Tony Blair Says Sorry (again)
- May 25, 2016
- by
- Matt
The Chilcot Inquiry report really does look as though it’s only weeks away from publication, and Blair already out apologising for Iraq once again. Blair last did this back in October last year, when it also looked as though Chilcot was coming, and he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria:
‘I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong. I also apologise, by the way, for some of the mistakes in planning, and certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime. But I find...
Interview with Jackie Walker
- May 22, 2016
- by
- Matt
Few people who pay attention to such things will have failed to notice the stridently McCarthyite atmosphere that has descended on British politics since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party last year. Needless to say, these developments did not originate from Corbyn himself. A spectrum of opinion...
Son of Saul
- May 19, 2016
- by
- Matt
In these dismal times, when the issue of ‘left antisemitism’ are being ruthlessly and cynically instrumentalised within British politics in an attempt to neutralize opposition to the Israeli state, and destroy the leftist surge within the Labour Party, it’s salutary experience to see the Hungarian director László Nemes’s shattering Son of Saul. If...
Truth, Lies, and Politics
- May 14, 2016
- by
- Matt
In Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a pompous eighteenth-century professor asks the idiot-savant Kaspar Hauser a variant of the classic logical puzzle: You are traveling down a path and come to a fork in the road. One fork leads to a village where everyone tells the truth and the other to a...
The Antisemitism Circus Comes to Town
- April 28, 2016
- by
- Matt
The last few days of Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ have been a genuine education for me on many levels. I had thought that Naz Shah’s retweeting of a crass twitter meme suggesting that Israel should be reestablished in the United States was a clumsy satire on the ‘joined-at-the-hip’ relationship between America and Israel which American politicians...
Between Europe and a Hard Place
- April 24, 2016
- by
- Matt
In June the United Kingdom will decide whether or not to remain part of the European Union. This is obviously a historic decision for the country, and it may have far wider historic implications and consequences for the whole of Europe, even if the gaggle of reactionary Little Englander or rather Great Britainer nationalists,...
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