In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be, a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that kind is more than foolish, I claimed – it’s dishonourable. Exactly what duty meant to those around the table at the India Foundation in Delhi was left unspoken.
I was corrected by a French colleague who pointed out that while politically or militarily speaking, it is possible to give up this hope, in French named espoir, it is much graver now to lack espérance.
That’s the virtue which in the medieval allegory of Alain Chartier (lead image), he fought with the monsters he called Melancholy and Despair, and by opening a very small window Chartier named Memory, he defeated them.
Chartier was writing between 1428 and 1430; that was 91 years into the Hundred Years War, and 23 years before it ended; Chartier was dead by then.
For Russians it is now 108 years since the war with the rest of the world began with the revolution of 1917. The German monster then is fighting still.
He’s not the only one on whom the window of Memory is opened to expose. After the new book-writing of January, we will return to do more of that.
by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025 No Comments »
Pejorism is the idea that the world is getting worse so you should prepare yourself, your house, your country, your army.
Meliorism — the opposite idea that the world is getting better, that time and history are on your side, etc. — has been so powerful for so long that it has suppressed the skeptics and buried pejorism. The term doesn’t rate an entry in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. The digital version of the full Oxford Dictionary claims the idea, or at least this word for it, is a modern one even if it is based on the ancient Latin word peior which described the condition of comparative degree between malus (bad) and pessimus (worst).
In the war of civilizations in which Russia finds itself with the US, Germany, and the NATO allies, and also in the war for the sea lanes and freedom to trade, the longest lasting ally Russia has had is India. In this hour-long discussion with Lieutenant General P.T. Shankar and Brigadier General Arun Sahgal, the former a specialist of artillery, the latter of intelligence, we discuss the issues that were addressed during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Delhi earlier this month, and the problems to be solved by the two allies in the year ahead.
For the time being the Trump Administration and its allies conduct their war against Russia on the high seas, outside defended territorial waters, against ship targets which are unarmed, threaten no resistance. This is piracy, effective if the sight of the skull-and-bones flag triggers fear, shock, immediate surrender.
In the Caribbean against Venezuela, President Donald Trump is displaying an enormous naval force: “the largest Armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” he tweeted on December 16. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before”.
Then the US Coast Guard announced that it lacks the men and firepower to board and seize the Bella-1 oil tanker, owned by China and heading to Venezuela to load crude oil for delivery to Chinese refineries. “The days-long pursuit [of the Bella-1] highlights the mismatch between the Trump administration’s desire to seize sanctioned oil tankers near [sic] Venezuela and the limited resources of the agency that is mainly carrying out operations, the Coast Guard,” a US official announced on December 23. “A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Coast Guard officials on the [USS Gerald] Ford were from a Maritime Security Response Team and at the time too far from Bella 1 to carry out a boarding operation.”
The next day, December 24, Trump officials lowered their flag to half-mast. “The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a ‘quarantine’ of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters, indicating Washington is currently more interested in using economic rather than military means to pressure Caracas.” ‘While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),’ the official said on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.”
In the Mediterranean, the cover story for drone attacks on tankers operating for the Russian oil trade is that it’s the Ukrainians at work, reportedly firing from 1,500 kilometres to the north.
More certainly, the small drone detonation on the deck of the Qendil southwest of Crete on December 19 was fired from Tympaki, a Greek Coast Guard base on Crete armed with Israeli and NATO drones and using US and NATO satellite and live airborne electronic surveillance. Although claimed by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) , this was an act of war by the Greek Government against Russia – and it failed. The Qendil has continued under its own power through the Aegean to Nemrut Bay, Turkey. Omani-flagged, with Indian management and a Russian master, the Qendil was empty at the time of the attack.
This is a war between the 3,300-tanker alternative fleet (alt-fleet) versus a mainstream fleet of about 5,000 vessels in which the world oil tanker market has been cut in half by the international war between Russia, China, India, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea on one side, and the US, the NATO allies, Israel, and Japan on the other.
At sea, for the time being, this is a war of provocation, profiteering, and face-saving short of shooting. The more time that goes by, however, the stronger the Venezuelan government grows in resistance, and the closer to capitulation the US and NATO-backed regime in Kiev.
In an unusually frank analysis of the General Staff’s electric war campaign since 2022, Vzglyad, the semi-official platform for security analysis in Moscow, has acknowledged that three years of strikes against Ukrainian energy targets have fallen short of their military objective because the targeting has been restricted by President Vladimir Putin’s tit-for-tat order.
But now that order has changed. Or has it?
Ukrainian military bloggers were reporting on Tuesday afternoon (December 23) that “as a result of the morning strikes of the Russian Armed Forces, the Rivne, Ternopil and Khmelnitsky regions of Ukraine were completely de-energized. There is a risk of disconnection in Vinnytsia, Chernigov, Zhitomyr, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov regions.” The capacities for repair and replacement of damaged energy facilities have “almost dried up”, they add.
If this is the current situation, does this mean that the successive waves of electric war operations – October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024 — failed in their cumulative impact?
Answers a veteran military engineer and specialist in electric warfare: “The electrical spare parts coming from Europe via rail could have been stopped. The yards containing spare transformers, service vehicles and equipment could have been put out of commission; multiple high-voltage cable towers — easy targets! — could have been hit at the same time. Coupled with strikes on the substations, service equipment yards and supply logistics, such a campaign would have quickly overwhelmed the Ukrainian capacity to effect repairs in anything resembling a timely fashion. Why hasn’t this happened, or why is it, apparently, happening only now?”
“Can you imagine the war continuing if the 33 main Ukrainian electrical substations and the towers carrying the lines to and from them had been destroyed in the autumn and winter of 2022/23? If the railways from Poland and Romania had been de-electrified, had their rolling stock and engines smashed? If the rail and highway bridges carrying Ukrainian re-supply had been bombed?”
“Unless the decision-makers in the Kremlin are stupid, which we know they are not, striking again in 2023, 2024, and 2025 without finishing off the Ukrainian electrical grid can only be explained as a political decision – that’s to say, President Putin’s decision.”
In Moscow on Tuesday, this is publicly admitted for the first time, albeit by inference between the lines and under a byline that is fake.
Vzglyad, the state-funded publication of military, intelligence, security and economic analysis, headlines its report with an irony — “Zelensky’s stubbornness is finishing off the Ukrainian energy industry”. The text which follows makes clear that stubbornness has been a problem from the beginning of the electric war – not in Kiev but in Moscow.
Note that unlike most Vzglyad reports, no source has been cited by the author, Nikolai Storozhenko. No trace has been found of this name as an active writer for Vzglyad. The name belonged famously to a literary historian and Shakespeare scholar in Moscow in the mid-19th century. The use of such an obvious alias carries the invitation to knowing readers to understand this as a semi-official editorial.
The official record of three conversations President Vladimir Putin (lead images, right) had with President George W. Bush (lead images, left) in 2001, 2005, and 2008 has just been released in Washington.
This follows a federal court lawsuit to compel the US National Archives to speed up the declassification process which was initially to have ended in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, and which the Biden Administration then attempted to block for another decade. A lawsuit, filed in November 2024, identified 19 separate face-to-face meetings between Putin and Bush, and 73 telephone calls over Bush’s two terms, 2001-2009.
Stonewalling by the National Archives and the White House ended with the release of documents early this month. Three texts have been released and can be read in full here. Other records, including telephone calls, are expected to follow.
The hitherto secret remarks of Putin are almost identical with what he was saying at the time in public, and what he has subsequently said in opposition to the US plans to make the Ukraine a platform for NATO threats to Russia.
Equally unsurprising is the record that Bush made of his readiness to listen to Putin, and also of his evasiveness and misrepresentation in response – amplified at the time by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Yury Ushakov, then Russian Ambassador to the US, were present at the second and third meetings, the record shows they had less than their counterparts to say – that is, next to nothing.
Read in retrospect since Putin has negotiated strategic partnership and defence agreements with North Korea in 2024 and Iran this year, Putin’s negative references towards the North Korean and Iran leaders he had met are noteworthy. “There may be a lot of nuts there”, Putin said of the North Koreans in 2005, “but not everyone is.” About the Iranians, whom Bush called “religious nuts with nuclear weapons”, Putin responded: “They’re quite nuts…They may be crazy in their ideology, but they are intellectuals…That was quite a surprise to me.”
Putin added a qualifier. He believed North Korea’s policies, he told Bush, were the result of the security threats imposed by the US and its ally South Korea, and that no change could be expected until and unless these were lifted. “The North Koreans live in more seclusion than we lived in,” Putin said. “They are more isolated than the Soviet Union under Stalin. The overwhelming number are prepared to die. This is not East Europe or East Germany. For any serious change in mindset, there needs to be rapprochement between the North and South.” Bush did not reply.
Putin’s response was different when Bush told him Iranian nuclear weapons technology was “scaring” Israel. “The military option stinks,” Bush claimed, referring to Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment operations. “But we can’t take it off the table. [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is thinking about the military option. If you or I were Sharon, we’d be thinking about the military option. Iranian nukes really scare the Israelis. Diplomacy must work. That’s an important point to keep in mind. If Sharon feels he needs to strike Iran, all hell will break loose. I’m not saying it will happen, only that the most likely military reactions will come from Israel.”
Putin is evasive. “But what will they target?” he asks. Left unsaid is that Putin conceded that Israeli nuclear weapons threatened Iran with US support, and that he accepted that US would support Israel to attack Iran’s counter-deterrent. Putin did not tell Bush that until and unless the US and Israel lifts the nuclear attack threat against Iran, there could be no reciprocal security although the Iranians, like the North Koreans, had told him exactly that.
This is telling with the hindsight of Putin’s acquiescence in Israel’s June 2025 attacks on Iran during a telephone call on June 13 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his response to Trump’s bombing of three nuclear technology sites on June 23. “Who says we should have done more,” Putin declared on June 20, “— what is more? Starting some kind of combat operations, or what?”
Twenty years earlier, on September 16, 2005, Bush had told Putin: “But we aren’t doing the targeting for Israel”. Putin knew then Bush was lying; Putin prevaricated. “But it’s not clear what the [Iranian] labs have, where they are. Cooperation with Pakistan still exists”, Putin went on, attempting to get Bush to respond on US military and intelligence assistance to Pakistan.
Bush was evasive. “I am concerned about Pakistan,” Putin said. “It is just a junta with nuclear weapons. It is no democracy, yet the West makes no criticism of it. Should talk about it.” Bush didn’t want to, so Putin asked Bush about the problem of terrorism spilling out of Afghanistan to attack both Russia and the US. “What should we do about the Taliban? I asked Clinton but never got back a straight answer.”
Bush was evasive again. “Armitage [Deputy Secretary of State] and George Tenet [CIA Director] have my full cooperation”. Putin replied: “Perhaps now, after your elections [November 2006], there will be fewer games.”
There weren’t.
Five weeks later, on October 29, 2005, the Pakistan-directed terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) bombed crowds in New Delhi, India, killing 67 and wounding more than 200.
In the International System of Units,hertzis a unit of frequency for measuring the number of times a repeating event occurs per second, like waves, cycles or vibrations of pitch, sound, or electrical current. The common multiples are kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz.
Merz is the unit measuring the number of times German politicians and soldiers repeat the mistake of thinking themselves so superior to the Slavs or Russian race, they will be able to defeat them in war. The name in German for the gigamerz multiple is Friedrich (lead image).
In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we go over the evidence that the drone attack on the Qendil oil tanker off the south coast of Crete was a US-NATO operation disguised to look like a Ukrainian one. Then we discuss the implications for the European states and the UK in the escalation of the war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield to the high seas – from the Meditearranean to the Baltic, Atlantic, and the Caribbean.
Friedrich Merz (lead image) — Germany’s chancellor for just eight months with only 28% of the vote — is a Joseph Kennedy fascist. That’s the line which Kennedy, then US Ambassador to the UK, ran to President Franklin Roosevelt between 1938 and 1940 — “fascism is the cure of communism”.
Now that there’s no more communism to cure in Russia, the old rationale for making war against Russia has lost its camouflage and is revealed in Merz’s policies as rearming Germany to defend against a Russian attack Merz is both fabricating and provoking. He has been hoping to convince the Trump Administration that he’s their best candidate in Europe to wage this war and pay Trump’s asking price for his weapons – except that the German state budget doesn’t have enough cash and lacks the Bundestag votes to raise borrowing limits and taxes.
Merz has also been trying to convince German voters whose support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now outnumbers supporters of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to switch their votes to him. But so far Merz is failing: since September he is growing weaker in the polls and the AfD has crossed over him.
The trajectory of the German aerospace and defence stock index also reveals that since August there has been a change of mind among Germany’s money men: the index line for the state’s warmaking industries has topped and started downward as investors and banks lending to them have begun to lose confidence in the future revenues, profits, and share price gains of Merz’s war against Russia.
Once calling Merz “a very strong person and a very strong leader” who had “just won a great election, very, very strong election”, President Donald Trump has also begun to lose confidence in the German. But not quite as much as President Vladimir Putin at a Defense Ministry meeting this week, who called Merz, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, “podsvinki” – little pigs running behind the hog.
Blowing the shofar, the Jewish ritual ram’s horn, has traditionally been the signal to start an attack or a war, and also to celebrate victory at the end of a war.
In the lead picture, two rabbis, Eli Schlanger (left) and Yossi Friedman (right) blew the shofar above Bondi Beach in Sydney in September 2019. Schlanger was the assistant rabbi in the Chabad Lubavitcher religious organisation in Bondi; Friedman has been the Jewish chaplain to the Australian Air Force and runs a rabbi-on-demand service in Sydney.
Schlanger was the organiser of the annual celebration of Hanukkah; that was a civil war and rebellion against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in 167 BC. The Hanukkah ceremony was held on Bondi Beach on December 14. Schlanger was one of the fifteen killed during the shooting attack by Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, father and son, in which the father was killed by police.
Wounded but surviving, Naveed Akram has been charged with 15 counts of murder; one count of committing a terrorist act; 40 counts of wounding with intent to murder; and one count of “caus[ing] public display of a prohibited terrorist org[anisation] symbol.” The police have not released the text of the indictment. “Police will allege in court the man engaged in conduct that caused death, serious injury and endangered life to advance a religious cause and cause fear in the community,” a local newspaper has reported.
The NSW statute defining terrorist acts says they are “an action where…(b) the action is done with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, and (c) the action is done with the intention of– (i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country, or (ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.”
The law explicitly excludes from this definition of terrorism “if it– (a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action, and (b) is not intended– (i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person, or (ii) to cause a person’s death, or (iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action, or (iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.”
The Australian Government’s release of “listed terrorist organizations” includes Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, with its coalition partner Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Hezbollah, part of the Lebanese government coalition; Ansar Allah, the ruling authority in Yemen; Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the ruling authority in Syria; and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in civil war againast the Turkish Government in Ankara.
According to the statute implementing this list, the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Prohibited Hate Symbols and Other Measures) Act of 2023, symbols such as flags, hand gestures, pictures, and speech “advocating terrorism or genocide” are criminal. The offence, under this law, “applies if a reasonable person would consider that the conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) involves advocacy that: (a) is advocacy of hatred of: (i) a group of persons distinguished by race, religion or nationality (a targeted group ); or (ii) a member of a targeted group… it does not matter whether the conduct actually results in the hatred mentioned in that paragraph…For the purposes of paragraph (4)(b), it does not matter whether the conduct actually incites another person as mentioned in that paragraph…this subsection applies if the conduct mentioned in paragraph (1)(a) is likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person who is: (a) a reasonable person; and (b) a member of a group of persons distinguished by race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion or national or social origin; because of the reasonable person’s membership of that group.”
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have subsequently arrested and charged a 19-year old man for speech and hand gestures on board an aircraft flying from Bali, Indonesia, to Sydney airport. The AFP have charged “one count of threatening force or violence against members of groups or close associates, contrary to section 80.2BB(2) of the Criminal Code (Cth). The offence carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. The AFP received a request for assistance from an airline on 17 December, 2025, in relation to an incident on a flight from Bali to Sydney. Police will allege the man made antisemitic threats and hand gestures indicating violence towards the alleged victim, who the man knew to be affiliated with the Jewish community. AFP officers arrested and charged the man on his arrival into Sydney International Airport. He was refused bail to appear before NSW Local Bail Division Court 7 today.”
In the Australian context of the murders at Bondi Beach, the evidence made public so far linking the Akram killings to terrorism is a black flag of the Islamic state shown in videoclips fixed to the windscreen of their car.
Published research before the incident has revealed that since the beginning of the Hamas military operation against Israel in October 2023, “reports of antisemitism in Australia increased 738% and Islamophobia increased 1300%”, and that “anti-Palestinian racism is a specific and documented form of Islamophobia.” Critics of the Australian hate-speech laws and lists have registered many objections, including taking sides in “strong disagreements between religions.”
In this context then, in the war in Gaza ruled to have method and intent of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians by the International Court of Justice — does the evidence and the law apply to the Chabad Lubavitcher organisation in their support for the Gaza genocide? Click to view the podcast with Jamarl Thomas.
There’s a line in Shooting the Past, a 1999 film by the London filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff, in which the leading character, who runs a large historical photo archive, asks whether it is possible for a photograph to capture a lie coming out of the mouth of a liar. The character isn’t sure.
He hadn’t studied the neuropsychology of interrogation researched by William Marston, inventor of the polygraph, and Paul Ekman, the psychologist of facial expressions whose methods were dramatised in the US television series, Lie to Me. Those two claimed lies can be detected by mechanical or electronic records.
In politics and war, lying is a weapon and so it is heavily camouflaged. It can defeat the truth by techniques that prevent evidence and the courtroom standards for reasoning and judgement from controlling the narrative. The Bondi Beach attack on December 14, in Sydney, Australia, is an example. Listen to the hour-long podcast with Nima Alkhorshid to understand what has happened.
