A businesslike piece by Ilya Somin about the scale of Communist crimes – and why we must not forget them. It’s the sheer scale of the cruelty which we normally fail to grasp. Cuba? Great health care! Unless you’re murdered by the state: Since coming to power in 1959, Castro’s […]
Here is a curious piece by LeftOutside trying to explain why "the overwhelming body of evidence in favour of Socialism" stops him being lured by libertarian ideas: When the tax revenue of South Koreans was directed towards the manufacture of Microwaves it was neither an area they specialised in nor […]
Here is the Comment I have posted on OutsideLeft’s site: I have lived for most of my life in countries grappling with different forms of socialism (communist Yugoslavia, apartheid S Africa) or trying to escape from it (post-communist Russia, post-war Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia, post-communist Poland). So I feel qualified to […]
A great diplomatic flurrying around the latest vote by the UN Human Rights Council in effect condemning Israel. The resolution passed seems to be this one. The resolution welcomed the earlier Goldstone report which condemned human rights abuses by Israel and Hamas alike. But it also contained a long list of condemnations […]
The latest developments on the Torture issue – the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed – are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with […]
Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what […]
Wrinkled Weasel asks: My line of late has tended towards the very position you are critical of – the concerns of Russians about "encirclement" Can you explain to me why the USA, which has far more form when it comes to "encirclement" than Russia has had in the last 50 […]
Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision. Two take a different view, arguing that Putin’s Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not […]
President Obama has cancelled a plan to build US anti-missile defence radar facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. This move has been hailed by Russia’s President Medvedev as a "wise decision". Which, of course, prompts the ignoble thought that if the Russians like it so much, something must be […]
A consignment of weapons clandestinely sent from North Korea to Iran is intercepted by the UAE. Pretty big news for the UN Security Council and the different sanctions regimes against North Korea and Iran alike, huh? Of course not, when the USA is chairing the UNSC: At Ambassador Rice’s news briefing, […]
