Strolling through the rural Cambridge countryside as spring bursts forth, past rows of daffodils, pink and white blossoms and cheerfully grazing ponies; greeted at the door by the lovely Morris, a sleek black panther and my current charge, my mood is lifted. My skin feels warm and Morris rubs around my legs; I sit down in a patch of sunshine and he jumps into my lap. I’ve been trying to clear my head; to enjoy this beautiful weather, the sudden explosion of life in the natural world, and my presence here. I am fortunate. There are many things I’d like to write about; frivolous, fun things. Perhaps I’d even crack a joke or two. But the elephant in the room has been staring straight at me and this time, I can’t look away.
A couple of days ago a post from George Galloway popped up on my social media feed. A name from the past, I hadn’t quite realised he was still around, so to speak. I read the post. It was well-written in George’s inimitable style, peppered with sarcasm that could pass for humour if the subject wasn’t so serious. Every word resonated. I began to dig. I’d never taken much notice of him before, and I had to Google why he was ‘disgraced’, as that’s about all I remember. This, I now realise, is the problem. George was never the problem. To the contrary, he needed to be silenced. Before people like me – ordinary people, who have spent most of their lives sleepwalking while believing they are aware, wake up to the reality of the systems we are living under. Before we begin to question the narratives we are sold.
When I was little, we had print of Winston Churchill in an ornate gold frame, hanging at the head of the dining table where my dad could see it from his favourite chair. I grew up believing him a hero. I’m sure he had a few heroic qualities; he, and my parents, lived and fought in a different era. An era when The Establishment wasn’t questioned. Leaders, and the national newspapers, were trusted. There were rules, there were orders, and one followed them. Authority was respected, and I respected theirs; I knew they had my best interests at heart. If only their those they looked up to had wished the same for their generation, and those which followed.
I lived in a Conservative household. This wasn’t up for discussion; it simply was. I carried the rhetoric, veiled as values, into my teenage years, and unashamedly behind the bar in a Yorkshire pub. Fortunately, the chat was mostly about beer. I received a card from Margaret Thatcher on my 18th birthday, but I intended to vote for her in any case.
Most people remember clearly where they were when important or startling events took place: the shooting of JFK; the death of Princess Diana; the Lockerbie plane crash; 9/11. I was in my kitchen in Fuchsia Cottage, on Tanera Mhor, when my personal penny dropped. I’d been in Scotland for several years; I was becoming naturalised. I heard other voices, accepted differences of opinion. I’d travelled; I was open hearted. Thatcher wasn’t a popular figure in the Highlands. Call it cognitive dissonance, but I stood by my choices – she was a woman, after all – until that day.
I nearly dropped the mug I was holding as I turned up the radio in disbelief. I remember gripping the worktop, my world swimming. This woman was quite mad! Had she always been? Why hadn’t I seen it?
I spent the next few years in a political no man’s land. I raised two kittens and some rescued chickens. I opened my gallery. I worked with my sister-in-law, one of the kindest, funniest and least judgemental people I’ve ever known. Her political opinions couldn’t have been more different from mine. I loved her. I listened. I was no longer invested in inherited beliefs and, before long, I was voting for Tony Blair; it felt like a compromise.
It all seemed very promising. Even in Scotland, there was a general feeling of positivity…until the invasion of Iraq. I managed to convince myself it was warranted. After all, I listened to the BBC; how should I have known, back then, that it was nothing more than an Orwellian propaganda machine, relaying directly from Empire? When did I first smell that festering rat?
Was it the images of Saddam Hussein, who we had been instructed to view as the enemy, (not realising, of course, he’d been funded – and armed – by the West), on his knees, hands tied behind his back in readiness for a brutal assassination which left me squirming? Was it the death, portrayed as ‘suicide’, of Dr. David Kelly, UN weapons inspector, who publicly confirmed that Iraq did NOT possess weapons of mass destruction? Or was it when Robin Cook, who had resigned from the cabinet over the Iraq scandal, holidayed in Achiltibuie and bought paintings from my gallery, was surrounded by everyone wanting to shake his hand? As far as I could see, he was a genuinely nice bloke, and one with principles. I was obviously missing something.
To my shame, I did not completely give up on the BBC or mainstream newspapers until Brexit, although many did so after the Scottish independence referendum, and let’s not even mention the blatant smear campaign against Nicola Sturgeon following her impeccable performance during Covid. After, of course, they’d succeeded in removing Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps the most moral politician of our time, leading us, in a wiggly line, to where we are today.
The mask has well and truly fallen.
The reportage of the Palestine genocide, despicable aggressions in Lebanon and Syria, and the illegal, irrational, unprovoked attack on Iran is, at best, reprehensible.
Friends sometimes say to me, ‘I’m just not political.’
You may as well say, ‘I don’t care about life, my children’s lives, or the planet we depend upon. I simply have no interest in anything around me.’
Everyone should vote. Ordinary people died for that right. And your vote should be a considered one, not dependent solely on who you imagine will bring down the price of your Tesco shopping. Monthly bills are irrelevant in a nuclear winter.
Silence is complicity. Ignorance is agreement. The billionaire class want to keep you powerless, but there is no excuse not to be informed.
George Galloway’s post began:
‘The scale of the Trump War disaster is now hoving into view and it is an ugly sight. It is plain he is now losing his mind…’
He then described the situation the only way one could, on examination of the facts. Unless, of course, one had been listening to the BBC or Fox News, or reading The Telegraph. These sources, along with the majority – no, all – of the mainstream UK and US media outlets should be regarded as humourless satire. The educationally challenged could be forgiven for assuming that what they are fed on a daily basis is a broad approximation of the truth, but there really is no excuse for swallowing this when our eyes, once open, can see obvious contradictions in every paragraph.
What is the answer, then? Where does one go for independent, factual journalism, uncontrolled by State and ‘elites’ (now commonly referred to as the Epstein Class)? Well, there is a bounty, once you start to look. And the more you look, the more appears. While some may not initially appeal to you at all, you’ll soon begin to see a pattern, and understand the brainwashing and gaslighting that has been attempted on you for your entire life.
If you care – about yourself, about other people, about this fragile planet we are currently inhabiting – you will wake up and seek the truth. Ordinary people all around the world are doing so, and the trickle is becoming a flood. I’ve made it easy for you. There’s a lifetime’s worth of reading and listening in the lists below. Try them all, or pick and choose; just so long as you understand the lengths the state-funded media will go to keep real investigative journalism and analytical writing out of your line of vision.
Independent news, reportage, discussion and investigative journalism sites:
Novara Media (UK) https://novaramedia.com
Double Down News (UK) www.doubledown.news
Declassified UK (UK) www.declassifieduk.org
Open Democracy (UK) www.opendemocracy.net/en
New Left Review/Sidecar (UK) www.newleftreview.org/sidecar
Middle East Eye (with David Hearst, UK) www.middleeasteye.net
Neutrality Studies (Japan) www.neutralitystudies.com
Breakthrough News (US) https://share.google/FZfXpb9KtmkjK8swG
Drop Site News (US) www.dropsitenews.com
Al Jazeera English (Qatar) www.aljazeera.com
TRT World (Turkiye) www.trtworld.com
Interviewers and YouTube broadcasts with various intelligent guests:
Dialogue Works (with Nima Alkhorshid, Brazil) https://share.google/3T7MCpudjirMTVERS
The Grayzone (with Max Blumenthal, US) www.thegrayzone.com
Zeteo (with Medhi Hassan, UK) https://zeteo.com
The Majority Report (with Sam Seder, US) https://www.youtube.com/@TheMajorityReport
The Empire Files (with Abby Martin, US) https://www.youtube.com/@EmpireFiles
Democracy Now! (with Amy Goodman, US) https://democracynow.org
India & Global Left (look out for Vijay Prashad) https://www.youtube.com/c/indiagloballeft
The Electronic Intifada (with Ali Abuminah, UK) https://electronicintifada.net
Reason2Resist (with Dimitri Lascaris, Greece) https://www.youtube.com/@reason2resist
The Chris Hedges Report (US) www.chrishedges.substack.com
The Palestinian Pulse (Ahmed Alabadla, UK) www.thepalestinepulse.com
Katie Halper show (US) https://www.youtube.com/@TheKatieHalperShow
Danny Haiphong (US) https://www.youtube.com/@DannyHaiphongYT
Dawn News English https://www.youtube.com/@dawnnewsenglish
Non-UK historians/writers/academics/intellectuals:
Ilan Pappe (Israel) (Many sources, many books. Google him, he’s a legend.)
Gideon Levy (Israel) (As above)
Professor Marandi (Iran) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Marandi
Political, military and economic analysts, activists and spokespersons:
Daniel Levy (UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Levy_(political_analyst)
Norman Finkelstein (US) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein
Yanis Yaroufakis (Greece) https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu
John Mearsheimer; Jeffrey Sachs; Col. Lawrence Wilkinson; Richard Wolff (All US. Regular interviews on above YouTube broadcasts)
Independent UK writers and journalists:
Richard Medhurst https://www.youtube.com/@RichardMedhurst
Jonathan Cooke https://www.jonathan-cook.net
Owen Jones https://www.youtube.com/@OwenJonesTalks
Peter Oborne (A reformed Tory Brexiter and Telegraph writer, now author of many damning political books and writer for Open Democracy)
Craig Murray https://www.craigmurray.org.uk
Last, but far from least: the simply beautiful writing of ‘Sodium Haze’ (Green Murphy) and the raw, punchy Caitlin Johnstone on Substack (below), and the misrepresented, misunderstood, but brilliant George Galloway. www.georgegalloway.com
Now please, for the sake of humanity, when you see the elephant, look him in the eye and hold his gaze.
***
Future alien visitors to Earth, sifting through the charred ruins of our ‘civilisation’, will surely note the human discovery of fossil fuels as a case study of how stunted cognitive development preceded a material disaster, what happens when philosophical and psychological growth is too slow to provide rational frameworks for the integration of emergent technologies.
Many historians already point to the development of the earliest agrarian systems as the moment when human material development diverged from its societal capacity for oversight, assessment, integration and restraint. Isolated groups of hunter gatherers did not unduly tax the delicate balances of the biosphere, but everything that has followed, right up to the current wars between rapacious military industrial complexes has been essentially cancerous to itself and all other life on the planet.
As Richard Heinberg noted, humans are as dumb as yeast.
Yeast grows exponentially until it consumes all of its sugar and then dies, starved and simultaneously poisoned by its own waste product (alcohol).
Competing colonies of human soldier ants are swarming all over the syrup of oil / gas, right now and resource depletions, toxic excretions and / or a technological Armageddon will surely follow. None of the colonies will survive a victory of one nor the defeat of another.
The only gift of Trump and his deranged entourage is that the brochures for tomorrow’s utopias have had their credibility revoked, leaving today’s Orwellian dystopia unmasked.
Is there anything to be done about the collective toxicity of the uppity apes and their gaudy toys? I suspect not, but hope can only come from a philosophical and moral renaissance. Who ‘wins’ the current bloodbaths and culture wars are important in the short term, but will not delay climate vandalism, overpopulation, resource depletion and global ecocide in the slightest.
In the giddy excitement over our culture and its technological marvels / terrors, the intellectual machinery of what passes for civilisation lies moribund and neglected. Thinking is out and reacting is in, truth is out and propaganda is in, restraint is eschewed and unlimited licence worshipped.
As a proud moralist, I have been warning of the current outcomes for decades but I take no pleasure from being right. My son will be denied his future because fossil fuels afford gratification without the work of thinking and a handy loan facility to offload the consequences of our moral bankruptcy on to the bar tab of posterity.
Plato foresaw the current Trumpian degeneration thousands of years ago, describing with unerring prescience the current descent from unrestrained liberal democracy into tyranny.
Why haven’t we made any progress since Plato? Well that there is the whole problem in a nutshell, one that could be addressed through education and dialectic if enough people were minded to stop guzzling the kool aid – but most are too busy aspiring to a middle class materialist utopia that left the building thirty years ago at least.
Such hope as there is may come from an unlikely source, the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz will soon create cascading system failures in the hyper-stretched and mega-leveraged techno hamster wheels of modernity, everything from fertiliser to finance will be disrupted. This dress rehearsal of the play “The Sad Fate Of Yeast” will perhaps deliver a much needed hoof up the posterior of mankind and we might just wake up and re-examine all those peak-oil scenarios from 1998.
Inter alia Trump’s clown car geopolitics aboard the good ship lolita-pop are about to finally meet the harsh grown up realities of action and consequence – with consequences for all this time, not just those living in nominated sacrifice zones.
The Western imperium has managed to traumatise, impoverish, murder and maim just about everyone else, perhaps some self-inflicted pain will prove salutary and growth inspiring for its own citizens.
https://sodiumhaze.substack.com
***
Western officials: Israel is defending itself.
Israeli officials: We’re doing genocide
Western officials: They’re following the laws of war
Israeli officials: We’re gonna do way more genocide
Western officials: It’s a measured response to 10/7
Israeli officials: Yep, kill ‘em all
‘This is what it looks like when you give Zionists everything they want.
This is Zionism put into practice.
The wars.
The massacres.
The bombed-out schools and hospitals.
The millions of displaced individuals.
The invasion of Lebanon
The explosions carpeting Tehran.
The hollowed-out moonscape of Gaza.
The horrific pogroms in the West Bank.
The child amputees.
The smell of rotting corpses.
The assassinated doctors and journalists.
The blackened sky and the poisoned water.
The nonstop deluge of brain-melting propaganda.
The aggressive promotion of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
The erosion of free speech rights throughout the western world.
The corrupt warmongering politicians.
The legions of online hasbara trolls.
The soaring fuel prices.
Money which could pay for social services buying bombs for Israel instead.
All the death, destruction, instability and suffering that’s being visited upon countless civilians throughout west Asia.
This is Zionism.’