Quotations

‘The Europeans dance to our tune…we have all these fictions that we tell people about ‘joint decision-making’…the US runs NATO and the Europeans do what we tell them.’ John Mearsheimer. If only Sarkozy and Frau Merkel had refused in 2008 to agree that Ukraine and Georgia might one day join Nato.

Aaron Maté

@aaronjmate

·

Dec 12, 2025

In military conflicts that the US is involved in, questioning the official narrative at the outset will result in marginalization or disqualification. One can only remain "respectable" in establishment circles if you defer your dissent until long after the damage is done. In the Ukraine proxy war, those who argued that there were reasonable diplomatic options that could have prevented, and then quickly ended, the Russian invasion were dismissed as Kremlin apologists. Now, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, senior Biden official Amanda Sloat admits that Ukraine declaring neutrality before the invasion, or accepting the April 2022 Istanbul peace deal just weeks after, "would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life." Proxy war cheerleaders, including on the left, might want to reflect on why they shunned those of us who wanted to prevent the destruction and the loss of life:

'Gaza has not been "a mess" for centuries. Gaza City was a prosperous Mediterranean port with extensive trade connections until 1948, when Israel shunted 250,000 Palestinians into the narrow strip of land we now call the Gaza Strip and imposed new military borders, cutting Gaza off from its trade routes and much of its agricultural land, and rendering all those who lived there, both refugees and residents, destitute.'

British economist Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola, on December 30, correcting Donald Trump

Needs must

Lord Ricketts in the time of Messrs Blair and Brown was Permanent Secretary for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Criticising the US National Security Strategy he said "there will be no stability in Europe if Russian aggression is rewarded". I think by rewarded he meant there will be no stability if Russian gains are recognised de facto. 

What about the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus? 

What about Goa?

The British foreign policy establishment has led us into disasters at least since 1914 - but possibly since the English Revolution of 1688.

From an article in Compact magazine

 

Quotations

In twenty to thirty years, Islam could become the dominant religion [in Germany].
Cardinal Gerhard Müller in an interview with Diane Montagna dated September 17, 2025, quoted by Rod Dreher yesterday in his newsletter

If you’re carrying the weight of roads not taken, of dreams deferred, of a life that feels smaller than you once hoped — watch It’s a Wonderful Life again tonight. Not as nostalgia, but as revelation.

Tony Seruga also quoted by Rod Dreher 

Giorgia Meloni warns her staff that 2026 will be "much worse" than 2025

I missed this. 

Giorgia Meloni said on December 23rd, "The year we've had has been tough for all of us. But don't worry, the next one will be much worse."

This was in the Christmas message that the Italian Prime Minister delivers each year to people in her office, usually consisting of bromides. 

Last year, for example, she wished everyone a Merry Christmas especially people who 'can’t be with their families' such as police, doctors, nurses and servicemen and women. 

Zionism began in Romania

"I would claim that the Zionist movement was founded on December 30, 1881 (according to the Julian calendar), in Focşani, in Romania, at the actual “first Zionist congress”, which was attended by 51 delegates from 32 settlement organizations who met in the town’s Jewish school. The conference lasted two days, during which five members were elected to serve as the “Central Committee for the Settlement of the Land of Israel and Syria”. Samuel Pineles, a Zionist activist from Romania, was elected committee chair and secretary."

More here.

Trotsky and Hitler went to Café Central in Vienna at the same period. Did Stalin and Freud too?

[I came across this on Reddit. Tom Stoppard wrote a play called Travesties that I always meant to read about Lenin meeting James Joyce in Zurich in 1917. There's a play or novel here too.]

<In 1913, Hitler live in a Men's Dormitory in Meldemannstrasse 27 in Vienna's twentieth district. Being rejected from the art academy, he lived off the sale of his paintings and was unable to afford another residence, so he live in a men's dormitory, an institution set up for people without fixed residence, where for a weekly rent of 2,5 Kronen, you could rent a bed.

In the same year Trotsky lived at Rodlergasse 25 in Vienna's 19th district. He worked as a journalist from Vienna reporting on the Balkan wars and publishing the Vienna edition of Pravda. Trotsky had live in Vienna before after being exiled for political agitation in 1902. After the attempted Revolution of 1905 had been crushed, Trotsky again fled Russia and moved to Vienna where he had good contacts with the local Social Democratic Party and through them found employment as a journalist. Trotsky's favorite hang-out was Vienna's Cafe Central where he was relatively well known. There is an unsubstantiated anecdote that in 1917 when the Russian Revolution broke out, a fellow patron of the Central and and officer of the Austrian Army is to have said "And who is supposed to lead this revolution? Mr. Trotsky from Cafe Central?"

Quotations

“In CIA, we didn't give a hoot about democracy... If a country didn't co-operate with us, democracy didn't mean a thing, and I don't think it means a thing today.” 

CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee



"Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress, must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or hastened. All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth. To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently the hour of descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one's art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity.
In this there is no measuring with time. A year doesn't matter; ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!"
Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter written to aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus, April 23, 1903. Collected in the volume "Letters to a Young Poet" (1929).

Mark Twain, letter to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, January 1863

“New Year's Day--Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”

A New Year’s Poem by Ogden Nash

 

Good Riddance, But Now What?

By Ogden Nash

Come, children, gather round my knee;

Something is about to be.

Tonight’s December thirty-first,

Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching, dark and small,


Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.

Duck! Here comes another year.

Happy New Year!

Arnold Bennett said pessimism was as enjoyable as optimism once you get used to it. But I am always an optimist. Here's to no more killing and no more war crimes in the Ukraine, the Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria or anywhere else in 2026. 

Where did 26 years go? 

Did people in 1826 and 1926 ask themselves that? 

Possibly not. Unlike me they had lived through world wars.

Death on a lion. This sculpture was once a device on a bell in the choir of Heilsbronn Abbey. At the stroke of the hour, the "Grim Reaper" would strike the bell around the lion's neck with a bone to remind people of the brevity of the human condition. Height approx. 140 cm. c. 1513, Franconia, Germany. In the Bavarian State Museum.

Professor Michael Hudson talking to Glenn Diesen

"The European voters obviously reject the policy of their leaders and they don’t realize that their leaders themselves are sort of American puppets. Whereas the proponents of the alternative are not Putin’s puppets. They’re the realists. And they realize there’s no need for war. It’s fictitious. It’s not that they’re pacifists, but there’s just no need for war, and there’s no war that Europe can win against Russia now that it doesn’t have any more arms. It has used them all up in Ukraine and sent them to Israel. So it’s disarmed. It has no money. Its industry is unable to operate without the inexpensive oil and gas that powered it before. There’s been no accounting for what are the costs and benefits of the future."

I don't think European states sent many arms to Israel but the USA certainly did. What a mess Europe is in and, instead of joining with Trump in seeking a modus vivendi with President Putin, Herr Merz seems to want to continue the war. 

For what purpose? None. 

Once Europe had intelligent leaders like Talleyrand, Metternich and Disraeli who sought to act in their country's interests.

Owen Matthews' 'Overreach'

“Everything we thought we shared with the civilised world was borrowed. Moscow literary editor Varvara Babitskaya, February 2022


“Though neither Putin’s siloviki – nor even ultra-conservative philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin – would put it in these terms, a war of national salvation was the only force powerful enough to stop the encroachment of the modern world and radically cut the country off from the West.”
Owen Matthews, Overreach

I enjoyed Owen Matthews' book Overreach. He is described as a legendary hell raiser, he was a correspondent in Moscow for many years and speaks English and Russian as his first languages. 

He strongly backs the Nato line on the Ukrainian war but even so he explains that the invasion happened because "not to strike would be to abandon Ukraine to the west and fatally expose Russia to the encroaching existential political and military threat".

The threat included a CIA inspired regime change.

In other words, he agrees that Putin acted under provocation, at least in his mind. He is not trying to recreate the USSR or conquer Poland.

Nato commanders had always assumed that Russia could quickly conquer Ukraine but the Russian army was in terrible shape, much of the money spent on it stolen.

A quarter of a million Russians left the country in the week the invasion started, considerably more than the initial Russian invasion force.

Two very important points. The risings in the Donbass were orchestrated by the Kremlin, not by Igor Girkin or the local people - and the people of the Donbass with few exceptions do not want the area to revert to Ukraine.

Andrew formerly known as Prince seems different from his siblings in looks and character and was the late Queen's favourite

I caught my old pal Andrew Lownie on X saying some people have asked if the quondam Prince Andrew is Lord Porchester's son. 

The late Queen and 'Porchey' once went to Kentucky together to view horses.

Words imputing inchastity to a woman are defamatory and anyway in law the Sovereign can do no wrong but the dead have no means of redress.

The glories of our blood and state are shadows not substantial things...

Not that being in the royal family stopped Andrew being the only person in the whole wide world whose reputation has been destroyed by the Epstein scandal. 

So much for the madmen who think the British royal family are part of a global conspiracy ruling the world.

I just returned from a Windstar cruise from Barcelona to Rome

 

Chirac's statue in Nice. I had forgotten that he is dead. The old crook deserves a statue on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square and one outside Congress in Washington D.C. because he warned the USA and the UK not to invade Iraq. 

He was a friend to the Arabs and I imagine he would have condemned Netanyahu's massacres as has his PM Dominique de Villepin. 

“Soon she was lost to sight in the Danube.” An illustration by Arthur Rackham for Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine (1909)

 

Quotations

'When asked whether her emancipated behaviour was intended to be of the feminist sort, she retorted: “Absolutely not. Though men can be beasts, women’s lib is idiotic.”' (Daily Telegraph obituary of Brigitte Bardot.) In 2018 she called actresses who commented on sexual harassment as part of the #MeToo movement "hypocritical, ridiculous, uninteresting".

“So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.” Arundhati Roy. Gaza will be the 'Are we the bad guys?' moment for the West. (I know Julius Caesar boasted of slaughtering three million Gauls, but things change and now the West’s collective self-belief rests on not being like the Germans in World War Two.)

Mohamad Safa

@mhdksafa

·

Dec 28

Netanyahu said that an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would be like “10,000 tons of TNT falling on a country the size of New Jersey (22,610 km2).” Israel has dropped 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza (365 km2) - the equivalent of 20 nukes on 1.6% the size of New Jersey.

He is Lebanon's Permanent Representative to the UN.

No more cold wars

"I believe the best guard against prejudice is a frequent examination of our opinions, and a cool estimate of the arguments opposed to them — You must as Cicero says identify yourself in imagination, first with your adversary and then with your judge — and above all you must have resolution to abide by the result even if it should be adverse to your preconceived opinions." US President John Quincey Adams

I was disgusted to read just now that Sir Niall Ferguson thinks that we need to be frightened of losing the second cold war which apparently must be waged, if that is the right word, between 'the West' and China.

Why must we have a second cold war? Why does the USA have any interests in Asia, much less the UK or Nato?

I have slowly come to agree with another American president, Herbert Hoover, that Chamberlain and Daladier should not have gone to war with Germany and that Franklin D Roosevelt who wanted us to go to war in 1939 deliberately provoked an attack by Japan in 1941. Far better had Lord Halifax been Chamberlain's successor as Prime Minister, not Churchill, and spoken to Germany about the peace that Hitler very much wanted.

I also see that containment of the USSR was necessary but the cold war was not and could have been ended had we agreed to a unified democratic Germany when it was offered by the USSR in 1955, that Nato should have been wound up in 1991 and the Anglo-Americans are repeating the same mistakes now.

Quotations

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The world is violent and mercurial...it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love...love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

Tennessee Williams in an interview with James Grissom

I accidentally came across this which I posted on New Year's Eve 2022

In the Turkish holiday village of Dalyan I'm having dinner with a Turkish bar owner in his 30s. Predictably, he loathes Erdogan, a would-be dictator.  

'What do you think of the war in Ukraine?' 

'I support the Russians, actually.' 

'Why?' 

'Because they are being attacked by America.' 

'Do many Turks think this?' 

'Some do. Some don't.'

Christmas night 2024

One year ago I was in a bar in New Orleans talking to a Jewish American girl who told me there was absolutely nothing to be said in defence of Israel. She was certain Trump was more Zionist than Biden. I said that was impossible but she may have been right.

Later I said how sorry I was to have lost my copy of 'The Confederacy of Dunces'. A man who heard me gave me his copy 15 minutes later having gone home to get it. What Southern courtesy!

Genoa yesterday

Genoa yesterday was shabby, drizzly, full of cheap hotels and absolutely delightful. Its historic centre is strung along a long line, a bit in the way that Bucharest's much more modern Calea Victoriei is.

From Lonely Planet: "Genoa's zebra-striped Gothic–Romanesque cathedral owes its continued existence to the poor quality of a British WWII bomb that failed to ignite here in 1941; it still sits on the right side of the nave like an innocuous museum piece."

When I was 8 reading about WWII it seemed obvious that countries want to extend their territory but what good could conquering Nice and Savoy have done Mussolini? Had he stayed neutral he'd have died in his bed like Franco.

What good could the Soviet territories have done Hitler?

He thought England's power was due to our possessing Canada 

If England and France don't go to war with Russia or Iran all will be well.

Leghorn is grey, cold, drizzly and closed for Christmas

The priest said Livorno (Leghorn is its real name in English) has few treasures. I said, "Because of the British". "Well, we declared war on you." Indeed. What a fool Mussolini was ...... 

And what fools Europe's current leaders and Starmer are. Still I think the people will see through the war propaganda.