 | I am able to edit only intermittently until further notice, and may not respond swiftly to queries. |
| I am able to edit only intermittently until further notice, and may not respond swiftly to queries. |
| “ | I think your description of the American position in December 2021 and in the run-up to the war in February 2022 is correct. But it’s also important to emphasize—and people in the West don’t want to hear it, but it is true—that the Russians were desperate to avoid a conflict. The idea that Putin was chomping at the bit to invade Ukraine so he could make it part of Greater Russia, it’s just not a serious argument. The Russians did not want a war, and they did, I believe, everything possible to avoid a war. They just couldn’t get the Americans to play ball with them. The Americans were unwilling to negotiate in a serious way. Period. End of story. | ” |
The full discussion is available here.
See Jonathan Cook, Nato isn’t defending Ukraine. It’s stabbing it in the back, Middle East Eye, 14 July 2023. Quote: "Do not expect this conundrum to be highlighted by a western establishment media that seems incapable of doing anything other than regurgitating Nato press releases and cheering on bigger profits for the West’s war industries."
See:
Quote:"President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and U.S. taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election. The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war ... and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia."
From the Stephen Cohen Lecture, “The Ukrainian Crisis: A New Cold War?” on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies Program, Fairfield University, February 5, 2015
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(emphasis in original) |
| “ | And there was more: there was diplomacy, but it was an American diplomacy marked by broken promises and concessions made by the Russians that were not reciprocated. Let me give the young people in the room an example they probably don’t know about. After the United States was attacked on 9/11, the first world leader to call President Bush was Putin. He said, “George, it’s horrible. We’re with you. Tell us what we can do. We have major military assets in Afghanistan; they’re yours. We have a fighting force. We have terrific intelligence. We have transit bases; it’s all yours.” And since Bush was going to send a land force to dislodge the Taliban, Bush took this. And it cost Putin a lot at home. His security people didn’t like this, but he did it anyway. And Putin saved a lot of American lives in that war. Mark that down. What did he get in return? Trivia question. Within two years I think, Bush had expanded NATO right to Russia’s borders. And, equally fateful, Bush took the United States unilaterally out of what was called the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which had been the most stabilizing nuclear treaty in the history of the world because it prohibited the kinds of missiles that can eliminate the other side’s retaliatory response. | ” |
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My name is Neil Hall. I am a Quaker and like most Quakers am concerned with peace (see Quaker Peace Testimony) and equality (see Social responsibility).
I have a degree in mathematics from the University of Warwick and am an Associate of the Institute of Actuaries. I am retired from actuarial work but still maintain my membership of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries as a retired member.
Current recreations include marathon running and cycling (updated: a series of small but annoying medical problems has prevented me running any marathons in the last few years).
I am also a volunteer visitor with the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and support several other organisations which help refugees and asylum seekers. I think the practice of imprisoning refugees or asylum seekers, who have committed no crime, is an obscenity. Updated: I have been a volunteer visitor since 1996, but am no longer visiting, as I finally found the experience so emotionally draining, and depressing, that I needed to take a break.
For more about help to Jewish refugees, see Peter F Kurer, "Thoughts for the Week: A helping hand", 8 March 2018.
"One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been the result of media lies. The media could have stopped it if they had searched deep enough, if they hadn't bought into government propaganda, they could have stopped it. What does that mean? That means basically populations don't like war and populations have to be fooled into war, populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we'll also have a peaceful environment." – Julian Assange, speaking from inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.
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My little tribute to Pilger, following his recent death. |
Some quotes, all from the same source (my emphasis in bold):
(1)
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer. She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
(2)
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
(3) – citing Harold Pinter
"U.S. foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies."
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.
“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
Source: Pilger, John (7 September 2022). "Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works". Trondheim World Festival, Norway. Retrieved 9 January 2024 – via Consortium News.
The erosion of the whole memory/immediacy of the question of imperialism and the need to counter it, as I understood it back when I was young in the UK, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many younger people in the west today think that imperialism/anti-imperialism is “tired old dogma” or whatever. Or, they talk glibly, in re Syria, about “dual imperialisms”– that is, Russian along with US/Western– without any appreciation of the relevance of the history of western imperialism in the M.E. region or the significance of the fact that Russia is in Syria as the invited ally of the legitimate government of Syria while the US/Saudi/western forces are there to disrupt, hobble, or topple the country’s entire governing system, in the continuation of plans that the Zionists and Americans have pursued for many decades now.
It’s important to grasp the moral enormity of this. [US Ambassador James Franklin] Jeffrey did not stoop to deploying the standard cant about theoretical ‘humanitarian exemptions’ (which don’t work in practice) or about aiming only at Assad’s capacity to do harm. No, for him, the purpose of sanctions was and is to strangle the Syrian economy and if that should mean causing ordinary Syrians to queue for bread or gasoline for hours, or be unable to revive factories and recover jobs, or rebuild and re-equip hospitals, or import vitally needed medical goods… well that’s just collateral damage and it’s all for the greater good of pursuing U.S. interests.
What Feltman and Balian are proposing is to ease off on some of this strangulation in return for political concessions. There is a term for this: it’s called extortion. (my emphasis)
The New York Times been continuing its wilful hiding of the political facts around the fighting in Syria’s Idlib province.
... Gall’s report– like the whole stream of humanitarian tearjerkers the NYT has published about Idlib over the past year– made zero mention of the force that has been controlling Idlib for the past few years, against which the Syrian army and its allies have been fighting. It is an alliance of genocidally takfiri*/jihadi militias led by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
... Why is it important that responsible journalists should mention the fact that the Idlib enclave is under the control of fairly heavily armed Al-Qaeda-affiliated militias? For a number of reasons:
If zero mention at all is made of the fact that the enclave is controlled by armed militias, it makes it easier for journalists and those whom they misinform to believe that the Syrian forces and their allies are just gratuitously and cruelly targeting locations and facilities inside the enclave that are very frequently described as “hospitals”, “day-care centers”, etc. Of course, to target such facilities makes zero military sense (unless they are co-located with military installations, which they definitely should not be.) Yes, mistakes, excesses, and “collateral damage” occur in any war; and any war is always horrendous for the residents of the war zone. But if there is zero mention of the presence of any armed formations in the enclave, then the narrative of the Syrian army being gratuitously violent easily takes hold (reinforcing the regime-changers’ longstanding argument that the Syrian government is so uniquely evil that it needs to be toppled asap.)
– Source: Helena Cobban, "US corporate media and the suffering in Syria (contd.)", Just World News, 20 February 2020.
My comment: Note the propaganda technique being used to construct yet another variant of the warmongering narrative.
| “ | This piece was originally commissioned by an editor at The Guardian, who asked me to write about the wave of retaliation and censorship of political expression in solidarity with Palestinians that we’ve seen in the past two weeks. Amid my work as an attorney on some of the resulting cases, I carved out some time to write the following. Minutes before it was supposed to be published, the head of the opinion desk wrote me an email that they were unable to run the piece. When I called her for an explanation she had none, and blamed an unnamed higher-up. That a piece on censorship would get killed in this way—without explanation, but plainly in the interest of political suppression—is, beyond the irony of the matter, a grave indictment of the media response to this critical moment in history. | ” |
| — Dylan Saba | ||
Source:
From Caitlin Johnstone, 15 October 2023
"Internet blackouts, the war on journalism, propaganda, influence operations, bans on demonstrations and online censorship are all happening for the same reason: to keep the public from forming a truth-based understanding of what’s happening in Gaza. Because if the public did form a truth-based understanding of what’s happening in Gaza, they wouldn’t consent to what’s happening there."
More from Caitlin, 14 January 2024:
"You don’t need to believe anything I’m saying on faith. If you just keep in mind what I said and start watching the patterns for yourself while seeking out the truth day by day, you will see it for yourself. You will see the same patterns emerging over and over again, year after year. Over and over again you will see the US and the states that are aligned with it acting with extreme aggression toward non-US-aligned powers in ways that benefit the US-centralized power structure, and you will see the western press deceiving the world about what’s happening. The next Official Bad Guy you see dominating western press coverage on international affairs will be a non-US-aligned power, and if you apply diligent research and critical thinking you will find that they are not presenting an accurate picture of what’s happening."
As usual, Caitlin points out the obvious, 30 Jan 2024
"Defunding UNRWA over a handful of alleged Hamas members who don’t even work there anymore makes no sense from a humanitarian perspective or a military perspective, but it makes a ton of sense from a genocidal perspective."
"In times like this, it is our role as Israeli war resisters to do all we can to prevent deadly escalation, an all-out war and the re-occupation of the Gaza strip. It is also our role to say loud and clear, in the Middle East and internationally, that there is no military solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – this Gaza crisis is proving us right. The only stable solution to the conflict is a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians."
Source: Gaza: You can help war resisters make this crisis into a turning point, Refuser Solidarity Network, 11 October 2023.
Also: watch this young Israeli woman (Atalya Ben Aba) explain why she is refusing to be conscripted into the IDF. 14 December 2023.
... for unsung heroes. Here's an article by a sports journalist (a rugby specialist, which probably explains the headline):
Aylwin's piece is obviously heavily based on Chrissie Wellington's Wikipedia article, which I wrote. Aylwin has done a good journalistic job of paraphrasing and condensing Chrissie's article (with some useful additions of his own) into 500 words. So if you're willing to pay for access to the Telegraph's site (or already have access), please do go and vote for Chrissie. She won't win, of course (the unsung hero again), but it would be nice to see her getting some recognition. In any case, it's good to see that there exists at least one journalist who actually gets the point about Chrissie. As Aylwin wrote,
The trouble with Wellington is that you’ve either never heard of her (most people), or you see her as, well, the greatest sportsperson quite possibly in the world ever, but certainly in the UK. No Brit has dominated their sport like Wellington.
Update: Chrissie came 64th (out of 100). But the main point I draw from this exercise is that the result is more dependent on the media coverage, than on any objective assessment of the athletes' achievements. Andy Murray is indeed a deserving winner; at least as far as I can tell, he is the only one who comes close to (but still doesn't quite reach) the standards of fitness and determination shown by Chrissie. Also note the lack of women: only 3 in the top 20, the highest being Jessica Ennis-Hill at #12, and only 17 in the entire shortlist of 100.
It baffles me that people still believe, or are so easily swayed by, what they read in the press or broadcast media. In the case of sport, it's relatively harmless, except for the systemic bias against women; but when the exercise of military force is involved it's quite a different matter, the most obvious example being the invasion of Iraq, and the results have always been catastrophic.
If anyone is in any doubt about the obscenity of immigration detention (see About me above), please watch last night's (4 September 2017) BBC Panorama here (58 mins). A shorter version is here. GDWG statement here.
Follow up. Worth noting that the BBC avoids assigning higher-level responsibility for this horror. Usually I prefer cool, contemplative thoughts, but sometimes things are so vile that only a rant will do. And if you want a rant, they don't come much better than this (2min 20sec).
Press coverage
On the first day of hearings, the inquiry heard evidence from whistleblower Callum Tully, who worked as a Brook House officer from 2015 to 2017. Mr Altman [counsel to the inquiry] said [the whistleblower] described a "disturbing culture" at Brook House where staff showed "apathy to vulnerable, disturbed or distressed detained persons." Brook House officers who were deemed too empathetic, helpful or kind to detainees were themselves marginalised, criticised or mocked, he said, adding that there was "visible hostility" towards raising concerns. One of the incidents which drove Mr Tully to go to the BBC was witnessing staff mocking and laughing at a detainee who was standing naked in a room in the solitary confinement block of Brook House.
One of the things I find most offensive is that I am a self-hating Jew if I am loyal to that tradition of Judaism which has produced such figures as Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, Jesus – all those Jewish heretics, somehow all those guys are freaks and Bibi Netanyahu represents my true soul – and if I don't like Bibi Netanyahu very much, I'm a self-hating Jew. I can't express how offensive I find that. Those people don't speak for me and they don't speak for the majority of Jews worldwide, and the fact that they are taking our safety, our culture, our traditions, and using it as a weapon to fight against someone who wants to redistribute a little money to homeless people on the street, it's a deep, profound insult to the humanistic spirit which is at the core of Judaism. It is itself antisemitic. I come from a left-wing Zionist tradition, actually my mom was Hashomer Hatzair who were socialist Zionists. One of the things which are terrifying is how the right wing has essentially captured the Jewish identity more and more – you hear people say, well you know when people make anti-capitalist statements they're being subtly antisemitic because, as we all know, Jewish people are more likely to be capitalists, err it's like Karl Marx? Rosa Luxemburg? Leon Trotsky? Emma Goldman? – there's a long tradition of Jewish radicalism. To some degree what we now think of as the left is a product of Jewish thought and the Jewish tradition just as much as say Christianity comes out of that tradition. [...] They went through anything that Corbyn had ever said, and tried to fit, is there anything we can construct as if it were somehow antisemitic – obviously if you did that you could "prove" anybody was antisemitic – you could prove that Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan were communists if you just took quotes in isolation, and he laid a wreath, I mean Ronal Reagan did lay a wreath on the cemetery of SS troops at Bitburg, the very same force that was running Auschwitz; he knew he was doing it, and no-one has ever accused him of being an antisemite as a result.
... to Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis:
"The current hysteria engulfing the British Labour Party resolves itself into a pair of interrelated, if discrete, premises: Anti-Semitism in British society at large and the Labour Party in particular have reached crisis proportions. If neither of these premises can be sustained, then the hysteria is a fabrication. In fact, no evidence has been adduced to substantiate either of them; on the contrary, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. The rational conclusion is that the brouhaha is a calculated hoax—dare it be said, plot?—to oust Jeremy Corbyn and the principled leftist politics he represents from British public life. But even if the allegations were true, the solution would still not be to curb freedom of thought in the Labour Party. At its worthiest, the Left-Liberal tradition has attached a unique, primordial value to Truth; but Truth cannot be attained if dissentients, however obnoxious, are silenced. Given the fraught history of anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and its crude manipulation by Jewish elites, on the other, an objective, dispassionate assessment could appear beyond reach. Still, it must be attempted. The prospect of a historic victory for the Left might otherwise be sabotaged as, thus far, Corbyn’s supporters, whether it be from fear, calculation, or political correctness, dare not speak the name of the evil that is afoot."
As always, Finkelstein is well worth reading. A long article, but essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is really going on.
Some things Wikipedia does well:
For the avoidance of doubt, I also think there is a dark side to Wikipedia. Perhaps I will add something about that later.
“What I can't work out about this place,” she says, “is whether they're genuinely oblivious to what their policies are doing, whether they're so out of touch that they honestly don't see how much damage it's doing, or whether they just don't care.”
— Source: Mhairi Black (age 20), quoted in Cadwalladr, Carole (12 July 2015). "The SNP 56: a breath of fresh air… or a timebomb at the heart of Westminster?". The Observer. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
| “ | I watched American Sniper the other night and it really is the most puerile propaganda imaginable.
[...] Reading the US reviews of American Sniper is a good way to remind ourselves not only of the critical role Hollywood plays in popularising lies about the West’s recent history and in sanitising our crimes, but also of the vital role the mainstream media play in giving these simplistic and duplicitous fables an aura of ethical complexity and intellectual respectability. |
” |
| “ | Ask yourself – when is the last time you saw an anti-war voice, as opposed to a pro-war ‘military’ or ‘security’ expert, asked by the BBC to comment on a Middle East development? Yet the majority of people in this country are against the war. There is no doubt at all that when you make anti-war or anti-government points on the BBC the whole body language and line of questioning indicates that you are some sort of isolated extremist. |
” |
| — Craig Murray, source: click here (PDF) | ||
... a letter by Richard Forer, a former member of AIPAC, 21 June 2010 (useful reading list at the end).
| “ | If truth is the first victim of war, it is then Israel's absolute priority to assassinate it, before, during and after the conflict. Our duty as activists, and more generally as human beings, is to document and tell the truth for the sake of freedom and justice, and then bring it to the table of world public opinion, and then serve it as a meal, the more difficult to digest the better.
For tomorrow, so as to stay human. Vittorio Arrigoni |
” |
| “ | For me two things come out clearly from these painful documents (some of them have parallel data in the US embassy cables on Wikileaks). First it is not that the Palestinian officials are traitors but merely (and this is bad enough) mistakenly and passionately going through motions hoping against all odds that by talking and compromising more they could achieve a tiny fraction of what we are entitled to. The second observation is that Israel will not sign a peace deal regardless of how low and ridiculous the concessions on the Palestinian side:
Some critics asked: if, as the documents show, the Palestinian negotiators were willing to accept all of this then WHY did Israeli politicians hold out? The answer is obvious to anyone who ever faced Zionism. They believe (rightly or wrongly) they can get 100% so why should they settle for 91% or even 99% especially when the ceiling of the Palestinian requests kept dropping in the past 22 years (since they accepted in 1988 to let Israel keep most of the looted parts of Palestine 1948). Today, Israel's three main sources of income are dependent on a continued conflict and occupation: the $6.5 billion military and security exports, the $6 billion US and other western direct aid, and $3 billion from the captive markets in the West Bank and Gaza. All three would be threatened with end of conflict even if Israel gets to keep most of its stolen loot. Israeli officials are keen to keep negotiations going to avoid an anti-Apartheid scenario and for PR and normalization to keep pumping more money and more settlers into the remaining small shrivelling Palestine because it is economically profitable. |
” |
| — Mazin Qumsiyeh, Fear and the Palestine Papers, 30 January 2011 | ||
| “ | But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in al-Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results. | ” |
| — Robert Fisk, The Independent 30 January 2010 | ||
| “ | In nearby al-Jiftlik village, Israel has refused permits to build a school, insisting that families should either move or bus their children more than an hour each way to Tubas. In peaceful response, the teachhers of al-Jiftlik started holding classes in a large village tent. Last year, al-Jiftlik finally constructed a real schoolhouse, which students will use until Israel tears it down.
About 4,500 Palestinians live in Fasayil and al-Jiftlik combined. That's nearly the total population (6,300) of Israeli settlers in the whole of the Jordan Valley. And yet, that small number of settlers, living in 36 settlements, controls the land where tens of thousands of Palestinians reside. ... Just 4% of the valley remains for its 50,000 Palestinian inhabitants. That includes the city of Jericho and a few built-up Palestinian villages, but leaves next to nothing for agricultural use. This has been devastating for the agriculture-based society and explains the mass exodus of Palestinians even after Israel's overtly violent expulsion tactics ceased. |
” |
| — Anna Baltzer, 12 April 2007 in
Baltzer, Anna (2007). Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59451-307-7. | ||
| “ | In Gaza, children, |
” |
| — Michael Rosen, January 2009 | ||
| “ | I have dreams. |
” |
| — Immigration detainee, quoted in GDWG newsletter, Summer 2009 | ||
| “ | Do not show me a young rebel, |
” |
| — Caitlin Johnstone, My New Book, "Poems For Rebels", November 2020 | ||
| “ | Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame, |
” |
| — Robert Burns | ||
| “ | They killed a poet in Gaza on Wednesday. |
” |
| — Caitlin Johnstone, For Refaat Alareer, December 2023 | ||
|
Another one from Caitlin, slightly modified by me |
| “ | Welcome to the empire |
” |
| — Caitlin Johnstone, Welcome to the Empire, January 2024 | ||
My late father was a scientist, and my education had an emphasis on science and mathematics, so my editing includes biographies of scientists.
I also edit biographies of Quakers and peace activists. Note that there is significant overlap between all three groups.
Some of the main topic areas I edit, besides the biographies listed above, include:
But I will also edit almost anything interesting that I happen to come across.
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| 2 March 2024 |
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Nice things people have said about me (barnstars, DYK credits) →
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Barnstars
 dreams of peace --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:44, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
DYKs
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