Great Quotes
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol. - Alexandre Dumas
Seymour Hersh: Concealing genocide, praising war-crimes
Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh  has  curious view of the Israeli invasion and bombing of Gaza.1 According Hersh: ‘The Israelis had mapped the system and thus were able to assassinate many Hamas brigade commanders and their families, in their beds ….’ It seems indisputable that their families were not combattants but were nevertheless deliberately targetted  without any need from an operational point of view. This was merely an act of terror. ‘Israeli intelligence, which has mapped the tunnel system, understood early on…

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Andrew Roberts: Might makes Right.

Roberts1 suggests in a recent article that one should consider the post war large -scale population transfers. I presume that  he does not consider the population transfers of Jews to Israel or to concentration camps as an acceptable model. He asks the Palestinians to accept their displacement as ‘an irreversible historical fact’ .  This is an astonishing statement for a historian.  The juxtaposition of ‘irreversible’ and ‘fact’ reveals the deep deceit. Whether the change is ‘irreversible’ is an opinion not…

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Afton Titus and the shaming of African Tax Professionals

Afton Titus  has written an article on Chinese investments in Africa  implying more costs than benefits.1 What is more important is how she puts her article together. She violates almost all the rules either of academia or of international tax. She is aware of the many arguments that China is involved in debt trap diplomacy but she is also aware that most of those arguments have been discredited. She has arrived with a new argument. What is this new…

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US Neo-Cons: the Jim Jones Moment?
Rev Jim Jones

Jim Jones led a religious movement that ended in mass suicide. Initial reports suggested that  Jim Jones led a solely Black congregation with the silent implication that these Black people were just dumb idiots who would commit suicide if a white leader told them to. Though Jim Jones was anti-racist, his congregation was not exclusively or majority Black. Jim Jones had fervent dreams of bringing about a better world and was driven by these dreams. Self-awareness was not one…

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Mercouris & Christoforou – The Duran: Eurocentric recidivists

We are in this story following a tradition from Canon Doyle. What is missing might be the important and strong clue as in ‘the dog that did not bark’. Let us consider the current analysis of The Duran (Alex Mercouris and Alex Christoforou). They have accepted that the Ukraine war is part of a conflict between US on one side and China and Russia on the other. They also accept that China and Russia have an unbounded relationship. However,…

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Macron: waiting for the other shoe to drop

There is a strange situation in the world. America is riding tall even though it is only one event from a catastrophic fall. Consider the geo-political environment. If Germany had broken loose from the Western alliance and decided to join hands with Russia then US dominance would collapse overnight. Russia and Germany would be a great power actually greater in a short time than the US. Russia and Germany would be beyond US military intimidation. This would be Mackinder’s…

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Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni: exhibiting the breakdown in African culture

Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes: ‘Wole Soyinka’s widely cited injunction against Négritude, ‘a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces’ (Ischinger 1974, 23), suffers miserably from ahistoricity. If the tiger’s essence or being as a tiger was questioned and renamed derogatively as an ant or something similar, it would definitely be forced to proclaim its tigritude (its essence or being) as part of its resistance and defensive self-constitution.’ 1 Soyinka’s famous phrase is widely misunderstood. I am not fussed about the…

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Moscow Times Revelation: the US thinks Russia is a banana republic

Sometimes the worst insult is the one you don’t know you are giving. Moscow Times gives the final insult to Russia. Russia is a major global power and a democracy. Russia has been on the receiving end of US’s complete disdain and disrespect. It has also  been on the receiving end of complete lack of sincerity in negotiations, with the US believing it has no obligation to commit to previous agreements. It is strange and important that no one…

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David Olusoga – how not to talk about African literature
David Olusoga

David Olusoga is a well-known British presenter cum historian. But he is a problem. There needs to be some serious analysis.  The immediate issue is his show ‘Africa Turns the Page’. As a history of African literature this is a disaster. He has neither a historical understanding nor literary understanding. When he talks about the history of a period there is no sense of time and place in his narrative.  His basic temporality is all upside down making Soyinka…

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The Duran: Soft racism of Alex Mercouris
Alex Mercouris - journalists

Alex Mercouris has revealed himself as a soft racist in his video on ‘A New Europe ’  1. I write this with some sorrow. I do not consider it on the basis of his saying something negative about immigrants (frankly who cares?) but on the basis of his deliberate distortion of the facts, and his inflammatory insinuations. Lets start with the most simple statement. His statement that migration is causing increasing cultural stresses  in Britain  is an amazing statement….

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