Not being content with attacking Syrian military facilities a few days previously, Israel went and repeated its aggression this time against several Iranian bases that are on Syrian territory.Their excuse was that Iranian forces had fired at Israeli territory first.
if anyone had any lingering doubts as to whether or not any State really gave a genuine damn about International Law and the prevailing norms of diplomacy,then this latest Israeli outrage ought to put such jejeune notions finally to bed.
Whatever vestiges of pretend-authority any notional Internationally accepted and binding rule of law is meant to have has been firmly consigned to the naive daydreams and unattainable aspirations of those who pine after some kind of brotherhood of man. Otiose cant and vacuous platitudes based on their respective DNA to western liberal democratic values,which themselves are of course the surviving chimera of such truly awful events of human history as the American and French revolutions.
Bismarckian Realpolitik is back in vogue. All well and good.Assuming of course that the dimwits, especially those in Washington's State Department and their institutional rivals at The Pentagon actually are able to discern and implement such a cunning strategy.
The Israeli MSM platform Haaretz reports on the construction by the US with French collaboration of a military base near Manbij in Syria and the threats made to the US for doing so by Erdogan's Turkey.I don't recall this potboiler of what is a growing classic Mexican standoff ever being referred to or taken notice of at the UN,either at Security Council or General Assembly level.
So,having planned,nurtured,financed,trained,armed & logistically supported the hydra-headed Arab Spring popular uprisings and having watched as they went "south" one by inexorable one, the US administration rears up on its hindlegs and accuses Iran of being the source of instability in the region! This Punch & Judy show suits Israel's atavistic urges that underpin and motivate Netanyahu's faux-demagougery and pathetic bellicose antics.
Erdogan's Turkey - and let us hope that he might be defeated in the forthcoming Turkish general election- is a Treaty bound member of NATO and aspires to become a member of the European Union.Clearly reality is on the blink,on both counts.
And the legitimate Syrian government fights on with the invaluable assistance of its allies- Russia,Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah and elements of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria.The Kurds though,right in the middle of all this are,no surprise getting royally shafted by all and sundry.That was inevitable.
As is Schadenfreude.
Saturday, 12 May 2018
Monday, 7 May 2018
fahrenheit451:252
There really is nothing new under the sun. It's 2018 and we are still stuck with an ossified voting system. Labour and Conservative perpetuate,to their mutual advantage,the FPTP system and so keep the Punch & Judy tropes of British political discourse on an interminable respirator instead of switching it off.
So here's my original blog post And So It Goes...#768 from May 6 2016. A timeless classic...
Democracy.Voting.The democratic process.Ballots.Universal Suffrage. These are terribly important,not only concepts, but practices for the acolytes of that most noble of specious secular quasi-theologies, Democracy.
It has always struck me as an indelible flaw in their national character for the British to have persisted for as long as they have,with the eccentricities of " The first past the post " system. Back in the days of the Reform Acts, of 1832 and 1867, there was plausibly nothing amiss with such a constricted,parochial settled kind of way of ascertaining the will of the people.
Time-honoured methods have without vigourous renewal become moribund and taken on the characteristics of arcane rituals. Geographic distances within the historically determined British national polity are no longer a precusor for division and rancour to any significant degree.Distinctions and differences matter far less than once they did.
And yet the legitimate expression of this innate plurality is stymied and devalued at every major opportunity. A Vote,the universal currency unit of political expression,is not equal to any other given Vote at any one time.
Parliament ought long ago have instituted a fair and credible system of proportional representation.
Each contending Party's ideological and practical political aspiration and raison d'etre-to win a majority for its policies and goals would not be compromised.
After all winning a majority of the Sovereign electorate's Votes cast is per se more democratic in truth than winning a numerical majority of arbitrarily defined seats.
All Votes must be of equal numeric value irrespective of where they are cast.
The alternative, as has been the sad dystopian reality for decades is the " marginals ". Usually calculated to be around 70 seats out of the 630 where historic voting patterns and voter behaviour subject to minimal shifts in opinion poll discerned party policy differences turn these seats into genuine contests which determine the overall outcome of all 630 seats. That is not democracy.
Legitimacy is after all a learned behaviour. Given enough cynicism coupled with disappointment,disillusionment and a powerful,cogent counter-narrative, methods other than the democratic ballot and universal suffrage begin to be contemplated.
Footnote :- I emailed this to the Wakefield Express and Yorkshire Evening Post the day after the local election results were announced on May 6.
So here's my original blog post And So It Goes...#768 from May 6 2016. A timeless classic...
Democracy.Voting.The democratic process.Ballots.Universal Suffrage. These are terribly important,not only concepts, but practices for the acolytes of that most noble of specious secular quasi-theologies, Democracy.
It has always struck me as an indelible flaw in their national character for the British to have persisted for as long as they have,with the eccentricities of " The first past the post " system. Back in the days of the Reform Acts, of 1832 and 1867, there was plausibly nothing amiss with such a constricted,parochial settled kind of way of ascertaining the will of the people.
Time-honoured methods have without vigourous renewal become moribund and taken on the characteristics of arcane rituals. Geographic distances within the historically determined British national polity are no longer a precusor for division and rancour to any significant degree.Distinctions and differences matter far less than once they did.
And yet the legitimate expression of this innate plurality is stymied and devalued at every major opportunity. A Vote,the universal currency unit of political expression,is not equal to any other given Vote at any one time.
Parliament ought long ago have instituted a fair and credible system of proportional representation.
Each contending Party's ideological and practical political aspiration and raison d'etre-to win a majority for its policies and goals would not be compromised.
After all winning a majority of the Sovereign electorate's Votes cast is per se more democratic in truth than winning a numerical majority of arbitrarily defined seats.
All Votes must be of equal numeric value irrespective of where they are cast.
The alternative, as has been the sad dystopian reality for decades is the " marginals ". Usually calculated to be around 70 seats out of the 630 where historic voting patterns and voter behaviour subject to minimal shifts in opinion poll discerned party policy differences turn these seats into genuine contests which determine the overall outcome of all 630 seats. That is not democracy.
Legitimacy is after all a learned behaviour. Given enough cynicism coupled with disappointment,disillusionment and a powerful,cogent counter-narrative, methods other than the democratic ballot and universal suffrage begin to be contemplated.
Footnote :- I emailed this to the Wakefield Express and Yorkshire Evening Post the day after the local election results were announced on May 6.
Sir - iIrecall being in the Public gallery not so long ago when Wakefield's Labour Councillors unanimously voted through £27,000,000 in Budget cuts. I also recall Council leader Box inveighing against the Conservative government and its Austerity measures. The central point of his lengthy,self-indulgent diatribe was to call into question the legitimacy of the Tories mandate to impose Austerity measures having won an overall majority with only 24% of the votes cast in the General election. Let's put aside for the moment the Historic alliance Labour has with the Tories on the issue of first past the post system.Those two have been brothers-in-arms in colluding to maintain this palpably iniquitous and dysfunctional model of electoral representation. What,I wonder has Cllr.Box to say about last Friday's results in Wakefield ? The turnout was 30%, of the 245,000 registered electors only 74,000 cast their ballot.Of the votes cast Labour got just over half,which means that Labour's mandate to govern and implement without dissent let alone any form of active resistance the government's Austerity measures is 15% of the electorate. Go figure.
Louis Kasatkin ( TUSC Candidate,Wakefield West 2016 )
Tuesday, 1 May 2018
fahrenheit451:251
Israeli Premier Netanyahu is trying to light a few extra fuses in the Syrian imbroglio and investing an extraordinary amount of diplomatic demagoguery toward that objective.The trigger,he hopes, will be the revocation of what is commonly termed the Iran Nuclear Deal.A Heath-Robinson affair where the 5 permanent members of the UN security Council plus Germany exercise vigilance and constraints on Iran's ambition to create a nuclear arsenal.
The saving grace, if indeed there is to be any in this prelude to WW3, is that,the current US President Trump's predilection for diplomatic anarchy may not on this occasion be allowed free rein.China,France,Russia and the UK,oh,and Germany,all have an intense desire to maintain the present Iran Nuclear Deal.A position and outlook that enjoys a broad spectrum of support amongst the various experts,analysts and ad-hoc international bodies who between them have a good idea as to the degree and veracity of Iran's adherence to the deal itself.
Netanyahu, au contraire just wants to get the US and its increasingly deluded NATO satrapies to bomb Iran on any old pretext.To this end,the reprobate who is facing indictment on multiple corruption charges,delivered a mise en scene before the world's media with apparently 50,000 documents proving Iranian perfidy.
Fortunately sanity and reason are momentarily back in vogue among the western powers and so this byzantine Israeli-conspiracy theory was found to be short of legs. So Iran isn't going to get bombed any time soon.
However this all comes in the wake of what were a series of missile strikes against what were reported as Iranian bases inside Syria.And so the World sinks a little deeper in the quagmire and Israel is doing the pushing down.
The Zionist statelet celebrated its' 70th year of existence recently and no-one does mass shroud-waving and emotionally vacuous hyperbole better than Israel. Demagoguery.
Then again, who knows what the Washington beltway neocon deep state establishment might yet get Trump to do.
And therein lies the danger.
The saving grace, if indeed there is to be any in this prelude to WW3, is that,the current US President Trump's predilection for diplomatic anarchy may not on this occasion be allowed free rein.China,France,Russia and the UK,oh,and Germany,all have an intense desire to maintain the present Iran Nuclear Deal.A position and outlook that enjoys a broad spectrum of support amongst the various experts,analysts and ad-hoc international bodies who between them have a good idea as to the degree and veracity of Iran's adherence to the deal itself.
Netanyahu, au contraire just wants to get the US and its increasingly deluded NATO satrapies to bomb Iran on any old pretext.To this end,the reprobate who is facing indictment on multiple corruption charges,delivered a mise en scene before the world's media with apparently 50,000 documents proving Iranian perfidy.
Fortunately sanity and reason are momentarily back in vogue among the western powers and so this byzantine Israeli-conspiracy theory was found to be short of legs. So Iran isn't going to get bombed any time soon.
However this all comes in the wake of what were a series of missile strikes against what were reported as Iranian bases inside Syria.And so the World sinks a little deeper in the quagmire and Israel is doing the pushing down.
The Zionist statelet celebrated its' 70th year of existence recently and no-one does mass shroud-waving and emotionally vacuous hyperbole better than Israel. Demagoguery.
Then again, who knows what the Washington beltway neocon deep state establishment might yet get Trump to do.
And therein lies the danger.
Thursday, 26 April 2018
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.....
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.
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.
Friday, 20 April 2018
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.
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.
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
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! ".
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! ".
Friday, 13 April 2018
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.
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.
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