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Angus Barr
@AngusBarr
Theatre-maker, comic songwriter, environmental ruminator. Artistic Director @PublikTransport
Bristol, England
Joined June 2011
950 Following
116 Followers
574 Posts
As the video below demonstrates, Israelis are often astonishingly ignorant about the history of the Palestinians communities around them. They haven't the slightest conception that, as their DNA proves, the Palestinians have deep roots in the soil going back to at least the Bronze Age and are in many cases their cousins. Instead they imagine them- quite unhistorically- as random Arab immigrants from 6thC on, who are indistinguishable from other Arabic-speakers elsewhere and who should therefore be ethnically cleansed to other Arabic-speaking areas, without compunction.
The half-truths and massive omissions of Zionist history writing from Herzl onwards has a lot to answer for: history re-written to airbrush an entire people out of history and prepare the way for the ethnic extinction of the entire indigenous Palestinians people.
The media can make us believe anything they want – even that Charles loved Diana:
The current narrative of “beloved king shocked by claim he said something nasty 30 years ago” is a perfect example of how, given a bit of time, the media can reinvent the very reality the media itself once created, readily flipping on its head a now inconvenient, earlier narrative.
Anyone who lived through the Princess Diana years should be able to recall that, according to the media of that time, Charles was the undoubted villain – a cold-hearted man who cheated from the start of his marriage on a young, beautiful, doting wife he never loved.
Charles wanted his old flame Camilla as his bride and future queen – and, with Diana’s untimely death in 1997 at the hands of the press pack as her car was chased through a Paris underpass late at night, he soon got his way.
Earl Spencer’s new claim in a book published this week that Charles told him, shortly after Diana’s death, that she would “soon be forgotten” fits all too snugly with that earlier narrative.
But not with the new narrative.
Now, with Charles a “kindly old king and family man battling to recover from cancer”, the sort of behaviour that made perfect sense in the earlier narrative is a nuisance. Which is why Earl Spencer is receiving a lot more pushback than he would have expected had he made such a claim in the late 1990s.
Three decades ago, Charles was portrayed as an unpopular Prince of Wales, a man lacking the common touch of Diana, and a crank obsessed with irrelevant things like the environment and architecture. The Queen, so the story of that time went, was so unsure of his ability to rule effectively that she dared not abdicate.
Fast forward to the present day, with Queen Elizabeth II dead and Charles III head of state.
The King is now a wise elder statesman bearing lightly the heavy burden of high office, managing Britain’s tricky relations with a deranged Trump administration better than any politician, and doing it all through serious illness. Ever the good father, he is fulfilling his duties as king to provide his son, William, with the chance to raise and enjoy his young family before he himself is crowned.
We’re in permanent telenovela land. Who knows which bits of this, if any, are true. But the plot twists serve a purpose, like soap opera, to keep us entertained and distracted from the real problems we desperately need to be focusing on.
And most importantly, whichever way the plot switches, the media cash in on the drama of it all.
But there is a deeper point. The media, through sustained plot engineering, can have us believe anything – that black is white, and up is down. They can, through sheer force of a new narrative consensus, make us believe the very opposite of what we were encouraged to believe a few moments earlier.
That is why billionaires buy up newspapers. Because they can, through their ownership of everything, and most especially the media, shape our minds into believing it is a good thing that billionaires own everything.
They make us believe that any change to that order would be catastrophic.
They make us believe that our societies are in decline, not because the billionaires have siphoned off all the wealth to their off-shore accounts but because small boats are “invading” our shores.
For decades, they had us believing the planet was doing just fine despite what all the scientists said. It was simply down to each individual to be more responsible: to cycle more, to recycle more, and to switch to long-lasting lightbulbs. Now that climate chaos is upon us, they tell us we will just have to adapt to hotter summers and colder, stormier winters.
The only consistent element is that the billionaires never address their own role in engineering this ecological disaster. Their choice to prioritise rocketing profits over the health of the planet is never scrutinised by the media they own.
Last year the writer Omar El Akkad published the book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the West’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One can already see how prophetic the book’s title is.
A British government led by Sir Keir Starmer that deeply colluded in the mass slaughter in Gaza is now recasting itself as an opponent, under the new leadership of Andy Burnham.
Similarly, the billionaire-owned media is slowly taking a less enthusiastic stance on Israel, doubtless hoping that Israeli voters evict prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the forthcoming general election so that the media can have a freer hand to rewrite their script. Then they will gradually accept as a given that what Netanyahu did – though not Israel – was a genocide. And of course, they will have always been against it.
Any lie can be repackaged as a self-evident truth once you have absolute narrative control. The naked emperor can be magically clothed, if the media so decides.
Amid this pervasive unreliability, there is one North Star by which to navigate. Anything that benefits the billionaires cannot be trusted.
As long as they are in charge, we will continue squabbling among ourselves, victims of their self-serving story-telling.
He was obviously murdered.
WHO SILENCED DR DAVID KELLY
Most people scrolling past this have never heard the name Dr David Kelly. They should.
He was one of the world's leading weapons inspectors, a quiet Ministry of Defence scientist who spent years checking Iraq's chemical and biological arsenal for the United Nations. Nobody understood that file better than he did.
In 2003 Tony Blair's (@InstituteGC) government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That one line helped justify sending Britain to war, a war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Kelly knew the intelligence behind that claim had been stretched. He said so privately, off the record, to BBC (@BBCNews) journalist Andrew Gilligan (@mragilligan). Nothing more than a conversation.
Somebody in government made sure his name reached the press anyway. Within days a respected scientist with decades of service was dragged in front of 2 parliamentary committees and questioned like a suspect on live television. His wife later said he came home a broken man.
On 17 July 2003 he left his house in Oxfordshire for a walk. He was 59. He never came home. His body was found the next morning in nearby woodland, a knife beside him and a shallow cut to his wrist.
Now here is where the story stops making sense.
Instead of letting the standard coroner's inquest run its course, Tony Blair's government suspended it before it properly began and replaced it with a private inquiry led by a judge the government appointed, Lord Hutton.
It was never resumed.
To this day Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to die in unexplained circumstances without a full coroner's inquest ever taking place.
Hutton concluded suicide within months. Officially, that was that.
Unofficially, a group of senior doctors reviewed the medical evidence and said the conclusion was unsafe. In letters to The Times (@thetimes) and The Guardian (@guardian) they explained that the artery involved is so small that cutting it rarely causes fatal blood loss in a healthy person, that the painkiller level found in his body was well under a lethal dose, and that the amount of blood at the scene was too small to account for the death recorded.
In 2011 those doctors formally asked the government to finally allow a proper inquest. Attorney General Dominic Grieve (@dominicgrieve_) reviewed it and refused. Hutton's inquiry was declared sufficient. The matter was closed, again, by the people who opened it.
Think about what actually happened here. A civil servant quietly raised concerns about the most consequential political deception in modern British history. He was exposed, humiliated and found dead days later, and the same government that needed answers made sure a proper, independent investigation never happened.
Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East peace envoy. He was later knighted.
Dr David Kelly got a rushed private inquiry, a sealed post mortem report kept from public view for years, and a grave that campaigners are still fighting over more than 2 decades on.
Nobody has ever been held accountable. Not for the dossier, not for the leak, not for what happened next.
This story deserves to be told every single year, not forgotten. If you think that too, share it.
Sources @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews
WHO SILENCED DR DAVID KELLY
Most people scrolling past this have never heard the name Dr David Kelly. They should.
He was one of the world's leading weapons inspectors, a quiet Ministry of Defence scientist who spent years checking Iraq's chemical and biological arsenal for the United Nations. Nobody understood that file better than he did.
In 2003 Tony Blair's (@InstituteGC) government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That one line helped justify sending Britain to war, a war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Kelly knew the intelligence behind that claim had been stretched. He said so privately, off the record, to BBC (@BBCNews) journalist Andrew Gilligan (@mragilligan). Nothing more than a conversation.
Somebody in government made sure his name reached the press anyway. Within days a respected scientist with decades of service was dragged in front of 2 parliamentary committees and questioned like a suspect on live television. His wife later said he came home a broken man.
On 17 July 2003 he left his house in Oxfordshire for a walk. He was 59. He never came home. His body was found the next morning in nearby woodland, a knife beside him and a shallow cut to his wrist.
Now here is where the story stops making sense.
Instead of letting the standard coroner's inquest run its course, Tony Blair's government suspended it before it properly began and replaced it with a private inquiry led by a judge the government appointed, Lord Hutton.
It was never resumed.
To this day Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to die in unexplained circumstances without a full coroner's inquest ever taking place.
Hutton concluded suicide within months. Officially, that was that.
Unofficially, a group of senior doctors reviewed the medical evidence and said the conclusion was unsafe. In letters to The Times (@thetimes) and The Guardian (@guardian) they explained that the artery involved is so small that cutting it rarely causes fatal blood loss in a healthy person, that the painkiller level found in his body was well under a lethal dose, and that the amount of blood at the scene was too small to account for the death recorded.
In 2011 those doctors formally asked the government to finally allow a proper inquest. Attorney General Dominic Grieve (@dominicgrieve_) reviewed it and refused. Hutton's inquiry was declared sufficient. The matter was closed, again, by the people who opened it.
Think about what actually happened here. A civil servant quietly raised concerns about the most consequential political deception in modern British history. He was exposed, humiliated and found dead days later, and the same government that needed answers made sure a proper, independent investigation never happened.
Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East peace envoy. He was later knighted.
Dr David Kelly got a rushed private inquiry, a sealed post mortem report kept from public view for years, and a grave that campaigners are still fighting over more than 2 decades on.
Nobody has ever been held accountable. Not for the dossier, not for the leak, not for what happened next.
This story deserves to be told every single year, not forgotten. If you think that too, share it.
Sources @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews
This is a rare photo of Donald Trump from 1934, helping Albert Einstein finish the theory of relativity. According to Trump, Einstein had been stuck for weeks.
“Very smart guy. Terrible with numbers. I looked at the board and said, Albert, put a little 2 up there. He loved it."
The quote of the century.
Kasparov: Any compromise with absolute evil is a victory for evil. For years the West thought business would restrain Putin from aggression.
Putin understood the opposite: business would restrain the West from responding. 4/
Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo 🇨🇩 who was executêd in a firing squad and his body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, by Belgium/USA allies because he tried to protect his country’s minerals.
"It's pathetic ! European leaders should stand tall and united against Trump. I should've bought knee pads for world leaders ! They've been played"
👏@GavinNewsom California Governor, Trump's most vociferous opponent at home, telling others how to do it, in no uncertain terms👇
I study authoritarianism for a living, so I do not say this lightly: America isn't facing an authoritarian future. America is living an authoritarian present.
(A long 🧵)
/1
Many people idealize Ukrainians. Some imagine us as berserkers charging toward Valhalla; others think we love freedom so fiercely that we are ready to die for it.
But the truth is simpler — and more human.
We want to survive, both as individuals and as a nation. We want our children not to face another war in 10–20 years. And we understand that fighting gives us a chance to live, while surrender means death.
Not just the death of a nation. Your own death as well. Maybe not on the battlefield, not from a drone or a rocket, but quietly. They will come to your home at night, take you away, and you will vanish. No headlines. No outrage. Everything on the surface will look peaceful — just fewer people around.
It happened to my great-grandfather and his three brothers. They were taken in the night and disappeared. No information, no grave, nothing. Only decades later did I find in an online archive that they were executed in 1938 in Zhytomyr. My mother never even knew when or how her grandfather died.
If Russia occupies more land, this can happen again — to anyone. If it happens to me, you won’t know either. Trump will claim he “made peace” and that no one is dying on the battlefield. But the killing will continue in the occupied territories, hidden from view. And it will happen everywhere Russia is allowed to advance. What do you think will happen to the 400,000 people living in the region Putin wants as part of the “peace deal” that Witkoff is pushing?
And we remember 1933. The Soviet regime confiscated food from Ukrainians, and millions starved. My great-grandmother survived the Holodomor at age 13. Sixty years later she still panicked when the potato harvest was slightly worse than usual. Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist, reported the truth — but the US bought cheap grain because it was a “good deal,” and other journalists mocked him. Think about this: up to 10 million people died in a man-made famine, and the world shrugged. It was genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, yet few know about it.
If Ukrainians in occupied territories start disappearing again, will anyone care?
Even I — with all my posts — could end up on their kill lists.
The Moscow regime is already repeating the same atrocities. Look at the mass graves in the cities liberated in 2022. Listen to the witnesses.
So understand this: for Ukrainians, “peace” can be far scarier than war if it simply means giving Russia what it wants. That is why we keep fighting.
And one more thing — idealizing Ukrainians creates the illusion that every Ukrainian must be perfect. But we are real people, not movie characters. We have traitors who work for Moscow. We have thieves who steal even during war. We have those who flee because not everyone is ready to risk their life. War exposes the true nature of people: some become heroes, others lose any honor they had.
But the fact remains: Ukraine has been resisting for four years against an army feared by most “civilized” countries. That alone speaks for itself.
Author: Volodymyr Kukharenko
Garry Kasparov is 100% correct. Thank you for always telling it like it is, @Kasparov63. Listen before it's too late.
The following facts must be emphasized when assessing any proposed peace agreement:
-Vladimir Putin has never once kept a single promise that he has made regarding Ukraine. Not once. Ever. And he’s not about to start now. Any agreement that requires any element of trust placed in Vladimir Putin’s “promise” is not worth the paper it is written on.
-There are only two enforceable security guarantees: 1) NATO Article 5, or 2) a treaty that is passed by the U.S. Congress. Anything outside of this is just a Budapest Memorandum 2.0 — a completely unenforceable and empty promise that led to the invasion of Ukraine, and will lead to the future dismantling of Ukraine.
-Any “forced reduction” of the Ukrainian military means future increased pressure, risk, and danger to the European, NATO, and U.S. military.
-Any official recognition of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory as “Russian territory,” and any official prohibition of Ukraine from being free to decide what alliances to join, would, for the first time in American history, create a brand new precedent of officially rewarding a dictator for invading a sovereign nation, and officially punishing a victim nation that was wrongfully invaded. What a terrible precedent to set. What a terrible message to send.
AI is going to wipe out at least 25 million jobs in the next 5 to 10 years. Probably much more. It will destroy every creative field. It will make it impossible to discern reality from fiction. It will absolutely obliterate what’s left of the education system. Kids will go through 12 years of grade school and learn absolutely nothing. AI will do it all for them. We have already seen the last truly literate generation.
All of this is coming, and fast. There is still time to prevent some of the worst outcomes, or at least put them off. But our leaders aren’t doing a single thing about any of this. None of them are taking it seriously. We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away. It drives me nuts. Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us? Is that the plan?
Today, I was able to visit my friend, who had been imprisoned in the Israeli occupation’s jails.
He told me about the suffering he endured there, and about the daily torture and humiliation he was subjected to. He said that one night, at a late hour — specifically at three in the morning — the soldiers stormed into the cells, shouting in our faces, beating us while we were asleep, and repeating: “You are terrorists, you deserve to die... you are terrorists, you deserve to die,” over and over again.
Then they ordered us to go out into the prison yard and stripped us completely of our clothes, until we stood naked before one another. After that, they unleashed the dogs on us, biting and tearing at our bodies while our hands were tied, leaving us powerless to defend ourselves.
Three prisoners died there, succumbing to the deep wounds caused by the dogs. No one cared for them; they were left lifeless on the ground. We were forced to remain in the yard all night, naked in the freezing cold, the wind striking our bodies until everyone lost consciousness.
He told me, “When I woke up from the coma, I found myself in a solitary cell no larger than one meter by one meter — completely dark, with no window, no air, and no light.”
Then he added, his voice trembling, “That day was the worst day of my life. I still suffer to this day from fractured bones and from the wounds the dogs caused me.”
Every word he spoke trembled as it left his lips, choked by fear, his eyes overflowing with tears, as if he were still living the same nightmare to this very moment.
What the Palestinian prisoners are subjected to in the occupation’s prisons has gone beyond the limits of humanity and surpassed every meaning of mercy — it has gone beyond genocide itself.💔
omg
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans not allowed to attend Aston Villa UEFA Europa match due to safety concerns.
This is what happened last time the genocidal racist violent hooligans visited Europe @pularjs
I retired from the U.S. Army after almost two decades in uniform, and for the last 3½ years I’ve been on Ukraine’s front as a volunteer combat advisor—training over 5,000 soldiers across 22 brigades.
What we face here is a new reality. FPV strike drones and recon birds hunt positions all day. If you move, you’re seen, and within minutes artillery or a kamikaze UAS is on top of you. Shahed swarms crash into cities. Lancets hunt armor. FPVs chase individual soldiers down in trenches. Nothing is safe—armor, command posts, infrastructure, even civilians are targets.
Survival comes down to concealment, constant movement, electronic discipline, and small-unit decision making. There is no time to wait for higher command—if a squad leader hesitates, his men die. Ukraine has had to innovate to survive: building drones in garages, creating cheap interceptors, rewriting tactics every month to keep pace with the battlefield.
Meanwhile, the West still pours billions into Cold War doctrine—large formations, static positions, and the assumption of air superiority. Out here, none of that exists. If NATO armies walked onto this battlefield tomorrow, using their current doctrine, they would not last 48 hours.
This war is the warning. Drone warfare is not the future—it’s the present. Every Western military should be flooding resources into attack drones, counter-UAS, electronic warfare, camouflage, and training for dispersed, drone-saturated combat. But they’re not. And the price of that delay will be paid later in blood.
I’m not writing theory. I’m telling you what I live through every single day. Ukraine is holding the line, buying the world time. Either the West learns from this fight, or they walk blind into their own disaster.
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
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