Germany at the brink

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

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

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

Back in 2022 I read people saying the Americans were using the Ukrainian war to separate Germany from Russia and China and make her dependent on expensive American liquefied gas. I dismissed this Machiavellian thinking then but don't now. The State Department almost certainly does think this way.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

The families of the victims later sued Iran in a civil lawsuit and their lawyer uncovered, according to Wikipedia: 

'a U.S. National Security Agency intercept of a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to Hojjat ol-eslam Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. As it was paraphrased by presiding U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, "The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him ... 'to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines"'. 

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

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

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

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

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

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

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

By 

Yaroslav Trofimov

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

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

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

How they misinform us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

How Intelligence Services Captured Academia and Journalism

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

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

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

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

America's allies are observing the weakness. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The recent past is the most obscure historical era

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

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

Trying not to die

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

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

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

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

Cenk Uygur

@cenkuygur

·

2h

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

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

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

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

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

US novelist Joyce Carol Oates on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first paragraph of a mixed review

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

Quotations

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

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

Is Trump America's Charles XII?

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

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

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

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

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

Russia is too big to defeat. 

So thankfully is Iran.

As Trump has learnt too late.

A very shameful terrifying fact

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

Michael Hudson explains why Trump attacked Iran: his Napoleon complex

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


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

A lot of the problem is American historiography.

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

Though to be fair nobody thinks Trump is morally driven.

Europe is occupied territory

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

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

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

Arrogant ignorance

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


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


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

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


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


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

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

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson thinks over 1.5 million Ukrainian military died in action as opposed to fewer than 227,000 on the Russian side

In this podcast, entitled "This Doesn't Add Up About Ukraine War Casualties...", using his skills acquired in the CIA for finding correct information (as opposed to inventing disinformation) Larry Johnson disputed Western media reports and estimated:

Some good news

UAE government jets have been coming and going to Tehran for the past 2 days, staying less than an hour each time. They are likely to be carrying banknotes and gold. 

Sweden's lost empire and Lithuanian arcana

I did not know that Sweden had a colony in North America until I read this interesting story on the BBC.

I knew Sweden briefly possessed the island of Guadeloupe (from 1813 to 1814) but didn't know or had forgotten that she owned Saint Barthélemy (St. Barths) from 1784 to 1878. 

I also did not know about Swedish outposts on the Gold Coast or that Sweden once planned to capture Madagascar. 

Before those colonies Sweden's last colony had been England, but in the 17th century Sweden was again a great power until Peter defeated Charles XII at Poltava.

We all know Dr Johnson's famous lines on this. 

'He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay;
Hide, blushing glory, hide Pultowa’s day:
The vanquish’d hero leaves his broken bands,
And shews his miseries in distant lands;
Condemn’d a needy supplicant to wait,
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate.'

Lord Salisbury pointed out that Poles complain about the three partitions of Poland but do not mention that Sweden and Poland partitioned Russia. He was talking about swathes of what is now Belarus and Ukraine.

                                        *

Did you know that Lithuania was once the biggest country in Europe, before and after it was converted to Christianity in 1387, more than two hundred years after Sweden, the last of the Nordic countries to become Christian?

Do you know the only word in the English language which is taken from Lithuanian?

It is 'talk'.

Democracy is feared now because of the notion it was responsible for the rise of Hitler. By the way, Hitler invaded 14 countries. The U.S. has attempted about a hundred regime changes and nearly 500 military interventions

Historian David Starkey talking to John Anderson, the former deputy prime minister of Australia, explained that fear of another Hitler had made democracy suspect.

'I mean, John, what we've got to understand is that the left has captured words and when it captures words, it inverts them. It stands them on their head. The word democracy no longer means. You and I know what democracy means. It means majority rule. Oh no, it doesn't. This new-fangled thing called liberal democracy, which is neither democratic nor liberal, you know, like the Holy Roman Empire. What it means is the control of the majority in favour of the minority. You stood the thing absolutely on its head. And the explanation of course is the notion that democracy was responsible for the rise of Hitler.

'Trump's Main Policy Is Making Himself The Centre of Attention' and other things I recently read

'Trump's main policy is making himself the center of attention.' Michael Wolff

"Israel has unveiled its vision for Palestine-which is none. No Palestine between the river and the sea. The genocide is a state enterprise. The apartheid is a state enterprise. There is no good Israel and bad Israel -it's all Israel. Sanction Israel. Isolate Israel. Cut trade. No more arms. The Nakba has never been over." Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories

'When the entire EU/French establishment tells you that the Russians want to manipulate the next French election you know *for sure 100%* that they’re planning to do that themselves.' Thomas Fazi

Three surprising things I just learnt

"Today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." Primo Levi, author of "If This is a Man" an account of his time in Auschwitz, in 1982 during a June 1982 interview with Filippo Gentiloni for the leftist Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. He was talking after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militias killed thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces surrounded the camps.

“For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.” -Michael Parenti, The Nobel Peace Prize for War (2012)


"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform, not the plight of Kosovar Albanians, that best explains NATO's war.”  John Norris, who served as the communications director for Strobe Talbott the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State during the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia in Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005). Strobe Talbot wrote the introduction. Odd that a retired senior State Department diplomat I know says even now that NATO is a purely defensive organisation.

The Second Crimean War like the first is an attempt to contain Russia

In this podcast on George Galloway’s MOATS (The Mother of All Talk Shows) Professor Jeffrey Sachs described the war in Ukraine as "the Crimean War version 2" and said that dating back to the 1990s it has been US policy to encircle Russia via Nato expansion in the Black Sea.  

America wanted  to contain Russia as England and France did in 1852.

The first Crimean war could easily have been triggered by events in what is now Romania rather than in Jerusalem. It was the result of mistakes and inept diplomacy just like this one.

 

Professor Sachs makes the pretty obvious point that the U.S. is the main driver of global conflict and has become a force for ill in the world. Who can deny that?

He admires Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy and thinks America was a force for good led by them. He thinks the latter was almost certainly killed by the American "security state".

He often says it was the CIA.

Until recently I dismissed this and most conspiracy theories but security states exist to conspire and the US and British ones are exceptionally ruthless. 

I think the whole of American history shows the country to be expansionist -- even the revolution was fought partly because London restrained Americans from warring against Indians - but Kennedy was much better in foreign policy than his successors or the baleful Eisenhower who spurned unrepeated opportunities to end the cold war.

After seeing the failed US-Israeli attempt to regime change Iran this year it is very hard to doubt that 2014 Kiev was a US regime change operation that succeeded.  

For many including Professor Sachs (but not me) it was always obvious. But senior British diplomats and a senior US diplomat I spoke to denied it and I think were sincere.  The American even worked close to Victoria Nuland. 

Why can't America become isolationist again and Nato be disbanded? 

Because it is easy to start wars but hard to end them. 

We all know that by now. 

By hunting the world looking for Hitlers to fight, the Americans have come to resemble their greatest foe.

Is Romania therefore reprising a role she played before? 

Key quotations from Jeffrey Sachs in the podcast: 

"Every major war has the United States as the main cause behind it... The war in Ukraine, though it's unfortunately not obvious to many people, is a war that was provoked by the United States by a plan dating back to the 1990s to weaken Russia, to encircle Russia by expanding NATO around the Black Sea and surrounding Russia—a kind of a Crimean War version 2, 160 years after the first Crimean War."

"This war, first of all, never would have happened had the U.S. not conspired to overthrow the Yanukovych government in 2014.

"It was a game plan that followed that of Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III in the Crimean War (1853–56)... designed by the U.S. to encircle and weaken Russia."

Wonderful astonishing breakthrough amidst so much bad news

Professor William Marx posted this on X 22 hours ago.

The news went almost completely unnoticed in the French media, overshadowed by the World Cup and the wildfires: artificial intelligence has succeeded in fully deciphering a charred papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, as fragile as cigarette ash, without unrolling it or even touching it! It revealed a philosophical treatise on Stoicism. It took a wealth of ingenuity and technology to achieve this result. The dream has thus become reality: soon, we’ll be able to read in record time the hundreds of scrolls from that library incinerated by Vesuvius 2,000 years ago, and Greco-Latin literature will be enriched by that many unpublished texts—new tragedies or epics, perhaps. In this depressing summer, here’s a true ray of light. Long live science!

Elizabeth Lane wants Trump to take Greenland

I came across Elizabeth Lane being interviewed about American propaganda by Tucker Carlson and did some research on her. 

She is a Georgian-American actress who admires Vladimir Putin. Her boyfriend or former boyfriend or close friend is in the FSB. 

But her being an admirer of Vladimir Putin (I am not one, just so you know) or even her being close to the Russian secret service doesn't mean what she says should be dismissed.

This post on X today makes good sense but the reason why I copy it here is because it made me see that the Cold War served US interests by scaring Europe into obeying Washington. 

I worked out at the time that it was unnecessary because Russia and America were in the 19th century parlance satisfied powers. 

Today fear of Russia makes Europe obey the USA, a much more murderous country than Russia, one that has invaded far more countries than Hitler's Germany. 

I do feel that Denmark that has supported so many illegal and unnecessary American wars and actions is on thin ice on this one.

Things they said

 

Tony Blair, by then out of office, one month before NATO met in April 2008 to promise future membership to Ukraine. Acknowledgements to Glenn Diesen.

"We are the only people in history who are expected to witness our own genocide, and then watch what we say so we don’t hurt the feelings of the people who did this." Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa, speaking to the Oxford Union last year.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, Israeli strategic analyst, former diplomat and military intelligence officer in the IDF's Unit 8200, on X today:

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim

@academic_la

An incredible expose by Ronen Bergman shows how Israel invents quotes from Iranian officials in order to manufacture "evidence" that Iran is building nuclear weapons. This event took place on August 5th, when it was reported globally that Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the IRGC had admitted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. The only problem? It wasn't true:

From Andrew Marr's very good book The Making of Modern Britain (2009)

 He does his own research which is unusual nowadays.

The American hegemon is an unprecedented threat to world peace because it wants to rule the world

When I came to Romania in the late 1990s every Romanian I knew opposed the USA intervening in Kosovo. Later they were utterly cynical about American motives in invading Iraq in 2003. How right they were.

David Gibb talks in this podcast about how neocons in the very influential 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) argued that America's primary post-Cold War goal was maintaining absolute global military dominance, how humanitarian reasons for wars and interventions (to support women, minorities, later homosexual rights) were at first cynical ploys by the neocons who later came very much to believe their own propaganda.

The neocons from the defeat in Vietnam onwards saw Israel as a model of how the USA should be: aggressive, with little interest in diplomacy. This increased the importance of Israel in the US.

He says Ukraine in 2014 (and now) was a neocon project, just like the current war in Iran.

'To the victor belong the spoils' Professor Gibbs quotes Trump saying about taking Venezuelan oil while Rubio rules Venezuela like a colony - Trump is original not in his policy but because 'he says the quiet part out loud' to quote the voguish phrase. 

But I'd add that the hypocrisy was very important - hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld said. Without the idealistic screen America is very corrupt and decadent. 

This does smell of decline.

Iraqi oil is still controlled by the US, which all Romanians  assumed in 2003 was the reason for the invasion. 

In fact, there were many reasons and the most powerful, we now know, was false intelligence from Israel.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Quotations

JD VANCE: "Iran could be the richest country in the Middle East if they trust United States."  

ABBAS ARAGHCHI: "Excuse me, Look how prosperous Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq became after they trusted the United States."

[Isn't the fall of Assad in Syria more Turkey's doing?]

The US should accept the Iranian peace proposals and Ukraine accept Russia's but this will not happen

Iran has issued these demands before she opens the Strait of Hormuz. Her demands are very reasonable and do not rule out Israeli and US vessels using the Strait but will not be accepted. The USA is talking about negotiations but is playing some game. Nothing the Americans say can be trusted, of course.

Ukraine should of course accept Russia's demands, make peace and keep her coast, but will not.

The West is utterly lost if it continues to fight unwinnable (and in the case of Iran unjust) wars and if the USA wants to rule the world and threaten China, Russia, Iran and all the other states that do not accept US hegemony.

Meanwhile let's remember the continued fighting in Lebanon and Gaza.

I happened to reread today what former deputy chief of Mossad and retired IDF Major General Amiram Levin said in August of last year: "The orders the government is giving the army today are a crime... To give an order to shoot at hungry children and parents looking for a piece of bread... This is a crime, this is genocide." 

Read yesterday and today

There is a story, I think from the French writer Charles Péguy, about a man who goes to heaven. Jesus says to him, “Show me your wounds,” and he replies, “I have none.” It meant he never lived.

Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

What if one reason Israelis are so happy is that brutality has become pleasurable? … Today, violence is not only liberated from the trap of “shooting and crying” … or from acceding to the call of Naftali Bennett ... of “no more apologizing”: It is also becoming joyful. Probably the clearest manifestation of the ostensible joy of violence takes the form of what’s referred to as “happy Jews.”
In 2015, journalists Akiva Novick and Chaim Levinson explained in their report, “The Complete Hilltop Lexicon,” that happy Jews are those “who are not bound to the archaic conventions and rules of morality, and carry out ‘price tag’ [retaliatory operations against Palestinians] with a smile on their face” … Invitations to carry out pogroms are circulated on colourful, cheerful posters that look more like flyers for an open-air rave than calls to violence …

Dr Ariel Handel, Israeli political theorist, author of Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, in an article in Ha'aretz on 3 August headlined No Wonder Israelis Want War. Violence Has Become a Source of Joy. Acknowledgements to Alastair Crooke

Deliberately killing a civilian is a war crime

Larry Johnson, a very well informed ex CIA man said last night that Ukraine is winning the war on the ground according to even Chinese AI, but says it's not true. 

Russia is attacking the Konstantinovka–Druzhkovka–Kramatorsk–Slavyansk belt and has ended Ukraine’s ability to conduct maritime and trade operations from Odessa and Nikolaev since July 22nd. 

I am on Ukraine's side but the most to hope for is a peace on the current lines.

But Putin cannot trust the US any more than Iran can so peace is hard to see happening - Putin would be stupid not to require Ukraine to demilitarise.

Gilbert Doctorow says Ukrainian attacks are making Russia speed up what hitherto has been for a very long time a slow war of attrition. Whether it is the CIA or MI6 who are really behind the Ukrainian attacks he doesn't know for sure but it seems almost certain to me that one of them is. 

Brian Berletic has no doubt that it's his fellow Americans.

Brian Berletic on recent car bombings by the Ukrainian secret service.

▪️Western media is reporting on a car bomb killing the head of a Russian drone developer inside Russia;

▪️This is only the latest of serial car bombings and other attacks inside Russia killing military officers, politicians, and even journalist - the latter 2 being undisputably terrorism;