I enjoyed his speech, mostly because the cantankerous old bastard went against the grain.
The ‘however’ is coming, though. It’s the old “you can take the man out of the Foreign Office, but you can’t take the Foreign Office out of the man”: on the one hand Murray often says that Russia has a GDP equal to that of Spain (ie, not huge), yet in this speech he talks of the Russian empire and the ‘Grand Game’. It seems to me that the latter is more accurate, because Russia has huge natural resources (making it one of the richest nations on Earth), which is why the neocons want to get their hands on it; after all, plundering Africa gets boring after a while.
As ex-ambassadors go, I would hazard that Peter Ford is much better value for money.
Yeah - CM is pretty good on the general anti-war front but I agree about the FO - he still tries to shore up a neutral or ‘antiwar’ position by equating Russia’s invasion with the UK/US war on Iraq. This contradicts his acknowledgement that Russia’s aims were not imperialist. He has to skirt round what he undoubtedly knows for sure, that there is a large element of self-defense in the Russian invasion. Strictly legally, this might not have made the attack on Ukraine legal, because it (arguably) did not threaten Russian territory immediately. But this is a ‘borders’ based argument not a ‘peoples’ argument and there is no doubt that the Nato expansion does represent an existential threat. I expect if he was less aware of his position he would have mentioned this.
Craig is about as good as you can expect to get among ex-FO types - far better than the norm - but what a pity the millions of marching antis from 2003 did not produce more iconic figures than him to be asked to make these speeches now.
Thanks RG, and good comments Evvy. I listened to a little and found CM’s perception and presentation of the whole situation very confused. For me and other Putinistas, Russia intervened in Ukraine because of the direct threat to their countrymen in Donbas from the imminent NATO-Nazi campaign to cleanse the whole country of Russia-sympathetic Ukrainians. Russia never had the slightest intention of taking Kiev, and still will only do so in desperation. Also far from being a poor military, Russia’s use of high tech missiles and strategic attacks - taking out all the air bases and facilities in the first 24 hours was a masterstroke - enabled its initial operations in Donbas. What has followed is thanks mainly to endless lies and false flags, and demented Nazis like Pustula vdl and Stolz, and the POMS pathological hatred of Russia. But have no doubt Russia will prevail; people are just going to have to live with it.
BTW, if you’ve been following all this, can you tell me how much discussion there was about Hersh and the NS terrorism?
Oh you can’t expect objective common sense from Craig about Russia. He’s sure it’s a hellish anti-democracy. Stuck in what he saw years ago, I guess. Good on anti-war; naive as ever about realpolitik. Odd, coming from an ex-diplomat; or perhaps not. Though Sergei Lavrov doesn’t exhibit the same blindness. Realism is possible. Pity Craig’s tripped up in that department by his terrible naivety-streak.
Otoh, he’s got La Sturgeon’s number…
There are now very big protests happening in Germany with regard to this, as far as I can tell. It’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on, if you live in the West, because we no longer have a free media.
I would venture that the Soviet Union (a place I was familiar with back in the day) had a more free media than we now have in the West.
There you go, Mr Murray, stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
Incidentally, if you look at this No-Nato protest, it was banned by ‘the authorities’ on two previous occasions. On the third occasion that had to hold it in a hall that was part of the Venezuelan Embassy in London.
When it comes to free speech, it’s all very similar to East Berlin in the old days.
(the cat is still jumping all over me)
Someone has probably already posted this (I don’t mean Rhis’ post of Murray’s speech). This is a 30 minute recap of the No to Nato protest that took place recently…
Great thread, I’d seen glimpses of Craig M’s speech.
The nonsense about Russian GDP being so meagre (which merely proves what a flawed metric ‘domestic product’ is - especially when the denomination is Dollah Bills) is at the heart of a lot of the Anglosphere thinking. “We’re so much wealthier than these peasants with their outside toilets…” etc. This article dates back a few days but blows holes in that line of thinking to great effect.
CW: Victoria Effing Nuland photo
(I read the article Will is critiquing, published at Unherd (yeah, right) first and you might find it useful to do that too. However there is enough of it quoted directly to get a decent sense of the text, and the passages quoted are a perfect representation of the whole.)
Great reality-based analysis by Metatronic, K. Thanks for the link.
I know that god - whatever your conception of that entity might be - would prefer us to be magnanimous rather than mean and spiteful, especially when handling fellow souls who’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn in their current lifetimes… but dammit, once in a while it’s justified.
And besides, it’s not as if I’m being unforgiveably crass and mean (just a bit, in fact). And for that reason I’ll lay out for readers’ consideration a descriptive title that I’ve been nursing for a few weeks now, for the odious, delusional, and horrendously spite-filled Victoria Nuland:
The phrase 'FlabbyVicki NulKag, the Wicked Bitch of the West[‘s State Department]’ bubbled up from somewhere in my sub-poet’s deep consciousness. Lame, I know, but it’s been a sort of earworm lately, that keeps nagging whenever I hear about her, or see one of her increasingly-ghastly pictures… 
We have to be able to register obdurate resistance to these criminal fools somehow, even if it’s no more than just silly name-calling. Even that offers a little smirk of relief. 
I didn’t want to start a new thread about Galloway’s show yesterday evening (5th March), so I thought I’d highlight it here because it seems appropriate to this thread.
Galloway has recently done a 180 with regard to covid stuff (during the 2 years of madness he was a strong advocate of lockdowns and vaccines and all the rest of it). Yesterday George Galloway openly admitted that he had been wrong about covid, and apologised. It takes a certain strength of character to admit so publicly that you were wrong, and whatever you might think about Galloway you can’t take that away from him.
Galloway goes into the Hancock revelations in his opening monologue. His apology comes later into the programme.
By chance, yesterday was also the anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg. There’s only socialism or barbarism, and all that…
https://www.youtube.com/live/Q_Qeenxvml4?feature=share&t=330
Hi Dimac
Following it only from afar. Do you mean did we discuss it? Briefly here
Nothing in the mainstream as far as I know. Other than the interesting character Jeffery Sachs who called it out.
Good letter.BTW
ED
George’s MOATS show was worth a look. But it’s very clear that he still has a long way to go before he’s fully caught up with the truth about the scamdemic. Still believes there was a violent novel pathogen (which he still calls a virus, apparently still not aware that NO-ONE anywhere can produce a pure physical sample of this alleged entity, and I’ll bet he’s barely aware that a serious challenge has (re)-started now against the whole alleged science of virology, and the very existence of any viruses at all; still stating blithely that ‘the covid virus’ has killed millions, despite a now-clearly-visible all-cause-mortality picture that denies any such thing, though the poison-stabs have, as did ‘the measures’; still hosting some fool from Minneapolis who insists that the collated studies of masks show that they do work, when in fact the studies show by a large majority that they don’t; and on.
I get frustrated with George: a brilliant speaker, a steadfast lifelong socialist (which is high praise in my book), a man who would have made a good prime minister - if we lived in a democracy rather than the English-raj class’s hereditary fiefdom posing as a democracy and fooling enough of us - including George - enough of the time. But still a man who never seems to find time to dive deep enough, down to the very depths, of the subjects that he engages. Pity.
Can’t help but feel that George is another Bernie Sanders. A sheepdog. Don’t get me wrong, I like George. And that Iraq testimony is legendary.
It doesn’t matter if it’s through coercion or willfully, George will never be the leader or organiser of what the nation needs.
Thanks - and yes interesting to read your discussion - and would have added to it at the time, but too bogged in reading and writing and tweeting about it here. A month later the story is still dormant in the msm, but as relevant as ever, particularly after the festival on Feb 24th. Our whole parliament stood and cheered for the Ukie Ambo, and even said “slava Ukraina”…
I also wrote an article about a BBC report, including a screenshot video with undersea exploration, when Katya Adler went to the Baltic on October 27th with the Norwegian navy. I don’t think I posted it here…:
I can’t access BBC videos here - wonder if any of you can help. My TV recording froze several times, but I saw the televised report in full… cheers David.