Apologies
- December 07, 2015
- by
- Matt
Some last thoughts – from me anyway – on the International Brigades debacle. As I have tried to make clear since I wrote my piece about Hilary Benn last Thursday, I never meant to suggest any moral equivalence whatsoever between Daesh and the International Brigades. I continue to believe that the overall context of the article makes it clear that I intended no such thing, and that nobody who is familiar with my writing could ever believe that I would make such a suggestion.
That said, I recognize that the controversy which has resulted from...
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...
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...
Recent Comments