I loved robots when I was a kid. They seemed to be everywhere in popular culture. From the Amazing Magical Robot Game, an educational toy that appeared in my Christmas stocking, to the weekly dose of “Danger, Will Robinson” while watching the cult American classic series Lost in Space, I was hooked. So when I was seven or eight years old and "Tricky’s" the local toy shop, put one in their shop window, I had to have it. Beyond the reach of my pocket money, I devised “The Robot Club” with school friends John London and Ian Collie, whose club subscriptions coincidentally covered the price of the robot, though I don’t recall John and Ian getting much time to play with it. (Sorry guys!)

Fast forward fifty-five years and the robots are here for real. However, the reality lacks the magic conjured by my childhood imagination. In fact, to me, the whole robot business seems just a little bit scary.

For starters, why aren’t there any purple robots? Or blue, pink, green, etc.? Even robots in black-and-white movies, like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, were clearly not monochrome. I don’t know what colour Gort was, but he had a metallic shimmer that suggested silver or grey, as did Robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Today, though, I bet you a Buffalo nickel that all the humanoid robots you’ve ever seen have been white, or worse, white with black faces. I don’t think this is an accident. I think the way in which robots are presented to us is a representation of the intention of the people behind them. The robots of yore were the product of the creative minds of science fiction writers, who cast robots as angels or demons as their narratives demanded. The folk behind the robots being sold to us today are the products of billionaire tech futurists. Their intended narrative appears to be somewhat different.

In the old stories, the robot was always a character. It could be comic or tragic, loyal or murderous, but it was always a someone. Even when it was a menace, it had personality. It had colour. It had a face you could read, even if it was only a blank mask of rivets. The robots coming to an online distribution outlet via your billionaire-controlled tech device of choice are blank, faceless soldiers of servitude.

These are not characters; they’re appliances with limbs. That they’re white is no accident. White is a cultural signal: clean, clinical, neutral, safe. White is the colour of hospitals and laboratories and the myth of objectivity. A white humanoid says: don’t worry, there’s no ideology here. This is just engineering.

There is more going on here, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a recent interview, Subhadra Das, historian of science and author of Uncivilized: Ten Lies That Made the West, revealed a hidden dark agenda. Speaking to Myriam François on The Tea YouTube channel, she outlined some of the motives behind the forthcoming robot revolution.

She says that it’s a myth that science and technology are automatically neutral, “truth with a capital T,” floating above politics. As was the case with eugenics, this aura of neutrality has historically been used to give harmful social ideas a clean bill of health, because if something is labelled “science”, it becomes harder to argue with and easier to obey.

That matters, because the robot revolution is going to force society to answer a very old, very ugly question: what is a person for?

When machines can do more and more of what people currently do for wages, there will be more and more humans who are “unnecessary” to the labour market. In a sane world, that would be the start of leisure. In a less sane world, it becomes the start of sorting.

She talks about how eugenic thinking worked, not as cartoon villainy but as something disturbingly mainstream: decide that society has a “problem”, identify a group you can blame for it, then present control over that group as rational, scientific, and even compassionate. What gave me a chill was the way she described how this thinking can return in softer packaging: not “inferior race”, but “burden”, “low productivity”, “won’t contribute”, “won’t pay taxes”. Those aren’t just insults. They’re the vocabulary of a future in which citizenship is conditional on usefulness.

If that sounds dramatic, consider the mood music coming from the billionaire futurists themselves. The same people who sell “abundance” also flirt with demographic panic: talk of “Western civilisation” in peril, fear of replacement, the sense that the wrong people are multiplying. My earlier point about robot colour isn’t separate from that. If you’re anxious about who counts as the rightful inheritors of the future, then a white, “neutral”, “default” robot starts to look less like a product and more like a flag.

There’s another strand in her reasoning that helps explain why this ideology arrives with such confidence: the belief that the future is inevitable. In the transhumanist/AI-accelerationist framing she describes, AI isn’t treated as one possible path. It’s treated as destiny, almost a secular end-times story: history has a direction, the merger with machines is coming, and anyone who slows it down is cast as ignorant or even immoral.

Once you accept that framing, debate becomes blasphemy. Regulation becomes “standing in the way of progress”. And political questions, like “who owns the robots?” or “what happens to the displaced?” get pushed aside by a louder question: “how fast can we build?”

Which brings us back to those white bodies and black faceplates.

I’m not saying a designer sat down and said: “Make it look colonial.” I’m saying something more mundane and therefore more plausible: the industry is building the visual language of a future in which robots are framed as neutral, rightful, unquestionable. The whiteness is laundered as safety. The black “face” is blankness: no ethnicity, no history, no individuality, nothing that might prompt you to empathise or to ask who is being served. A humanoid, stripped of the human.

In the fiction of my childhood, robots were angels or demons depending on what the story needed. In the marketing of today, robots are neither angel nor demon. They are presented as inevitable infrastructure. And when infrastructure is inevitable, the people who control it quietly become inevitable too.

So the question I want to ask, before the robot revolution is declared “AMAZING” and the press releases start writing the future in permanent ink, is this:

When the billionaire futurists say “abundance for all”… who exactly is included in “all”? My fear is that it will be “all who remain” after the dust has settled on what may turn out to be the most turbulent period in human history.

 

There's a war going on right now for the control of money. Its significance cannot be overstated. It will shape the future of everything to such an immense degree that I believe its impact will dwarf all the wars of the 20th century combined. Billions will die - untold billions will cease to exist, all because of a handful of laws that are being passed today, with hardly anyone batting an eyelid. I'm woefully inadequate as a writer to convey the magnitude of this change, especially in a short form such as this blog post. I just hope I can bring you a flavour of what is going on so that you can start thinking about it and doing your own research.

Back in 2022, I penned a somewhat gloomy blog about the future of freedom, power and money (Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We). It now turns out that not only was I on the right track, but the rate at which our freedom is coming to an end is massively accelerating. I'm late publishing this blog because every day since writing the initial draft, new relevant stories kept coming to light which I've had to research and include.

Anyway, getting back to the main story, the nature of freedom, power and money is intertwined. If you've acquainted yourself with the history of money, perhaps by reading The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson or Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, you can't help but see the analogy to a game of Monopoly. Every game ends the same way. One player buys all the houses and hotels, wins all the cash, then the other players get frustrated and throw the board up in the air. Then a new game starts with the wealth redistributed evenly again. The pendulum swing, where wealth moves from rich to poor and then back to rich, is essentially the history of economics, money, credit and debt, and ultimately power. This may be why the same redistribution myth appears across cultures, from Prometheus giving man the fire of the Gods, to Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. [Others include Zorro, Koschei the Russian folk hero, Song Jiang from the Chinese 'Water Margin' and to some extent Jesse James!]

There isn't room to fully summarise the story here, but I've always been impressed by the theme tune to the Big Bang Theory which somehow manages to compress the entire history of the universe into a song lyric. With the help of AI, I've had a go at doing a similar thing for economics:

A History of Debt (karaoke cut, Mont Pelerin edition to the tune of the Big Bang Theory theme)

Ten thousand years ago we started farming land,
And temples used their scribes to track the IOU demand.
The pharaohs taxed the people, while kings declared a slate,
Religions banned the usurers - they tore apart the state.
The Medici got clever, winked at God and made it pay,
The Brits built banks and empires, flags and debts along the way.
The French cut heads, the markets bled
Wars, New Deal, Bretton Woods, the dollar ruled instead.
The anti-red Chicago boys said freedom is the key
Thatcher, Reagan hatched a plan, cried "Markets wild and free!"
Math, cash, history, unravelling the mystery,
It all comes down to big debt (Debt)!

And so here we are today, with the Neoliberalism of the Chicago School economists, embraced by left and right wing governments in the US, UK and EU - collectively known as the West. In universities it is taught as political orthodoxy - as though there is no rational alternative, yet it's only working out well for the 1% of people. The widening gap between rich and poor at the heart of this theory is there for all to see.

At this point, given our Monopoly analogy, we would reasonably expect the millions of people who are saddled with debt, living from pay packet to pay packet, may soon reach that point again where they have had enough and the board gets thrown up in the air.

Here's the thing though: the 1% know this, and are making subtle yet fundamental changes to the law to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So pay close attention to the next bit because it really matters. Cash - the simple handing of value from one person to another, without permission, without oversight, has been the bedrock of human liberty. Take that away, and everything else, every right, privilege, every choice falls with it. If money ceases to be ours, our life ceases to be ours. Total financial control is not just tyranny - it is an apocalypse. It is the weapon that makes famine deliberate, war automated, pestilence engineered and death selective. Billions will never live because they will be smothered before birth by resource control systems that decide who may eat, who may travel and ultimately who may exist. The end of our personal financial sovereignty is worse than the Four Horsemen - it is the master that rides them all. Once it comes, there will be no going back.

The war of which I speak then - the laws being changed are designed to move us away from cash towards a future of digital money. There is nothing wrong with digital money itself. We could have a form of digital money that can be exchanged between individuals with no other parties involved - in fact it exists already - it's called Bitcoin. However, that's not the form of digital money that we will be forced to use. They want us to use digital money that is centrally controlled - the CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currencies. The difference between these is huge. With money that transacts from person to person, we retain personal financial sovereignty - we are the masters of our own funds. It's this very Personal Financial Sovereignty that 'they' are planning to take away from us.

Of course, they're saying they're not. The US, UK and the most recent EU digital currency announcements don't claim to be doing away with cash altogether. In fact, the EU said they're considering a system of 'peer to peer' digital transactions with the digital Euro which won't require third party banking intervention, but I'm old enough and ugly enough not to believe a word of that nonsense. The stakes are too high, the power too great for them to allow that to happen.

When I speak to people about this they often fail to see the danger, and are seduced by the ease of use of apparently frictionless card purchases. I get it - it's easy. They want you to be comfortable with it. That's why the UK's Financial Conduct Authority announced on 10 September 2025 their intention to raise the limit on cashless card transactions. But this is to ignore what is going on behind the scenes. For all its flaws, Bitcoin has demonstrated that no banking intermediary is needed for value to be exchanged from one person to another. Despite what you may have read, Bitcoin has never been 'hacked'. The horror stories the press love to dwell on all refer to Bitcoin exchanges - essentially the interface between Bitcoin, which is perfect money, and the banking system, which is bent as the proverbial nine bob note. That 'they' are trying to ban anonymous crypto wallets and force everyone to use crypto via recognised exchanges says all you need to know about 'them', the folk who bought you the Wall Street and 2008 financial crashes - what could possibly go wrong?

Who, you may ask, is 'them', or the 'powers that be' as I referred to them in the previous blog? This question was eloquently answered by Critical Theory lecturer Louisa Toxværd Munch on TikTok recently. Conspiracy theorists love to apportion blame, even naming people like George Soros, Charles Schwab or Bill Gates as the arch villains in charge of it all. In reality the system is protecting itself. Rich people work to protect their own interests in all sorts of ways, and this leads to the creation of organisations that serve to protect those interests. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. There are just structures, many of which are unconnected and uncoordinated that appear to conspire against the interests of the less well off. 

There is no single figure to point at, just a blob, as I discovered myself a few years ago while trying to play low-stakes poker.

One day, the online gambling site 'Pokerstars' decided I wasn't allowed to play €1 sit-and-go tournaments unless I sent them shots of my passport, my face from multiple angles, my tax ID and my inside leg measurement. I failed the test (Spanish bureaucracy - enough said), so I tried other poker sites. Malta, Gibraltar, the other side of the world - didn't matter. They all demanded the same. Why? Because the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an unelected global body, had decided it should be so. They forced every online poker site in the world to introduce 'KYC' - know your customer. The G7 created the FATF back in 1989, and now, if FATF says jump, every government on Earth asks "how high?" No elections. No accountability. It seems on the face of it to be a one world government in all but name, but it's actually less well coordinated than that.

The reason I felt compelled to write this blog now is that 2025 is the year in which the 'powers that be' want to beef up online security, in the name of children's safety, by forcing people to provide KYC to access certain types of content (The Poker experiment clearly went well). While the UK government is most vocal about access to pornography, access to other sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia are similarly affected. Australia and Canada are following suit with similar legislation in the pipeline. Even America has The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill with bipartisan support which is currently grinding its way through congress.

The important point here is the direction of travel. We've had web access for 30 years, but all of a sudden we're supposed to believe it's right now we're taking action to protect children from porn? The UK government has seen that people are circumventing the identification process by using a VPN, so now they're talking about banning them too.

The relevance to child protection of these sorts of digital legislation has been shown elsewhere to be spurious at best. The real reason is to increase the control that governments have over the Internet. As I explained in the previous blog, I believe there to be a movement to restrict the software we are allowed to run on our devices. As if to confirm my suspicions, Google announced last week that from 2026 it will restrict the sideloading of apps to those of 'authorised' developers. (Sideloading basically means loading an app that comes from outside the Android appstore). I predict that moving forward, terrorism will increasingly be used as an excuse to introduce further restrictions on the software we're allowed to run. To ban software that could be useful to fight our subjugation: encrypted messaging, peer to peer file exchange, off-grid messaging apps like bitchat and many other tools will all have to become 'authorised'. Most of the open source software repositories for these sorts of apps are hosted on a source control website called Github. Github was bought by Microsoft in 2018, to gasps of horror in the open source community. Years later, Microsoft has been lauded for largely maintaining the site's independence and encouraging its continued growth. However, the cynical voice in my head says they would do that if there was a long term plan to capture and control the world's open source software.

My belief is that none of this is really about poker sites or porn filters. The endgame is cash. Cash, or as I explained earlier, Personal Financial Sovereignty, is the overarching goal.

When 'we the people' have our money fully digitally controlled, there are many upsides for the winner of the Monopoly game, but many downsides for us.

Once cash disappears, governments can literally program what you're allowed to spend money on. The classic example is "Fancy a sausage roll? Sorry citizen, your cholesterol's too high. Try a lettuce leaf." However, it goes much deeper than that. "Government deficit? We'll introduce negative interest rates - there won't be a bank run because you can't get cash out at the bank!" We're already seeing in America how Trump is using the threat of litigation to silence news media. Imagine how much easier that would be if the same man had the ability to control every penny everybody has to spend. The stranglehold an unscrupulous leader would have over our lives doesn't bear thinking about.

We tend to think of the end of civilisation as nuclear war, asteroid impact or a global pandemic, but this is far worse. I can see it happening in my head like a slow motion car crash. I feel like Nuñez in that H.G. Wells short story "The Country of The Blind". If I talk to people about what I think is going on they treat me like I'm mad.

And maybe I am mad - mad because I can see what most refuse to see. Once our money itself is captured, resistance dies with it. You can't organise, you can't fund a movement, you can't even buy bread without permission. Rebellions require resources, but all the resources will be controlled by them, so the fight will be over before it starts. That's why to me, this feels so apocalyptic: not because it ends in fire, but because it ends in absolute submission, forever.

 

In the quiet pueblo blanco of Olvera, where I’ve lived for fifteen years, a war has erupted.  Not over healthcare, jobs, or the creeping cost of living, but over something far more mundane: rubbish.

The town hall has hiked refuse collection fees and doubled down on a door-to-door recycling scheme, complete with barcode-tagged bins linking every scrap to your name.  Non-compliance, though unspoken, carries the threat of fines.  This isn’t just about sorting plastic from paper - it’s about control, surveillance, and the theft of our time.

The town hall is saying “it’s not our fault, we’re just following orders” citing an EU directive that seeks to make citizens more responsible for their rubbish, however there is nothing in the EU law that conflates recycling with refuse collection.  This seems to be a decision made nearer home.

While door to door recycling collection may at first seem innocuous enough, it has inconevienced many people. The closing of most of the public recyling bins means smelly organic waste has to remain in the house until being put out on the correct day. Folk with limited space find it intolerable to be expected to keep separate bins in their house for paper, plastics, organics, and “resto” the catch all-category that has many inexplicable exceptions from batteries to jam jars. In the absence of public bins, many frustrated citizens are just leaving their rubbish in the street as a dirty protest. So far, the town hall isn’t listening.

However I believe Olvera’s bins are a microcosm of a larger betrayal.  The traditional left, who are in charge here, has lost its way, having become wedded to neoliberalism’s altar of individual responsibility and managerial disdain. By dismissing the legitimate anger of ordinary people, they’ve left a void - one that populists, with their placards and promises, are all too eager to fill. This is not just a local squabble; it’s a warning of democracy’s fragility across the West.

The Recycling Dogma: A False Salvation

Recycling is a modern sacrament.  To question it is to invite scorn, as if you’ve denied a universal truth.  Yet the reality is far less divine. A ‘New Scientist’ article from decades ago pointed out a brutal truth: burning a piece of paper can be kinder to the environment than driving it to a recycling center, where it’s sorted, shredded, pulped, bleached, and reformed - each step guzzling more fossil fuel than the last.  In a world still hooked on oil and gas, recycling often costs more carbon than it saves.

I don’t hate recycling. I hate the lie it’s built on: that individual acts can offset a system addicted to overproduction and waste. Corporations churn out plastic, reaping profits while paying nothing for its disposal. Meanwhile, we’re guilt-tripped for not rinsing a yoghurt pot. This is called ‘Agency Fallacy’: the myth that our small choices can fix a large system that is structurally broken.

“If the planet burns, it’s not because you used the wrong bin. It’s because the system was designed to burn it.”

The Minute Snatch: Your Time as Their Resource

Every day, we lose fragments of our lives to tasks we never signed up for.  Take the EU’s new water bottles, with caps tethered to the neck to “aid recycling.” Sounds noble, but try screwing one back on. It’s fiddly, awkward, and steals seconds each time. Ten sips a day, and that’s five minutes gone. Multiply that by millions, and you’ve got a mass heist of human time. I call it the ‘Minute Snatch’.

Banks are the masters of this theft.  Not too long ago, bank tellers handled your transactions. Now, you’re the teller, fumbling through online banking or over-engineered ATMs. A UK bank once bragged, “We’re all bank managers now!”  No, we’re not. We’re unpaid clerks. Self-checkouts at supermarkets?  You’re the unpaid cashier.  Website CAPTCHAs that make you identify traffic lights? You’re training AI for free. Each task chips away at your day, your dignity, your autonomy.

This isn’t empowerment - it’s exploitation dressed up as convenience. And it’s not accidental. It’s the logical endpoint of a system that sees your time as a resource to be mined.

Neoliberalism’s Long Shadow

The roots of this lie in neoliberalism, a philosophy that recast society as a collection of individuals, each responsible for their own fate. As Grace Blakeley argues in ‘Stolen’, Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “there is no such thing as society” wasn’t just rhetoric - it was a blueprint. Public services were gutted, collective bargaining weakened, and responsibility was shifted onto the individual.

“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

 - Margaret Thatcher, 1987

This mindset - responsibilisation, as sociologists call it - makes us feel guilty for systemic failures. If recycling doesn’t work, it’s your fault. If the economy tanks, you didn’t upskill enough. If the climate collapses, you didn’t cycle to work. The Agency Fallacy thrives here, convincing us that our tiny acts matter while corporations and governments dodge accountability.

Olvera’s Bins: A Local Betrayal

In Olvera, the PSOE, a party with “socialist” in its name, should be the voice of the people. Instead, they’ve embraced neoliberalism’s playbook: enforce compliance, monitor citizens, and dismiss dissent. Their social media posts about the recycling scheme have been curt, even rude, brushing off concerns about cost, privacy, and practicality.  Residents aren’t just angry about bins - they’re angry about being ignored.

The scheme itself is a case study in overreach. Bar codes track your waste, raising questions about GDPR compliance and proportionality under Spanish consumer law. Fines, though not yet explicit, loom as a threat. For many, especially the elderly or those in rural areas, the system is impractical. Yet the town hall presses on, blaming individuals for systemic flaws.

This isn’t socialism. It’s managerialism - a top-down imposition that treats citizens as cogs, not partners. And it’s failing the people it claims to serve.

The Populist Void

This is the macrocosm you see across the West. From Brexit to Trump to the rise of far-right parties in Europe, the pattern is clear: when progressive parties wed themselves to neoliberalism’s cold logic, they lose the trust of the people. Populists, with their simple answers and emotional resonance, rush in. They don’t win because people love their ideology - they win because no one else is listening.

“When the left stops listening, the right starts shouting. And the people, desperate, follow the noise.”

The Threat to Democracy

David Graeber once wrote that bureaucratic systems punish the powerless while absolving the powerful.  Byung-Chul Han described our “achievement society,” where we internalize our own exploitation, proud of our “agency” even as it enslaves us. In Olvera, you see both: a system that fines you for a mis-sorted bottle, while the corporations who made the bottle pay nothing.

But the deeper danger is political. When the left fails to offer a real alternative - when it swaps solidarity for spreadsheets - it cedes the field to those who thrive on division and fear. Democracy doesn’t die in a single blow; it erodes when trust is broken, when people feel abandoned, when the only voices left are the ones promising order over justice.

It’s Not Your Fault - But It’s Our Fight

Let’s be clear: it’s not your fault. You didn’t design a world that runs on fossil fuels. You didn’t choose to spend your days as an unpaid bank teller, cashier, or AI trainer. You didn’t ask to be a bin inspector, scrutinized by Bar codes & RFID chips (yes, Olvera’s bins also have the same radio frequency chips that supermarkets use to stop us running off with a bottle of whisky). The Agency Fallacy wants you to believe you’re the problem. You’re not.

But this fight is ours. Recycling won’t save us. Compliance won’t save us. Only collective action - real, messy, human action - can.

We need a left that listens, that rejects neoliberalism’s hollow promises, that fights for systems where responsibility is shared, not dumped on the individual.

Olvera’s bins are a small story, but they’re a warning. Across the West, the failure to heed that warning is giving populists the keys to the future. If we don’t reclaim our agency - not the false kind, but the kind rooted in solidarity - then the next war won’t be about rubbish. It’ll be about democracy itself.

Things to keep in mind

• You don’t owe the system your spare minutes.
• You don’t owe your soul to a recycling bin.
• And you definitely don’t owe your free labour to the companies that created the problem.
• It’s not your fault.
• It never was.

[This blog was researched and drafted with help from ChatGTP and Grok]

I loathe Trump, and pretty much anyone else who thinks dripping themselves in gold is a good look. However, I saw the recent meeting where he and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy, and my 'take' on what went down seems very different from most commentators on the left. I thought I'd share my opinion and take the brickbats as they come.

Trump is a performative president. What you see isn't a logical person behaving in a predictable manner. It's arguable that all people in power, to some degree or another, have to do this because politics can be like poker—you’ve gotta hide your cards. Trump takes this to the nth degree. His modus operandi was exposed to me in the book Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi, which is an excellent read explaining in detail the dynamics of digital media.

Matt followed Trump around on the first campaign trail and describes how he and other journalists were dumbfounded by the things that came out of Trump's mouth. He goes on to explain how he came to realise that Trump was taking his cues from sports—particularly professional wrestling—and the way that really basic human emotion is leveraged to co-opt and polarise opinion.

Trump knows that in order to get things done, hate works. He knows that to get a crowd to unite behind a cause, you get more reaction from being Captain Hook than Peter Pan. When I saw Trump and Vance gang up on Zelenskyy, my hackles went up, and I thought back to Hate Inc..

Pro wrestling pivots on the relationship between two polar opposites: the bad guy or "heel," and the good guy or "face." The heel comes out jeering at the crowd, getting as big a rise out of them as possible. As the heel’s jeers rile up the crowd, their support for the face erupts like a volcano. In our meeting, Zelenskyy played the face while Trump and his tag partner Vance were the heels. By the end, the global hatred of Trump and Vance was visceral, but look at how advantageous that has since been for Zelenskyy and US interests.

Hours after the meeting ended, social media was filled with posts from European leaders pledging their united support for Ukraine. They waved their cheque books, vowing to increase their own defence spending and to extend more military assistance. Also, I think this is more than a knee-jerk reaction. My guess is that this will inform European policymaking for a generation. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we see the election of another politician like Merkel, who argued there was more peace to be gained by trading with Russia, buying their oil and resources. US interests are being served by the likely further severing of EU/Russian commerce. This is probably why we've heard so few words of protest from the Bush/Clinton/Obama/Biden axis.

While Trump obviously took a lot of flak, what does he care? He’s not running for re-election. So am I saying he's a good guy? No, of course not. What I am saying is that while Trump's primary driver is his own wealth and power, he does this while maintaining an alignment with 'US interests' far closer than his rogue persona suggests.

If we accept this tenet, what do we make of Trump's relationship with Israel? We've seen in British politics that anyone who aligns with Palestine and criticises Israel gets cancelled. The most high-profile example is how Jeremy Corbyn was tried and convicted of anti-Semitism by the British press, demolishing his chances of winning an election. Trump knows the fallout of criticising Israel is far too dangerous, so he would never pull a trick on Netanyahu like he did on Zelenskyy. However, perhaps his over-the-top claims about building a Gaza Riviera and the reposting of that stomach-churning AI video with the gold Trump statue were deliberately meant to have the polarising effect that they did.

Now that the demolition of Gaza has been achieved, perhaps US interests are best served by deposing the Netanyahu government and returning the country to a more human-friendly, liberal administration. Maybe by embracing Netanyahu—making him and Trump the heels—we're anticipating the appearance of a new face who will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Zionist destruction, enabling the smooth passage of US corporations into Gaza to realise the long-term plan: the exploitation of the offshore Gaza Marine gas fields and the execution of the Ben Gurion canal project. Call me cynical, but I don't think anything happens by accident, even an apparent car crash like the Trump administration!

You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians

They all seemed like game show hosts to me

 
Yougov puts Johnson's popularity at 39%  and, in another poll specifically related to his handling of the COVID crisis, the Daily Express reported on Jun 9 that Johnson had "the lowest approval rating worldwide" 

verb [ I ]

uk/prəˈkræs.tɪ.neɪt/ us/proʊˈkræs.tə.neɪt/

to keep delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring

It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it's been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it's spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn't notice passing has passed away. 

The comment he made was in response to the daubing of anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue in North London on Hanukkah. The post read:

Anti-semitism has long standing roots on the Left - read Marx on 'The Jewish Question' - and please remember that Muslims are brought up, in varying degrees, to loathe Jews and for some indeed - it takes but a few - to envisage a world where they are wiped out. The Left are allies of a certain stripe of Islam so don't immediately jump to the facile conclusion that the 'Far Right' is responsible. The rise of anti-semitism has coincided with large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe, some of whom deeply resent Judaism and 'nationalist' parties have arisen in response to this and the increasing emphasis on pressing for a monolithic European 'government'. The 'Far Right' was a risible minority until these two processes were underway.

I was immediately angered by this. Triggered if you will. Now the friend in question (no names no pack drill) isn't your typical Britain First thug. He's an educated man with a degree from the LSE of all places. He is well read and has a house full of books. I was aware he leaned to the right as I've enjoyed many late night alcohol-fuelled discussions with him, during which times we've never had too many violent clashes.

In my experience and of what I have read, the very notion that the left is anti-Semitic is a nonsense. The communists famously battled alongside the Jews in the battle of Cable Street against Moseley's British Nazis in the 1930's. It was the nazi's spouting anti-jewish slurs and propaganda during the 70's that necessitated the formation of the anti-nazi league. During 2019 election there was even an anti-Labour proppo starring Maureen Lipman that listed the life-long links that previously existed between the Jewish community in Britain and the Labour party. But then later in the video one gets to the nub. This horrendous piece of anti-Corbyn propaganda is part of a much larger and more sinister campaign by the right deliberately designed to smear Corbyn as anti-Semitic.

Going back to my friend's original post, if you have read 'On the Jewish Question' you'll know that it was far from being anti-Semitic. Marx wrote it in response to an essay by the German philosopher Bruno Bauer, who himself was arguing that Jews should renounce their religion in order to be free in a secular society, clearly an anti-Semitic position that Marx was attacking. If instead of reading the whole piece you only dip in and grab snatches of it one can easily confuse it as being anti-semitic because Marx uses many quotes from Bauer which have anti-semitic language in it. Also the language Marx used is perhaps a little less delicate than we would use today, but one has to consider the essay was written in 1843 in a time when the phrase anti-Semitic had yet to be coined. Marx also used irony and takes Devil's Advocate positions which go over a lot of reader's heads. Let's not forget too, he himself was Jewish! This leads to misconceptions about the piece such that even some Jewish scholars argue among themselves whether Marx was being anti-Semitic or not. It is this has been taken advantage of by the right who have cited the piece many times since around the year 2000. One can see the cited articles in Google Ngram searches and by searching for mentions of the book with the advanced Google search tag site: e.g. "on the jewish question" site:telegraph.co.uk

Clearly my friend's claim that anti-Semitism has deep roots on the left is completely without foundation. The far right however have been solidly anti-semitic since Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and that has manifested itself in various forms with the rise of the right. My suspicion is, that like many people my friend has been the victim of right-wing gaslighting.

Further clues follow in the rest of his comment which is pure Mainstream Media 'dog-whistle racism' as seen everyday in the Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, Star etc etc.

1) He suggests Muslims hate Jews. There are about 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet, I'd be surprised if some of them weren't brought up to hate jews as are some Christians, but it's simply a racist stereo-type to regard being Muslim as automatically anti-semitic.

2) The left are allies of a certain 'stripe' of Islam. Hmm, not sure which stripe that is. Does he mean the Palestinian stripe who has had their lands occupied by Israel in defiance of UN resolutions, or does he mean the stripe of Islam opposed to the war being waged by the Wahabbi's on Yemen? Tell you what, we'll leave that for another blog post.

3) The rise of anti-semitism has coincided with large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe. Has it though? He was saying earlier how old the roots of anti-Semitism were in Europe because of the political left. Is there more anti-Semitism in Europe now than there was in the 1930's? Clearly not.

4) ..'nationalist' parties have arisen in response to this [sic. large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe] and the increasing emphasis on pressing for a monolithic European 'government'. This is a Brexiteer trope. The increase in Muslim migration to Europe is a direct consequence of American meddling in the Middle East and the notion that there pressure for a monolithic European government is also a distopic fantasy from the minds of Bannon and Farage. Anyone who believes this is barmy but anyone who believes this and uses it to accuse the political left of being anti-semitic is clearly of a dangerously confused mind.

So I politely replied to my friends post rebutting his arguments I also added the following:

"What is a crime against intellectual freedom is the notion that any criticism of the State of Israel is automatically antisemitic, and the recent decision by the Tories to prohibit public bodies like universities and local authorities from supporting the BDS movement. That's worse than Thatcher supporting apartheid."

Of course the unanswered question here is who hoodwinked my friend and the electorate into thinking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party were anti-Semitic, but that is a theme for another blog post on another day!