RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/italys-populist-government/

In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League(Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate; the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio came second with just over 32 percent. The centre-left coalition, strongly pro-EU and led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, came a distant third with 23 percent.

On May 31, after 88 days of negotiations and several impasses, Giuseppe Conte was appointed prime minister, with Salvini of the League and Di Maio of the M5S as vice premiers. The news of this unlikely coalition has been greeted with dismay by les bien pensants on both sides of the Atlantic. The German magazine Der Spiegel published a deeply offensive cover (“Ciao, amore!”)which featured a fork of spaghetti with one piece dangling as a noose. “Italy is destroying itself—and dragging down Europe with it,” was the headline. “At a time when the EU could be proving itself as an alternative to Trump’s unilateralism,” it wrote, Europe may instead be facing months, if not years, of squabbling:

“If the populists now govern in Italy, the country could steer itself on a course of constant confrontation with Brussels—by for example, expressing its solidarity on key issues with right-wing populists in France, Austria or Finland or with the EU-critical governments in Hungary and Poland. Or it could take the side of half or full-on autocrats like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and undermine European unity in the process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/09/tommy-robinson-supporters-arrested-after-clash-with-police

A group of Tommy Robinson supporters has blocked off a major road in central London in a tense stand-off with police, who made several arrests.

Hundreds of demonstrators descended on the capital and blocked off the road around Trafalgar Square.

Rows of riot police blocked the gate down the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace, where the Royal Family has gathered on the balcony after celebrating Trooping the Colour just hours earlier.

The protest on Saturday afternoon was the latest in what appears to be a bid to secure the release from jail of the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL).

Supporters chanted “Free Tommy Robinson” and hurled missiles and smoke bombs at police.

Hundreds of supporters crowded on to an open-top sightseeing bus, waving union flags, while one supporter posed on the roof in a Donald Trump mask.

By 6pm, officers had removed protesters from the bus and had kettled many of the remaining protesters on the traffic island overhead.

Other Robinson supporters crowded on to the steps of Nelson’s Column and continued to chant slogans.

A spokesperson for megasightseeing.com said: “Our London sightseeing bus was on its normal route when it got caught up in the demonstrations. The bus was stormed by demonstrators, and the driver and a small number of customers got off.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ireland-abortion-referendum-irish-exceptionalism-ending-european-identity/

The long experiment in cultural transformation has proved to be a mere detour on the way to becoming West Britain.

In Bernard Shaw’s great play John Bull’s Other Island, an English liberal character who at first seems a silly-ass Englishman but who later emerges as a more Machiavellian one, exclaims enthusiastically at one point: “Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.” This is a surefire laugh line in the theater. It is also a prediction of something that finally happened on Friday, May 25, with the landslide passage of the referendum to liberalize Ireland’s abortion law more or less in line with English precedents. And it symbolizes the end of a 100-year diversion in Irish history from West Britain to a prickly independent Catholic Republic back to West Britain again.

That something this important was at stake was realized very early by William Butler Yeats, who had commissioned the play from George Bernard Shaw to open Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats rejected the play and gave several reasons for doing so, but his main motive was almost certainly that it was alien, both politically and in literary form, to the kind of Irish national theater that Yeats was trying to establish. Shaw thought so and many years later described the incident as follows: “Like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr Yeats got rather more than he bargained for. . . . It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.”

Andrei Gromyko believed that the so-called Westphalian system, in place at least until the Second World War, had been replaced by a duopoly in which only the USSR and the United States counted as powers that could truly affect things. Moscow these days is full of rumors and speculation regarding an impending bid by Putin to revive at least in part and in a new form, the Gromykan “duopoly” by reaching out to the Trump administration in Washington.

Putin knows that without reaching out to the US, he may not be able to consolidate his gains in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia, while he could become stuck in the Syrian quagmire with no prospect of getting out anytime soon.

Russia’s isolation was best illustrated during the big annual military parade in May 2017, when of all the foreign dignitaries invited by Putin only one turned up: the President of Moldova.

“Consolidation”. In Moscow these days this is the word that most flavors discussions in political circles. The idea is that, thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s bold and risk-taking strategy, Russia has made a number of major gains on the international scene and must now act to consolidate those gains and reduce the diplomatic, economic and political price it has had to pay for them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12483/london-al-quds-terrorism

The leader of last year’s London Al Quds Day rally, Nazim Ali – director of the “Islamic Human Rights Commission”, which organizes the annual march – called for the annihilation of Israel. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British). If, however, like the scholar Robert Spencer, one reports on these activities, one is barred from entering England.

The real problem is the contrast in how the slightest criticism of Islam in the UK is perceived by British police, who readily go about arresting and prosecuting people for it.

An afternoon of racism is in store for Londoners on Sunday, but as long as the hate is directed against Jews by Muslims, British authorities apparently have no problem with it.

On Sunday June 10 in London, the yearly so-called Al Quds Day march — Al Quds is the Arabic name for both Jerusalem and for the day, invented by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran’s 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah — will take place. The march is, basically, a call for the destruction of Israel, sometimes also Jews in general. Many other cities, among them Toronto, Berlin and Tehran, will also be “celebrating” the day.

Last year in London, around 1000 people waved countless Hezbollah flags, in honor of Iran’s proxy terrorist organization, while chanting slogans such as “Zionists/ISIS are the same, only difference is the name” and “From the river to the sea – Palestine will be free”. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British).