StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Observer wonder’s at the political desperation of a Technocrat.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 03, 2024

Headline: The fury of history

Sub-headline: There can be no peace until there is regime change inside Iran.

https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2024/10/the-fury-of-history

Mr. Kaplan makes no secret that he is a Neo-Conservative, as his impressive resume, as presented by Eurasia Group, makes utterly clear, and the sub-headline of his latest screed .His resume , below, simply confirms his status as a Propaganda Operative, of the once ascendent ‘Post-War Liberal Order’, under many and varied descriptors, that is now mired in the ever expanding Zionist Pogroms, with the active complicity of The American National Security State.

As a senior advisor at Eurasia Group, Robert D. Kaplan advises investors and top executives on political risks in countries around the world. Kaplan is the bestselling author of 18 books on foreign affairs and travel and a prolific essayist for numerous publications. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first US writer to warn in print about a future war in the Balkans. And in the 1990s, his article “The Coming Anarchy,” arguing that population growth, ethnic and sectarian strife, disease, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining the political fabric of the planet, was hotly debated in foreign-language translations around the world. Other positions held by Kaplan have included senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington; chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor; consultant to the US Army’s Special Forces Regiment, the Air Force, and the Marines; and member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

He has lectured for military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, major universities, and global business forums. He has briefed kings, presidents, secretaries of state, and defense secretaries, and reported from more than 100 countries. Kaplan, a graduate of the University of Connecticut, was given the Distinguished Alumni Award by his alma mater. He received the Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

https://www.eurasiagroup.net/people/rkaplan

Editor: The first paragraph of his essay is a quick sketch of the end of the Cold War and the failures Gorbachev:

The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union ended dramatically not because of a military conflict or international crisis, but because of internal domestic politics: Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms inside the Soviet Union led not to rejuvenation but to the dismantling of the communist system itself, and that, as we know, changed the world.

Editor: The self-serving Historical Pastiche of the above paragraph, compared to the two sources presented below, offer a more Historically relevant, and cogent analysis of the the Gorbachev Reforms, its Political Actors and its actual Historians!

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1520341

Editor: I will just highlight some of the the vapid propaganda of Mr. Kaplan.

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The postmodern Middle East may experience a similar fate. The military conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Arabs can have lulls and ceasefires, but ultimately cannot truly end until there is change inside Iran. This historical process has only quickened because of the current war in Lebanon, which pits Israel against Iran’s most militarily powerful proxy force, Hezbollah.

The assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, followed by Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, further undermines Iran, whose decades-long project in Lebanon may be turning to ashes. The regional war just ahead of us will ultimately focus on Iran itself and its military-security complex. Iranian territory will be less and less off-limits.

Its clerical regime, in power since 1979, defines the region’s era to an extent much greater than even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, himself a historical life-force who will echo for far longer than the unmemorable mediocrities that now govern Europe and the US. But it is Iran, a country of 88.5 million and an ancient cluster of Persian civilisation (rather than many Arab countries, which are merely vague geographical expressions), that holds the key to the current regional war. Energy-rich Iran provides the money, the military training, the brilliant tactics and the dynamic ideology of revolutionary nihilism (which combines a radical Islam with an anti-Semitic fascism) that has allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to become what they are today. The older Arab-Israeli conflict over historical Palestine was a conventional contest over states and territory. But the introduction of clerical Iran has given the struggle a tiers-mondiste quality, further infused with a millenarian religious call for the annihilation of an entire people.

It is Iran that struck Israel on 7 October 2023, an event so dramatic and so bestial that it will be remembered like 9/11: a date so infamous that it becomes a concept. Of course, Iran did not do the murdering, the raping and the hostage-taking in southern Israel. Hamas and its operatives and supporters did that. Iranian leaders may not even have known about the exact timing of the event, or may even have been uncomfortable with its scope. But their long, total support of Hamas means their strategic fingerprints are all over the attack. Had Iran a different regime, there would likely have been no 7 October – no matter the anger and suffering of the Palestinians.

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This is 1342 words of Zionist Propaganda, just posting the most egregious examples of Kaplans Zionist Fascists Apologetics:

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Thus, with America being less helpful, they needed Israel as almost a corporate acquisition to aid them in their struggle with Iran in this new age of cyber warfare.

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On 7 October 2023 Sinwar’s forces launched an attack reminiscent of the Holocaust, which Sinwar knew, having learned Hebrew in an Israeli prison and understanding the mind of his enemy, would elicit an Israeli military response of such devastating proportions that it would be impossible for MBS and his fellow sheikhs to believe they could ignore their own streets, which were quietly baying for retribution against the Israelis.

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A simultaneous regional war in Lebanon and the Red Sea has been ignited as a result of the scale of the Israeli military response.

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On 7 October, that arrogance, in part, resulted in too much reliance on technology, allowing young people to congregate at a music festival protected by electronic surveillance rather than by soldiers.

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The Israeli military and intelligence services may be resourceful, but Israel’s entrepreneurial economy simply cannot sustain an Armageddon for too long. Nor are territorial concessions by Israel necessarily the answer: Gaza was a de facto independent state for two decades, with no Israeli troops or settlers.

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Many once made the mistake of thinking the shah’s system was eternal; one should not repeat the error. The collapse of the shah was a world-historical event; the collapse of Tehran’s clerical system might be too.

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Israel’s recent strikes against Hezbollah, in addition to creating the conditions for the return of 60,000 Israeli civilians to northern Israel, carries the benefit of preparing the battle space for an eventual Israeli strike on Iran.

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Editor: Self-Congratulation dominates this exercise in unapologetic Zionist Propaganda, ended in a toxic evocation of History in the lower case. What might that ‘furious’ mean except the chaos of battle, by a man, writer, pundit with no experience of what War is and means!

That’s where we are at this juncture: a year on, the 7 October attack has unleashed a chain of events that previous decades combined did not do. The pace of history is now furious.

Political Observer

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 02, 2024

It’s impossible for Bret Stephens to face the unpalatable reality that The West’s proxy’s Kermit Roosevelt & Anglo-Iranian Oil Company overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, and placed the Shah in power. SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information was the instrument of oppression and murder, Stephens ‘self-willed forgetting’ is nurtured in the Neo-Con lie, in a Tradition of Lies!

The Stage was set for ‘The Iranian Revolution’ of 1978–1979. Reader factor in the American Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as two key factors in the nurturing of ‘Islamic Radicalism’ : which is about throwing off the yoke of oppression by those ‘Radicals’, as they impinge on the Colonial Imaginations of the hallowed Post-War Liberal Order, that is in a continuing state of collapse.

Mr. Stephens is a Zionist Partisan, and not quite yet a Double-Agent. It takes patience to read through this would-be bill of attainder in a mere 815 words. The why and how of this metastasizing rebellion, of the former subjects of that Colonial Mentality, fails to register with Mr. Stephens, though it cannot surprise! I’ll provide a selection of his diatribe, with the hope that The Reader, of her own initiative, will read the complete essay?

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I thought of Nasrallah’s words on Tuesday while watching images of Iranian ballistic missiles raining down on Israel, fortunately causing only slight damage, thanks mainly to Israeli and American air defenses.

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But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.

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As I write, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is promising consequences for Iran’s attacks, though it isn’t yet clear what they might be.

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Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.

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Editor: with each paragraph Mr. Stephens political hysteria leaps from the page!

There needs to be a direct and unmistakable American response. Iran currently produces many of its missiles at the Isfahan missile complex. At a minimum, Biden should order it destroyed, as a direct and proportionate response to its aggressions. There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too.

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We can’t simply go on trying to thwart Iran by defensive means only — fighting not to win but merely not to lose.

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Notice that the Iranians began asking for the nuclear negotiations they spurned for the past three years only once they started to fear that Trump might return to office. Bully regimes respond to the stick.

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Notice that the Iranians began asking for the nuclear negotiations they spurned for the past three years only once they started to fear that Trump might return to office. Bully regimes respond to the stick.

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That’s a point Americans have chosen to ignore in recent years, and not to our benefit. As Israelis consider their response to Iran’s missile outrage this week, they know they have no such luxury.

Editor: As the Zionist Faschist State continues it’s Genocide in Gaza, the Theatre of War continues its toxic expansion. While Bret Stephens continues his War Mongering from the comfort of his office! At the least The Reader can look to the bellicose Joe Alsop, who was in Asia and Korea during these Wars/Conflicts as a possible …

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

Here is my commentary on Mr. Bromwich’s American Breakdown in 2018 in The London Review of Books :

The ‘insights’ of david.bromwich@yale.edu : a collection of quotes and commentary on his London Review of Books essay ‘American Breakdown’. Part One? By Political Observer (Revised)

Mr. Bromwich manages to avoid the current political hysteria ,or simply to mute it, therefore making it more palatable to the reader, than the Corporate Media hysterics.He even manages to shame these political actors, yet at the same moment to exercise a kind of restrained iteration of the current Party Line.

Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an infectious vulgarity, and with it comes the power to make his enemies act with nearly as little self-restraint as he does.

Mr. Bromwich’s Bill of Attainder includes Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA, and his successor Andrew Wheeler both products of an utterly corrupt American Corporatism. Next in order of consideration is Iran, and the Wars of Empire: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, all fully endorsed by the New Democrats, led by ‘tougher than any man in the room’ Mrs. Clinton. An utter inconvenience to Mr. Bromwich’s reserved indictment.

But the patient, indeed, doubtful reader of this writer’s judgement is taken aback by this deviation from the Party Line:

Russia remains the obsessional concern. Not wanting to restart the Cold War might seem one of the few good ideas attributable to Trump, no matter how he came by it, but the pride of the Democrats is invested in pushing him towards renewed conflict: stiffer sanctions, cyber implants, enhanced deployments and joint military exercises with Nato – nothing (it is said) should be ‘off the table’. American commentators lack even a minimal awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been considered a betrayal by every Russian leader from Gorbachev to Putin.

History intrudes itself into a subject not mentioned, but the constant sub-text of the Anti-Trump coterie’s agitprop : The New Cold War fomented by Mrs. Clinton, her minions, and the perpetually bloodthirsty Neo-Conservatives, who have a continuing political romance with her jingoism, expressed by the notion of her ‘toughness’. History is again utterly inconvenient, Mr. Bromwich should be congratulated for this moment of clarifying honesty. A long quote from the virtuous martyred American political saint Lincoln adds more historical depth.

Next in order of appearance are political hysterics Senator Joe McCarthy and Congressman Adam Schiff. Then to Patrick Buchanan and his :

‘Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did. Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the US bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo? How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?’

By this quotation from Mr. Buchanan, identifies Mr. Bromwich as an Apostate to the current New Cold War Mythology!

Next in line are considerations of the Republican Party’s ‘collaboration’ with Trump and the utterly preposterous , but  self-congratulatory notion of the ‘Resistance’. Recall  the quote from Goya: ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’ !

Mr. Bromwich then opines that:

Police, for the most part, haven’t yet shown a pro-Trump disposition, and Democrats should want to keep things that way. Among officers of law enforcement at all levels, Trump’s role as an instigator of popular disorders is the strongest point against him.

The years 2016 and 2017 have escaped the political memory of Mr. Bromwich, in which 2600, mostly black people, were murdered by police in America, without one conviction in a court of law. The Police have already rendered a verdict. The ‘Broken Widows Policy’ of the Manhattan Institute,  has evolved into a siege mentality- the domestic corollary of the War on Terror. A  bourgeois pundit like Mr. Bromwich dare not go that far in his Apostasy.

The first part of Mr. Bromwich’s ends with the ‘Democrats’ and the feckless dullard Comey, playing a new role as FBI Hero, straight out of the manufactured lore of  movies,radio and television propaganda, spanning generations. The scandal of the FBI Crime Laboratory remains unmentioned in Mr. Bromwich commentary:

See John F. Kelly author of Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab on C-Span address here of July 10, 1998:

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Reflections on the New Encampment Culture 

There were many puzzling features of the recent protests. This coming year, universities must course correct—while protecting the right to dissent. 

David Bromwich

Sep 20, 2024

Persuasion

Reflections on the New Encampment Culture

This article is part of an ongoing Persuasion series on the future of universities…

Read more

12 days ago · 59 likes · 6 comments · David Bromwich

I had better now make my position clear to avoid a misunderstanding. In April and May, and earlier for that matter, I would have supported a campus teach-in, or better, a campus-originated march on the White House or the Pentagon to demand an immediate Israeli cessation of bombing and to press for the negotiation of a ceasefire, under threat of withdrawal of American support. It took a very few days, however, for the protests to face in an altogether different direction: what began as an anti-war protest had turned anti-Israel, without regard to peace or war, and it seemed clear that, for some people, the Palestinian flag had taken on a new meaning, including the erasure of Israel from the map.

It had become unclear anyway—in strictly political terms—by what logic the universities were the most effectual staging ground for a protest. Yet the encampments, the slogans they chanted, and the symbols they asked to be known by, all seemed a natural expression of the politics that has come in the public mind to represent the universities.

The long-term consequences of the specialization of campus politics have been unhappy for American society generally. Political complexity of mind is rare among students, but the same students will go on to be full-time citizens. Some of the fault is traceable to university administrators: their political position-taking, after recent elections and supreme court decisions and certain shocking local or national events, has seemed to define the boundaries of polite opinion. Such public statements are now being pulled back, with recent moves toward “institutional neutrality,” and that is a good thing. The idea that universities, as if they were a person, should carve out an official stance on social and political issues of the day is a recent innovation; it has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity—neither of which qualifies as an educational value.

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Two telling political/moral questions present themselves in Mr. Bromwich’ s long essay: that he is ‘The Voice of Reason’ and that somehow Jewish Students are not subject to the ‘Call of Tribalism’, or that Jewish Vagilities didn’t attacked UCLA student with impunity!

Mr. Bromwich is a ‘Liberal’, this political creature long, left behind in an American Politics dominated by New Democrats, Republicans, Neo-Conservatives , all held together by AIPAC money!

A wrong lesson has been learned from an airbrushed memory of the 1960s. The antiwar protests of that time may have begun in college teach-ins, but they went on to organized marches in big cities. Disrupting the universities became part of the program only in a later and decadent phase; and even as the narrowest of tactics, it never made sense. The truth is that “shut-it-down” campus protests were the path of least resistance, the method closest to home, but they pushed against the necessary ethic of a university because they involved an element of coercion.

The implication for the present moment is clear. On no account should students or their faculty supporters be allowed to prevent the speech or disrupt the intellectual work of any member of a university. If students opt out of attending classes, or otherwise fail to satisfy academic expectations, the normal penalties should apply. Meanwhile, of course, the right to dissent has as natural a home in a university as it does in a free society more broadly.

Lets hear from that original ‘60’s’ Radical Mario Savio: I watched this on the ‘Evening News’ of the time!

Political Observer

Political Observer provides two Le Monde commentaries.

Editor: I will not pretend that I have done nothing more that provide the links, to these two Le Monde Opinion commentaries. The Reader need only look at the compelling evidence that Macron is mendacious, incompetent and politically toxic. The fictional ‘Jupiterian Politics’ that once Public Relations salvo, has de-volved into a permanent political fracturing ?

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Political Reporter on Barnier’s conservatism, that ’tilts to the right’ : is a well established fact?

Headline: French PM Barnier’s still-to-be-approved government tilts to the right

Sub-headline: Michel Barnier handed President Macron his cabinet line-up on Thursday. According to the prime minister’s office, the government will be officially appointed before Sunday.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/09/20/french-pm-barnier-s-still-to-be-approved-government-tilts-to-the-right_6726729_5.html

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These initial elements show that Barnier has drawn on the former majority and on the right to make his selection. While the prime minister claims to be representing a “break” with the previous government, his team’s profile bears a striking resemblance to the previous one, being essentially made up of Macronists and LR elected representatives. This composition confirms the right-wing direction of Macron’s administration. The only difference with previous governments since his 2017 election is that this time, the alliance between the presidential camp and the right is fully asserted.

The absence of figures from the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance, for the moment, contributes to the impression of imbalance in the new team, even though the NFP came out on top in the second round of legislative elections. “In France, under Macron, it’s all the losers of the last elections who are going to make up the government,” denounced Manuel Bompard on X. The top official in the radical left La France Insoumise party then called for demonstrations on September 21, “everywhere in France against the biggest scam of the Fifth Republic.”

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Have @gatinois4 & @alexandrepedro willfully forgotten this from The Telegraph of September 9, 2021?

Headline: Michel Barnier demands return of France’s ‘sovereignty’ from European courts

Sub-headline: Former EU negotiator accused of hypocrisy by Brexiteers after attack on European Court of Justice

Michel Barnier said that France had to regain the sovereignty it has lost to European courts on Thursday and called for a referendum on a ban on non-EU immigration.

The former Brexit negotiator and EU commissioner was accused of hypocrisy because his comments appeared to contradict many of the positions he took when he was helming talks with the UK.

During the Brexit negotiations, Mr Barnier, who is running to be French president for the centre-Right Republicains party, called for the European Court of Justice to continue to hold sway in the UK and insisted it remained the sole and supreme arbiter of EU law.

He also secured British commitments that the UK would remain part of the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution, in return for cooperation on extradition after Brexit.

Mr Barnier said at a rally,  “We must regain our legal sovereignty so that we are no longer subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights.”

“We will propose a referendum in September on the issue of immigration,” he said, referring to his earlier call for a halt on non-EU immigration into France for five years.

Freedom of movement, which is open to EU nationals in the bloc, would continue under his proposal, which would stop all non-EU residency permit requests for three to five years except asylum seekers and students.

Mr Barnier later tweeted a clarification saying that France should not break entirely free of the European courts but only have a “constituional shield” on matters to do with non-EU immigration.

“This is ironic in the extreme. Barnier preaching the merits of national sovereignty to curb the over-powerful EU and European Court of Human Rights,” tweeted Simon Clarke, the Tory MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.

Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, told the Telegraph Mr Barnier was the “biggest hypocrite ever born” for co-opting eurosceptic arguments after working for the EU for so long.

Mr Barnier also took aim at the Franco-German relationship at the heart of EU policy making. He said that the relationship was unbalanced by a dominant Berlin and France needed to reassert itself.

Ursula von der Leyen, the woman chosen ahead of Mr Barnier to be European Commission president, is German.

Mr Barnier stands little chance of being elected ahead of either the pro-EU incumbent Emmanuel Macron or the eurosceptic, anti-migrant National Rally’s Marine Le Pen in the presidential election next year.

After many years working for the European Commission in Brussels, his profile is not as high as his rivals and his Republicains have not recovered from their mauling at the last presidential elections.

Since announcing he would run for the presidency, Mr Barnier has made a pitch for votes from people who feel disenfranchised by globalisation.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/09/09/michel-barnier-demands-return-frances-sovereignty-european-courts/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1631268226

Does the last last sentence, I have highlighted, make utterly clear where Barnier stands?

Political Observer

Old Socialist reads a Le Monde made to order diatribe, that undercuts itself!

Editor: The reader has to approach Nonna Mayer’s essay with more than skepticism!

Headline: The political crisis since the dissolution marks a new stage in the RN’s de-demonization.

Sub-headline: While the influence of Marine Le Pen’s party is growing, the sociologist Nonna Mayer believes that this rise needs to be put into perspective and, above all, can be curbed, provided that other political players adjust their strategies.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/09/14/the-political-crisis-since-the-dissolution-marks-a-new-stage-in-the-rn-s-de-demonization_6726039_23.html

Editor: Mayer provides in three paragraphs the political territory as she views it, in sum the villain’s of The Right, that include ‘the repulsive effect of the radicalization of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’. Political elasticity rules!

Marine Le Pen has much to be happy about: Her party is experiencing unprecedented political momentum. With over 31% of the vote in the European elections, double that of the Macron-aligned coalition’s list, the list led by Jordan Bardella won 30 seats in the European Parliament, becoming the largest delegation in the legislature.

Bardella, who is the president of the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right), thus took the position of head of the Patriots for Europe group, founded by Viktor Orban, the third largest group in the Parliament. In France’s parliamentary elections, despite the republican front formed by its opponents, the RN obtained 29% in the first round and 32% in the second round, managing to send 126 representatives to the Assemblée Nationale, making it the largest single political group in the chamber. If we add to that its allies led by Eric Ciotti, they have 143 seats.

At the same time, the RN’s image has considerably improved, as shown by the RN Image Barometer, which has been monitoring it since 1983. This improvement is due to Le Pen’s strategy of normalization, her ability to present herself as a bastion of democracy and secularism in the face of radical Islamism, but also due to the indulgence of both Macron-aligned and LR right-wing politicians toward her ideas, and the repulsive effect of the radicalization of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his movement, La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left).

Editor: Mélenchon appears again, but as not just a sub rosa political ally of Le Pen but her conscious agent!

Mélenchon’s provocations, some bordering on anti-Semitism, have enabled Le Pen to position herself as the protector of France’s Jewish population, obscuring the party’s scandalous origins and her father’s deep-rooted anti-Semitism, including among a section of the Jewish electorate.

Editor: Here Mayer presents the French Electorate:

However, it is important not to overestimate its influence. The French vote is an imperfect reflection of society. Foreigners, who account for 8% of the country’s population, are, by definition, excluded from the electorate. Some 6% of French adults were unable to vote because they had not registered. Of the 49.4 million registered voters, almost half abstained from voting in the European elections (48.2%), and almost a third in each round of the parliamentary elections. In proportion to the registered electorate, the RN’s score falls to 15.7% in the European elections, 19% in the first round of the parliamentary elections and 20.2% in the second. Although it came out ahead of the other parties, it is far from being in the majority.

Editor: The Reader might wonder at the data that Mayer presents, on the voting habits of the French, to speak in American parlance, ‘what is all the fuss about’ ? I’ll end with the final paragraphs of this unimpressive diatribe that undercuts itself, as The Reader trudgers onward…

However, in the last parliamentary elections, women voters voted less often for the RN than men, most notably young women under 35, who clearly favored the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance’s candidates, with half of them voting in favor of the alliance, compared to 37% of men of the same age. If their attraction to the left persists – a trend which, incidentally, is not unique to France – this would be a major setback for a party whose electoral growth has been boosted by the conquest of the women’s electorate.

The RN has undoubtedly never been so close to power, but there are still obstacles in its path, unless the right continues to serve as a stepping stone for it and the left as a boogeyman.

Old Socialist

Political Observer wonders what are Mr. Roberts’s qualifications to utter such an irresponsible, indeed bellicose pronouncement?

Editor: Here is the portion of Mr. Roberts essay devoted to Vladimir Putin and the American and EU War in Ukraine. Mr. Roberts come from an Economist Tradition that produced that Great Oxbridger Tag-Team of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge! That produced that classic apologetic for the War Mongering Bush The Younger: ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ and his coterie of henchmen: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and ‘Turd Blossom’ Karl Rove! As a regular reader of The Economist from the 1990’s, till they closed the comments section. When I attempted to read ‘Right Nation’ I experienced déjà vu, the already seen, as the literary/political style these two re-write men.

Hello from London,

Will conflict with Russia escalate? Vladimir Putin, again, wants to make you believe so. Joe Biden may be poised, at last, to say that Ukraine may use western-supplied weapons to hit military targets—such as airfields, logistics bases, or missile launchers—in Russian territory. That would be welcome, if overdue. Mr Putin, who booted out some British diplomats to show his anger on Friday, suggests this would be a step towards outright war between the West and Russia. His goal, of course, is to intimidate the West into inaction. But with bullies, caving into threats is a mistake. The West must dare to confront the aggressor. Ukraine, as the victim of aggression, has every right to fight back. Its allies should support it.

Russia continues to rain missiles, drones and artillery shells on Ukrainian cities and villages. Its forces are creeping towards making meaningful gains in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Across the country, Mr Putin’s goal is to destroy power supplies ahead of the winter, to further spread misery for ordinary people. Even as his forces commit war crimes, however, he has threatened Ukraine’s foreign supporters that they must not cross his red lines. At the same time, his forces continue to carry out sabotage and attempt assassinations in Europe, and to meddle in elections abroad, including in America.

Mr Putin’s threats of escalation, therefore, must be seen for what they are. He is aggressive when he observes weakness in others, not when he is met by strength. Some in the West were previously fearful about supplying battle tanks to Ukraine, and then F-16 fighter jets. As on those occasions, the lesson to take is that standing by the government in Kyiv, helping Ukraine to fend off its aggressor, is the right way to act.

The Economist and their employee Adam Roberts attempt to re-heat The Old Cold War.

Reader begin your sturdy of that Cold War, with this issue of the Journal Of Cold War Studies Fall of 2013, that offers critiques of John Lewis Gaddis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George F. Kennan , with insightful critical evaluations by critics not sycophants!

Political Observer

American Writer wonders at the dregs of French Literature!

Magdalena Miecznicka provides… The Reader can’t exactly call it gush, or even mistaken adoration, but it resembles in an odd way the Edward Luce interview of Henry Kissinger! Although Magdalena Miecznicka offers a sophisticated, wary knowledge of her subject!

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He’s a great admirer of Christopher Lasch, an American historian who argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries. “He was ahead of his time,” says Houellebecq. These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility, he muses. “Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.”

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Here is another view of Lasch, or perhaps just an endorsement of Houellebecq’s position? Although Horkheimer, Adorno & Marcuse might appear odd company for Houellebecq?

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https://www.ft.com/content/73338e2e-331a-4be3-88d4-a0d9e4216c8a

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Headline: Michel Houellebecq: Brexit, sex tapes and my tears for France

Sub-headline : The controversial French novelist discusses African immigration, his new novel and laments the death of the country of his rural childhood

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/michel-houellebecq-interview-author-new-novel-france-nhgvswv9t

Editor: the first paragraphs of Will Lloyd’s what to name it? The marriage of literature to a Houellebecqian politics of decline, despair, held together by alcohol and literary cachet? The American Reader might think of once ascendant Charles Bukowski?

So here is Michel Houellebecq. The author of eight novels, several volumes of poetry and innumerable controversies stumbles out of the first day of autumn rain in Paris towards this down-at-heel brasserie. He looks rather dazed.

And he can’t really walk. Instead he moves with a slow, pained shuffle. His knees incline towards the ground; his back bends forwards, as if all of French, all of western civilisation, were carried on his narrow shoulders. Depending on your view, Houellebecq, 68, is either a grotesque literary provocateur or the last novelist in Europe who has anything interesting left to say about the way we live now.

In France Houellebecq is revered as a prophet and condemned as a racist. Print runs for his novels run into the hundreds of thousands here, and his pronouncements, particularly about Islam, have led to court prosecutions, media frenzies and interventions from presidents and prime ministers.

He began his career as a morbid, scatological literary shock jock with the 1994 novel Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated into English as Whatever), but over the decades Houellebecq’s writing has taken on a broader social dimension. In later works, like the 2016 novel Submission (hailed in different ways by the former French president François Hollande and the leader of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen) and Serotonin (2019), the decline of France is mercilessly analysed in an atmosphere of sly, sombre resignation.

While Houellebecq’s prose can be workmanlike, his ability to identify the maximum points of pain beneath the surfaces of everyday life is not. There is no British equivalent to what Houellebecq has become: the subversive and anguished chronicler of a nation in free fall. When we meet, France has not had a functioning government for two months. Le Pen’s hard right is on the rise. The political centre has been crushed. Predictions of civil conflict fill the air.

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https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/michel-houellebecq-interview-author-new-novel-france-nhgvswv9t

The valuable thing that Will Lloyd offers is quick capsule reviews of five books by Houellebecq.

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/michel-houellebecq-interview-author-new-novel-france-nhgvswv9t

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So much more to be said!

American Writer

Political Observer: Foreign Policy is/are active agents for The American National Security State. ‘X’ ‘s Long Telegram was the last important essay it published!

This showed up in my e mail today: 9/09/2024

I have a confession to make. I feel a sense of paralysis in these weeks leading up to the U.S. presidential election. Whether it’s the fate of Ukraine, peace in the Middle East, competition with China, or the broader question of America’s role in the world, too much is riding on who will be the next occupant of the White House. A Donald Trump presidency would be very different from a Kamala Harris one, and polls continue to show Americans are bitterly divided on how to choose between them. Key players in global crises, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seem as if they are waiting to see who wins before they make their next big move. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to cast beyond Nov. 5 and imagine how a range of conflicts and issues may play out.

Four years ago, our Fall 2020 print issue tried to examine what we called “The Most Important Election. Ever.” Little did we know we’d find ourselves at a similar crossroads in 2024. Yes, Harris has replaced U.S. President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, but many of the issues at stake—for the United States and the world—remain the same. Columnist Michael Hirsh wrote a cover essay for us about 2020; we asked him this time around to contrast the visions presented by Harris and Trump.

But back to that paralysis: What happens after Nov. 5? For starters, there’s little guarantee the U.S. public will respect the results of the election. Even if you imagine a point in the future where Americans agree on who will lead them for the next four years, the question is how the next president should unite a polarized electorate and what issues they should prioritize.

That’s a dilemma we wanted to address in our cover package, “Dear America.” Nine distinguished thinkers with lifetimes of experience in global policymaking have written nonpartisan letters of advice to the next White House—and to Americans. With the United States no longer the world’s sole hegemon, each of them considers how Washington should approach the critical challenges our planet faces.

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Ravi Agrawal shares with @nytdavidbrooks a certain taste for flaccid melodrama!

Political Observer