Open Letter to Tristram Hunt
- December 06, 2015
- by
- Matt
Dear Tristram Hunt MP,
You have probably never heard of me, and there is no reason why you should. But I felt moved to write to you because a rather freakish and unusual series of events has brought our names into the same orbit. Today, while driving home, I heard on the radio that you have asked Jeremy Corbyn to distance himself from the Stop the War organization by not attending their annual fundraising dinner, because according to you STW is a ‘disreputable’ organization.
Had I heard this on any other weekend, I would have...
We Bomb Therefore We Are
- November 23, 2015
- by
- Matt
Many people who have never read a word of military history or strategy will have come across the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous observation that “war is politics (policy) by other means.” If wars are fought in pursuit of political goals, then it follows that governments will know what these goals are, and...
Pitiless War
- November 18, 2015
- by
- Matt
The Narodnik revolutionary Vera Figner once described terrorism as a ‘very sombre form struggle.’ Figner spent twenty years in prison for her part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II – the most high-profile assassination of the nineteenth century and an act that contained many of the essential features of revolutionary terrorism, so she knew...
Murder in the City of Light
- November 14, 2015
- by
- Matt
Let’s get one thing straight: The responsibility for last night’s disgusting massacre in Paris belongs to the shrunken specimens of humanity that carried them out and the organization that sent them to do it. The attacks are yet more evidence that Daesh/ISIS is one of the most vicious and repugnant gangs of mass murderers in...
Erdogan’s Massacre
- October 12, 2015
- by
- Matt
Terrorist events tend to provoke a stock response from politicians and governments. Invariably there is a great deal of sonorous rhetoric, accompanied by exhortations to the population to stand firm and show unity in the face of the universal evil. Nearly always there is a lot of use of the first person plural, as in...
The Day of Terror
- June 27, 2015
- by
- Matt
In his memoir The Devil in France, the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger looked back on the historical circumstances that had resulted in his internment in a French prison in Tunisia during World War I, and driven him into exile in southern France following Hitler’s ascent to power, and his internment in French concentration camps...
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