One war criminal writing about another. Nice chums you have, Rusbridger*.
For once there was something worth reading in the Guardian, an article by my friend Coleen Rowley. But the Guardian cut out the most important paragraph in the article. As Coleen put it in an email:
Unfortunately, the paper edited out the politically incorrect paragraph pointing out that the British Parliament committee inquiry totally ignored why Islamic terrorist recruitment is rising exponentially. So an even more important opinion piece needs to be written as to the factor swelling the numbers joining and affiliating with “terrorist” groups. Although the two issues are related as people’s naïve belief in the national security complex’s magical data-mining serves as cover to keep the more important debate from happening. Similar to Helen Thomas’ politically incorrect question: “why do they hate us?” or put more gently: “why can’t our bombs and exceptionalism win hearts and minds?” No longer will anyone in mainstream even ask if the US-NATO-Israel’s reliance on perpetual war, drone assassination and regime changes is working to reduce terrorism. I fear the Guardian would be unlikely to publish such an op-ed but it needs to be attempted nonetheless.
*By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, smasher of hard drives
For YouKnowMyName:
If you don’t have a comment cookie set you can see a slightly older variant of the page as it is served from cache. Users with a comment cookie previously set bypass the page cache. The page cache should get updated every time a new comment is made but there may be some rare occasions when this doesn’t happen immediately. If you want to get technical you can view the page source code and check the last few lines which will tell you when the page was generated.
“Churchill was right to turn the offer down.”
The mainstream argument is not as you’ve presented it, that Churchill distrusted Hitler’s intentions with regard to western Europe, but rather that Churchill feared encroachments by an emergent Gemany upon his beloved British Empire.
And, how did that work out, eh. Idealistic poodles everywhere, take note.
Your argument is that because this racist Nazi ein Volk Aryan broke an agreement with the despotic Slavic hordes, he couldn’t be trusted to an agreement with his beloved Aryan brothers.
Bit of a glitch in the matrix there.
Anyway, the war for Eurasia goes on, and, thanks to Churchill, Europeans have litle say in where it goes, what happens, whether they’ve got heat for the winter or a roof above their heads.
Thanks Winnie, for saving us from the Germans and 1966 and all that, but.
You’ll be delighted to know that Shree, under fierce questioning about her husband’s warmongering, claimed that one day Tony would be considered comparable to Churchill.
I can only agree.
The slaughter. The unbelieveable slaughter. And for what. That today the USA slaughters even more and more, and on and on it goes. For what. For whom.
Thankyou for your service.
The mainstream argument is not as you’ve presented it, that Churchill distrusted Hitler’s intentions with regard to western Europe, but rather that Churchill feared encroachments by an emergent Gemany upon his beloved British Empire.
Possibly so. I make no claim to represent the ‘mainstream’ whatever that is. I don’t think that makes my argument untenable. As to the British Empire, the involvement of the Americans, which Churchill rightly solicited, put paid to that. He wasn’t stupid: he must have anticipated that.
If Hitler made such an offer, he could not possibly have been sincere, and he would have broken the agreement at the first opportunity. He’d already stitched up Poland, with the happy co-operation of the USSR: now he was about to grab the lot for the Reich. OTOH, the lines set at Yalta remained pretty well intact until the Soviet Union fell apart. But that’s another story.
Oh, and, I said nothing whatever about any racial implications. Your idea. But he’d happily invaded partially Aryan Poland, a Catholic country (like Bavaria), Aryan Netherlands, Aryan Belgium and the Aryan – as opposed to ‘Mediterranean’ – half of France. You’d have thought…wouldn’t you?…You wouldn’t? Why?
” They were going to invite Malaysia to present evidence ”
So you accept that GlobalBollox were wrong to claim that Malaysia had been excluded?
” On 7 August 2014, following the coordination meeting held at Eurojust on 28 July, authorities from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine signed an agreement to set up a joint investigation team (JIT) to investigate the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, with the participation of Malaysia and Eurojust. ”
Seems clear enough to me, you’d better write to the Dutch authorities and tell them they got it wrong.
“As to the British Empire, the involvement of the Americans, which Churchill rightly solicited, put paid to that. He wasn’t stupid: he must have anticipated that.”
That’s interesting.
Supporters of Churchill have long argued that his determination to war with Germany, rather than the peace offered, was to protect the British Empire.
This is obvious. That’s all they can argue, because otherwise there was no reason to fight at all. What was there to fight about. Ideologically he was consistant with European white sumpremacist attitudes as expressed in Germany and indeed throughout Europe.
The only difference was that Churchill included Jews as equals in his aristocracy of being. The Germans and indeed much of Europe by this time took a different view, on that score.
Detractors will argue that he was foolish in trusting the Americans, as in the piece below, for example, but none of his supporters argue that he knowingly sold The British Empire. Anyone who knows anything about Churchill knows that that was the last thing he would knowingly do, they say.
He’d have to have been bought for that to be the case. No, naivete is as far as mainstream detractors will go.
That’s the official pro and anti-Churchill argument, more or less.
“The book’s best and bitterest pages are those in which James bluntly lambasts Churchill for being “hoodwinked” by anti-imperialist Roosevelt. Himself half-American, and desperate to draw America into the war, Churchill was blind to FDR’s real purpose: to dismantle the Empire and impose a new world order benefiting the United States.
Churchill’s sentimental picture of the “special relationship”, says James, was nonsense. In brutal reality that relationship was one of master and servant. It is high time that someone stripped out the guff about the Anglo-American alliance being a partnership of equals, and James performs the necessary demolition job admirably.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/10176637/Churchill-and-Empire-by-Lawrence-James-review.html
There are sub arguments of course. Socialists and Communists have long argued that they were fighting fascism, but that wasn’t Churchill’s argument, for obvious reasons.
In the US itself such arguments were encouraged after Pearl Harbor. What else could they argue. They were fighting the Baddie. The transcendental Baddie. They couldn’t easily argue that they were fighting for American hegemony. And yet.
They even had this concept of pre-war anti-fascism, which was a bad thing and during the war anti-fascism which was of course a good thing.
These contradictions often arise when the message being sold to the public is a kind of on the hoof made up piece of crap. And we see this more and more today.
We live with the results of Churchill’s decision now. That’s clear. And rather than Europeans making the decisions about who rules Eurasia, they are being made for us by people in Washington DC.
Thanks again, Winnie.
Rusbridger: Guardian of the truth: not
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/palestine-is-not-an-environment-story-921d9167ddef
I heard Coleen Rowley at Birkbeck Uni on 20th November, at a ‘Journalism, Whistleblowing and the Security State’ talk; there were also another four whisleblowers who spoke:
•Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and former US embassy representative in Afghanistan who became the highest-ranking U.S. official to publicly renounce policy in Afghanistan in 2009.
•Norman Solomon is the coordinator of ExposeFacts.org and the author of a dozen books on media and public policy including *War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death*.
•J. Kirk Wiebe is a retired National Security Agency whistleblower who worked at the agency for 36 years until October 2001. Since then, he has made several key public disclosures regarding the NSA’s massive surveillance programmes.
•Katharine Gun is a former translator for the GCHQ who leaked a top secret memo in 2003 revealing NSA spying operations at the UN. Gun was subsequently charged under the Official Secrets Act but the case was dropped after the prosecution offered no evidence. Given the backdrop of impending war with Iraq at the time, Daniel Ellsberg called Gun’s leak “the most important and courageous” he had ever seen.
All had good stories to tell, and had put honesty before themselves and their careers, but unfortunately all of them seemed to accept the ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ that OBL and 19 Muslims were responsible for 9/11. Hopefully the leaflets I gave them will open their eyes to the blindingly obvious, that 9/11 was a classic ‘False Flag’ op, the favourite way of fomenting wars for centuries, along with blatant lies. A variant is to purposely instigate war by deliberately provoking a perceived enemy, as was done in WWII to entice Japan to attack Pearl Harbour (see ‘Day of Deceit’ by Robert B Stinnett).
Churchill was frequently on and beyond the verge of bankruptcy all through the 1930s, he even advertised Chartwell for sale in a newspaper advertisement to raise £30,000 for which he was being pursued. Once he switched from anti-Communist rhetoric to anti-German, all his financial difficulties disappeared with publishing offers, US newspaper columns using various pseudonyms and handouts from the Rhodes-Milner-All Souls ‘Cliveden Set’ which included Balfour, Curzon, Edward Wood/Halifax, Jan Smuts, Austen Chamberlain, John Simon, Leo Amery, Astor et al., set up by a secretive trust the sole beneficiary of Cecil Rhodes’ will. But he was never of that set simply offered himself as their frontman for cash.
He was a presstitute hack and politico for hire, and absolutely corrupt, to a great extent only concerned with his personal enrichment, he had no honourable motivations whatsoever which could not be overcome at a surprisingly meagre price.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
As to the terror bombing campaign, it was ineffective, the will to fight, if not morale was actually raised and German wartime production rose and rose spectacularly in spite of the damage, it never faltered until just a couple of months before the war’s end. There was never any intention to seriously damage the German ability to keep slogging it out against the Russians, the above-mentioned nepotistic Milner-Round Table group controlled all the important ministries of Churchill’s wartime cabinet, most notably the Ministry of Economic Warfare which determined ultimately targetting of the bomber forces and thus the focus on mere destruction of mostly working-class homes -that Harris himself was a mass-murdering zealot was mere icing on the cake, plenty more could have filled his role and followed the orders relayed from ‘the Group’, via Churchill to Bomber Command. Large industrial plants, pouring out armaments, such as the vast Ford Motors plant at Cologne, survived the war completely unscathed, never once even explicitly targetted. The Germans themselves said after the war, and a forerunner of the the M of EW itself said from 1937 onwards that the electricity grid was the key to stopping industrial production stone dead, it was forever vulnerable, absolutely so at some well-known points and was never at any time even lightly disrupted. For most of the war in respect to allied bombing the German command couldn’t believe their good luck, seeing the vast gulf between what real damage allied bombing could potentially, easily, have achieved and what little it actually did. I’d say the ‘phoney war’ wasn’t just the early months or year but lasted from 1939 till June 1944, by which time Soviet armies had already over-ran Geramny’s last-stand eastern positions and the D-Day sideshow and long mooted second front opened.
for Site_Supremo/Craigmurray.org.uk, 4 Dec, 2014 – 2:39 pm
OK on the cookies, I get
I not only block nearly every cookie, script, beacon etc – whilst also generating a cloud of plausible (but fake) surfing activity – I also am very parsimonious over which SSL Cert/CA Trust Anchor to accept on my system (e.g. I’ll accept your Comodo root, but not the GoDaddy ‘statcounter.com’ CA) This ‘paranoia’ is post a nice chat with the interception leader/leaderette at the Home Office
I don’t know which of your 3 cookies I’m currently having problems with, I’ll do some more digging. It’s a balance between client usability/privacy/security whilst allowing you security/business-information on your server-side work. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for your interesting response, Herbie. Why we went to war is not the issue I’m discussing, however, and Churchill wasn’t PM when the decision was taken – more by Hitler than Chamberlain, it has to be said. I’d just like to throw into the balance the fact that Churchill was an historian in his own right, and well-read at that. He knew just how reliable offers made by the other side in the midst of a war could be. And, unusually for a politician, he learned from history. Rome’s/Constantinople’s problems with the Goths/Vandals/Huns, as outlined in Gibbon, which he could hardly have avoided reading, would have provided him with much food for thought re the imperial ambitions of Nazi Germany.(This section of The Decline and Fall is occasionally extremely densely written – Robert Graves’ ‘Count Belisarius’ is much more fun and draws on similar sources)
I could also mention that Churchill was half-American, and it may be that he wasn’t quite as gung-ho for a British Empire as the proto-tabloid press of the day…
Rusbridger’s rag
lifts Vanity Fair pieceon Tony Blair _http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/04/tony-blair-defends-business-dealings-cites-henry-kissinger-role-model
Headline:
Tony Blair’s wealth estimated at £10m
A mere bagatelle. But that excludes the property empire:
But the figure does not appear to include Blair’s portfolio of houses, which include a mansion in Buckinghamshire and six homes in London, which estimates put at much more than £10m…. Or, indeed this:
The owners of Oldbury Residential snapped up a block of 10 double-fronted red-brick flats in Manchester at a knock-down price of £650,000 – the flats were originally valued at £850,000.
The flats join an impressive portfolio that includes two London mews cottages, a smart Bristol pad, a Grade I listed manor house worth £5.75m in Buckinghamshire, and three more London homes.
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/blogs/tony-blair-property-tycoon/7006209.blog
Or this:
Cherie Blair has bought yet another block of flats – just weeks after snapping up ten apartments in Manchester.
She and eldest son Euan have purchased 14 apartments in nearby Stockport – dramatically increasing the family’s property empire to 31 homes.
The total would have been 32, but earlier this month Mrs Blair, 60, sold the notorious ‘Cheriegate’ flat in Bristol she bought with the help of convicted Australian fraudster Peter Foster in 2002.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2816495/Cherie-s-spends-1m-flats-owns-31-homes.html
So, right, Tony may not personally be as rich as Croesus, but between him, his appalling wife and his deeply unpleasant firstborn, there’s no lack of the folding stuff.
Meanwhile, the Independent faithfully transcribes something dictated to it by the Tony Blair Media Centre (LP):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/tony-blair-tells-wannabe-mps-to-get-a-real-job-before-entering-politics-9904884.html
Unsuccessful lawyer defending working people against rapacious employers by any chance? Nearly right. Wrong about who gets defended…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nethermere_%28St_Neots%29_Ltd_v_Gardiner
Still, he got the right verdict, eh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nethermere_%28St_Neots%29_Ltd_v_Gardiner
YouKnowMyName – actually it is confusingly worded but “Page Caching using disk: enhanced (Cookie is rejected)” means that a valid cookie was seen and that page caching was rejected – not that the cookie was rejected. So in your quoted case the time “08:30:59 by W3 Total Cache” should have been the actual time you retrieved the page.
Caching is necessary due to the frequency search engine and bots continually retrieve archive information from the blog which puts a very heavy load on WordPress/database without caching. Craig has written thousands of articles and they have anything up to about 100 comment pages per article although usually much less and the database continues to grow with time. Assorted search engines and crawlers/bots are always retrieving articles/comment pages from say 2006 just in case they’ve somehow changed since last indexed! Sometimes they request the same article 100 times in a row for no apparently good reason.
Statcounter is used to count genuine visitors to the blog as opposed to bots which won’t execute statcounter tracking code. Some users block statcounter and other trackers for privacy reasons but that shouldn’t cause problems.
The Supreme Leader’s Faith Foundation (current cash in the bank, £1.75M as far as HMRC is concerned) spawned a wholly-owned subsidiary called Face to Faith. Like its oleaginous parent, it is a true evangelist for globalisation. Here’s its take on Wealth, Poverty and, er, y’know, Charity. (It’s typical of Tony’s business acumen that you can’t actually reach this page on the Face to Faith website.)
http://www.reonline.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/F2F-Module-Synopsis-Wealth-Poverty-Charity1.pdf
If you live in Washington State, Uruguay or the Netherlands, you may take this moment to explore the anti-nausea properties of cannabis, and good luck to you.
Lesson 1…In order that students avoid the easy temptation to immediately associate wealth with greed and avarice* students explore the correlation between wealth and development. Towards the end of the lesson, students do consider, using some celebrity earnings, whether some salaries are disproportionate to the work and impact that some have.
*Heaven forbid. Tony, videoconferencing from a yacht in the Mediterranean, will now lead us in prayer…
Excellent! thanks for the clarification, I have to start hosting my own site soon (just for secure mails) & join the fray! (there might be steganography implications in ‘old-blogs’ that require HMG to continuously scan them (labelled as Google Spider) Blogs/comments are often used as command & control channels for botnets)
The news-just-in that GCHQ is performing mass-surveillance fully in accordance with UK law is heartening.
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2385283/gchq-s-tempora-programme-deemed-legal-by-investigatory-powers-tribunal
Eric King, deputy direct at Privacy International emphasised that the decision by IPT is of huge concern.
Tony M’s two posts at 11h33 and 12h14 contain such a deal of bollocks that it’s difficult to know where to start one’s critique.
Suffice it, therefore, to point to only two assertions.
1/. “..handouts from the Rhodes-Milner-All Souls ‘Cliveden Set’ which included Balfour, Curzon, Edward Wood/Halifax, Jan Smuts, Austen Chamberlain, John Simon, Leo Amery, Astor et al…”
In the context of appeasement, the ‘Cliveden set’ is generally accepted to have been a phenomenon of the 1930s (by definition, after 1933, the year the Nazis assumed power).
May I therefore recall that Balfour died in 1930 and Lord Curzon 5 years earlier in 1925?
2/. ” the D-Day sideshow and long mooted second front opened ”
Firstly, if D Day was a sideshow, then the entire second front must have been so also, since D Day marked the opening of the second front.
Perhaps Tony M does consider the entire second front to have been a sideshow – in which case he obviously disagrees with his hero Uncle Joe Stalin, who pressed precisely such a second front on his American and British allies as from mid-1942.
‘Unfortunately, the paper edited out the politically incorrect paragraph pointing out that the British Parliament committee inquiry totally ignored why Islamic terrorist recruitment is rising exponentially. So an even more important opinion piece needs to be written as to the factor swelling the numbers joining and affiliating with “terrorist” groups. … Similar to Helen Thomas’ politically incorrect question: “why do they hate us?” ‘
. . . .
Hmmm — so the politically incorrect answer to the question of why muslims are being exponentially recruited to Islamic terorist activities is that Western brutality in the Middle East has roused them into joining a resistance movement?
Why should muslims care any more than anyone else about Western brutality and be moved to such militant action when many other non-muslim objectors do not? Is it because aspiring militants have more affinity with Middle Eastern muslims despite being often unrelated by ethnicity, language and non-religious cultural habits?
And how does Western brutality against those in the muslim world explain the horrific savagery that these fighters practice on their warpath, raping and murdering innocents including other muslims deemed insufficiently pious?
Well, the real “politicially incorrect” answer to the question “why do they hate us?” is one that non-muslim Islamophiles are too vainglorious to debate in good faith because of the terrible consequences of having to admit that they are not just plain wrong, but are active in breaking down native resistance to Islamisation as a by-product of their Leftist political agenda. The very clear, historically documented truth in muslims’ own words is provided by the Quran which has taught believers to hate infidels and that any act of barbarity committed in the course of defending Islamic lands or advancing the Islamic frontier is not only permitted but encouraged and glorified as ‘jihad’.
If you can get your head around that simple truth, similar to accepting that the Earth is round, rather than looking for elaborately contrived explanations to defend an ideological position, you will then see that Islamic violence has been the reason for its successful conquest of so many lands and destruction of even more native civilisations around the world. The native Sumatrans and Javanese were not subjugated in response to Western war crimes so how do anti-Western Islamophiles explain that? Of course, they don’t. Rather, they prefer to engage in the ‘whataboutery’ of Christian and European colonial crimes as if that makes the brutality of Islamic colonialism perfectly benign.
The only reason why we are now aware of the true violent nature of Islam is because that violence has only just visited our own communities thanks to Western geopolitical interference in the Middle East for its energy resources and the bloody-minded determination of the Left to bring about a cultural revolution under the guise of “multiculturalism”. Otherwise, Islamic barbarism would be practiced exclusively within and on the fringes of the Islamic world under a pall of information darkness.
But to put it simply for those disinclined to think about it more deeply, or think at all, muslims hate you and I for no other primary reason than because we are not muslim and we refuse to be converted. And, as a *group*, muslims become violent when Islam is challenged, constrained, attacked or stymied. So, either play by their rules or pack your bags and find a new home because they are here to stay. Get used to it.
Islam does not hate us.
Not Christianity,
Nor Judaism.
We hate ourselves.
Whenever the West doesn’t listen or act appropriately, does novel future activity go East to tempt all with the fruits of exceptional labour for the obscene profit of unbelievable bounty in Shared IntelAIgent Secrets and Remote Virtual Command and Practically Real Control of Future Global Event Outcomes and Derivative Dark Web Ventures.
HonourableMember [1412071133] throwing around a few home truths on http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/07/north-korea-sony-pictures-regin-gchq-nsa-snowden-belgacom
Is post pre-moderation of this accountable HonourableMember still necessary, Guardian? Please consider resumption of normal active and HyperRadioProActive service. Thank you.
And now to the matter discussed and of admittedly grave and injurious concern to certain deserving elements. And things are only just starting to get lively and considerably more interesting.
In Magic Quantum Communications Circles with Sublime Internetional Networks, are real fact and virtual fiction after SMARTR Processing, one and the same and deliver quite wholly different streams of information and … Advanced Enhanced Intelligence …… for Future Presentation of Media Related Tales and Trails …… Brilliant CyberSpaced Journeys.
Or do you not think and imagine that is what Super IntelAIgent Service Servers do with the time in their hands with their hearts and minds. North, South, East or West, is that not what intelligent beings do for public and private enterprise and pirate systems of commerce for profitable gain?
Over to you, Guardian angels 🙂 Are you ready and willing to lead with provision of the intellectual property supply of others, whenever not necessarily able oneself or enabled, or is one content in fields of misery and mayhem, madness and myopia to just follow and report to the best of limited ability on such as be in simply complex virtual reality fields, future organising events, dear boy, future organising events?
To imagine that the future is gonna be anything like the present and the past, is to admit to oneself and declare to all others that intelligence is crucially lacking and one be subject to the wishes of that which arranges changed ways for every day with zeroday exploitation of Administrative SCADA Systems Vulnerabilities.