The greatest boost ever received by Islamic fundamentalism was the invasion of Iraq. Closely followed by extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and drones, and Israeli bombings of Gaza. All of those things lead some Muslims to believe a violent response by terrorism is required to defend themselves. So for Tony Blair, who has promoted huge hatred and caused unnumbered deaths through a career of deceit and self-enrichment, to warn about the dangers of Islamic terrorism is something nobody but a few Guardian and Murdoch acolytes wish to hear.
Blair of course has many tens of millions stuffed into his capacious back-pocket by oligarchs from the ex-Soviet space, so it is unsurprising to hear him call for understanding between Russia and the West. It is even more to form that this understanding should be based on joint hatred of Muslims.
There is an alarming failure by many in the UK to understand that Russia is an Empire. Russia’s Asian possessions were taken by invasion from their indigenous and Muslim populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at precisely the same time Britain was taking its own colonies. The Russian conquests were no less colonial from the accident of geography that they were contiguous. Dagestan and Chechnya were only conquered in the 1830’s. Most of Tartarstan later. The “Islamic fundamentalist threat” Russia faces jointly with the UK, is actually the struggle of colonized peoples for their freedom.
Blair includes China, which likewise is the colonial occupier of the Uighurs and other suppressed Muslim populations. To conflate the struggle for freedom from colonial occupation of these people with an over-reaching monster of “Islamic terrorism” is part of Blair’s trick. His examples in Africa are again born of despair from the consequences of centuries of colonial and now neo-liberal exploitation. I find his pronouncements on Boko Haram ironic, given that Blair’s single biggest legacy is to move the United Kingdom close to Nigerian standards of equality of wealth distribution.
The extraordinary thing is that Blair is somebody so hate-filled he wants to see yet more hatred, killing and violence. It is worrying that the establishment media are so happy to promote his view without providing any balancing opinion. I comfort myself that the real motive of this silly speech was that, other than his media acolytes, absolutely nobody cares what he is saying. It wasn’t so much a speech as a public display of ADD.
A final note though, the wee Village of Ellenabeich, is a wonderful place… we sat oot under the Black Starry sky.. listening to the music of big Atlantic Rollers… And a wee dram of course…. Bliss man. (Brian)
I know the place well. Lived for a long time nearby, and have sat on slaty beaches getting gently pished many times. Glad you like. Re. C. John, glad you don’t like. But he made enough out of his coach-party crap – a – thon to spend most of the year on a cruise liner… MORAL: never overestimate the intelligence of the average punter, and outsource your horrible ceramic goods to Korea. 🙂
Garbage – anyone with half a brain would realise that there is a lot more human biodiversity in European nations than used to be the case – and jolly good thing too. (Res Diss)
Anyone with a whole brain would require some numbers in support of that. And maybe a definition of “European nations”.
the second sentence contradicts the first, and although I am not a trained biologist I’m pretty sure that Darwin didn’t say that evolution juts happens – are you sure that your English university was that decent, or perpahs you have just forgot what you were taught.
Jemand has dealt with that in sufficient detail to confirm that he went to a decent university and hasn’t forgotten much. But what Darwin said is no longer the sole criterion – if it ever was – for our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. This is not a question of “The Origin of Species” vs. The Holy Bible. It’s about observable phenomena and their parsimonious interpretation. Which in this case leads to the conclusion that as there is no observable purpose or direction to evolution other than that imposed by the environment of the organism, it’s something that just happens. Hope that’s about right, Jemand.
I don’t know Simon Ostrovsky. I know the CIA pays journalists as agents. But that does not make him an agent. And I am glad he is free. There are too many people who are held without charge all over the world, and the UK is as culpable as any in this respect.
If Simon Ostrovsky is a descendant of the great Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky his literary pedigree is from the best stock. Ostrovsky wrote among other plays a version of Snegurochka, an old Russian folk tale about a snow girl. I used the Ostrovsky idea of the birth of Snegurochka for a musical called appropriately ‘Snegurochka – Snowgirl’ which was staged Christmas 2006 at the Library Theatre, Birmingham. Dan Rodger wrote some of the music but we also used music from Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi’s themes for winter and spring and folk music from the great Irish composer and blind harpist, Ferlough O’Carolan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-I11_yC1c
Ostovsky created the idea that Snegurochka was born out of a union between Grandfather Frost and Mother Spring which I thought was the best of the stories about her origin. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky Korsakov were also inspired by Ostrovsky’s lyrics.
BZ, yeah that’s about right. But we might also say that the complexity of evolutionary dynamics is probably more like a Mandelbrot function where aggregated simple processes are repeated and permutated at different scales to form complex subsystems within larger systems. Studying these systems at any scale reveals interesting similarities.
Systemic contraints act as filters to produce competetive outcomes. If a system has no constraints (ie unlimited resources) then that would eliminate competition, radical diversity and eventually all diversity. But such a system is impossible because a system is inherently defined by its constraints and in the absence of constraints there would be pure chaos, not order/structure.
In the case of cultural and ethnic diversity, constraints are necessary in order to preserve attributes that are vulnerable to domination and eventual elimination. See how the French are trying to preserve their national language against a global trend towards adopting (American) English as the world’s lingua-franca. Bloody French.
Anyway, that’s my two pennies.
Glad you mentioned Mandelbrot, Jemand. When I got keenly interested in the dynamics of evolution (at a decent English university), chaos (in the self-organising system sense) was not so well recognised as a useful descriptor, and like most conventional economists, writers on palaeoevolution were still looking for cycles. They found them of course…Milankovich and the rest are visible in the fossil record…but just as in economics, the base model has to accomodate multiple independent variables and sensitive dependence on initial conditions; and the power spectra of origination/extinction time series definitely have fractal dimensions. So, yes.
It was Mandelbot, I’d add, maybe unnecessarily, who analysed cotton prices in the US and found that they were scaling. More recently he found financial data could be more generally described in terms of multifractals. Very pretty multifractal here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifractal_system
A comparable non multi- fractal would give simple spirals
BZ, thanks for the link.
Canspeccy, nature is cleverer that the eugenicists were. That’s why they all but disappeared.
No Clark, the eugenicists are alive and well busy destroying the nation state, a racial, cultural and religious aggregation of humanity that is the chief obstacle to global control by the plutocratic elite. Craig and his acolytes are among their many mouthpieces.
CanSpeccy, 4:56 pm: excellent paper; thanks. I still don’t think that the Vietnamese should be confined to Vietnam, or even excluded from England, in an attempt to preserve your favourite shape of young women’s noses.
Clark, You’re referring to “The network of global corporate control” ?
Anyhow, I’m glad we agree about something.
The charm of the Vietnamese female nose, was actually pointed out to me by a Vietnamese girl — a claim with which, on reflection, I felt compelled to agree.
But that minority of Brits who want to live in a society of high human diversity should consider migrating to Canada or Australia or Florida where they will find an irreversibly multi-racial society, albeit well on its way to homogenization.
But by seeking to impose on the English a eugenic program of racial miscegenation that a huge majority of the population opposes, you are seeking to destroy one of the founts of diversity upon which a diverse society must depend for constant renewal.
Canspeccy/Jemand
My point was about their being much more human biodiversity within European nations which is something I stand by – and I don’t believe it is destroying those nations in fact on the whole it is a force for good. Opening peoples brains up to other competing ideas is on the whole a good thing – and is the way societies and cultures have progressed in the past – and I should add that isolated mono cultures don’t score particularly well on that score. That is not to say that all competing ideas and cultures are good – I am no supporter of fundamental Islamism or any other religious fundamentalists for that matter, but again history shows that such tendencies are exposed and ultimately ameliorated by exposure to other cultures and that isolation often has the opposite effect.
I can take your point that there will be greater biological diversity if we all split into small individual nations and never seek to cross contaminate our DNA and cultures – but I think perhaps you ought to think as to what purpose such bio-diversity would be put if we are all sitting on our individual islands just knowing that the rest of the world is full of interesting and different people, that the racial purists will not let us go out and mingle with.
As someone who lives in a mixed nationality family I can say without a shadow of doubt that being able to draw on two cultures is actually something that is enriching and stimulating, especially for our “mongrel” children (please don’t lecture me on insulting language again Canspeccy when you throw around insulting terms like that – you really serve all you get and some more). I should also add that there is a substantial body of research pointing to mixed races being more intelligent and better looking.
Canspeccy
You clearly don’t know you are talking about if you think Craig is a mouthpiece of the plutocratic elite.
And as to defending our national culture and heritage I think Canspeccy would do well to read the Lion and the Unicorn were Orwell, who was a fierce defender of national culture, made the point that such cultures are not static things frozen in aspic and are in fact constantly changing and improving. Anyone for a spot of bull baiting after archery practice?
Canspeccy
You clearly don’t know you are talking about if you think Craig is a mouthpiece of the plutocratic elite.
Craig Murray is a globalist, or at least an advocate of the destruction of the nation state as an racial, cultural and religious community. That is the necessary prerequisite for the establishment of a global system of governance by unelected bodies such as the WTO, the UN, Nato, the EU, etc. That is the goal of the plutocratic elite, who wish to impose their rules on the world without obstruction by democratic governments serving the interests of the goddam people.
Of course cultures are not static. But when the state represses the reproduction by the indigenous people, funds the abortion of hundreds of thousands of indigenous children (Muslim immigrants are indoctrinated not to kill their own childred) every year — at least two million in the last decade — then more than making up the deficit in population by importing millions of young philoprogenitive people of a different race, culture and religion it is:
a. committing racial genocide. Replacing most of the indigenous population by people from elsewhere.
b. committing cultural genocide. Replacing the indigenous culture with something totally alien.
c. trashing the national religion, allowing the conversion of Christian churches to mosques, eliminating Christian teaching in schools, etc.
What’s fascinating about this place is the number of apparent fanatic haters of the of the English who will insult anyone who mentions what mass immigration, legally enforced political correctness and promotion of multiculturalism are doing to destroy the English as a nation.
“Craig Murray is a globalist, or at least an advocate of the destruction of the nation state as an racial, cultural and religious community.”
Currently hiding under his kilt as a Scottish Nationalist – I think perhaps you should let Craig speak for himself
“What’s fascinating about this place is the number of apparent fanatic haters of the of the English who will insult anyone who mentions what mass immigration, legally enforced political correctness and promotion of multiculturalism are doing to destroy the English as a nation.”
What’s not so fascinating about you is how you refuse to accept that most people here do not accept the basic racist premise on which you base your whole flimsy philosophy – and how ridiculous you make yourself continuing to repeat your neo Nazi garbage. There are many things on which contributors here are not united – you are not one of those things.
Canspeccy,
“But when the state represses the reproduction by the indigenous people…”
Good Lord Canspeccy…you’ve truly lost the plot now.
Remember to visit your GP to get your meds topped up yeah?
What a disturbed zoomer you are.
Remember to visit your GP
Evidently I have won the argument hands down, since the critics can only sneer, incapable apparently of dealing with the simple arithmetic of English national genocide through the combination of a suppressed indigenous birthrate and mass immigration.
RD,
you call me a racist without defining the term. But since you can have identified me as a what you call a racist only on the basis of what I have said here, your idea of a racist must be a person opposed to the genocide of their own people. To that I am happy to confess. I would have thought, however, that it would be more in keeping with common usage to consider an advocate of genocide, such as yourself, to be racist, rather than the other way around.
Interesting to see another piece on Blair last night/this morning in the (Ha Ha) Indy. No comments allowed this time, after the stuffing that occurred with the last one a few days ago.
CanSpeccy – It’s reasonable enough to say that increased immigration (mostly due to new transport technologies and massive inequalities of wealth within and between countries) is likely to reduce human biodiversity.
It’s something very different and wildly at variance with the facts to claim that this is genocide.
It’s even less credible to claim that immigration policy of UK governments is a policy of genocide against white British people. UK governments , Labour and Tory, have in fact had extremely harsh immigration policies with forced deportations back to countries where the deportees faced serious risks of torture or death (Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan etc).
Spanish judge defies pressure to scrap Guantanamo torture case against Bush
By Agence France-Presse
April 15, 2014
A Spanish judge on Tuesday defied pressure to scrap a probe into alleged torture in the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay which targets former U.S. president George W. Bush.
Judge Pablo Ruz at the National Court, in a written decision, refused to scrap the case despite a recent reform to restrict such human rights probes in Spain.
He also vowed to press on with two other investigations into alleged genocide in the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara from the 1970s.
Ruz opened the investigations under universal jurisdiction — a principle that allows judges to try certain atrocities committed in other countries.
Spain’s parliament, dominated by the conservative ruling Popular Party, last month passed a government reform to restrict courts’ powers to apply universal jurisdiction.
That reform came after a lawsuit alleging atrocities by Chinese leaders in Tibet, which annoyed China, a major trading partner of Spain.
Rights groups have criticised the reform, saying it puts economic and diplomatic interests before human rights.
The Spanish courts agreed in 2009 to probe charges brought by four ex-Guantanamo detainees who say they were tortured during their detention in the camp between 2002 and 2005.
Among those cited in the charges are Bush, US former vice president Dick Cheney and ex-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The new law says courts in Spain can only probe atrocities committed abroad if the suspects are Spanish.
But Ruz said in Tuesday’s judgement that Spain had an “obligation” under international treaties to investigate alleged atrocities even if the suspects were not Spanish.
In one of the two other cases, plaintiffs accuse Moroccan authorities of genocide in Western Sahara, a disputed region annexed by Morocco in the late 1970s.
The third case alleges genocide in Western Sahara by the Polisario Front, a pro-independence force in the region.
Ruz said he could investigate those allegations on the grounds that Western Sahara was a Spanish territory at the time.
Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara was never recognised internationally.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/15/spanish-judge-defies-pressure-to-scrap-guantanamo-torture-case-against-bush/
~~
I see another country like the UK is having its universal jurisdiction legislation weakened or even abolished if the powers-that-be have their way.
Canspeccy
Racism: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races
Yep the cap fits
“common usage to consider an advocate of genocide, such as yourself,”
really beneath contempt
It’s something very different and wildly at variance with the facts…
Why is it, Duncan, you remind me so much of that amazing US State Department Spokeswoman insisting that “the facts are the facts are the facts”? LOL
Your earlier claim that Lemkin’s definition of genocide does not fit the facts in England because the English are still free to speak their ignores the obvious fact that English happens to be the language of the globalist system that Britain is being subjugated to. Moreover, there is a difference between permitted language use in Britain today and the language of the common people of England: the English spoken in England today must be politically correct, and that is enforced by law and or administrative means for the use of such formerly common terms such as “niggardly,” or even, for God’ sake, “nitty-gritty.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/1988952.stm).
RD
You express yourself the same way as Duncan: “you’re a racist and that’s a fact, it’s a fact, it’s a fact.”
Why not try to use your brain instead of resorting to endless Jives-like mendacity and prevarication.
Duncan McFarlane, 3:03 pm; I don’t think it is “reasonable enough to say that increased immigration […] is likely to reduce human biodiversity”. I don’t see how breeding between populations could decrease the gene pool.
I think it might depend upon how one measures “biodiversity”. If population A breeds with population B, so-many generations later you’ll no longer find that the descendants tend to fall into the two groups “A-like” and “B-like”; there will be a continuum instead. But if you measure a broad set of attributes such as nose length, eye colour, kidney function, height, etc. etc., you’ll find just as much or possibly more variation, compared to the total in the two original groups A and B considered together.
CanSpeccy, 25th April 2:12 am:
What exactly do you mean by this?
Clark
Canspeccy may well be right on biodiversity, especially if he wants to see each race consigned to their own specified Galapagos Islands (or equivalent) and he clearly places some races in superiority and inferiority to others. Where he is very wrong is in that he places what he wishes to see biodiversity as being the primary driver as to how we should organise our affairs within nation states i.e. he clearly sees that nations should be defined by race – and hence anything that changes the mix within a nation amounts to genocide of that race. He clearly doesn’t understand or denies that racial mixing, which happens in most nations, actually adds to cultural and intellectual diversity – his is not an argument about the strain that an acceleration in the rate of change in immigration might place on a nation’s infrastructure but one about whether it should happen in the first place. He will of course deny it, but his style of thinking does bear an awful lot of similarity to that of the racial purity thinking of the Nazis – and which of course is why Churchill is something of hate figure in some of his past rantings.
Resident Dissident, 8:09 am
Why do you accept this? I know Jemand agreed, but so far I’ve seen only these assertions. No evidence or logical argument has been presented, and logically it seems wrong to me. I see no mechanism whereby mixing of groups could reduce the diversity of the gene pool. Restricting the available environment could do it over time, by reducing the diversity of selection pressures. But so long as the mixed populations have access to the sum of their environments before mixing, how could the diversity in the gene pool be decreased by mixing?
It just doesn’t reflect the way genetic inheritance works. Brown-eyed, blue-eyed and green-eyed people interbreed freely, as do dark haired, light haired and red haired people, but we don’t end up with uniform eye or hair colour. It’s not like putting milk in coffee; it works on different principles.
Actually, if we examine milky coffee at the level of the constituent particulates, we can still tell the difference between the milk solids, the coffee components and the water molecules. The “uniformity” is only apparent, an effect of observing from a macroscopic scale, with thermal energy keeping it all in motion.