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  1. Aug 4

    ‘Let’s Just Embrace A Mediterranean Lifestyle’: Climate Lunacy And Burnham's 'Pragmatism'

    ‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’ This has to be a serious candidate for the most foolish comment ever made publicly by a British newspaper editor. Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, opined: ‘We’ve lost the war against global warming - so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather.’ One might wonder which trench Heath occupied in the ‘war against global warming,’ given that the Telegraph titles have spent decades in the climate-denial camp. From his privileged position of comfort and wealth, he added: ‘Yes, climate change will inflict many well-rehearsed costs on Britain, and there will be plenty of losers, but it is pointless seeking to prevent the inevitable.’ And: ‘It’s time to accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and whenever possible, even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate.’ Capitalism, the very system of planet-devouring economics that brought us here, will, Heath confidently proclaimed, ‘drive down emissions, when the time and, crucially, price are right.’ He continued: ‘Without minimising the severe downsides of global warming, especially on some [sic] poorer nations, many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers... construct more pools…plant more Mediterranean vegetation.’ Jason Hickel, an economics anthropologist professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, noted of Heath’s article: ‘This grotesque headline is from the Telegraph. 3,000 people in Britain have been killed in heatwaves this year so far. 20,000 in Europe. ‘Even if Britain did get to “embrace Mediterranean life”, what about the actual Mediterranean, what do they get to embrace? What about India?’ Hickel added: ‘The indifference of the British elite toward mass suffering is astonishing.’ As for ‘the despicable con that is net zero’, it is a basic law of physics that to stop global warming, humanity has to cut net emissions of global-warming gases to zero. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who sounded the climate alarm to US Congress in 1988, said three years ago that ‘we are damned fools’ for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis. According to Hansen, there is a huge amount of global heating ‘in the pipeline’ because of the continued burning of fossil fuels. Moreover, he argued, the Earth is ‘very sensitive’ to the impacts of this; far more sensitive than the best estimates presented by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said: ‘We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain [in burning fossil fuels]. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.’ Hansen added: ‘We are in the early phase of a climate emergency. Such acceleration is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium.’ A new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that global warming has accelerated sharply since 2015. Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the study’s co-authors, warns that: ‘How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.’ In his Telegraph piece, Heath adopted a classic diversionary tactic: blame China and growing nations of the Global South: ‘All of our efforts at carbon reduction (and those of the European Union) have been offset many times over by the increase in Chinese emissions; Britain could return to the stone age and cut our GDP to zero, and it would still make only a trivial difference.’ He continued: ‘Even a global government would not have enforced net zero. Forget worthless treaties: such a body would have been controlled not by Western eco-warriors but by a coalition of Chinese, Russian, Indian, African and South American powers desperate for growth.’ Heath neglects to mention the great strides that China, for example, is taking in boosting its renewable energy capacity and decarbonising its economy. Moreover, many climate scientists disagree with cynical attempts to whitewash Britain’s historical responsibility for global warming since the Industrial Revolution. Dr Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist and board member of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit UK organisation conducting independent research and analysis on energy and climate, said: ‘The climate crisis is a global problem and every country should be acting to reduce emissions and build a greener global economy, especially those with the largest historical responsibility, like the UK. The climate doesn’t care where carbon comes from – whether [it’s] from multiple countries responsible for smaller proportions of emissions, or China.’ She added: ‘The UK may account for just 1% of current global emissions, but we’re responsible for 100% of our own emissions, and we have the opportunity to show global leadership by bringing them down.’ While Heath pines for a mythical Mediterranean lifestyle, soaking up sunshine and sangria by his pool, in the real world the Mediterranean will increasingly suffer ever more intense and persistent heatwaves of over 40C, with extensive wildfires forcing people to flee from their homes. In Britain, the hard reality is that we could face food shortages this year after severe droughts in parts of England, as well as climate-driven crop failures in major importing countries. Heath’s article suffered such a severe public backlash that the original title of: ‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’ was later changed to: ‘We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero’ One of our X followers asked if we could fathom Heath’s mindset. We pointed out the famous dictum by the US writer Upton Sinclair: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ Meanwhile, Andy Burnham, the putative saviour of the genocide-participating Labour government, has maintained a stoic silence over the summer’s European wildfires and wider climate breakdown. Instead, he has promised he will take a ‘pragmatic’ approach to oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. The dictionary tells us ‘pragmatic’ means: ‘dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations’. There is, of course, nothing ‘sensible’, ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ about burning yet more oil and gas, raising carbon emissions and global temperatures, and leading to ever-greater climate emergency death tolls. Burnham says that: ‘There is a resource there [in the North Sea]. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that.’ He would like us to believe that being ‘pragmatic’ is about helping the ordinary man and woman in the street, not the billionaire oil giants like Shell who have just posted profits of £7.37 billion for the April-to-June period, double last year. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party in England and Wales, condemned Burnham’s comments: ‘Allowing new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea will worsen the climate breakdown, putting more lives at risk and doing untold damage to our economy. It’s not too late for Burnham to do the right thing and commit to leaving dangerous fossil fuels in the ground.’ Compare Burnham’s version of reality with that described a few years ago by Noam Chomsky: ‘I don’t know what word in the language - I can’t find one - that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal - the existence of organised human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’ DC & DE Note to our readers David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027. Media Lens was 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others. New alerts and cogitations are now available as podcasts on Substack, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Jul 14

    25 Years Of Media Lens – The BBC’s Paul Adams On Iran

    Audio narration by Matt Alford This month marks the 25th anniversary of Media Lens. Still in short trousers, we sent our first media alert to a handful of readers on 9 July 2001. For a long time, our alerts focused on challenging journalists directly by email, publishing their responses, and encouraging readers to politely respond with their own views. One of the most positive exchanges involved the BBC’s diplomatic editor Paul Adams. From his news reports, we had always got the impression that Adams was a decent, amiable guy. And so it proved when we emailed him in January 2007: ‘Dear Paul ‘Your online piece today is curious. You write:‘“Tony Blair insists Britain must continue to show its willingness to launch military interventions for humanitarian purposes after he leaves office.” ‘Why do you take at face value Tony Blair’s argument that military interventions are “for humanitarian purposes”? Why did you not write, instead:‘“...to launch military interventions for what he calls ‘humanitarian purposes’...”?‘Likewise:‘“We can pursue climate change, world poverty and the Middle East peace process while still being able and willing to project British military power, in the interests of British and global security.”‘Again, why do you take at face value Blair’s argument that projecting military power is “in the interests of British and global security”?’ ‘Why is your piece – supposedly from an objective, nonpartisan perspective – in fact couched in propagandistic terms? ‘I hope you will respond, please. ‘Best wishes ‘David Cromwell Adams replied: ‘Dear David,‘Thanks for your comments, and you’re absolutely right that the piece should have appeared with rather more in the way of editorial distance. I don’t - and shouldn’t appear to - take a partisan view one way or the other.‘All I can say in my (rather feeble) defence is that the first paragraph, which appears in bold on the page, was not written by me at all but by the OnLine team, presumably as a kind of “headline” or explainer for the piece to follow. I agree that it would certainly have read better with the sort of caveat you describe.‘As for the second, I think I assumed (wrongly, perhaps) that the reader would see it as an extension of the previous paragraph, in which I set out Blair’s view of what he’s about. Again, it would have benefitted from some added distance.‘The piece was, I admit, written in a hurry on a day when I was flitting between one live broadcast and the next. In fact, what the OnLine team tend to do in these cases is to transcribe things they hear me saying during lives and thread them together as a kind of “authored” piece. I don’t care for the method, as live remarks are rarely as considered or articulate as properly written ones (as one Andrew Gilligan once rather disastrously illustrated!). This piece was a mixure [sic] of transcription and writing - and probably suffered as a result.‘Apologies. ‘Best ‘Paul Adams’ This was an eminently reasonable response, topped off with an actual apology. Adams was clearly open-minded and able to respond with genuine humility. The exchange seemed to vindicate our strategy of politely engaging with journalists. Perhaps they would be willing to listen and change. And after all, even small changes could make a difference. Alas, as we have since learned, Upton Sinclair’s famous observation did not tell the whole story: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ (Upton Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked,’ Oakland Tribune, 11 December 1934) In fact, we have found that people can understand salary-unfriendly truths, and they can then go straight back to behaving as if they had never understood at all. Discussing his famous study of obedience, psychologist Stanley Milgram warned: ‘With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the [authority’s] definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.’ (Stanley Milgram, ‘Obedience to Authority’, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.141) The Missing War Crime Last week, before the latest tit for tat airstrikes, Adams commented on Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran: ‘Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.’ By focusing on ‘the issues that led to war’, Adams gave the impression that political pressures had escalated to a point where war happened in an almost natural, inevitable way. He led readers away from the reality that the US and Israel opportunistically waged a war of choice on Iran in the middle of peace negotiations. Certainly, no serious analyst has suggested that ‘issues’ were leading Iran to declare war on the US or Israel. The ‘issue’ that actually ‘led to war’ was Trump’s willingness to fulfil Netanyahu’s dream of combining US and Israeli military might to again overthrow the Iranian government as the US and Britain had done in 1953. Netanyahu said: ‘This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I promised – and this is what we shall do.’ The promise to ‘smite… hip and thigh’ was a reference to a biblical idiom indicating a plan for total, merciless destruction. Adams’ version self-censored the unarguable truth that the attack that began on 28 February was a textbook example of a war of aggression, the supreme war crime. By contrast, in the Guardian, Julian Borger described the war as ‘an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public’. How in reviewing the history of the conflict could Adams not make the same point? How can this key truth of the war go unmentioned? The words ‘crime’ and ‘illegal’ did not appear in his piece. The answer is that the war’s illegality is deeply embarrassing to the UK state’s leading US and Israeli allies – the truth paints them as the rogue states they really are, which is the exact opposite of the salary-friendly impression reflexively communicated by the BBC. Adams added: ‘The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran.’ Khamenei was not merely ‘killed’; he was assassinated in the middle of peace negotiations. General Sir Richard Shirreff, a retired British Army officer and former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, explained that Khamenei held absolute religious authority for Shiite Muslims worldwide - not just political power in Iran - and that assassinating him, especially during Ramadan, was like ‘murdering the Pope on the steps of St Peter’s during Holy Week’. Adams’ reference to ‘devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes’ suggests these were merely tactical attacks – perhaps part of a long-term tit for tat pattern - rather than a maximum effort to ‘smite the terror regime hip and thigh’. The US committed fully 40-50% of its air power, on a par with the US-UK Iraq wars of aggression in 1991 and 2003. Adams continued: ‘Back in January, Iran was wracked by popular protest which both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted might herald the collapse of the Islamic Republic.’ It is not reasonable to present the unrest as simply a ‘popular protest’. On December 29 last year, The Jerusalem Post reported: ‘On Monday, the Mossad [Israeli secret service] used its Twitter account in Farsi to encourage Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it will join them during the demonstrations. ‘“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote. ‘It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”’ Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of State, posted on X: ‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…’ We can find no record of Adams ever mentioning these astonishing admissions. No doubt there was a ‘popular’ element to the protests, but history will surely judge that this was Phase 1 of ‘Operation Epic Fury’ and ‘Operation Roaring Lion’, as the 28 February ‘hip and thigh’ campaigns were termed by the US and Israel, respectively. Adams added: ‘Iran’s economy was already in tatters after decades of international sanctions. The country was also still badly wounded after a 12-day war with the US and Israel six months earlier.’ Sanctions have indeed left Iran’s economy in ‘tatters’. But why did Adams make no attempt to communicate the reality of what that means? In fact, it is a devastating form of siege warfare waged on the civilian population of Iran. In March 2021, the academic journal Foreign Affairs reported: ‘To judge from Iran’s Households Income and Expenditure Survey, administered by the Statistical Center of Iran, the country’s absolute poverty rate rose by 11 percent between March 2018 and March 2020, while the average living standard dropped by 13 percent nationally. The national currency lost almost one-fourth

  3. Jun 24

    Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy

    On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was given a largely respectful farewell by the ‘mainstream’ media, portraying him as a ‘decent’ man who put his country first. And now the same news organisations are burnishing Andy Burnham’s credentials to enter 10 Downing Street without actually submitting his record or policies to proper scrutiny. Starmer’s appalling record as Prime Minister was barely touched upon in his political obituaries. In particular, his complicity in the Gaza genocide was virtually whitewashed out of existence; notably by the BBC and the Guardian. But first, consider this selective overview of his two years in power since his ‘landslide’ victory at the 2024 General Election. (With just one-third of the electoral vote, fewer than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in both 2017 and 2019, Starmer’s Labour won around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats because of the absurd first-past-the-post UK voting system): * On his election as PM, Starmer ditched the ten pledges he’d made during his Labour leadership campaign which had deceptively presented him as a left-leaning, progressive successor to Corbyn whom he had called his ‘friend’. * He attempted to court right-wing Reform voters by adopting the language of the notorious Enoch Powell in warning that ‘mass immigration’ had done ‘incalculable damage’ to the British economy, and that the UK could become an ‘island of strangers’. * He attacked pensioners, people with disabilities, families on low income with more than two children (until he did a U-turn following a huge public backlash), and migrants. * Against strong advice, he appointed Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as UK ambassador to the US. * He waged war on the left wing of the Labour Party, suspended Jeremy Corbyn and many others, including numerous Jewish members. * He undermined trial by jury and, unjustly extending the definition of ‘terrorism’, proscribed Palestine Action and oversaw the arrests of more than 3,000 peaceful protesters, many of them elderly or with disabilities, opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. * He continued to arm and support Israel during the genocide despite his obligations under the Genocide Convention to take immediate action to prevent it, welcomed Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who had used genocidal language against the Palestinians in Gaza, approved visits from Israeli military officials and thwarted calls for a ceasefire. He also allowed the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus to be used for spy flights over Gaza, sharing intelligence with Israel that was likely used to attack targets in Gaza. * Infamously, he even declared in a live radio interview with Nick Ferrari that Israel ‘has that right’ when asked about Israel denying electricity and water to Palestinians in Gaza and, days later, tried to gaslight the public that he had not actually said that. The list could go on and on. As Peter Oborne, author of ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, rightly noted of Starmer: ‘Incredibly, he leaves office without accusing Israel of ever committing war crimes.’ No tears were shed by Starmer in his ‘emotional’ Downing Street speech for the more than 73,000 Palestinans killed in Gaza, including at least 21,289 children, since 7 October 2023. This week, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank. In December 2024, Amnesty International published a detailed report that explained the meaning of genocide: ‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis) Amnesty added a key clarification: ‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”. In its submission to the International Court of Justice against Israel, South Africa presented a detailed legal case that Israel has committed genocide. This case has been backed by other states at the ICJ who have published their own findings of genocide. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, reached similar conclusions in two reports in 2024: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ and ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’. In 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that Israel ‘has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination’. Moreover, many of the world’s leading scholars on genocide, including Israeli experts, have determined that Israel has committed genocide. The evidence is simply overwhelming. Diverting Readers’ Attention Away From The Genocide The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer (‘Slán Keir’). For example, the Independent mentioned that Kneecap released the single ‘Liars Tale’ earlier this year where they criticised Sir Keir’s stance on, as the paper put it, ‘Israel’s military offensive in Gaza’, thus avoiding use of the accurate word, ‘genocide’. Another mention of Gaza appeared in the Daily Telegraph where associate editor Gordon Rayner noted: ‘As early as September 2024, in his first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir gave the country a taste of the blunders to come when he called for the return of “sausages” from Gaza rather than hostages.’ That was a safe mention of ‘Gaza’ for the right-wing paper. Only 11 of the 30 mentions of ‘Starmer’ and ‘Gaza’ also contained the word ‘genocide’. Recall, this is out of a total of 1,485 newspaper mentions of Starmer in the 24 hours after his resignation. One such mention was in the Herald in Scotland quoting Green Party leader, Zack Polanski: ‘The vested interests that are holding this country back need to be confronted, with wealth taxes on the super-rich, utilities taken into public ownership, rent controls and affordable housing, and an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. ‘We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham might [be] going to show up in Downing Street.’ That the Gaza genocide barely registered in media coverage of Starmer’s departure from Downing Street is utterly damning of the insular, power-hungry nexus of the British political-media establishment. The Guardian’s ‘big hitter’ and resident Zionist Jonathan Freedland devoted around 2,000 words to the question, ‘the rise and fall of Starmer: where did it all go wrong?’. Notable features of his piece: Mentions of genocide? Zero. Mentions of Gaza? Zero. Mentions of Israel’s crimes? Zero. It takes real dedication to divert readers’ attention from Starmer’s complicity in all of the above. Meanwhile, Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, uncritically cited analysts declaring that foreign policy was an ‘area of relative strength’ for Starmer. Mark Curtis, co-director and co-founder of Declassified UK, was scathing: ‘The Guardian is such trash.’ In similar vein, Guardian political correspondent Alexandra Topping had a piece on the departing PM’s record with a section titled, ‘Success: Starmer the international statesman’. Once again, there was no mention of Gaza. BBC News performed its usual establishment role too, steering clear of awkward mentions of the Gaza genocide; not least on BBC News at Ten on the day of Starmer’s resignation speech. Ben Chu of BBC Verify presented an overview of ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership in six charts’. None of these charts depicted the deaths, injuries or devastation wreaked by Israel in Gaza, with Starmer’s complicity. In fact, there was not a single mention of genocide, Gaza or Israel. Propaganda by omission is, of course, a dominant feature of BBC News. In an extensive piece titled, ‘Sir Keir Starmer: Top lawyer whose “Mr Rules” approach failed to connect with the public’, BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide. This omission is particularly glaring because one of the many reasons that Starmer is deeply unpopular with much of the public is his complicity in Israel’s massive crimes against humanity. For example, in 2025, an Opinium poll tracker found that 45 per cent of the British public explicitly disapproved of Starmer’s handling of ‘the Israel-Gaza conflict’. In particular, sup

  4. Jun 4

    Invitation To A Turkey Shoot – How To Debunk Climate Denial

    We, of course, post on all kinds of emotive and controversial issues on social media: genocide in Gaza, the war of aggression on Iran, the weaponisation of anti-semitism to undermine democratic choice and defend Israel, and so on. Perhaps because we don’t post out of anger and hate, we don’t generally receive a lot of hostility in response. Remarkably, the one issue that is all but guaranteed to generate snarling dismissals and abuse is climate change. Discussion of highly sophisticated and complex climate science has become a ‘populist’ cause among people raised on a diet of trashy tabloids and hard-right politics (Reform, Restore, MAGA). Their passionate conviction: climate scientists and ‘alarmist’ politicians are faking data to secure research grants and tyrannical control of society. With great, mocking confidence, scientists are accused of the most childish errors – like all ‘Bad Guys’ they are as stupid as they are corrupt. On 26 May, the Met Office posted on X: ‘Today is now the hottest day in May on record with Heathrow and Kew Gardens provisionally reaching 35.0°C. ‘Until yesterday the highest temperature in May was 32.8°C, but we’ve now exceeded that record on consecutive days by a full two degrees Celsius.’ The Met Office emphasised the ‘full two degrees’ because in the last century records have usually been broken by tenths or hundredths of a degree. Despite what many people appear to believe, this spring was actually the warmest on record for England and Wales. The last three years are the top three warmest on record. Nine of the top ten warmest springs have been since 2007. Paul Hudson, a BBC meteorologist and climate correspondent, posted: ‘EVERY weather station, both rural & urban, in Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, set a new May temperature record yesterday. ‘Unprecedented. ‘For the climate sceptics out there, the game is up. Go and bore someone else with your nonsense.’ Nahel Belgherze, who focuses on extreme weather events worldwide, commented over a graph: ‘Hard to believe I’m even writing this. ‘Meteorological summer hasn’t even begun, yet Paris, France has already logged more days above 32°C (89.6°F) than its annual average.’ Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay), posted a map of shattered temperature records in France that also contained this comment: ‘A totally HISTORICAL day. ‘334 monthly records were SIMULTANEOUSLY broken this afternoon in France. Never in the history of climatology have so many records fallen all at once.’ Nevertheless, in response to the latest heatwaves, the BBC featured the following responses from two male beachgoers: ‘I just love it, just bring it on! More, more...! If this is what global warming means, don’t want the other stuff, but lovely temperatures like this is good.’ The second interviewee agreed: ‘Gotta make the most of the sunshine. You can’t complain about it; it’s not here for long enough, is it? So, yeah, make the most of the sunshine; come down by the sea and enjoy it.’ In 2022, Saffron O'Neill, Professor in Geography at the University of Exeter, led a study which investigated the visual reporting of heatwaves over the summer of 2019 in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. The conclusion: ‘Many visuals were positively valenced (in contrast to article texts), framing heatwaves as “fun in the sun”. The most prevalent type of images in all countries were photographs of people having fun in or by water. When images did depict the danger of heat extremes, people were largely absent.’ Professor Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University responded to an article on the BBC website: ‘This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK’s extreme heat this week. ‘As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that. ‘First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence. ‘And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous. ‘In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.’ Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, was more direct: ‘”Climate change is believed to have played a role in such hot spells as this” ‘FFS BBCNews ‘Belief has nothing to do with it. This is hard, scientific, fact ‘When will you get this right?’ Carbon Brief, a UK-based website specialising in the science and policy of climate change, found that despite blanket news coverage of the record heat in media outlets across western Europe, there has been ‘relatively little commentary from their opinion pages’: ‘No major UK newspapers have published editorials about the heat and there has been no space dedicated to it in the comment sections of the largest French and Spanish newspapers. ‘One exception in UK media was the Daily Mail’s climate-sceptic columnist Richard Littlejohn writing an article mocking heat-safety measures and warnings issued by the Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).’ Fiddling The Figures Alas, many social media posters were unimpressed by claims of record temperatures. Gregory Davis offered us some unsolicited advice on X: ‘Remove your lens from your a*****e.’ Christopher Talbot questioned the source of the measurements: ‘Are those measurements from real stations or your imaginary ones?’ This is a popular theme – for obscure, nefarious reasons, temperature readings are distorted to inflate the results. Thus, Paul Dakers, ‘Ex Army and an ex District Councillor’, explained in his reply to Talbot: ‘They measure them at the end of airport runways apparently - not surprisingly it’s quite warm there with all the heat coming out of the plane engines, supposedly it helps the planes fly or something’ Scientists are just that corrupt, or stupid, or both. Someone called Lady Windermere concurred: ‘They use ground temperatures near tarmac and enclosed buildings to get the most out of their scam stats’ Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, offered a correction: ‘The UK’s hottest ever May Day was recorded at Kew Gardens. Next to plants. Does anybody still take this climate change denial seriously?’ An incredulous tweeter saw the absurdity: ‘It’s a green house’ To be honest, like many people, we didn’t know where the weather station is located in Kew Gardens, and would likely not have had the time or inclination to find out in answering one of the endless flood of denier claims. So, we asked AI. From its cogent answer, linked to highly credible sources that we could easily check, we wrote this response: ‘The measuring station is situated in the middle of a wide, open lawn. It’s deliberately sited far enough away from walls, concrete paths and greenhouses to ensure they don’t inflate the readings.’ It took us a couple of minutes, and the poster had no answer. We understand that, like much technology, AI is a double-edged sword consuming yet more energy and posing huge potential risks for society. Last year, global datacentres used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world. Perhaps unwittingly, anyone accessing Google searches and social media like X, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or shopping online, is using AI. The same is true of anyone using email spam filters, or playlist curating on Spotify and Netflix, and so on. If much of this use of AI involves a grotesque and unjustifiable waste of energy, the one justifiable use of this new technology, we would argue, is asking simple text questions to challenge and debunk climate denier propaganda. It is a tool that changes the balance of power against the propagandists – the result is a rout, an intellectual turkey shoot. Given that it is far less energy intensive, and far more vital, than standard online habits like streaming video and video conferencing - which many of us indulge without a thought - then perhaps this is one of the few uses of AI that is acceptable. What is so staggering about the frequency of scepticism about UK temperature measurements is that records are, of course, constantly being shattered all around the world. In January, Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation, indicated the scale of this: ‘We conclude that 2025 was the third warmest year on Earth since 1850. It is exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. This period, since 1850, is the time when sufficient direct measurements from thermometers exist to create a purely instrumental estimate of changes in global mean temperature. Berkeley Earth’s analysis combines 23 million monthly-average thermometer measurements from 57,685 weather stations with ~500 million instantaneous ocean temperature observations collected by ships and buoys. ‘The last 11 years have included all 11 of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record, with the last 3 years including all of the top 3 warmest.’ (Our emphasis) Are these 23 million measurements from 57,685 weather stations all being faked in pursuit of some dark Orwellian agenda? The idea is simply pathological. Of course, many of the deniers popping up on social media are fossil fuel industry ‘astroturf’ (propaganda operations made to look like a genuine, grassroots movement). In 2020, a major study from Brown University analysed millions of tweets. They found that bots were responsible for roughly 25 per cent of all tweets about climate change. On days with big climate announcements, bot activity surged even higher, promoting denialist talking

  5. May 19

    Media Myopia As We Hurtle Towards Climate Oblivion

    Audio narration by Matt Alford Any aliens who have been monitoring radio and television transmissions streaming outwards into space from Planet Earth over the past few decades will likely be intrigued, bemused or simply horrified at humanity’s headlong drive towards climate catastrophe. No matter the urgent warnings from climate scientists, the power of billionaires, financial speculators and corporations maintains a death-like grip on governments around the world. Amid the occasional flurry of big business greenwashing and government rhetoric about ‘climate protection’ and ‘eco-friendly’ initiatives, billions of people are being held hostage by the forces that are dragging everyone to the edge of the climate abyss. New warnings about climate change do, of course, occasionally appear in the press. But rarely, if ever, are there prominent and sustained front-page headlines and news-leading television coverage. Rarer still are impassioned editorials, high-profile presenters and commentators demanding the substantive, radical changes that are needed to avoid the most damaging predicted impacts of business as usual. Earlier this month, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a 100th birthday party for naturalist David Attenborough, Britain’s most beloved broadcaster. Celebrities showered him with love and praise: Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Emily Eavis, Chris Martin, Ben Fogle, Raye, Kate Winslet. And Paddington Bear. Attenborough sat in the royal box, alongside Prince William. King Charles delivered a handwritten message from Balmoral Castle via a ‘cavalcade of creature couriers’, including eagles, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, otters, ducks, a fox and deer, thanks to the wonders of CGI. All very nice; all very Disneyfied. For many years now, Attenborough has been warning about the dangers of mass consumption, pollution, worldwide species loss and global warming. These subjects are clearly of great concern to him, although he started ringing the alarm bell very late. But the evening gave a wide berth to such uncomfortable topics. ‘Life on Earth’? The climate crisis must be happening on a different planet entirely. As Jonathan Liew, a Guardian sports journalist and columnist, pointed out: ‘This is, of course, the Attenborough with which our public discourse is most comfortable: depoliticised, universally adored, a man-sized Paddington Bear fit only for our veneration. Who teaches us about tree frogs and seal cubs and stick insects and asks for nothing in return.’ Of course, what Liew called ‘public discourse’ is the tightly constrained media space permitted by state and corporate power. Liew continued: ‘And perhaps there are more difficult questions to negotiate here: the extent to which he has been a force for the meaningful and revolutionary change he seeks, and the extent to which his broad, inoffensive appeal has been more hindrance than help, allowing the powerful to feign concern for the planet while shirking the tough and bloody compromises required to secure it.’ To his credit, Attenborough has been eloquent and impassioned in recent years about the climate crisis. He addressed the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, saying that: ‘We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking. This story is one of inequality, as well as instability. Today, those who’ve done the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit. Ultimately, all of us will feel the impact, some of which are now unavoidable.’ But, even five years on, as the climate crisis worsens, the topic was deemed unmentionable by the organisers of Attenborough’s 100th birthday party. ‘Hothouse Earth’ And Collapsing Currents In February, a new scientific report warned that runaway global warming is closer than had previously been thought. We are heading for the ‘point of no return’ after which we would be locked into a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’. Climate ‘tipping points’ would be triggered, producing rapid heating, which would lead to a domino effect of yet more tipping points and feedback loops. These include the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, drastic dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the weakening, and possible shutdown, of the Atlantic ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The scientists stated that: ‘Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia.’ The world has already experienced a global average temperature rise of over 1.3C since pre-industrial times and is likely to surpass the Paris Agreement ‘limit’ of long-term average heating of 1.5C in the next few years. Current government and business policies are pushing us towards 2-3C of global warming, if not more, by 2100. But, if trigger points are breached and runaway global warming occurs, we are talking about much higher temperature rises, perhaps 10C or more. This would mean almost unimaginable catastrophic effects on the climate system, global agriculture and societal infrastructure; not to mention the extinction of humans. Scientists have warned that even a rise of 3-4C means that ‘the economy and society will cease to function as we know it’. Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, put things in grim perspective via X: ‘We are already locked-in to a return to Pliocene [around 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago] conditions (3C hotter and (eventually) ~ 20m sea-level rise) ‘Keep going as we are, and hotter Miocene [5.3 to 23 million years ago] conditions will result ‘Beyond this a return to early Eocene [around 48 to 56 million years ago] hothouse beckons - and potential oblivion’ During the Eocene, the global average temperature was well over 10C higher than present. Oblivion would hit humanity long before such a temperature rise occurred. Earlier this month, yet another deeply disturbing scientific study revealed that the risk of AMOC reaching a tipping point by 2100, after which its shutdown would be inevitable, is as high as 50 per cent. Previously, this was considered ‘a low likelihood event’ of around five per cent. But even this should be held in perspective. How many of us would board a plane knowing that there was a five per cent chance that it would crash? AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, is a vital carrier of warm water from the tropics to high latitudes in the North Atlantic, returning cold water southwards. It is a primary source of heat for western and northern Europe, leading to the temperate climate here. AMOC connects with other ocean current systems in a global network that transports heat, water, nutrients and carbon around the planet. Any disturbance to AMOC, far less its collapse, would have devastating global consequences for climate, agriculture, infrastructure and even for the habitability of Earth. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who has studied AMOC for 35 years, said: ‘This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the “pessimistic” models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.’ He added: ‘I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that AMOC shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.’ To emphasise: the tipping point may be much earlier than 2100; it could happen by 2050, or even sooner. The vital point here is that scientists increasingly agree that the ‘safe window’ to stabilise the current by halting emissions is closing far faster than previously thought. And the public likely does not even realise it. Rahmstorf had previously said that a collapse must be avoided ‘at all costs’. Now he added: ‘I argued this when we thought the chance of an AMOC shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the AMOC switched to a different state.’ In an English-language video for the German DW news channel, Rahmstorf explained the importance of AMOC for European and global climate, and the significance of the latest alarming results. He warned that we should expect more climate extremes in heat, cold, drought, floods and storms. If and when the AMOC collapses, the impact on agriculture in the northern hemisphere will be devastating. The drop in harvest yields for key crops could be as high as 50 per cent. Mass starvation is a very real possibility. Climate Shocks A few days after the disturbing new AMOC report came out, Guardian columnist George Monbiot noted: ‘Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.’ Prior to Monbiot’s column in the Guardian, the paper had published a piece on the report by Damian Carrington, its environment editor. Two other UK national papers covered the study: the Daily Mail and the Independent. Channel 4 News covered the topic in a news broadcast. Amazingly, that was about it for the entirety of the establishment media. The fact that deeply disturbing findings about a likely collapse of a vital component of the climate system were not given wider, extensive and sustained coverage is a devastating indictment of ‘mainstream’ journalism. Even worse, when the report came out, the BBC preferred to push Reform-style propaganda about ‘migrants making false claims to stay in UK’. This was given prominen

  6. May 12

    'Starmageddon' - The Anti-Polanski Smear Campaign That Ate Itself

    Audio narration by Matt Alford. Historian Ian Kershaw titled the two volumes of his definitive biography of Adolf Hitler, ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’. (Allen Lane, 1998 and 2000) Inevitably, it seems, great power comes with great hubris. For a brief, glorious moment, brick walls appear as doorways, everything seems possible. Nemesis lies in wait. Having taken just six weeks and one day to conquer all of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1940, Hitler said of his plans to invade the Soviet Union the following year: ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ The war would be over in a matter of weeks, three months at most. Four years later, Berlin lay in ruins with Hitler’s corpse smouldering among them. In the Guardian, Julian Borger cited former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas on the hubris that consumed Donald Trump: ‘Netanyahu, being the conman that he is, used Venezuela as an example. He said to him: “Look what you did in Venezuela. It was painless. It was effortless. It was beautiful. You changed the regime.” ‘He told Trump: “The Iranian economy is in shambles. The people are on the precipice of revolt. The Revolutionary Guards are losing control. Life in Iran is intolerable. This is our time. What we could do together is bring down the regime … think that together, jointly, we can win the war in three, four days.’” ‘Together’, Netanyahu’s 40-year dream, and Trump, met the nemesis of Iran’s missile mountains, its deluge of drones. With these, Iran was ‘able to inflict withering damage on US bases and Gulf monarchies, close the Hormuz strait and trigger a global economic crisis’. Pinkas concludes: ‘This affects Netanyahu politically and this affects Trump politically. In other words, they have screwed each other pretty badly.’ In February 2023, the previously unthinkable appeared as low-hanging fruit to Keir Starmer – he would dispense with all compromise, all pretence, and simply evict the left from Labour once and for all. With great hubris, he declared: ‘If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open and you can leave.’ In the aftermath of last week’s ‘Starmageddon’ election catastrophe that looks likely to terminate Starmer’s premiership, Owen Jones commented: ‘Labour’s high command gambled that a vicious smear campaign against the Greens would lower their vote. Yet Zack Polanski’s insurgents look well positioned to replace Labour in large swathes of its urban heartland. Keir Starmer believed that if he could crush the left within Labour, he would be able to expel it from politics for ever. The Greens have proved him wrong.’ The BBC’s Chris Mason and Iain Watson nutshelled the results: ‘Sometimes it is the details that best illustrate the broader canvas. ‘The Labour leader of the prime minister’s local authority, Camden in north London, lost to the Greens… ‘Labour have been winning elections in Wales since before Sir David Attenborough was even born. Until today that is. ‘Sir Steve Houghton had been the Labour leader of Barnsley Council since Sir John Major was prime minister. Until today that is.’ The conclusion: ‘Labour were thwacked and the Conservatives became a sideshow at the same time.’ The Green Party received 1.95 million votes at the local elections (not including mayoral votes), approximately 1 million more than the previous best result in 2023. But who facilitated Starmer’s audacious attempt to crush the left? In the Guardian, Andy Beckett pointed to a ‘coalition of interests’: ‘… including the rightwing media, the right of the Labour party, the Conservative party, corporate lobbyists, defenders of Israel and the Anglo-American “special relationship”, and supposedly realistic centrists from the opinion pages of the Financial Times to the deep-state recesses of Whitehall. Protecting Britain’s status quo, by any means necessary, against the disruptive plans of the left has been one of this loose and adaptable establishment’s main priorities for decades, arguably for centuries.’ Beckett, of course, is guilty of ‘selective inattention’. With his trademark acid tongue, former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald responded to a post on X by Guardian political editor Pippa Crerar: ‘When the establishment/Blairite wing of the UK Labour Party couldn’t stop Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, their media operatives at the Guardian and similar outlets fabricated anti-Semitism accusations against Corbyn and his supporters, eventually handing party control to the unprecedentedly hated Sir Keir Starmer. ‘As Starmer’s historic unpopularity is now fueling the rise of the Green Party, Labour’s media apparatchiks -- led by the Guardian’s supreme Starmer loyalist @PippaCrerar -- are now replicating that tired smear campaign against the Greens. That the Green Party leader, @ZackPolanski, is Jewish is, of course, no impediment.’ Indeed, in July 2015, state-corporate politics and media launched an unprecedented smear campaign to derail Jeremy Corbyn’s project, peaking just prior to the 12 December 2019 election. That month, Loughborough University found that pre-election coverage of Labour in the press had been consistently ‘very negative’, while coverage of the Conservatives had been consistently ‘positive’. Our own ProQuest database search of UK newspapers for articles mentioning ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ showed how the smears intensified as the election grew closer: September = 337 hits October = 222 hits November = 1,620 hits Corbyn first became an MP in 1983. He stood for the Labour leadership 32 years later, in May 2015. In March 2019, we searched the ProQuest database for UK newspaper articles containing: ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ before 1 May 2015 = 18 hits None of the 18 hits accused Corbyn of anti-semitism. For his first 32 years as an MP, it just wasn’t a theme associated with him. Then things changed: ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ after 1 May 2015 = 11,251 hits Similarly, one year ago, the idea that the Green Party UK had ‘an anti-semitism problem’ would have been deemed nonsensical. So, what changed? The difference, obviously, is that Zack Polanski started criticising Israel and winning a level of support that threatened the status quo. Just as the Guardian played a lead role in undermining Corbyn, it led the way in promoting Starmer with an embarrassing series of articles archived under the title: ‘Starmer’s path to power’. Despite the fact that Starmer had famously scrapped every one of his 10 ‘socialist’ pledges, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian of how the Conservatives failed to punish wrongdoing in the party because they didn’t take it that seriously: ‘Straight-as-a-die chief prosecutor Starmer will allow no such equivocation.’ Polanski Pilloried As Craig Murray noted of last week’s elections: ‘The most striking thing about the BBC election coverage is that the BBC presenters were all under instruction not to speak to any Green without referencing the Golders Green knife attack and “anti-semitism”.’ The Daily Mail explored other avenues of attack: ‘Zack Polanski admits he was WRONG to claim to be a “spokesman” for the British Red Cross…’ Piers Morgan commented on X: ‘So he’s an egregious liar as well as a moron. Good to know.’ ‘Egregious’ as in outstandingly bad, shocking? This was absurd. Owen Jones posted a message received from someone who had worked as a manager at the British Red Cross: ‘I was a paid member of staff at the British Red Cross where I managed Dance: Make Your Move fundraising events. These events regularly attracted large audiences and involved significant participation from young people, raising substantial funds for the charity. Zack Polanski volunteered as an emcee at several of these events over multiple years. In this role, he was on stage, represented the organisation publicly, and spoke about its core principles, including humanitarianism, impartiality and voluntary service. He was, in practice, acting as a public-facing representative of the charity at these events. ‘The recent smear campaign is appalling. Zack was an enthusiastic, kind and valued volunteer who believed deeply in the cause.’ A poster on X commented that Polanski tried ‘to flimflam women that hypnotherapy could make their breasts bigger…’ An X handle called ‘Stan’s account’ had already answered that point: ‘zack polanski said what?? about boobs??? i guess i have no choice but to vote for the eternal misery, war and paedophiles candidates then.’ It is a bitter irony that, despite the press railing endlessly against the supposed threat of anti-semitism in left politics, the hostility directed at Polanski may in fact be exacerbated by the fact that he is Jewish. Several cartoons appeared in major British newspapers depicting Polanski with a hook nose that he does not possess. Lord John Mann (Baron Mann, of Holbeck Moor in the City of Leeds), advisor to the UK government on anti-semitism, commented on the images: ‘All four are antisemitic. Which is precisely why removing Green Party extremist candidates is necessary.’ So, cartoons that Mann deems anti-semitic targeting the Green Party are a reason to further criticise the Green Party rather than the newspapers that published them! This can best be described as Trumpian ‘logic’. The Board of Deputies of British Jews responded with notably muted criticism: ‘Caricaturists and their editors must take care that their depictions of Jews in public life do not wade into centuries old anti-Jewish tropes. ‘We have seen a number of examples of political cartoons published depicting Zack Polanski that are a cause for concern. ‘We call on publications to show the utmost vigilance and stringency on these issues.’ Readers wi

  7. Apr 21

    A Lefty Progressive Goes To The Tank Museum

    I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically moustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spitfires in the skies directly overhead. Or they had flown Lancaster bombers over Berlin: ‘I was just a taxi driver running a night-time service, there and back.’ Relentlessly propagandised to celebrate the great victory by films, TV series, documentaries, comic books and toys, I became an avid builder of model tanks. When I was thirteen, a middle-aged German businessman with a partially melted right hand visited our house. He had been a tank commander in the war. Knowing I would be fascinated, my dad ushered him into my room and showed him the tanks I had built. Clearly dismayed, the visitor shook his head and pointed to an electric guitar I had been playing: ‘Metal is better used for making those than for tanks. War is terrible, really terrible. Forget about all of that!’ Decades later, bemused by my youthful enthusiasm for war, I took a train from Bournemouth a few stops down the track to the tank museum at Bovington. I climbed inside one of the early Second World War German tanks that had invaded France and the Soviet Union. The inside of any tank is so brutal that to make contact with any part of it is to risk injury. Momentarily losing that awareness, I banged my head against a cluster of metal spikes poking down from the turret. It hurt. Even as a stationary museum exhibit, a tank can harm you. I struggled to imagine how anyone could be inside such a thing when it was moving or under fire. I rapped my knuckles against the front of a Soviet T-34: Donald Trump’s claims notwithstanding, the tank, 57,300 of them, that defeated Hitler. If you rap your knuckles against the wall of a building, there’s a response - the energy resonates in the brick or concrete; you have some effect. When you rap your knuckles against a tank, there’s no reverberation, nothing; you have no effect at all. And you can’t lift the tracks of a large tank even an inch, they are like slabs of rock. Rolling gently around the T-34 was an elderly man in a wheelchair. Old school, he was chatting to everyone, making friends at every turn. He was the right age, and I wondered if he had lost the use of his legs while fighting these metal monsters. As I walked on, I had a growing sense that war was the quintessence of all that is anti-human, anti-life. The tank is perfectly symbolic of the ego, of its hostility, aggression, rejection, hatred. What I found staggering was just how much time, energy and resources had been devoted to the development of these weapons – the investment of engineering and other technical expertise defies belief. The power was impressive, but where, as a teenager, I had felt excitement, I now felt a queasy revulsion. And a deep weariness – there was nothing inspiring or enlivening in all of this; the whole focus of the museum led down a cul de sac of killing and death, which made it, in the deepest sense of the word, boring. Why is it that wars are a perennial feature of human experience? The towering walls surrounding so many of the world’s cities are testament to that grim reality. Just this year, after the ruthless blitz on Venezuela, the US and Israel have waged a war of aggression on Iran, with Cuba also in the crosshairs. Is war genetically hardwired, an inevitable product of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’? Is it something we could somehow choose to renounce, if enough of us chose to do so? Of course, I know the arguments: Perpetual War is the result of economic and political momentum that has built up over decades and centuries. If you don’t fire the missiles, the factories close. If you don’t have an enemy, you can’t fire the missiles. If the ‘Bad Guy’ doesn’t exist, you have to invent him. As the historian Howard Zinn said so well: ‘It seems to me that it only takes a little bit of thought to realise that if wars came out of human nature, out of some spontaneous urge to kill, then why is it that governments have to go to such tremendous lengths to mobilise populations to go to war? It seems too obvious, doesn’t it? They really have to work at it.... Most humans don’t respond to appeals to go to war on the basis of Let’s go and kill. No, Let’s go and free somebody. Let’s go and establish democracy. Let’s go and topple this tyrant. Let’s do this so that wars will finally come to an end.’ (Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, pp.4-5) But this reminds me of the ‘infinite regress’ problem of religion: Who created the universe? God. But then who created God? If wars don’t come out of human nature, what about the fact that so many people consistently fall for the propaganda manufacturing consent for war? Does that gullibility and indifference come out of human nature? And why are people willing to work for militaries operating at the whim of obviously barbaric, greed-driven governments and defence industries that kill for profit? And why do people work for fossil fuel companies in an age of catastrophic climate change? Why do they continue to participate, ignoring the evidence of their own eyes – literally, the obvious facts of their day-to-day experience, of existential catastrophe? Why are we so easily seduced by fake dreams of Star Trek to the Moon and Mars when the journey that really matters is ‘Earth Trek’? Are we somehow destined, designed, doomed to sleepwalk to disaster? But why? The questions echo across the universe… Sometimes, we receive a kind of answer. Monte Cassino – ‘That Were Rough’ Because the previous service back to Bournemouth has been cancelled, the train is crowded, so I drop into the only seat available. To my surprise, I see that the person sitting next to me in a seat reserved for the disabled is the guy in the wheelchair I saw in the museum. Within seconds, I learn that he is called Billy. We have more room than people in the other seats because we are facing the curved wall of the toilet. Parked against this wall is his wheelchair. His legs are outstretched and he is holding a pair of crutches. It slowly dawns on me that Billy, in fact, has two artificial legs. And it again becomes clear that he is one of those chatty types who knows that everyone is basically the same: everyone is friendly, likes a good chinwag. We are soon nattering, and Billy is 81 years-old and has had a ‘grand time’ in the museum. He mentions something about Africa and the war. I take up the obvious prompt and ask him if he saw action. He looks me in the eye, ‘Oh yes,’ he saw action alright. ‘Apparently,’ I offer, ‘Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”’ gives a pretty good idea of what war is actually like.’ ‘No, no’, he says dismissively, exactly echoing the German tank commander I met in my youth, ‘they never show it like it is, they make it look glamorous, exciting. It isn’t glamorous. War is terrible, really terrible.’ Words are such small containers, and something is missing from this: ‘terrible’ doesn’t seem to capture the extent of the awfulness. I want him to tell me how war is terrible, why it is terrible. I want to know just how terrible this life we are living is capable of being. I try again: ‘So, you were in the thick of it…’ ‘I were in North Africa at Tobruk. They had us under siege.’ ‘Must’ve been dreadful in that heat.’ He laughs and points at the carriage floor. ‘We used to dig holes in the sand at night and bury the beers, then dig ‘em up the next day, and we had freezing cold lager. Bloody marvellous!’ He laughs: ‘That kept us cool!’ This isn’t quite what I’m after, either – the refrigeration of beers! - but that’s what I get. Billy isn’t interested in communicating the terribleness of war; he’s interested in the scams, tricks, fiddles. ‘We landed at Sicily, and then, when we’d got them out of there, it was mainland Italy. We moved up to Monte Cassino - that were rough.’ Monte Cassino was one of the fiercest battles of the war – the Allies suffered 55,000 casualties battling up a mountain to eject German troops from a bombed-out monastery at the top. It was utter carnage. Billy says: ‘We were crossing this river, and we were just slaughtered. Out of a thousand men, 300 were killed crossing that river. It were so bad that people who’d got hit were getting hit again coming out on stretchers. It were that bad!’ I have to ask, feeling as if I already know the answer: ‘Is that where you lost your legs?’ ‘Oh no!’ he says. ‘I got through the war without a scratch. They never touched me.’ I’m too surprised to be polite: ‘Then what happened to your legs?’ ‘I was a smoker. I had circulation problems, and I went to a doctor when I were in Canada, and he said: “Forget about cutting down, if you have so much as one cigarette a day, I guarantee you’ll be back here for amputation.”’ ‘So, what happened?’ ‘I kept on smoking!’ ‘You kept on smoking?’ Around us, silence falls as a dozen fellow travellers start paying attention. ‘My wife smoked. And my brother-in-law, who was living with us then, smoked, and it was so tempting.’ He points to his artificial legs: ‘I had this one off in ‘67, and this one in ‘68.’ ‘My God, and do you still smoke?’ ‘Oh no! I gave up in ’78. It were New Year’s Eve and I said to my wife, “That’s my last f*g! That’s it!’” And that were it. I’ve never had a f*g since.’ He pats a leg and looks out of the window: ‘It’s no problem, I’m used to them now. It’s no problem getting around.’ With that, he

  8. Apr 10

    Nuclear Genocide - The Threat And The Ceasefire

    Given the ‘mainstream’ structural filters that reflexively whitewash the crimes of ‘The Good Guys’ - ‘us’, by doctrinal fiat - we have often wondered how the great and the good of corporate politics and media would react if the US or Israel ever decided to use nuclear weapons. Could they, even then, break out of their lock-step deference to power, reclaim their souls and say something humanly honest about that ultimate moral abomination? This week, it looked like we might find out. On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted a message on social media threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure: ‘Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy b******s, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP’ Afterwards, Trump told Fox News there was a ‘good chance’ a deal would be reached on Monday, but he was considering ‘blowing everything up and taking over the oil’ if a deal to end the war was not reached quickly. The threat followed Trump’s April 2 bombing of Iran’s unfinished B1 bridge (40 km west of Tehran, designed to be the highest bridge in the Middle East) and his associated threat to ‘bring [Iran] back to the Stone Ages where it belongs’. For Britons going to bed on Tuesday evening, there seemed to be a real prospect that we might wake up to news that nuclear weapons had been used for the first time since the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Trump had, after all, posted this apocalyptic prediction on Truth Social: ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.’ Of course, nothing Trump says can be taken at face value. His clear devotion to the ‘madman theory’ of international relations means he has to wildly threaten with the biggest stick possible in one hand while offering carrots in the other to achieve a ‘deal’. But many of us felt deeply anxious for the fate of Iranians being terrorised this way, facing the ultimate horror of a nuclear holocaust. Even if Trump’s threats had been a sham, Iran might have preemptively struck at Israel’s nuclear and desalination plants triggering a nuclear response. Iran has anyway suffered grievously. According to the Iranian authorities, around 81,000 civilian sites have so far been damaged by US-Israeli bombing, including 61,000 homes, 19,000 commercial sites, 275 medical centres, and nearly 500 schools. Sarah Smith of the BBC described Trump’s threat that ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ as merely ‘brutal’. Smith’s breathtakingly bland conclusion: ‘But this latest post does not indicate that he is optimistic about reaching an agreement before his deadline tonight.’ Much worse appeared elsewhere on the BBC website. Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a ‘senior reporter’ at BBC Persian at just 27 years of age, published this comment allegedly supplied by a twenty-something Iranian called ‘Radin’: ‘About them hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or leveling Iran – my honest reaction is that I’m okay with all of these.’ The first thing to say is that a comparable obscenity from a crazed British or US citizen eager to see the ‘leveling’ of their country would of course never be published by any BBC journalist. Des Freedman, professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, commented: ‘Iran has 90 million citizens and yet the BBC manages to find one who claims to be “OK” with using nuclear weapons against his own country. There isn’t a single reference in the entire story to the fact that the attacks are illegal and seen by many as war crimes.’ Some seven hours after being published, following much public outrage, ‘Radin’s’ quote mysteriously disappeared from the BBC’s article, replaced by a different comment from the same source: ‘If attacking targets brings down the Islamic Republic, I’m fine with that.’ No correction or edit notice was attached at the time highlighting the change. So, what did ‘Radin’ actually say: the first comment, the second, both, neither? Grayzone discussed the background of the BBC journalist responsible casting serious doubt on her impartiality. BBC Persian has long been a notorious conduit for regime change propaganda. On 7 April, the BBC finally added an ‘Update’ to explain its vanishing quote: ‘However, after further review, this part of the quote was removed from the article due to concerns over the way in which the speaker expressed his views and the extent to which they reflected wider Iranian viewpoints.’ This was meaningless verbiage that explained nothing. Health secretary Wes Streeting was asked whether destroying Iran’s power stations and bridges would be a war crime. Reaching deep into his soul, Streeting replied: ‘Not my judgement to make.’ We like to feel that we give people a chance, that we are tolerant, open-minded. But we also think it’s important to recognise the truth of Oscar Wilde’s observation: ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Voters need to be clear that plastic politicians like Streeting can be judged by the sociopathic, blank look on their faces – our felt awareness that they are lacking humanity, compassion and empathy is not mere imagination. We can all see and feel the soullessness of much of the Labour hierarchy, notably the ‘empty raincoat’, Sir Keir Starmer. To his credit, ITV News political editor Robert Peston expressed his deep exasperation and astonishment at Trump’s ‘appalling remarks’ on ending Iranian civilisation, asking Starmer: ‘How did you feel about that? And how do you sustain a relationship with an American president who can say those things?’ Starmer replied with his usual emotional vacuity: ‘Well, let me be really clear and blunt about this - they’re not words that I would use, or would ever use.’ NATO secretary general Mark Rutte replied in similar fashion to Trump’s genocidal threats: ‘When it comes to what leaders are saying, I’m not commenting on everything.’ Consider, also, the US senator and leading warmonger Lindsey Graham. Glenn Greenwald has often commented on Graham’s ‘ghoulish’ delight in death and destruction: ‘Look at the glee on Lindsey Graham’s face as he talks about people dying. It is the only thing that seems to animate him, the only thing that makes him truly happy: the idea of more war and more people being killed.’ (Greenwald, Systems Update, ‘The Sociopathy of Lindsey Graham & the Neocons’, 30 May 2023) Graham likes to make comments of this kind on Iran: ‘You either do a deal where you get out of the business you were in, or we’re going to blow your stuff up that will allow you to function as a nation. That is your choice.’ In his classic book, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’, psychotherapist Erich Fromm wrote: ‘Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion “to tear apart living structures.”’ (Fromm, Penguin Books, 1982, p.441, our emphasis) Fromm noted a coldness and deadness in the eyes of such people. Incapable of smiling authentically, their faces are rigid, unresponsive, limited to smirking. Fromm pointed to a specific type of ‘hard’ or ‘cruel’ mouth set in a permanent expression of distaste or contempt. All of these traits are clearly visible in Graham’s appearance. A real problem is that these monsters can slip through to the highest echelons of politics where they are mistaken for cool, emotionless, tough defenders of the national interest. In reality, they bring the death and destruction they crave even on their own nations. ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’ And The Ceasefire With a nuclear holocaust apparently averted, on April 8, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran: ‘With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.’ (Our emphasis) As this clearly stated, the ceasefire included Lebanon. Nevertheless, just hours later, Israel launched its most violent bombardment of Lebanon yet, killing at least 303 and wounding 1100 people by targeting, without warning, apartment blocks in residential areas of Beirut that had not previously been attacked, and also by attacking a funeral, cafes, emergency workers and ambulances. Israel’s name for the attack was ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’. Tucker Carlson, a devoted Christian, noted that ‘eternal darkness’ appears numerous times in the New Testament as a reference to hell. The BBC’s whitewashing response to this attempt to derail the ceasefire: ‘Well, more now from Lebanon, where Israel says it’s hit more than a hundred [Hezbollah] command centres and military sites in ten minutes.’ As we have commented before, ‘Israel says’ is not journalism. Unusually, BBC Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega posted a defence in response to criticism: ‘There is a clip circulating that misrepresents the way the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were covered by the BBC last night. ‘This is the full segment. I’m out in Beirut interviewing people so unable to do it by myself - but here’s the introduction, my live and my report.’ His report was sympathetic to the plight of Lebanese civilians, and it did quote the president of Lebanon describing the attacks as

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  • Creator
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    2026
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    Explicit
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