On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.
She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.
You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.
Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.
In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.
There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.
As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.
In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.
Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.
It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.
This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.
Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.
In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.
Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.
The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.
Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.
Which is what an election is.
It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.
But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.
Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.
I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.
However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.
That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.
I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.
I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.
Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)
Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.
The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.
———————————
My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.
Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.
Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a
What’s wrong with our democracy is that only parties that operate within certain parameters are allowed to flourish. Should an unacceptable group become too popular then there are well-funded methods for sabotage. That, and the media space is tightly controlled.
Jonny Conspiranoid.
You’ve described Corbyn’s ‘ouster’ (a much in-vogue US word) perfectly.
And what applies to the UK applies to even smaller countries. There are One Party States, and the UK or the US is no different.
In the Western World, One party is represented too: the Party of Pro-Capitalism. All delivered as Democracy in its various guises.
Worked well so far; but as is obvious – isn’t working too well now.
Ukrainisation of Europe, heh-heh.
The most terrifying of the Romania matter is the total lack of media outrage in Europe.
Romania has never been much in serious focus of e.g. the German public.
But as Craig conveys in this important post – there is no institutional accountability. The European Union might have never had any such concept for real due to its opaque design.
But at least for the media the EU was the bad guy.
No more.
Knowing Romania from personal experience the frustration by the many and the infighting by the critical few there won`t make for change.
The country has been fucked over by its elites too many times in the past 100 years for anyone to believe in that.
But I´d love to be proven wrong. After all my time there is long past.
Because the Romanian scenario will happen everywhere, that’s why. This will be repeated in Germany, in France etc.
I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas
I think one should be careful to even claim as much, in almost in every european nation that had elections past 10 years one heard the same hysterical claim of alleged “russian interference”. How often did one actually see evidence for these claims? To be honest, Russia seems to be horrible at propaganda/PR and seems to be overall quite uninterested and reacting very slow in what is happening around the world.This whole thing of Russia is everywhere plotting and tweaking the world in some secret, conspiratorial way is just a boldface lie/moral panic.
The only “evidence” one ever saw was what some russians spread some harmless meme’s on social media. What a crime right!
‘Hillary is a Satan’: Ten ads that Russian trolls posted during the 2016 U.S. election
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/hillary-is-a-satan-ten-ads-that-russian-trolls-posted-during-the-2016-u-s-election
Just look at those images in the link, will looking at such images get an individual to vote for this or that candidate? Laughable.
Decades ago scientists disproved that brainwashing worked this way: Just because you see one message one time somewhere, does not mean that you will suddenly come to believe that message.
This “Hypodermic Needle”– theory was disproven decades ago:
https://www.communicationstudies.com/communication-theories/hypodermic-needle-theory
I tend to agree with you jack, and similarly so with the Chinese propaganda.
Common sense says, cui bono? With all the elections of the last 10 years, and longer, what benefit is there for Russia for one western candidate over another? Killary whined about Russian influence defeating her presidential bid, but the fact was everyone hated the mad bitch – that’s what defeated her. One could argue that Corbyn would have been a good candidate for Russia to back, because it could have led to peace. But he lost because of USA and Israeli interference in the electoral process and MSM bias. Now look at the shit state the world is currently in; I don’t believe this is what Russia or China wanted. BRICS has risen as a phoenix from the flames of the hegemons’ destructions. If the West hadn’t gone down this path, maybe BRICS would have never appeared.
@Stevie – Regarding China and Chinese influence abroad, what do you think of the ongoing case regarding Yang Tengbo?
Yang Tengbo, who is said to work with Chinese state intelligence, befriended the moronic British king’s retarded brother Andrew Windsor (formerly of squeaky-clean British Trade International, which operated in Thailand among other places, and friend of Jeffrey Epstein). Tengbo was also close to
* former British prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May (see the photos here) and former chancellor George Osborne (See this 2020 piece from the Daily Mail)
* a “top British school” which still hasn’t been named but which is surely Harrow (read this)
* the British king, it seems, given that he was invited to Buckingham Palace, and presumably it’s the king, not his brother, who is responsible for who comes into the king’s house
* possibly other members of the royal family too, given what the Daily Mail said in 2020 about the “web (that Yang Tengbo’s Hampton Group) has spun between Beijing, Westminster and Royal palaces” – with “palaces” in the plural
One fascinating question is whether the above-mentioned government and royal dudes had anything to do with military secrets finding their way to Beijing.
As well as the above sources, see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H6_(Chinese_businessman)
https://indianexpress.com/article/world/heres-what-we-know-about-the-chinese-spy-linked-to-uks-prince-andrew-9727753/
The 48 Group Club (mentioned in that 2020 Daily Mail article) also includes John Prescott, Tony Blair, Michael Heseltine, etc.
https://www.the48groupclub.com/about-the-club/whos-who/
Gotta laugh really.
Yang Tengbo also seems connected to Foxtons, the powerful London “estate agency” (and debt arranger).
This is to go by the fact that Yang Tengbo’s only listing at Companies House is as a director of Archstone Assets Ltd (company no. 10457539) and the only other person of influence listed for that company is a person called Jean Jameson. Jean Jameson is also the CEO of Hampton Group Holdings. This appears to be the same Jean Jameson who is at Foxtons. (I would say p>0.9. Take a look at this before opining: –
“Foxtons Asia Pacific provides a London hub to help Chinese and international customers achieve their goals within one of the world’s leading property markets.“)
So there you go – the next scandal – huge amounts of Chinese money invested in London property while the intelligence requirements of the Chinese state, shall we say, don’t go overlooked.
Chinese dirty money invested in Cambridge university is another “scandal” that didn’t happen because the British media didn’t dare pursue it.
I keep getting adverts on FB and through the door saying Chinese businessmen want to buy my property in Wales….. House sales have fallen through the floor with the second homes tax, which means summer residents now want to ditch their holiday homes, but there are no jobs that pay enough for anyone local to buy, and the council is just shutting public toilets, tourist sites, primary schools, sixth forms, and health services, because population isn’t of high enough density to justify public spending. At least when we were in the EU we got match funding because we were the poorest region in Europe. Now they are even shutting down the oldest university in Wales, third oldest in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge. Democracy is not local, now that boundaries have been moved, and public services are bankrupt.
This of course is not accidental and is the result of successive Conservative governments funding Conservative local authorities more highly than those voting Labour or Plaid, and what funding that is received being spent on areas with higher population density. Waiting for Labour to notice, and amend the dire situation is not working. Hundreds are still waiting for electricity and mobile phone masts to be restored after the code red storm. The Labour government is clear – sympathy is the only thing it will offer.
I have strayed off topic… Chinatown in London is massive and is an autonomous gated region within the capital, with its own Chinese law and surveillance. Its influence is not to be dismissed. Who knows what its agenda is now?
Alyson: Chinese BAD, West GOOD. Repeat ad nauseum …
@ Alyson – There are various places in Britain where Chinese money is very influential, including Exeter and Cambridge. Albeit not all of it comes from the mainland. Some comes from Singapore or Hong Kong. I didn’t know about the Chinese police in London’s Chinatown but it doesn’t surprise me. There are Chinese police stations in Manchester and in Italy too – and one interesting thing is that they are at one and the same time organs of the People’s Republic of China and run by local gangland “faces”, which suggests that the supposed opposition between the PRC and the Republic of China (“Taiwan”) may not be how it is portrayed, or you could say that the PRC has already won the war “without a battle having been fought”, which is the best way to win a war according to Sun Tzu.
The third and fourth oldest universities in Britain are St Andrews and Glasgow, both in Scotland.
Yang Tengbo has now been named in the MSM. At the time of writing, Harrow School has not been named. Nor is the Tengbo connection with Blair, Cameron, TMay, Duncan Smith, Osborne, etc., being highlighted much.
I mean seriously who had any respect for Prince Andrew anyway? Everyone knows he was a pal of Jeffrey Epstein, he paid off Virginia Giuffre to avoid being handed a jail sentence for sexual assault, he’s as thick as two short planks (see his interview), and he’s an international crook (see Wikileaks material about him).
Now Harrow School would make a real story. So would the king being a crook too, clearly with Chinese connections as well as Gulf ones.
How many MSM security or military correspondents are going to notice that members of the royal family get given higher security classifications than they’d otherwise get, and therefore access to higher grade military secrets, just by dint of being in the royal family – and that this may be somewhat of a national security issue?
Seriously, can anyone imagine being an MI5 or military security officer tasked with looking at a “prince’s” security file and deciding “dodgy AF”?
The person behind the concentration on Prince Andrew is almost certainly his brother the king, who is almost certainly also behind current stories saying Prince Harry’s book is a load of crap, nobody would want to read it, it’s the most remaindered book in the world, etc. Actually it’s a very good book, obviously genuinely written by him even if someone else may have held the pen, and I’d recommend everyone to read it.
It’s high time for Harry to say screw the monarchy and let’s have a republic – as his mother should also have said.
Just to add regarding Prince Harry’s book, for those who haven’t read it yet – the section where he talks about imagining instructing an army plane to bomb his father’s car (with his father in it) is priceless.
It’s much more interesting than what he says about getting frostbite on his knob, which is what all the ditzy reviewers concentrated on most.
I won’t be surprised if Donald Trump kicks Harry out of the USA.
Brian.
I don’t think at all about Chinese propaganda or any other obvious western lies.
I do however think the royals are stupid, inbred, oxygen thieves who have been robbing the UK for the last 1,000 years. They are a detestable symptom of the UKs sickness.
What anyone thinks the chinese state could learn from these morons is a mystery.
This story is typical MSM bollox designed to distract the gullible masses.
@Stevie – The UK *is* the royalist regime here. Bye-bye royalist regime equals bye-bye UK. The use of the term “UK” to mean the country *is* royalist propaganda.
I once read some idiot journalist talking about whether the UK could become a republic. That kind of question is beyond the level of stupidity that would make the person worth discussing with. Britain could get rid of the UK and have a republic instead. One could say that sentence to the journalist, but they almost certainly wouldn’t understand what it meant.
Nowadays even the f***ing weather reports talk about rain over “the east of the UK” etc. In the past, they didn’t do that.
Certain members of the royal family have a lot of power, and power is all about money. Info that would weaken them is also about money and is certainly of interest to foreign intelligence services.
The Chinese state does have a worldwide network of influence… Doesn’t mean the royals aren’t oxygen thieves and crooks.
@Jack – The “hypodermic needle theory” is a straw man.
Start with
* Le Bon on the crowd
* Bernays on propaganda
* some basic reading of Skinnerian stuff, perhaps to do with dog training
* basic reading on the history of suggestion – understand what the subconscious is – maybe some reading on neurolinguistic programming if you fancy some pudding
* the film “Compliance” (2012)
Interestingly, now that Turkey has carried out its mandated tasks for the west in Syria, it’s now asking for it’s payment.
https://theaviationist.com/2024/11/26/turkey-resubmits-offer-to-purchase-f-35-jets/
Wily old Erdoğan or Janus ?
We have a saying “trying to fit his one ass on two chairs at the same time”, about a person who wants to have as much of his own benefit as possible everywhere. The president of Turkey was nicknamed “Erdoğan, the thousand-assed”.
There are Turkish-branded money laundering places on most British high streets now, described as “Turkish barbers”.
Although it has to be said that many are run by guys who are ethnically Albanian or Kurdish rather than Turkish.
Note: in case anyone wanted to make this observation, yes a few do actually make their money out of doing male customers’ hair rather than putting heroin money through the books.
Brian.
I too read that story in the Daily Mail and on GB News, scary stuff, must be true, not right wing propaganda at all.
BTW. I wouldn’t go anywhere else for a haircut, excellent service, £14 for a No 4 plus extras.
The real question is why do they prosper whilst ‘british’ barbers are closing. Nothing to do with the fact that they are family run, open seven days a week for 10 or more hours a day.
If they are dodgy it’s directly because of government policy, nothing else.
He shows more true colours than a chameleon.
Democracy in the UK was also abolished a couple of years ago, likely forever, when the Labour Party changed its leadership election rules. To become a candidate to lead Labour now requires being nominated by fully 20 percent of the Parliamentary Labour Party, almost all of whom were selected by Peter Mandelson.
Any new British political party to the left of Mandelson would be strangled in the cradle by the same pan-establishment frenzy that did for Corbynism.
The goal of the political class when Corbyn became leader in 2015 was to reduce democratic choice as quickly as possible back to what it had been in the 90s and 2000s (effectively to what it is in the USA), and to lock that in permanently.
They knew they were free to use the most dishonest and underhanded methods to achieve the restoration because they know very well that the sympathies of British journalists mirror their own.
Youtube video by an Englishman from Poland to the Ukraine-Russian border just before the war:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2rBUvWKSZw
Contemplating the grimness of the “scenery” on the border, he tells viewers in the West to be grateful for what we have. Amen!
His journey on a refugee train out of Ukraine just after war began:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzBxFH_hEwA
There are picttures of Ukranian refugees and some music as well.
Слава Україні!
There is also another way by which democracy is being abolished, and that is to produce choke points on the means of information, including media and social media. This is why Tik Tok is being banned in the US and there is now a concerted effort to ban Telegram. Of course the equivalent pliant social media do not need any further control because they already provide governments with all the necessary information requested. Freedom of information and privacy rights have been markedly eroded.
Brexit.
Dominic Cummings: Why Leave Won the Referendum (23 Apr 2018) – YouTube, 32m 18s
Dom thinks it was Facebook wot won it.
The Brexit Referendum was fixed by postal vote stuffing – it is absolutely clear by looking at turnouts in the areas where such large numbers voted to Leave. Dominic Cummings had a big hand in that and the cover up via the suppose social media influence. CC and the ‘Liberals’ played their part in soft soaping their readership into believing that people had actually turned out in such numbers. The ones who had mischievously voted for Leave having been told right out the day before the ‘polls’ showed a comfortable Remain majority were aghast that it might have been their measly vote that did it!
See? It’s gaslighting the populace into believing they did something they didn’t!
And the villain was the social media targeting!
Wholly agree with the conclusion
“The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza”
But am befuddled by the preceding:
“It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.
But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.”
As I said above the Leave result was achieved by postal vote fraud.
Codswallop and Co are at the nexus of the IOS/ii, pro Zionist Imperial World Order. Like LauraKoftheCIA- those raised in families that are part of the British Empire stalwarts and wonks going back generations. It is their life’s work – raised to lead, cheer lead the Imperial project or attack dissent against such. And above all foster Russophobia (now also Sinophobia) to retain their god given right to be the imperial supreme humans… whilst disguised as ‘liberals’ and ‘democrats’.
The Brexit project was to extract the City, and further weaken the EU’s good stuff, and leave just the weeds so that we would progress to the state of affairs we are in now – namely the Ukraine Project. Which if it fails can be blamed just on the EU who would be left holding the shit end of the stick with the grand forever strategy of keeping Germany Down, Russia Out and America In !
If it succeeed it would belong to plucky Britains role!
The destruction of the EU was long planned. From getting the U.K. in to the mad expansion under Blair that has upset the happy apple cart and proceeded to neutering of the EU/EurAsian Economic Union and energy security that would have disposed of US ziofascist occupation of Europe.
They had to wait until Merkel was out and the miracle of JC was erased!
Assange was imprisoned, Corbyn was hounded and elections were stolen using postal votes and media cover – just to achieve such ‘victory’ over Russia and to preserve the unipolar Anglo European Ziofascist Imperial order that has been fucking everyone up for centuries for the shapeshifter Masters.
When it comes to rigged judiciary and judges we are not really in a good place with the various judges who were involved with Assange, Salmond, CM’s imprisonment and even the smug Novichok Inquiry bumbler – where the prime targets have been disappeared never to be seen in public! Though I don’t doubt they have had all sorts of pantomimes presented to them including interviews with supposed well known journos… we may see some footage someday.