Clown Planet is a YouTuber who puts up short videos about the weird, bizarre and stupid happening around the world. I think he’s a man of the right, as much of his content is about some of the daft, nonsensical and dangerous stuff uttered or done by the extreme gay rights and trans crowd. In this video, however, he covers the reintroduction by the NYPD of their Digidog and K5 robots. The Digidog is a version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, equipped with an artificial arm. It was first put on the streets by New York’s finest two years ago, but was subsequently taken off following complaints that it represented a science fictional, aggressive style of policing. As you can hear from the audio in one of the excerpts, the cops state that it will only be used for situations like terrorism and hostage negotiations,
The K5 robot looks to me like a giant pepper pot, a bit like a Dalek shorn of gun, sink plunger and eyestalk. This machine is intended to police the subway and Times Square.
This is getting close to some of the dystopias in science fiction in which machines patrol the streets keeping criminals and the general public in their police. One of the first SF stories about the dangers of this kind of mechanised policing was Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian. This was a short tale about a man stopped and arrested by a robot police car, which judges him suspicious simply for going for a walk. With these machines now patrolling New York, this is starting to look more than a little prescient. The video is bookended with Alex Jones looking amazed and horrified. Which he may well be, as this is precisely the kind of SF scenario he kept banging on about. When he wasn’t ranting about ‘the globalists’, Barack Obama planning to incarcerate everyone in emergency camps and declaring himself totalitarian overlord of the US, Hillary Clinton being an alien, or a cyborg, or possessed by demons, and stupid and dangerous nonsense about the Democrats operating a child abuse ring out of a Boston pizza parlour.
At present I don’t think these robots present a serious threat to humanity. Their own intelligence and autonomy is very limited, and it doesn’t look as if there’s going to be many of them hitting New York’s streets. So at the moment it’s still going to be human police officers keeping citizens safe from the bad guys.
The situation in China, on the other hand, may be very different. A year or so I found another video on YouTube showing what the Covid lockdown was like there. It was very restrictive over here, but this video showed drones flying through the sky and one of the Spot robots patrolling the ground making sure that everyone kept to their apartments. A very chilling, totalitarian sight, from a state that is using facial recognition technology to track and monitor its dissidents.
I think we’ll have to watch this very carefully. At present it’s a harmless gimmick, but if American politics becomes authoritarian, it’ll easily become something much more sinister.
I had a medical appointment today at the BRI – Bristol Royal Infirmary – one of the city’s major, historic hospitals, located just off the city centre. It went ahead despite the doctors’ strike. Passing the hospital’s main entrance, we saw the picket line and the immense support they had from the Bristolian public. Drivers beeped and waved at them as they went past. If I’d had my wits about me, I should have thought to take a photo of it with my camera and posted it here. But unfortunately, I didn’t think of it.
The consultant who saw me was a young, softly-spoken Nigerian chap. He came here from Nigeria last October, and was enjoying working in the hospital and the support and friendship he had received from his colleagues and co-workers there. And he told us he was very pleased that in the Britain the NHS funded some of this care.
This is the difference between this country and nations like Nigeria, or even America. America’s probably the richest nation on the Earth, at least at the moment, but Hillary Clinton and the rest of the American political class are stilling telling their people that the country can’t afford Medicare for all. The only person telling it like it is, is Bernie Sanders. And I don’t doubt their political class would like to do to him what ours have done to Jeremy Corbyn. They had one of his aides dismissed for supposed anti-Semitism, despite the fact that, like most of the victims of such smears in this country, she was Jewish, self-respecting and strongly involved with her community.
And if Sunak, Johnson and their friends get their way, they’ll make this country like America by privatising the NHS.
Okay, we all know exactly who Paul Joseph Watson is and what he stands for. He’s the far right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist who was fellow conspiracy nutter Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars before he split with him and returned to Blighty. He, along with Sargon of Gasbag and Count Dankula, brought down UKIP when they joined at the invitation of Gerald Batten. All the genuinely liberal, anti-racist members, who just hated the EU but not immigration and people of colour, complained and left, and the party imploded. But here the old adage about stopped clocks being right twice a day is probably right. And I’m going to give him his due credit.
Remember the brouhaha last year when someone blew up the Northstream pipeline or whatever it’s called, carrying Russian oil into Europe? Fingers have been pointed very firmly at Putin and Russia. But according to Watson, the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has found instead that it was the Americans. The bombs were supposedly planted during a NATO exercise in July last year by divers, and then detonated three months later by a sonar buoy. The purpose was to increase Europe’s dependency on American oil and prolong the war in Ukraine.
I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by Infowars, stupid, tabloid tales of 4-dimensional aliens, or demons, and how Barack Obama is the antichrist and Hillary Clinton a cyborg, the Democrats are imprisoning children in pizza parlours to be raped and abused at their conventions and the rest of the nonsense. But real conspiracies do exist, and Lobster has been covering them since the magazine was founded in the 1980s. This has the ring of truth about it, especially as the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president was arranged by the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there’s the story that the Ukrainian president was about to negotiate a peace deal until Johnson turned up to encourage them to carry on fighting. And it’s been confirmed that the Iraq invasion was about the West stealing the country’s oil. The information about the pipeline also comes from Seymour Hersh, who I think is a very well respected journalist rather than some kind of right-wing mouthpiece and fearmonger.
Watson’s therefore, in my opinion, right about this one, and also right about the way the story has been overshadowed by the reports of the Chinese spy balloons. It’s a pity that only people like him are noticing this.
That was the allegation made today in a video put up by Our Favourite YouTube ‘Historia’. Johnson was in one of the tabloids today giving Britain the benefit of his experience and talent in foreign affairs. I just saw the headline which was something about how Britain should give more aid to Ukraine as if it falls, Putin will be a threat to Europe. I didn’t read any more. It was in something like the Depress or the Scum or some other terrible rag, which isn’t worth reading. But apparently he had more to say. He wanted Ukraine to be admitted to NATO ASAP. Simon Webb over at History Debunked took this idea apart, showing that far from leading to peace or defeat for the Russians, it would instead probably lead to World War III. If NATO did admit Ukraine, then the next Putin attacked we would be required to counterattack by the terms of the treaty. You can see how this would expand into a direct war between NATO and Russia and the possibility that this would go nuclear very quickly. Putin and his aides have been making threats of a nuclear strike against the NATO countries, as well as threatening to invade Sweden if it joined NATO. One of the news articles that came up for me a little while ago on the news feed on my browser argued that Putin wasn’t bluffing when he made these threats. Elsewhere the group of scientists responsible for the Doomsday Clock showing how far away we are from nuclear Armageddon moved its hands forward to 90 seconds to minute. This places us in unprecedented danger, the group says. So what Johnson has said is so colossally stupid that the former Prime Minister should be nowhere near power. But what do you expect from him? This is the edit, you will remember, who started reciting the Road to Mandalay when on an official visit to Thailand’s holiest Buddhist temple. This is the nutter, who went off a diplomat mission to Moscow to soothe tensions with Putin, only to ramp them up even further at a press interview on his return. And there’s more and worse. There was a story going round last year that Zelensky was about to make a peace deal with Putin, only to persuaded otherwise when Johnson turned up to advise him.
Webb suggests that this suicidal belligerence from Johnson may come from the sorry state of affairs He, Rishi Sunak and Zahawi are in. Zahawi’s facing criticism and calls for an inquiry because he’s been dodging paying tax, Sunak got a loan from a Tory donor, who was then rewarded with a place at the Beeb and Johnson is similarly having his collar felt for breaches of ministerial conduct. Webb states that Johnson couldn’t have made these comments without approval from Sunak, and so this sabre-rattling is just to get us to look away from their personal corruption. I can see there being more than something behind this. One of the ways governments try to divert attention from domestic failures is to start a foreign policy conflict.
But there are other aspects to the Ukraine conflict which make it very clear that all is not as it appears. After the fall of communism, the west signed a deal with Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into the former eastern bloc and threaten Russia’s borders. But this is what NATO has done with the accession of Poland and other states. The Maidan Revolution which overthrew the pro-Russian Ukrainian president in favour of one who was pro-western, wasn’t a spontaneously democratic display of popular anger. It was carefully orchestrated by Victoria Nuland and Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, and the National Endowment for Democracy, the organisation that has taken over the CIA’s role in engineering regime change.
But there are dangers for rightists and ethnonationalists in following this line of inquiry. Before you know it, you could end up like the late American Nazi leader, Francis Parker Yockey. Yockey was a White supremacist almost straight out of the skits of the Blues Brothers and The Producers. He used to appear on Public Access Television in New York in the 1970s, seated wearing a blue uniform and motorcycle helmet and flanked by two of his storm troopers ranting his fascist nonsense. Not surprisingly, he was eventually kicked off air following complaints from Jewish viewers. Surprisingly for a raving Nazi, Yockey was a fan of the Soviet Union. He felt it was the great hope for the White race because it was still a dictatorship after the western nations had embraced corrupt democracy. There was a similar tendency over here in Nick Griffin’s BNP. There was a section of its membership and supporters that admired Colonel Gadaffy’s Libya.
Webb has posted videos suggesting that Britain needs a dictator for White Britain to survive and that we should be giving medals to particularly prolific women like the Nazis did. But the Soviet Union also gave out ‘Heroic Mother’ medals and there was a similar scheme by Mussolini as part of his ‘Battle for Births’. Putin is also a dictator, who is also keen on promoting national pride among his people, and he has succeeded in raising the Russian birth rate, which had been declining below replacement levels.
Putin’s a thug and a monster, but if you want to see where such ideas about nationalist dictators lead, they lead to people like him. If not worse.
This is shocking! Far-right YouTuber Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a piece yesterday attacking NATO’s warmongering, from the bombing of a TV station in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia to the Iraq invasion and the bombings of Libya and Syria. In his view, NATO is an aggressive force, and as two of the countries it attacked were allies of Russia, one of them being Syria, it is no wonder that Putin in his suspicious and hostile towards the west. He states, however, that he is certainly not a supporter of Putin either.
This is very much what left-wing critics of NATO have been saying, like the late, long-term critic of American imperialism, William Bloom and the Stop the War Coalition on this side of the Atlantic. I think Webb also may have been critical of the expansion of NATO until it’s on Putin’s doorstep. This may have been prompted by the Ukrainian president’s statement that his country is now effectively a member of NATO. But it wasn’t meant to be like this. The original agreement after the fall of communism was that NATO would not expand eastwards. Instead the newly independent states would remain militarily neutral, and their security would be guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. But NATO’s rapid expansion to include Poland and the Baltic States put an end to that and almost certainly provoked Russian fears of encirclement.
As for the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine that is one of the major causes of this fiasco through the overthrow of its former president, who favoured closer ties with Russia, this was definitely not a spontaneous public uprising. It was very carefully engineered by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland at the American State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the quango set up by the American government to engineer regime change after it was taken away from the CIA. Conservative critics of the war in Ukraine have also made the point that their president is as much a dictator as Putin, jailing opponents, banning rival political parties and closing down critical TV stations. Some of this is self-serving – both the British Conservative party and the Republicans in America under Trump benefited from Russian support and donations, but it is still nevertheless true. Of course, Ukraine has the right to protect itself and Putin’s invasion of a sovereign and independent state is wrong. But this seems to be a war between ruthless oligarchs and international geopolitics, rather than a defence of an independent, genuinely democratic nation. And Webb, appallingly right-wing though he is, is right to criticise NATO for its belligerence. And what is even more surprising is that some of his commenters actually know that its due to NATO’s bombing of Syria and the Middle East that we now have the migrant crisis. So, no nutters ranting about Jewish conspiracies and the Great Replacement, although I think they also turn up in the comments section..
Things aren’t looking good for Alex Jones, the mad Texan conspiracist theorist behind Infowars. Jones has been using his YouTube channel and website to push some very nasty conspiracy theories about how the world, and especially America, are under attack from ‘the globalists’. These are evil Communist, feminist, trans businesspeople determined to set up some kind of global one-world totalitarian superstate on behalf of evil aliens or demons or whatever. He’s pushed often dangerous nonsense about various prominent and not-so prominent politicians, organisations and ordinary people. He claimed that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ, and was going to use the laws providing for government action in emergencies to force everybody into FEMA camps to enslave Americans. Hilary Clinton was also Satanic, and was some kind of cyborg or robot, at least from the waist down. She was also impregnated with the spawn of some demon or alien or mixture of the two. Quite often this stuff was just so over the top that it’s the subject of ridicule and laughter rather than alarm, as when he claimed that they were putting stuff in the water that was turning the frickin’ frogs gay. But often it wasn’t, and the effects of his rants were dangerous and distressing to their targets. One example is when he claimed that a Boston pizza parlour contained a dungeon, in which children were being kept, to supply to leading Democrat politician to abuse. It was a complete lie, but it resulted in a gunman walking in to free the captive children. After being shown round the business and persuaded that there was no dungeon and no abused children, he put down his gun and gave himself up to the cops. It’s a mercy no-one was killed. Jones has been hit by a judgement for $1 billion in damages for libelling the parents of the schoolchildren killed in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones had claimed that the school shooting hadn’t really occurred and had just been staged in order to provide a pretext for the government to deprive Americans of their precious guns. The grieving parents were just ‘crisis actors’. The result was years of harassment by people, who had bought this offensive nonsense. They sued, the beak has found in their favour, and now Jones is crying that he’s bankrupt as a result. ‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum used to say.
Jones has published a book, in which he attacks the World Economic Forum and its leader, Klaus Schwab, now the target of right-wing conspiracy theories about shadowy organisations trying to create the one-world superstate. Private Eye reviewed it in last fortnight’s edition for 18th November to 1st December 2022. And they very definitely weren’t impressed. This is what they had to say about it
‘Toxic Schlock
The Great Reset and the War for the World
Alex Jones
According to Alex Jones, the gravel-voiced US conspiracy-monger, the world is facing a “Great Reset”. That reset is, he writes, an attempt by a shady cabal of internationalists “to achieve an unprecedented amount of control over your daily life.” To make sure he has the reader’s undivided attention, Jones warns that the whole thing “is a war to control the future of human development and capture control of the human species.”
These evil internationalists are, according to Jones, a group of technocrats and money men who have swilled around the world stage for the last 80 or so years. These evil plotters have names such as Kissinger, Rockefeller, Yuval Noah Hariri and Soros (and yes, there is an unfortunate pattern to those names. Between them, these men have spawned and sustained a new global elite, at the centre of which is the World Economic Forum at Davos.
For anyone lucky enough to be invited, Davos is essentially as piss-up0 in a posh ski resort. Jones’ view is somewhat different. The man who runs the thing, Karl Schwab, may look like a common-or-garden egghead but, we learn, he is in fact a very evil egghead, bent on global destruction. “Schwab and his Davos gang are interested in wiping out every one of the previously existing social structures that have guided the development of countries and nations,” says Jones.
He quotes from one of Schwab’s books, singling out a passing reference to “more agile forms of governance”. The phrase sends Jones into a horrified tizzy. “What are these ‘more agile forms of governance’?” he demands to know. “Summary execution by firing squad without the demand of a trial?”
The globalists have no moral centre, says Jones, and seeing as “God was the original insurrectionist”, it is up to every decent, freedom-loving citizen to stand up to the evil Davos cabal. They will take away your cars and your petrol, restrict your food supply, invent fake pandemics, lock you in your home, turn all money into digital tokens so your bank accounts can be frozen and — oh but this book is just so exhausting. So, so exhausting.
If you have not heard of the author, lucky you. A preposterous, ranting fatso, Jones is from the internet’s nether regions. Essentially a man with a website – the idiotically named “Infowars” – he’s made his reputation by parping out a vast, toxic guff-cloud of paranoid nonsense about lefty plots. This book is a distilled version of his bizarre world view, in which every government employee is a Hitler, anyone who wants to improve society is a fascist and our future will consist of “Karl Schwab, or his downloaded brain, giving us all orders from his laptop.”
Jones, then, is a maniac. As nice as it would be to pull the lever and flush him into the septic tank of history, he is not so easy to dismiss. A glimpse at the back cover of this book reveals a set of glowing endorsements. “If Alex Jones is just a crackpot,” one reads, “why are the most powerful people in the country trying to silence him?” It continues: “Maybe Alex Jones is onto something.”
That glowing endorsement comes from Tucker Carlson, the star turn on Fox News (prop: Rupert Murdoch). Jones, you see, has powerful fans who’ve noticed the sizeable, Trumpy audience he’s built. They want to keep him onside.
The quote now looks somewhat embarrassing for Carlson – and Murdoch. For years, Jones promoted a vile conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting, during which 26 people were murdered, most of them small children, had been faked. The grieving parents were actors, he said, and the whole thing had been staged to justify a left-wing attack on people’s gun rights. The parents sued and won. The court ordered Jones to pay damages of $1bn. That amount could rise farther.
So Alex, it turns out, is not “onto something”, and no one in their right mind should touch him, his website or this book with a bargepole. But this deranged nonsense does serve one purpose. It is a warning. The Americans are in the midst of a culture war, stoked by odious loudmouths like Jones and his buddy Carlson. The results include an increase in social division, the 6 January Capitol riots and a delusional young man attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
There are people in the current Westminster government and on Fleet Street, who have flirted with the culture war – some even whipping off their undies and hopping straight into bed with it. But as this book makes clear, culture war, with its “us-and-them” rhetoric, is an attack on the stuff that holds societies together. As someone once nearly said: trying to win a culture war is like to trying to win and earthquake. Britain should stay well clear.’ (p. 30).
The problem is that there are real issues threatening freedom in the west and around the world. This includes governments and big corporations harvesting personal information from the internet, including our purchases, and using electronic banking to track the way we move our money. Corporations and clandestine interest groups really do exist and attempt to lobby governments to their own ends. The conspiracy magazine Lobster has been documenting all this for years.
Jones and his nonsense points people away from these real threats and replaces them with dangerous fascistic nonsense.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, parts of the right have sympathised with Russia and argued against supporting Ukraine. I think Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters have put up a post raising issues about Ukraine and I believe that Peter Hitchens may have done so as well. This afternoon I found a short video on YouTube from American Republican politician Tulsi Gabbard, which, if true, raises significant questions why we should be supporting Zelensky’s regime. She claimed that Zelensky closed down three Ukrainian TV stations because they were criticising him, and that he banned the party that came second in the Ukrainian elections and imprisoned its leaders, all actions which Putin has been accused of doing. In the case of Putin, there’s little doubt: this is exactly what he has done. But there have been no reports over here of Zelensky doing the same, though this is not to say he hasn’t done them. One of Hitchen’s videos on the war is about what the media isn’t telling you. Gabbard in her video calls the people demanding support for Ukraine ‘warmongers’, which is surprising language coming from a Republican. But it’s no more surprising than the Tories opposing Blair’s invasion of Iraq. Some of them were no doubt opportunists, opposing the invasion simply because it was done by Labour, not themselves. But some of the Tories did oppose it from moral conviction, the best example being Hitchens, who has continued to denounce it and Blair. It’s possible that Gabbard is the same.
There’s a fair amount of self-interest in the Tory defence of Russia. Russian oligarchs have contributed handsomely to Tory coffers. In America Trump’s government also gave contracts and concessions to Russian firms, quite apart from the rumours that Putin had some kind of incriminating footage involving Trump from the Orange Man’s visit to Russia. And even if these accusations of dictatorial behaviour by Zelensky were true, they would not justify the Russian invasion and the atrocities Putin’s forces have committed. But they do raise questions about why we are providing military aid. Are we doing so simply because Ukraine is a sovereign nation, which is threatened with annihilation and dismemberment by a larger, more powerful former colonial master – Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and before then the Russian empire? Or are we backing it for the same reason the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy under Barack Obama, Hillary ‘Queen of Chaos’ Clinton and Victoria Nuland helped to orchestrate the the Orange Revolution of 2012? That had nothing to do with overthrowing an unpopular president, and everything to do with installing one who favoured the west rather than Putin’s Russia. These are serious questions that need to be answered. But I doubt we’ll get them through the mainstream news.
This is a very informative video I found on YouTube laying bare what was really behind the revolution in Libya against Colonel Gaddafi. And as we’ve seen with the Iraq invasion, this had absolutely nothing to do with liberating the country’s people from an evil tyrant. The real causes were Islamic politics in the Arab world on the one hand, and the desire of the French under Sarkozy to get their hands on Libyan oil. The video states that the uprising against Gaddafi was part of the Arab Spring series of revolutions and protests throughout the Arab world such as that against the military dictatorship in Egypt. These were hailed by the west as protests against tyranny. The rebellion against Gaddafi, however, was by moderate Islamic organisations and groups similar to the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. They were backed by Qatar as a way of increasing its power in the region and counterbalancing the extreme Islamists like ISIS backed by Saudi Arabia.
The presenter states that Gaddafi was a dictator, but under his rule the country kept control of its own oil and its people enjoyed a reasonable standard of living. The rebellion broke out in the east of the country, along the traditional fault lines between Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and a third region. Gaddafi’s forces were able to crush it in the most of the country, and were about to move on its centre when the Muslim rebels appealed to Sarko and the West for help. According to emails received by Hillary Clinton’s office, the rebels offered the French 35 per cent of the country’s oil if it would help to overthrow this Mad Dog of the Middle East. So Sarko and Blair sent in the planes to bomb the country, and Gaddafi was overthrown. He was kneecapped and sodomised with a stick before being shot.
Another reason Sarko wanted him gone was because Gaddafi was planning on ditching the North African Franc in favour of an African currency. If that had gone ahead, it would have meant France losing economic domination of the region.
The result of the revolution has been to split Libya in two, with one half backed by France, Syria and Russia and another backed by the West and the EU. Supplies of oil from Libya have collapsed.
In other words, it’s another revolution that was all about western imperialism and Islamic geopolitics than promoting liberty or democracy.
The presenter sounds Arab and the accompanying text contains the sources for the video, so it seems solidly based in fact, narrated by a person indigenous to the region.
With the threat of a confrontation between NATO and the Russians in Ukraine rising daily, I felt I had to put up this video. It’s from an interesting left-wing YouTube channel, Not The Andrew Marr Show, whose host wears the spangled jackets sported by game show entertainers of a certain vintage and who interviews some very interesting people. In this video he talks to Chris Nineham of Stop the War Coalition about an article Starmer has penned in the Guardian accusing Jeremy Corbyn and the Coalition of siding with NATO’s enemies. Nineham states that this resulted in an article in the New York Times, the most right-wing of Murdoch’s newspapers, praising the Labour leader. He also states that the coalition has received masses of support over the past few days, with new members flooding in and messages backing them piling up. He feels that the majority of British people don’t want war. As for NATO, he dismisses Starmer’s statement that NATO stands for freedom and democracy as illiterate. That isn’t what the invasion of Afghanistan was about, and it wasn’t what the Iraq invasion was all about. He also makes the point that Starmer has scored a point against himself, as Starmer claims that he marched against the Iraq War. Well, I realise that was nearly 20 years ago now, and that people can and do change their opinions. I’ve certainly changed mine, as I initially supported the invasion. But now, having read more about it, I’m convinced that the Coalition were absolutely right to oppose it. Just as they are right to oppose war in Ukraine. But Starmer’s opinions seem particularly flexible. I really wonder if he has any principles at all.
Nineham also makes the point that at the end of the Cold War NATO assured Gorbachev that they wouldn’t expand up to Russia’s borders. Which was immediately broken as a the former vassal states of the Soviet empire joined. Mike’s mentioned this in his blog post about this whole affair. Russia has for a long time had a fear of encirclement, dating back at least to the Communist era. When Communism collapsed in eastern Europe, Russia wanted an agreement whereby the former Communist countries remained neutral, respected by both parties, who would guarantee their independence and security.
And there’s much more that could be said. The Maidan Revolution of ten years ago wasn’t spontaneous, but run by Killary under Barack Obama and the National Endowment for Democracy, the non-governmental organisation the US government has outsourced regime change to after taking such murky affairs out of the hands of the CIA. They wanted the previous, pro-Russian president out, and a pro-western one in. Unfortunately, such covert schemes are only covered by radical YouTube channels like The Jimmy Dore Show and online conspiracy magazines like Lobster, so they’re easy to dismiss as conspiracy theories.
Mike in his blog post has said that there is much about the western arms build up that we haven’t been told. Like the stationing of nuclear-capable weapons. I’m sure he’s absolutely right. And I think some of our generals have been planning a confrontation like this for years. Way back c. 2015/16 a senior British general wrote a book predicting war between the west and Russia in Lithuania in 2017. Mercifully that didn’t happen, but it seems the threat and the theatre of war has simply moved south, away from the Baltic.
Nineham has also said that the Coalition has been inundated by people asking for news of local demonstrations. Well, we need them, even if our leaders look like they’re going to turn a deaf ear. Because all the talk about the use of nuclear weapons in Europe absolutely terrifies me. Putin’s a thug, and I don’t want the Russians to invade Ukraine. But I don’t want to see the world turned into a radioactive cinder just because of stupid geopolitics and the monstrous egotistical desire of Johnson and Biden to be seen as strong men countering the Russian threat.
Macron has got the right idea seeking a diplomatic solution.
At the moment it looks like Johnson and Biden’s sabre-rattling brings nothing but the threat of death and carnage.
You can say one thing for Tony Blair and his inclusion on this New Year’s Honours list, it’s united the British people in a way that’s rarely been done. Right across the political spectrum, from Corbynist left to Tory right, people despise him as a warmonger. The petition on Change.org to have him stripped of his knighthood has reached 650,000 signatures. Which I think means that it has to be debated in parliament. Unfortunately, as the mad right-wing internet broadcaster Alex Belfield has said in one his videos, there’s little chance of the politicos taking notice of it or doing what nearly three-quarters of a million people want.
Mike has pointed out that the people want him denied the honour because he took the country into an illegal war with the Iraq. The charitable interpretation of this is that Blair believed the fake information that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But rather than wait for a UN resolution authorising military action, Blair put pressure on his advisers to state that he could launch an invasion,, and then went ahead and acted according to the advice he’d decided he should be given. Nearly a million people have died as a result of the war that followed.
Less charitable individuals might follow instead the information in Greg Palast’s book, Armed Madhouse, which showed that the real reason behind the invasion was economic. The Neo-Cons wanted Hussein out the way because he occasionally sent aid and support to the Palestinians. The American and Saudi oil industry wanted to loot Iraq’s state oil industry and oil reserves, which are the largest outside Saudi Arabia. Western multinationals also wanted to get their mitts on the country’s state enterprises. And the Neo-Cons also had a plan to turn Iraq into the kind of free trade state with precious few tariff barriers against imports they wanted for America. The result was that Iraq’s oil is now in the hands of foreign countries, a situation authorised by the new constitution written for the country. Many Iraqi businesses went bust as a result of the lowering of tariff barriers, as the world dumped their surplus goods on the country at cheap prices. The country’s own businesses couldn’t compete and went out of business. The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 60 per cent.
The country had been relatively secular with a welfare state and, I believe, free healthcare for its citizens. This has vanished. Women were also safe on the streets and could follow a career outside the home. That vanished too. One of his Hillary Clinton’s female officials tried telling a crowd that things were actually better for Iraqi women during a diplomatic tour of Turkey. She was very definitely told the contrary by a group of annoyed Iraqi ladies. And domestically the country collapsed into bloody chaos. In Baghdad, peace walls had to be erected between Sunni and Shia Muslim areas. Sectarian death squads roamed the country looking for the wrong kind of Muslims to kill, with the cooperation of the American military authorities. The mercenary companies also employed as peacekeepers were also out of control. They ran drugs and prostitution rings, and their soldiers shot ordinary Iraqis for sport. One American diplomat to Iraq was so shocked that he came back to the Land of the Free to the tell the media all about it, including the Nazi regalia sported by some US squaddies.
Over 2 million severely normal Brits marched against the Iraq invasion. One of the priests at my local church was one of them. They were ignored. Just as Blair’s successor, Keef Stalin, is also keen that the government or Her Maj not rescind Blair’s knighthood. Apparently he gave some kind of speech listing all the good things that Blair had done, like winning three elections. Blair’s administration was responsible for some good policies. He would have liked to have privatised the health service, but under him it was still properly funded and he had some success in tackling poverty. But he was also responsible for the Work Capability Tests that have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled people wrongly judged fit to to work, and thrown off the state support they desperately need. All too many have died of starvation and neglect as a result.
And that still doesn’t remove the fact that Blair launched an illegal war and on that account is viewed as a war criminal by many. I bought a book a while ago, written by a lawyer, which made that very case. It went through the relevant international legislation and showed through repeated examples how Blair and Bush had violated it. There were even attempts by Canadian and Greek human rights activists to have the two arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity. This failed as it was successfully blocked by politicians and other officials.
The war also further destabilised the Middle East, setting up the conditions for the expansion of Iranian power into the Iraq, while at the same time radicalising parts of the country so they were taken over by Daesh. Who then went on to smash the monuments and sacred buildings of Christians, Shia and other religions they didn’t tolerate, and destroy priceless antiquities going back to ancient Babylon. This, along with the civil war in Syria, has also fuelled the refugee crisis. I’ve no doubt many of the channel migrants, or ‘dinghy divers’ as they’ve been dubbed by anti-immigrant right-wingers like Belfield, are people fleeing the chaos in Iraq. I am definitely no fan of Barbara Barnaby, the head of the British branch of Black Lives Matter. But she made a good point at a Corbynite Labour meeting last year when she said that Britain should admit these refugees because of our responsibility for the wars that forced them to leave their homes.
I’ve also heard the other side of the argument, that Blair should have got the knighthood after leaving office, as was customary for all prime ministers. He wasn’t. This has also caused a further problem, in that apparently they have to be granted to prime ministers in order. This has meant that Cameron hasn’t got one either and Tweezer hasn’t been made a dame or given some equivalent honour. The insult, on this view, is that it already has taken so long to grant Blair his honour.
Well, I still don’t think he deserves one. Just as I don’t think Cameron and Tweezer deserve honours either. Cameron held the vote on Brexit thinking it would fail and he’d defeat the Eurosceptics in the Tories. It didn’t. It narrowly won. However, it divided Britain. England largely supported it, while the Welsh, Scots and northern Irish rejected it. It’s breaking up the union and has particularly betrayed the people of Ulster. Both Loyalists and Nationalists wanted the border with Eire to remain open. The loyalists, as you might expect, also didn’t want a tariff barrier separating the Six Counties and the rest of the UK. An open border with Eire was one of the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the war in Northern Ireland. With Britain leaving the EU and the imposition of a hard border, instability and sectarian violence have returned. Speaking on the BBC comedy show, Room 101, Jeremy Paxman nominated Cameron to be sent into the room containing all the most horrible stuff in the world. Cameron was, declared the former bane of politicians on Newsnight, the worst prime minister we’d had since Lord North. He was the PM who lost us the American colonies.
My guess is that Blair will still get his knighthood. But millions of severely normal Brits will still hate him as a warmonger, the man who lied to us to get the illegal war he wanted, and sent Britain’s courageous young servicemen and -women to fight and die in decades of pointless war. I think Blair will still get the honour, but millions will still remember him as war criminal, and further resent the honours system that has rewarded him.
Bush and Blair were subjects of satire and ridicule when they started the war. Someone on the Net cut footage of various speeches and press gatherings by the duo to show them singing Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’. Which has the fitting lines ‘Let’s start a war. I want to start a nuclear war’. Let’s hope Blair and the world’s other politicians never do.
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