I grew up in an English-speaking country in an era when there was a smug but possibly merited attitude that free-speech was an Anglo-Saxon speciality, like prime roast beef.

It was a fin de siècle era.

I recall we viewed the coming millenium with some awe, although it seemed a long time off.

Tweet from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Virginia Trioli re 9-11; a rare gem of actual communication from a 'journalist' paid by the Australian taxpayer, who incessantly repeats duplicitious nonsense about 9-11 & 'terrorism' - piffle that would insult the intelligence of a child

’2001′ was also a memorable year back in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the title of Arthur C Clarke’s best-known futuristic sci-fi adventure – as well as the extremely popular Stanley Kubrick movie based on Clarke’s book.

Anyhow, if someone had told me back then, that by 2010 I’d need to watch Russian TV for honest interviews about the most crucial event of the century (an event that happened to occur in 2001) –  I’d most definitely have said “You’re Joking!”

And yet it is so.

Above is Dr Kevin Barrett, the man Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly once suggested should be taken out by the mafia and dumped in Boston Harbor. The excellent  interview is courtesy of  RT.com. Sound warning: the video comes with unexpected extras at the end

Which year will material like this be covered by the English-speaking world’s mainstream media?

As a youngster I once fell in with a rather rough crowd of boys who liked to set off fire-crackers, also known as ‘bangers’.

Fireworks were not hard to get hold of at the time – and my apprentice delinquent friends knew how to hustle. The group of us would head out of an evening and cause minor mischief – simple acts of puerile wickedness such as blowing up garden gnomes.

As soon as I plucked up the courage to give these maniacs a wide berth, I never looked back. Their company got on my nerves. It wasn’t just guilty feelings of wrong-doing or the increasing likelihood we’d all get caught. I was seriously concerned they’d blow me up too – not out of spite as much as by accident. Immature maniacs and gunpowder are an explosive mix.

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin: keeping cool in the company of hoons

I was reminded of this experience yesterday when I watched the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, emerge from an exhausting closed session of the UN Security Council. The meeting had been called at Russia’s behest. It asked to discuss the latest tensions on the Korean peninsula and try to preserve the peace.

CNN covered Mr Churkin’s press conference, which seemed to be conducted entirely in flawless English. Churkin’s tone was ‘diplomatic’ – but unlike his western counterparts, he was not required to purvey blatant disinformation. Consquently his words were reasonably easy to understand.

The weary Ambassador looked like I felt after surviving an evening out with a bunch of banger-throwing bad boys. He’d survived the experience – but at considerable cost to his nerves.

But what about Korea? What about the world?

Will there be “peace in our time?”

That’s not so clear.

As far as I can tell, the pugnacious leadership in Seoul, egged on by the Americans and the rest of the squalid US cheer squad, is insisting on its ‘right’ to carry out military exercises so close to the North Korean border they’re actually shelling disputed territory.

Why, for God’s sake? WHY?

The only possible reason is to ratchet up tension. Why do that? (I recall the adolescent brat who enjoyed knife-throwing and took offense when I objected to him demonstrating his prowess by narrowly missing my feet. Who need’s that?)

I can’t think of any good reasons to tempt fate like this – not for Koreans at any rate. In any outright conflict, the South with its superpower-on-steroids big buddy would almost certainly prevail. But much of the Korean peninsula – north and south – could become nuclear wasteland in the process. Millions could die. Land could become uninhabitable.

That’s not victory. It’s insanity. Why do that? Who needs it?

Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN, gave her press conference shortly after the Russian. She explained the inability of the Security Council to come up with a unanimous position was partly due to the reluctance of some countries to condemn the North for sinking the South Korean submarine Chenoan back in March 2010. She didn’t spell it out, but Russia was clearly one of the Governments that resisted this push.

Rice is too much of a liar – and Churkin was too diplomatic – to explain what that dispute is really about. Russia won’t condemn North Korea over the Chenoan incident because it is not convinced North Korea is actually guilty of the allegations against it. That’s for good reasons.

Evidence over the Chenoan is contradictory and inconclusive at best. Western nations no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt. We’ve lied too often – and been caught out lying too often. Wisely, the Russians and the Chinese no longer believe everything these governments and their corrupt mass media say – if indeed they ever were so naive. But they do prefer eshewing open accusations of ‘liar’, leaving that kind of plain-speaking to welterweights such as Presidents Chavez and Ahmadinejad. The Russians and Chinese are extremely interested in avoiding World War Three. That’s also for a very good reason. They’re not completely nuts.

Are governments of the western world completely nuts? There are alarming signs that might indeed be the case. Certainly US policy over Korea makes no apparent sense.

If the idea is to end the division of Korea and bring about national reconciliation, this is an crazy way of setting about it. Committing to peace, opening borders, freeing up trade and facilitating the migration of people is the obvious way to help the North change for the better. There are complicating factors. For example, the Chinese have legitimate interests to protect. They don’t want American missiles on their border. That’s understandable – and fair enough. The best solution for Korea is surely is the best solution for the world. Koreans need demilitarisation and disarmament – not a ratcheting up of hostility and tension.

All the Korean people I can remember meeting have been delightful, friendly and very intelligent people. Korea has had a blighted last century. It’s protracted division in this limbo state of ‘no war, no peace’ is a tragedy. But Koreans – north and south – can rightly be proud of remarkable achievments. South Korea has laboured hard to develop one of the most advanced economies on earth. North Korea has survived and remained independent – against all the odds.

Left alone, Koreans could unite at their own pace and lead the world by example. But will they be left alone? Will the bodgy bullies who’ve foisted their presence on Korea blow them up in childish miscalculations?

US bombing of Wonsan, 1951: the brutal war in Korea that still awaits peaceful resolution

A number of commentators have mentioned there seems to be a whiff of August 1914 in the air. With luck, that’s just frazzled nerves and paranoia. But one interest group on earth is interested – or so it would seem – in getting a hot war started. It’s not much bothered about East Asia – but once bangers go off they can start exploding all over the place…

That interest group is the State of Israel. Its main obesession seems to be trying to destroy Iran (with Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon also on the priority hitlist). The whole idea is complete luncacy of course, But the existence of such a push is not in doubt. There’s no secret about the Zionists’ lust to see Iran attacked.

But Israel has at least two problems.

First, it rather lazily wants the USA to do the dirty work on its behalf. Why risk Israeli pilots if another, bigger maniac State is willing to serve as proxy? Yet sections of the US government and military are resisting.

Second – and I suspect this is the key constraint tempering the Israel Lobby’s war lust – it’s maniacs-in-chief know full well that another war started in the middle east would be blamed on Israel (and by extension on Zionists and Jews as a whole) by a majority of the world’s people. However much the western media might spin stories about ‘Iranian provocations’ or uncritically report new false-flag operations, the maniacs know a significant proportion of the people wouldn’t be fooled again.

However… a war that started in Korea, half a world away. Who could blame poor little Israel for that?

Warmongering is a crazy game. Humanity can’t this craziness any longer. The stakes are so high in the 21st century that war, quite simply, must be set aside. It’s a childish thing we shouldn’t do any more…

For the sake of us all, North and South Korea must cool it and do some serious peace-making work.

Zionists and other warmongers should butt out and give peace a chance.

No more wars for Israel!

Every now and again, they throw us a bone.

A nice cute story to take our minds off the gloom of economic recession, the doom of ecological catastrophe, the anguish of false-flag terror and the misery of war without end.

Anna Chapman nabbed! Britain's annual expenditure on 'counter-terrorism and intelligence' is over £3 billion - but whoever said it's a waste of money?

The story of the ‘Russian spies’ busted in the USA and Britain is one such tale.

For all I know it may actually be true – but really, are we expected to take this stuff seriously?

Hoping to get a moderately rational take on the drama, I turned to The Guardian, that venerable leftish British newspaper with a reputation (occasionally deserved) for serious journalism.

Here are some extracts from what Richard Norton-Taylor and two other hot-shot  journalists report about the most notorious of the Russian spies’, Anna Chapman aka Anya Kushchenko.

in 2005, she was, he said, “a ‘green, wet behind the ears’ type of girl“.

…less than two years later, Chapman was being wined and dined at Annabel’s and Cipriani in the company of Vincent Tchenguiz, a private equity billionaire.

“When I met her, she didn’t know which way was up,” said her husband, then a 21-year-old British student

But then, Alex Chapman said, his wife began to change.

In 2005, he said, she began having meetings with people she referred to as “Russian friends”.

“She was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money” he said

Later that year, Chapman left her husband and had moved into a cramped, two-bedroom flat behind Marble Arch tube station with Elena, her flatmate. She began seeing a French man, Laurent Tailleur, and moved in with him in 2007. She lived frugally, friends said, and had no money.

… those who knew her then struggle to see signs of the “practised deceiver” described by US prosecutors in court this week. “She was a simple girl,” said Camilleri. “She was all about parties and didn’t seem that bright. She wasn’t constructive in her work, she just sat at her computer and booked my business trips.”

Her husband, however, describes his former wife as “extremely intelligent”, and claims she has an IQ of 162. She graduated in 2004 with a first-class honours degree in economics despite having to shuttle back and forth between Russia and London to complete the course.

Observant readers may notice one or two discrepancies in this account.

Anna is by turns rich and poor, inexperienced and sophisticated, extravagant and frugal, a bimbo and a genius.

But who cares? She looks great!

My suspicion is that the story is essentially bullshit – part silly attempt to distract from the genuine endemic problem of Zionist infiltration of western nations – part pathetic justification for the billions now spent each year by underemployed spooks in the USA, Britain and the rest of the western fools’ club who, far from preventing ‘terror’, preside over it’s systematic deployment.

But if it happens to be true that Anna Chapman really is a spy, then I think Russia is generous to loan such fine-looking and talented women to the rest of the world.

The churlish Anglo-Saxons should shut up and appreciate their good fortune.

As for the FBI, CIA, MI5 and the rest – is their reputation really so bad that they can’t they even turn Russian agents any more?

Is that why they ran off and snitched to the press?

That is sad.

About 36 hours ago, in the aftermath of the UN Security Council’s vote to punish Iran with yet another round of sanctions because of its nuclear program, a rumour circulated that Russia would freeze delivery to Iran of the long-awaited S-300 missile defence system.

The story, reported by Reuters New Agency, was based on a media release from Interfax. It was widely – and excitedly – repeated by the mainstream TV networks.

President Putin meets 'Sarko the Sayan'

Hours later,  the Russian Foreign Ministry denied the reports, saying that only sale of mobile S-300s would be frozen. This retraction was not as widely reported as the initial Interfax report of cancellation.

Today comes another twist in the saga. Following a meeting in Paris between Russian President Putin and French President Sarkosy (Sarkosy is widely rumoured to be a Mossad agent), the Russian President left without fronting reporters’ questions.

According to the Xinhuanet.com news agency, Putin confirmed at his meeting that the sale os S-300′s would be totally frozen – see Putin says no missile sale to Iran: press. This was rapidly re-reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz: Russia to freeze missile sale to Iran, Putin tells Sarkozy.

In the absence of a formal, high-level announcement from the Russian Government, it’s hard to know what’s really going on. The impression is that Israel – and its agents – are trying to ‘push’ Russia’s foreign policy. Unhappy with what the Russians are actually saying, they repeatedly put words into the Russian Government’s mouth.

So – why should this peace-loving, armaments-loathing blogger care if the sale of S-300s goes ahead?

In a nutshell, I care about peace. I want Israel – and Zionist-manipulated governments such as the Obama Administration – to leave Iran in peace.

If Israel attacks Iran, Iran can take strong retaliatory action. But most of this is action against the USA – and the world economy as a whole. Yet again, Zionists could start a war, then leave it to others to fight and be weakened and ruined by war.

An advanced defensive missile system in Iran may deter the Israelis from striking.

The decision by China and Russia to join western governments on the UN Security Council in the latest resolution directed against Iran was a major disappointment. A lot of arm-twisting must have been applied to get that result. It stands against reason and basic principles of fairness to punish Iran, which operates within the rubric of the International Atomic Energy Authority. Even more outrageous is the timing: this is the week after nuclear-armed Israel showed its vicious brutality yet again, in defiance of the entire world.

• Iran hasn’t attacked any country in hundreds of years; Israel attacks its neighbours so often it’s hard to keep count.
• Iran has no nuclear weapons, nor does it have a nuclear weapons program; Israel has hundreds.
• Iran opens its nuclear facilities to international inspection; Israel never does.

So why is the UN Security Council punishing Iran, while maintaining silence about Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons?

It’s a very good question.