Friday 19th of April 2024
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the loonies of the mad kingdom…..

During the upcoming televised debate, British Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson’s government, is expected to promise resolute action against China, which he accuses of “being the biggest long-term threat to the UK.”

Claiming that Beijing is now “infiltrating our universities” and “stealing our technology,” racist scaremongering talking points which originated from the Trump administration, Sunak will call for strengthening NATO cooperation against China and will pledge to close all 30 Confucius institutes in the country (which teach Chinese language but have been frequently and baselessly accused of espionage and political interference).

 

By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst 

 

To most Tory hawks, however, Sunak’s rhetoric isn’t convincing. Only as recently as January did he in fact vow to deepen business ties between China and the UK. His change of course is blatantly motivated by his desire to become the leader of the party and pander to a right-wing populist base who overwhelmingly favour his opponent Liz Truss, who models herself quite explicitly after Margaret Thatcher. As the first ever ethnic minority candidate for Conservative leadership, it isn’t rocket science to see why he is at a disadvantage in such circumstances, a sad but uncomfortable truth.

With Sunak’s previous positions on China also being fairly reasonable, this has also quickly turned into a line of attack against him by the right-wing press, with the Daily Mail recently claiming he was supported by China’s Global Times, which, it said, was “the endorsement nobody wanted.”

However, nobody would seriously think that Sunak is going to ‘out-hawk’ Truss, who has been fanatical in her confrontational approach to diplomacy against both China and Russia, and her zealous obsession with democracy – or rather, the rhetoric construct of “democracy” so often used as a rallying cry by Western leaders.

For Britain as a whole, this is disastrous news, but few people will be realizing it. Despite talk of “global Britain” and “free trade,” whoever should succeed Boris Johnson (and it will probably be Truss) will put Britain on a collision course with the world’s second-largest economy, the largest in terms of imports and exports, despite the lingering impacts of Brexit, and of course whilst simultaneously pursuing an aggressive proxy war in Ukraine, where Truss wants nothing less than the defeat of the Russian state. One might pause and ask, what on Earth has gone wrong with British foreign policy? In light of all this, and of Brexit, how could it have become so unhinged and self-defeating? It is demonstrative of the sheer madness which has captured the political mainstream in the light of Brexit.

Modern Britain has always, at every point in history, been arrogant and aggressive, completely unrepentant of its imperial legacy. Attributing Brexit as the starting point of such unbridled chauvinism might lead one to forget about the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and of course Britain’s continuing toadyism to American foreign-policy preferences and clear lack of independence in its own direction. After all, the United Kingdom has on paper participated in every single US-led war after World War II. The sole exception was Vietnam, thanks to Harold Wilson, a Labour Prime Minister who truly defined the “swinging sixties” in Britain and refused to assist. But he was the exception.

Thus, whilst it was always there, Brexit has manifested itself as probably the highest and most chauvinistic form of Anglophone exceptionalism and ideological elitism yet, specifically because it has suffocated the post-war debate concerning Britain’s post-imperial identity and the bid to be part of Europe. Instead of moving on from the past, it has doubled down on it, and in turn has merged with a brand of extreme neoconservatism to become even more subservient to the United States and wage hyper-aggression against certain countries, in this case Russia and China, in the name of British civilisation. Any pragmatism, any reason, balance and humility that might have otherwise restrained Conservative politicians has evaporated in the name of populism.

Now we’re at the stage where an Indian-origin British politician feels he can solicit political gain for himself by weaponizing fear, hate and scaremongering against Chinese people, betraying the diverse and open country where his parents settled and which allowed him to become so successful. It is a sorry state of affairs, and this aggressive pursuit of burning bridges and geopolitical confrontation will undoubtedly, as it has already, place further strain on the British economy, already beset by surging inflation, shrinking incomes, growing industrial unrest and eye-watering inequality. While of course, Liz Truss looks to be an almost inevitable victor, the fact someone like her is in this position speaks volumes about not her ascent, but about Britain’s descent. If you thought Boris Johnson was bad (he was personally incompetent but politically restrained by the standards of others), things are about to get a whole lot worse. On multiple fronts, we’re going to see the UK now take the deep turn of right-wing regression the US has been experiencing.

 

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digging two graves……..

 

By Frances Letters

 

One: Select your grievance. Two: Insult and belittle your adversary. Three: Brace yourself…

Over the past month the ABC has been replaying The Hollow Crown, a TV series based on Shakespeare’s history plays. Henry V is claiming some French dukedoms he believes are his by inherited right.

The Dauphin sends an envoy with a suggestion for peace talks––and as a flattering inducement, a wondrous gift. A box of treasure.

But what’s this? A gift fit for a … child? For the giddy young Prince Hal the king used to be? A box of tennis balls! What an unspeakable insult!

Naturally Henry, enraged by the mockery, attacks. In his own words, the tennis balls become cannon balls. Untold suffering ensues.

Readers of Pearls and Irritations will have no difficulty hearing echoes of this war-trigger as they ricochet down the ages into our present world. One article after another calmly draws our attention to the fact that sneers, insults and scorn provoke wars, and that as a result we are all now in danger. If poked hard and often enough, even the mildest, sweetest bear will finally erupt in a fury of snarls and slashing claws. China––never the mildest or sweetest of creatures…and why would it be?––is clearly in the sights of many a cold-eyed watcher.

Twentieth century history positively seethes with examples of unnecessary insolence and stupidity triggering disaster. Australia has certainly not been exempt. When you think about it, even proud Anzac Day’s invasion of Turkey was an up-you assault on a enemy of Mother England’s that had done us no harm, and threatened none. But we longed for Mother’s approval, and the security it would surely guarantee. And this despite reports, not long after Gallipoli, of a very early German appeal to Britain for a peace conference. Some historians believe all that fawning colonial kow-towing to the lords of Empire only buttered them up and stiffened their resolve to fight that stupid, good-for-nothing war to the bitter end.

So however remote––and even fanciful––the connection may seem, Australia’s WWI obsequious tugging the forelock might actually have played some part in triggering one avoidable twentieth century world crisis after another: a step-by-step slide into a string of catastrophes…

Had the lordly British Empire, basking in power and narcissism as it was, agreed to those early peace proposals, would there for certain have been a Russian Revolution? Almost two million Russian soldiers died in that war; the nation’s economy had been smashed; millions were famished and desperate enough to lash out at the Tsar, who was naturally blamed for the disaster.

Then, swiftly following, the Treaty of Versailles: vicious punishment and humiliation heaped onto a Germany forced to admit guilt for the war. Reparations so vast and shaming they beggared the nation. Without them, would the next inevitable link in the chain have followed? Fascism, and the furious rise of Hitler?

Had early peace talks taken place and the worst of the war been avoided, would there have been such a ruinous Great Depression? And without fascism’s stiff-arm salute flashing round Europe, would a Spanish Civil War have erupted? Then would humiliated Germany’s rage for vengeance have triggered World War II?

And what of the next inevitable link: that seismic thunderbolt, nuclear weapons? Then the Cold War? Now NATO’s sly moves eastward, and Russia’s vengeful 2021 snatch at Ukraine?

“Ah, but beware appeasement!” you might retort. “Look what happened last time, with Hitler!” I can only answer that Chamberlain’s attempts at appeasement came far, far too late. By then the triumphant arrogance of Versailles had long done its worst.

The Liberal leader Peter Dutton famously warned that if we want peace, we should prepare for war. That is not how most of us deal with the irritating guy over the fence, whose lawnmowing wakes us too early in the morning or whose wood fire spews out too much smoke. Instead, we try a friendly chat. We explain our situation, offer mild suggestions. Maybe even a bit of a conciliatory promise of our own. Finally, with a parting grin, we slap him cheerily on the back. Diplomacy! The very stuff of good neighbourliness…

On 9 July 2022, Teow Loon Ti wrote in Pearls and Irritations that Dutton’s advice “should be replaced by Confucius’ maxim that if we are thinking of destroying our enemy, we should dig two graves.”

A wise warning. Clearly the tidal undertows from those pitiably ill-considered goings-on from our warlike past still lap around us menacingly to this day…

 

READ MORE:

 https://johnmenadue.com/frances-letters-how-to-trigger-a-war-three-easy-lessons/

 

WE'VE ALREADY MENTIONED CONFUCIUS ADVICE ABOUT WAR..... MEANWHILE "ATTACKING A Rottweiler WITH A Chihuahua ISN'T A GOOD IDEA"....

 

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a UK mess…...

  1. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says both Tory leadership candidates "are the architects of the mess this country is in"
  2. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss attacked each other's economic policies in their first head-to-head televised debate in Stoke-on-Trent last night
  3. The two contenders talked over each other and clashed on taxes, their Brexit records, the schools they went to and their records in government
  4. Sources close to Sunak said they believed he had "won the argument" on the economy, but one Truss supporter accused him of "mansplaining"
  5. About 160,000 Conservative members will take part in a ballot to choose the next party leader and prime minister, with the winner announced on 5 September

READ MORE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-62273292

 

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bojo the glorious?…...

When you look at who is about to replace Boris Johnson, you realise he was a true leader – and that got him deposed

 

The Tory leadership candidates are a ‘confederacy of dunces’ united to tear Johnson down at the behest of global elites 

Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

 

[GusNote: Gus disagree with Hryce on this issue....]

 

The global elites are no doubt still celebrating the political demise of Boris Johnson. In one sense, they are entitled to do so – after all, it was the dysfunctional and anti-democratic political culture they spawned over the past thirty years that brought him down.

With scant loyalty to the economic and cultural traditions of the countries in which they have accumulated nearly unchecked power, these new overlords have ushered in a globalised economy that has gradually and – ever more tumultuously since the 1990s – replaced the older economic order grounded in the nation state. The previous national elites were pushed aside in most Western democracies and now maintain only limited influence culturally and within certain traditional conservative parties.

All important institutions in most Western democracies have come under the control of the global elite. This includes the large transnational corporations, the financial sector, universities, the bureaucracy, the professions, legal institutions, large sections of the media. In addition to advocating an economic program that has impoverished and hollowed out the working and middle classes, their myriad ideologies – perhaps most prominent of which are catastrophic climate change, identity politics and political correctness – have decisively won the ‘culture wars’ in most Western societies.

The dramatic economic and ideological changes brought about by this cohort have also fundamentally reshaped and revolutionised politics in the West. Indicative of this is that both the Democratic Party in America and the Labour party in the United Kingdom have been fully taken over by these forces, and both have long since abandoned their traditional working-class constituencies.

These elites have also divided, and in some countries – such as France – completely destroyed traditional conservative and centrist parties. In the process, they have generated a powerful anti-democratic populist political backlash – personified by Donald Trump – that threatens to seriously destabilise democracy in the West.

It was the historian Christopher Lasch who first pointed out the intrinsically dysfunctional and anti-democratic aspects of the political culture created by the global elites in his book ‘The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy’, published in 1994.

For a brilliantly satirical account of precisely how the greed-driven global elites operate in the UK, both at a personal and institutional level, readers should consult Quentin Letts’ 2017 book ‘Patronising Bastards – How the Elites Betrayed Britain’.      

Boris Johnson is at heart a traditional conservative politician (not for nothing is he the biographer of Winston Churchill), so it is not surprising that, within the West’s fractured and volatile contemporary political culture, his career has been a controversial and turbulent one.

Pushing through Brexit against the determined opposition of the global elites and the institutions they control – including the powerful Remainer segment of the Tory party (led by the gormless Theresa May), the former speaker of the House of Commons, the Supreme Court, and the woke establishment media  – was a remarkable achievement.

So too was winning the 2019 election with an eighty-seat majority that brought substantial numbers of traditional working-class voters (in the so-called “Red Wall” seats) back within the Tory party fold for the first time in decades.

No contemporary British conservative politician other than Johnson could have accomplished either of these things. Paradoxically, however, it was these very achievements that the global elites could never forgive Johnson for.

Johnson tried to placate them by embracing their climate change program and even their misguided foreign policy of perpetuating the conflict in Ukraine. But these concessions were never going to be enough to save him. 

Johnson’s poor political judgment and erratic behaviour – including his fragmented domestic political program, his sacking of Dominic Cummings, his indulging of the crassness and narcissism of his younger millennial wife, and his arrogant refusal to create a viable support base within the Conservative party – certainly played a part in his downfall.

It is a moot point as to whether Johnson could have survived had he behaved differently. I suspect that he was simply incapable of doing so.

What sealed Johnson’s political fate, however, was his anachronistic vision of the United Kingdom as an independent nation state that needed to integrate its displaced working class economically and politically (his “levelling up” program) – a worldview fundamentally at odds with the globalised perspective of the ruling elites.

The global elites are determined to destroy the nation state and the nineteenth century bourgeois values that underpinned it – hence their fervent and ruthless commitment to transnational ideologies and organisations, most notably the European Union.  

They also despise the traditional working class, whose lives, values and culture they have upended, and whose economic security they have progressively destroyed over the past five decades. There is simply no place within their economic and cultural vision of a brave new world for those people that Hilary Clinton so contemptuously and revealingly described as “deplorables.”  After all, didn’t this lot vote in droves for Brexit?

Now completely abandoned by traditional labour and centrist parties that once protected their interests, it is this group that has now – what other choice did it have? – turned in desperation to populist leaders such as Trump.

Therein lies the root of the intractable instability and irrationality at the heart of contemporary politics in most Western democracies. 

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each Western democracy is disintegrating in its own peculiar fashion. Johnson attempted to reverse this process in the United Kingdom by keeping working class voters within the Tory party. Now that Johnson has gone, however, these voters will desert the Tories and look for a populist alternative. This will create even more political instability and ensure that the Conservative Party cannot win the next election.

One aspect of this process of political disintegration is the poor quality of politician that it inevitably throws up.

The last thing that the global elites want are politicians of real stature; rather, they seek pliable non-entities that simply mouth their ideologies endlessly, and who can be controlled and dismissed when and as the elites see fit. 

Johnson, for all his manifold faults, was a genuine political leader – and virtually uncontrollable. 

Rational political discourse and debate is now impossible, it is the global elites that created in the West this irrational mode of politics, in which opponents are not debated but only “cancelled” – as Johnson has been.  

It is now standard practice to use minor transgressions against the canons of political correctness – sensationalised ad nauseam by a compliant and debauched media – to depose political leaders. This is precisely what happened in Johnson’s case.

What were the egregious crimes that necessitated Johnson’s political cancelling? He and his staff at Number 10 had a few late-night drinks in breach of the Covid lockdown regulations (for which they later paid the requisite fines); and Johnson appointed an obscure MP party whip against whom historical allegations of sexual impropriety (some dating back to 2005) had been made. Johnson is also alleged to have lied about both matters.

These are not serious offences in any meaningful sense. But such ‘crimes’ contravene the deep-seated puritanism and narcissistic eagerness to be offended that are at the heart of the elites’ politically correct worldview.

These are mere hypocritical pretences for ‘cancellation’ – simply the ‘justification’ for the vituperative political campaign that the Labour Party and the Remainer faction of his own party waged against Johnson for months. A complicit and woke media did the rest. 

Tony Blair took the UK into an unlawful war in Iraq that led to nearly a million deaths, but the elites took that in stride. Having a few drinks late at night, however, apparently requires the dismissal of a conservative prime minister.

As to the consequences of Johnson’s sacking, we only have to take a glance at the politicians who emerged as his potential replacement as prime minister.

Five candidates presented themselves for approval in the first two televised debates. Having observed them, Jonathan Swift’s epigram came immediately to mind: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Such a group of political dullards has rarely been assembled in one room. None of them could possibly lead the Tories to an election victory in two years’ time.

Let us describe the leading candidates in turn.

Rishi Sunak is a failed chancellor and multi-millionaire who previously worked for Goldman Sachs. His wife is even wealthier than he is, and until recently had arranged her affairs such that she paid no tax at all in the UK. Sunak preaches the virtues of austerity to the average Briton. Like Johnson, Sunak also breached the Covid regulations and was fined. It was Sunak’s mutinous resignation from the cabinet that triggered Johnson’s resignation.  A more typical representative of the global elite one could not find – even Quentin Letts could not have invented him.

Liz Truss, a former Remainer, of whom Alistair Campbell said this week: “Liz Truss would be so appalling as Prime Minister that it’s almost unthinkable, which means it could happen.” Journalist John Crace described her as “a politician totally without effect ….. an ideologue without ideas.”

Penny Mordaunt is a failed defence secretary, who Tory peer Daniel Moylan branded this week as “incompetent.” Former Brexit minister David Frost said that she was “missing in action” when they worked together. Mordaunt was this week caught out in a blatant lie as she attempted to backpedal from her unqualified support for transgender athletes.

The first two televised debates – in which the candidates tore into each other like deranged pit bulls – were such unedifying spectacles that this week’s third debate was cancelled at the behest of Sunak and Truss, no doubt in order to preserve whatever small shreds of credibility and dignity the candidates may still have possessed.

When conservative commentator Peter Hitchens was asked this week who his favourite candidate was, he replied: “What is your favourite disease?” Does anyone seriously believe that any of them can unify a Tory party that has been torn apart by Johnson’s political assassination? 

The new prime minister will be selected by a vote of the 160,000 Tory party members – rather than the entire British electorate – and on Wednesday the party unsurprisingly selected Sunak and Truss as the final two candidates who will vie for that vote.    

In deposing Johnson, a serious political crisis has been created – Nicola Sturgeon and Sinn Fein cannot believe their luck – that can only hasten the demise of democracy in the UK.

Flawed though he was, Johnson will leave office with a record of substantial achievement behind him – “mission largely accomplished, for now” as he jauntily put it in his bravura farewell speech in the Commons this week. (Pointedly, arch Remainer Theresa May refused to applaud Johnson’s speech.)

It is absolutely certain, however, that none of the dunces that joined together to depose Boris Johnson will ever will ever find themselves in the position of departing office with such an array of accomplishments.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/559583-truss-sunak-johnson-uk/

 

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This won't change the outcome. BoJo is an idiot.... The contenders are loonies....

 

GUS: THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THE UKRAINE PROBLEM IS TO DIVIDE IT IN TWO COUNTRIES — AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE: THE GALICIANS IN THE WEST, THE RUSSIANS IN THE EAST. END OF STORY.

See Ireland and England. See Serbia and Croatia.... et cetera......

 

GUSNOTE: I give the date 1929 for the Irish full independence.... as a link between 1922 and 1937....

 

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