In Britain and most of Europe we have a toxic combination of extremely poor leadership, characterised by self delusion, plus an inability to do other than hang on to the coat tails of an unstable and declining superpower.
Look at how Trump has been turned from "President for Peace" in Riyadh just a month ago where he condemned the neo-cons that delivered Iraq, Libya etc - and now here he is giving them their dream of regime change in Tehran. How did that happen? Simple, he knows that if he doesn't give them what they want then they will come after him and he'd rather keep them onside. The US political class, with the exception of Thomas Massie, is bought and paid for by Israel and everyone knows it.
The Hungarians talk a lot but ultimately do nothing.
It's about time they organised Magyarexit.
No more blackmail by Brussels: "We're not giving you all these millions of euros that you are legally entitled to, and we're not giving it to you because you're not homosexual enough."
Come on, Victor, it's time to put this sort of shit in the bin.
Trump is rapidly becoming the neocon Manchurian candidate and at this point the difference between him and George W Bush is a thin bit of rhetoric and a lot of style but no discernible substance.
His Iranian antics give credence to the notion that he represents the elite faction that eschews globalism for imperialism and whose only basis for wanting America to be great again is to re-establish the post-war industrial hegemony that lent her military hegemony.
Whether that is even possible now is an open question but I suppose we’re about to find out. Possibly they think they can leverage military power to acquire industrial strength.
As for Europe we see that common sense springs from the fertile ground of suffering of consequences. Until the “leaders” of the western EU experience such suffering they’re unlikely to humble themselves by acceding to the common.
I would suggest that we also need to reclaim our sovereignty as individuals as well as collectively.
Our entire system of governance is nothing more than an elaborate scam that we help to legitimise through the "act" of voting.
Some months back I wrote a detailed email stating this and asked to be completely removed from the electoral register (which according to the government can't be done)
They didn't attempt to rebut anything that was stated and simply responded and said I would be completely removed, which I was.
Another avenue to explore is withholding taxation as they are nothing more than criminals in suits and lie about everything.
The social contract between the governed and government is broken.
If the rule of law and good governance returns then these could be reversed.🇬🇧👍
Yes. The only real form of Democracy is Sortition - election of temporary executive committees by random lot. This is what ancient Athens recognised as 'democracy'. What we currently have, they called 'oligarchy'. Strangely enough (or not) recent-ish experiments in Sortition gave very good results in practice. However, it has the severe drawback of not allowing the rich or powerful any more say than the poor and weak.
Thank you Ian, yourself a bastion of northern working class common sense. The sort of working class common sense that brought socialism and care for working people a century ago. If anyone commenting or reading this hasn't read Ian's little book, "A Misfit in Moscow", you should do, it's an easy read, a diary from an informed and independent commentator and an eye-opening excoriating challenge to British "diplomacy" now absent by default. I'm an expatriate UK citizen now living in NZ. So sad to see the deterioration of political, social and economic life in my old country as mirrored in the deterioration of leadership over this time. Starmer's Orwellian "Peace through Strength" says it all really.....
"Professor Radhika Desai, asked by the host of a discussion last September why Europe’s leaders act manifestly against the interests of their citizens, replied:
The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals."
With your professional background Ian, do you think this is the reason for EU/UK high-heed-yins being the way they are? I can't think of a better explanation, but I have no insight into these circles.
With all my heart. We could use a massive dose of it over here in North America too. I always thought that the EU was on a downward path once it tried to grow past open trade and movement of peoples. I suppose everything is connected but it did seem to start to unravel then. I guess the perceived advantages of a common currency pushed the rest of it. But certainly greater recognition of individual state's sovereignty would not only help Europe, I suspect it would put some roadblocks in the way of US hegemony too? What do you think?
I suspect that "Roadblocks" on US Hegemony would not only be good for the nations of Europe, it would actually be better for the people of the USA. We have a $37T National debt, escalating with no end in sight. Much of this debt has a direct link to the nearly $1Trillion that the US spent last year on "defense" and the $1T we will spend on debt Service this year.
Defense means keeping tens or hundreds of thousands of troops deployed on hundreds or thousands of bases throughout the world. There are 122 bases and 84,000 personnel stationed in the EU alone! WW2 was over 80+ years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed 30+ years ago. All these bases remain in place for for one reason, that is to support and enforce the US Hegemony. Almost none of these bases is essential, unless world domination is our goal.
What 'Defense' really means is very large profits for a few relatively small firms like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing etc. I was amazed to see a while ago that such firms are only small to middling size within the whole US economy, but they seem to have a disproportionate degree of influence. Possibly through extremely intense lobbying?
The correct approach to the EU would have been "centralized when needed; decentralized when possible". Instead we got the "ever closer union" that would love to obliterate the nation-state.
The top of the EU is a vacuum: lots of power and no one to answer to. It is a paradise for lobbyists, a.o. from big business, ngo's and the US.
I'm not happy that Hungary and Slovakia (and Russia in some ways) have a right-wing orientation, but I am pleased that they are all displaying a stubborn independence from the Neo-Liberal poison which has infected the rest of the west.
Hopefully the ending of the Ukraine war, inevitably in a crushing defeat for NATO, will cause the downfall of such people as Baerbock, Von Der Leyen, Merz, Starmer and the rest of that crooked crew, and result in a new and more realistic set of politicians.
An outbreak of common sense in Europe would be most welcome, but I'm not holding my breath. It will take an electoral rout of the centrist Uniparty, which has held power for three decades in the UK and most Western EU states, and has been steadily hijacked by an unelected, incompetent and out-of-touch bureaucracy in Brussels to shake the elites out of their arrogant complacency that they can continue ignoring the will of the people with no apparent consequences.
Sovereignty has been further eroded by a straitjacket of human rights legislation which is no longer fit for purpose, such that when a country like the UK theoretically regains its sovereignty, it no longer has any idea what to do with it. The multipolar Europe that Ian talks about cannot come soon enough.
I fully agree with your general European analysis. Your depth of knowledge far out ways my own but your logic and common sense thankfully is in abundance. Iran the seventh country to be attacked by the West at the request of the Terrorist State of Israel. An occupation that was led and conspired by Baron Rothschild, Balfour, Churchill and Samuels. This action was supported by both the Church of England and the Catholic Church. They both still today remain silent at the continual theft of Palestinian land and the Genocidal eradication of the Arab Indigenous population. I find it chilling that the British media in general are totally supportive of this Zionist massacre. We are led by a government and a Royal family who appear totally indifferent to the Palestinian plight with not the slightest condemnation of Netanyahu and his IDF thugs as they continue to butcher the imprisoned population of Palestinian families. The British press and TV channels appear to be swimming in a Sea of Zionism support. In particular the Daily Mail and GB News where the only element of truth has been sidelined, that being the honourable Neil Oliver. We have lost John Pilger, Julian Assange has been nullified so the only bearers of truth in the UK appear to be George Gallaway, Neil Oliver, Roger Waters and the sole MP who has always supported Indigenous Populations, the compassionate Jeremy Corbyn. Many try to ridicule Jeremy Corbyn but there is hardly an MP in Parliament in all parties who are fit to lick his boots when it come to condemnation of Colonialist treatment of 1st Nation People. Regarding the present USA threats to attack Iran. I think that Russia,China and Pakistan will play a key roll in supporting Iran and I fully support that possibility. As for the stupid Western comments about freeing the Iran nation from tyranny. Well we fully support a similar regime in Saudi Arabia and many other questionable regimes and the ongoing legislation about protest restrictions is bringing the UK ever closer to a Police State where there is already no open platform for debate on subjects such as Gaza, the West Bank and the corrupt decisions by the Western biased UN regarding aid and the policing of supposedly confidential Nuclear Inspectors who are allowed to inspect Iranian sites whilst being denied access to Israeli sites. The answer for the UK is that we need to be Secular, all religious deities should be barred from the house of Lords. Religion should be your own private hobby and have no bearing on legal legislation. All religion is 'Man Made' as my Grandma said. Let's get real.
In Britain and most of Europe we have a toxic combination of extremely poor leadership, characterised by self delusion, plus an inability to do other than hang on to the coat tails of an unstable and declining superpower.
Indeed.
It hardly needs saying, common sense isn’t at all common, it’s sadly rare.
Indeed!
There is but one reason that the USA will go to war with Iran, that is because the Zionists and their rich powerful US Lobby commands it to happen.
I fear you may be right.
Look at how Trump has been turned from "President for Peace" in Riyadh just a month ago where he condemned the neo-cons that delivered Iraq, Libya etc - and now here he is giving them their dream of regime change in Tehran. How did that happen? Simple, he knows that if he doesn't give them what they want then they will come after him and he'd rather keep them onside. The US political class, with the exception of Thomas Massie, is bought and paid for by Israel and everyone knows it.
Spent some remarkable time in Hungary in the 80s with Esperanto-speakers. An unique country
And a unique language.
The Hungarians talk a lot but ultimately do nothing.
It's about time they organised Magyarexit.
No more blackmail by Brussels: "We're not giving you all these millions of euros that you are legally entitled to, and we're not giving it to you because you're not homosexual enough."
Come on, Victor, it's time to put this sort of shit in the bin.
Trump is rapidly becoming the neocon Manchurian candidate and at this point the difference between him and George W Bush is a thin bit of rhetoric and a lot of style but no discernible substance.
His Iranian antics give credence to the notion that he represents the elite faction that eschews globalism for imperialism and whose only basis for wanting America to be great again is to re-establish the post-war industrial hegemony that lent her military hegemony.
Whether that is even possible now is an open question but I suppose we’re about to find out. Possibly they think they can leverage military power to acquire industrial strength.
As for Europe we see that common sense springs from the fertile ground of suffering of consequences. Until the “leaders” of the western EU experience such suffering they’re unlikely to humble themselves by acceding to the common.
I would suggest that we also need to reclaim our sovereignty as individuals as well as collectively.
Our entire system of governance is nothing more than an elaborate scam that we help to legitimise through the "act" of voting.
Some months back I wrote a detailed email stating this and asked to be completely removed from the electoral register (which according to the government can't be done)
They didn't attempt to rebut anything that was stated and simply responded and said I would be completely removed, which I was.
Another avenue to explore is withholding taxation as they are nothing more than criminals in suits and lie about everything.
The social contract between the governed and government is broken.
If the rule of law and good governance returns then these could be reversed.🇬🇧👍
Yes. The only real form of Democracy is Sortition - election of temporary executive committees by random lot. This is what ancient Athens recognised as 'democracy'. What we currently have, they called 'oligarchy'. Strangely enough (or not) recent-ish experiments in Sortition gave very good results in practice. However, it has the severe drawback of not allowing the rich or powerful any more say than the poor and weak.
👍🤝
Thank you Ian, yourself a bastion of northern working class common sense. The sort of working class common sense that brought socialism and care for working people a century ago. If anyone commenting or reading this hasn't read Ian's little book, "A Misfit in Moscow", you should do, it's an easy read, a diary from an informed and independent commentator and an eye-opening excoriating challenge to British "diplomacy" now absent by default. I'm an expatriate UK citizen now living in NZ. So sad to see the deterioration of political, social and economic life in my old country as mirrored in the deterioration of leadership over this time. Starmer's Orwellian "Peace through Strength" says it all really.....
yes, I got one with a personal note from Ian - I think he does this with all mail-order copies. It was a very good read.
I came across this quote a while back at https://steelcityscribblings.uk :
"Professor Radhika Desai, asked by the host of a discussion last September why Europe’s leaders act manifestly against the interests of their citizens, replied:
The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals."
With your professional background Ian, do you think this is the reason for EU/UK high-heed-yins being the way they are? I can't think of a better explanation, but I have no insight into these circles.
With all my heart. We could use a massive dose of it over here in North America too. I always thought that the EU was on a downward path once it tried to grow past open trade and movement of peoples. I suppose everything is connected but it did seem to start to unravel then. I guess the perceived advantages of a common currency pushed the rest of it. But certainly greater recognition of individual state's sovereignty would not only help Europe, I suspect it would put some roadblocks in the way of US hegemony too? What do you think?
I suspect that "Roadblocks" on US Hegemony would not only be good for the nations of Europe, it would actually be better for the people of the USA. We have a $37T National debt, escalating with no end in sight. Much of this debt has a direct link to the nearly $1Trillion that the US spent last year on "defense" and the $1T we will spend on debt Service this year.
Defense means keeping tens or hundreds of thousands of troops deployed on hundreds or thousands of bases throughout the world. There are 122 bases and 84,000 personnel stationed in the EU alone! WW2 was over 80+ years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed 30+ years ago. All these bases remain in place for for one reason, that is to support and enforce the US Hegemony. Almost none of these bases is essential, unless world domination is our goal.
What 'Defense' really means is very large profits for a few relatively small firms like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing etc. I was amazed to see a while ago that such firms are only small to middling size within the whole US economy, but they seem to have a disproportionate degree of influence. Possibly through extremely intense lobbying?
The correct approach to the EU would have been "centralized when needed; decentralized when possible". Instead we got the "ever closer union" that would love to obliterate the nation-state.
The top of the EU is a vacuum: lots of power and no one to answer to. It is a paradise for lobbyists, a.o. from big business, ngo's and the US.
I'm not happy that Hungary and Slovakia (and Russia in some ways) have a right-wing orientation, but I am pleased that they are all displaying a stubborn independence from the Neo-Liberal poison which has infected the rest of the west.
Hopefully the ending of the Ukraine war, inevitably in a crushing defeat for NATO, will cause the downfall of such people as Baerbock, Von Der Leyen, Merz, Starmer and the rest of that crooked crew, and result in a new and more realistic set of politicians.
An outbreak of common sense in Europe would be most welcome, but I'm not holding my breath. It will take an electoral rout of the centrist Uniparty, which has held power for three decades in the UK and most Western EU states, and has been steadily hijacked by an unelected, incompetent and out-of-touch bureaucracy in Brussels to shake the elites out of their arrogant complacency that they can continue ignoring the will of the people with no apparent consequences.
Sovereignty has been further eroded by a straitjacket of human rights legislation which is no longer fit for purpose, such that when a country like the UK theoretically regains its sovereignty, it no longer has any idea what to do with it. The multipolar Europe that Ian talks about cannot come soon enough.
I fully agree with your general European analysis. Your depth of knowledge far out ways my own but your logic and common sense thankfully is in abundance. Iran the seventh country to be attacked by the West at the request of the Terrorist State of Israel. An occupation that was led and conspired by Baron Rothschild, Balfour, Churchill and Samuels. This action was supported by both the Church of England and the Catholic Church. They both still today remain silent at the continual theft of Palestinian land and the Genocidal eradication of the Arab Indigenous population. I find it chilling that the British media in general are totally supportive of this Zionist massacre. We are led by a government and a Royal family who appear totally indifferent to the Palestinian plight with not the slightest condemnation of Netanyahu and his IDF thugs as they continue to butcher the imprisoned population of Palestinian families. The British press and TV channels appear to be swimming in a Sea of Zionism support. In particular the Daily Mail and GB News where the only element of truth has been sidelined, that being the honourable Neil Oliver. We have lost John Pilger, Julian Assange has been nullified so the only bearers of truth in the UK appear to be George Gallaway, Neil Oliver, Roger Waters and the sole MP who has always supported Indigenous Populations, the compassionate Jeremy Corbyn. Many try to ridicule Jeremy Corbyn but there is hardly an MP in Parliament in all parties who are fit to lick his boots when it come to condemnation of Colonialist treatment of 1st Nation People. Regarding the present USA threats to attack Iran. I think that Russia,China and Pakistan will play a key roll in supporting Iran and I fully support that possibility. As for the stupid Western comments about freeing the Iran nation from tyranny. Well we fully support a similar regime in Saudi Arabia and many other questionable regimes and the ongoing legislation about protest restrictions is bringing the UK ever closer to a Police State where there is already no open platform for debate on subjects such as Gaza, the West Bank and the corrupt decisions by the Western biased UN regarding aid and the policing of supposedly confidential Nuclear Inspectors who are allowed to inspect Iranian sites whilst being denied access to Israeli sites. The answer for the UK is that we need to be Secular, all religious deities should be barred from the house of Lords. Religion should be your own private hobby and have no bearing on legal legislation. All religion is 'Man Made' as my Grandma said. Let's get real.
Sorry to be pedantic, but if you insert a few paragraph breaks, a long post becomes much more readable.