The summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that took place in Tehran on 19th July is reminiscent of the meeting that took place in the same venue in 1943 between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin. The similarities extend not only to the place but also to other circumstances. The nations represented by the three leaders of 1943 were in a state of war; the same applies to the three nations whose representatives gathered in Tehran of 2022. Seventy-nine years ago the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in hostilities against Germany, and – in the case of the United States and partly the United Kingdom – against Japan.

Today Russia is in deep conflict with the collective West through the war by proxy in Ukraine, Iran has been a besieged state – i.e. suffering from a variety of Western sanctions – for more than forty years while Turkey – though formally the West’s ally and a member of NATO – is straddling the West-East political divide, increasingly flirting with Moscow, especially since the failed coup d’état carried out by (pro-)Western powers against Recep Erdoğan.

Yes, there are issues that threaten to break up the political unity formed between Ankara, Tehran and Moscow – with Syria and the Turkish provision of Bayraktar drones to Ukraine coming at the top of the list of divergences – yet, the factors that glue the alliance emerge equally powerful. Now wonder that at more or less the same time the American president visited Israel and Saudi Arabia, as if consolidating these three nations against the aforementioned triangle. Continue reading →

Information is a commercial item or – to say it better – it is an inexhaustible series of items. We, humans, need to know about what is happening so as to be able to run our business or simply to slake our curiosity. Information needs to be accurate and unbiased; it needs to be collected and forwarded. No one person can do it on his own. First newspapers maintained a number of correspondents here and there. No single newspaper was rich enough to have correspondents in all the interesting places in the world. They began exchanging information and paying for it. Ultimately it was the collective customer – the reader – who paid the price. At a time in the past someone had a brilliant idea (and had sufficient resources) to establish a news agency for the purpose of solely gathering information and selling it to news outlets. It worked.

News agencies have become numerous around the globe, but the most important include Agence France Presse, the Associated Press and Reuters. They all claim to be providers of objective, unbiased information, but that certainly is not the case; but first things first.

An agency needs to have a correspondent or an office somewhere in the world, someone who collects information and relays it to the agency. A correspondent works on the spot, makes contact with people important locally or witnesses to events in person (he needs someone to notify him of unfolding events), speaks the local language as he has learnt it or relies on interpreters, which in either case is a barrier to overcome; most importantly, a correspondent has his own political, moral and philosophical stance through which he filters the information that is fed to him; a correspondent is employed by an agency precisely because his views overlap with those of the agency’s bosses! The filter is then doubly strong. Continue reading →

or a few questions and observations

A few days ago a monument to the so-called Windrush Generation was unveiled with all the pomp and the presence of Prince William and Princes Kate. The monument depicts a man and a woman with their child, all Jamaicans, on suitcases. It reminds the viewers of the 1948 event when the first group of Jamaicans arrived in Great Britain on the Empire Windrush, later to be followed by many, many more. The United Kingdom’s government, the queen, Prince William, the BBC and all the media hastened to celebrate the occasion and emphasize the enormous contribution to British culture made by Jamaicans. It was also reminded that Jamaicans sacrificed themselves and their well-being as they hurried to arrive in Britain to help rebuild the country after the war. All of this makes one wonder.

Jamaica, just as the other Caribbean countries, ranks among the poorest in the world, with the highest crime rate. How on earth
① could people from a country like that contribute “enormously” to British culture and economy, and
② why on earth the Jamaicans being capable of making such enormous contributions to a very well developed country are not able to raise their own state from poverty and crime?

Great Britain’s benefactors

These are legitimate questions, are they not? The sycophantic statements made by the prince and others make one believe that Britain could not have done without those Jamaicans and that those Jamaicans virtually sacrificed themselves for the sake of Great Britain. Needless to say, it was reminded that they were not accepted by the then British society and they faced – yes, you guessed it right! – racism. Still, they would flock to Britain and they did their best to “make an enormous contribution” to the nation that – to put it mildly – did not like them. One is led to believe that the United Kingdom could not have survived the post-war period without those Jamaicans and that the United Kingdom would fare far worse today if stripped of Jamaican aid. Continue reading →

Monuments are pulled down, names of heroes – tarnished, past exploits – mocked, tradition – ridiculed, anything held sacred up to very recently – denounced in the strongest terms. Are these things done by the conqueror in regard to the defeated? In such a case all of the above would be understandable but no. All these things are done by the powerful West to itself. The Occident is suiciding itself in a very ugly manner. It still produces technological wonders and its popular culture – first of all movies and music – is still in high demand everywhere in the world, but its societies are growing weaker and weaker, softer and softer, more and more childless with every decade. They are indifferent to having themselves replaced by the Third World people and they do not care about their past and traditions. What is happening?

The Occident may be fixed on dismantling itself just like that, without any particular reason, or it might be that it has fallen victim to a hostile takeover. The powers that be acting from within have devised just three psychological processes with which they perfectly control the Western man. These are guilt, shame and the feeling of nobleness or occupying moral high ground.

The Western man has been made to feel guilty of his past: slavery, colonialism, xenophobia and racism that were practised by some of his ancestors.

The Western man has been made ashamed of being white, of being Caucasian, of leading the world, of bearing the burden of raising the other peoples of the earth from their backwardness.

The Western man has been made to believe that he needs to atone for all the wrong things that his ancestors did, and that this is the way to his salvation; he’s been made to believe that prostration and capitulation, that self-denial and pathological altruism will absolve him of the inherent grave sin of racism, xenophobia, and intolerance while it will also help to strip himself of the privilege of being white.

With these three reins, three steering wheels, three psychological tools the whole West has been rendered defenceless, obedient and even docile. Ah yes, there are two more weapons for those few who stubbornly refuse to accept such a vision of the world and these are deplatforming (a modern term for ostracism or censorship) and intimidation. Gefira 65 entitled “The Self-Destruction of the Occident” explores the mechanism behind this self-imposed or induced annihilation.