Where can you find spectacularly honest barbs like ‘flunkies’ in the Bill Gates and Akshata Murthy era? And as the greatest journalists in history have not screamed at us or delivered anodyne deadpan reports with nasal Walter Cronkite accents (perhaps shedding an “Oh look he’s not completely wooden, mechanical or robotic” tear, or choking up, just a little, in such a manly fashion, upon the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy¹ – oh look, the guy’s got a hard exterior and cuts it with the best the American Century can serve up at him but “obviously” if not “absolutely” has a heart of gold) but delivered swingeing/ excoriating lines exquisitely laying out (for the ever-thoughtful, fascinated and above all other humanised relational transactional considerations engaged – if not charmed like a fan-boy or -girl – reader) the psychological and cultural apotropaic ideational sequence² Fence ..Security Barrier ..Wall. Or to be reminded of good old Harris Tottle’s advices on public-spirited explication and effective teaching or leading forward – no, not how to play a crowd/ win friends & influence people/ feed ‘lambs’ or kill fatted calves for good old Uncle Jesus (every time he sneezes we all come down with a lethal novel upper respiratory tract infection, such were the toimes, aaarrgh) finding out the existing means of persuasion.

Yes I keep going back to my Robert Fisk. A word of suggestion dear reader here: if you’ve not already, get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation. If like me you read chunks of it when it was first published, then you might want to get the book out again. To briefly jump from the micro-content to the macro “WTF-is-human-civilisation-supposed-to-be-about” processual, reflective intelligent grown-up demands placed on all thoughtful people by acts of genocide by fascist governments please get some Robert Fisk.. deceased 12/10/2020 St Vincents Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.

I am delighted to reproduce this 2007 piece for The Independent because it represents a blunt yet high-order professionally crafted acerbic fearless journalism that has obviously died in the arse all over the world this century and was in my opinion rarely if ever seen in Australia after World War II at all..

And if it was written as for example with some of Wilfred Burchett’s epochal work, it was never widely read anyway because the dead hand of sycophantic Amerophile Marshall Plan & Lend Lease authoritarianism pumped up by Christian fundamentalist frenzy and fear of ‘World Government.’ – whatever the hell that may have meant to Hugh Morgan, the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney and the Wool Board – in the style now raised to a Harvard programmed learning & dislearning art form by the vast electronics communications and accountancy firms and finance houses with their Manichaean economic AND social policy strangleholds on five continents got it siloed off, marginalised and censored.

The Independent 23rd June 2007..

Robert Fisk

“I supppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beiruit when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut-al-Amara was going to create ‘Palestine.’ I checked the date. No, it was not 1 April – but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands, is really contemplating being ‘our’ Middle East envoy.

“Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle East hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he had a role in the region – he whose own ridiculous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to no avail – is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world’s last colonial war, is simply overwhelming.

“Of, course, he’ll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will talk endlessly about ‘moderates;’ and we’ll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he’s absolutely and completely confident that he’s doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush’s forlorn hope of an Israeli victory over Hizballah) in bringing peace to the Middle East…

“Not once – ever – has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Blair actually believes – in what must be a record acty of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up thje fake evidence of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – that he can do good in the middle East. For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region – a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East – now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up ‘Palestine.’ In the hunt for quislings to do our bidding – ie. accept even less of Mandate Palestine than Arafat would stomach – I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

“And I have a suspicion – always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue – tha Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for ‘peace,’ thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq. But ‘Palestine?’ The Palestinians held elections – real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety – and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He’ll need to talk only to Abbas’s flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as ‘a government without imagination.’

“The Americans are talking – and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack – about an envoy who can work ‘with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system’ to develop institutions for a ‘well-governed state.’ Oh yes, I can see how that would appeal to Lord Blair. He likes well-governed states, lots of ‘terror laws,’ plenty of security – though I’m still a bit puzzled about what the ‘Palestinian system’ is meant to be. It was James Wolfensohn who was originally ‘our’ Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct gaza nor work with a ‘peace process’ that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlemnet and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel. Does Blair think he can do better? What honied words will we hear?

“I bet he doesn’t mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a ‘security barrier’ or a ‘fence’ (like the famous Berlin ‘fence’ which was actually called a ‘security barrier’ by those generous East German Vopo cops at the time). There will be appeals for restraint on all sides, endless calls for ‘moderation,’ none at all for justice. And IOsrael likes Lord Blair. Indeed, Blair’s slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land as he awaits a Palestinian with whom he can ‘negotiate,’ Mahmoud abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza. Which of ‘Palestine’s’ two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more ‘security,’ tougher laws, less democracy.

“Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker – who worked for George W.’s father until the israelis got tired of him – and before that we had a whole list of UN secretary generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not come soon. I recall another man with Blair’s pomposity, a certain Kurt Waldheim, who – no longer the UN’s boss – actually believed he could be an ‘envoy’ for peace in thye Middle East, despite his wartime career as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group ‘E.’ His visits – especially to the late King Hussein – came to nothing, of course. But Waldheim’s ability to draw a curtain over his wartime past does have one thing in common with Blair. For Waldheim steadfastly, pointedly, repeatedly, refused to acknowledge – ever – that he had done anything wrong. Now who does that remind you of?”

John Blundell.. Philosophy of Science, Economy, Human History South Australia 🇦🇺 🦘

Gaza – Translation and Meaning in All English Arabic Terms Dictionary ; Gaza City · مدينة غزة ; Gaza Strip · قطاع غزة ; European Gaza Hospital · مستشفى غزة الأ…

¹ ..and for many decades on a generation of now old people acculturated by movie & television screen dementedly – or at least like socially, culturally and ecologically unhinged mathematics enthusiasts – chatter about where they were geo-located at a certain time on 22/11/1963, was it?

² YES, it’s my little pride & joy in neurolinguistics & quantum (interrelational 3-5 set series) maths trom way back in 1999 sequentia, everyon’e key now to not only explaining Self Other & world about them but of course also the only effective or even sensible schema and methodology for short-term recall dysfunction diagnosis, management and healing in fact since the days prior to TWENTIETH Century leucotomy (for Christ’s sake), lobotomy and Electro-convulsive Therapy, 15th Century European phrenology and the days of when-the-fuck-ever ancient Egyptians chiselling out neat carpenter’s squares^2A of human skull

^2A ever the grandiose study of mechanomporphic symmetrical operations, even recognising constructionism as a mere phase in human intellectual evolution, as we did in the Michel Foucault period 25 – 35 years ago, yet nary a moment’s reflection on Sir Isaac Newton’s perturbations, Sigmund Freud’s parapraxes or Adam Smith’s, and Milton Friedman’s, belated thoughts about rampant free-marketism and the ideology of neoliberalism 200 years after him – no doubt cribbed, he and @Harvard’s Michael Porter being @BBC Talks or @Google Technology Engineering & Design-style ‘look-at-me’ commercial-for-profit publicists of the late 19th Century English and East Coast USA neoclassical Fact & Value studies conducted along historical lines ilk