Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, op.82, was written from 1914 to 1915, then revised in 1916 and again from 1917 to 1919, at which point it reached its final form.
The 3rd (last) movement in particular is one of the most profound, most beautiful pieces of music ever composed.
The book on the mantelpiece in my Facebook profile picture (”La Reproduction Interdite’, painted by René Magritte), is Edgar Allan Poe’s ”The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” written in 1837.
Poe’s only completed novel describes a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.
Then, in 1884, forty-six years after the novel’s publication, four men were set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival-cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy’s name : Richard Parker.
This extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the scene in the novel and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after the journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence” ….
And Magritte, who painted ”Not to be Reproduced” in 1937, was presumably completely unaware of the ”coincidence” !
If Israel gets its way, (and when doesn’t it?), the survivors of the current genocidal slaughter will be herded off into the barren Sinai Desert, with Western governments’ approval and complicity.
Israel is already trying to bribe the Egyptians into allowing this, saying they will pay off the country’s massive debt to the (Jew-owned) central banks and IMF in exchange.
In a decade or two Gaza may well look something like the photo below, bankrolled by US and UK taxpayers and for Jews only, while the remaining displaced and ‘demilitarised’ Palestinians are forced to live in tents.
PHOTO : Dubai : A nasty little theocracy in a shopping mall, towers built by slaves.
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The evidence that Israel is preparing to ‘cleanse’ Gaza and expel its population into Sinai is growing by the day:
1. A leaked document from the Israeli intelligence ministry sets out how the expulsion into Sinai can be implemented.
2. Netanyahu is known to have recently lobbied EU states – with some success – to publicly back an expulsion of Gaza’s Palestinians into Sinai.
3. Israel has a ‘peace policy’ on the drawing board – known as the Greater Gaza Plan – approved by the US since at least 2007 that requires transferring Palestinians into Sinai.
4. Leading Israeli officials have openly declared since Oct 7 the need to drive Gaza’s population into Sinai.
5. Israel’s public policy of turning Gaza into ‘a place where no human can live’ is being effected on the ground as we speak.
The details of Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme for Gaza are in Jonathan Cook’s latest article :
In preparation for its ground invasion of Gaza, the Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.
“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.“
“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbour, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.“
On the eve of the ground invasion, Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war – starvation. Israel’s message is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Incredibly, the genocide is under way with the active support of almost all western governments.
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Here former UK ambassador Craig Murray examines what will happen internationally, and what is happening in western societies.
Israel plainly is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill many thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attack in the last fortnight.
Gaza has no defence from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation and disease killing even more people per day than bombardment.
The population of Gaza are simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries which have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.
The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip still further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?
That appears to be the end game: expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention. It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas at the moment.
Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low, that the only way he can recover is by making a major step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel. Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.
I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ their vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armour is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza the armour would be far harder for Hezbollah to hit at range.
Hezbollah is even better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than it was when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war into Israel, which would be a disaster. It also has to worry about hostile militias in its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, that would enable it to inflict substantial casualties, but Israel is not going to do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.
Iran has greatly improved its diplomatic position in the last year. The Chinese-brokered lessening of hostility with Saudi Arabia has potential to revolutionise Middle Eastern politics, and the benefits of this will not lightly be laid aside by Tehran. Iran had also made real progress with the Biden administration in overcoming the blind hostility of the Trump years.
Iran has no desire to throw away these gains. That is why it seems to me extremely improbable that Iran had endorsed the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Iran is now restraining Hezbollah. But there are limits to the patience of Iran. The extraordinary truth is that Iran is probably the only state under discussion here with a genuine humanitarian concern for the lives of Palestinians. If the genocide unfolds as horribly as I anticipate, Iran can be pushed too far.
That said, I offer just a cautionary footnote that Saudi Arabia is not, under MBS, quite the reliable US/Israeli puppet it has historically been. I do not have much time for MBS, as you know, but his high opinion of the importance of the Al Saud and their leadership role among arabs, makes him a different proposition to his predecessor.
Saudi Arabia has leverage. The Biden administration has gone all in on regional domination, sending two aircraft carrier groups into a situation which should it escalate, could send oil prices to highest-ever levels, with Russia blocked from the market. Biden is risking a huge gas price hike in an election year.
Biden’s calculation, or that of his security services, is that nobody can or will intervene to save the Palestinians. They judge the genocide as containable. That is an extraordinary gamble.
There has been an extraordinary amount of vitriol aimed at Qatar by pro-Israel commentators, for hosting the Hamas office and leadership. This is extraordinarily ignorant.
Qatar hosts Hamas, just as Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office, at the direct request of the United States. It provides a means of dialogue between the United States and Hamas (exactly as it did with the Taliban) both at deniable level, and through third parties, including of course the government of Qatar. Thus when Blinken arrived in Qatar one day and the Iranian foreign minister the next, these were in fact “proximity talks” involving Hamas.
How do I know? Well, at Julian’s request, I visited Qatar about five years ago to discuss whether Julian, and Wikileaks, might potentially relocate to Qatar, which Julian had described as “the new Switzerland” in terms of being a neutral diplomatic venue.
It was explained to me by the Qataris, at a very senior level, that Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office and Hamas because the United States government had asked them to do so. Qatar hosted a major US military base and depended on US support against a Saudi takeover. If I could generate a request from then President Trump for Qatar to host Wikileaks, then they would do so. Otherwise, no.
So I know what I am talking about.
One tiny but good result of this brokering in Qatar was the release of two American national hostages. British diplomats have told me that discussions in Qatar have so far held back the Israeli ground offensive, but I am not convinced that Israel really wished to do this yet. They are having sadistic fun shooting children in a barrel.
Qatar has also been the origin of deals allowing in a tiny amount of aid to Gaza, but this is so small as to be almost irrelevant. It is performative humanitarianism by the West.
I have frequently praised China for the fact that their economic dominance has been unaccompanied by any aggressive desire for world hegemony, but this also has its downside. China sees no benefit in assisting the Palestinians in practice. Hopeful reports of China sending warships refer simply to pre-planned exercises, largely in the Gulf. That China is carrying out such joint exercises with Gulf states is indeed part of a long term increasing of influence, but is not relevant to the immediate reality.
Russia of course has its hands full in Ukraine. It is allowing its Syrian bases to be used as a conduit following increased Israeli bombing of Syrian airports, but there is not a great deal more that it can do. Erdoğan is genuinely furious at what is happening in Gaza, but Turkey is struggling to find any way to apply pressure, barring linkage to Ukraine shipping issues (which Erdoğan is considering).
That is a very rough and ready tour d’horizon, but the net effect is that I see no current hope for averting the atrocity which is unfolding before our horrified eyes.
Most of our eyes are indeed horrified. The gap between the western political and media elites and their people on this issue is simply enormous. Western leaders have not only failed to restrain Israel, they have almost unanimously egged Netanyahu on, with the continued repetition of the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justification for the mass bombing, removal and starvation of an entire civilian population.
The western leadership glee in vetoing every attempt at a ceasefire resolution at the UN is astonishing.
Massive demonstrations have been taking place across Europe against this unspeakable massacre, and the knee-jerk reaction of politicians at their isolation from public opinion has been to try to make such shows of dissent illegal. In the UK people have been arrested for displaying Palestinian flags. In Germany pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been entirely banned. Something similar has been attempted in France, with predictable failure.
I have myself attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in three different countries, and the most striking thing on each occasion was the strong support of passers-by, and the number of people spontaneously coming out to join the demo as it passed.
A wave of racism has been unleashed in the UK and elsewhere. I am astonished by the Islamophobia and racial hatred released online, with no apparent comeback. UK Ministers claim to be alarmed at the “terrorist sympathies” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, yet it is perfectly legal to call for Palestinians to be exterminated, to compare them to different types of animal and vermin, and suggest they should be driven into the sea. That does not horrify ministers at all.
I am personally now subject to a police investigation for “terrorism” merely for suggesting that the Palestinians too have a right to self-defence and may offer armed resistance to genocide – a right they enjoy beyond doubt in international law. Remember, Israel has formally declared war. Is it the position in British law that the only belief it is legal to hold and express, is that in this war the Palestinians must simply line up quietly to be killed?
The step change in western authoritarianism is likely to be met by blowback.
After 20 years, we had finally come through the vicious cycle of the “War on Terror”, where terrorism, repression and institutionalised Islamophobia all boosted each other across the western world. Outrage at the appalling genocide in Gaza is very likely to result in isolated incidences of, also appalling, Islamist-inspired violence in Western countries, including the UK, particularly because of the UK’s military support of Israel.
That consequential terrorism in itself will be cited by the political elite as justifying their stance. And so the vicious cycle will restart. This will of course be welcome to the agents of the security state, whose power, budgets and prestige will be boosted. Once again we have to be on the lookout for radicalisation and real terrorism, but also for agent-provocateur-led terrorism and for false flag terrorism.
If we descend back into that nightmare again, the direct cause will be elite support for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the Islamophobic narrative. The major cause of terrorism here is Israel, the terrorist apartheid state.
Apparently it is perfectly acceptable nowadays to discriminate against white people – and not just quietly discriminate, but piously announce the discrimination as some kind of badge of virtue. It seems that liberals and the ”woke” are absolutely fine with racism and sexism – just as long as the targets are white, male and heterosexual.
This discrimination is becoming increasingly institutionalised across all aspects of society : in the media, politics, culture, the arts, academia, and perhaps saddest of all in schools, where working-class white boys are now officially the worst-performing of any ethnic or social group.
In this way the old-fashioned progressive ideals of equality, fraternity, and solidarity above and beyond racial and gender divisions are being subtly, and successfully, undermined by the neoliberal elite’s agenda of ”divide and rule”.
As Ms McVey points out in the video above, the WHO is an unelected and largely privately funded bureaucracy, controlled by the big pharmaceutical corporations. Its decisions will always be influenced by the profit motive, and they should certainly not be allowed to accrue more power than they already have. Its decisions during the pandemic, including the enthusiasm for lockdowns, caused untold damage to the welfare of populations worldwide, far in excess of any health benefits, which are debatable to say the least. The damage done by rushed-through programmes of inadequately tested experimental vaccines is unquantified, but urgently in need of investigation.
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This EU parliamentary conference, particularly the contribution from Dr Malone, should have been headline news all over the world, especially in the “free” West, but its conclusions have been suppressed by mainstream media and governments. It’s not difficult to see why.
Is the West forever stained by racism ? Are we all going to die from climate change ? Can a woman have a penis ? To the liberal establishment of London and New York the answer to all of these questions is ‘Yes’ ; .and anyone who disagrees is a racist, climate-denying transphobe.
Our elites have become convinced of some very strange and extreme ideas. And yet there is precious little pushback against them. Critics self-censor or are silenced by the threat of shaming, cancellation or even arrest. The new orthodoxies of our age are risible, and yet the space for dissent is shrinking.
Historically, it has always been those brave enough to puncture the prevailing groupthink who have propelled society forward, but they are in shockingly short supply today.
Brendan O’Neill makes the case for heresy in a new collection of essays, which will, of course, be reviled, (or more likely ignored) by ‘our’ corporate media when it is published next month.
I intend to read it before it is banned by the new Inquisition.
Quite rightly, most left-leaning people would not give Sunak, Johnson or Truss a minute’s credit on any other political issue. To assume that on the Ukraine war their policy somehow aligns with the interests of Ukrainian workers and progressives is illogical.
Sunak et al have no interest whatsoever in improving ordinary peoples’ prospects in Ukraine. They will back to the hilt the prevalent authoritarian neoliberalism in Kiev – a regime which has banned nearly all left-wing political parties, including the Communist Party of Ukraine, Left Opposition, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, and the Union of Left Forces. Many of these had significant support in the country and considerable parliamentary representation, but all have been driven out of political life for being “pro-Russian”. In addition Zelensky has just signed into law new rules removing all trade union rights and collective bargaining from workers in workplaces of under 250 employees, around 70% of the total workforce.
Under these circumstances, the claim by some on the left that they are “against imperialism east or west” is delusional. Like it or not, they are aligning themselves with NATO and globalist capitalism.
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Acknowledgement : Stop the War Coalition (Andrew Murray)
As the vast majority of people nowadays learn history mainly (often only) through the prism of fictionalised media, it is scandalous and unforgivable that films like the newly released “The Woman King” ignore real African history altogether, and instead cater to the white, progressive demand for one-dimensional caricatures of black victimhood.
The complexities of the slave trade do not fit neatly into the simplistic worldview of Western cultural elites. For them, black people are victims of history rather than participants in it. ”The Woman King” reflects this worldview by erasing the fact that vast numbers of slaves were held by Africans long before Europeans arrived, and that nearly four million slaves were sold by Africans to European traders between 1801 and 1866.
For the truth about the slave trade, I recommend Hugh Thomas’s classic history “The Slave Trade”, rather than the simplistic fiction peddled by travesties like this film, where all available real history, including first-hand written accounts, is erased. In its place, the film aims to reinforce the most superficial aspects of modern identity politics, with black female heroes and white European villains.
“The Woman King” is an inversion of history. It portrays violent African slave-traders as freedom-fighting abolitionists. It shows all black people as the righteous oppressed, and all white people as evil oppressors. It is perverse, and it is dangerous.
“Blonde”, the recently released biopic of Marilyn Monroe, is yet another Hollywood travesty. Marilyn’s life should not be defined merely by her supposed ‘victimhood’, and she was most certainly no ‘dumb blonde’. She was an avid reader with an extensive personal library, and embraced radical left-wing politics throughout her short life, which was terminated when she threatened to expose secrets she had learned through her affairs with the Kennedy brothers. She was a rare beauty inside and out and deserves better than this exploitative Hollywood trash.
”The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.” ~ Sir David Attenborough
”I think the tipping point has been reached. There can’t be more people on the Earth than we can feed.” ~ Sir Bob Geldof
”The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050.. And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.” ~ Bill Gates
”The population problem must be recognized by the government as a principal element in long-range planning.” ~ John D. Rockefeller
”In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” ~ Prince Philip
NO, Attenborough,
NO, Geldof,
NO, Gates,
NO, Rockefeller,
NO, Philip,
No, No, No !
There are NOT ”too many people” on the planet. There is plenty of room for many more and easily enough resources for all.
The problem is the grotesquely inequitable distribution of resources.
The over-population myth is simply a stratagem of the global corporatist elite, distracting attention from the real existential crisis and their responsibility for it.
*Orbis Non Sufficit* 