A dark but plausible hypothesis

"A dark but plausible hypothesis is that the American strategy now is to Ukrainify Europe, so that when Ukrainian men run out they can be replenished with Europeans. The point is not to copy every measure used in Ukraine. It is to reach the same result: a country so poor, so tightly controlled, and so sealed against Russia by propaganda that it can be spent as frontline material. In Ukraine that was done with IMF shock therapy, deindustrialisation and a long campaign that turned the country into an anti-Russian project. In Europe the tools are different — energy shock, the loss of cheap Russian inputs, fiscal strain, NATO rearmament and the same kind of information war. For it to work, unemployment and desperation must rise, and some form of attack from Russia must be provoked or fabricated."

So says Mattias Forsgren, a cognitive psychologist who analyses geopolitics on Substack.

I don't buy this idea but he thinks in a way I like. A lot of the Russian crisis isn't about defence but energy profits. I learnt a lot over the years about how energy pipelines are central to geopolitics. A lot is about preserving and extending American hegemony. Correction: it's all about American hegemony as are the wars in the Middle East.

Mattias Forsgren shares a realist critique of American hegemony with John Mearsheimer. Both thinkers view international relations as an anarchic clash where great powers fiercely protect their spheres of influence, arguing that Western "liberal hegemony" and NATO expansion predictably triggered conflict by crossing clear red lines. To me who read history at the university this makes perfect sense.

The liberal reading of geopolitics as a clash of values is very misleading.

The world is a competition for power and money. Values are useful for propaganda.

Alison Mutler a British journalist in Bucharest, for example, says that the politicians are frightened of Trump leaving them unprotected against the threat from Russia. The politicians I know aren't scared of Russia but speaking to a journalist they might say so if that's their message to the public.

Larry Johnson sees a 90% chance of war between Russia and "Europe"

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson 2 days ago: "It's probably a 90% certainty there is going to be a war between Russia and Europe."

Pepe Escobar, asked if war was a realistic possibility, said the situation is "complex" and "depends on European political elites, who are full of warmongers."

"Right now, among them we have the leadership of the European Commission – who are all, in essence, warmongers – as well as Europe's key governments, such as Germany, France, and Italy, which are located far away from Russia. However, the core of a militant NATO lies in Eastern Europe, just as the Americans wanted. This includes Poland, the Baltic states, Romania to some extent, and, of course, the Scandinavian countries. It is all very complicated. One could say there is a sort of consensus among these political elites – a completely mistaken one, of course – that war against Russia is inevitable. They are already persuading the European population to think about this war."

Fallen angels

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
MACBETH iv. 3.


The angel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet-blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the star shores of heaven.
RUSKIN.


Ah ! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Nor daily labour's dull, Lethaean spring.
Oblivion in lost Angels can infuse
Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD

 From Bowyer Nichol's Words and Days (1895): the entry for yesterday.

"They were using the only means they had to fight an invader": the violence in Palestine started in Jaffa in 1921

What a predictable and predicted disaster it is having the Jewish homeland in Palestine. It should have been carved out of Germany not Arabia, as the King of Saudi Arabia told Roosevelt in 1945.



The Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 are the continuation of the story that began on 30 April 1921 when the Jewish Communist Party distributed Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish fliers in Jaffa calling for the toppling of British rule and the establishment of a "Soviet Palestine."


The party members were Eastern European immigrants some of whom arrived in Palestine before the Balfour Declaration but many of whom came after. Democratic socialists fought them and it somehow became fighting between Jews and Arabs that left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead.

Remember that in 1921 many of the most fanatical Bolsheviks in Russia and Hungary were Jewish. 

"They did not kill us because we were Jews, but because we were an invader. They were using the only means they had to fight an invader." Baruch Ram a Jewish pioneer settler said this of the riots. He left Palestine disillusioned by Zionism.

Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky said something very similar in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall.
"The Arabs are not executing pogroms against us in the style of the Russian tsarist police, which organized mob violence for its own political goals. They are fighting against the invasion of their country by a foreign people. They are using the only means they have." 

"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs." Gandhi, 1938

"I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.” Isaac Asimov

Yes, he was right.


And what now?

Naza

Soldiers in the film Naza explain how they monitored children's phones to know the exact moment a father returned home, using that as the signal to launch a strike.

Naza sounds a must see film. It opens in Bucharest on 9 October and after its run at the cinemas will be streamed for free. Please go to see it if you want to know what is happening beyond the illusory world of the newspapers.

Retired US Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (once Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, the stage in his career of which he is least proud) recently said that what the IDF is doing in Lebanon 'is comparable with - no worse than what Hitler did'.

An Israeli woman I had dinner with in Tel Aviv years ago told me the way some young IDF soldiers behaved was no better than the Nazis.

Sir Keir Starmer expelled Members of Parliament from the Labour Party for much milder criticisms.

That wonderful doctor in England Dr Aladwan keeps getting prosecuted for her criticisms of the IDF and vilified in the Dailly Telegraph as if she's the bad guy. Why is free speech restricted by conservatives?

I don't see proof that she explicitly supports Hamas but simply wants the Gazans to fight the occupier - but why should support for Hamas or Hezbollah or the IRG be illegal in England?

These are disputes in far away countries between people of whom we English generally know nothing, to paraphrase Chamberlain on the Sudetenland.

Latest on Guilfoyle scandal

The Financial Times cites new independent sources who attended the dinner where Kimberly Guilfoyle threatened to bring down Greek government as the Americans had brought down Bolojan, as well as officials who were briefed on the confrontation immediately afterward. FT has credibility. It's not the Murdoch press.

On TV former President Traian Băsescu, accused of murky things himself, defended PSD leader Sorin Grindeanu against treason charges but strongly praised the state-owned energy company Romgaz for rejecting the contract. According to internal data, the unfavourable price difference between European and American gas would have inflicted massive financial losses on Romania, estimated between $50 million and $300 million.

The debate intensified following a leaked photograph of a political dinner held on March 31 at a Bucharest restaurant, which included Kimberly Guilfoyle, Grindeanu, high-profile PSD figures and presidential advisor Florin Vlădică. Băsescu argued that Vlădică's presence firmly connects the Presidential Administration to the negotiations, asserting that President Nicușor Dan was undoubtedly briefed on the matter. According to Băsescu, the highly experienced U.S. Ambassador—whom he described as a seasoned former prosecutor—is actively leveraging her diplomatic influence to pressure Romanian politicians into bypassing Romgaz’s refusal.

While Băsescu refrained from directly linking these stalled energy negotiations to the recent dismissal of Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan's cabinet, he noted that Romanian politicians historically yield to foreign interests. He referenced past controversial deals, such as the Bechtel highway contract and the privatization of the Galați steel mill, as examples of Romania offering economic favors to international powers. 

Guilfoyle was not acting alone to enrich her close associate.  The Trump family are heavily involved. The Albanian connection brings Jared Kushner to mind.

The hero is Bolojan, the villains PSD, AUR and the generals who decide contracts. 

They all know in Romania, Greece and the White House that Russia is no threat to Nato but it's all about making money.

Is murder wrong?

AJ Balfour, the only philosopher to become Prime Minister of England, said that philosophical argunents for why murder is wrong agree only in their conclusion, which forced him to suspect that the authors began with the conclusion and worked backwards.

"It is true, no doubt, that the subject-matter of Morality is, or is believed to be, familiar to all the world. But it is also true that every philosopher has found himself compelled to search for the grounds of its authority, to map out its provinces, and to explain its origins. I have read many of these arguments, but, in spite of wide differences of method and profound disagreements in principle, I have found that they almost invariably coincide in one singular result. Whatever their starting-point, they all arrive at the same conclusion. They may differ as to why we ought to be good, but they are practically at one as to what goodness consists in.

"It is a matter of common observation that moralists of every school, however much they differ as to the grounds of obligation, are very nearly agreed as to the thing which is obligatory. They may argue indefinitely as to why murder is wrong, but they are all agreed that it is wrong. They may find it impossible to harmonize their theories as to the nature of the moral sense, or the origin of the concepts of 'duty' and 'right,' but they are quite at one when they come to practical rules of conduct.

"The reason of this phenomenon is not far to seek. The moralist does not, as a rule, generate his premises and then deduce his conclusions. He starts with his conclusions."

AJ Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, 1879.

Balfour had intended to call it A Defence of Scepticism and scepticism is the most important conservative value but his uncle Lord Salisbury (this is where the phrase 'Bob's your uncle' comes from) warned him to rename it lest people who only knew it by its title would assume he was sceptical of the existence of God, something that would have killed a political career in that more civilised era.

Even these lines show AJP Taylor was right to call Balfour trivial but he makes a point that is true enough and not just about philosophy. 

People come to their views from emotions and then justify them. 

This is why wars happen. 

If you seek the proof look around you, though unfortunately people no longer think murder is wrong, if it happens in far away countries.

"I think Donald Trump has correctly sensed the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age, which is genocidal" said former US Ambassador Chas Freeman about Mr Trump’s speech last week at the UN.

Yes - more true today than ever

'Sooner or later ... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.'

Graham Greene in The Quiet American, the most devastating critique of American foreign policy there is.

Herbert Hoover from the grave blames Franklin Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor and says England and France should not have gone to war in 1939

If it were not for plane journeys would I read books? 

Coming back from Athens I finally started Herbert Hoover's wonderful book Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath which was on my Kindle.

Like Neville Chamberlain Hoover was a great man in the wrong place at the wrong time - in Hoover's case US President at the time of the Wall St crash which started the Great Depression

Had he been president in 1941 Japan would not have gone to war with the US (he argues that FDR provoked Pearl Harbor and the Japanese capture of various British and French colonies). 

Had he been president in 1939 England and France might not have ended up declaring war on Germany. 

Hoover called Chamberlain's guarantee to Poland's security "the biggest blunder in the whole history of European power diplomacy" and done because FDR pressured England and France to do so.

He said US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of John F Kennedy, was used by FDR to get England to take a hard stance against Germany but in fact unlike the president Joe Kennedy, who became close to Chamberlain, was keen to prevent war.

Interestingly in his diary entry for December 27, 1945 James Forrestal (then US Navy Secretary) records playing golf with Kennedy and that "Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war."

In Hoover's view, had FDR not done this Hitler would have moved east to fight Bolshevik Russia leaving the democracies out of the war. 

Baldwin wanted war if it came to be betwen Germany and Russia with us staying out , as he explained to a three man parliamentary delegation of whom one was Churchill in 1936.

Historian Maurice Cowling, who would have taught me had I gone to Peterhouse, said the same thing. John Charmley probably thought so too. It's implied in his two books on appeasement, which he self-deprecatingly described as translations of Cowling into English.

If Hoover was right the USA laid the foundation for the American empire that rules most of the world today at British and French expense in 1939. 

There is a direct path between US pressure on England and France to give the Polish and Romanian governments a guarantee of military aid in 1939 and the cold war, the expansion of Nato to Eastern Europe and the recent US attacks on Iran and Venezuela.

I blogged about the book here years ago without having read it.

As Voltaire once said

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets" Questions about Miracles (1765). This is topical always.

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion." In a letter to Mme. d'Épinal

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." The Age of Louis XIV (1751). 

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers” is often attibuted to Vooltaire but it is the Duke of Lévis in his 1808 book Maximes et réflexions sur différents sujets de morale et de politique. It is very true. Interesting questions are what matter especially when it comes to AI.

"Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh" is another and obvious misattribution. It is the godless HL Mencken in his 1920 work A Book of Burlesques. It might be true. It probably is.

Jordan Peterson is right - I think best when talking to someone

"Most people think by talking. It's actually really hard to think, because to think properly you have to be like three people in your own head, because you have to have an argument.


"If you ask yourself, like you're asking someone, which I think is a form of prayer, if you ask yourself instead of telling yourself, 'What is it that I could do, to set things more right today, that I would actually do?' It's usually some small thing... Then you can go do it." 

Confirmation bias

I am saddened and infuriated by how people take sides and then read everything to favour of the side they've taken. 

You see this with people who dismiss all evidence that suggests the Ukrainian government is corrupt (or that Ukrainian policy is mistaken) as being pro-Russian and therefore untrue.

But I did this myself for a long time. I too had a secret policeman in my brain.

Some people likewise take any evidence that Israel is committing war crimes as being anti-Western, even anti-Semitic, yet how is Israel helping the West (a cold war expression that should be ditched anyway)?

I'm certainly not anti-Ukrainian. I took a side in the Arab-Israel dispute only when I read up on it on October 7, 2023 but having taken a side do I look at the evidence dispassionately? 

I don't bother to read anything written in the Murdoch press and I certainly dismiss anything written in the Daily Telegraph on the subject of Ukraine, Israel or the Middle East. But I do occasionally read the stuff the Telegraph prints because I still have a subscription and am almost always horrified at the way the truth is twisted. 

So yes I do give the Telegraph a chance by reading it very occasionally, though certainly not with an open mind. 

See how many inaccurate statements you can find here. There are at least two very big ones plus the usual absolute distortions, worthy of the paper in the 1914-18 war.

Athens at 8 o'clock on a crisp morning

 

For years Athenians have refused to let a mosque be built here but why don't they let Mahometans use the old one? Half the population used to be Mahometan before the nationalists started the war of 1821-29.

In the Benaki Museum, Athens

It's the Athenian equivalent of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, my favourite London museum. I discovered it just now.

Both contain the eclectic collections of interesting men. 

The Zambaccian is the Bucharest equivalent. 

Here is 6th century AD tapestry fragment showing a personification of Spring. It's like Picasso.

Mid 16th century, possibly from a workshop in Wallachia or Moldavia, but it looks late 19th century, perhaps Burne-Jones:

Meir Baruchin an Israeli teacher arrested in November 2023 for criticising Israeli actions towards Arabs on Facebook, talking to Chris Hedges, April 8, 2024

'Chris, we kill the Palestinians. We injure the Palestinians. We have more than 1,500 Palestinians in administrative detention. We demolish their houses. We confiscate their property, their waters. We cut down their olive trees. We put them in quarantines on Jewish holidays. And you know what? It goes even beyond that. We are conducting, for generations, a campaign to conceal every sign of Palestinian identity in this land, every sign of Palestinian culture. And most Israelis expect the Palestinians to accept it. And if they don’t, they can always leave.'

AI

Lytton Strachey said, "The history of the 19th century will never be written because we know far too much about it." What would he say about AI?

We are living in the most exciting moment in the history of the world since the Emperor Constantine became a Christian.

I am hopeful. AI means possibly an end to mass migrations of unskilled labourers and of US-UK world hegemony.

Ambassador Chas Freeman: Trump read the spirit of the age as genocidal

 

“I think Donald Trump has correctly sensed the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age, which is genocidal. Basically, he’s stating an intention to commit genocide against the people of Iran. And people sit there, and they say nothing. Why do they say nothing? First, they may regard him as a comic character, a tragicomic character who has the habit of blustering and not following through. So they may not take him seriously. But I think there is every reason to take him seriously, because I think Donald Trump is a bully who respects only two kinds of people or nations. One is the powerful, and he faces in the United States a very powerful Zionist lobby which remains committed to the destruction of Iran. And he is enthralled to that lobby, to donors from that lobby who take their cues, their direction, from the fascist government in Israel. And the second kind of person he respects is those who can blackmail him, and the Israelis apparently have the ability to do that.

Cancer?

On Thursday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly. During the speech, he held up a portable Starlink Mini kit and criticised the Iranian government for spending billions to enforce a five-month internet blockade. 

He thus made clear that there was obviously there was a highly coordinated, covert operation aimed at regime change involving Elon Musk who let Iranians use Starlinkfor free at the end of last year.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had already openly admitted that Israel had been secretly smuggling tens of thousands of Starlink receivers into Iran to fuel anti-government demonstrations. 

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant admitted the US drove down the value of Iranian currency for this purpose. 

Mike Pompeo spoke about Mossad involvement. 

Allegedly Russia gave Iran the codes to hack Starlink probably leading to many Mossad assets being killed or imprisoned. 

Israeli media have already publicised the failed Israeli plot. 

The CIA were equally involved.

Hundreds or even thousands of Kurds who crossed the Turkish border into Iran were killed thanks to a tip-off from Turkey according to India General Bakshi.

This was as much an illegal act of war as the attack in February, or the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria (the UK was involved in all those attacks) or the assault on Venezuela or the takeover of Greenland or the planned invasion of Cuba - or the overthrow of the last Romanian government or the coup in Turkey, if the latter two involved the Americans.  

Is it going too far to say that America is the cancer of the world?

Did America overthrow the last Romanian government like it has overthrown countless governments?

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle allegedly claimed during a private dinner in March 2026 that the United States played a role in the downfall of the Bolojan government. 

During a discussion in March with the Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou, Miss Guilfoyle reportedly pointed to the recent collapse of the government led by Ilie Bolojan in Romania and said, "We can do this to any country we want. We can do it here too," prompting the Greek minister to counter that the U.S. cannot replace a democratically elected government. 

Miss Guilfoyle denies the claim. 

Ilie Bolojan is said to have refused requests from an American-Greek consortium Aktor Group to purchase U.S. gas at rates above market prices. 

The Wall Street Journal mentioned the heavy involvement of businessman and registered lobbyist Christos Marafatsos, who frequently shadowed Guilfoyle at official diplomatic meetings across the Balkans, lobbying for the Aktor Group, which recently expanded into the natural gas sector and stood to profit from these regional U.S. LNG distribution agreements. 

She recently joked that she is looking for a husband but Mr Marafatos is married.

Whether Miss Guilfoyle is on what the lawyers call a frolic of her own or acting for her government Europe has fallen into a well laid trap by replacing Russian energy by more expensive US LNG.

It looks terrible for the soi dixant sovereignists (as Farage's support for bad actors does).

In Albania in the late 1990s the Americans created a pyramid scheme which caused economic misery for years to get rid of President Sali Berisha, who was given his job originally because of US bribery. 

He offended the Americans by becoming too close to Turkey. 

My source for this is impeccable but I promised not to reveal it.

The Hilda von Ein de nos jours

Question. Is any politician outside the USA and Israel as unprincipled an opportunist as Frau v d Leyen? She's a warmonger who deplores Russian war crimes while supporting vastly worse ones by America and Israel and claims to be a Christian Democrat while being neither? (A delight to see how China treated her forcing her to go through the immigration queue like hoi polloi.)

Her only redeeming features: 6 children, beauty and being a von. These are not enough.