Neither the Kremlin nor local people created the Donbass 'republics': Strelkov did, he says

In 2014 parts of Donetsk and Lugansk rebelled against the Kiev government. I thought at the time that this was something arranged by the Kremlin but it's not so, according to Igor Strelkov, a Russian who spent two weeks trying to start a war in the Dombass. He claims that his band of volunteers were responsible for the existence of the so called Donetsk and Lugansk republics.

"If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out — like in Kharkiv, like in Odessa." 

The mainstream media should be investigating this but finding out about what happened is very hard indeed.

The Whistleblowers: Inside The UN

There are some people who are not aware that the UN is an evil organisation, despite what we learnt about the WHO over the last two years. And about the UN bringing lethal disease to Haiti and about the rapes. 

My friend from Bucharest in 1999 John O'Brien is one of the people who still believes there is some good in the organisation, despite the wicked way he was treated for exposing corruption.

I think it is irremediable. It is not responsible to anyone. (A bit like the EU.)

A programme was broadcast last night on the BBC called The Whistleblowers: Inside The UN about the corruption and sexual offences and how whistle blowers are ruthlessly silenced. It includes an interview with John who was fired for speaking about the way aid money is embezzled. 

Reader, are you surprised?

A lot of people who create trouble for the powers in charge of our world get serious charges brought against them. I can thinks of a number offhand. 

From the very PC Guardian review:

Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN went after them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of solicitation and viewing nude photographs on his phone at work (O’Brien sees the allegations as vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, then had his identity leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her flat and refusing to leave: she says the UN had sent them, and had told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Effectively,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me sectioned.” By the time she’d convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting at which she had planned to raise the disclosure of activists’ identities – it so happened that the cops arrived just as the meeting was beginning.

Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul this morning

 

David Goldman: 'The U.S. and NATO are losing catastrophically in Ukraine'

I listened to this interview with David Goldman last night when I couldn't sleep and am very glad I did. David Goldman has more insights into the Ukrainian war than anyone and has no respect for the echo chamber. 

Like many people, though unlike the mainstream media echo chamber, he thinks the U.S. is losing catastrophically in the Ukraine.

He, like me, blames Putin for this illegal and stupid war but knows that this war would never have happened had Donald Trump won in 2020. It was provoked by Biden and Blinken arming Ukraine to the teeth.

He blames Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland for helping engineer the 2014 coup and says they hoped regime change in Kiev would be followed by regime change in Moscow.


This is certainly true and was how most of us fools thought before Russia invaded the Crimea. Reader, I thought exactly the same as I read my newspaper, but I learnt wisdom from events. Many people didn't.

How many wars the US Democrats have caused, though George W Bush was worse still.


As Kissinger said, to be America's enemy is dangerous but to be her friend is fatal.

He, of course, knows.

David Goldman rightly considers Boris's egging on the Ukrainians for a long war 'despicable'.

He also says that sanctions have been a huge mistake which is thrusting the West into recession.

Agreed, but the Ukrainians' heroism made sanctions unavoidable. The media and public opinion required them.

I should add that Donald Trump originally opposed arming Ukraine, because of the corruption in the country, but then swung round to arming her in order to provide jobs for American workers.


Reader, you can decide if this is to his credit or discredit.

Quotations

"He had delusions of adequacy ” Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” - John Bright

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Dr Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it.” - Groucho Marx

Colonel Douglas Macgregor says 'The war has been lost a long time ago'

Good readers, Borges said, are very black swans indeed. I am lucky to have such a swan in Toma, who posts fascinating things here in comments.

He reminded me of Colonel Douglas Macgregor, whose stuff another friend sent to me at the start of the war. Col Macgregor was nominated by Donald Trump to be ambassador to Germany and it sounds like he would have made a good one, but the Senate did not ratify the appointment.

I found this recent interview with him on the net.

Plenty I disagree with in it, but quite a bit that is probably right. 

I am confident Putin wanted to take Kiev originally. Colonel Macgregor like Scott Ritter (until he changed his mind for a moment) always argued Russia would win easily. 

Unlike David Goldman, who thinks Putin intends to destroy Ukraine, Colonel Macgregor thinks Putin wants to remove a threat that Ukraine and the USA would try to recapture the Crimea.

'The Ukrainians had been very straightforward about their determination to re-conquer the Donbas and then, subsequently, to regain control through conquest of Crimea. If you're a Russian and you're looking at that — and you're seeing the enormous buildup of weapons and equipment in Ukraine, particularly Eastern Ukraine, and you reckon that the United States at some point is going to move strike assets in terms of medium, intermediate-range missiles into Eastern Ukraine that could reach very important targets in Russia in a very short period of time — you make the decision to go in or sit and do nothing.

'The calculus [for Russia] was very simple: “If we do nothing, what happens? Well, the situation in Ukraine becomes more and more dangerous with each passing month and year to Russia. If we do something, we'll be condemned by everyone, but we can at least destroy the threat.”

'Ultimately, they came down on the second option. It's not the best, but it was the only one they saw because they saw no evidence that we or anyone else was going to listen to them.


'Now, the question is, “What is the United States' strategic objective in Ukraine? What do you want the situation to look like when the fighting ends?” That question was never asked, and it's never been asked in any of the interventions we've conducted over the last 30, 40, 50 years.


'...I think that NATO is weaker than ever. The unity you're seeing is a facade, at best. Macron was absolutely right, and he was not the first to make those statements. The United States does not have allies in Europe. It has military dependencies. There is one country in Europe that is capable of fielding significant military power and dominating the scene if necessary, and that is Germany. Germany, today, is what it was before World War II and World War I. It is the dominant power, regional power, and, to a large extent, an international power.

'....Russia is not afraid of the Europeans and never was. Russia always saw the European states as entirely subservient to, and dependent upon, Washington. NATO is the United States-led alliance. As long as we are seen as the dominant power in Europe and unambiguously hostile to Russia, then, yes, Russia is going to view what happens under the broad title of “NATO” as an existential threat to Russia.'

What do I think? I just don't know and nor does anyone. I do think sanctions are going to be more painful for the West than for Russia and will not affect the outcome of the war. I do want peace soon. 

John Winterson Richards on 15th June - I agree with him

Putin sees himself as "a leader in the tradition of Peter the Great" - I said ...in a post here back in March. It has taken the BBC this long to catch up, and even then they needed a heavy hint from Putin himself! [Political Refugee from the Global Village: I did too!]

This rather confirms what I wrote in the same post: "The Western media and political class simply do not understand the Russian mentality." Sorry to be quoting myself, which is usually a bad sign of egotism. In my case it is a sign of frustration, that the people being paid to know these things are so ignorant.  

 The people making all the decisions in the West today prefer to think of themselves as cosmopolitan - literally "citizens of the world" - but lack the faintest idea of how most of the world thinks.  

Most of the world, including the people making all the decisions in Russia, China, India, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, etc, care absolutely nothing for the New World Order with all globalist bureaucracies and sanctimonious declarations.  

They seek only to increase the power of their own tribes, be those tribes national, religious, or political, or some combination. In doing so they remember what Western leaders try to ignore, that power ultimately comes down to force and, possibly more important, the will to use it.  

Gyles Brandreth interviewed in the Telegraph today - what a shame he wasn't made host of the radio show Just A Minute

'When I was at my first boarding school, a prep school in Kent, the headmaster, Mr Stocks, said to me, “Brandreth, busy people are happy people”, and I’ve kept that motto all my life.'

Quotations

"If one distorts faith in Christ by uniting it with the goals of this world, the whole meaning of Christianity will at once also be destroyed and the mind will necessarily fall prey to unbelief." Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Strange Death of England

'Partisans sometimes rejoice in seemingly historic triumphs that are followed by defeat and retreat, something that may yet apply to both the referendum, and Johnson’s win in 2019 (shades here of George Dangerfield’s famous critique of the Liberal landslide of 1906: “from that victory they never recovered”).' John Harris in the Observer yesterday reminded me of one of the best books I ever read, Dangerfield's Strange Death of Liberal England.

"The One Nationers are a psychological type. They see themselves as the party of the established order, but our establishment is no longer Tory, dominated as it is, from the NHS to HSBC, by the liberal-Left." Timothy Stanley in the Telegraph a week ago.

David Goldman quotes a US military intelligence professional with 30 years' experience

"What we are seeing is what Ukraine wants us to see, they have done a masterful job painting the picture. But we need to keep in mind that the real numbers - training, manning, equipment, readiness and all the other boring stuff - have been hidden from us and we really don’t know what is or is not possible until we know those details. Hopefully, the folks inside the Pentagon have the real numbers on both the Ukrainians and the Russians. They won’t be able to make accurate assumptions and plans without them."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions." 

A memorable sentence

"More immigrants arrived in the UK in 2010 than came between 1066 and 1950." Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch speaking to the Bruges Group in April.

Carlyle on Muslims

"No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it." Thomas Carlyle

Dame Edith Evans

Why, when women behave like men, can't they behave like NICE men? 

Porsche

'When a problem has no solution, it ceases to be a problem and becomes a fact.' (Porsche the car manufacturer)

The liberal world order is back

I posted this on Facebook a week before the Brexit referendum.

"The Economist says that "in the age of Donald Trump, Brexit would be a defeat for the liberal order that bla bla". There are good arguments for staying and for leaving but this seems to be a good argument for leaving."

The liberal world order that Biden’s victory restored is going from strength to strength. I ean this very ironically and ironically. The globalists and neo-cons are in charge, the EU and Nato are suddenly strengthened, the American empire has resumed its sway over Europe. War and famine have taken the place of plague.

21% of Romanians think that Ukraine, the EU or the US are responsible for the Ukrainian war

21% of Romanians think that Ukraine, the European Union or the United States are responsible for the war and 24% of them think those countries are standing in the way of peace. 58% blame Russia. This makes Romania one of the countries in Europe with the largest percentages of people who think in this way. I know a few people who think something like this or evenly divide the blame, but I get the impression that among the people in Bucharest I meet the percentages of people who take the politically incorrect view are much lower. But then people who tell pollsters that the Americans are to blame don't always mention it at dinner parties. The taxi drivers who drove me recently thought Biden as much to blame as Putin. Romanian cynicism and scepticism about Ukraine and Covid is markedly different from British people's faith in what their rulers tell them. I think scepticism and cynicism about politicians and experts is by no means bad for democracy.

Adam LeBor, June 17, 2016

"Labour, writes a well-known political journalist, embraced the idea of Europe in 1998, as it was the best opponent of Thatcherism and seemed to mean trade union and welfare rights. But this came at a high cost, he writes. "In doing so, however, it abandoned the classic left-wing vigilance against the 'bankers' ramp' , the device which allows democracies to be overpowered by banks, central banks and their lackeys to run an economy in their own interests. The euro is just such a ramp. It was imposed without democratic endorsement and cannot be unstitched by democratic rejection. Hence perma-slump in large parts of the eurozone, 50 per cent youth unemployment in the worst bits, and German domination of the whole. Never, since the age of the dictators, have the workers been further from control over the means of production, distribution and exchange than they are in the EU today."

Oh glory be, at last someone has spelled out the left-wing (very left-wing) case for Brexit. But who is this seer? Gosh, it's Charles Moore, a high Tory, in the Spectator, the weekly conservative magazine. And some of you criticise me for writing in the Daily Mail. But it is here, on the right, that the left-wing case for Brexit is being made. Where Is The Thinking Left in this debate?" Adam LeBor, June 17, 2016

Europe

Ukraine and Moldova can become candidates for membership of the European Union, but not Georgia because of a partisan chief prosecutor linked to the ruling party. Do they know that England's Attorney General is a senior government minister and Member of Parliament? The reason Georgia should not join is quite other. Georgia is not in Europe. The same applies to Turkey of course, except for Western Thrace (3% of Turkey) and Western Thrace is in Europe in body but not in spirit.