fahrenheit451:250

The other day  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote a stinging jeremiad in the Telegraph denouncing the shenanigans of the metropolitan elite and their political class as they carry out their historic treasonable betrayal of the British electorate's verdict delivered in the June 23 Referendum. Plus ca change! That was always going to be their end game. Truth is that it is the Labour Party & Trades Union movement that bears the greater shame and culpability in the treason itself than any other party or movement.

As I said in an earlier blog posting.....

 

APRIL 26, 2016 BY LOUISKASATKIN1

And So It Goes…#765

There’s a little over another 8 weeks of nose to tail electoral campaigning to endure before we finally get to cast our ballots on June 23. And the blizzard of increasingly vacuous and contentious statements and reciprocal point-scoring is inexorably gathering pace. We have become unaccustomed to mature,nuanced,indeed clever political badinage and rhetoric here in the formerly ” great ” britain. Instead we’ve allowed ourselves to be alternately hectored and lectured by a seemingly endless cavalcade of preening,fatuous wannabe poseurs and parliamentary arrivistes who are for the most part are utterly devoid of even the merest scintilla of statesmanship and popular political acumen that might influence and resonate with the ordinary citizenry and electorate.
The EU Referendum debate,such as it is is being soundly buffeted by verbiage and flimsy assertions coming at it from all conceivable ideological and Party directions.For Labour it is essentially a tribal struggle vis a vis the Conservatives.Their worn out,dessicated mantras are being dusted off and brought back into circulation,wrapped in a faux-nostalgia and counterfeit,superficial class politics that long ago ceased to have any traction in the world post Thatcher-Blair. Following on from Shadow Foreign secretary Benn’s wildly delusional and idiosyncratic exposition of his tenuous grasp of modern history during the ” May we bomb Syria “debate ;Alan Johnson follows Benn into going over the top on an equally implausible rhetorical suicide mission underscoring the axiom that truth is the first casualty in war,but in Johnston’s case as in Benn’s earlier,Meaning itself is the biggest casualty of all. Gleaned from the eponymous Labour List site,Tuesday 26 April. :-
” The EU referendum is as important as the General Election of 1945, Alan Johnson says today in a rallying speech to trade unionists.
The “immediate consequences” of Brexit would harm both the country and society as a whole, the chair of Labour In For Britain is expected to warn at the Usdaw conference later today.
“I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,” Johnson will say.
“It is a vote about whether we remain or leave the EU, and there will be immediate consequences to that decision for everyone here, and every family in the land.  But it’s about more than that.  For me, it’s about what kind of country we are, what kind of society we want to be.”
“Nearly four million British trade union members are represented by unions campaigning to keep Britain in Europe this June.
“From nurses and builders, to railway workers, steel workers, postal workers and shop workers, trade unions will be campaigning for a Britain that Remains in Europe.
“The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership..”
This is absurdist installation performance art on an epic scale.Benn ‘s verbal necromancy sought to conjure the ghosts of a largely misunderstood Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s -here Johnson trumps even that vainglorious essay with: “I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,”  The meds have clearly kicked in and someone ought to fetch the Nurse.
More important than the general election of 1945 ? The absolute zenith of Labour Party/Trades Union reformist mythology second only to the Keir Hardie Creation myth.And Johnson has gone and erased from the collective,historic working class memory absolutely everything else.The coup de grace being his repeating the outright figment of Blairite imagination,that ” The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership “.
Theologically this would count as Apostasy or even Heresy coming from within the Vatican itself. And we all know what should happen to Heretics.

fahrenheit451:249

It should be noted that the EU Withdrawal negotiations led by the May regime have to all intents and purposes utterly betrayed the verdict delivered by the EU Referendum of 23 June 2016.

Not a single scintilla of discernible advantage has been accrued by the UK during the seemingly, but not quite, interminable Leave negotiations.Nothing whatsoever.For all the venal,hubristic posturing and indiscriminate use of diplomatic hyperbole and cant from all three sides in the Withdrawal negotiations,nothing to paraphrase Bob Dylan, has been delivered.

Three sides,you say? The EU ,the official UK and if you hadn't already noticed the unofficial UK aka the Remain campaign. they have  carried on ever since the dawn of the 24 June 2016 as if in fact it was they that had triumphed in the referendum irrespective of the empirically verifiable numerical disadvantage recorded for posterity on the day itself.

Days after that irritating,shabby little twerp Donald Tusk  ( with pretensions of being some kind of latter day reincarnation of Marshal Pilsudski ) goes about telling the UK off,yet again, for its continuing negotiating stance on the so-called " Irish Border Post Brexit " , the House of Lords decides to throw all of its toys out of the pram.

It's like watching a prison riot consisting of alzheimers patients.Most of them have difficulty recognising the person speaking or where they themselves are most of the time.

The H.oL. latest jape was to vote through an amendment which graphically illustrates the dangerous antipathy toward democracy they and their metropolitan elitist political class feel. The amendment which goes back to the House of Commons for further debate ( with the danger of it actually being accepted by a majority of those itinerant benchwarmers ) forces the UK to seek to enter a Customs Union relationship with the EU.

The term non-sequitur springs to mind,but given the Alice-In-Wonderland tropes that the entire Brexit process has been subsumed in,one can never tell.

The Remoaners aka metroplitan seditionists & EU shills ( many posing as the government itself pretending to want to carry out the ineluctable democratic mandate of the British electorate but in reality having no intention whatsoever of actually doing so ) are of course giddier than a chimpanzees tea party that's just drunk all the Kool-aid in one great big gulp.

Matron will be having words with them in the morning after having had to change their bedsheets so often during the night.

fahrenheit451:248

For the record it should be stated that:-
Robert Fisk is an English writer and journalist. He has been Middle East correspondent intermittently since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he has been correspondent for The Independent.
He is  widely respected ,hence his report a couple of days ago of his visit to Douma-where a chemical weapons attack against civilians was allegedly perpetrated-has caused such widespread alarm and despondency across  the Corporate MSM and social media platforms.
This is not what,for instance, the 630 itinerant Westminster benchwarmers were expecting to be so graphically revealed to them in the wake of their pathetic,mewling faux-debate - post fact of the UK's involvement in the incident of international lawbreaking ( i.e. criminality ) where the US ,UK and France launched a massive air and missile attack against various  government establishments inside Syria.These establishments having been " identified " as critical infrastructure in the Syrian government's alleged chemical and biological  weapons program.
In the absolute realm of historic Realpolitik it is for the strongest to govern.And powerful nation states as a matter of praxis in the end do actually do whatever the hell they want to whenever and wherever. That in itself isn't problematic;what is problematic is the faux-insistence that everyone maintain a polite fiction that nation states are somehow accountable to another polite fiction which they refer to as " International Law".
Once a generalised consensus and modus vivendi arises around such a priori notions as International Law,then by and large it behoves the sponsors and beneficiaries of this to acknowledge and adhere to the bloody thing.Which of course the US and its EUNATO lackeys singularly fail to do whenever somebody cries " wolf ! " as they did In Yugoslavia,Afganistan,Iraq and Libya to name a few.
it is always the other side,those who contest the US global hegemony,who are the ones needing to adhere to International Law or are the ones circumventing International Law or in breach of it. This is in fact deeply Freudian.
Law and Order presumes generally matters such as :- due process, evidence,verifiable witness statements and the archaic concept habeas corpus . The alternative is vigilantism.Which of course is what the US and its band of outlaws are all about.
Otiose pseudo-moralistic cant,vacuous platitudes,egregious rhetoric and non sequiturs dreamed up by p.r . and marketing gurus that pass themselves off as philosophical/ideological expressions of some gravitas.One needs only ,if one has the intestinal fortitude,to listen again to the blather issuing itself from May's facial orifice as she  " justified " ordering the bombardment of the territory of another sovereign nation state with which the UK is not at war nor has ever been existentially threatened by.
And then along came Robert Fisk and his frontline report from Douma.Which the itinerant Westminster benchwarmers then chose not to refer to at all.
And meanwhile in Idlib,the Mad Dog Erdogan Turkish invaders' backed Free Syrian army is engaged in a brutal no holds barred turf war with the Al Qaeda rebranded Al Nusra Front rebranded HTS.Which is causing unnecessary widespread humanitarian suffering which could be alleviated and or prevented by timely intervetion;say by a series of airstrikes for example?

Only no-one in the West has cried "Wolf! ".

fahrenheit451:247

The Western powers aka the United States and its kowtowing,toadying satrapies with the UK to the fore,insist that other nations,for example the likes of North Korea,Iran ,China and Russia,et al abide by what they assert are the generally accepted precepts of the so-called international rules based order,or " Westphalian System ".
Rules based. International order.Supposedly brought into being by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that brought to a close what has since be called  " The Thirty Years War ",it established the legal fiction of territorial integrity and the sovereignty of individual nation states.
Hasn't actually ever really bloody worked out in practice,but it's a convenient comfort blanket.
This rules -based Order presumably applies to its most vociferous proponents; the likes of the US,UK and France for example,no? Just to be entirely consistent and thereby avoiding the charge of outright hypocrisy.
Here's what Oona Hathaway, Professor of International Law at Yale Law School reiterated in a as part of a recent article for the Just Security website.
2. The coming air strike will violate international law. The United Nations Charter prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This most important of international laws has three exceptions, none of which are implicated here: First, Syria has not consented to the strikes; second, the U.N. Security Council has not authorized the strikes; and third, the United States is not acting in self-defense.
And that is as unequivocal as it gets.
There might or might not have been a breach of an international prohibition on the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian city of Douma.
Even in the wake of President Trump's bull in a china shop tweet about Russia having to get ready for a massive missile strike from the US against targets in Syria, Defence Sec. Mattis restated the all too obvious, " We don't have any hard evidence ".
Evidence or not, hard or otherwise, the US and its miscreant lackeys in London and Paris shall be breaking the Rules based International Law by carrying out any military actions whatsoever against Syria.

I rest my case, m'lud.

fahrenheit451:246

Marking the occasion of the anniversary of Trump's ordered missile strike on Syrian airbases in 2017,Israeli aircraft launched their own missile strike against a Syrian airbase. As per their protocols for such incidents,the Israeli high command refused to confirm or deny any such event.But it was Israel.
There are several previous recorded and verified incidents of Israeli airstrikes against Syrian airbases,their excuse being that they were targeting Iranian military facilities at those bases.Well,that makes it all hunky dory then.A country that is officially not at war with another country can pop across the border and do a bit of bombing,run off back home and thumb their noses at International Law.
The world just took once huge irrevocable step toward triggering a Nuclear 1914.Apparently the Israeli regime was incentivised ( or thought it was jolly good idea ) to strike at Syria prior to the US doing so because it seems that Herr Trump is once again hugely aggrieved at reports emerging from the imbroglio that is the foreign-engineered Syrian civil war,of poison gas being used against civilians.
Erdogan's blitzkrieg and the meticulous ethnic cleansing of Kurdish populated regions bordering Turkey are not so much of a concern to the pseudo-moralistic posturing on Syria by the US and its NATO satrapies with,of course dutiful bootlicking lackey Tory UK austerity regime to the fore with its otiose cant.
Turkey is a NATO member,Erdogan's original wheeze of a scenario was to try and persuade the US that the Kurdish Syrian militias-part of the US backed SDF anti-Assad coalition- were themselves posing an outside existential threat to the Turkish state,which if it were actually true would oblige all NATO members to come to Turkey's ( Erdogan's ) immediate aid and declare all out war on the Kurds. Who,darn it from Ankara'a point of view are not a state actor;which is why NATO legally can't act.
And on and on.The Saudis and Qatar continue to ply Syrian based Al Qaeda affiliates,who've undergone dozens of changes in nomenclature to try and fool the CIA ( not all that difficult) with vast amounts of money,arms and intel support.This Wahabi ultra extremist strategy marries up nicely with the super scale atrocities the KSA is perpetrating in Yemen even as NATO member states including the UK has military advisors on the ground witnessing and sanctioning this unspeakable barbarism being carried out with a knowing nod and wink from Washington.

Head for the hills,is I fear no longer a viable survival strategy.

fahrenheit451:245

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Two weeks after Mr Johnson gave an interview to the German broadcaster DeutscheWelle, and was asked why he believed the chemical came from Russia.

He said: "When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory..."
Mr Johnson was asked if they had samples.

He said: "They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said, 'There's no doubt'."

Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, said scientists had not "identified the precise source".

The Foreign Secretary was urged to explain the answer he gave when asked why he was certain the novichok nerve agent originated in Russia.

And in the meantime, the entire corporate MSM domiciled in the UK ( notionally "right" and notionaly  "left" ) have spent the past few weeks lambasting the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn MP who urged caution and circumspection in regard to making accusations against Russia prior to establishing the facts and presenting the evidence.

Which naturally enough the decrepit,bumbling minority Tory regime were never ever going to hang around for before attempting to single-handedly re-ignite the Cold War. None of this habeas corpus,due process,let the Police investigate the crime,establish the facts,uncover the empirical evidence to give to the CPS to present in court at a trial -none of that nonsense.

Just wantonly defame and slander a sovereign nation state with whom the UK is officially, at least for now,still at peace and instigate hand in glove with the US neocon State Department a co-ordinated wave of diplomatic expulsions involving most but not all EU and NATO satrapies who accept the " evidence " as  vouched for by a deluded haridan and Thatcher impersonator.

I'm no longer sure that Schadenfreude covers it.

fahrenheit451:244

There is no recognised,valid international agreement that has magically granted authorisation nor any shred of legal legitimacy to the activities of the US.UK,Turkey or France whose forces are currently ensconced on the territory of the sovereign state of Syria. The only foreign forces who are incontestably legally,legitimately assisting the Syrian government are those of Russia,Iran and the forces of Hezbollah.
That the corporate MSM in the UK choose to announce the death of a British forces soldier in Syria whilst serving with US Special forces does nothing to alter or mitigate the brazen violation of all manner of International Law and norms governing the relationship between sovereign states who are at peace with one another.
Mad dog Erdogan's instigated  blitzkrieg against predominantly indigenous Kurdish dominated provinces bordering Turkey are a major case in point.Turkey's NATO membership further deepens an already insoluble imbroglio. The Kurds under attack were until a few weeks ago a strategic ally of the US ( and France and Germany ) in the hydra-headed Syrian civil war scenario.
Now it seems that France has declared its renewed support of the Kurds much to the consternation of Erdogan whose vainglorious territorial ambitions remain unabated by this latest complication.
And given the diplomatic spat initiated by the UK's beleaguered,ailing,minority Tory regime against Russia over an as yet unresolved attempted assassination of a former Russia traitor on British soil,the  climate of international relations has entered a period of deep depression.
The Washington Deep State continues to remorselessly tighten its grip on what remains of Trump's avowed non-interventionist stance that helped him get into the Oval Office.
The various jihadist factions are engaged in a variety of interconnected blood feuds that have come back to life after their collective failure to achieve anything more lasting than their own infamy.And two ISIS butchers- bizarrely nicknamed  "The Beatles"- because of their british accents, whose UK citizenship was revoked are in the hands of the mainly Kurdish SDF anti-Assad forces who don't seem capable of simply giving these two the coup-de-grace.
And so it goes.Turkey is appointing its own governors to administer the territory it has annexed in its avowedly racist,anti-Kurdish blitzkrieg,which if nothing else has spooked the US and UK into an embarrassing omerta,all their supposed international diplomatic muscle rendered useless,except of course in their lunatic,hybrid warfare out-of-theatre assault on Russia.
As someone else has already opined, we could indeed be heading into a Nuclear 1914 scenario.
Duck and cover ain't going to help.