiracy theories but all secret services do is conspire (and in some cases murder). 

Since January I no longer believe a word the US adjacent international defence establishment says or the media in the American controlled information space, which includes most of the world outside a few "enemy countries".

Murder most foul

I am very shocked by her murder and mourn the wonderful Ann Widdecombe, a great Englishwoman and Catholic convert, but what's wrong with calling her a "virgin", "spinster" and "old maid" as Adam Bolton did?

I remember browsing through a dictionary of offensive words and phrases in 1994 and read that old maid was offensive as it suggested an unmarried woman didn't have sexual experience and thought that the world had gone mad. 

In fact it had gone bad.

This is certainly no time to speak ill of the dead but I wonder why she and so many British conservatives gave the IDF complete support in Gaza. I don't understand it, perhaps because I've lived in an all white,  extremely Christian country since the 1990s.

One can't help for a moment when reading about her murder in a village to think of Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple but Margaret Rutherford, whose father killed her grandfather, refused for a long time the role because murder is not to be treated likely, anywhere in the world.

There are lots of people on the internet expressing their hatred for Miss Widdicombe hecause she was a conservative and believed in Christian sexual morality. 

One hopes she died painfully which reminds me of this.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) posted “Hurrah! She’s dead!” in response to the death of Ann Widdecombe. 

Why is it noteworthy that an unmarried Christian lady is a virgin?

AJ Balfour lived without sex and that didn't arouse comment. He did some snogging with pretty girls in summer houses one biography suggested. 

Edward Heath's lack of a sex life wasn't discussed when he was PM but is now. When I was a pretty undergraduate and lunches with him I noticed I made a hit with him and looking back I am sure he was a non practicing homosexual.

Axis of evil

The US deep state and Israel have brought disaster to the world starting in 2001. Nobody is held responsible.

The new axis of evil consists of America, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and American vassals like Frau Ursula Von Der Leyen, Mark Rutte, President Nicușor Dan and most of NATO. The other Gulf states are peeling off after Iran's victory because they have to.

America is now the evil empire, what Reagan accurately though undiplomatically called the USSR. 

It imposed sanctions on a third of the world's population, announces that it does not care about international law, attacks countries without provocation, murders, kidnaps, acts as a pirate arresting vessels on the high seas at its whim.

Please watch this short clip. George Yeo Foreign Minister of Singapore understands perfectly the new situation. 

He compares the NATO bombing of Kosovo with the Russian invasion of Ukraine to point up the lack of Western consistency.

I am completely on the Ukrainians' side against the Russians but Anglo-American folly in trying to make Ukraine a Western democracy from the 1990s onward led to the war.

Compare the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, intended by some to be the forerunner of an invasion of Iran, the Turkish and Anglo-American interventions in Libya and Syria, the Israeli invasions of nearby countries from 1967 onwards and the US attack on Iran after the CIA, Mossad and MI6's regime change operation failed.

What do they all have in common? All were completely illegal, as was the NATO bombing of Serbia, which I supported but all the Romanians to whom I spoke opposed.

Please don't think NATO is a defensive alliance.

Looking back September 11 2021 was the moment when the USA should have seen the consequences of allying with Israel and moved away.

However when attacked by foreigners people want revenge, just as so many Iranians who may previously have been well disposed towards America do now.

Here is Alastair Crooke in a four minute clip explaining where we are now.

Jewish-Canadian writer Aaron Maté a few minutes ago

About one-third of the world, including Iran’s 90 million people, live under crippling US sanctions. 

So under the current order, the US gets to crush foreign economies at will. By contrast, Iran is not allowed to use its own economic coercion over the Strait of Hormuz to raise money for the damage caused by an unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression, and to help ensure one doesn’t happen again.

And the entire region, already hurt by decades of US-Israeli wars, has to suffer the consequences.

These lies are still widely believed

 

Iran threatens to expand war to Red Sea

The Daily Telegraph is the most wretchedly deceitful propaganda sheet in the world. 

Trump has just said the Gulf ceasefire is off (it was never on, always a US trick). 

Iran will protect herself as best she can (which is plenty) from the renewed US aggression and the top Telegraph headline is

<Iran threatens to expand war to Red Sea>

Inside we find:

Jake Wallis Simons

The three-word chant that demolishes the case for peace with Iran
Mourners screaming ‘death to America’ at the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proves it’s nonsense to try to appease the Tehran regime

This is the funeral of a man murdered by the Americans remember, during peace negotiations starting an unprovoked, illegal war.

In other words this chant they have chanted since 1979 justifies the US making war on Iran, as if Iranians didn't have very ample reason to chant it, ampler with each passing year. I remember at the time of the revolution that chant endeared the new government to my reactionary heart. I am sure Michael Wharton (Peter Simple in the Telegraph) approved too but the Telegraph was conservative in those days.





Meanwhile Rutte of NATO backs this flagrantly illegal war because Iran levied fees to use persian Gulf in self defence after this unprovoked attack.




Please don't imagine the Guardian is not pro-Israel. In 2021 the Guardian fired US contributor Nathan J. Robinson following a sarcastic X post in which he said that the U.S. Congress is legally obligated to buy weapons for Israel, calling it a custom functionally indistinguishable from law. The U.S. editor-in-chief of The Guardian criticized the tweet as misleading, accusing Robinson of spreading "fake news" and promoting antisemitic "tropes" (dread word). Robinson deleted the tweet and apologised, but was fired anyway.

Quotations

"Solitude is not an absence. It is a form of fullness. Almost no one understands this. They call it emptiness, oblivion, cold, collapse, even pathology. And it is simply a language, the most ancient of all. Spoken by sages, eccentrics, exiles, writers and women who go out in the morning with a book under their arm instead of a companion." Sofia Proneikos, "Caryatid - The Vital Threads of The Soul"

"Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure;books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us,consult with us,and join with us in a living and intense intimacy." Petrarch

"Ah, the eternal burden of the intellectual - to pour all this knowledge into his brain through the three-millimetre aperture of the iris." Irvin D. Yalom, "When Nietzsche Wept"

"An intelligent man understands ideas. An intellectual believes in them." Alberto Moravia

"From the unreal lead me to the real, from darkness lead me to light, from death lead me to immortality." Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1:3:18

From John Mearsheimer's speech to the Patriots for Europe conference at the European Parliament on November 10, 2025.

(The transcript is here.)

Some might argue that the EU, not NATO, was the main cause of European stability during the unipolar moment, which is why the EU, not NATO, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. But this is wrong. While the EU has been a remarkably successful institution, its success is dependent on NATO keeping the peace in Europe. Turning Marx on his head, the political military institution is the base or foundation, and the economic institution is the superstructure. All of this is to say that, absent the American pacifier, not only does NATO as we know it disappear, but the EU will also be undermined in serious ways.




The conventional wisdom in the West is that Vladimir Putin is responsible for causing the Ukraine war. His aim, so the argument goes, is to conquer all of Ukraine and make it part of a greater Russia. Once that goal is achieved, Russia will move to create an empire in eastern Europe, much like the Soviet Union did after the Second World War. In this story, Putin is a mortal threat to the West and must be dealt with forcefully. In short, Putin is an imperialist with a master plan that fits neatly into a rich Russian tradition. There are numerous problems with this story. Let me spell out five of them.

The British should not feel guilty about slavery

Konstantin Krisin:

The strange thing about progress is that it only counts if you ignore where we started.

Every civilisation practised slavery.

The civilisation that ended it is now told it should feel guilty forever for having once participated. How does that make any sense?

I tried here to answer the question: Why do white Americans feel guilty about slavery?

Gideon Levy in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, July 5: I Thought It Was AI or Art. It Was a Palestinian Zip-tied to a Pole in Gaza

What brings a young Israeli, someone serving in a combat unit, to torture a man by tying him to a pole? Did he wrong them somehow? He's their age, after all. Did they think about his life or his dreams? About his past, present and future?
Gideon Levy


He is lying in his underwear, almost naked, on his stomach. His eyes are covered with a rag. His face is pressed against a cot on which his kidnappers have placed him. His hands are behind his back, tied with plastic zip ties, tightly and painfully. His torso is tied to the bed with cords. On his leg, there are two red bruises.
So far, a routine picture of a detained Palestinian, but this time, the abuse also includes an original accessory: a wooden pole, the top of which is covered in iron for unclear reasons. It's tied across the length of his body, looking like an African spear. One might guess that its purpose is to prevent the victim from bending, even for a moment.

Ukraine's future looks very dark

"The defeat of Ukraine is inevitable. The real question is how much of Ukraine outside of the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporhyzhia will Russia capture?"

Larry Johnson, former CIA man on his website Sonar21 

"Russia is going to do to Ukraine what it did to Grozny."

Chas Freeman who was US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and has the mind of a first class history don, talking to Pascal Lottez on the latter's YouTube channel Neutrality Studies. 

I highly recommend the Ambassador and Neutrality Studies, which was not long ago shut down by YouTube for a wholly specious reason (sending spam) but returned. Our rulers do not like to be criticised and the channel may disappear in the future.

Quotations

"You get to choose your damn sacrifice. You don’t get to choose not to make one. And if you don't choose your sacrifice, time makes it for you, and it takes everything." Jordan Peterson

What life is there, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite? 

Mimnermus, fragment 1, line 1 (tr. Douglas E. Gerber)


If, as Mimnermus holds, without love and play
there's no enjoyment, live for love and play.

Horace, Epistles 1.6.65-66 (tr. Colin Macleod)

I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.”
Nancy Mitford

Trump: I was shocked to see Iranians crying at Khamenei's funeral, as I thought people hated him.

Mr. Trump told Barak Ravid of Axios: I was shocked to see Iranians crying at Khamenei's funeral, as I thought people hated him.

He also said: "They are all there [at the funeral]. One shot and we can take them all out, but we are not going to do that because then we would have nobody to negotiate with...They are begging to make a deal." 

Mr Ravid is Israeli and "former" Israeli intelligence. There have been suggestions that millions or even billions have been made based on foreknowledge of things that he announces.

America has been at war for all but 6 years since 1776. The last war initiated by Persia (Iran) was from 1775 to 1776

I saw this on LinkedIn. I haven't checked its veracity.

American independence has really meant the start of their forever war. Only 6 full years from 250 without a war somewhere.

1775-1783 - War of Independence
1785-1795 - Northwest Indian War
1798-1803 - Quasi-War with France (at sea)
1801-1805 - First Barbary War (first expansion)
1811-1813 - Tecumseh's War
1812-1815 - Anglo-American War
1814-1819 - First Seminole War
1821-1826 - Clearing the Caribbean Sea of pirates
1823 - War with the Aricara Indians
1832 - Black Hawk War
1835-1842 - Second Seminole War
1836-1837 - Creek War, Indian deportation "Trail of Tears"
1846-1848 - Mexican-American War
1849-1886 - Wars with the Apaches
1855-1858 - Third Seminole War
1855-1855 - Invasion of Fiji and Uruguay
1858-1864 - War for the Bareheaded Hills
1861-1865 - Civil War
1865-1890s - Indian Wars, Great Plains
1890 - invasion Buenos Aires
1891 - invasion Valparaiso (Chile)
1893 - Overthrow. Queen of Hawaii
1894 - US Navy suppresses a mutiny in Rio
1894 and 1896 - invasion Nicaragua
1894-1896 - Operations of US Marines in Korea
1898 - Spanish-American War
1899-1902 - Boxer Rebellion in China
1899-1902 - Philippine-American War
1901 - Colombian Civil War (seized Panama)
1903-1914 - US involvement in Honduras, Dominican Republic, Panama, Cuba
1917-1918 - First World War

A series of "Banana Wars" - Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean
1915-1934 - War and cleansing of Haiti
1916-1924 - Occupation of the Dominican Republic
1918-1920 - Intervention in the Russian Civil War
1926-1933 - War in Nicaragua
1934-1941 - Operations during the occupation of China
1941-1945 - Second World War
1946-1949 - Conflicts in China, Greece
1946-1950 - Occupation in the Philippines
1950-1953 - Korean War
1954 - Operation in Guatemala (US Air Force and CIA)
1954 - First Taiwan Strait Crisis (nuclear blackmail)
1954-1975 - Vietnam War (the last military defeat of the US)

Then the US waged wars not for military victories. The task was: to punish, to exhaust, to carry out coups.

1961 - Bay of Pigs landing in Cuba (epic failure)
1962 - Landing in Thailand
1964-1975 - Secret war in Laos and campaigns in Cambodia
1980 - Operation "Eagle Claw" in Iran
1982-1983 - Operations in Lebanon
1983 - Intervention in Grenada
1984 - Operation in the Gulf of Sidra against Libya
1986 - Operation "El Dorado Canyon" - air strike on Libya
1987-1988 - Operation "Honest Endeavor" - US Navy operations in the Persian Gulf
1989-1990 - Intervention in Panama (Operation "Just Cause")
1990-1991 - War in Iraq ("Desert Shield", "Desert Storm")
1992-1998 - Occupation actions in a collapsing Yugoslavia
1993-1995 - Operations in Somalia
1999 - Bombing of Yugoslavia
2001 - Operations "Enduring Freedom" - in Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Horn of Africa, Western Sahara
2001-2021 - War in Afghanistan
2003-2011 Second Iraq War
2011-present - Military operations in Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.
2014 Coup in Ukraine and start of the proxy war against Russia
2026 invasion of Venezuela and attack on Iran

'Masha and the Bear' reminds me of the German waiters scare of 1910

Fifty members of the British parliament from six parties have written an open letter to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy demanding that the Russian animated series Masha and the Bear be pulled from streaming services, BBC Russia reports.

The signatories include members from Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, and Plaid Cymru. The series amounts to propaganda, the lawmakers argued, and “not subtle” propaganda at that. As an example, they mention an episode in which Masha, while guarding the Bear’s vegetable garden, first puts on a peaked cap with a blue band and a red star — resembling those worn by NKVD officers — and then dons a tank crew helmet.

The letter reminds Nandy that the NKVD was responsible for the mass deportation, execution, and persecution of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. In the lawmakers’ view, the series “actively normalizing Soviet military iconography for a global audience of young children.”

The warmongering press of 1910 in all countries led  to the end in  sense of civilisation, certainly Edwardian civilisation, to World Wars, Communism ruling half of Europe and to the modern Middle East. 

In some ways America started well but went badly wrong - perhaps in 1860, perhaps under FDR, perhaps after September 11

No American expected in the 1760s to see independence in his lifetime. Had someone like Pitt the Elder been British Prime Minister America would not have rebelled and would today have the same political status as Canada, self governing and with King Charles III not Donald Trump as head of state.

American Indians would have been better protected and slavery abolished sooner.

But the Whiggish ideals of the Founding Fathers are not the essence of America. Rather America is based on Anglo-Scottish tradition, culture and to some extent blood and very much based on Protestantism.

Americans borrowed their view of America being the light of the world from 18th British cant about Protestant British liberty.

Jordan Peterson who's a Canadian wrote today in a long paean on Facebook for America's 250th:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.
This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.
Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.
This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.
But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.
This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

I like Jordan Peterson and he has a point, up to a point, but it is quite wrong to think "the American dream" of success is what the US founding fathers wanted. 

The second President John Adams in his Discourses on Davila warned that people "measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is" and if these materialistic drives for distinction and wealth go unchecked, they inevitably lead to oligarchy.

The American dream was an idea invented in the 1930s.

JP went on to say

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

Unfortunately here he is out of date. The USA in its foreign policy has for years been more malevolent than almost any state I can think.


I say that not to defend Russia at all. I am utterly on the side of the Ukrainians but American folly and greed for power provoked her invasions of Ukraine and anyway invading Ukraine is a smaller crime than the illegal Anglo-American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and now the unprovoked war against Iran.

Then there's the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and the threats to invade Cuba. And the murders of countless people by drones and more recently of alleged drug smugglers on the high sea.

It's been estimated that 38 million people have been directly or indirectly killed by America.

How many countries have China, Iran or Venezuela invaded?

The Americans accuse Iran of being a sponsor of terror but when it comes to terrorism what terrorists compare with the US armed forces? 

Severe weather has disrupted celebrations of the United States’ 250th anniversary of independence, including in Washington, DC, where a thunderstorm delayed a speech from President Donald Trump by almost two hours.

These things are a parable.

P.S. Brian Berletic in this podcast explains that America has been in a proxy war with Russia since 2014, a war with Iran and a dirty war using terrorists against China, aimed at cutting off Europe's and China's energy supplies and preventing the inchoate multipolar world from replacing American world dominance.

Europeans misled by the American controlled information space and still thinking in Cold War terms can't see it.

What a falling off is here. America has declined very much in 50 years

I always had love-hate feelings for America but my reasons for love and for hate changed a lot over the years. 

Finally I recently paid my first visit and to my surprise found I absolutely love the country. 

In a sense. 

I do not love America politically, America the empire. It is an international tyrant.

To wish America Happy 4th of July after Iran and Venezuela and the threats to Cuba would be like congratulating Germany or the USSR after they invaded Poland.

Of course the American Pope declined his invitation to today's party.

This is the moment for Americans to reflect on whether they are proud of their history since 2000 or 1990 or choose a date. Do they like what America has morphed into?

Trump was right to see that Western civilisation was in big danger and so was America but he is making bad much worse.

I remember the 200th anniversary and the Queen  dancing with Gerald Ford to "That's Why The Lady is a Tramp".

Then America was widely loved. 

Americans were what the English had been, the boyish masters of the world.

Obama got into trouble by attending the church of a black pastor who had once uttered the words in a sermon "Not God bless America. God damn America."

Now many people in the world think like that pastor and for good reasons. In Iraq, Libya, Gaza, in Iran, throughout the world.