Category: Letters to America
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Custard Woman vs The Dark Lord
If you think America has it bad with a rapist paedophile president hell-bent on fascisting his way out of the international blackmail trap he happily stumbled into with his pants around his ankles… wait ‘til you hear about the UK’s current predicament.
Our rapist paedophile ex-prince aside, and the King’s late rapist paedophile man-of-the-people “jingle jangle” advisor aside, we find ourselves with a prime minister who thinks it’s ok to have a key political advisor who is best friends with a rapist paedophile.
Kiddie-fuckers are bad, but not so bad that you can’t stay in touch and even stay in their mansion while they’re in prison for fucking children.
Of course, its not even the kiddie-fucking that’s the problem. The problem is that the kiddie-fucker looks like he was a foreign asset or a spy. And the key political advisor passed on highly privileged sensitive information to this foreign asset.
Fuck the children! This is about national security and the national interest!
But remember, for all his faults, the key political advisor isn’t a paedophile, as far as we know.
Three strikes and we’ll chop off your broadband.
He does, however, have a history of fucking our children’s (and other poor people’s children’s) futures. He wanted to reduce aid to developing countries as long ago as 2005. And he wanted to expand Heathrow. And he wanted to cut off the internet for seven million Brits found to have downloaded copyrighted material.
Enter Custard Woman. Custard Woman bravely made some vegan custard (unusually smooth, according to her mum), dyed it green to match the green slime she imagined coursing through his’s veins, and promptly accosted him with it, throwing it right into his creepy, frightening-looking face.
To Mandelson’s credit, he brushed it off and carried on with his day. He reappeared five minutes later, custard-free, and claimed the custard was organic and non-toxic. If anything, he looked positively glowing and revitalised - as if he’d just received a hydrating facial massage and a blood/slime transfusion simultaneously. At no time did he complain of being assaulted, or of violent left-wing fascists, unlike modern-day far-right snowflake warriors. Although he did whine about a minor skin irritation on his face. Fuck him!
What brought all this on? Well I was going through my email archive to make sure I wasn’t inadvertently connected to Mandelson, Epstein, Savile or any other kiddie-fuckers or their friends. I a spirit of openness and transparency, this was all I found.
This, and a couple of messages from my fellow not a podcasters. One saying how creepy and frightening Mandelson’s facial mannerisms are. The other saying he is “worse than a bronchoscopy”.
From Antisemite to Anti-American
When confronted with documented evidence of war crimes, defenders of atrocities cycle through predictable stages before settling on a final (final?) position: reframing opposition to genocide as “anti-Americanism.”
This evolution is telling. First came the antisemitism accusation - the nuclear option deployed when hospital bombings and destroyed aid trucks became indefensible. But when that weaponisation of historical trauma failed to silence criticism, the charge quietly disappeared, replaced by a more sophisticated imperial framework.
Now the same critic who was supposedly driven by “rabid anti-Semitism” gets recast as an anti-American contrarian. The accusations shift, but the goal remains constant: delegitimise opposition to documented atrocities through character assassination rather than evidence.
The “anti-American” framing is particularly absurd given the intertwined nature of Anglo-American imperialism. British special forces operate in Ukraine alongside extensive arms sales and military coordination with Israel. When Boris Johnson can veto Ukrainian peace negotiations and the UK maintains outsized influence in international organisations despite its declining economic power, we’re seeing coordinated imperial projects rather than American unilateralism.
The “special relationship” allows Britain to punch above its weight strategically while America provides the military muscle. Royal Marines in “high-risk operations” in Ukraine, deep military oversight of Gaza operations, and the historical legacy of the Balfour Declaration all point to British imperial continuity operating through American power.
Critics who oppose both British and American imperial interventions get labeled “anti-American” because the imperial mindset cannot process consistent opposition to coordinated oppression. It must choose sides in great power competition rather than opposing the system of domination itself.
The accusations will keep shifting - antisemitic, anti-American, whatever works - because the goal was never sincere concern about prejudice, but silencing criticism of documented atrocities.
Why complain?
Two years into Gaza’s destruction, you can trace the evolution of genocide denial in real time:
Phase 1: “It’s not happening” - Israel is only targeting Hamas, civilian casualties are minimal, reports are exaggerated.
Phase 2: “It’s justified” - Palestinians brought this on themselves, Hamas (“ISIS” - seriously?!) uses human shields, Israel has the right to defend itself.
Phase 3: “It’s normal” - War is ugly, these things happen, other conflicts are worse, why complain about hospital bombings when other wars exist?
Phase 4: “Why do you care?” - The mask fully drops. Not defending the actions anymore, just questioning why anyone should object to war crimes at all.
Each phase abandons the previous justification while moving the moral goalposts further into the abyss. By the end, you’re not debating policy or tactics - you’re facing someone who has reasoned themselves out of basic human empathy.
The weaponised whataboutism reveals the imperial logic - both Ukraine and Israel are Western client states whose “sovereignty” depends on US backing. When a UK prime minister can fly to Kyiv in order to veto peace negotiations, and US aid determines Israeli military capacity, these aren’t independent nations making sovereign choices.
Some of this stems from historical guilt transformed into moral blindness - where “never again” becomes “never again to Jews” rather than “never again to anyone,” providing cover for Western imperial projects wrapped in humanitarian language.
The most chilling part isn’t the denial itself. It’s watching someone systematically dismantle their own moral framework, piece by piece, to avoid confronting what they’re supporting.
Look away if you’re not interested in reality, right and wrong, or changing it. And yes, that’s politics.
Israel admits no proof of Hamas systematically stealing UN aid. [original NYT article with its misleading url.]
Israel destroyed over 1,000 aid trucks, leaving supplies to rot.
Documentation of American and Israeli forces murdering Palestinians seeking aid.
The pattern is clear: Israel used false claims about Hamas aid theft to justify a blockade that has created mass starvation, while simultaneously destroying aid shipments and shooting people trying to get food. This is the very definition of collective punishment and using starvation as a weapon of war. It’s a war crime.
This is so messed up!
‘Yves Bonnet, the intelligence chief who tried to negotiate Abdallah’s exchange in 1985 and is now a member of the far-right National Rally, said he was “treated worse than a serial killer” and that “the United States was obsessed with keeping him in jail”.
‘According to a report in Le Monde newspaper, no Palestinian prisoner – even those condemned to life imprisonment in Israel – has served more than 40 years in jail. Abdallah served 41.’
Pro-Palestinian convict freed by France after 41 years: bbc.com
“Self-defence.”
Israeli forces kill 67 Palestinians seeking aid in northern Gaza, Hamas-run ministry says: bbc.com
American values.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy on the forced disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil
What's going on in Syria?
If I understand this correctly: it’s illegal in the UK to say or do anything that could be construed as support for the democratically elected government of Gaza and likewise for a party of the democratically elected government of Lebanon because we designate them as proscribed terrorist organisations.
The outgoing US president brokered a one-sided ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, which allows Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory.
As soon as this ceasefire was in place, the Israeli prime minister threatened the president of Syria, and the armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra (who we designate as proscribed terrorist organisations) proceeded to violently overthrow the government of Syria (who we did not designate as a terrorist organisation despite all the bad press).
Incidentally, the leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra was previously held in US detention facilities in Iraq for several years and was coincidentally released just in time to form Al-Nusra at the start of Syrian Civil War in 2011.
The leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra has now formed the new government in Syria.
They are the good guys and are really very moderate compared to the former government of Syria - the bad guys (which is presumably why we didn’t proscribe them as a terrorist organisation).
While all this is happening, Israel is bombing Syria and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory. And Israel continues to obliterate Gaza. All paid for by the good ol' US of A.
Bye Bye Biden
Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚
Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)
This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.
Foreign policy
“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”
Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.
”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)
Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.
Israel
Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.
Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.
Yugoslavia
Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)
Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.
If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
Iraq
Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)
George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.
Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.
He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.
A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.
Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)
Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged' from an oppressed religious minority.
War on Terror
Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.
That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.
Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)
Domestic policy
Race relations
Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.
This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.
Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)
Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states' rights over a united federal states of America.
Women’s rights
”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)
Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974
Biden’s neoliberalism
Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.
At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.
Supporting spending cuts
Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).
Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.
”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”
Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.
Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.
Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)
No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.
”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)
Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.
Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)
Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.
Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.
As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)
The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)
Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)
By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.
People Don't Change
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions.
This is a quote, or the gist of a quote, from an episode of Person of Interest, a TV show I watched avidly for two and a half seasons before rapidly losing interest after the scriptwriters killed off one of the only characters with a fully functioning sense of empathy (who happened to be a black woman) and which therewith descended into a cliched, repetitive, and all-too predictable (yet surprising) slapstick parody of itself.
If I wanted to watch a bunch of psychopaths endlessly escalate a brutal war on humanity I could just look at the news. Americans sure like their guns and shooting people for entertainment. Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea and a good book, and a bit of peace and quiet.
Anyway, people don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Especially when they have enough guns pointed at their head. That’s the takeaway, or the moral of this story. But they always escape, and then they’re back to making bad decisions all over again, usually involving pointing guns at other people’s heads.
And maybe that’s right. People don’t change. Not until there’s a compelling reason to. We carry on mindlessly making the same old bad decisions over and over again like in Einstein’s theory of insanity, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.
It’s a horrible take. But it’s true to some extent. Getting better (it can’t get much worse) can be a bit of a song (and a dance). Recovery is a long and winding road. They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said “No, no, no!” There’s a lot of resistance to change, and even to making good decisions.
But is much of this also a result of the world we live in, and who we are? We live in a world consumed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We are in thrall to the ideas of freedom of the market, the decimation of government and public services, and the freedom of individuals (and individual responsibility, even while what’s left of the state bails out the greed and mistakes of unaccountable banks and corporations).
There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher told us. There is no alternative.
Trump was right, Americans will never vote for a black woman. Hell, they wouldn’t even vote for a warmongering white woman. The white supremacist patriarchy is strong. Yes, they voted for a black man, but he turned out to be the most murderous president in history.
Is there an alternative? There’s always an alternative. It’s just that usually the alternative is more of the same, or worse. Take it or leave it. And even when there is a different option, one which might slightly rein in the excesses of this neoliberal onslaught, it’s demonised as a Stalinist coup that will murder Jews. “Nothing. Has. Changed.” implored Theresa May, quite rightly, as she continued as Prime Minister despite losing her massive parliamentary majority and failing to obtain a mandate to deliver Brexit, or anything other than her own resignation. Calling that election was the most audacious thing she ever did, aside from running through a field of wheat as a child.
Despite the people obviously voting for change, and genuine hope, it was clear that what we really needed instead was a lying, racist killer clown to run the country into the ground.
At least he had a plan. An oven-ready plan to deliver Brexit on a plate just in time for the New Year. It would be served cold, and thoroughly unappetising to everyone, toxic even. But it was the will of the people. It’s what we wanted. We voted for it! We wanted to sever our economic ties to our nearest and biggest trading partner and experience the freedom of going it alone in the big wide world, unleashed!
But that wasn’t enough! The killer clown told too many lies, and hosted too many parties in covid lockdown. He had to go. A tiny minority of elderly rich right wingers then voted for a new leader for us. One who would be more honest, less racist, less murderous, and not as stupid. Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.
Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline, all in less than a month. Talk about a whirlwind. And some bad decisions. She now has a very nice pension. You reap what you sow.
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Neoliberalism doesn’t change, and the more that the people are subjected to its bad decisions, its lust for war, for death, for oil, for money, for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the harder it gets for people to change, and the fewer good decisions are made.