War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself. The West has come to view “owning” the winning narrative – and presenting the...
Walter Kirn, an American novelist and cultural critic, in his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, described how, after a sojourn at Oxford, he came to be a member of "the class that runs things" – the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them.” It...
The signposts are there for all to read: The West – in deliberately overlooking such explicit markers – cannot then complain, or escape, the ensuing consequences. No, the “tin ear” is not some new western derangement – a unique mass collapse of sanity – that we are...
Extraordinary Times: Biden renounces his election bid via in the slimmest of Sunday afternoon postings; retreats into a silence which finally is broken by a “long farewell” pronounced from the Oval Office. Biden’s staff didn’t hear of his renunciation until...
Brussels Élites let out their long sigh of relief – the French Right was blocked. Markets complacently shrugged; “everything must ‘change’ to remain the same.” The Centre will find a way! Macron successfully had blocked the “populist” Right and Left through...
The Editor at Large for the Wall Street Journal, Gerry Baker, says: ‘We’ve been “gaslit’ and deceived” – for years – “all in the name of ‘democracy’”. That deceit “collapsed” with the Presidential debate, Thursday’. Until the world saw the truth … [against] the...
There perhaps was a momentary shrugging-off of slumber in Washington this week as they read the account of Sergei Lavrov’s démarche to the US Ambassador in Moscow: Russia was telling the US – “We are no longer at peace”! Not just “no longer at peace,” Russia was...
The G7 and the subsequent Swiss “Bürgenstock Conference” can – in retrospect – be understood as preparation for a prolonged Ukraine war. The three centrepiece announcements emerging from the G7 – the 10 year Ukraine security pact; the $50 “billion Ukraine loan;” and...
On all fronts, the Israeli internal paradigm is fracturing; and externally, the West is itself fissuring, and becoming a pariah on the global stage. The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of...
On a visit to Oxford a few weeks ago, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative, (Walter Münchau writes), made an interesting remark: “Diplomacy is the art of managing double standards.” Münchau illustrated its inherent hypocrisy by contrasting the enthusiasm...
The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a “new world.” It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through “saving Zionism”;...
Alon Pinkas, a former senior Israeli diplomat (well plugged in at the White House), says aloud the “reality” about Israel which he underlines cannot be hidden further: [There are now] two [Jewish] states – with contrasting visions of what the nation should...
The core issues at the heart of release of hostages held in Gaza were two: A complete cessation to the war and full withdrawal of all Israeli forces. Netanyahu’s position was that whatever the hostage outcome, the IDF would return to Gaza and that the war there might...
The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the US and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza....
Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile “demonstation” attack into Israel: A “message,” rather than an...
(This paper is the basis of a talk to be given at the 25th Yasin (April) International Academic Event on Economic and Social Development, HSE University, Moscow, April 2024) In the summer following Israel’s 2006 (unsuccessful) war on Hizbullah, Dick Cheney sat in his...
We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different. Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very...
US Democratic Party support for Israel is fast fissuring – an “ideological tremor,” Peter Beinart (editor of Jewish Currents) calls it. Since 7 Oct “it has become an earthquake” – a “Great Rupture.” This concerns the fusion of Liberalism to Zionism that long has...
Charles Michel, the European Council President, has called on Europe to switch to a “war economy.” He justifies this call partly as urgent support for Ukraine, but more pertinently, as the need for relaunching the (beached) European economy by focussing on the defence...
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued, “That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn,...
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