Mr. Wooldridge’s essay about Sunak is awash in political cynicism? its a convenient posture, that almost mimics critical thinking, under a heavy veneer of the ersatz.
Note that Wooldridge ‘shows’ Sunak in his various guises in the first three paragraphs of this essay:
Followers of Rishi Sunak on social media are treated to high politics and low culture. In one post, the prime minister accused Labour of being on the same side as “criminal gangs” who profit from smuggling people across the Channel into Britain. In another, a beaming Mr Sunak posed with his young family mulling whether to see “Barbie”, the pinktastic film about the doll, or “Oppenheimer”, a biopic about the godfather of the atom bomb. “Barbie first it is,” posted the unapologetically lowbrow politician.
Mr Sunak’s perky and nerdy demeanour covers an overlooked fact: he is comfortably the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. Taking a hard position on asylum-seekers is just the beginning. On everything from social issues, devolution and the environment to Brexit and the economy, Mr Sunak is to the right of the recent Tory occupants of 10 Downing Street. Yet neither voters nor his colleagues seem to have noticed.
Critics dismiss Mr Sunak’s hardline position on small boats crossing the Channel as focus group-led posturing. Mr Sunak has made stemming the flow of people across those waters one of the main goals of his government. The prime minister has curtailed the right of asylum for people who arrive in small boats. A barge for 500 asylum-seekers is docked in Dorset waiting for its human cargo. Mr Sunak wants to solve the crisis in the most aggressive and prominent way. If it is all for show, it is a needlessly expensive blockbuster. There is a simpler explanation for Mr Sunak’s approach: he believes in it.
Wooldridge, in the next five paragraphs, writes a made to measurer potted history of the Tories. These topic sentences are indicative of the Wooldridge attempt at a methodology.
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Where recent Conservative prime ministers dragged the party towards liberalism, Mr Sunak is resolutely traditionalist.
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Each recent Conservative prime minister has boasted of their environmentalism.
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Critics within the party moan that Mr Sunak is a closet leftie: a man who was too quick to spend money when he was chancellor during the pandemic and is too slow to cut taxes now that he is prime minister.
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When it comes to Brexit, now a religious question for the Conservatives rather than a policy one, Mr Sunak was always a believer.
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Mr Sunak’s credentials as a right-winger are close to immaculate.
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The final two paragraphs are -let me highlight a selection of Wooldridge’s wan attempt, at an informed analysis of Sunak’s status as right-winger. Yet the long time reader of Wooldridge, finds the terminus of his political analysis of Sunak, awash in political hypocrisy: in sum Wooldridge is an unapologetic Right-Winger. Given that, what might be the political purpose of this multi-layered polemic?
Right On
Ultimately, Mr Sunak’s strange reputation is due to the scrambling of British politics after 2016, which mangled the old left-right axis.Mr Sunak’s most decisive act was to bring down Mr Johnson. If Mr Johnson was Brexit incarnate, then his assassin must be a Remainer stooge. Right-wing Brexiters flocked to the Remain-supporting Ms Truss, who was loyal to Mr Johnson, in the leadership contest last summer; Mr Sunak relied on a rump of more liberal Tory mps. Nor was this delusion isolated to Conservatives. After the unprofessionalism of Mr Johnson and the chaos of Ms Truss, centrists welcomed the rise of the diligent Mr Sunak, mistaking competence for liberalism. They assumed he was one of their own based on his age, manner and background rather than his views. Many of them still do.
It is this ideological dissonance that creates the danger for Mr Sunak. He is left channelling another former prime minister who had to persuade his party his views were genuine. In 2001, after New Labour had secured re-election, one party wallah asked Sir Tony if he would ditch his rightward drift. Sir Tony replied: “It’s worse than you think. I really do believe in it.” Mr Sunak is right-wing out of conviction, rather than convenience—even if few others believe it.
Capitalism’s failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.
“(The bad) things have been forgotten,” said Rumen Petkov, 42, a former guard now clerk at the only prison still functioning on the Persin island.
“The nostalgia is palpable, particularly among the elderly,” he said, in front of the crumbling buildings of another old jail opened on the site after the camp was shut in 1959. The communists imprisoned dozens of ethnic Turks here in the 1980s when they refused to change their names to Bulgarian.
Some young people in the impoverished town of Belene, linked to the island with a pontoon bridge, also reminisce: “We lived better in the past,” said Anelia Beeva, 31.
“We went on holidays to the coast and the mountains, there were plenty of clothes, shoes, food. And now the biggest chunk of our incomes is spent on food. People with university degrees are unemployed and many go abroad.”
In Russia, several Soviet-themed restaurants have opened in Moscow in recent years: some hold nostalgia nights where young people dress up as pioneers — the Soviet answer to the boy scouts and girl guides — and dance to communist classics.
Soviet Champagne and Red October Chocolates remain favourites for birthday celebrations. “USSR” T-shirts and baseball caps can be seen across the country in summer.
While there is scant real desire for old regimes to be restored, analysts say apathy is a vital outcome.
“The big damage of the nostalgia…is that it dries out the energy for meaningful change,” wrote Bulgarian sociologist Vladimir Shopov in the online portal BG History.
The year 1989 brought the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. It was also the year that the economic theories of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Chicago School achieved global dominance. And it was these neoliberal ideas that largely determined the course of the political, economic, and social changes that transformed Europe—both east and west—over the next quarter century
Philipp Ther—a firsthand witness to many of the transformations, from Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution to postcommunist Poland and Ukraine—offers a sweeping narrative filled with vivid details and memorable stories. He describes how liberalization, deregulation, and privatization had catastrophic effects on former Soviet Bloc countries. He refutes the idea that this economic “shock therapy” was the basis of later growth, arguing that human capital and the “transformation from below” determined economic success or failure. Most important, he shows how the capitalist West’s effort to reshape Eastern Europe in its own likeness ended up reshaping Western Europe as well, in part by accelerating the pace and scope of neoliberal reforms in the West, particularly in reunified Germany. Finally, bringing the story up to the present, Ther compares events in Eastern and Southern Europe leading up to and following the 2008–9 global financial crisis.
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Goldberg ends her ‘essay’ with
One silver lining to Brexit is that it offers a cautionary tale for the rest of Europe. After Britain voted to leave the E.U. in 2016, there’s been fear, among some who care about the European project, that France or Italy could be next. But as The Guardian reported, as of January, support for leaving the E.U. has declined in every member state for which data is available. As governments across the continent move rightward, the E.U. itself is moving in a more conservative direction, but it’s not coming apart.
“I don’t think you’re going to see other countries in the E.U. leaving the E.U. if for no other reason than because they’ve seen the impact on us,” said Khan. But there’s a larger lesson, one most Western countries seemingly have to continually relearn. Right-wing nationalist projects begin with loud, flamboyant swagger. They tend to end unspeakably.
If The Reader consults François Duchêne’s hagiography of ‘Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence’ reviewed here..
No one can seriously doubt the existence of a crisis in the affairs of the European Union. As the implications of the treaties on which it is based, including the Maastricht timetable for economic and monetary union, become ever more widely appreciated, and as the ordinary citizen in most member countries begins to participate in the debate over the future of the Union and its institutions (a debate hitherto largely confined to the United Kingdom), the glow of the European ideal begins to fade and the demand for precise definitions as to what it is all for becomes louder. We are all Euroskeptics now.
The only country seemingly unaware of this change in public attitudes is the United States of America. Washington continues to act on the assumption that a “United States of Europe” is the continent’s inevitable destiny, and American ambassadors continue to proclaim in London, and no doubt elsewhere, that nothing must be allowed to frustrate this “manifest destiny,” even at the expense of the solidarity of the English-speaking and Atlantic worlds.
Ever since I began studying this process nearly forty years ago, I have been puzzled by the uncritical acceptance in the United States of the view that only with common institutions exercising sovereign power could Europe flourish economically, and play a proper role in its own defense. For while it is understandable that the United States should welcome the apparent decision of the countries of Western and Southern Europe to end their age old strife–did not Americans twice have to intervene to redress the balance?–the assumption that, without the institutions of Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, these countries would once again be preparing for armed conflict is on the face of it wholly implausible.
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Should The Reader look to the continuing Rebellion’s in France, or the Revolt of the Dutch Farmers against the EU, as indicative of the fracture of Monnet’s ‘vision’? Or might The Reader be blunt: Michelle Goldberg is out of her depth, yet fully congruent with current ‘political wisdom’. Yetthe fracturing of a Utopian Capitalist Collectivism, in sum The EU , tinctured in an etiolated Neo-Liberalism, is under attack by The Populist Menace?
WARSAW — Last week, a friend asked me what I could learn from a four-day trip to Ukraine I was planning that I couldn’t glean just by reading the news. It was a fair question. With the trip now behind me, I can answer.
I learned how strange it is to visit a country to which no plane flies and, as of last Monday, no ship sails — thanks to Vladimir Putin’s cruel and cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative through which Ukrainian farm products reached hungry countries like Kenya, Lebanon and Somalia. The only feasible way for a visitor to get from the Polish border to Kyiv is a nine-hour train ride, where the sign inside the carriage door urges, “Be Brave Like Ukraine.”
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Mr. Stephens doesn’t quite reach the level of apologetics that fellow Neo-Con Francis Fukuyama expresses:
Headline: Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-right Azov group after school visit
Francis Fukuyama, a well-known author and researcher at Stanford University, said he is “proud to support” the Azov brigade, a Ukrainian military unit with longstanding far-right ties and connections to neo-Nazis.
“I think you need to do a little more reading on Azov,” he wrote. “They originated among Ukrainian nationalists, but to call them neo-Nazis is to accept Russia’s framing of what they represent today. By the time they defended Mariopol they were fully integrated into the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and are heroes that I’m proud to support.”
Just last year, that same institute published a report on what’s known as the “Azov Movement,” the broader network of military and political organizations that were born out of what was originally a battalion. The institute’s report said that Azov “mixes classic right wing themes, including antisemitism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and racism, with more populist economic proposals arguing for a greater role of the state in society.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his ostensible goal was to “denazify” Ukraine through force — a comment many saw as a direct reference to groups like Azov. While Putin’s claim that the Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis has been widely dismissed, and was used as a false pretense to invade Ukraine, the country nevertheless has some real far-right elements.
First formed as a paramilitary group in 2014, Azov quickly earned praise for its prowess on the battlefield as it fought alongside Ukrainian forces and other paramilitary groups in clashes with Russian-backed separatists. Just months after its initial formation, the unit was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard as an official “Special Purposes Regiment.” Since Russia’s most recent invasion, the unit has received widespread praise from Western institutions and officials for its heroics in the field — namely the role it played in defending Mariupol from Russian invaders in the spring of 2022.
But apart from its combat expertise, the brigade is also known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology and other far-right beliefs. Azov was formed by Andriy Biletsky, the founder of two other far-right groups in Ukraine, who in 2010 reportedly said that the country’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races].” Azov often uses symbols that are similar to those used by Nazi soldiers during World War II, including the wolfsangel, totenkopf and sonnenrad.
The Reader has to wonder at a writer, thinker, intellectual celebrity, not to speak of relentless self-promoter, seems to have suspended his critical judgement, in the interests of ideology? Though it should not surprise that the gloss of Hegel’s highfalutin chatter, made this man’s career. ‘The End of History’ was superb public relations. The Philosophical Provincials swooned over this. Fukuyama entered the Pantheon of The Moment of Intellectual Celebrity. Who can forget Edward Bernays contribution to the study of Propaganda ? Its offers the key to the rise of Fukuyama, as that rare being whose thought is transformational?
Back to Mr. Stephens:
Is it pure luck that he should encounter R2P Zealot Samantha Power?
I learned what it was like to sit in conference rooms and walk along corridors that would soon be shattered by Russian ordnance. On Tuesday, I joined a diplomatic group led by Administrator Samantha Power of the United States Agency for International Development on a visit to the port of Odesa. Power met first with Ukrainian officials to discuss logistical options for their exports after Putin’s withdrawal from the grain agreement, then with farmers to discuss issues like de-mining their fields and de-risking their finances. The stately Port Authority building in which the meetings took place, a purely civilian target, was struck barely a day after our departure.
Mr. Stephens was given a guided tour. This wasn’t happenstance, as he presents it. He sounded all the notes of the brave Ukrainians, stalwart Samantha Power … this is propaganda dressed casually. Mr. Stephens is an ally of Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, in sum the Neo-Con coterie, that salivates over war, with the enemies of the American Hegemon. The Neo-Cons exalt War, with no experience of service in its stark realities, as a soldier doing the fighting. Mr. Stephens provides the window dressing and then boards his flight… scribbling in his notebook as Ukraine become memory, attached to propaganda.
The Reader experiences a kind of political vertigo, while reading this meandering ‘essay’. Even Tom Friedman and David Brooks manage to express coherence of very particular kinds, in their political/moral/commentaries. Frank Bruni’s political observation, are tinctured in Pop Culture references, that are not just amateurish but maladroit- his practice of comedy lacks the sophistication, that experience in front of an audience brings.
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It feels dangerous to write about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: In the lag between when I put the finishing touches on this and when it becomes publicly available, I could be a conspiracy theory or two behind.
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I could be mulling his apparent belief that the coronavirus was diabolically engineered to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while he has already moved on to the hypothesis that Ron DeSantis is a hologram gone haywire (I could buy into this one), the revelation that earbuds deliver subconsciously perceptible government propaganda through our auditory canals or the epiphany that French bulldogs cause global warming. He’s a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.
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But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?
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But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?
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Oh, I understand the appeal of the perspective that narcissists like Trump and Kennedy peddle: that sinister operators deploy nefarious tricks to shore up their own dominance and keep hard-working, well-intentioned, regular folks in their places. It’s an exaggeration of inequities and injustices that really do exist, and it simplifies a maddeningly complex world. Ranting about George Soros or Anthony Fauci feels a whole lot better than raging at the vicissitudes of fate.
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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.
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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.
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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.
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But Kennedy’s place in a bona fide dynasty has also meant access, influence, mulligans. “Kicked out of an elite roster of prep schools, he still managed to arrive at Harvard in 1972,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an excellent recent profile of him and his presidential campaign in New York magazine, where she also described how he is “leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign.”
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In an insightful column in The Times, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted how, at a June rally in New Hampshire, Kennedy pitched his presidential bid as a return of his family’s magic and majesty. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he told an adoring crowd.
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All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.
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All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.
Is the evidence clear that Bruni, and his New Democrat allies, are doing to both Kennedy and Cornel West what was done to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. The one difference is that The Republicans control the House, and have provided ample evidence, that the New Democrats don’t just believe in Censorship, in the name of their political imperative. But demanded that the Hearings be in Executive Session.
The Reader is presented with paranoid political chatter of The New Democrats, recycled by an employee the Paper Of Record, The New York Times. The New Democrats are in a Political Panic over not just Kennedy but Cornel West as alternatives to the Party Of Censorship. The Reader need only look to:
This is the Sick Bitch Who Obama Appointed Chair of the Democratic National Committee and Defended Even after She was Exposed as a Crook:
Mr Ferguson no longer writes a column of opinion, but now resorts to that Straussian Methodology of writing a 2,626 word manifesto. That apes the Starussian ‘History of Philosophy’ as re-written in light of ideological imperatives ?
Could it be that Ferguson writing his new book in installments, to test the waters? Modesty is not a virtue that this Intellectual Technocrat, masquerading as an Historian might aspire? But the student of Strauss cultivates another kind of virtue of an ideological stripe?
The first paragraphs of the ‘essay’ :
Is democracy on a roll? You would think so if you listened to President Joe Biden’s speech at last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was vintage Biden, the rhetoric alternately soaring and stumbling. He started with “the transformational power of freedom” in Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors as they broke free of Soviet rule, lighting up “the flame of liberty.” The enlargement of NATO and the advance of democracy are one and the same, he argued, because the alliance is “bound by democratic values.”
The war in Ukraine, the president declared, is a war between a coalition of democracies and a Russian autocracy that poses a threat “to democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself.” In the same way, the Quad partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US is “bringing major democracies of the region together to cooperate, keeping the Indo-Pacific free.” Biden depicted the world in Manichean terms, divided starkly between the democracies, united in “the defense of freedom,” and their benighted foes, who would prefer “a world defined by coercion and exploitation, where might makes right.”
Fine words. But what if democracy, far from being ascendant, is really in retreat? For the past few years, my Hoover Institution colleague Larry Diamond has been warning of a “democratic recession.” As he put it in a recent Foreign Affairs essay: “In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary, and Turkey, elections have long ceased to be democratic. Autocrats in Algeria, Belarus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe have clung to power despite mounting public demands for democratization. In Africa, seven democracies have slid back into autocracy since 2015, including Benin and Burkina Faso … the world is mired in a deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession.”
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After the appearance of Larry Diamond of The Hoover Institution, in the next paragraph ‘Freedom House’ and Fareed Zakaria have brief walk-ons. Mr. Ferguson’s manifesto commences in earnest. Scrolling through this hysterical diatribe, it reads like his ‘The Great Degeneration’ : See Dr. Mark Kass’s brief, but insightful review:
The final paragraphs of Mr. Ferguson’s diatribe, featuring himself, hardly a surprise.
Finally, what about the challenge to American democracy posed by technological change? Two weeks ago, I wrote about the rise of corporations to positions of power unmatched since the 17th and 18th centuries. A central theme of my book The Square and the Tower was that the originally decentralized internet had swiftly and unexpectedly become dominated by a handful of network platform companies: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta. Does this threaten democracy? Indeed it does.
And the spectacular breakthrough of large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has implications for next year’s election that could be even bigger than the impact of big data in 2012 and Facebook ads in 2016. If both Democrats and Republicans are not already frantically working on applying artificial intelligence to voter mobilization in the key counties of swing states, I would be astonished. Remember: The people who first work out how to exploit any new technology are, in this order: 1. The nerds 2. The crooks and 3. The campaign operatives.
Democracy is not in recession. The invasion of Ukraine has elicited real democratic unity. The response to the challenge posed by China is weaker, but it is real. The idea of a global descent into illiberal democracy or electoral autocracy is exaggerated by dubious statistics.
But the future of democracy hinges, as it always has, on how far voters in the most important democracy are willing to vote their rights away. And the mechanisms to persuade them to do so have never been more powerful. Democracy is on a roll. The question is whether it is rolling toward a cliff edge. We shall find out in less than 16 months.
Like that notorious Neo-Conservative, who has converted to ‘Liberalism’, Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Ferguson’s defence/advocacy for democracy, is really a defence of a carefully Managed Democracy. It’s champion was Walter Lippmann’s faith in ‘experts’ in modern parlance Technocrats, who will check the ever-present threat of too much democracy.
Some commentators thought it was unwise of Starmer to adopt so many of the Blair mannerisms in his Observer article at the weekend. His riposte has been to copy Blair’s mannerisms in person and tell his critics that it is worse than they thought … he actually believes in this stuff.
After all, Starmer has been on what the Master might call ‘a journey’ over the past three years, in which he has had to be Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair rolled into one.
Blair doubters will shake their heads, complaining that the prime minister from different times long ago is now “toxic,” and that Starmer should strike out boldly as his own person. But Starmer’s appearance on Blair’s stage was his answer to that.
Starmer recognises that Blair has transformed his reputation in recent years; that his institute is the source of some of the best ideas for government and opposition. Not only is Blair the glue that holds the centre of British politics together, after a long spell in the wilderness, but for many voters, his endorsement conveys a simple message: Keir Starmer is the mirror image of the most successful Labour prime minister. You may safely vote for him.
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Excerpts from a review of ‘In Heroes or Villains?’
Headline: In Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered, Jon Davis and John Rentoul seek to counter the negative prevailing view of Tony Blair and the New Labour government, focusing on key areas of criticism.
The legacy of the Tony Blair government continues to be the topic of some debate, as shown by the former Prime Minister’s recent defence of his record following a sustained attack from the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting wing of the Labour Party. This makes Jon Davis and John Rentoul’s new book on the Blair era, Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered, all the more pertinent. The authors believe that the ‘prevailing view of Blair and New Labour is too negative’ and that this book should ‘provide a counterweight, so that the independent-minded reader is better placed to reach a considered view’ (312).
Heroes or Villains? takes an innovative approach to its subject, having developed out of a number of university courses taught by Davis and Rentoul at Queen Mary, University of London, and King’s College London. One of the strengths of the book is that many of the key protagonists—including Blair himself—spoke to the classes and provide at times fascinating detail.
Mrs. Thatcher might have amended her statement about Tony Blair, being her greatest accomplishment? With praise for Jon Davis and John Rantoul as the newest apologists for Blair in 2019, and into the political present ?
The ‘Cult of Blair’ is about the erasure of Jeremy Corbyn, as practiced by an utterly corrupt British Corporate Media, and it’s hirelings.
As a long time reader of The New York Review of Books: 1971 to the present: Mr. Remnick was part of a ‘Left Coterie’ that included Robert Silvers, the editor of NYRB. Silvers idolized Kennan , he appeared often, and NYRB sold his books through ‘The Readers Subscription Service’.
So it cannot escape the attention of a reader that Silvers provided publication space to New Cold Warrior Timothy Snyder, as early as 2014:
The Haze of Propaganda Timothy Snyder
From Moscow to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been seen through a haze of propaganda.
FORUM: George F. Kennan and the Cold War: Perspectives on John Gaddis’s Biography
Editor’s Introduction Mark Kramer
Gaddis, Kennan, and the Cold War: An Assessment of the Biography David Mayers
Analyzing and Assessing Gaddis’s Kennan Biography: Questionable Interpretations and Unpursued Evidence and Issues Barton J. Bernstein
Gaddis’s Achievement: Taking the Measure of Kennan Vladimir O. Pechatnov
An Assessment of John Lewis Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life Ivan Kurilla
Contained? The Religious Life of George F. Kennan and Its Influence James C. Wallace
Commentary on John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life Binoy Kampmark
George F. Kennan and the Division of Europe Vít Smetana
Gaddis’s Kennan: A Different Kennan? Anders Stephanson
Reply to the Commentaries of John Lewis Gaddis
This is too important an issue, to let the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance, now self-presenting as American Political Centrism , attempt to Control The Narrative- David Remnick seeks to discredit Kennedy, as a part of a political toxin of The Left, a Putin Apologist, or in the parlance of the McCarthyites, a Putin fellow traveler, via his notion of ‘The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’ . Mr. Remnick lives in a fools paradise, that doesn’t think that a potential Reader, might explore other alternative sources of information? or that that reader might be suspicious of Mr. Remnick’s political agenda, in his badgering, bulling tone that he adopts to his guest? That now has become the political weapon of choice of the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance. Also Mr. Remnick lacks the political savvy, to even conceive, that a Reader might look to the toxic object lesson of Jeremy Corbyn, that stares us in the face?
Last thought : Kennan was a thinker/ writer who traded upon his past, in the political present: The Reader catches some sobering glimpses of him in ‘The Georgetown Set’ .
Note that ‘Liberal Zionism’ is not just moribund, but dead! While Tom Friedman was the ‘middle ground’ of Israeli Loyalists/Apologists, at The Paper of Record. His latest 1,819 word essay is anguished in its way, yet still hewing to the received wisdom that he helped to construct.
Headline: The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun
Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a translator from English to English. I try to take complex subjects and make them understandable, first to myself and then to readers — and that is what I want to do here regarding three interrelated questions: Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?
The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.
If you want to get just a whiff of the tension between the U.S. and this Israeli cabinet, spearheaded by extremists, consider that hours after Biden mentioned to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria just how “extreme” some of Netanyahu’s cabinet members were, one of the most extreme of them all, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told Biden to butt out — that “Israel is no longer another star in the American flag.”
Nice, eh? According to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report, Israel has received the most U.S. foreign assistance of any country in the world since World War II, at $146 billion, not adjusted for inflation. That’s quite an allowance and one that might have merited a little more respect for the U.S. president from Ben-Gvir, who in his youth was convicted of inciting racism against Arabs.
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The Reader need only look to Friedman’s final anguised paragraphs to understand …
Israel’s very decent, moderate president, Isaac Herzog, who has been pleading with Netanyahu’s coalition to step back from forcing any changes in the judiciary and to do so only by national consensus, will be meeting with Biden in Washington next week. It is Biden’s way of signaling that his problem is not with the Israeli people but with Bibi’s extremist cabinet.
But I have no doubt that the U.S. president will arm the Israeli president with the message — out of sorrow, not anger — that when the interests and values of a U.S. government and an Israeli government diverge this much, a reassessment of the relationship is inevitable.
I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital. I am talking about our basic diplomatic approach to an Israel that is unabashedly locking in a one-state solution: a Jewish state only, with the fate and rights of the Palestinians T.B.D.
Such a reassessment based on U.S. interests and values would be some tough love for Israel but a real necessity before it truly does go off the rails. That Biden is prepared to get in Netanyahu’s face before America’s 2024 election suggests that our president believes he has the support not only of most Americans for this but of most American Jews and even most Israeli Jews.
He is right on all three counts.
I’ve highlighted the sentence: ‘I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital.’ Friedman is, as always, a political conformist. In sum ‘tough love’ is the answer to the arrival of The Zionist Faschist State, and it’s toxic actors Netanyahu and his thugs Smotrich and Ben-Gvir ? The Genocide On The Installment Plan against the indigenous Palestinians does not merit mention, Friedman is a Loyalist …
Political Observer reads this crap, so you won’t have too!
I recall Joe Conason calling Ralph Nader a ‘spoiler’ during the 2000 Presidential Election, in that once very trendy, salmon pink newspaper, The New York Observer. Also look at the treatment, in a word defamation, of Jeremy Corbyn, in the British Press, as an object lesson, about the possibility of the power of American Corporate Media, to message an American Electorate, into believing that candidates like RFK Jr., Marian Williamson, and Cornel West represent a threat to respectable bourgeois politics.
‘Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer’ follows the lead of others:
Headline: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Real Motive
Sub-headline: He’s not actually trying to become president.
Mr. Shafer brings a talent that @mtomasky nor @joanwalsh can’t quite equal! Mr. Shafer reads the mind of his protagonist, RFK Jr. This essay is what used to be called ‘a hatchet job’, so as such, I offer The Reader some samples of the Shafer Methodology. Shafer trades in a dull-witted pastiche of a Borscht Belt Comic.
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If Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s three-month-old presidential campaign were a newly opened restaurant, it would have already succumbed to its negative reviews and closed its doors.
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Kennedy — and this comes as a surprise to nobody — is about as likely to win the Democratic Party’s nomination as, say, Donald Trump.
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A sharp CNN piece last month by the network’s analyst Harry Enten attached an anchor to Kennedy’s chances and sunk it into the depths of the Mariana Trench.
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This inevitable defeat is self-evident to everybody, including Kennedy, one suspects. But RFK Jr. doesn’t care about losing because there’s little evidence he was very interested in becoming president in the first place.
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Some people give more forethought to picking a dressing for their salad than Kennedy seems to have given to his run for president.
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Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it could be that Kennedy has always craved power but wanted to start at the top.
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The political gene, which often comes bundled with the one for narcissism, never adequately thrives until fed by some form of adulation. Even the negative adulation of the recent profiles can be read as “I must be doing something right because they’re all knocking me” for somebody as thirsty for attention as Kennedy. He’s winning there, too.
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The current Kennedy moment will soon be swamped by the Biden machine. But every day this final heir to America’s second greatest political dynasty spends on the hustings, he will continue rolling up winnings like an undetected card counter in Las Vegas.
The opening paragraph of Mr. Colvile’s latest political corrective:
How did you mark the great occasion? Personally, I’m worried I didn’t do enough. Sure, I got the tattoo and renamed both of my children “Aneurin”. But it’s Our NHS. Its 75th birthday deserved much more.
Like his political idol Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Colvile is a humorless ideologue. Mr. Colvile version of Thatcherism engages in a self-serving ‘changing the subject’ at will, that mimics political concern for the welfare, and the greater good of children? Thatcher’s Household God was Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’, she passed it out like party favors. We still live in that political collapse: so in propaganda terms, ‘changing the subject’ is advantageous in ‘cover your ass’ terms! That the NHS is being ‘privatized’ is inconvenient to Mr. Colvile:
This from 2022:
Headline: NHS privatization drive linked to rise in avoidable deaths, study suggests
Sub-headline: Outsourcing accelerated by Lansley’s shakeup in 2012 linked to drop in care quality in landmark review
The privatisation of NHS care accelerated by Tory policies a decade ago has corresponded with a decline in quality and “significantly increased” rates of death from treatable causes, the first study of its kind says.
The hugely controversial shakeup of the health service in England in 2012 by the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, forced local health bodies to put contracts for services out to tender.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash has since been handed to private companies to treat NHS patients, according to the landmark review.
It shows the growth in health contracts being tendered to private companies has been associated with a drop in care quality and higher rates of treatable mortality – patient deaths considered avoidable with timely, effective healthcare.
The analysis by the University of Oxford has been published in the Lancet Public Health journal. “The privatisation of the NHS in England, through the outsourcing of services to for-profit companies, consistently increased [after 2012],” it says.
“Private-sector outsourcing corresponded with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality, potentially as a result of a decline in the quality of healthcare services.”
With a record 6.5 million patients now waiting for care, and private companies being lined up to help tackle the backlog worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, the research will prompt new fears over the potential harms of the increased outsourcing of NHS care.
“Our study suggests that increased for-profit outsourcing from clinical commissioning groups [CCGs] in England might have adversely affected the quality of care delivered to patients and resulted in increased mortality rates,” the authors said.
“Our findings suggest that further privatization of the NHS might lead to worse population health outcomes.”
Mr. Colvile attempts to cover his political tracks by introducing his concern ‘we’ve forgotten schools need intensive care’ . The next 929 words show him at full gallop , while the NHS is left in the clouds of self-created political dust, Mr. Colvile’s has kicked up born of that vital ‘change of subject’!
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