Jeffrey Sachs, Fred Weir and Anatole Lieven explain the Ukrainian war

Of course Europe and Great Britain must make a settlement along with the USA with Russia, rather than rearming. How can the chanceries of Europe be so obtuse? 

You probably know some of what Jeffrey Sachs said in his brief speech at the European Parliament by now, if you don't form your views from the reporting in the traditional media, which are propaganda vehicles for CIA and M16. 

Professor Sachs is invaluable on most subjects and very succinct. One of the best minds in the world. He is incapable of being dull.

Here is Fred Weir who is a veteran Canadian correspondent in Moscow.

'We know that Donald Trump perfected his schoolyard bully persona, shouting "you're fired!" over and over during 14 seasons of an awful reality TV show that he co-created. It's quite apt that the Times of London headline this morning reads: "Trump fired Zelensky like he was a loser on The Apprentice." 

So it's unsurprising that he brings the same public grandstanding, hectoring style to diplomacy. I suppose he thinks it will work. But Volodymyr Zelensky is the elected leader of Ukraine, and publicly humiliating him is going to alienate the people he represents. I'm a Canadian, and I'm pissed-off, on principle, over the way he belittles our prime minister and ruminates about annexing Canada. Even in Moscow, where wrecking the US-Ukraine relationship should have a popular following, I don't think anyone is much impressed by that spectacle.
It's bad, bad, very bad diplomacy

'But someone has to set the histrionics aside and calmly analyze the underlying dynamics and suggest what, if anything, can be salvaged for the sake of the peace process. So, here's a good stab at that by Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.'

I asked Mr Weir did Zelensky up the ante in Donetsk in November 2021 provoking a reaction, as some people tell me?

He gave me permission to quote his reply.

I have no special knowledge about all that. I know what the Russians say, and can make some general observations from having been talking with them, and watching events, for years. First, Zelensky was elected on a clear peace platform. I was in Ukraine to cover the election -- I went to Mariupol to take the temperature -- and there is no doubt that people voted for Zelensky on the belief that he would implement Minsk II and negotiate peace with Russia. The Russians began to give up on him, and any hope for Minsk implementation, in the months after Putin and Zelensky met in Paris in December 2019. Second, the refusal of the West to negotiate a new security architecture for Europe, which would have kept Ukraine neutral, among other things, was probably the final straw for Putin. I'm not advocating for him -- I would have thought he had lots of options short of war -- but at some point in late 2021 he and a small circle of advisers clearly made the decision to invade, in the belief that they could effect a quick regime change and solve all their Ukraine problems at one fell swoop. That failed, in an epic way, and Moscow negotiated that abortive peace deal with Ukraine. He keeps referring to it. So, the main terms would have been Ukrainian neutrality, substantial demilitarization, and rights for Russian speakers. I'm guessing those will be the same bottom lines now, plus territory.

Hope at last

Trump's Ukrainian policy is very hopeful. America isn't interested in Nato. Is this a good moment for the United Kingdom to lose interest in Nato and European entanglements? To trade with everyone but not to get involved in wars in faraway countries between people of whom we know nothing?

What Germany and France and the European Union should do is join America and Ukraine in making a durable permanent settlement with Russia. Russian interests and those of the EU and Nato and Ukraine can be teconciled. Also please let us not have a cold war. No cold wars with Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela or Afghanistan please.

Theatre of the absurd: was Zelensky ambushed by Trump and Vance?

Was Zelensky ambushed by Trump and Vance or was Vance on what lawyers call a frolic of his own? 

I am broadly in favour of Trump's Ukrainian and even Nato policy but the press conference, though huge fun, was disgraceful. It made Trump look small not big. 

And how does this strengthen America's position negotiating with Russia?

Zelensky is annoying certainly but should have been treated respectfully as a head of state. 

World leaders in future should refuse to take part in press conferences with Trump. 

The London crowd will not cheer Trump's second State Visit to London but nor would they have done anyway nor will the King enjoy it.

But his mother hosted Ceaușescu.

Still is politeness better than telling the truth?

Trump intends to bring peace and Zelensky wants the war to continue. The Observer today explains that Zelensky is to blame for the disastrous press conference. He should not have visited Washington.

<The officials believed that had all been communicated to Ukraine, as was the advice that senators gave Zelenskyy on Friday morning to praise Trump and not litigate the issue of wanting stronger security guarantees to his face.

To Trump’s aides, Zelenskyy did not heed that advice when he expressed skepticism at JD Vance’s view of making peace with Russia and, in their view, lectured the US vice-president on the history of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine that started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.

That set off a downward spiral in the Oval Office as Vance took issue with being questioned about his description of diplomacy, and clapped back at Zelenskyy: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.”>

Vance though aggressive was right, of course.

And why shouldn't the public see disagreements between heads of state over war and peace? Many of the pubic, it seems, prefer the lies to honesty. Not that Zelensky was being ingenuous in talking about Putin breaking agreements.

Quotations

"We have to believe in free will; we have no choice." Isaac Bashevis Singer

Everything is different now

I was shocked, disgusted even, by the way Trump attacked Zelensky but just heard this interview in which left-wing journalist Max Blumenthal supports Trump 100%. I start to rethink. The Russians have not won and their cause was not just but yes we need peace very quickly and a neutral Ukraine. We did from the start. America is hugely to blame for this. So is the EU.

The horror!

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, said of Gaza on CBS’s “Face the Nation” programme on Sunday that “the facts suggest that nobody can really live there in a safe environment for probably at least 15 years.”

Patriotism has nothing to do with values

Anne Maria Waters  (former leading figure in the British party UKIP) said today:

"It's very interesting to discover that "patriots" in Europe and America actually hate our beautiful Western civilisation and would prefer to live under the tyranny of monsters like Putin." 

I largely agree but want to say something about patriots.

I do not like Putin or what I suppose is his tyranny, but patriotism is nothing to do with civilisation - or democracy or values. 

It's simply love of ones country and ones forefathers.

Mr Trump reminds me of Enoch Powell talking about this with Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Philosophy Group at Peterhouse, Cambridge (the college I wish I'd gone to), as described by John Casey.

'Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to ‘Western values’. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.’ Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism. (Mr Blair would have been equally baffled.)'

Quotations

'What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass..' Lord Melbourne (Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, for readers who do not have the luck to be English).

'Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honour them is a great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.' Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Stephen Kotkin, an eminent historian of Russia, gave an interview in which he observed that to achieve stated Ukrainian war goals – the total recovery of lost territory, Putin on trial – “you have to take Moscow”. In fact the Ukrainian leaders knew those goals were not going to be realised.

One page from Philip Short's magisterial 'Putin: His Life and Times' (2022) explains the Ukrainian war

I was travelling a lot and wanted to blog about my travels but have failed to do so. Perhaps I shall find time to write about it. 

Meanwhile, I recently reread the parts of Philip Short's long and magisterial Putin: His Life and Times (2022) that touch on Ukraine and want you to read this one page, about the situation in late 2013.

Quotations

'Here's a direct quote: "If I said what I know about both candidates, they'd have to cancel the election." That's what Jeffrey told me in 2016.' Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, speaking to The New York Post 1 January, 2025

‘The trick is to survive success. Anyone can survive failure’ Tony Bennett

"If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan." Eddie Izzard

“Losers, like autodidacts, always have wider knowledge than winners, if you want to win you must know only one thing and don’t waste time knowing them all, the pleasure of erudition is reserved for losers. The more things one knows, the more things didn’t go the right way. " Umberto Eco

More quotations

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” 

Kurt Vonnegut

"Trump routinely deploys all the subversive transgressiveness that campus Leftists claim to value."

Camille Paglia

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." 

Lord Salisbury

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” 

Quotations

"What matters, in the end, is less whether a country is democratic or not, more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American."  Tom Cotton, Chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee.

"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire." Charles Bukowski

“We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us … We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.” Erel Segal, Israeli journalist

"People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists." Sir Roger Scruton

"When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction." Mark Twain. He wasn't similarly benign to the Indians. He thought them "a good, fair, desirable subject for extermination if ever there was one".

"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set." Lin Yutang

"I used to think I was born in the wrong time... now I understand I'm here to keep the old ways alive." Anonymous internet meme

Political quotations

"France’s ex-Commissioner Thierry Breton thinks the EU should override the German elections if the AfD does too well, citing the recent Supreme Court putsch in Romania as a good precedent." Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph, 17 January 2025

"After each wave of NATO expansion, for example, Russia became more rather than less threatening. If the purpose of NATO expansion was to make Europe more secure, the contrast between the security environment of 1992 and that of 2025 delivers a damning verdict — all the more so when contrasted with the success a more limited NATO enjoyed in checking the Soviet Union until its demise." Daniel McCarthy, "It's over: Biden is last gasp of failed post-Cold War internationalism", Responsible Statecraft, 17 January, 2025

Quotations

Joseph Fasano

"Your gift is not a gift, it's a loan, a loan to do something extraordinary; it's the paying back of that loan, squaring up with yourself and the universe, that's the gift." Dylan O'Sullivan

Cry the beloved country

The USA is quite unlike anywhere I've been.

I imagined it a dull copy of Europe without the good things like beautiful buildings, ancient peoples and social hierarchy, but isn't remotely like Europe. It has an enormous, strange energy and seems friendly, optimistic and fun. I am generalising from Miami and the staff on the plane. It's a huge culture like Russia or France is a huge culture.

It's where the men of 1848 won their revolution. It is the apogee of 19th century and modern liberalism.

I have always loved and hated America but lived and hated different things at different times. I passed up two chances to come here for free. I might find myself loving it now I finally am here. Let's see. I only arrived yesterday from somewhere I teally loved, the very humid old town in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

It's not very Anglo-Saxon or Protestant in Miami but then the Spanish are reconquering Florida.

Quotations

"May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.” Leonard Cohen

'Frommer believed that travel should be demanding, both physically and cerebrally. He saw it as one of the finest methods of self-education. Early on he realised the intrepid traveller’s essential truth: the less you spend, the more you enjoy. Dormitories, hostels and even a geriatric ward were his lodgings of choice. Luxury hotels were to be avoided. “They insulate you totally from the life and people of a country,” he said, while sightseeing was “inane”.' Daily Telegraph obituary for Arthur Frommer

"My ancestors were puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time." Garrison Keilor

“If you started measuring global temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees." Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist, in 2018

Popcorn

Knowing that war would break out in Ukraine President Iohannis put together a coalition of the centre right and left. The Romanian electorate has now rejected the government, the leaders of both the big parties and the whole less than mediocre existing political class including even the so-called far right party, AUR.

It is richly comic to watch all the establishment parties be smashed simultaneously. 

Both candidates who will compete in the final round are anti system idealists, in their very different ways, but Elena Lasconi is only opposed to the Romanian system which she wants to bring into line with Western Europe. She is the anti system and pro system candidate, the candidate of social and economic liberalism, business and the urban university graduates. She represents a European future, Calin Georgescu resembles Viktor Orban, Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Junior. The European Union will punish Romania very severely if he wins.

That was a surprise

Good lord! I had not even heard of Călin Georgescu until my very interesting and nice young waiter on Friday appealed eloquently to us to vote for him. 

A President who doesn't obey Washington or Berlin? Is it possible? 

No it is not.  

The media and the Americans will try very hard to prevent him winning but the majority of voters would certainly vote against him anyway. 

It's the economy, stupid.

Romanian politicians are happy to obey America and the European Union, which is very good for attracting foreign investors, but many Romanians are not. I knew this from talking to taxi drivers who blame America in part or wholly for the war in Ukraine. I risk sounding like Nancy Pelosi saying 'Donald Trump is - not- going to be President of the United States' but a man who says pre-war mystic fascist Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was a great Romanian will not be President of Romania.

It is not exactly democratic that he did so well because another sovereignist candidate was disqualified on dubious grounds and that he was in trouble with the law for praising Codreanu. What happened to free speech in Romania? 

I wonder if the politicians will listen to the opinions of the 30 percent of the population who back the sovereignists or (more likely) treat them with the contempt Romanians usually have for peasants and the working class.

It's a protest vote and just possibly people in the incoming administration in Washington will hear the protest and take it into account.

The news

My taxi driver blamed the Ukrainian war on Nato expansion (a majority of cab drivers do), blamed America for its intervention in Syria and Afghanistan and divided the blame between Israelis and Arabs. He thought Margaret Thatcher damaged British society enormously. We agreed on most things, especially on the need for women to have more children. I suppose, as Baudelaire said, love is a crime that requires an accomplice. 

Every regime, he said, has its good and bad points. 

He thought Biden the worst US President for thirty years but there demurred. Biden though absolutely terrible beyond words is not as bad as George W Bush.

The Daily Telegraph this morning disgusts me more utterly than normally

It's simply propaganda, whether about Ukraine or Israel, and probably reflects the MI6 line. Its fury at the ICC for issuing a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu contrasts with its enthusiasm for the one for Putin's arrest. I am trying to cancel my subscription. 

Yesterday I renewed my subscription to Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz to find much more objective news. 

Quotations

Democrat supporting US journalist Cenk Uygur:

'Sarah Palin was very nervous before her VP debate with Biden in 2008 and then she realized she just had to memorize the talking points on each issue and give that answer no matter what the specific question was. Are we sure that's not what Kamala Harris did this entire campaign?' 

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

The US and UK are now actively working on the missiles they provided Ukraine to launch inside Russia. Ukraine can't launch them on their own. They need US intelligence and military support to guide them. Putin knows this. Would the US be OK with that?

Absurdly the international deep state apparatchiks say Tulsi Gabbard might give classified information to the Kremlin

2022 

 

"Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It's time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country-- no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both US and NATO countries as well as Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other's non-Baltic borders. This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace." 


October 

"Kamala Harris was in Europe a few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, speaking very clearly and loudly about how Ukraine should become a member of NATO. This was one of the main instigators, crossing the red line that Russia, during Putin's reign and before him, has held."For any objective-minded person, you can see why they wouldn't want NATO missiles sitting in Ukraine, the country with the biggest border with Russia. Kamala Harris has put us, the American people, in this position, where we are closer to the brink of World War III and nuclear war than we ever have been before. We are staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden." 

American revolution

The gallant British and the brave American Tories lost the war of 1776-83. The only American conservatives  were then deported.

We should have freed the slaves and won with their help, then executed the Founding Fathers. 

Our defeat led to the French Revolution and eventually to Marxism, girls in slacks and all the horrors of the modern world.

Since then all Americans have been liberals, except for the somewhat influential Marxists and the insignificant fascists.

Now England, of course, is an American colony.

Perhaps Mr Trump will be an isolationist and set us (and the rest of the world) free, but I know he won't.

Quotations

Ed Miliband, after losing the 2015 election (which meant David Cameron had to fulfil his promise to call a Brexit referendum), said: "When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool."


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."


Mario Vargas Llosa: "We live as many lives as we read books."

A. N. Wilson: “Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a ‘God-bearing’ nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country – that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.” 

Is Trump America's De Gaulle?

Tom Gallagher once asked me this and Richard Vinen, a fine historian, explores the idea in Unherd.


I'd prefer to say he is the antithesis of Franklin D Roosevelt. That is a good thing, in case you were in doubt.

When I was 19 the joke was "Ronald Reagan's hero is Calvin Coolidge, Nancy Reagan's is Calvin Klein".

It is Ronald Reagan's achievement that the joke is no longer funny because liking Coolidge is respectable.

I have come to join his fan club.

Donald Trump has certain things in common with Silent Cal, when it comes to policy not personality. Perhaps he should bring tiger cubs into the Oval Office.

The BBC's Katty Kay said in 2016 that Trump was really a Democrat but he turned out to be one of the very few Republicans still standing, by which I mean Coolidge Republicans.

Trump is right-wing but left and right no longer mean very much and the parties in most countries no longer make sense. 

My favourite journalists are mostly leftists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tahibbi, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Cockburn and Caitlin Johnstone, on foreign affairs. 

They are far more like my romantic Toryism than any British Conservative politician. 

Theresa May was to the left of Tony Blair. 

Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Prime Minister since Harold Wilson.

This is from Allister Heath in yesterdays' Telegraph. (He is usually very good, but not when he rejoiced at Liz Truss's budget.)

"America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media. The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.

"Donald Trump is 78, but he is a very modern politician with an intuitive grasp of how social fragmentation and the rise and fall of institutions can work for him. He has learnt to bypass network news and The New York Times. His brand of populist, multi-racial, working-class, highly online, Right-wing politics has captured the new centre-ground. It now looks as if 2016 was a mere dry run, derailed by Covid; 2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles, many excellent but some much more malign."

Another question is: is Putin Russia's De Gaulle? They do have certain things in common, though very much that separates the Christian gentleman from the ex-KGB thief.

A famous victory

They said I'm going to start wars – I'm going to end wars. 

Donald Trump in his victory address at Mar-a-Lago

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Wednesday that Donald Trump will be tested on his statements that he can stop the war within hours.

Any objective observer could see Kamala was unqualified for the job. Even Kamala at times, behind the cackle laugh and the word salads and the baffling array of accents, seemed to know she wasn’t up to it.

But they pressed ahead with her anyway. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter to the virtue signalling Left that Kamala’s position had been achieved by chance to a greater extent than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. That, a diversity hire for VP, she was able to fall into the presidency slot because Joe Biden needed to be put out to pasture with no time for a contest.

Trump wins decisively

Trump has won Pennsylvania and Fox News has declared him the winner of the US presidential election. CNN says he needs 4 more electoral college votes, which inevitably he will obtain. The Biden-Harris administration deserves this. It's been almost as bad as the Bush-Cheney administration.

America in decay

Biden-Harris are responsible for a disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine and what looks exactly like genocide in Gaza. 

The administration has a malign influence in the world, trying to subvert the Hungarian government and make France woke. 

They preside over US decline, which might be a good thing.

They and their proxy the UK were defeated when they went to the aid of Israeli shipowners at risk from the Houthis. Many Americans and Englishmen could scarce forbear to cheer on the Houthis. 

Worst the Biden and Harris left the American borders open while they interfered around the world.

My taxi driver today blamed America, and her desire for expansion, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Bucharest taxi drivers seem to do so. 

Behind the killing in Gaza he thought were Israelis discerning tourist industry and real estate opportunities. I thought of Mr Kushner.

He, the driver not Mr Kushner, reminded me to look at of the Baron in The Third Man, the one who played the violin at the nightclub. This put me off him, no doubt unfairly.

An interesting conversation with someone in the real world. 

He might know more than the men and women who write for the papers. Taxi drivers often do. Discuss.

Quotations

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Israel in trouble

“The REAL enemy that we have is not Iran…is not Hezbollah….is not Hamas... it's from within, the messianic, crazy, extreme groups of Israelis that think that they can kick out the Palestinians and annex the territories. Netanyahu depends on them… he allows them to do things which are totally intolerable and unacceptable.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last night.

'Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long. Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us.' IDF (retired) Major General Itzhak Brik

'The consensus in the defense establishment over the progress of the war is surprisingly broad. All senior officials, from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on down, have been speaking in near-unison for a week. After a dizzying series of military and intelligence successes in the past three months, the war in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon has just about exhausted itself, with only a few necessary measures remaining. Once these are completed, it would be best to try to reach agreements that will end the fighting in the north and south and include the release of all hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.' Ha'aretz two days ago

“I met many [neocons] at the Hudson Institute, where [I] had worked for five years in the mid ‘70s; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. They picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said what began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neocons adapted this and said, No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire. It’s going to expand, and expand, and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”. Profesor Michael Hudson quoted by Alistair Crooke 

Hallowe'en

Hallowe'en does not have origins in paganism, Satanism, Samhain, Druidic festivals, or the occult. It's purely Catholic, just like Christmas, and like Christmas was commercialised by American big business.The Feast of All Saints was originally only a local feast day in Rome. Pope Gregory III transferred the Feast of All Saints from May 13th to November 1st. Pope Gregory IV then extended this feast to the Universal Church. This was before the Great Schism, when the Orthodox recognised the primacy of the Pope. The Americans received Hallowe'en originally from England. The English Halloween tradition was apple dunking but I never came across it.

Acknowledgements, Lakshmi Kapoor

"Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancour. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes... furious and... spiteful... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself." Mikhail Bakunin

Quotations

“It is the perversity of the Tory party to want to get us out of the European Union when, of course, we’re much more than ever unlikely to be able to look after ourselves as an independent state because of the quality of our political system. The people who want to get us out are obviously of an undesirable kind. That the future should depend on Farage is part of the sickness. The real horror is for him to have any influence at all.” Peregrine Worsthorne quoted in the New Statesman in 2016. His friend Auberon Waugh supported the UK  belonging to the EEC and EU for the same reason.

Auberon Waugh was appalled when he went up to Oxford, he recalled, “by how few public schoolboys there were, appalled by the number of earnest, working-class youths whose humourless faces betokened young men on the make.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard 1978 - what a great man he was

'The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much

News

"Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that Israel "will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens." Western diplomats told Haaretz that Israel has not done enough to quiet concerns that it is acting to remove the entire civilian population from northern Gaza." Haaretz 21 October 2024

Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein opposed the creation of a Jewish state

After he had been asked by Dr. Chaim Koffler of the Jewish organisation Keren Hajessod to sign a petition condemning the Arab riots of 1929, in which more than a hundred Jewish settlers were killed, Sigmund Freud replied as follows.

Quotations

"History knows no resting places and no plateaus. All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most of them eventually collapsed." Henry Kissinger

"The only time anyone should watch the news is to study how psychological manipulation works on the general public." Anonymous, on Facebook

The old days

My father and grandmother in my 1960s and 197Os childhood and adolescence thought things were better in the old days, though they were the first to say that people were very hard up in the old days. I never believe them until I came to live in Romania in 1998, when it had the standard of living of England circa 1949. Then I saw that they were right. The old days were better.

[In case you doubt my working class credentials my grandmother was a cashier at the Co-op, whose left-wing politics she despised as she did Labour. Ian Smith and Enoch Powell were her heroes.]

Quotations

"Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. I preferred her to sceptres and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her. I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth." Book of Wisdom 7:7-11

"Netanyahu's government is not seeking to revive negotiations for a hostage release deal and is pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza, senior defense officials told Haaretz." Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz today

Quotations

'I am the flail of God. Had you not created great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.' Genghis Khan

“I don’t like eloquence. If it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts." The Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett's pulp fiction story “Zigzags of Treachery” (1924)

“Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice.” Another story by Hammett

'The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.' Margaret Atwood.

'If you care about preserving a distinctive British or English culture, and not just a generic “this could be any liberal democracy” brand of liberalism, the BBC is the only game in town.' Stephen Bush, Financial Times 6 October 2024

Quotations

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Cardinal Sarah in April 2019 in an interview with French journalist Nicolas Diat

“It is a false exegesis to use the Word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these heartbreaks."

"The church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that has become mass migration." 

“As during the fall of Rome, elites are only concerned to increase the luxury of their daily life and the peoples are being anesthetized by ever more vulgar entertainment. … The barbarians are already inside the city.”

”If Europe disappears, and with it the priceless values of the Old Continent, Islam will invade the world and we will completely change culture, anthropology and moral vision.” 

More here. 

 

Quotations

"People talk about grandiose plans to "reshape the Middle East" at the moment, but to be honest I think it's more likely that, by the time this is over, it will just be more of the same except that Iran will now have the bomb." Philippe Lemoine

"God is a fire that warms and kindles the heart and inward parts. Hence, if we feel in our hearts the cold which comes from the devil – for the devil is cold – let us call on the Lord. He will come to warm our hearts with perfect love, not only for Him but also for our neighbour, and the cold of him who hates the good will flee before the heat of His countenance." St. Seraphim of Sarov

"The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk— I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind."
Rudyard Kipling

“The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Only the dead have seen the end of war (Santayana, not Plato)

“There are some commentators and even some people within the defence establishment who raised the question: Why the hell not hit the nuclear military programme? A little bit more than a decade ago, I was probably the most hawkish person in Israeli leadership arguing that it was worth considering very seriously, because there was an actual capability to delay them by several years. That’s not the case right now, because Iran is a de facto threshold country. They do not have yet a weapon – it may take them a year to have one, and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, you cannot easily delay them in any significant manner.” Ehud Barak on Wednesday. He is now 82.

"A nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability to the region." Professor John Mearsheimer

'Our job is to keep the Palestinians radicalized. Most of them would settle in a moment for peace, some deal that will let them get on with their lives. We need to keep them angry.' Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas leader who took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities and was killed in Lebanon by a drone in February, speaking in March 2007 to Bronwen Maddox.

"According to their conservative estimate, at least 118,908 people have been killed in Gaza through direct violence, starvation, and disease, and they say that the real death toll is almost certainly higher than that. This estimate represents a loss of life nearly three times greater than the current official count from Gaza’s Ministry of Health." Responsible Statecraft referring to the detailed appendix to a letter published two days ago by 99 American health workers who served in Gaza.

“I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support and for what he has done to serve our country." Kamala Harris, at a rally with Liz Cheney on Thursday

'I mention a 2019 essay in which he called Donald Trump a good president and wonder if he will be cheering him on in this US election too. “Yes,” he says. “Trump won’t start wars,” he adds, topping up our glasses. What if he stops supporting Ukraine? “That’s good,” Houellebecq says. But Ukrainians want to liberate their territory, I say. “What do I care? At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian,” he says. “It’s better for nature to take its course,” he adds in the spirit of might is right. “People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.”' Interview with Michel Houellebecq in The Financial Times, 13 September 2024

Quotations

"Show me a man who enjoyed his schooldays and I'll show you a bully and a bore." Robert Morley

"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's

American empire

July 2023 as the Ukrainians were being slaughtered in the failed offensive and the US complained Ukraine was too "casualty averse", Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post why this war was successful: "Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance." David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 2023, quoted on Saturday by Glenn Greenwald

Most dramatic events in the Middle East since October 7 last year

"September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough. I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible." Jared Kushner

"Obviously, the extraordinary events of the past fortnight have been widely reported, but their significance has been grossly underplayed. Taken together, what with the pagers and the walkie-talkies and the killing of leader after terrorist leader, they are Israel’s greatest success since 1967’s Six Day War." Charles Moore