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Suggested reading
Article by Jacob Siegel: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the CenturyThirteen ways of looking at disinformation Though the title may seem sensationalist, the contents of this profound and illuminating analysis are not. If you prefer to just get a gist of what Jacob Siegel wrote, you can turn to Glenn Greenwald’s interview of…
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Harnessing history to politics, part II
The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis. Causes of grain shortage Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the…
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Intermezzo
I shall be publishing the second part of Thorarinn Hjartarson’s analysis of the “Holdomor” narrative in a couple of days. In the mean time you might take a look at an article that appeared yesterday in Helsinki Times. I was kindly informed about it by a friend in Poland. I gather press freedom is not…
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Harnessing history to politics
The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of…
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Antagonising journalists
By mistreating and possibly poisoning the prisoner Aleksej Navaljnyj, the Russian authorities are merely reinforcing the Western public’s perception that the concept of justice simply does not exist in Russia. No matter what you or I think about Navaljnyj’s political views, he is not suspected of having killed anybody, or of having turned “customers” into…
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Rødt
Rødt is the name of a Norwegian left-wing political party. It is the only political party that still advocates leaving NATO. The party maintains that NATO is not a defence alliance, but an alliance of nations vindicating US global hegemony. The party avers that NATO not so much solves as creates problems. It is the…
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Defence of self or of hegemony
Have you heard of “perception management”? Simply put, it means persuasion on the basis not of facts but of lies (or suppression of facts). During the 1980s, Reagan decided to “kick the Vietnam syndrome“, a condition from which the US public was suffering, sick to the heart of the horror and shame of the Vietnam…
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The tightening of the screw
Europe is currently undergoing a tightening of the screw. As most of you will have learnt from either Milton Friedman or Naomi Klein or both, crises (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine, etc.) will be inexorably exploited by the powers-that-be. Result: the poor will become poorer, the rich richer. This is…
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Libya again
Why, you may be asking, am I writing about Libya when everybody else is writing about Iraq? And that brings me straight to the rather surreal aspect of this ignominious war, which some countries, not least my own, waged against a country that was, from the 1990s on, one where even you or I might…