We are directly responsible for the disasters in the Mediterranean. The bombing of Libya into failed state status is now coming back to haunt us. The ludicrous idea, propounded by Blair, Robert Cooper and the Henry Jackson Society, that you could improve dictatorial states by massive bombing campaigns that targeted their basic infrastructure, is now a total bust. Sadly so are Iraq and Libya, to the permanent detriment of many millions of people. We caused both the Islamic State and the Mediterranean boat disasters, and we caused them with bombs.
But the lack of any effective policing is only part of the problem. What makes people so desperate that they are prepared to give all of the small amount they own, to ruthless gangs, in exchange for a dreadful sea crossing with a one in ten chance of drowning? Most of the refugees are sub-Saharan African. We only see the European end of the saga, not the terrible conditions on the cross Saharan journeys that they start with.
There will be no security anywhere if the world does not address the terrible scourge of African poverty and under-development. That is a huge subject on which I have written extensively and worked much of my life, and I do not wish to open it here. But what it does show is the utter stupidity – inhumanity yes, but also stupidity – of UKIP in thinking that cutting development aid will increase the economic security of the UK.
To think that there are readers who might still think that Republicofscotland (who lives in England and will not move to an independent, republican Scotland) is on here for anything other than laughs!
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What’s the matter Habby boy,is HRH,a touchy subject for you?
Are you sitting by the phone hoping Lizzie’s minion will call and allow you to genuflect in front of her as she pins a gong on your lapel.
It will never happen,old droopy chops has enough obedient acolytes, get over it.
China close to completing airstrip,in the Pacific Ocean which will allow it to patrol 1.4 million square miles of ocean,it will bring it into confrontation with the US,said President Obama.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/16/chinas-new-airstrip-in-the-south-china-sea-is-almost-completed/
America may well be the biggest instigator of troubles around the globe,but do we really want another in the form of China?
Giyane’s main problem, apart from being a loony, seems to be his blind spot when it comes to child abuse in his own community. Thousands of English children abused by Muslim grooming gangs and he is silent. Throughout the Muslim world pederasty is rife and barely ever prosecuted. Silence. Even his prophet took a 9-year-old as his ‘wife’. But a Jewish paedophile? That really gets him exercised.
Uzbek in the UK, 5:20 pm; people vary in intelligence and integrity, in the 1930s and now. I agree with you that there is no good reason to accept propaganda. I object to John Goss’ accusation that you serve “Western” propagandists. I used to enjoy visiting this blog’s comments section, but recently I’ve found it distressing. Good wishes to you.
Anon : “That’s lovely to hear, Node. Most haven’t moved past phase one though.”
On the contrary, I believe Irvine Welsh speaks for the majority of Scots. We’ve moved on, we see the English as fellow victims rather than oppressors. But I have recently come across a pitiful example of phase one thinking :
“I object to John Goss’ accusation that you serve “Western” propagandists. I used to enjoy visiting this blog’s comments section, but recently I’ve found it distressing.”
Clark, when you are talking blackbirds I see a whole different person, observant and sensitive, and one with whom I would willingly engage.
But when something does not fit with your preconceptions you cannot look at it objectively and see that Russia has not attacked anybody. You follow all the western propaganda yourself (remember the combined harvesters). Putin has said there are no official Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine. Yes Russian soldiers have fought on the side of the Donbas, but so have US soldiers. Here is a Texan, an American who is wise enough to see through the bullshit and knows just who the fascists are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWt0ofMdxcM
Anon1
21 Apr, 2015 – 8:31 am:
“May I be the first on behalf of the blog to congratulate Her Majesty the Queen on her 89th birthday. Long may her good health and outstanding public service continue.”
________________________________________
What?!
UK PLC is totally bankrupt, due to corruption.
Anon1, you won’t last long at GCHQ if you keep coming out with such unsophisticated statements.
Next you’ll be joining halitosis Habba in telling us that everything is wonderful, and that the rape and murder of children is quite normal.
Psychos is not the word for you people.
I’m tempted to say some things, but for the usual legal reasons I will have to desist.
“A Horror We Made”
Um…excuse me. What happened (and what continues to happen) is absolutely horrific, but with all due respect it’s not a horror “we” made but a horror YOU middle and upper class political ‘elite’ made. Us precariat and working class folk don’t have any power over anything and we sympathise and find great affinity with our poor comrades all over the world. Workers of the world unite!
I also agree that the Putin regime is homophobic, transphobic, sexist and misogynistic and should be destroyed so that its LGBTQ people can be liberated. However, the UK is more than a little hypocritical in condemning Putin for annexing territories on the pretext they have majority Russian populations yet continuing to apply the same principle by insisting that because Las Malvinas/Falklands Islands have a predominantly British population it is part of Britain. Argentina actually has more liberal laws in some respects towards LGBTQ people than Britain as well. For instance, in Argentina everyone is guaranteed freedom from discrimination based upon one’s gender identity which is far in advance of Britain’s piecemeal ‘equalities’ legislation in this particular area.
Fedup
“How long does this blog intend to put up with these fuckwits?”
____________________
So what are you going to do about it, you foul-mouthed sawdust Caesar?
Nothing?
Thought not.
“I’m tempted to say some things, but for the usual legal reasons I will have to desist.”
_________________-
And I was tempted to call you a pompous prat (“legal reasons” indeed! “Desist”!) but then I remembered that you are just on here for a bit of fun.
Have a drink (or five) on me, it’ll get even funnier! 🙂
“…in Argentina everyone is guaranteed freedom from discrimination based upon one’s gender identity..”
_________________
And in the Argentine, moreover, every citizen is guaranteed a blustering loudmouth as Head of State, be it a man (Senor Kirchner) or a woman (Senora Kirchner).
By the way, and off-topic, it is said that Senora Kirchner enjoys the (intimate) company of a man half her age. Whoaaarr 🙂
Habba, every statement you make is being noted.
Likewise with the rest of the GCHQ brigade.
Our troll doesn’t like well documented accusations of serious crimes against members of the UK establishment, whereas he is quite willing to retail gossip about the (legal) sexual behavior of Argentinian leaders.
Confirming what Greenwald and Snowden have said about NSA and GCHQ snooping on government leaders in Latin America?
For those who actually think that Iraq Body Count is a better source than the Lancet …
Nafeez Ahmed
“How the Pentagon is hiding the dead”
The secret campaign to undercount the ‘war on terror’ death toll in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-pentagon-is-hiding-the-dead-862a7b45ce57
“In this exclusive investigation, Insurge Intelligence reveals that a leading anti-war monitoring group, Iraq Body Count (IBC), is deeply embedded in the Western foreign policy establishment. IBC’s key advisers and researchers have received direct and indirect funding from US government propaganda agencies and Pentagon contractors. It is no surprise, then, that IBC-affiliated scholars promote narratives of conflict that serve violent US client-regimes and promote NATO counter-insurgency doctrines.”
From the GCHQ web site:
“Current threat level
The current threat level from international terrorism for the UK is assessed as SEVERE.”
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/about-us/what-we-do/the-threats/terrorism/threat-levels.html
One of the first things that Obama did when he became president was to get rid of ‘terror threat’ levels in the US, because Bush had been using it for political purposes (ie, to terrify the population to vote a certain way).
Anyone who is old enough to have lived through the IRA bombing campaign might perhaps understand what a load of total tosh the ‘Muslim bogeyman’ is.
Whilst always corrupt and pro-Establishment, the UK security services did used to at least try to protect British citizens. Now the security services are so corrupt it’s beyond belief.
You can regularly read trolls from the security services in these blog comments.
Make up your own mind.
As I, and a handful of others have been dubbed Putinitsas, it is incumbent upon us to know something about our leader. I’ve just come across this Kremlin site.
You’d think from his biography that westerners would love Vladimir Putin. He’s just an ordinary local boy made good. There’s a lot here I didn’t know. Enjoy.
http://eng.putin.kremlin.ru/bio
In the ‘Interests’ section under cars, of which he is fond of Russian makes, there is the following:
“For instance, in 2005 he drove President George W. Bush around in his 1956 ivory-coloured Volga (GAZ-21).”
He scared the living daylights out of Bush! “That’s for killing all those poor Iraqis George.” A white-faced Bush got out of the car, straightened his tie, brushed the dust off his suit, and said: “I thought you were going to kill us both”. Mr Putin looked him straight in the eyes and said, simply “Shock and Awe, George, shock and awe!”
It was just beyond belief how all political parties voted to bomb Libya on some “humanitarian” basis after what we then knew about Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the liberals gave up and lost their moral high ground. I don’t support UKIP but at least they have had the sense to question this sort of foreign intervention. What purpose did the destruction of Libya serve. I can’t believe the humanitarian argument one jot and so have wondered if it served some realpolitik agenda instead, but what save for a message that says “mess with us and we will seriously up your country”. The only thing that seemed different to Iraq and Afghanistan was that we were not sending in ground troops – so that was alright then ! It beggars belief. How could so much opposition to the invasion of Iraq have melted away when it came to Libya? is there no moral voice of dissent left? I like Clegg but what was he thinking.
William Engdahl argues in his recent book Target China that the purpose of the attack on Libya was to establish Western control over Libyan oil and to deny it to China.
He might be right for it didn’t make much sense on the basis advocated at the time.
FT’s latest projection has Labour at 269 seats, SNP at 47, Plaid Cymru at 4 seats, SDNP at 3 seats, and Greens at 1. That adds up to 324, 2 short of a majority. http://elections.ft.com/uk/2015/projections/
Tories 283 + LibDems 26 + DUP 8 + UKIP 1 = 318.
So, if the projection holds, it will be up to the 8 Others. Who are they?
John Goss
“But when something does not fit with your preconceptions you cannot look at it objectively and see that Russia has not attacked anybody.”
This is just brilliant. I am not being sarcastic. I am actually admiring work of Russian propaganda and the way MWL bite on this sh.t again. KGB/RT I applaud you.
“Putin has said there are no official Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine,”
Brilliant again. Putin is the man we can all trust now. I bid he had never work for organisation where deception was one of the main motto. I somehow also recall him just under a year ago denying those “polite green men” were Russian military in disguise. And then few weeks earlier he had accepted them being that and ensuring Crimean referendum went right way – the Mr Putin’s way.
On topic;
“The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says Syrians and Eritreans were by far the biggest groups among migrants and asylum seekers making the risky crossing of the Mediterranean Sea last year to seek refuge in Europe. This is its breakdown of the nationalities of those who arrived between January and October 2014, when the agency counted roughly 200,000 people who landed in southern Europe. It does not include those who died or disappeared while crossing:
Syrians: 31 percent
Eritreans: 18 percent
Afghans: 5 percent
Malians: 5 percent
Nigerians: 4 percent
Gambians: 3 percent
Somalis: 3 percent
Palestinians: 3 percent
Bangladeshis: 2 percent
Other sub-Saharan Africans: 10 percent
Other nationalities: 16 percent”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/countries-migrants-leaving-europe-30448407
Clark
I do recall you commenting on this blog more often before. There were times (in the past) I have enjoyed commenting here more myself. It seems a lot of MWL here nowadays and just few with alternative views. And even then those few are taken very hostile by these many MWL.
Times might change again in future and this blog might yet again become more welcome place for people with more moderate views.
I will miss you until then.
The stench of hypocrisy;
http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2015/04/20/political-murders-in-kiev-us-troops-to-ukraine/
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/04/20/263818/us-dispatches-elite-troops-to.html
William Engdahl, the man quoted with approval by our Transatlantic Greatsman (allegedly) has form.
Here are excerpts from his Wiki biography:
” He has also been a long-time associate of the LaRouche movement and has written many articles for their publications.
His first book was called A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, and discusses the alleged roles of Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball and of the USA in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which was meant to manipulate oil prices and to stop Soviet expansion.
Engdahl argued that the problem with global warming is much exaggerated.[4] He claims that global warming, like peak oil, is merely a “scare” and a “thinly veiled attempt to misuse climate to argue for a new Malthusian reduction of living standards for the majority of the world while a tiny elite gains more power
On Russia Today television channel’s interview Engdahl stated that the 2011 Egyptian Revolution was orchestrated by the Pentagon to facilitate Barack Obama’s Middle East foreign policy He believes that the Arab Spring is a plan “(…) first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called “The Greater Middle East Project”.”[6]”
With views like that, it is not surprising that he us quoted approvingly by our Transatlantic Friend. What is more surprising, however, is that he is not quoted more often by the other Loonies on here.
“But when something does not fit with your preconceptions you cannot look at it objectively and see that Russia has not attacked anybody.”
This is just brilliant.
Thank you Uzbek. I think you will enjoy this too.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/04/a-horror-we-made/#comment-521395
“Putin has said there are no official Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine,”
Brilliant again.
Thank you Uzbek. I am not being sarcasic either.
Uzbek in the UK, please continue to comment. Ignore the pro-Kremlin astroturfers who are impervious to reason on matters concerning Russian government policy; engage with others instead.
I asked John Goss and Macky very directly for over an hour if they were deliberately advancing the agenda of the Kremlin and neither of them could bring themselves to deny it. From here onwards:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/amnesty-international-conference-on-torture/comment-page-10/#comment-511681
But make no mistake; I hold little support for Habbabkuk, and I oppose Anon’s islamophobia and support of Israel.