BRITISH DEVIOUSNESS

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—The Orwellian plot thickens when the authors of the boilerplate Russian Report then conclude by urging MI5 to be given more secretive powers to collaborate with social media networks in order to control information in the name of combating a “hostile state threat”. This is a sinister, anti-democratic call worthy of a dictatorship for censoring and blackballing any dissenting views under the guise of “defending democracy”.

ERIC ZUESSE—Yulia Skripal was a Russian citizen who only shortly before her airline flight to UK to visit with her father, had become engaged in Russia to marry a fellow Russian (and none of the couple’s parents approved of their intended marriage; this caused both Yulia and her fiancé great distress), when, on 4 March 2018, she and Sergei were somehow poisoned by a chemical that UK’s Porton Down intelligence laboratory soon thereafter identified as being a “nerve agent” which might have been novichok, but whose source and country of origin the Porton Down lab was unable to identify with any certainty. UK’s Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, said that Porton Down had identified the chemical as having been made in Russia, but he was simply lying, as he routinely does. (He’s famous for it, actually, like Trump is.)

JONATHAN COOK—It seems Bristol’s political class today are little more responsive to the popular will than they were 200 years ago.

The point is that the gains made by ordinary people, and conceded so reluctantly by the establishment, always came through confrontation. Rights were won because of events termed “riots”, because of popular protest, because of disobedience. Protest – violent and non-violent, explicit and threatened – was at the root of everything we now identify as progress.

MATT EHRET—When it became evident that the story of the laboratory origins of COVID-19 wasn’t going to disappear on its own, a new counter-narrative was spun which involved embracing the evidence of the laboratory origins while shifting the blame from the hands of Anglo-American intelligence to… China.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—In some countries, which are seen as close allies of the West, like Indonesia and India, even speaking about independence can lead people to imprisonment, torture, rape, disappearance, and death. In Indian-administered Kashmir and Indonesian “administered” West Papua, hundreds of thousands have already vanished. In such places, just waving a flag of independence, can abruptly end human life. But in the Western lexicon, both Indonesia and India are defined as “democracies”, and their political systems are hardly ever attacked or criticized. No sanctions are imposed due to “human rights violations”.