Trudy Rubin wants America to rule the world?

"But one thing is clear: This drama [Prigozhin's mutiny] ― with its incomplete ending ― openly displays the growing debate and disarray within the Kremlin. It also offers the United States, and its NATO allies, a singular opportunity to take advantage of the confusion and finally send the long-range missiles and planes that could enable Kyiv to succeed in its counteroffensive.

"For the Biden team to waste the chance to immediately take advantage of Moscow's mess would be a crime against Ukraine ― and could help Putin survive without losing his power."

'Give peace a chance' is now considered a right-wing sentiment

Clever men explain why a ceasefire in Ukraine would not be a good idea. It would enable Russia to re-arm. (Ukraine is constantly being armed by America without need for a ceasefire.) 

To me the war looks like one that neither side can win. If one side can win it I think that side is Russia, by sheer size of her armed forces.

Had the two warring sides made peace in 1915 the civilised world would have been saved. Or at the end of 1917, when Lord Lansdowne wrote his letter.  

A German invasion of Poland might have been avoided had Britain not given Poland a guarantee in 1939, but this is very speculative and Beck was utterly stubborn and inflexible.  

After the fall of France in 1940 Britain might have listened to what peace overtures Hitler had to make, as Halifax advised, but much better (for France and the Low Countries especially) not to have gone to war the previous year.

In 1955 the USA and Adenauer should have accepted Khrushchev's proposal for a united, democratic, neutral Germany, which would have freed East Germany from Communism, hugely benefited Germany and ended the cold war. 

But once wars and cold wars start emotions become involved. 

Lord Home, who accompanied Chamberlain to Munich in 1938, told me that as Prime Minister he would have used the hydrogen bomb if he thought Britain in immediate danger of attack from Russia 'because in that situation emotions become involved'.

Thanks to Delia Dragomir

 

Free speech and its enemies, including the BBC

I regret ever watching the BBC News. I shall stop. On Friday he third story in the headlines was that Tiktok was not keeping its promise to take down videos that deny that climate change is a problem. 

From a picture on the TV screen you could see Donald Trump's face on one. He was the last US president but his views on climate change may not be repeated.

An expert was brought on who explained that there was a very short window of time to save the planet and so these videos had to be suppressed.

So it was with Covid and is with lots of things and will be with many more. 

Unless people fight back.

Meanwhile, the British Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which in a truly free society would not exist, has ruled that Jeremy Clarkson was guilty of sexism, which is not allowed on TV, for saying this, which is not remotely sexist in any way, of the Duchess of Sussex.

"Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or [serial killer] Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. At night, I'm unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her".

Quotations

"But there is one part of getting old we’re not so good at preparing for; one investment for which we don’t employ specialists, to ready us. Or even discuss in the pub. And it’s the pension plan of memories — our investments in mental souvenirs. We do not, it seems, regard the fact that, by the time we’re 70, we will be as a dragon, sitting on a lifetime’s hoard of hours and days. A dragon with four slightly dodgy knees, who doesn’t get around as much, and so spends most of its time just sitting. Just sitting with the past.

"No man should reach his final years full of regret, and abandoned ideas, and heart-aching disappointments, simply because he obediently played by the rules of “what a man should be”. Because there is no science, or physics, or rules, of what a man “should” be! You have signed no Man Contract; there is no one to report to. By the time you’re 70, everyone whose disapproval, ridicule or disappointment you feared will be long gone, or dead. There is no one who will give you a medal for your sad dutifulness. The approval you wanted will never come. Rebel now! While you still have the time!" Caitlin Moran

"[Adam] Smith believed that human beings had a natural sympathy with one another that led them to look beyond their immediate prosperity. He grasped that commerce, far from sundering people, draws them together into networks of mutual dependency." Daniel Hannan

"How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?" Péter Szijjártó, Foreign Minister Hungary, talking about the Nord Stream pipeline

 

Hanjo Girke

@GirkeHanjo

·

Jun 27

Replying to

@RWMaloneMD

There is no investigation because we are no independent nations but vassals. We all know who did it. Sweden wouldn't have blocked sharing its findings for "classified" reasons otherwise. We would not have prevented an independent investigation by the security council otherwise.

"Harvard itself calculated in 2013 that if it admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, less than one per cent of its undergraduate student body would be black, as opposed to its then current 10 per cent black share. (That ten per cent is now up to 14 per cent, without any corresponding national rise in the test scores of black students.)” The Spectator

A country is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to have a bank account

'It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.' Bertrand Russell

Or to have a bank account. 

Nigel Farage, the British politician without whom Brexit would not have happened, has had his bank accounts closed by Coutts and other banks refuse to let him open an account. He suspects (without evidence) the involvement of MI5 and says he may be forced to leave the UK.

He said nothing when the same thing happened to Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins.

The Reverend Richard Fothergill, who has been with the Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years, has lost his account too. From The Times:

Fothergill, from Windermere, Cumbria, typed out his views on transgender ideology to the building society on June 18. He responded to a monthly email he gets from YBS asking for his feedback, after noticing that it was displaying support for Pride month on its website. The minister, who no longer has his own parish but founded the Filling Station evangelical network, wrote out “a couple of paragraphs” about how he did not agree with trans ideology — or the idea that you can have alternative genders — being pushed on children.

Fothergill said: “I was polite all the way through. I was pointing out that they are a financial house – surely they should just be worrying about financial issues.”

On June 22 he received a letter from YBS about his “views regarding LGBTQIA+”. It said the comments he made were “not tolerable” and the building society had a “zero tolerance approach to discrimination”.

 From the Mail:

First Direct has also been accused of closing the account of the founder Wings over Scotland pro-Scottish independence blog, run by journalist Stuart Campbell. Mr Campbell has suggested that his accounts were closed because of his views on gender and sex, including declaring: 'Women don't have penises'.

....Journalist Toby Young, of the Free Speech Union, told Mr Farage on GB News last night that he was contacted by a Yorkshire Building Society customer who claimed he asked why their branches were festooned with Pride flags. The bank allegedly replied that his account would be closed down.

Brexiteers have lost their accounts, including Lady Fox.

In America singer Kanye West accused Jews of being responsible for cancel culture. He immediately lost his accounts. He then made other antisemitic remarks. 

'Who laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round?'

I knew the ancient philosophers knew the word was round (because of the lack of shadows at noon) but not that this was known to illiterate people in the Middle Ages, until I read this article. 

The idea that they did not was a mistake by Washington Irving. 

I was struck by this fact that I hadn't thought of.

English kings being crowned since at least Harold II – including Charles III – have been ceremoniously presented with an orb, not a disc, representing the planet.

I was once driven by a terribly sweet taxi driver who told me in confidence that the world was flat and the moon landings had been faked. I was delighted by his scepticism but sad too, because he was so nice, that he was wrong.

Lord Lansdowne's letter in 1917 has been proven right by history - what horrors will the next hundred years hold?

Former British Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne's letter to the Daily Telegraph (the Times refused to publish it) on 29 November 1917, calling for a negotiated peace with Germany, was execrated, he became a pariah, but now we weep at the missed opportunity to end a pointless bloody war, save the Habsburg and German empires, and prevent the Nazis coming to power, the Second World War, the Cold War and many horrors of modernity (add to taste). 

So it may be again.

Lord Lansdowne's letter has been proven right by history, if any document ever were. I quote from it.

'We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it...We do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a great power ... We do not seek to impose upon her people any form of government other than that of their own choice... We have no desire to deny Germany her place among the great commercial communities of the world.'

He wrote immediately after the Bolsheviks had seized power and should have written two or three years earlier.

The parallel with people like Donald Trump who want an enduring ceasefire in Ukraine, rather than a continuing cold or hot war between democracies and autocracies, is obvious, I hope.

Before I read the New York Times piece that said General Surovikin was involved in the planning of Prigozhin's revolt, I had already come to the conclusion that the mutiny was a coup attempt that failed. 

The NYT says Prigozhin's plans were discovered, it started at half cock and the forces in Moscow from whom Prigozhin expected help chose not to offer it.

Mark Galeotti thinks otherwise, says it is now clear that it was just a protest or something, to make Putin change his mind about the Wagner Group being put under the control of Sergei Shoigu, the Defence Minister, which makes no sense. 

Owen Matthews has the same view though.

John Helmer, veteran Moscow correspondent, has an explanation that sounds like it comes from Sergei Shoigu.

A senior Kremlin source quoted in a great article in the Guardian:

"Many in the [defence] ministry believe Prigozhin has kompromat on everyone. This would make it unlikely that he would be liquidated, since the kompromat staying secret would be tied to him remaining alive."

What will happen next? 

Who knows?

‘In Russia, nothing is more dangerous than the appearance of weakness’ said the great Peter Stolypin, quoted by Simon Sebag Montefiore. 

He wrote a good article published yesterday in the Times on how Russian autocrats lose power if they mishandle wars (Tsars Peter III, Paul and Nicholas II). Khrushchev's fall was precipitated by the Cuba Missiles Crisis.

'In 1904, Nicholas II was advised by his interior minister Plehve to launch “a short victorious war”. Nicholas’s ensuing Japanese war was a catastrophe that led to the 1905 revolution. But Putin was made by his “short victorious wars” — until 2014. He pulled off a near bloodless victory to seize Crimea and Sebastopol. And he hoped to destroy Ukraine obliquely by a dirty war in Donbas. Ironically it was a cardinal error: I believe if he had seized all of Ukraine then, he would have got away with it. Instead Ukraine armed itself. As his spy agencies and courtiers promised instant victory, Putin invaded Ukraine.'

I agree that from his point of view Putin should have taken over the whole of Ukraine in 2014, but that was not how it seemed at the time or while Mr. Obama played things very cool and refused to supply Ukraine with 'lethal weapons'. 

Mr Obama and Mr Trump had much in common - they were both unhappy with the idea of an active American empire involved everywhere.

In the news

“Modern man has begun a terrible war against God and against man: a satanic war. This is why the spiritual battle with evil is part of the Christian life," Cardinal Robert Sarah

"As one disgruntled and very famous senior journalist once said to me: ‘The problem is not just that younger journalists are remarkably privileged, coming from affluent families that either already live in London or can afford to set them up in London. It’s also that they increasingly see themselves as political activists who are in media to ‘change the world’ rather than search for truth in an objective and neutral way." Matt Goodwin

"The doll has faced decades of criticism, with some suggesting that the toy’s slender proportions would render Barbie unable to walk if she was real, and that the character’s preoccupations presented her as materialistic and unintelligent. A 1992 talking doll uttered phrases such as “I love shopping”, “Will I ever have enough clothes?”, and “Math class is tough”, prompting concerns about the example being set for young girls." News story in the Daily Telegraph yesterday.

"Our response to Covid also encouraged our governing elites’ technocratic instinct for social engineering. Many now believe that it is reasonable to restrict liberties more widely “for the greater good”, including on net zero grounds." Allister Heath in the Daily Telegraph yesterday.

"When the Berlin Wall came down the proportion of the world in extreme poverty (as defined by the World Bank) was at 38 per cent. At the turn of the century, it was 30 per cent. Now it’s at 8.5 per cent, meaning 100,000 lifted out of poverty every single day. In the past two decades, child labour rates have fallen from 16 per cent to 10 per cent. The proportion of children who die before the age of five has halved, to 3.8 per cent." Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph 22 June

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

Why is everyone so sensitive? What if everyone just shut up and stopped crying?

Tim Stanley

@timothy_stanley

I just saw the King! In his car. Thrilling, as if a lion just crossed the road.

'The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.' G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton was right back in the time of Stalin. He would certainly think his sentence is even more true now in the age of Biden and Putin and he would be right.

AJP Taylor: 'Of course we do not want to see new wars in Europe. But if we enter into European alliances or European associations we make war more likely.'

A.J.P. Taylor ends his magisterial Oxford History of England 1914-45 with the words: 

'Few now sang England Arise, but England had risen all the same.' 

I still think and hope this will prove true of Brexit, despite the likelihood of a Labour Government.

A.J.P. Taylor, a left-wing socialist, was a leading opponent of England joining 'the Common Market' or EEC, the original names for the European Union. 

He said: 

"We have been most secure when we kept out of Europe. Meddling with European affairs has brought us nothing but toil and suffering. The greatest age of British economic achievement was in the nineteenth century. Then we were truly the workshop of the world. The sole principle of our foreign policy was Splendid Isolation. This was the basis for our prosperity.' He also said, 'Of course we do not want to see new wars in Europe. But if we enter into European alliances or European associations we make war more likely.'

That is true. Neville Chamberlain by giving a guarantee to Poland in 1939 intended to deter a German invasion but had precisely the opposite effect. 

Boris Johnson sent Royal Navy vessels to patrol close to the Crimean coast but this did not calm Putin down. 

Were we to stop being America's satellite and mind our own business would things be better or worse?

A stereocard from circa 1895 of Welsh hay girls in national costume, taking a rest

 

 

What were stereocards? 'The stereoscope, invented by the English physicist Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), was meant to prove that our sense of depth, when viewing objects, occurs because of the disjunction between the two eyes in binocular vision. The stereoscope relies upon the principle that each eye sees a slightly different view and that these two dissimilar pictures are united by the brain. Pictures used in stereoscopic imagery are almost identical, save for a slight difference in the amount of the view from either side (the left or right). Viewed through the stereoscope, the flat images seem to become one picture with three-dimensional depth.'

Alison Pearson in the Telegraph today is a beast but a just beast about the Duchess of Sussex

'According to the Wall Street Journal, Taylor Swift got an aide to reject an invitation to appear on Archetypes, calligraphed in Meghan’s own fair hand. Who knows, maybe Taylor, who made her first recording aged 15 and is now worth the best part of $1 billion, didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to bitch with marry-into-a-fortune Meghan about “the labels that hold women back”.

'An author, also invited to be a guest on Meghan’s podcast, said that when she arrived she was interviewed by a producer. She didn’t speak to Meghan; never even met her. Allegedly, the recording was then “edited” with the Duchess’s voice spliced in to pretend she had carried out the interview herself. How rude, how utterly lacking in class. Apparently, this experience was not unusual. Meghan would only have “conversations” with the most famous guests.


'Well, what do you expect from a woman who, during a royal tour of Australia, is said to have moaned, “I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.” (All the poor thing got was a £32 million wedding and an ancient title to flex like a Platinum Reserve card.)

Lukashenko did broker peace

President Lukashenko did negotiate a peaceful outcome with Prozhhgeny, according to his account, and prevent a bloodbath. If he is telling the truth I suppose he is to be congratulated. I see no reason to think that he is not telling the truth.

I suppose Prozhhgeny is worse than President Putin. But chaos in Russia would presumably help Ukraine.

My hope is for Russia to return to being a conservative, Christian, constitutional monarchy, as little like Joe Biden's USA as possible. Lots of nice young Russians were monarchists who admired Stolypin, when I met them years ago. Alas it seems unlikely at the moment. The monarchists are the true Russia (and the true France).

Sir Lawrence Freedman is interesting on the subject here. He thinks Prigozhin could have captured Moscow.

Lastly, when his options looked bad, [Putin] chose negotiation, showing little interest in martyrdom and leaving flight as his last resort. He agreed a deal that made a nonsense of his promises to punish the mutineers.  If he was irresolute in this case then might he be so in another? If the fighting takes another turn for the worse can he really afford to reject negotiations when there is no serious hope of incorporating the claimed chunk of Ukraine into the Russian Federation? A lot of recent thinking about the likely course of the war assumed Putin’s intransigence and his ability to cope with regular setbacks so long as Russia could stay in the war. That assumption will be easier to challenge.

Putin cares about his survival, whether from Covid or coups. The unintended consequences of this war are now threatening his regime. Any suggestion that he wants to get out of the war will aggravate the image of weakness; sticking with the war regardless of losses will aggravate his actual weaknesses. 

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." Dostoyevsky

"Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner." Jean Anouilh

“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.” Somerset Maugham. But steak and kidney pudding and lemon meringue pie are sublime.

Mutiny

That headline in the Mail on Sunday asks a good question but the article has been taken down from the net.

I wonder why the Wagner Group's mutiny began and why it stopped. The idea a man I know posits that it was a false flag operation by the Kremlin, or that Putin let MI6 bribe Prigozhin to do what he did in order to flush out traitors or something, of course makes no sense. The events of yesterday gravely weaken Mr Putin. 

The trouble is that the mainstream media are so untrustworthy that people believe the most absurd conspiracy theories. (The mainstream media, after all, say that women have penises.)

Ben Judah says in an excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph:

'The coup marks the definitive turn of a page in Russian history. Over the next 48 hours Putin may come to some sort of uneasy truce with his one-time caterer, but the result in the long-term will be a fundamental rebalancing of power away from him. The era when he was the only thing that mattered in Russia is over. Prigozhin buried it'.

Who was in league with Prigozhin?

 

For neo-cons it is always 1938 but they don't understand 1938 - Americans see foreign policy as overwhelmingly moralistic

It is good to be reminded that the League of Nations was set up on the assumption that the USA would be a member. The arch neo-con Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria Nuland, who has never apologised for his support for the invasion of Iraq and still thinks it a good thing, talking about his latest book back in February said this.

Advisors to Chamberlain are very clear that whatever else was true, the number one factor in his mind was the fact that he couldn't count on the United States and not count on the United States to come join the war against Germany, but merely to be a reliable supplier of goods during the war, as it was during World War I. And as it would later become after the Lend-Lease and other programs of the late thirties and early forties. But during that period when the Neutrality Acts were in place, the United States would not have been able to help, according to congressional legislation, would not have been able to help if there were a war. And so a tremendous missed opportunity came in 1938 when Hitler really was taking an extreme gamble in trying to take over Czechoslovakia. If France and Britain had supported the Czechs, the Czechs might well have succeeded in fending off the German invasion and Hitler, it might, well at that point have been overthrown. His military was gearing up to overthrow him if he invaded, and the French and the British defeated Germany. It's interesting to think about that today because of course today Ukraine is sort of in the position of Czechoslovakia, but lo and behold, this time they are fighting and they're fighting with the support of allies and look what's happening to Russia. Something similar could have happened in 1938, and the world would've looked like a very different place.

For neo-cons it is always 1938 (Paul Gottfried) but it is interesting that Chamberlain told the US ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of John, that 'America and the Jews were responsible for the war'. This is in contrast to Kagan's view that American neutrality prevented war in 1938.

To me it seems that it was impossible to contain Germany if the Soviet Union was outside the European system - and it had to be because Poland and Czechoslovakia did not want Bolshevik troops on their territory. 

I think the two priorities for British policy should have been to avoid war between France and Germany, in which Britain would have had to get involved to prevent a German victory, and to avoid war with Japan. In this respect our fatal error was to let our alliance with Japan lapse under strong American pressure. 

We need not have got involved in a war between the Soviet Union and Germany if the Polish question could have been resolved. Instead the British guarantees to Romania and Poland encouraged Poland not to find a modus vivendi with Germany along the lines of the proposals Germany suggested in late 1938 (extraterritorial railway and road across Polish corridor and the free city of Danzig returning to Germany).

The truth is that in 1938 and 1939 everyone, to use a rugby expression, fumbled the ball. And so they did in Ukraine after the Biden administration took power.

Robert Kagan's reading of 1938 is the one that is regarded as true and this tells us much about American policy to Ukraine under Biden. Of course this policy has led to Russia's terrible and unjustifiable invasion.

Of course on Friday night the Russian army was drunk

When I heard the first news of the 1991 attempted coup I knew that the coup leaders were all drunk. I was proven right. This coup took place on Friday evening when the army was drunk.

The Romanian revolution took place on television.  The Russian revolution is taking place on social media: vk.com Twitter and Telegram. This thread is the best thing I've seen.

Vk.com widely read in Russia relays uncensored information.

Today is the anniversary of the coronation of King George V of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of India.

This lovely picture conveys a sublime sense of hierarchy with peers in ermine and coronets, no TV cameras, no gospel singers, no princess in trousers, no priestesses and bishopesses.

In Kenneth Rose's biography George V emerges as one of the great comic characters in English literature. 

The story of looking round the first plastics factory and then saying to the Queen 'And it's all made from milk, isn't that right, Melchett?' 'Yes, sir'. I told my father that and he said crossly that the original plastics did involve some milk. 

George V said he told Sir Samuel Hoare, when he came to resign after the Hoare-Laval pact to give most of Ethiopia to Mussolini became public, "It only goes to show 'No more coals to Newcastle, no more whores to Paris' and do you know what the fellow didn't even smile."

He said of homosexuals, ‘I thought people like that shot themselves'. David Cannadine who taught me about the monarchy under Queen Victoria, thought this showed he abhorred homosexuals. i think it shows his innocence (though he was not innocent about women before he married).


I am not sure that Rose mentioned it but, like his father, George V was  tatooed. In 1881, visiting a port in Japan as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, the had a blue and red dragon tattooed on his arm.