ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
Another month’s worth of developments seems to have happened within seven days. Derek, as always, you’re my source of intel on what’s going on. So what’s happened that people need to know about?
Right, okay. First, I’ll say a bit more about why it’s important to talk about these things. This series wasn’t really meant to be a current affairs programme…
The ‘powers that ought not to be’ have got other ideas about that!
Well, pretty much everything that’s going on has a fairly direct bearing on your prosperity and your likely quality of life for the foreseeable future. We’ll see how that ties in as we go through.
First of all, I find it interesting how quickly things are unfolding now. Alternative media are developing, and really good quality people are getting into journalism and attracting enormous followings.
The tools are there for anyone to be an independent journalist. I feel like the authorities are playing whack-a-mole with their censorship efforts.
Yeah, I’m surprised they haven’t been more effective at closing channels down. It’s not for lack of desire. But there’s a growing awareness of various things that you and I have probably known about for many years. The most prominent example concerns Iran.
Few people were aware that the hostility with Iran goes back to 1953. That was when the British and the Americans overthrew Iran’s elected Prime Minister, Mosaddegh.
The Brits were at the root of a lot of these things, usually for short-term geopolitical reasons, trying to shore up influence in the Middle East. That’s how Israel came about, too, with the Balfour Declaration. If you go back far enough, you can find British fingerprints everywhere.
Precisely. But that was completely off people’s radar. Many millions of people have now learned about that background, which puts the situation in a very different light. Another thing many people have probably been unaware of is how prevalent false flag operations are.
If you brought this up, a lot of people would wave it aside and call it a conspiracy theory. Of course, the term “conspiracy theory” itself begs a lot of questions.
Because the world’s richest people are conspiring with each other to cause these events. So yes, I’d say it’s a conspiracy in some sense.
Well, the way I look at it is this. When they say that’s a conspiracy theory, my answer is: I know it’s a theory that something is a conspiracy. The question is not whether it’s a conspiracy theory. The question is whether it’s true!
So, false flags. People are probably fairly ready to acknowledge that Hitler’s invasion of Poland was triggered by a false flag operation. Dead bodies were dressed in Polish uniforms.
The story put out was that these men had been trying to invade Germany. That gave Hitler the excuse to invade Poland in retaliation, or in defence, or whatever. A significant event that escalated the Vietnam War was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Allegedly, an American destroyer in international waters was fired on by the North Vietnamese.
That gave the Americans an excuse for further aggression against North Vietnam.
In World War I, Belgian neutrality was the reason given. Yet the Germans had offered Belgium pretty solid guarantees that, given safe passage to France, Belgian’s neutrality would have been respected.
Yeah. So this week we’ve had two events that are bizarre and peculiar, to say the least. The first is the apparent terrorist attack on RAF Fairford, which of course is really a US Air Force base.
The whole thing doesn’t even make sense as a plausible storyline. Three very conspicuous white vans full of oil drums, which turned out to be empty, drove round the area. They then parked in a lane and waited for a farmer’s wife to come along. She phoned the MOD police, who didn’t answer the phone.
She then dialled 999 and the police came round. Meanwhile, the miscreants had run into a nearby wood and waited for the police to come and find them. The police then arrested them and released them on bail. For terrorist offences, they could easily have detained them for at least fourteen days. So there was obviously no attempt whatsoever.
Then, a day or two later, our Prime Minister Andy Burnham was interviewed by the BBC. He said there was solid evidence of an Iran connection.
That base has been used as the takeoff point for bombing sorties into Iran. Bearing that in mind, it would be entirely justifiable by any standards for Iran to attack the base. It would be a legitimate target. But if they did attack, it seems extremely unlikely they would do it by driving three white vans around.
It sounds like a plot straight from the Netflix series ‘Prison Break’.
So we’ll watch this space. Meanwhile, it seems to be producing more laughs than serious concern among onlookers.
The other one, which raises more questions than it answers, is the flight from the UAE to Tel Aviv that sent out an emergency hijack signal. The initial story was that the co-pilot attacked the captain with a knife and stabbed him. He was supposedly intending to crash the aeroplane in a terrorist incident.
This sounds like another false flag event from the past, doesn’t it? Like, haven’t we tried this plotline before, guys?
A bunch of intrepid passengers apparently broke into the cabin. However, since 2001 it hasn’t been possible to open the flight deck door from the passenger side. It has to be opened from inside. So the story now is that the pilot, despite being stabbed, managed to get to the door and open it. That enabled some intrepid passengers to get in and overpower him. At least, according to Israel, it was intrepid passengers who overpowered him. According to the airline, it was the cabin crew who got in. Then it turned out that both pilots had been stabbed. So they apparently stabbed each other, which is not impossible.
It’s a nice plot twist; I’ll give them that.
We haven’t yet heard how badly either of them is injured, at least not to my knowledge. Apparently neither of them was capable of flying the plane at this point. Somehow they were neutralised. It just so happened that two qualified pilots were among the passengers. Not only that, they were familiar enough with this particular aircraft type to bring it in for an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, en route to Israel.
The passengers were fairly soon transferred back to Tel Aviv amid scenes of much rejoicing. I don’t know what anybody will make of this. The story has so many peculiarities that it definitely raises a question mark.
Yeah, next time I’m bored on an EasyJet flight, I’ll count my lucky stars!
Well, don’t fly to Tel Aviv. It’s pretty difficult, actually.
Anyway, apart from that, we obviously have three main focuses of conflict now. First, there’s the US and Israel against Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the ensuing blockade.
Second, there’s the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Ansar Allah, universally referred to in the West as the Houthis. They appear to represent, and have the support of, the majority of Yemen’s population. Once again, the official government appears to be essentially a proxy appointed by the US Empire.
Ansar Allah have been making all the running in this conflict. This week Saudi Arabia bombed a market in Yemen. I can’t remember which town, but they killed a large number of civilians, mostly women and children. Needless to say, this enraged the population at large.
It also spurred Ansar Allah to step up their attacks. They’ve caused considerable damage to the pipeline running east to west across Saudi Arabia, which was the remaining route for Saudi oil. But they’ve now attacked the port of Yanbu, where this oil was loaded. This may have cut off the route south through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. It may also have stopped any oil being loaded for the time being.
Super.
Meanwhile, the repercussions for the world economy are still accumulating. There are credible reports that Xi Jinping firmly told Trump to remove the blockade, such as it is.
They’ve got fifteen ships in total. They have two aircraft carriers with accompanying protection ships, plus a handful of destroyers and cruisers. With these, they’re attempting to monitor at least a 200-mile strip of water where the Gulf of Aden opens into the Indian Ocean.
How that many ships can successfully intercept anybody coming out is anybody’s guess. I’m not a naval warfare expert, but it doesn’t strike me as very plausible. Meanwhile, Iran is shipping significant amounts of oil to China.
It’s also shipping significant amounts by rail over the border into Pakistan. Some of that is destined for Pakistan, and some no doubt goes on further. So the US attempts to impose its will on Iran don’t seem effective at all.
Today it was announced that the Theodore Roosevelt carrier group is heading towards the region. So there will now be three carrier groups there. This is apparently accompanied by an amphibious assault group of sailors and Marines.
I can’t imagine anybody’s projections of what a few thousand Marines or soldiers would do if they tried to land in Iran. It seems pretty obvious to me they’d come to a very sticky end extremely rapidly.
Finally, there’s Ukraine, which is increasingly seen as another US proxy war against Russia. Some people may still follow the narrative that it was an unprovoked, illegal invasion by Russia of an otherwise peace-loving Ukraine that was…
… A highly democratic state.
Right. Every time Ukraine has tried to up the ante, Russia has responded in kind on a far larger scale. They’ve done this several times over the past two or three months. They started attacking Russia’s power distribution grids and oil refineries.
So Russia responded with far more devastating attacks on the Ukrainian power grid. The scale, intensity and effectiveness of these attacks have increased rapidly over the last week. At the same time, Ukraine is still launching drone attacks deep into Russia. Russia’s success rate in intercepting them is increasing dramatically.
They’re now also taking out large numbers of Ukrainian railway locomotives. This is preventing supplies from coming in, mainly from the Polish border. So Ukraine is really on the ropes.
The US is definitely getting the worst of it in the Iranian conflict, and it looks set to get worse. Xi Jinping apparently told Trump very bluntly that they had to remove the blockade. He said Iran had already given them an off-ramp, and it would be in America’s best interest to take it. He apparently also said that if they took that route, China would support them. But as soon as the Chinese delegation boarded their plane home, Trump truculently rejected any return to the deal Iran had on the table.
The sources I hear from suggest China is extremely angry about that. It’s regarded as a gross personal insult. It also directly conflicts with China’s objectives. China is clearly the world’s growing dominant economy. What it wants is to lift its own population further out of poverty and move towards a more just, prosperous world. I don’t doubt that whatsoever. Clearly, the United States’ behaviour is in direct conflict with that.
The other thing I’d say concerns the speeches at the United Nations General Assembly. Russia, China, Iran and various other countries made supportive presentations. These were far more convincing, certainly in the eyes of the rest of the world that is not already part of the increasingly isolated US bloc.
The UN’s structure gives the US, Britain and France veto powers in the Security Council. Even if it’s impotent to actually implement things, it has still shown itself to be a global stage on which positions can be stated. Even if you look at it purely from a game-playing point of view, Russia, Iran and China have played the game far more effectively than any of the Western nations.
It’s some game.
Yeah. Believe it or not, it’s still distinctly possible we’ll get a very good outcome from all this. Of course, it’s hanging in the balance. It’s by no means a foregone conclusion, and we’ll have to see how it goes.
What it is doing, for the time being, is ratcheting up the uncertainty that people are feeling. So watch this space.
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