Let me start by explaining that the title does not refer to the sad buggers in forgotten communities who vote Labour out of force of habit, nor the careerists they vote for.
I’m dealing with those who bring city streets to a standstill waving terrorist flags and shouting anti-Semitic slogans. Antifa, BLM, and all the other representatives of grievance politics.
And the Quixotic beings forever battling ‘fascists’ and ‘transphobes’, ‘climate deniers’ and ‘Islamophobes’. Those who think the white man is genetically evil.
◊
IN THE BEGINNING
I’d considered writing something along these lines for a while, but the trigger for what you’re about to read was something that happened a week ago.
I put out a post on X that linked to Google maps to show the heat island around the Senedd, with nary a blade of grass to be seen near the building whose denizens want to plant trees everywhere . . . preferably on what today are working farms. It struck me as mildly hypocritical.
Among the responses was one from someone called Ben Wildsmith.
He seemed to suggest that vegetation does not grow near the sea. Making the marram grass of my childhood summers in Port Eynon a false memory. The palms lining tropical beaches, and trees running down to more northern shorelines, must be equally imaginary.
So I got to wondering about Ben Wildsmith.
Let’s give some background for what’s coming. At the Trump assassination attempt one man died after shielding his wife and daughter from the shooter, His name was Corey Comperatore, aged 50, and he was a firefighter.
In one of those theatrical gestures that Americans seem to like, Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, kissed the fire helmet of the dead man.
Which prompted Ben Wildsmith to put out this post on X. The message reads: ‘Yer Da kisses dead men’s helmets’.
‘Yer Da’ is Scouse for ‘your father’, and the rest is a crude reference to a human penis. However you think about it, it’s distasteful. I mean, is it addressed to Trump’s children? Or is it something really, really clever that’ll be understood by leftist necrophiliacs?
That helmet belonged to a man who put his life on the line in the job he did, and then gave that life to save his wife and daughter. Doesn’t he deserve better?
Well, no – because he was a Trump supporter. That means he can be ‘othered’, and vilified. Because that’s how too many in the modern left think. Including the brainwashed young man who tried to kill Trump. And this nutter.
Reminding us that those who urge ‘tolerance’ are often the most dangerously intolerant.
They suffer a kind of tunnel vision; which is never a good thing, unless perhaps you’re in a tunnel. But as long as sufferers stick together, they see no problem.
Take the July 4 general election. There were people in Wales celebrating a Tory-free Wales as if that was going to make everything better. Of course it won’t; but these people are so fixated on the Conservatives being the source of all evil that they’re incapable of seeing the truth.
Wales has had 25 years of socialist rule from Corruption Bay and it’s been disastrous. But everything’s gonna be fine now – because we’ve got no Tory MPs!
Ben Wildsmith was one of those rejoicing, in his Nation.Cymru column. Yes, Ben writes for that site funded by the ‘Welsh Government’. Ben also likes to think of himself as a poet and a musician.
◊
LOST
I believe the left in the Anglosphere started losing its way in the late 1970s. The answer to human misery was certainly losing ground in the UK then (partly due to over-reach), and this culminated in the Winter of Discontent.
Which helped Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives get elected in May 1979. Her position was then strengthened by an unlikely combination of an Argentine military junta invading some islands nobody’d heard of, and the antics of the extreme left.
In the USA, Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, but was not re-elected due to his administrations’s perceived weakness over the US hostages taken in Tehran. Republican Ronald Regan won the presidency in 1980, and was re-elected in 1984.
To cap it all, after years of obvious decline, but also thanks to a collapsing economy, and a costly and unpopular military intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union started falling apart in 1988/89.
This was crucial, so it’s worth considering how the end of Soviet Communism affected politics in the West. Or certainly, this is how I see it.
On the one hand, the US military-industrial complex had grown rich and powerful by holding up the Soviet bloc as an existential threat.
But in his farewell address in January 1961, less than three years before his successor, John F Kennedy, was assassinated, outgoing president Dwight D Eisenhower, warned:
. . . guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex
With the Soviet empire gone, those Ike warned against were left almost without a raison d’etre.
But with China not yet powerful enough to be a credible replacement there was little alternative but to stick with Russia. The regime had changed, but post-Communist Russia still had all those nuclear warheads. And a space programme.
Which posed a problem for the left, because since 1917 many socialists in the West had looked to Russia for inspiration, even orders.
Remarkably, the left, traditionally critical of US foreign policy in Latin America, Vietnam and elsewhere, eventually fell in with military-industrial complex thinking.
This was achieved because many leftists began to regard the new Russia under Yeltsin, and then Putin, as a betrayal. And when Putin came all out for nation, church, family, tradition, the left turned on him.
When he banned gay marriage the comrades became apoplectic.
Putin’s position on these matters also made him a target for the Globalists, who ridicule religion (but only Christianity), and seek to undermine the family unit, erase national differences, and destroy Western traditions.
This led to a fear among both Globalists and the military-industrial complex that the new Russia might serve as a dangerous example to the West. This became another reason to treat Russia as the enemy, and to villainise Putin.
And so it was full speed ahead to NATO encirclement of Russia, EU enlargement, the 2014 Kiev coup, provoke war in Ukraine and . . . I wonder what comes next?
Something else that must be understood about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it killed off any lingering belief in the Communist economic model. It just didn’t work. Few saw that more clearly than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The lesson for ‘our’ socialists was that their war against the corrupt and evil West would need to take a different form. Which meant cultural Marxism; initially the relatively benign ‘political correctness’, with this softening-up process leading to the mind-numbing idiocies of Wokeism that followed.
Yet Russia in the early 1990s, with its vodka-loving president, and gangsters fighting over state assets, was a bit of a shambles. In the public mind it was not perceived as the same threat as its superpower predecessor.
Other ‘threats’ were needed as a supporting cast.
◊
FOUND
In the UK, the initial cleansing under leader Neil Kinnock wasn’t enough to win Labour the general elections of 1987 and 1992. A complete re-brand was needed, and it came with Tony Blair and New Labour which, after victory in 1997, stayed in power until 2010.
New Labour was a kind of Margaret Thatcher tribute band.
In the USA, the left seemed to be largely incorporated into the Democratic Party, and to some extent de-fanged.
The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet empire, and with it the removal of a unifying focus for Western concerns, was also a problem for supranational bodies that like to influence public perceptions and political decisions.
The answer they came up with was ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’. This racket fulfils an almost identical role to the Cold War; because as well as focusing minds and frightening people, it’s used to dictate human behaviour, curb individual freedoms, and satisfy corporate greed.
And when it came to more immediate military ‘threats’, well there was a theatre company of sociopaths out there with dodgy moustaches . . . and oil. To raise the curtain, and stress the importance of oil, Saddam Hussein conveniently invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And as we soon learned from US and UK spokesmen, Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). People who knew that to be a lie were helped to commit ‘suicide’.
Perhaps Saddam felt encouraged to invade after the US had funded and armed his bloody war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. Done, not because the Americans had any liking for him, but because the Ayatollahs had deposed their Shah in 1979. And of course, as payback for the hostage crisis that so embarrassed the USA and brought down the peanut farmer from Georgia.
(Though rumours persist that certain US agencies dragged their feet over the hostages in order to make Carter look bad, and help former CIA boss George H W Bush get elected. What a thought!)
These forays into the lands of oil initially wrong-footed the left. Normally, the comrades would oppose Western powers invading countries over natural resources. But Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti was a difficult bloke to defend.
So by 2010 the left is onside with the thinking of the military-industrial complex agenda, has bought into the Globalists’ climate scam, and is open to adopting any lunacy that can be deployed to challenge Western values and institutions.
With a Conservative government returned in 2010 the left felt it was time to flex its muscles again.
◊
RE-PURPOSED
In the USA, blue collar workers and southern whites had been switching to the Republicans for some time. And this continued under Obama.
While in the UK, many lower-paid workers had lost their fear of voting Tory with Margaret Thatcher, some moving to even more ‘exotic’ destinations on the right.
Which meant that Labour and Democrats needed to replace these lost voters. In the USA there was a push to register more voters from minority groups. But that took a dangerous turn when the left started arguing that to ask voters for ID was ‘racist’.
Now, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, we’ve seen Democrats demand that undocumented, illegal migrants be allowed to vote.
The thinking behind this is pretty obvious.
The military-industrial complex may have taken shape to further US imperial ambitions and enrich US corporations, but it soon spread its influence to UK politics, and NATO.
For as Tom Paxton put it in Daily News:
Ban the bombers are afraid of a fightPeace hurts business and that ain’t right
At its simplest . . . corporate America gains from making the weapons for the military. The quicker the products are used, and replaced, then the bigger the profits.
But the military-industrial complex also profits from ‘rebuilding’ the countries wrecked by the weapons it’s produced.
This report from 2005 explains how Halliburton did it in Iraq. And with the fighting still taking its bloody toll along the Dnieper BlackRock and JPMorgan have been quick off the mark to set up a Ukraine Reconstruction Bank.
Globalist corporations profiting from a war the USA engineered in order to support the most corrupt regime in Europe. What’s more, Ukraine’s been corrupt for a long time.
As I’ve reported before, the head of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, wants “governments, businesses and non-governmental organizations” to have the power of compulsory purchase over farms and other private property.
Should that happen, then WWW, or Radnorshire Wildlife Trust, or even Bute Energy, could throw you off your land, or out of your home – to save the planet.
When they’re not supporting the US military-industrial complex and the most corrupt country in Europe, the comrades are promoting the Globalist land grab agenda of Jamie Dimon and his buddies.
As I’ve said before, 2016 saw the process ratcheted up because, through Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the lower orders had proven themselves to be both stupid and racist. The gloves were off.
Which is why we are where we are. And seeing the West so weak, socialists may think their time has finally come. But I believe their time has come, and gone.
The entitled, attention-seeking clowns, with their half-baked ideas, have become an embarrassment. Certainly Ed Miliband thinks so. The days of performance socialism may be coming to an end. People have had enough.
◊
FINISHED
Miliband is close to those hoping to benefit from net zero, carbon capture, and all the other elements of the climate scam. So he may not just be speaking for himself.
But anyway, it’s not just Miliband, there are other signs that something is changing. Just look around. Can’t you smell it!
There are governments in Europe hanging on for dear life, dreading the next election. The UK has a government with no real mandate. France seems to be falling apart. The West is being flooded with ‘refugees’ who are nothing of the sort. Following an assassination attempt on the man likely to be the next US president, there was a palace coup to remove the incumbent!
All because people are waking up to the truths. They know they’ve been lied to in so many ways, and for too long. Those who’ve lied to us are getting worried.
Change is inevitable. Possibly major change.
Finally following Ike’s advice and reining in the military-industrial complex, curbing the power of the Globalists, and dealing with the clowns who serve their agendas without realising it, is the best hope for a just, peaceful, and prosperous world.
But if it’s too late and the worst happens; then when you see that mushroom cloud, you can at least console yourself by knowing there are no Tory MPs in Wales.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2024
Unfortunately I cannot go to Pontypridd next week for the Eisteddfod Hwyl for personal reasons.
I love wandering around the main MAES and meeting people young and old. The stalls are generally of such quality.
Can anyone report back on a few things:-
Did you visit any stall run by Plaid Cymru? Was it pushing Renewable Energy and Bute Energy in particular. Did you challenge Plaid about Bute? Please report back to us via Jac.
Climate change is a cycle, the world has been here before
So English Labour have taken the axe to what little the Conservatives put in place towards investment in a practical alternative to car use, the Restoring Your Railway Fund. All the while the Taphydom Branch Office spouts slogans about saving the environment. They really are a duplicitous band of cunts aren’t they? Right from the top down, Knee-er Starmer and his smug-faced ginger tosser of a lieutenant.
Let’s get back to Bute Energy and the present silence as our country is going to be racked to landscape ruin to serve the electric demand of English cities.CPRW is a charity, Campaign for Protection of Rural Wales, set up many years ago to campaign to protect the rural landscape of Wales from intrusive developments such as today’s wind turbines. CPRW other than advocating the Celtic Sea as a generating wind zone is silent .
The Open Spaces Society OSS is a very well-known UK organisation, set up a very long time ago, to protect open-access heathlands and commons from enclosure and developments.
They have both recently been surprisingly fairly silent over the proposed enclosures and development of vast areas of Wales for so-called “green” energy schemes claimed to save the planet from climate change. Bute Energy is but one example.
In my opinion, they are basically ‘do-gooders’, not wishing to offend the ‘keen to be seen as green’ politicians who are madly propelling us towards unachievable zero carbon within a decade.
It is today a virtual ‘blasphemy’ to disagree with any form of renewable energy development. If anyone objects the ‘greens’ rudely call them ‘deniers’.
Here in my village we fought for 25 years to save Mynydd y Gwair Common in north Swansea from 300ft-high plus wind turbines – each with a service road made of rubble and fences and cable runs – it has devastated the area.
Their output here is just an average of 8MW or 8,000 old fashioned single-bar electric fires. They persistently claim it to be 32MW capacity (which is maximum in a persistent strong steady high wind force) – whereas often it is simply nil on calm days.
Y Bryn – between Neath and Maesteg – was once ravaged by coal mines and is soon to be swallowed up by a mass of wind turbines 820ft tall, to be developed by a wind developer that is part of the state owned nationalised power company of the foreign Irish republic government reaping huge UK subsidies creating erratic power.
It will be equivalent to ‘taxing’ us, the UK energy-consuming residents, by levies on our energy bills to subsidise the Irish republic state budget, and yet nobody much is complaining. Google Irish utility Electricity Supply Board (ESB).
This new UK state energy business, now proposed by Starmer and Miliband, Great British Energy, GBE, is nothing new.
The Irish already operate a state-owned wind turbine complex between my village and Ammanford on Betws Mountain, next to Mynydd y Gwair.
Nearly all wind turbines (and solar panels) are manufactured overseas in Denmark and Germany (solar panels in Spain and China – with child labour used in foreign lands to mine essential molybdenum).
Now, the most ultra-devastating proposal, is many, many hundreds of wind turbines each 820ft tall all the way down the spine of upland Wales – Google Bute Energy – with pylon lines taking out the erratic power to English cities – Google Bute Energy for one example.
Some of this major development is to be massively bankrolled as an investment by the Welsh local government workers pension fund. Let’s hope the bubble does not burst.
There already is a firm proposal to alter the UK National Grid to accept such erratic power from the remote hills of Wales.
Google and regularly check for free Gridwatch UK.
All this is to save us from exaggerated climate change in an insane rush to carbon zero when UK’s contribution to carbon is so globally minimal – and Wales’ contribution to global carbon is so small it cannot be calculated easily – especially after the last Port Talbot blast furnace imminently closes.
Go for a walk along the coast at Swansea and Gower to see submerged forest remains at low tides and raised beaches along the coastal path – proof of major changes in climate and sea levels throughout history – far more recent than geological times.
Tell your grandchildren the legends of Cantre’r Gwaelod, and its bells, and the tale of Seithenyn.
National Grid is also having a laugh at gullible us, the UK public, in saying that when the wind does not blow and the sun don’t shine (as every night) we can turn to our overseas friends to send us electric via massive undersea international connectors (that already exist in small versions). So, when we get a severe winter, when all of Europe is desperately trying generally to keep warm, we can ask France; Germany; The Republic of Ireland; Holland and Denmark to send us several Giga Watts of their own over stretched power, via undersea cables. Surely in a calm very cold freezing January night they will want all their own energy for themselves. We might as well beg Russia for some help from Siberian Solar Panels! Then there’s talk of costly storage batteries. How big will they be? They also glibly say nuclear, when the last practise needed is to play about ramping up and down our own existing stable nuclear fission reactors. Oh, I forgot the promised Solar Panels for the UK talked about siting them in an Algerian desert via undersea connection, but dash it, they are on a fairly similar longitude night time zone as the UK! Can anyone explain all this to the National Grid and our UK Energy Minister Ed Miliband MP and most members of our own Senedd? I think all these pseudo ‘greens’ have been partaking of loony lunar moonshine.The only moonshine I know that works comes in a proof bottle from a remote secret village in western Ireland.
What happens when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining?
I just checked GRIDWATCH UK at 11pm tonight Thursday 1st August 2024 in mid summer. GRIDWATCH shows on set times the sources of power in the UK Grid. It showed just 7% Wind Power and 2% Coal Power. Can anyone challenge or explain that?
Post-Soviet Russia has a military-industrial complex too. I’m told by someone who visited lately that factories are engaged in Stakhanovite efforts for the Motherland, turning out Kalashnikovs 24/7. More cynical Russians are viewing Putin’s military activities as a long-planned attempt at Keynesian reflation post-Covid. The consensus for stalemate in Ukraine suggests neither side would be happy to see sales dropping off any time soon.
You don’t think it was just a crude play on words? By someone who, like about 50% of the USA, doesn’t like Trump?
Had I seen it on Twitter I really wouldn’t have made any connection to where the said helmet came from. It’s just a “knob gag”, nothing more
‘Play on words’.How? Not sure how Trump’s popularity is relevant. We’re talking about a dead man.
But the knob gag is at Trump’s expense. The helmet (snigger) could be from anywhere. Like kissing the Pope’s ring, or that classic Carry On line “have you seen my Dick” (Turpin, if I remember correctly)
its just someone who doesn’t like Trump, and there are many of them, making a crude joke
Yes, it’s a crude and tasteless joke. But it involves a man who was murdered. Which for me, puts it beyond the Pale. (This is getting like the famous, ‘Do you you think I’m funny?’ scene from Goodfellas.)
Never seen Goodfellas!
Knob jokes are crude and tasteless. Viz is full of them. This one works irrespective of the type or where the helmet came from, as the subject of the joke is Trump. It’s literally Trump kissing someone’s helmet, made doubly funny as it’s not even photoshopped or done with AI. He really did it, he kissed someone’s helmet!
It cannot be a term used in the US otherwise I’d hope his PR people would’ve stopped it. You can just imagine the headlines in the red tops “Trump on stage with massive helmet”
Maybe it’s a generational thing? Too much time watching Channel 4 in the 80’s
A generational thing!!
Anyway, here’s a link to the scene I mentioned.
One good thing to come from the emergence of Kamala as the Democratic Party candidate is that there will be an endless supply of recycled (and some new) gags about the real and imaginary flaws of both candidates. Trump never really had a wide variety of quips or gags about Joe but Kamala presents him with an opportunity to refresh his stock. Equally Kamala has come flying out of the blocks which suggests that she had been preparing stuff for weeks in the hope, or expectation, that Joe would either keel over or see sense.
I’m not sure Joe keeled over or saw sense. He was told he was standing down. The decision was made for him.
Harris is such a vacuous clown that she’ll have a rocky ride just being herself, she won’t need much outside help. One of her weak points is what is currently being pushed as her main selling point – her colour. A bitch from the ‘hood. Truth is, her mother was Indian (from India) and her father, while coming from Jamaica, was of indeterminate ancestry. But it’s being widely reported that in her father’s genetic mix is an Irish or Scots-Irish slave owner named Brown. And of course, she moved to Canada when she was 12 and spent her teenage years there.
Her political career got a lift up with regular leg overs. When she was mistress to SF mayor, Willie Brown, a powerful party boss. He was of course married and 30 years older. Already, she’s being picked up on her record as Attorney General in California. She put hundreds in prison – for cannabis offences. She kept prisoners in when their sentences had expired – to use as cheap Labour for the state. Then there’s her support for the campaign to ‘Defund the police’ after the George Floyd riots. Finally, she was in charge of the southern border. Belatedly, Democrats have accepted that illegal immigration is an issue with their voters.
Finally, there are rumours that RFK jr, the third party candidate, will abandon his campaign and endorse Trump. Some may say, ‘So what?’, but it will definitely have an impact. To begin with, he’s a Kennedy. And as he’s said many, many times, he knows who killed his uncle Jack. The same deep state that is now enmeshed with the uniparty and desperately trying to stop Donald Trump.
This election may settle nothing. It could be the most bitter the USA has seen since 1860. And we know where that led.
RFK giving any kind of backing to Trump will suck a lot of breath out of the Democrat effort. He may, or may not, be up to much but his family name has a certain magic that latter day bums like the Clintons and even the Bush “dynasty” crave. Indeed the Bush crew have much to fear if Trump or anyone else lifts the lid on the JFK assassination.
What are the Globalist’s / Leftist’s beeves with the nuclear family, praytell?
The nuclear family is an alternative focus of loyalty. All totalitarianisms are suspicious of the nuclear family. More practical considerations might be the transfer or inheritance of wealth and land that happen within families.
That’s along the lines of what I was thinking. Individualism’s immediate priority is those closest to the self, as inferred by the phrase ‘you and yours’. Religion, family, self-betterment and the nation all fly in the face of obedience to that homogenised and abstract concept of ‘workers of the world’.
Hence, given that we’d all offer our very best in efforts towards the comfort and happiness of ourselves, our kin and to some degree our nation, the heavy hand is required to ensure efforts are instead directed towards the benefit of ‘the people’, when communism is scaled up to anything larger than, well, a commune.
It’s a silly and dangerous game. BAME tries to bring together people and cultures that have nothing in common other than they are not white, not of European background. Which then tells you that it’s a very crude attempt to gang up on Whitey. A form of racism.
Conflating the expansion of NATO with the exansion of the EU as anti-Russian aggression is just plain silly. Some members of the EU aren’t even in NATO and the EU had very good relations with Russia before the war in Ukraine. It was even suggested, at one time, that Russia could join the EU at some future date.
The USA only took an interest in the war when the price of gas in the EU fell below the price of gas in America. This is when Biden started raving about how unfair it all was that the EU was buying cheap gas from Russia. This was followed by the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Americans trying to coerce Germany into buying American LNG and American warplanes.
The spike in gas prices that followed soon fell back as the EU sourced gas from other countries ( mainly Norway ) so US dreams of destroying the EU economy by fighting a never-ending war in Ukraine came to nothing. Having been thwarted economically by the EU while at the same time losing its proxy war in Ukraine the US ( i.e. Biden ) started having litlle rants about how unfair it all was that US producers were being undercut by the Chinese etc. – while promising to protect Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
Are you starting to see a pattern yet ?
Switching to your comment on NATO, it was effectively dead in the water before the war in Ukraine and, despite what you made read in the English language media, it still is. In Europe it is generally seen as a tool of the Americans, designed to drag their (subordinate) allies into yet another proxy war. There is widespread talk in Europe about forming a new alliance – without the Americans. Nobody trusts the Americans any more – this is why, for example, warships from the EU are working independently of the US/UK led ‘alliance’ in the Red Sea.
America’s problem is that it is no longer the global superpower it used to be. In terms of population (330 m) it is far smaller than China (1412 m), India (1417 m) and even the EU (440 m); its role as a reserve currency has fallen from 85% in 1975 to 58% in 2023, and large parts of the globe completely ignore US ‘sanctions’ on trade. If the BRICS countries ( 46% of the world’s population) continue their move to de-dollarisation the US economy will suffer even more.
America is following the UK in post imperial decay. In the same way that the geriatric generation reached out to Brexit, so it could have blue passports, bendy cucumbers and wave two fingers at hated foreigners, so the same demographic reaches out to Trump.
Unfortunately for them the world is changing. American youth is becoming increasingly anti-capitalist, BRICS ( 6 counries waiting to join ) and the EU ( 8 countries waiting to join ) are growing and socialists are gaining power in places like France and the UK.
You can sob into your tea and gingernuts as much as you like, it won’t make any difference. All your vision for the future holds is the prospect of soggy biscuits.
A splendid contribution, Ifor, hard-hitting, humorous, no more or less than I would expect from you. But you’re way off target. I wrote about what I believe has happened over the past 40 or 50 years, what’s brought us to where we are today. Then I expressed some hopes for the future. But you wanted to focus on how you see the future unfold.
I appreciate that the interests of the USA do not always align with the best interests of Europe. More people should have listened to De Gaulle 60 years ago. Or read Servan-Schreiber. Or listened to the recording of Victoria Nuland organising the Kiev coup in 2014 – “Fuck the EU“.
I also appreciate the significance of BRICS, and the dollar’s loss of importance. And yes, Russia now refers to itself as a ‘Eurasian’ country, which perhaps it has been since the Russians spread south and east. But for me, Russia is part of our European civilisation, and with Communism gone there was a wonderful opportunity to forge new links with Russia.
Though I was disappointed to read you talk about size. If the size of a country’s population was what counted, then Britain would not have taken over India, and Chine would have had an empire like France. Come on, Ifor, you know better.
But what really hurt, was this: ‘America is following the UK in post imperial decay. In the same way that the geriatric generation reached out to Brexit, so it could have blue passports, bendy cucumbers and wave two fingers at hated foreigners, so the same demographic reaches out to Trump.’ Simplistic, at best. ‘Bendy cucumbers’! I thought I was voting for BBB, Brexit and bendy bananas. I feel cheated! Let’s have another referendum!
And this is how you end your contribution: ‘You can sob into your tea and gingernuts as much as you like, it won’t make any difference. All your vision for the future holds is the prospect of soggy biscuits.’ Brute!
When your blog post says about Putin that “when he banned gay marriage” that is not true. Gay marriage has never been legal in Russia. When a court case to allow it was taken to ECHR a formal ban was legislated in the form of “Family Code of Russia”. It was signed into law in 1995 by Boris Yeltsin not Putin. Whilst Putin who tries to take the credit and the ant-Putin left in the west tries to pin it on him. He was, in fact, not the president who banned gay marriage.
I stand corrected. But this is more evidence that my mate Vlad gets blamed for lots of things he’s never done. I think a lot can be attributed to the Orthodox Church which, since it re-emerged from the Communist regime, has been exerting considerable political influence. And unlike the Western churches it is very conservative.
Yes. The Russian Orthodox Church is used as a financial conduit for corruption and the oligarchs under Yeltsin. The chaos years. Not subject to tax or state financial reporting. United Russia, his party, and Putin saw this as an opportunity to consolidate his power and he now controls that turf. It was also a method for Putin to by-pass and eventually remove some oligarchs in his way. Doubt if it was some kind of epiphany. Often used by the KGB, him being a former officer, has always been the ‘gay’ leverage, bribery, extortion and eliminate opponents. Even an accusation as it’s difficult to prove you’re not in a court of law, and keeps the priests on side. Classic KGB operator.
All you say may be true, to some extent. But the consensus seems to be that Putin is a genuine Christian.
You mean the kind of guy who gets rich while preaching the virtues of poverty ? Hard to find genuine Christians these days, I’ve almost given up looking for those who just share Christian values. Perhaps that’s a major factor in how easily the Religion of Peace has penetrated our society. It’s like a rampant active virus invading a sick declining body.
Up to a point. The ‘Religion of Peace’ is growing not because it’s gaining new adherents but because its followers are being encouraged to flood the West.
It’s also reactivating earlier settlers in this country who seemed to have been quite passive in their adherence and observance of that faith. Then along comes the newer generation of very dodgy motivations and they are rekindling interest and adherence among those earlier settlers. Very disconcerting to hear tainted folk with Yorkie accents blabbing on about imposing sharia shit on entire UK.
Sleeper cells are how jihad works. If there’s no opportunity, just look normal. Once the opportunity is there, it becomes a religious obligation to grasp it. Once you have the numbers to make your own opportunities…
Sleeper cells are specifically for terror and similar covert operations. The “mainstream” insurgent activity is mostly run through religious channels and as religion permeates most aspects of life in those communities it works well at stirring mob responses like those we’ve seen over recent days.
Pardon me for using the language of assorted deranged ishoo driven militants, but it’s possibly the only way to succinctly describe a lot what seeks to inflict itself on the more passive majority that is just getting on with life in this world.
“Intersectionality” seems to be a key feature. If you “hate” capitalism cos it doesn’t give a fair shake to ethnic minorities then you are obliged to share the “hate” of those who think that the internal combustion engine will cause the end of the world. It’s a short leap in the minds of these people to bind closely with militants “representing” chixwivdix, Jewish/Israel hate groups, asylum seekers, etc etc. Seldom if ever do the “needs” of the ordinary working man or woman get a mention as they are considered unworthy of the effort when there are higher aspirations to be pursued.
Perhaps you can persuade an advocate of this cauldron of confusion to come on site and give his/her/their side of it.
I don’t think ‘intersectionality’ was anything more than an attempt to give the impression that assorted grievance groups had something in common, to combine their voices, and pretend the system was oppressing them all. Of course, it took some ludicrous turns, such as ‘Gays for Palestine’. On the surface it may sound a fine example of solidarity, but when you think about it . . .
An advocate of your ‘cauldron of confusion’ would probably offer little more than a paragraph of screamed slogans.
“People of Colour” being a pertinent example. It’s so ‘all-encompassing’, it even reaches back around to those who are fair-skinned but have some degree of ethnic heritage. Meg-Hag Markle made some point about her and Haz’s kid being ‘of colour’ in that interview she did with Oprah, which is patently ridiculous when you consider she can pass complexion-wise for perhaps Mediterranian and he’s a ginge, ergo the kid is not likely to be ‘of’ any colour but white. These idiots ironically are repurposing old racist tropes of One Drop, quadroons, and the like from the Slave Trade days.
I prefer to call her Meghanlomaniac.
It’s that superfluous ‘H’ in the middle of her name I can’t stand. An apt metaphor though given her husband is a supefluous H.
Intersectionality is the basis for oppression points: all oppressed are equal but it would be equitable to acknowledge that some are more oppressed than others. Bingo might be the autistic black transbian in a wheelchair, who recreationally identifies as a cat. A more deadly example is refusing to challenge homophobia or misogyny among the Submitted if ending Yankee imperialism is the higher priority.
We’re moving towards a world in which everything counts but ability, and when we get there everybody will suffer. Except those who’ve encouraged this descent into chaos. They’ll step in with the solution – them!
And I thought Trump supporters were paranoid.
Looking at the world as a whole, I think that many people are confusing Zionism with Judaism. As I understand it, by far the majority of Jews are NOT Zionists.
Anti semitism does not refer the Jews only.
Palestinians are also semites, as are Arabs and other peoples of the Middle East.
It still interests me that we seem to accept that so many people do not do the job for which they draw their salaries.
We now have an administration which was in opposition for 14 or so years.
Suddenly on July 5th, the new administration has all the answers.
What happened during the 14 years they were in opposition, drawing large salaries for just saying –
‘We wouldn’t do that’
To everything the party in power did or suggested.
Were they anti British or what?
Surely it is the duty of an opposition to put forward suggestions for what they believe would be a better way of doing things.
For the good of the country not just the politics of objecting.
Everybody in opposition has answers.
I take your point about the terms ‘Semitic’, and ‘Zionist’; but to try to explain them to Charlotte Church and her crew would test the patience of that Old Testament bloke, whassisname.
Get a job!
As Chuck Berry sang, ‘Goes to show you never can tell’.