Three more shorts on Sunday

Three peak events last week were the murder of Charlie Kirk … more US-Israeli criminality in the Middle East, this time not against Iran but, after the genocidal ethno-state itself, Washington’s closest regional ‘ally’ … and the handful of Russian drones alleged (Russia now being at a stage in its existential struggle with NATO where it seldom does half measures) to have struck Poland.

Each is the subject of a video pick by me; each weighs in at eighteen to twenty minutes.

I start with that shooting, subject of my previous post on the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, which saw Chris Hedges, an ordained minister and prize-winning journalist, in excoriating form on the violence never far from the US body politic and now closer than ever as an empire in terminal decline – whose true nature and origins may not be named – flails in drunken search of quack remedies. Here Novara Media’s Michael Walker, and more effectively Aaron Bastani, apply a wider lens to the Kirk slaying. After condemning it unequivocally, as do I, they use it as a start point for a fascinating discussion, without prejudice as to the political motives of the killer, on acts of adventurist terror of the kind condemned – not on pacificist grounds but as politically infantile – by every major thinker on the Left since Lenin …

… and for decades the near exclusive tool of the far Right.

How could Washington not have had forewarning and given blessing to Israel’s murderous, but unsuccessfully so, strike against the Hamas negotiators in Doha? Given that Qatar bristles with state of the art US military defence and early warning systems? Given too that those eight F-15s and four F-35s had to pass through the airspace of two other ‘close US allies’, Jordan and Saudi Arabia?

And how can any nation under the sun, even those whose rulers are welded by Faustian pact of one form or other to that dying empire, fail to conclude that Washington’s word, like Israel’s, is not worth the paper it’s written on?

Near the close of my post twelve days ago – Road to WW3. Part 4: Only Connect – I invoked the old saw that those the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Here to chew the fat over whether, if this be madness yet may there be method in’t, are the two Alexes at the Duran.

Where has Sebastian Sas – “a guy from the East who lives in the West, rediscovering the joy of life after a few challenging years [and] passionate about history, geopolitics and fishing” – been all my life?

That’s a daft question. Young enough and then some to be my son, he hasn’t been anywhere for most of my life. But unlike the others referred to in this post, Sebastian Sas was unknown to me till yesterday when, in idle serendipity, I tuned into this upstart. Why not, I asked, give the guy a hearing on those mystery drones over Poland?

Glad I did. He’s not only well informed but his exuberance of style is a breath of fresh air.

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