Tag: History
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World Food Programme –
It is widely respected but greatly undermined by Trump, America and that is the World Food Programme. The difficulty they have in feeding the poor, destitute and refugees is an argument of budgets. It is not an identity that the United Nations wants; it is a factor in the arsenal of the international community reaching…
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The voice that sung and lashed by the theocracy
There is an element of indifference to the argument of who or what is leading the Iranian state. The contest in identity and ideology is being fought out in the state and in the same sense – the identity of the state is being cemented by an argument, ideology, or theocracy that has not learnt…
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Sitting, waiting and then tomorrow.
Shamefully someone has asked me to write a piece on the standoff in northern Ireland. I really do not want to but I will. There really is very little to say other than Michelle O’Neill is in an impossible position within an argument that was stoked and is being stoked by two arguments about where…
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Can the US retool the World?
Sorry for being away from the laptop for so long… shit has happened and I am just getting back to work…. Enjoy… it is a start…
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A conflict within a confliction
It really is not a question of making a deal, it is exactly what was in the memorandum the two sides agreed – ‘an understanding.’ To understand the Shi’ism practiced in Iran – is to understand the Iranian state and how it is underpinned by factions, rivalries and arguments in how the Islamic regime identifies…
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Hagel or Marlowe….
John B Judis, writing in Persuasion went back to Hagel to explore Trumpian arguments by examining his scatterbrained approach to politics, economics and foreign affairs. Judis analysed the presidency through Hagel’s philosophical approach to history and underpinned his argument that Trump is an important figure by integrating Schilling’s “Stratergy of Conflict” into his argument, Judis…
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State capture
The commentator asked Jeremy Bowen – “What the war was about….?” I answered to myself – “I don’t know” – then laughed. There were no wry smiles, but there was a pause and then Bowen answered, “I think….” But what did I know, or what did I predict, like everybody apart from Ayatollah Khamenei, I predicted…
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reform The lower case argument.
I am not sure whether I should be writing this, but listening to Nigel Farage this afternoon made my blood boil. The more you say “the economy is broken” and the more you say that the British state needs reform is an ideology based on scant argument, few plans and disposing Britain to the variances…
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The revolution within a revolution….
In 2022 – it was five hundred – that was the number dead declared after the Mahsa Amini demonstrations. That number was significant, it was a number the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard elite could settle on as a statement of power – a number that was not high enough for the outside world to be…
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Xi Jinping and Chinese hegemony.
Xi Jinping is one tough nut to crack. The inscrutable leader who demonstrates no emotion and has no equity in any emotional outcome challenges anybody who has to face him. Behind the veneer are life lessons of being an outsider within the establishment, but he can also be characterised as being an insider. The poverty…