It’s been a while since I’ve written anything for this blog and the reason is simple; I’ve been busy taking care of my mom. She’s eighty-three years old now, and over the last eighteen months her health has been steadily in decline. As she’s getting into her twilight years she’s needed more and more help, and as I live quite close to her, it’s not just my duty to take care of her, it’s my privilege.
For this reason I haven’t had much time to write for this blog or create videos, or even post too much on social media, and when I do, I find that I have less and less time for idiots and the uninformed.
When your own mother is getting into her 80s and you start realising that she’s not always going to be here, you become very cynical towards people online who just want to cause arguments and have a fight with someone.
I’ve also become very cynical towards anybody famous with a large platform who thinks they’re an expert on geopolitics, especially anybody in my own country who is pointing fingers elsewhere in the world, saying their shit stinks and the UK is so much better than them.
Newsflash, dipshits. It’s not. Not by a long way.
In the 10 years since I’ve been covering world events, what I’ve learned about the crimes of my own country are quite frankly sickening. We are supposed to be the good guys. That’s what we’re brought up to believe. We are the good guys who fought and defeated the Nazis. At least that’s what my generation was taught.
Now, though, that seems to not be the case at all. Now, we seem to be arming and supporting those who are committing genocide. Now, we seem to arm and support and run diplomatic cover for an apartheid state who are committing the worst crimes in modern history.
Just last year, my country helped appoint the ex-leader of Al-Qaeda as President of Syria [1]. That was us. We did that. “Great” Britain.
Our hands are far from clean when it comes to matters of world history, and the way those in power will lie to us to keep the truth from us is, in my opinion, nothing short of criminal.
For instance, in the 8 years prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, virtually every Western media outlet from the BBC and The Guardian to The Telegraph and The Spectator and The New York Times were reporting that Ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world and had a serious neo-Nazi problem. Since Russia’s invasion, however, that messaging has been scrubbed, and all mention of these facts is ignored and treated as conspiracy – or dismissed as “pro-Kremlin talking points.”
Were our government and media lying to us back then about Ukraine being full of corrupt neo-Nazis? Or are they lying to us now so they can continue to arm and support Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia that America and NATO provoked?
So when I see comments by famous men like John Cleese on Iran or Russia, I honestly get offended by just how ignorant on history they are.
You can criticise Iran’s theocratic rule and system of government all you like – but make sure it is premised with the truth – that Iran is the way it is because we, Britain, made it that way.
We begged America to overthrow their first ever democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, and in 1953 Roosevelt helped us get rid of him in Operation Ajax [2]. The Western powers overthrew Mosaddegh and installed a brutal dictator called the “Shah” (Persian king).
We did all this because the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – a division of British Petroleum – was stealing Iran’s oil. When Mosaddegh was elected he wanted to audit them with a view to keeping Iran’s resources for Iran, which annoyed Britain and PM Churchill immensely, so Britain went to the World Court in an attempt to legalise the theft, and put Iran under siege warfare [3].
Eventually our coup was complete and the pro-Western puppet, the Shah, was installed for 26 years of brutal dictatorship until the revolution in 1979.
With all this in mind, when John Cleese was being entirely negative towards the Iranian people a few months ago, and if you ask me quite racist towards Muslims entirely, I was extremely critical of him.
But he hasn’t stopped there.
Cleese has recently turned his attention towards Russia in his posts, and is currently sycophantically cheering on Ukraine and criticising everything Russia. He’s basically saying that Russia is an undemocratic country and that’s why we should hate it.
Can you believe it? A Brit saying that Russia is undemocratic, and complaining that their dissidents have a way of meeting an ill-fate, with some of them even being thrown out of windows.
Now here’s a man who’s never heard of Willie McCrae – the Scottish lawyer and anti-nuclear activist who was shot in the back of the head, twice, by a revolver found twenty metres away and wiped clean of all fingerprints – but whose death is still ruled “suicide”.
Cleese also must obviously think that David Kelly – the Iraq WMDs weapons expert due – also died “by suicide” in the woods, and that there’s nothing mysterious about that.
Criticising other nations that do not affect us, when right now our own nation is in such a shit state, is quite frankly hilarious.
It’s like complaining the violinists on the Titanic aren’t that great, just as your ship slides beneath the icy waves.
It’s like a Monty Python sketch all on its own.
And as for criticising another country for not being democratic? Give me a break.
First off – the UK is friends and allies with plenty of dictatorships around the world, ok? Whether a country is a thriving democracy or not has absolutely no bearing on the diplomatic relationship at all. Second – let’s look at our own so-called “mother of all parliaments”:
In the last 10 years alone, the UK has had six Prime Ministers [4], but only half of them actually won a general election (May, Johnson, and Starmer). In the last general election when Labour and Keir Starmer won in a “landslide” – so the media told us – if you look at the numbers only 1 in 3 votes went his way [5] and only 1 in 5 of the people eligible to vote in that election was actually motivated to register their support for him – so how can they and he win in such a landslide if our democracy is so fantastic?
All of that doesn’t sound like a bastion of democracy to me, so for a Brit to be criticising and pointing fingers at any other country in the world is the epitome of hypocrisy.
But all of these things are not the main reason I get so annoyed.
The overwhelming reason that I get so upset with people like John Cleese, who have such massive followings and such huge influence, is that when they use their voices to sycophantically cheer on the empire, like we are not guilty of crimes ourselves, and like our system is so perfect, they’re not helping anybody in those countries at all.
There’s not a chance in hell that John Cleese will affect anything in Iran or Russia with what he says on Twitter – as huge as he is in Western circles, I doubt Monty Python and Fawlty Towers get any airtime on Iranian TV – but if he said something about the problems we have on these shores?
You can bet that would help people in Britain. You could bet that would help a lot.
When John Cleese criticised the state of our news media in the UK a few years ago and said he was moving to the Caribbean because of it, the BBC did an interview with him on Newsnight, such is the gravitas of the man.
If John Cleese, the great comedian and Monty Python genius, the star and co-writer of Fawlty Towers, one of the best sitcoms the world has ever seen, if he was to turn his attention home and criticise the people who have been running this country into the ground, who have been helping to install the head of Al-Qaeda in Syria and who’ve been joining their so-called allies in crimes all around the world, crimes which include arming and supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine – if he was to use his voice to be critical of those things, the chances of him affecting the lives of people back home are much, much higher than affecting anyone’s lives in Iran or in Russia.
But he doesn’t, and people like him don’t. They prefer to criticise Putin and Khomeini instead, and that is really disheartening to somebody like me who, believe it or not, deeply loves this country. I really want it to be the force for good that we like to think we are in the world.
I’m led to believe from listening to interviews in the past with John Cleese that he really loved his mum and had a really great relationship with her, especially as she got older. This is something that at least we have in common. I deeply love my mum, and I’m deeply proud that this country looks after its elderly much better than other countries do. The NHS in this country is the best thing about it, if you ask me. It’s the reason I’m so opposed to its privatisation. I realise that I’m here criticising a country for all its crimes, whilst sitting under the very blanket of protection that it provides me.
But that is precisely why I criticise it so much.
Because I also have something else in common with John Cleese, and that is I don’t want to live in Russia or under a system of Russian rule either. This is the reason I am so opposed to the powers that be in Britain trying to sell off our NHS to American companies that will use our elderly and sick in this country for profit [6]. This is the reason I am so opposed to our government changing terrorism laws in order to prosecute people for exercising their free speech, threatening terror legislation and prosecuting – and threatening to imprison – grannies for repeating slogans [7]. This is the reason why I’m so opposed to the continuing and overwhelming assault on our civil liberties, the restrictions on free speech, unwarranted surveillance, and why I am so opposed to the ever-accelerating march of our governments toward authoritarianism – a steady march towards fascism that continues no matter which one of our political parties has been in power.
I agree, John. I don’t want to live under a Russian government. But if people like yourself with huge platforms ignore these problems at home, and choose instead to criticise other countries and the crimes of their governments, authoritarian rule similar to that in Russia is precisely where Britain is headed.
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