The Excavator

Changing of The Seasons: Disciplining The Wahhabis Again

2026-10-14T13:30:25.310-04:00

Ibrahim Pasha, the "annihilator of the wahhabis."

Related: Mocha.

An excerpt from, "Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East" by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 98 - 101:

The Bombay authorities had been concerned about "pirate" attacks on Gulf shipping for over fifteen years. 'These attacks were generally blamed on the Qawasim (usually called Joasmees by the British), the trading Arabs based at Ras al-Khaimah and Sharjah on the south-eastern Gulf coast, who in the 1760s had also taken territory on the opposite, Persian shore. There was a history of rivalry between the major tribes engaged in trade within and outside the Gulf, and the Qawasim's main aim was to take trade away from the independent port city of Muscat, which had become the major commercial force on the western Indian Ocean seaboard on account of Omani trading connections with India and the East African coast. How far this trade warfare deserved the name "piracy" is a moot point, but Bombay used the term in justifying action to protect its merchants who traded with the Gulf. Since 1686, the EIC had operated a naval force, the Bombay Marine, primarily to safeguard merchant shipping. This was not easy, since the Marine had only a dozen ships, and Bombay was very reluctant to get drawn into disputes between Arab tribes.
After 1798, two problems complicated the politics of the Gulf from Bombay's perspective. One was fear that France might seek to build up local infuence, particularly in Muscat, which Napoleon had openly courted in 1799. The other was that the Qawasim began to pay tribute to the Wahhabi and accept their protection, making the latter a force in Gulf politics. The imam of Muscat was determined to keep his independence from all parties, and could see the benefits of playing Britain and France off against each other. Moreover, the climate there was appalling for Britons: four residents died between 1800 and 1809. From 1810, the idea of a permanent agent in Muscat was abandoned in favour of hoping that, now that France had been deprived of its Mauritius naval base, the lucrative trade between Muscat and Bombay would keep the imam sufficiently loyal to Britain. From 1803 onwards, the growth of Wahhabi and Qasimi power on Muscat's borders had offered Britain--or potentially France---the chance to protect it against its rivals. British agents toyed with offering Muscat this protection from time to time, but Bombay decided it did not want to take sides against the Wahhabi. It gravitated instead towards the idea of trying to secure a regional balance between the previously dominant Muscat and its new challengers, which would give the Bombay Marine a recognised role in the Gulf. This became its default policy in the years to come. In 1799, Duncan in Bombay, Jones, and Manesty had already cooperated to apply British pressure to settle a dispute between Baghdad and Muscat. The resolution of the dispute allowed the imam to turn his attention to another of his objectives---an attack on the wealthy island of Bahrain. This was a reminder that local enmities were almost impossible to suppress entirely.
The imam of Muscat was killed in battle against the Wahhabi in 1804. This increased Qasimi power in the Gulf: they now took Hormuz and Bandar Abbas as well as Qishm, and so controlled its entrance. In December 1804, they captured two ships belonging to Manesty. In Bombay, Duncan ordered his resident in Muscat, David Seton, to cooperate with the new ruler of Muscat against the Qawasim only if he was sure that it would not offend the Wahhabi. Seton coordinated his tactics with Manesty, who was keen to reach an understanding with the Wahhabi, not least to protect his own trading fleet. In February 1806, Seton secured a treaty with the Qawasim in which they pledged to respect EIC property and restore one of Manesty's ships. The presence of a British Gulf squadron during the crisis of 1807 also helped to keep the peace locally. However in late 1808, the Qawasim---now hunting in flotillas of up to twenty vessels-- increased their activities, and attacked over a dozen merchant vessels from Bombay, as well as the Sylph, a Bombay Marine ship. It was ceremonially purified with rose water and a number of crew members were killed before the rest were rescued. In May 1809, Manesty's country ship Minerva was intercepted after a fierce battle. Since some of the attackers were killed, forty-five of the (mostly Lascar Indian) crew had their throats cut in revenge, to the cry of "Allah Akbar." The women on board--the young Armenian wife of Robert Taylor, then stationed at Bushehr, her female servant, and her baby- were taken to Ras al-Khaimah, but then bought by a contact friendly to the British, and finally rescued.
Now Bombay could no longer ignore demands for reprisals, owing to merchant anger and to a concern that the regional balance had swung so far towards the Wahhabi that Muscat's survival was endangered. This was also the period of maximum concern about French influence in Persia, and potential French regional dominance. All this explains the attempt to show British might by bombarding Ras al-Khaimah in November 1809. Even so, Bombay did not want to antagonise the Wahhabi, especially as they seemed likely to become the major regional player if the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The expedition was a purely naval one to teach the Qawasim a lesson: Ras al-Khaimah was badly damaged, but the soldiers then withdrew, in order to avoid clashes with land forces supposedlv coming to reinforce it. Though several dozen Qasimi dhows were destroyed, this was only a small percentage of the fleet; the rest had been hidden.
The Wahhabi leader Saud urged a truce and promised not to molest British ships. The truce continued uneasily for six years. Saud died in 1814. By 1815. Qasimi attacks on other traders en route to India, in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, were so frequent that Bombay's naval authority seemed in peril. Moreover, in 1816, the Qasimi chief announced that only English Christians would henceforth be exempt from his attacks, not Indian merchants; this was plainly unacceptable to the traders of Surat and Bombay. In 1818, planning began in India for a major attack on Qasimi strongholds.
This bold step was possible because several things had changed. The Napoleonic Wars had ended without the Ottoman Empire collapsing. Instead, the local balance of forces between the Ottomans and the Wahhabi had shifted in the former's favour, because since 1810 Mechmet Ali of Egypt had been reducing Wahhabi power in the Hijaz and central Arabia. Mehmet Ali had been ordered to attack the Wahhabi by Sultan Mahmud, who probably hoped that a tough struggle in inhospitable climes would preoccupy both sides for many years and limit the danger to the Porte from either of them. By 1816, the Wahhabi were penned into their Arabian heartland, and had no capacity for aggression for the foreseeable future. In view of their new weakness, the greater danger was that continuing disorder in the Gulf would damage Britain's prestige and her local commercial relationships. A continuation of disruption would damage "our interests in Egypt and in the Pachalic of Bagdad but also at the Ottoman Court." In 1818, finally, Mehmet Ali's son Ibrahim reached Diriyya and captured the Wahhabi leaders, including their new chief Abdullah. He was sent to Constantinople with two followers, where they were forced to listen to the lute, against all their principles, and then beheaded. Rich's idea of an alliance with Abdullah was, to the benefit of his reputation, lost to history. Harford Jones later suggested that the "atheist Turk" Mehmet Ali had been able to suppress the Wahhabi threat, temporarily, only by betraying his word on several occasions, and by repeatedly bribing Bedouin tribes.
The destruction of the Wahhabi threat gave the Indian government the chance to strike at the Qawasim, while the end of the Mahratta wars freed up enough soldiers for a powerful expedition. In October 1819, 2,800 European and Indian troops set sail in three warships and seventeen transports under Sir William Grant Keir. They completely destroyed Ras al-Khaimah in December, and the fortifications and larger ships in most of the nearby ports, with the loss of five British soldiers and four hundred killed or wounded Qawasim. A garrison of 800 troops was left at Ras al-Khaimah. A treaty was negotiated with the Qawasim, which in the course of 1820 was broadened into a "General Treaty" on Gulf piracy signed by most of the Arab chiefs. This outlawed piracy and bound the chiefs to register their trading ships under the same flag. If they kept the terms of the treaty, they would be free to trade with British ports. Britain would, if necessary, coordinate the punishment of any pirate attacks. This was the beginning of the Trucial system of British protection of the Gulf chiefs, which was to make Britain dominant there. However, the initial intention was for only a limited intervention. The treaty gave the Bombay Marine no right of search; it was implied that tribes would resolve their petty disputes themselves, because of the "state of equilibrium" between them secured by the British.

Wikipedia:

Ibrahim Pasha (1789 – 10 November 1848) was an Egyptian general and politician; he was the commander of both the Egyptian and Ottoman armies and the eldest son of Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Wāli and unrecognized Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. He was the second ruler of Egypt from the Muhammad Ali dynasty and ruled from 20 July 1848 to 10 November 1848.
. . .Muhammad Ali had already begun to introduce European discipline into his army, and Ibrahim had probably received some training, but his first campaign was conducted more in the old Asiatic style than his later operations. The campaign lasted two years, and ended in the destruction of the House of Saud as a political power. Muhammad Ali landed at Yanbu, the port of Medina, in 1813. The holy cities had been recovered from the Saudis, and Ibrahim's task was to follow them into the desert of Nejd and destroy their fortresses. Such training as the Egyptian troops had received, and their artillery, gave them a marked superiority in the open field. But the difficulty of crossing the desert to the Saudis stronghold of Diriyah, some 400 miles east of Medina, made the conquest a very arduous one. By the end of September 1818 he had forced the Saudi leader Abdullah bin Saud to surrender, and had taken Diriyah, which he sacked. Ibrahim pasha was called in Egyptian “Qahir Al Wahhabiyyin” (annihilator of the wahhabis) for his brutality against Wahhabis.

Never Forget, Never Forgive

2026-10-13T10:50:24.038-04:00

Thus far Yemen has shown incredible restraint towards the apes in Saudi Arabia, as has Russia in Ukraine.

They may come to regret that policy.

Mercy is for the weak, not the guilty.

The Wahhabi tyrants in Riyadh imposed a man-made famine on Yemen from 2015, causing the world's worst humanitarian crisis

85,000 children died due to malnutrition in first 3 years

By 2021, 2.3 million children had been pushed to brink of starvation

Genocidal policy - and one… pic.twitter.com/7MTtsNwBmT
— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) October 13, 2026

Europe's Collective Suicide

2026-10-12T13:16:35.400-04:00

China’s greatest advantage is its freedom from the Jewish-Christian-Muslim virus.

Ever since China moved away from a strict interpretation of Communism it has flourished economically.

Europe and America have gone in the opposite direction. Ideology, Jewish supremacist policies, and fruitless wars have destroyed the economies of the West.

North Stream happened - paired with dumb self harming sanctions against Russia. https://t.co/PmRQsD4GJa
— -- GEROMAN -- time will tell - 👀 -- (@GeromanAT) October 12, 2026

The entire Europe in one picture 😄 https://t.co/P24lXPGHMg
— Aleksander 🇵🇱🇷🇺 (@dhulqarnayn786) October 12, 2026

Israel's Brief Moment In The Sun Will End

2026-10-12T09:21:37.169-04:00

"Is there a RACE left in England? Has it ANY will left to survive? You can carry slaughter to Ireland. Will that save you? I doubt it. Nothing can save you, save a purge. Nothing can save you, save an affirmation that you are English.
Whore Belisha is NOT. Isaccs is not. No Sassoon is an Englishman, racially. No Rothschild is English, no Strakosch is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Khan, Baruch, Schiff, Sieff, or Solomon was ever yet born Anglo-Saxon.
And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your empire, and it is this filth that elects your politicians.
You have lost your tradition. You have not even learned what Lord Byron told you. You are, as even that foul rag the Times tells you, a little late in making a start.
In the year 1942 Anno Domini, there is only one start you can make. And that is a start toward being England. A refusal to be a province of Israel, or an outpost of Yankee-Judaea." - Ezra Pound, March 15, 1942.

"He who deeply considers, with wise thoughts,
this foundation and this dark life,
old in spirit, often remembers
so many ancient slaughters, and says these words:
'Where has the horse gone? where is the rider? where is the giver of gold?
Where are the seats of the feast? where are the joys of the hall?
O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!
O the glory of princes! How the time passed away,
slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!
There still stands in the path of the dear warriors
a wall wondrously high, with serpentine stains.
A storm of spears took away the warriors,
bloodthirsty weapons, wyrd the mighty,
and storms batter these stone walls,
frost falling binds up the earth,
the howl of winter, when blackness comes,
night's shadow looms, sends down from the north
harsh hailstones in hatred of men.
All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,
the working of wyrd changes the world under heaven.
Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,
here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,
all the framework of this earth will stand empty.’" - The Wanderer.

I saw a video yesterday of a Ukrainian Rabbi laughing in an interview on Ukrainian television about how his sons are military recruiters, implying they will never see combat.

The same aversion to personal and familial sacrifice is pretty much the same for the political elites in Europe and elsewhere, whether Islamic clerics in the Muslim world or Christian pastors in America who push endless war in the Middle East but never choose to commit their own family members for the cause of Israel.

That explains the gist of modern wars. Goys dying for Jews and masses dying for elites. Men being dragged like sheep and drugged to fight wars that their own families will never benefit from.

The evil war in Ukraine has nothing to do with stopping Putin or saving Ukraine from Russia. It is a war being waged for other reasons.

Artificial hatreds and old resentments were cynically stirred in Ukraine to get the men there to fight Russia.

In a real war for existence you know who the enemy is in your bones. You don't need to be hoodwinked into battle. The real enemy comes to your door looking for a fight. False flags and propaganda are for cattle, not for warriors.

Modern imperial wars have produced few true warriors.

I have said before that the days of the goys blindly dying for the Jews are over, and I hope that's true. We'll see. Two world wars should be more than enough. Let's not have a third.

But it is not yet a reality, not in Ukraine or in Yemen. In both of those conflicts the goys are dying for the interests of Jews and of Israel.

In Ukraine the mobilization of the masses reached inhumane and insane levels quite a while ago.

The mobilization for the war in Syria was easier because of the Martyrdom dream that Islamic clerics like to sell to gullible Muslim recruits.

The nature of the mobilization doesn't matter when the end result benefits the same actor in all these theaters.

Israel emerged as the sole victor in Syria after the work that was done by Saudi Arabia and Turkey to herd the martyrdom seekers into that sacred land.

Syria is not ordinary real estate. It has a special place in history. And it has been reduced to the status of a whore.

In that war we all witnessed stolen valour, as the ones who defeated the ISIS threat, the Syrian army, Hezbollah, and the Kurds, were all discarded like trash when the time came to write a new chapter for the future of the country.

Syria under its new Al-Qaeda management has been relegated to the role of an errand boy in the region. It is no longer an important geopolitical factor. Russia and Iran let a precious prize slip from their fingers like the political retards that they are. Assad is still nowhere to be seen and true justice has not been done.

USrael won Syria without having to sacrifice any of its own blood. It was an impressive strategic victory.

But let's not get too carried away. Herding Muslims for USraeli wars isn't all that hard. I don't know who's dumber, the Muslim goys or the Christian ones.

Herding Christian goys for a new world war will be a much tougher challenge this time around. False flags alone won't get it done. The American people are waking up. The English have some life in them still. They're finally pulling back the curtain and finding out why their countries are in the toilet.

And Israel knows this. The Jews know it. They're scared. Killing Charlie Kirk was an act of desperation on their part. They can't stop the awakening. They will try to get in front of it and redirect it towards their evil goals but they will fail.

The days of Christians dying for Jews will come to an end.

The days of Muslims dying for Jews will come to an end.

Israel will be a brief memory.

That lame Wailing Wall will not even be a museum piece.

Netanyahu Grilled In Israeli Parliament For Financing Hamas Through Diplomatic Backdoor

2026-10-11T22:17:16.535-04:00

Say what you want about Israel, but they go after their political and military leaders in public and in parliament.

No Western or Muslim polity allows this type of dynamism and public show of defiance.

In Iran they just execute critics of the government overnight. In Pakistan and Turkey they jail them. In Saudi Arabia they bribe them. In America they blackmail them into silence, financially ruin their lives, or quietly kill them.

As for Europe, I don't think European parliaments have the same democratic spirit as maybe they once did. They're very tame that way.

And China, what is there to be angry or unhappy about? The Chinese leaders have it all figured out. Business is booming there. No wars. No stupid stuff. Their political leadership is the most competent in the world.

Netanyahu gets EXPOSED 👹

“He funded Hamas, he’s a terrorist.” pic.twitter.com/xLv08bNTPx
— Jvnior (@Jvnior) October 11, 2026

Christmas In October

2026-10-11T14:50:31.274-04:00

Peace and security must be for all or for none.

The Houthi campaign against Saudi airports is a taste of things to come.

The basic story here is that the world where the imperial and sub-imperial power could deliver one-way terror with the air weapon, while they were themselves protected from any retaliation by the fellah is…
— Policy Tensor (@policytensor) October 11, 2026

BREAKING: 🇸🇦🇾🇪 Yemen is currently striking Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, with ballistic missiles
— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) October 11, 2026

The Western backed Saudi / UAE Coalition carried out 227 attacks on Sana'a Civilian Airport in Yemen in 7 years and the European Union of Hypocrisy said nothing. Your empty words mean nothing... https://t.co/mho9PNizsP
— Mick Wallace (@wallacemick) October 11, 2026

The Crisis of Leadership In Europe

2026-10-11T13:55:22.191-04:00

England is the problem child of Europe.

It is a matter of public record that British officials and leaders have done everything in their power to prosecute the war against Russia via the Ukrainian proxy.

Ukraine under Zelensky is not a sovereign state and all countries should have thrown out Ukrainian ambassadors long ago until it recovered its national sovereignty through new free and fair elections.

Trump can make all the deals with Russia that he wants. It won't matter until the head of the snake in London is removed from the picture.

At every diplomatic opportunity for a peace deal to emerge between the two sides in this war the devils in London have triggered attacks against Russia and endorsed Ukraine's worst instincts.

It was one thing for London to interfere in European security and wage endless war against Russia or Germany when it was a massive trade empire in the previous two centuries. Empires do what empires do: make war. You can't hate that. England had the means, the will, and the money to wage war wherever it chose to. And as an empire England was particularly vicious and nasty. As Ezra Pound said during his WWII broadcasts, the British have the "habit of employing the savage to wipe out the civilized rival."

But the U.K. is a mere province today and it needs to start acting like it. It has to take care of its own backyard and worry less about mainland Europe.

It is in London where the cancer that is the Rothschild banking family has grown into the existential global threat it is today.

The Rothschilds, not Russia, represent the single greatest threat to European peace and security. And until that cancer has been completely eliminated both England and Europe will continue their slide into a new medieval serfdom.

These demonic forces must be banished. There is no other solution. And Russia will not eliminate this threat. Putin has spoken of the vampire's ball but he doesn't name names.

The English people have to do it. They can save their country and all of Europe by ending the evil Rothschild dynasty once and for all.

BREAKING: "It would be funny if it weren’t so accurate and depressing."#EnergyCrisis #DieselShortage #Diesel #OwnGoal #SelfInflicted https://t.co/cDNWH1PirW pic.twitter.com/nFMOF7UGnb
— Harvey Wallbanger (@HarveyWall8angR) October 10, 2026

Fall Reading List

2026-10-10T14:16:36.134-04:00

"Jefferson & Hamilton: The Struggle for American Democracy" by Claude G. Bowers (1925). Read The New York Times review here.

"Hegel's Ladder" by H. S. Harris (1997). Read a brief breakdown of the book here.

"Free Agent: The Unseen War, 1941 - 1991" by Brian Crozier (1993). Read it here.

To be continued in future posts.

Sorrowful Volodymyr, Diesel Don, And Bad Vlad: The Deal That Shook Europe, Broke Ukraine, And Exposed Russia

2026-10-10T11:46:11.257-04:00

I don't have any well-studied thoughts about this diesel deal between Trump and Putin. I don't know enough about the political or economic ramifications to give an informed opinion.

But my gut is telling me that Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem are pulling a fast one over Europe yet again.

Teflon Don and his cronies are taking Europe to the cleaners after encouraging them for years to cut off all trade relations with Moscow.

Europe is becoming a forgotten province in the Jewish world order. Its interests do not count in the great geopolitical questions of our time. Every decision runs through Jerusalem, not Brussels. Brussels is an afterthought.

And Europe deserves it. When you wage war against your neighbour with the aim of splitting it into pieces and seizing its resources, and using poor Ukraine as a battering ram to do it, then you deserve to be defeated, robbed, and humiliated.

God does not like stupid people. And Europeans are being very stupid right now.

You know who's not stupid? Trump. He's a very smart man. He knows a good deal when he sees one. He's made deals with the Devil before so shaking hands with Putin to make a couple of bucks is just good business.

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇪🇺 SLAP FOR THE VASSALS

Europe is in shock after Trump made a deal with Putin and thanked him.

Europeans tried to isolate Putin for years, while the US does deals that benefit America. The EU destroys its industry and cuts itself off from cheap Russian energy, yet Trump… https://t.co/R3tHuvTXcH
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) October 10, 2026

Pyotr Rachkovsky, The Invention of Pseudo-History, And The Old Spy Game of Fomenting Terror

2026-10-09T06:12:47.603-04:00

Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, Chief of Okhrana, may have originated the infamous anti-Semitic tract, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Spectacular events like October 7 that capture the world's imagination and the rise of political terrorist groups like Hamas cannot be fully understood without knowing the history of spycraft, the role of agent provocateurs, and secret police techniques.

It is public knowledge by now that the Mossad either created Hamas or facilitated its political ascendancy in Gaza to split the Palestinian resistance and nurture the most extremist voices in that movement.

The Mossad has not done anything new by employing this tactic. It is using a playbook that was written in the previous two centuries.

All these national intelligence agencies learned the tricks of the trade from each other. Before the Mossad, CIA, MI6, and the KGB there was the Okhrana of Tsarist Russia and Scotland Yard of England.

The Okhrana used very clever strategems to try to keep the Russian Tsar on the throne. Ultimately it failed but its enemies learned a lot from its ingenious practices.

Israel, which is led almost entirely by Russian Jews, took from their old nemesis the Okhrana the idea of infiltrating and directing political opposition movements.

It is highly probable that the top leadership of Hamas are all Mossad double agents. It must be remembered that Hamas and Israel were on the same side in the illegal war against Syria.

Everything Hamas has done has been for Israel's greater benefit. October 7 was a Trojan Horse operation, a gift for Israel. It was the trap of traps. Strategically it was suicide.

That's not to discredit the battlefield courage of the rank and file of resistance groups. Soldiers in all armies and movements are courageous and selfless.

Israel created such a hopeless and violent situation in Gaza over the decades that the righteous youth gravitate to arms to exercise their instinct for self-defense. That is natural. But joining Hamas is equivalent to joining Mossad.

The Palestinians are in a bind. The tyranny they're living under has been perfected over the ages. The Jews learned from their former oppressors the Russians and the Romans. And they're taking out all their age-old aggression on these poor souls who just happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

II.

Wikipedia:

Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky ( 1853 – 1 November 1910) was chief of the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire. He was based in Paris from 1885 to 1902.

. . .After the assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881, the government moved against various revolutionary factions operated by émigrées or hiding out in Russia. Rachkovsky's principal mission was to compromise Russia's growing revolutionary movement.

. . .These faction fights provide the backdrop to the infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky's agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who authored the first edition in the early 1900s. The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia's growing social problems. Another agent of Rachkovsky, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who sent the forgery from France to Russia via her uncle General Pyotr Vasilyevich Orzhevsky.

. . .After the Revolution of 1905, martial law was introduced in Saint Petersburg. Rachkovsky was brought back to head the entire Okhrana, first as MVD Special Commissioner and then as the deputy director of Police.

Rachkovsky had the reputation of being an unrivaled master of intrigues and provocation. In 1902, he faked a letter by the leader of the Russian social democrats Georgy Plekhanov that accused Narodnaya Volya leaders of cooperation with the British Intelligence Service. This allowed the police to exploit mutual distrust and recrimination between the factions.

Wikipedia:

The Okhrana used many seemingly unorthodox methods in the pursuit of its mission to defend the Tsarist monarchy; indeed, some of the Okhrana's activities even contributed to the wave of domestic unrest and revolutionary terror that they were intended to quell. Perhaps most paradoxical of all was the Okhrana's collaboration with revolutionary organizations. Early Okhrana agents to work alongside revolutionaries included Lieutenant-Colonel Georgy Sudeykin of the Saint Petersburg Special Section, who, in 1882, set up an illegal printing operation to publish the revolutionary People's Will literature with Okhrana funds. Sudeykin and his colleague, a revolutionary-turned-police-informant named Sergey Degayev, passed drafts of the publication through Okhrana censors before printing. This episode marked the beginning of the Okhrana's efforts to surreptitiously observe, but also influence and undermine, revolutionary movements. This focus on infiltrating and influencing revolutionary groups, rather than merely identifying and arresting their members, intensified with the innovations of one Okhrana bureau chief, Sergey Zubatov. While P. I. Rachkovsky, as head of the Okhrana's Foreign Agency, had long ordered Okhrana agents to infiltrate and influence revolutionary movements abroad, Zubatov brought these tactics to a new level by setting up Okhrana-controlled trade unions, the foundation of police socialism. Perhaps recognizing the same discontent among factory workers that the Bolsheviks sought to exploit to start a revolution, Zubatov hoped the unions would mollify factory workers with improvements in working conditions and thus prevent workers from joining revolutionary movements that threatened the monarchy. To this end, Zubatov set up the Moscow Mechanical Production Workers' Mutual Aid Society in May 1901. After Zubatov became head of the Special Section in 1902, he expanded his trade unions from Moscow to St. Petersburg and to Southern Russia.

Zubatovite trade unions achieved moderate success at channeling workers' political agitations away from revolutionary movements and toward labor improvements, especially in the cities of Minsk and Odessa, with one high-ranking official noting that many revolutionaries and workers were joining the unions.[18] However, Zubatov, if not police socialism, became discredited in the summer of 1903 after the Okhrana officer in charge of the Odessa union allowed a strike to get out of hand, causing a mass movement which paralyzed the region.[19] Although the police-run unions continued to operate after Zubatov's ousting, without Okhrana funding, they proved more a liability than an asset. The Assembly of Working Men, a police-run union with about 6,000–8,000 members, formed by the alleged Okhrana agent Father Georgy Gapon, sparked the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905, a milestone in the Revolution of 1905 when union members marched peacefully on the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg and were fired upon by Imperial soldiers.[20] The Okhrana complemented police socialism and other projects to prevent the conditions in which revolutionary movements could take hold by pursuing initiatives to curtail the activities of existing organizations. Yevno Azef, the notorious Okhrana provocateur who became the head of the Socialist Revolutionary Fighting Organization (SRFO), epitomized the Okhrana's inscrutable practice of revolutionary-group infiltration. While the Okhrana managed to embed many of its agents in revolutionary organizations, the police preferred to slowly gather intelligence and to attempt to interfere with revolutionary work surreptitiously rather than to arrest known revolutionaries immediately. This policy led to numerous dubious acts on the part of police spies, who needed to participate in revolutionary activities to avoid suspicion, as when Yevno Azef, as head of the SRFO, ordered the assassination of V. K. Plehve on July 15, 1904.

An excerpt from, "The First War on Terror" By Brian Doherty, Reason, January 2011:

The freshest and most relevant parts of the book are Butterworth's tales of cops and spies at war with anarchist radicals. The most valuable player in this battle against the international anarchist terror conspiracy—which didn't actually exist, in the sense of one organization centrally planning attacks across national lines—was the Russians' man in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky.

Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in St. Petersburg's radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a prosecutor for the czar's government. He ended up running the show for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated.

From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping anarchists under surveillance and on the run—and also, in many cases, financed and supplied with ideas. Butterworth notes that "prominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived." Rachkovsky's aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar. This guaranteed him a solid berth in Paris that was lucrative both in salary and prestige—and, Butterworth's research leads him to strongly suspect, in opportunities for corrupt under-the-radar dealings with a French government doing heavy business with Russia.

Rachkovsky wasn't the first cop to use agents provocateurs among the French radicals. Louis Andrieux, the French prefect of police during the early 1880s, had been frustrated that all his spying on the anarchists failed to uncover a crime worthy of his time and attention, so he decided that "it was necessary that the act was accomplished for repression to be possible."

Rachkovsky's bosses in Russia and his hosts in Paris both feared the radicals, allowing the Russian agent to tighten the ties between the two nations. He succeeded so well that Butterworth argues he was partly to blame for the Russo-French alliance that helped make World War I such a bloody mess.

The British government, by contrast, initially resisted czarist efforts to capture Russia's radical émigrés. In 1890 Vladimir Burtsev, wanted by the czarist police, boarded a British boat bound from Constantinople to London. When the ship found itself surrounded by Turkish police vessels with Russians on board, the captain refused their demand to hand over the fugitive, announcing: "This is English territory. And I am a gentleman!" But soon even Britain's Special Branch ended up playing the spy and provocateur game.

Although Butterworth warns today's governments and spymasters that future historians will "have access to the material necessary to hold those leaders to account for any deceptions they may have practiced," his own research into the century-old fight indicates that that won't necessarily be so. The current keepers of the Special Branch's archives, which could shed light on the history of police behavior toward the radicals of the time, keep access to the relevant records "tenaciously guarded" even now.

It would be comforting to assume that one of the reasons the radical anarchists were able to gin up more consistent bombing action in the West than radical Islam does today was because their ideals—storming the bastions of illegitimate power, winning a better deal for the working man, crafting a future without any coercive authority—were more inherently inspiring than Shariah or a new Caliphate. These anarcho-radical movements were huge in the late 19th century. Star anarchist figures such as Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta could get tens of thousands, sometimes more than 100,000, fans to show up whenever they arrived in town. The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist movement's many publications was in the tens of thousands in France alone. But the active participants in anarchist congresses numbered less than 1,000, and while many of those activists and intellectuals excused the violence, others opposed it. The number of people actively involved in planning and executing terror plots seems to be no more than a few dozen.

Terror then and terror now both hoped to inspire popular insurrection; both failed. Although anarchists referred to their violent actions as "propaganda by deed," acts such as blowing up cafés or opera houses were really far more successful propaganda against anarchism than for it. Similarly, there is scant evidence that even the spectacularly destructive strike of 9/11 did much to help Al Qaeda recruit smart, useful, self-destructive folk willing to wage constant war on the decadent West. Suicide attacks in the name of jihad are only about 30 years old; they arose from modern circumstances and could disappear as those circumstances change.

To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley, McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush's rhetoric about the post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: "When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance." Collaborations of national secret police agencies created an ad hoc global force to fight the nonexistent global anarchist conspiracy, and the very advocacy of anarchist ideas was outlawed in most of the West.

As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.

The legacy of the secret police war against anarchists is ongoing and ugly. Both the CIA and the KGB learned from the techniques of the Okhrana, and the authorities today still cling to the notion that policing terror sometimes means encouraging it. Many of the alleged terrorists captured over the past several years were influenced, and in some cases provided materials by, police informants, including the Miami Seven, the accused Rockford, Illinois, shopping mall bomber Derrick Shareef, and Sami Samir Hassoun, who was charged with conspiring to bomb a nightclub near a Dave Matthews concert in Chicago.

Likewise, Butterworth concludes from his scattered documentary record that provocateurs were close to the planning and/or financing of many headline-making anarchist bomb plots, and that the staff of the British radical magazine Commonweal may have consisted entirely of informants, unbeknownst to each other. (Even today, with unprecedented access to police files, Butterworth is often unsure who was reporting back to the cops.) The French grande dame of anarchy, Louise Michel, once joked, "We love to have [agents provocateurs] in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions." In his fanciful 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, inspired by the milieu of anarcho-skullduggery that Butterworth chronicles, G.K. Chesterton describes a convocation of anarchist conspirators in which all of the plotters turn out to be cops sent to infiltrate the group.

Anarchists may have been relatively effective at decapitating power, but they were not a mortal threat to Western civilization, and neither are the Islamists. They do not warrant the suppression of civil liberties or the huge cost, in lives and money, of the wars waged by Bush and Barack Obama.

The Deliberate Destruction of The West's Industrial Capacity

2026-10-08T12:01:39.563-04:00

When you read the political literature from the WEF crew it's obvious these transnational elites have a saviour complex. They believe they are saving the world from overpopulation, climate change, and overproduction.

And you can't have "democracy" when the key decision makers in all aspects of public and private institutions believe they know better than everyone else.

What you get instead is dictatorship. And dictatorships can be successful. There's nothing wrong with having a strong leader at the top. Look at China and Russia. If left to "democracy" Russia would still be in the toilet after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin pulled Russia out of the gutter. The Chinese leadership have done likewise.

But Western leaders have given us the worst of both worlds. The worst of democracy and the worst of dictatorship.

The leaders are all soft and effeminate, and outright pedophiles and homosexuals in a lot of cases. They're "elected" but they all continue the same agenda: the destruction of Western industrial civilization, the poisoning of the population, the debasement of national currencies, the raising of unnecessary taxes, the engineering of demographics, the installation of a global surveillance state, and on and on.

So here we have Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of Charles de Gaulle, saying:

"It makes me smile when people talk about Russian interference because it suits our political elites and allows them to avoid telling the truth to the French people.
Most of our politicians took part in… pic.twitter.com/iuhJc0XLfL
— Richard (@ricwe123) October 8, 2026

Storming The Gates of Heaven: Israel's War on God And The 10/7 Myth

2026-10-08T00:26:42.882-04:00

Terrorists like to play the victim, especially Jewish and Muslim terrorists.

The Christians followed the same victimhood script when they started out in their centuries-long confrontation with the Romans. These guys were burning libraries throughout the ancient world and still had the gall to cry victim when they faced any resistance to their religious madness.

Every religious cult or tribe never seems to find faults within its own ranks, leadership, dogma, and ideology. But Israel is a cut above. Israelis are truly special when it comes to crying victim. They murdered their own like ants on October 7 and then turned around and screamed bloody murder. That's not just false flag terrorism. That's national psychopathy. These people need Jesus.

Charlie Kirk suspected immediately that October 7 was an Israeli false flag. Our leaders ignored him, which is why our empire is now being destroyed by Netanyahu-led wars. Dave Smith on this generation’s 9-11. pic.twitter.com/MZsgNcZF6j
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 8, 2026

God's Work

2026-10-07T20:23:32.116-04:00

I've read reports about Mexican cartel members going to Ukraine for "training" and returning in body bags.

Now the ISIS cannon fodder in Syria are being sheepherded to Yemen for an absolute slaughter.

I usually don't like highlighting these stories because these poor fools are victims too, but you shouldn't go into another person's country with violent intent and expect things to go well for you.

Russia and Yemen are doing God's work. And I like they're not messing around. Syria was too gentle and allowed Turkey to transport these devils from all four corners of the Earth without making them pay in any sort of way.

Hit them hard as soon as they land in the airport in Yemen. Don't tease them with Valhalla. Make their journey quick.

One thing I really like about war in Ukraine and Yemen is how the ranks of Western mercenaries/terrorists are being thinned by Russians and Yemenis.

They are making the Global South much more secure. https://t.co/o4e3QvtbyF
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) October 7, 2026

By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét with music and sound effects

2026-10-07T14:12:13.155-04:00

Wikipedia:

Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, published in 1928, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster", published in 1936, and "By the Waters of Babylon", published in 1937.

Video Title: By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét with music and sound effects. Source: Ravensmaw. Date Published: January 27, 2013. Description:

This is an audio recording with no video done in the style of a radio drama. 39.30 min Intended for educational purposes only. Read by E.C. Mason

South Korea-Ukraine Relations Taking A Nosedive

2026-10-06T16:55:33.067-04:00

Screw an apology. The rogue thieves in Ukraine must be punished. South Korea needs to stop looking over its shoulders and stand up for itself.

🇰🇷🇺🇦 Apology not enough: South Korea may recall its ambassador from Ukraine

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Seoul is considering recalling its ambassador to Ukraine after Zelensky publicly revealed confidential information about the transfer of two North Korean… pic.twitter.com/X5NfM0wQwA
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) October 6, 2026

Operation Catch The Thief

2026-10-06T15:23:02.732-04:00

There will be plenty of rope to go around. Don't worry your little heads about that.

American Presidents since JFK have been trained pets on leashes. Worse than puppets on a string. One word out of line, one step in the wrong direction, and their masters tug the leash on their necks.

Nixon. Carter. Reagan. Clinton. All of them were either impeached, threatened with assassination, or blackmailed to keep them in line.

But Trump takes the cake. He's very well trained. He does tricks and everything. He still shits in the house, and throws the occasional tantrum, but apart from that he's been an exemplary pet. Very well behaved. Israel has in him an absolute goldmine. They couldn't be happier with their political investment.

Now he's threatening the American west coast with nukes, putting into the public imagination the nuclear obliteration of cities. I wouldn't put it past his administration to go forward with the old plan to stage a false flag nuclear attack in the United States using mini nukes.

These people have lost the plot and are beginning to lose their heads. They're in the looting stage of their terminal decline. And Trump is like a pig at the trough.

But nihilistic robbers and tyrants eventually get hanged. I think a Nuremberg 2.0 is inevitable at this point. Justice must be done.

Don't Take The New Killshot

2026-10-06T13:38:22.637-04:00

My mind keeps coming back to that Brzezinski quote where he said that in the 21st century it's easier to kill millions of people than it is to control them.

The Western elites view humanity as a virus. What the Zionists have planned for Palestinians they have planned for the rest of us. Total genocide.

Covid was a precusor, and a test. They have planned a world famine, energy blackouts, a world war, mass infertility, and a global plague, all to reduce the world population.

Retired NYU professor & propaganda expert Mark Crispin Miller on the Covid jabs as a depopulation tool☠️💉

"They want us dead... they don't want us enjoying the fruits of nature... what God gave us"

"this is driven by an... evil ideology that had a big influence on Hitler"… pic.twitter.com/eRMnlikNiP
— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) October 5, 2026

The DNA of Things

2026-10-06T11:31:11.410-04:00

Wikipedia:

DNA digital data storage is the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA.
While DNA as a storage medium has enormous potential because of its high storage density, its practical use is currently severely limited because of its high cost and very slow read and write times.
In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA. In 2021, scientists reported that a custom DNA data writer had been developed that was capable of writing data into DNA at 1 Mbps (128 KB/s).
. . .The concept of the DNA of Things (DoT) was introduced in 2019 by a team of researchers from Israel and Switzerland, including Yaniv Erlich and Robert Grass. DoT encodes digital data into DNA molecules, which are then embedded into objects. This gives the ability to create objects that carry their own blueprint, similar to biological organisms. In contrast to Internet of things, which is a system of interrelated computing devices, DoT creates objects which are independent storage objects, completely off-grid.
As a proof of concept for DoT, the researcher 3D-printed a Stanford bunny which contains its blueprint in the plastic filament used for printing. By clipping off a tiny bit of the ear of the bunny, they were able to read out the blueprint, multiply it and produce a next generation of bunnies. In addition, the ability of DoT to serve for steganographic purposes was shown by producing non-distinguishable lenses which contain a YouTube video integrated into the material.

An excerpt from, "A DNA-of-things storage architecture to create materials with embedded memory" By Julian Koch, Silvan Gantenbein, Kunal Masania, Wendelin J. Stark, Yaniv Erlich & Robert N. Grass, Nature Biotechnology, Volume 38, pages 39–43 (2020):

DNA storage offers substantial information density and exceptional half-life. We devised a ‘DNA-of-things’ (DoT) storage architecture to produce materials with immutable memory. In a DoT framework, DNA molecules record the data, and these molecules are then encapsulated in nanometer silica beads, which are fused into various materials that are used to print or cast objects in any shape. First, we applied DoT to three-dimensionally print a Stanford Bunny that contained a 45 kB digital DNA blueprint for its synthesis. We synthesized five generations of the bunny, each from the memory of the previous generation without additional DNA synthesis or degradation of information. To test the scalability of DoT, we stored a 1.4 MB video in DNA in plexiglass spectacle lenses and retrieved it by excising a tiny piece of the plexiglass and sequencing the embedded DNA. DoT could be applied to store electronic health records in medical implants, to hide data in everyday objects (steganography) and to manufacture objects containing their own blueprint. It may also facilitate the development of self-replicating machines.

The Physical Infrastructure of Our Digital World

2026-10-06T09:00:45.835-04:00

A data center in Norway.

An excerpt from, "Dark satanic mills 2.0: inside the massive server farms storing your data—and harming the planet" By George Grylls, Prospect Magazine, November 12, 2018:

Your family photos are currently in a warehouse on the edge of the M25. Or maybe they are in a warehouse in Swansea. Or maybe, just maybe, they are not in a prosaic suburb, but in a hollowed-out mountain in Norway.
When we think of the “cloud” we are supposed to think of the ether. But data is not immaterial. The route you took to work in your car today, the time at which you logged in to Facebook, the amount of money in your bank account—all this information is physical, perishable, and it is housed in a farm of computers hidden far from your view.
“A lot of people have the perception of the cloud as something out there,” says Tor Kristian Gyland, pushing his hand out into an expanse of thin air. “It doesn’t matter to them if their data is stored in a field in Ireland, or on a hill outside Barcelona or in a mountain in Stavanger.”
Gyland is the affable and surprisingly un-villainous CEO of Green Mountain, a company that transformed an old NATO ammunition store into an underground data centre. “Digitisation has progressed really quickly. Everyone now has an iPhone, an iPad, a Smart TV. But they don’t know where it’s all actually happening.”
When companies store their data (or rather, your data) there are three methods they can use. They can rent “racks” of servers in a form of storage called colocation. Or they can upload the data to the not-so-nebulous cloud, in which case there is no specific server on which the data is stored at any one time, with it instead rebounding from one server to another. Finally, if you are a Facebook or a Google you can just go and build your own data centre.
Whichever way you go, the final product is a warehouse containing thousands of black boxes whirring with billions of calculations. The precious computers are lavished with air conditioning lest they overheat and malfunction. Data centres positively feast on electricity.
“They are growing like mushrooms,” bemoans Dr Anders Andrae, a Swedish academic who studies the ecological impact of technology. “The number of data centres is increasing by 25 per cent every year and this is leading to at least a 10 per cent annual growth in the sector’s energy consumption.”
Data centres are indeed big business. Earlier this month industry grandees gathered in the City of London for the glitz and glamour of a digital infrastructure conference. For the builders of the internet this was the thirteenth such gathering this year. Old Billingsgate is just one destination in a sixteen-city tour that takes in everywhere from Sao Paolo to Jakarta. Beer, business cards and burger sliders were liberally dispensed as representatives from Google and Uber gave keynote speeches.
Noticeably prominent at the fair were representatives from Scandinavian data centres. The “Nordics,” as they are colloquially known, have established themselves as industry leaders. Facebook announced this year that they are building their third data centre in the Swedish city of Luleå, just south of the Arctic Circle. Google owns a converted Alvar Aalto paper mill in Finland. And despite the Bond-lair connotations, there are many incentives to building data centres in Scandinavia. Firstly, the outside temperature reduces the cooling costs; secondly, the Finnish, Icelandic and Swedish governments offer tax cuts; thirdly, renewable energy is plentiful and comparatively cheap. Green Mountain, for example, uses hydropower from the adjacent fjords.
Lars Schedin is the CEO of the Swedish company EcoDataCenter. By using uniquely sustainable energy, and repurposing the waste heat generated by servers to warm people’s houses, it claims to be the world’s first “climate positive” data centre.
“If you watch an HD Netflix film it uses as much CO2 as driving for 300km,” he says, armed with an array of self-calculated statistics that he hopes will combat the world’s apathy to the issue of data centre pollution. “Despacito has been streamed 5.5 billion times. That’s 350,000 tonnes of CO2— equivalent to the yearly emissions of 230,000 taxis in Stockholm.”
But there is another reason why the “Nordics” might prove attractive and it has nothing to do with ecological concerns or low energy costs. Scandinavia—that Northerly brotherhood of progressive politics and unmenacing hygge—has a reputation for security.
“There is a lot of secrecy around the data centre industry,” says Tor Kristian Gyland, whose Green Mountain stores data in a seemingly impenetrable natural fortress. “Companies don’t want you to know where data is stored.”
At Old Billingsgate, the vast majority of vendors were hawking sophisticated fire alarms, titanic air conditioners or impermeable cladding. It was a stark reminder of just how delicate data is. Take, for example, the lightning strike in Singapore that caused the country’s stock exchange to close for three hours in 2014. Or the fire at a data centre in Atlanta that caused the cancellation of 1,000 Delta flights in 2016. It is not malicious code that causes the most data loss, it is the physical loss of racks.

Rule By Narrative

2026-10-05T23:00:46.631-04:00

He who writes the textbooks is the true power behind the throne and behind fake elections.

What good is democracy if what the voters believe is false?

Regimes that rely on narratives to rule do so because they're incapable of ruling.

Successful governments don't need to lie and when they do they're believed.

China's government doesn't need to sell stories to its people because it is too busy building and making money.

The governments in the Western world, the Middle East, and pretty much everywhere else are losing money and not building anything. They are reverting to selling stories and making up lies to try retain the status quo.

And when consent by narrative fails that's when the guns come out. Those who first burn the books inevitably turn to burning people.

II.

An excerpt from, "The Battle for the Past: How Power Rewrites History to Secure the Present" By Prof. Ruel F. Pepa, Global Research, December 22, 2025:

History is never a neutral record of events, nor is it a simple accumulation of facts arranged in chronological order. It is a contested space where memory, identity, and legitimacy collide, shaped as much by power as by evidence. The act of recording history always involves selection: deciding which events matter, whose voices are preserved, and how causes and consequences are framed. Because of this, those who hold power have consistently sought to control historical narratives by emphasizing achievements that legitimize their rule, minimizing or erasing episodes of violence and injustice, and discrediting alternative accounts that challenge official versions of the past. Across continents and political systems, whether authoritarian regimes, colonial administrations, or even democratic states, a familiar pattern emerges. Rulers and their supporters revise or reinterpret history to portray themselves as inevitable, righteous, or necessary, while casting opponents as dangerous, illegitimate, or morally corrupt. In doing so, they transform history into a political tool rather than a critical inquiry.
This struggle over historical memory is neither accidental nor purely academic. It is deliberate, urgent, and deeply political, because control over the past shapes how societies understand themselves in the present. Historical narratives establish moral boundaries: they define heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, progress and decline. When a regime succeeds in imposing its version of history, it gains more than symbolic power as it influences public values, national identity, and the limits of acceptable debate. By contrast, challenging official histories can destabilize authority, expose wrongdoing, and open space for demands for justice or reform.
For this reason, battles over textbooks, monuments, archives, and public commemorations are often as intense as struggles over laws or elections. Whoever controls the past does not merely interpret what has been; they help determine what is remembered, what is forgotten, and ultimately what futures a society can imagine.

Hubert Dreyfus on History of Philosophy

2026-10-05T13:12:43.574-04:00

Wikipedia:

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".

. . . Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence (AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations or symbols.
Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalized (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.
On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism). Therefore, a truly scientific psychology is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. However, it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will be able to) understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context-free psychology is a contradiction in terms.
Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist views (on which AI has been based), our being is in fact highly context-bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.
Dreyfus argues that to get a device or devices with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world and to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks as well as researchers in the field of artificial life.)
Contrary to a popular misconception, Dreyfus never predicted that computers would never beat humans at chess. In Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, he only reported (correctly) the state of the art of the time: "Still no chess program can play even amateur chess."
Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."

Video Title: Hubert Dreyfus on History of Philosophy. Source: Goofy_Bidoofie. Date Published: May 7, 2025.

British Policy Towards Eurasia, Its Perennial Confrontation With Russia, And Its Treatment of Islam

2026-10-05T12:27:51.041-04:00

Related:

Mocha.

The Protestant Prophecies: Britain, Prussia, And Palestine In 1840.

An excerpt from, "Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East" by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 374 - 384:

Very quickly after 1798, most local British officials formed the view that the Ottoman authorities were incapable of providing good government, because of institutionalised corruption and a short-termist approach to land management. The Islamic caliphate was a husk of its former self, its old military fervour softened by decadence, its stolid fatalism unsuited to modern economic opportunities. It lacked popular confidence; it could not secure order across vast swathes of its territory. Many Britons also instinctively assumed that the Porte remained more hostile to Britain than to France or Russia: hence Rich's extraordinary animosity against its influence at Baghdad. Once British paramountcy was secured in the Gulf and around Aden, by the 1840s, naval officers were also anxious to counter the Ottomans' revival of claims to sovereignty in places to which they had no practical title. Those claims would allow local chiefs to acknowledge a rival source of power, which would undermine British authority, or at least make it much more expensive to reassert.

So British agents tended to see the Ottomans as imperialists, and themselves as helping to secure local justice. They wanted to offer protection where necessary to the Arabs, to the Lebanese and Kurdish mountaineers, and to the Jews of Palestine. They saw present-day overtaxing pashas as the latest in a series of invaders who had destroyed the region's potential. Hugh Rose lamented the misgovernment of Baghdad, which had "made a desert of a garden, and excited revolt, where conciliation and prudence might have made of the benighted Arabs of the Irak, grateful adherents of the Sultan and useful servants of the state." The Turk had blighted the garden of the Old World with a poisonous upas tree.' A major reason why Harford Jones, Viscount Valentia, and Thomas Perronet Thompson respected the Wahhabi (and why Jones and Valentia at times feared them) was the contrast that they offered to Turkish indolence, materialism, and brutality. Wahhabi puritanism seemed authentic and elemental; it also illustrated that Arabs were less corrupted by money than their Ottoman overlords. Jones ridiculed Mehmet Ali's assumption that they could be permanently destroyed "by his gold, rather than the valour of his troops"; they were bound to rise again. For the same reason, John Lewis Burckhardt assumed that the Ottomans would eventually be driven out of the Hijaz. Perronet Thompson thought Wahhabism a "great struggle for freedom" against "Turkish domination." Arabs also seemed much more reliable fighters than the Turks, and much more willing to cooperate with British commanders against common enemies. Observing them at Mocha and Hudavda, Katharine Elwood appreciated their "wild independence and ... manly frankness..., which is very different from the obsequiousness and servility of other Oriental nations." Relative to the Turks, their "vivaciousness, astuteness, and curiosity [were] quite European."

This inextinguishable temperamental independence suggested that the Arabs would not easily be subordinated by the Ottomans, France, or Russia. So British agents realised the benefits of cultivating that independence. During the campaigns of 1798-1801, they used money and military power to win Arab cooperation, paying promptly and regularly for their services. They prided themselves on their reputation for honouring fnancial obligations. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Indian Navy officers spent years surveying the seas around Arabia, communicating with the tribes, and enjoying the local food. They identified an Arab avarice that could be usefully harnessed, and a basic humanity that, if they reciprocated it, could be nurtured. British respect for Arabs had strict limits. Had a coherent Arab empire-state been possible, it would have created strategic problems for Britain. There was brief concern that Mehmet Ali might manage to found one: it might incite Islamists to destabilise British India, or provide the only means for France or Russia to buy its way into the region, by bribing the Egyptian viceroy. But Mehmet Ali was no Arab himself, and by 1840 the raggedness of his attempts to control Arabia was apparent; the threat disappeared.

From the 1830s, steam power, especially in Mesopotamia, was a valuable aid in intimidating the Arabs into appreciating British might. It also promised to strengthen the authority of the pasha of Baghdad, which plague had weakened, if he was willing to accept judicious British assistance. This would boost order and stability in the pashalik against external threats. Ostensibly, these threats came from Mehmet Ali. In reality, the main concern was Russia, and to an extent Persia, which seemed so vulnerable to Russian pressure. Baghdad and the Gulf became stages on which Britain would display its might, modernity, and confidence in order to defeat Russian ambitions, and to remind Russians that their influence at Constantinople itself was of little local consequence. In 1838-40, Britain pursued the same forward policy in Aden and the Gulf as in Afghanistan.

In strengthening its own power in the Middle East in the 1830s against potential enemies, Britain could claim to be propping up Ottoman sovereign authority there. Yet, at the same time, the Middle Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire was being shaped into an outwork of Indian defence. In India too, steam power on the rivers was used to move troops about, and to impress locals and enemies; the first railway followed in 1849. The ministers of the Liberal governments of the 1830s and 1846-52 saw the struggle with Russia as a global one. Palmerston inherited through Huskisson the Dundasite principle that a coherent strategy was needed, spanning Europe and Asia, to combat the challenges of European rivals. The Grant brothers (his fellow Huskissonites) and Hobhouse (his India secretary) shared that vision. Steam and commercial power could give Britain more strength across Eurasia than Dundas ever imagined possible. These men were not seriously alarmed that Russia could penetrate Indian borders; the main concern was always to assert Britain's regional power in order to subjugate potential rebels within India itself. In 1830, the East India Company admitted that its fear was "not so much actual invasion by Russia as the moral effect which would be produced among our own subjects in India .. . by the continued apprehension of that event."

This idea of strengthening India through technology can perhaps be seen as a liberal governing strategy. Scholars of imperial political thought have valiantly tried to define a "Liberalism" that can be applied to India in this period, but this can be done only by adopting an oddly narrow definition of Liberalism, based merely on the writings of a few idealistic thinkers, rather than on the study of what Liberal governments did and said. The founding myth of British Liberalism as a political movement, after the 1832 Reform Act. was that it could provide good government because it understood how to retain popular confidence. It could integrate the British nation as an effective and politically active community; it could also give Catholics proper political representation, and therefore pursue a union of consent with Ireland. Then, by harnessing national energies, a Liberal British state would lead the world against a Russia that after 1828 was aggressive as well as repressive. Strong government by popular consent would always defeat blustering autocracy. It followed that Liberalism in that sense----political Liberalism, the creed of British Liberal governments----could not be applied to India, because its core was effective political representation, whereas India remained a principle garrison state.

Nonetheless, the Palmerston-Hobhouse strategy involved standing up to Russia, and to internal Indian critics, by expressing the strength of the British state in India---in terms of financial power, technological mastery, administrative competence, and good order, translated into military efficiency. The expectation was that a feeble, antiquated regime would quail in the face of applied modernity. So the Indian army was mobilised boldly and proactively on the North-West Frontier. The result was the Afghan War, which was a disaster in several ways. Even so, it demonstrated British intent unmistakeably, both to Afghan rulers and to Russia, and it provided the iustification for the conquest and pacification of Sind and the Punjab in the 1840s. This strategy was criticised then, as it can be now, but its proponents continued to believe that it consolidated Indian securitv on its western flank.

In the Middle East, as in India, an additional hope for steam was that it might develop commerce on the coasts and rivers, increasing revenue and strengthening popular loyalty. These visions melded British capitalist confidence with romantic recollections of the region's ancient prosperity. The imaginations of Popham and Wellsted in the Red Sea, Lynch and Jones in Baghdad, and travellers to Palestine like Ashley and Lindsay far outstripped the reality. One reason why hopes of economic prospects were frustrated was the nature of Ottoman rule, except in Mehmet Ali's Egypt. The steamships on the Euphrates were, as Ainsworth wrote, "like a vision of future glory," rather than effective weapons of transformation---they were too few and the obstacles of governance too great. The same applied to most talk of economic development, such as Jewish settlement schemes in Palestine. Moses Montefiore seems to have considered them premature, and Palmerston became less optimistic about getting the Ottomans to facilitate them. Capitalists needed more security for landholding than the Porte would grant, while most emigrants were too elderly and spiritually inclined to become agricultural entrepreneurs. Officials could only hope that British influence over local rulers might gradually strengthen order and offer security for investment.

Though hardly any British officers in, or visitors to, the Middle East had any immediate aspiration to govern it, they could not help thinking about the prospect of doing so, because, at least before 1840, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was almost universally expected. Such thoughts were naturally affected by the experience of British rule in India. In the British imagination, India was becoming a land of law against age-old oriental despotism. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 claimed to defend property rights against arbitrary power. In 1813, Robert Smith asserted that "the meanest rights of the meanest native stand on the solid base of law and justice." The reality was a legal jumble that owed a lot to local customs. The flaws in Indian justice arrangements legitimised resistance in some respects, yet allowed uncontrollable lower courts to condone acts of white violence. However, the effectiveness of the myth was often noted by British officials in the Middle East, who reported local Arabs contrasting Ottoman misrule with Britain's reputation for legal fairness in India.

In one important respect, the Middle East seemed more likely to be receptive to the principles of good government than India had been. It had produced Christianity and had been governed by Roman law, whereas India had always been regarded in Britain as culturally alien. India was not directly ruled by government and Parliament before 1858---largely because so many British people insisted that their politicians would be corrupted by the increased patronage and financial powers that direct responsibility for managing India's poisoned wealth would give them. It could be brought under direct British government only after the 1857 rebellion, once anger at the mistakes of its arrogant and irresponsible bureaucracy outweighed declining fears about "old corruption." In 1801, the British soldiers in Egypt observed with astonishment the wasteful stately luxury of their Indian army counterparts: they jeered that they were "the army of Darius." Bombay civil servants bullied Rich, Stafford Haines, and Felix Jones with the callous cruelty of the desk-bound autocrat.

By contrast, the Middle East excited imaginations because of the familiarity of its history. It goes without saying that the familiarity was misconceived and romanticised: that is not the point. Visions of improvement gave officials some sense of purpose and identity in what were otherwise discouraging and discomforting conditions. The British army in Egypt had to endure ophthalmia, sand lice, and fleas. Lax quarantine procedures and inadequate medicine alarmed all travellers. The plague of 1831 ravaged Baghdad as if it were a modern Babylon. In a delirium caused by fever, Raymond Wellsted shot himself in the mouth in Muscat and never recovered physically or mentally. One naval officer, in the intolerable heat of the Gulf summer, saw his men "die in the utmost agony and raving mad, from exposure to the sun, after a few hours' illness." Yet that same officer charted every stop of his expedition by reference to the record left by Alexander's naval commander Nearchus 2,150 years before, and was pleased to note the continuing accuracy of his account of fishing practices.'

When Mackintosh, Rich, and Chesney thought about Baghdad, they thought about Alexander the Great using his courage and judgment to humiliate the decadent Orientals farther east. Baghdad was still threatened by the Persians and by the Russians; could it be saved for civilisation? In 1801, William Hamilton hoped to bring Egypt back into the greater Europe that the Romans had mapped out. Could the British help to supply it with tax reductions and peace--the policies for which Ptolemy V was thanked in the address preserved on the Rosetta Stone that Hamilton secured for the British Museum? In 1849, Layard claimed that the ancient civilisation that he had unearthed at Nineveh showed "the debt which the West owes to the East'" but also implied that the West should now repay the debt by a civilising mission to the modern inhabitants of those countries. In 1854, Charles Kingsley argued that the Romans had established the only acceptable type of empire, governing "with tolerable justice" Syrians and Egyptians who could not govern themselves, and making them "better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law." Was it visionary to think that law might be re-established throughout these lands, by the Romans successors, uniting West and East as they had done?

The Indian Navy's interest in developing steam power and commerce on the rivers of Mesopotamia was based on its unrivalled fertility and prosperity 2,500 years earlier. In the same way, the appeal of Aden to Haines and his fellow officers owed much to their study of the trading power of ancient Hadramaut and the Queen of Sheba. All that was needed to restore this prosperity was irrigation and commerce. Basic technology would turn deserts back into the gardens they had been--the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or even the Garden of Eden, associated with Qurna near Basra, Here, according to Wellsted, "man in the image of God was first created and here in his most perfect form is he yet found." Water was the region's key life-giving ingredient, and not just in the phials that tourists brought home from the River Jordan. British travellers imagined Christ preaching to thousands of happy, hard-working families around the fertile shores and well-stocked waters of the Sea of Galilee, in contrast to the rotting carcasses of the Dead Sea. Irrigation and steam power would remove the universal blight of depopulation and declining agricultural revenues. Perhaps they could also empower effective communities that would value their property and would respect orderly government.

Some British visitors and commentators therefore assumed that marauding Arab tribes could be persuaded to settle on riverbanks to tend crops and livestock peacefully and productively. As they had never been slaves, they would naturally take to being industrious free farmers. Other observers saw the Arabs less as participants in a potential orderly commercial future than as reminders of a primeval, divinely ordered past. They noted their established laws and customs, and their patriarchalism, infused with a healthy respect for wisdom and for tribal opinion. For Kinglake and Disraeli, they offered a window into "the Elder World." There was some admiration for the resistance of primitive desert tribes to morally corrupting urban values, though also some fear that Ottoman misgovernment and the arrival of wealthy Europeans had tempted them into a predatory cupidity. Ainsworth asserted that the "mental privileges of the Arabs," the "descendants from the most noble stocks of the human race," had not declined, but they had been "overwhelmed by moral despotism and political insecurity." Consciousness of their biblical ancestry was ever-present in the background. In his History of the Jews in 1830, Henry Milman used modern accounts of the Arabs to interpret the biblical material about Abraham's marriage arrangements. George Rose attributed the Arabs' tradition of circumcision to the Abrahamic divine covenant and its theme of purification.

The deserts of the Middle East were where God had given laws to his people to make them a society. British travellers climbed what the guides claimed was Mount Sinai---even though their biblical knowledge told them that the topography was not quite right---so that they could imagine how it must have felt to receive divine guidance so immediately. In the Arabian desert, Muhammad thought that he too had heard God's iniunctions, which inspired him to devote his life to waging war on the sins and errors of mankind. Reading Gibbon in Baghdad in 1809 taught Mary Rich to admire "Mahomet and the first Arabian heroes. Gibbon, like a number of eighteenth-century writers took pleasure in rebelling against conventional Christian abuse of Islam. He presented Muhammad as a crusader for a simple, inspiring, charitable monotheism, which had quickly taken root in much of the world. His emphases on the social benefits and proven permanence of Islam were taken up by several others, including by Thomas Carlyle in 1840, in one of his most famous and influential lectures. "These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! ... ---believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it ... Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes." Carlvle had also been influenced by Edward Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which showed him how deeply Islamic assumptions were embedded in Egyptian daily life. In the Middle East, as in India, some British intellectuals became orientalist scholars, keen to understand better the history of local cultures.

Of course, many Victorians continued to hold a more conventionally dismissive view of Islam, and two opposing answers were always given to the question of how far it was compatible with good government. Many who visited the East only briefly, such as Richard Cobden, had already decided to blame Ottoman regime failings on their "brutalising religion" that "disdain[ed] all improvement and labour." The "impostor of Mecca" defended slavery and polygamy, and taught Turks to govern by savagery and the sword, spreading devastation and pestilence over their realms. Likewise, Addison's journey confirmed his view that a code of law based on the precepts of the Quran could not be a proper legal code. Claudius Rich, who saw his years in Baghdad as training for a high-level post in imperial India, continued to look down on Islam as incompatible with improvement because it rejected all modern developments in "science, art, history, manners." Many visitors were pleased to note that it seemed to be losing strength in Ottoman realms, though this claim was usually based not on Middle Eastern experience but on the growing relative influence and prosperity of Christians in the Balkans and the Levant.

Other observers, however, were very clear that Islam should and must be the basis of any reform of governance in the East. Ambassador Ponsonby welcomed the 1839 Edict of Güilhane for several reasons, but fundamentally because it would strengthen the sultan's authority as Islamic caliph, by increasing Muslim popular confidence in him. An influential body of thinkers searched for a legal code to which Muslims could relate, that would supply this confidence and so give the regime the strength necessary to defeat French or Russian threats. When secretary to the Constantinople embassy in the 1830s, David Urquhart argued that the Ottoman Empire should strip its corruptions away to reveal its original foundation on Arab governance principles of decentralisation, free trade, and direct taxation. His central argument was that Arab culture placed governments in subordination to a comprehensible and simple Islamic legal code that would restore Muslim confidence and revivify the empire. The Arabophile Thomas Perronet Thompson devised the 1820 Gulf treaty, the foundation of the Trucial system, on the assumption that the British and the Gulf shaykhs could form an alliance based on a mutual respect for law. Both men were followers of Jeremy Bentham, who was concerned to secure the independence, viability, and vigour of Islamic regimes. An indigenous patriotism, founded on a clear, morally acceptable legal philosophy, would defend them against collapse and Russian imperialism. The difficulty in assessing Mehmet Ali was whether he respected law and civilisation or not. British travellers witnessed first-hand the security he brought to the small section of the country that they visited, and they admired his gestures towards European civilisation. Yet in other ways he was a tyrannical pharaoh. The Benthamite Bowring admitted that he was a despot, but argued that his strong, vigorous rule offered the best of both worlds, giving Muslims patriotic and Christians tolerance.

In practice, if law and order were to be imposed in a morally aceeptable way, British officials usually assumed that they would have to be involved. Britain tended to act as a non-sectarian power, believing that it could hold the ring between religious groups while respecting Islamic culture. By contrast, hardly any British consuls in the Middle East regarded the promotion of Christianity as a priority. They imagined that it might well revive in the wake of eventual economic development, but that would take a long time. There was a lot of British Christian interest in the Middle East, but it was generated overwhelmingly by domestic opinion. Bishops and missionaries alike were brought up on the idea that early Christianity had spread like wildfire across Asia and Africa from its original colonies in Syria and Kurdistan. They hoped against hope that this could happen again. The Church of England proposed missions to the Nestorians in Kurdistan. Evangelicals also advocated the restoration of the Jews to Palestine in the hope of facilitating Christ's Second Coming. Palmerston nodded to this sectarian pressure briefly in 1840-41, fearing that other powers would successfully use their own denominationa strategy to win local predominance. The consequences were counterproductive tensions between British, French, and American religious missions, which severely exacerbated local conflicts in Lebanon and Kurdistan. This was not in British interests. The crisis of 1841-43 made clear that, unlike France, Austria, Russia, Britain had no significant Christian denominational interests to defend in the East. Protestantism remained a lightweight political force: there were two Anglican churches in the whole Middle East in 1854. Britain seemed better off using its influence to press the Ottomans to protect the interests of all oppressed religious minorities--mostly non-Christian ones.

These People Are Savages

2026-10-04T09:26:44.001-04:00

Israel must be destroyed, or the world will not survive. There's no other sane conclusion after researching all the evidence of its crimes.

I don't know what you replace it with. Hamas and Islam will just wreck the place. Look at what's happening in Syria. There used to be secular and liberal Palestinians around but Israel killed them all.

My suggestion is to make the area a desert again and encourage the remaining Palestinian refugees to take over the Gulf monarchies or go to London which created this problem in the first place.

THIS IS CRAZY pic.twitter.com/UGGmh6fQFZ
— Meidas_Charise Lee (@charise_lee) October 3, 2026

Titus 2.0

2026-10-04T05:55:39.465-04:00

Mankind will tolerate crimes and murder. It will accept falsehoods from governing elites if they are told well.

What people will not tolerate is bad storytelling.

We were blessed with magnificent storytelling regarding the Moon Landing and the 9/11 terror attacks. Those were excellent myths, suited for the political and cultural moment. They inspired wonder, fear, sadness, and awe. Hollywood couldn't dream of such productions.

Those were true masterpieces of state mythcraft.

And time has proven they were tough acts to follow. They were the peak of Masonic mythmaking.

The false flag sequels and psyops we're being treated to today are just trash.

Netanyahu's latest fables don't even deserve commentary.

Someone close to him has to tell him the game is up. The spell is over.

There's always a limit to pulling the wool over the eyes of the world. A magic trick that's endlessly repeated loses its charm.

A band can get away with delivering nothing but the greatest hits. In most cases the fans demand it.

But a state and a regime can't keep vomiting out the same lies to the people decade after decade.

The Soviet regime collapsed not because of the Afghanistan war or the economic success of the West but because its own people got tired of all the lies.

Communism failed to deliver the goods.

Soviet leaders finally accepted reality.

Israel, the United States, the European Union, and I would include the Islamic Republic of Iran, will all reach the same stage of realization.

They will all simultaneously collapse in the near future. War is their only lifeline left. And they know it.

The world’s patience with the state of Israel has ended. It has exceeded all levels of rational expectation of how a modern civilized state should behave.

Its psychotic leaders falsely believe that they can transfer their crimes and evil transgressions onto Muslims and Palestinians, and that they can milk the American people until kingdom come.

They're wrong on both fronts.

The transferring of transgressions will end. The American piggy bank will close soon.

Israel will be harshly punished for its crimes against humanity.

No quarter will be given.

Titus 2.0.

He is the model to follow. What he did must be repeated.

The Christians and Muslims are too naive and too kind. The Americans and Europeans are too emotionally attached. The Russians and the Chinese are too aloof. The Iranians and the Arabs are too forgiving.

The Jews deserve the justice of Rome.

Jerusalem and Gaza must become indistinguishable.

The world will not know peace in our times until Palestine is a desert again.

The Companion to British History By Charles Arnold-Baker

2026-10-03T10:41:08.447-04:00

"For He Is an Englishman: Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman" by Charles Arnold-Baker.

Wikipedia:

The Companion to British History is a single-volume encyclopaedic reference work written by Charles Arnold-Baker and edited by his son Henry von Blumenthal. It was published by Longcross Press in 1996, and described by The Spectator as "arguably one of the most remarkable books ever written". The Second Edition was published by Routledge. The Daily Telegraph, in an account of how the book came to be written, described it as being "bigger than a foundation stone, longer than the Bible".

Wikipedia:

Charles Arnold-Baker, OBE (born Wolfgang Charles Werner von Blumenthal; 25 June 1918 – 6 June 2009) was an English member of MI6, barrister (called 1948) and historian. He was the author of the Companion to British History. He was awarded an OBE (1966) and the King Haakon VII Medal of Freedom (1945).
Charles Arnold-Baker was the son of Professor Baron Albrecht Werner von Blumenthal (10 August 1889, Staffelde, by Stettin, Prussia – 28 March 1945, Marburg an der Lahn), of Gross Schloenwitz by Stolp, Pomerania, by his first wife, an English lady, Wilhelmine, née Hainsworth (1883–1978), and stepson of Percival Richard Arnold-Baker.[1] His parents divorced in 1921; his mother returned to England and was remarried, in 1923, to Percy Arnold-Baker, (1875–1944), brother of Sir Frederick Arnold-Baker.) He was born in the Charité Hospital, Berlin, of which his ancestor Johann Christian Theden had been Surgeon-General, in 1918 and died in 2009, having been received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed. His ashes were interred, however, in the triforium of the Temple Church, London.
. . .Charles then took part in the liberation of Norway, where he captured the complete Gestapo archive which enabled him to arrest fugitive Nazis, including Karl Fritzsch, the Deputy Commandant of Auschwitz. In his 2007 memoirs, For He Is an Englishman, Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman, Captain Arnold-Baker recorded that as an MI6 officer in Oslo he arrested Fritzsch: "We picked up, for example, the deputy commandant of Auschwitz, a little runt of a man called Fritzsch whom we naturally put in the custody of a Jewish guard – with strict instructions not to damage him, of course."
He also arrested senior German military figures[dubious – discuss] (King Haakon VII's Medal of Freedom). He took the view that as the war was now practically over, it was important to gather as much intelligence about the Soviet army, since this was plainly the new threat. In this he was thwarted, and his reports concerning his interrogations of such figures as a high civilian official in the German administration of occupied Russia, von der Ow, who described the anti-communist feelings of much of the population of the western USSR, were buried by his superiors who were, as it later emerged, Soviet spies. It seems that as a consequence he voiced suspicions about Philby which were later conveyed by M. Oldfield to Washington.