At the pots and pans protest at our government’s complicity in the attempted starvation of 2 million Gaza Palestinians in Whitehall this evening, I was attempting to beat out the rhythm of the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Rheingold – old moles hammering away in their mines– with a saucepan and wooden spoon. This was an effort to create an air of collective subteranean proletarian menace. Needless to say, loud though it was, it did not catch on.
The cacophony of thousands beating pans with spoons nevertheless settled into a series of steady rhythms, sometimes echoing chants, sometimes settling into that most basic one, two, one two that is like marching feet and a heartbeat at the same time.
A kippah and a Keffiyah side by side against genocide.
The power of the percussion made me think of the scene in the Tin Drum in which Oscar subverts a Nazi Rally by beating a different rhythm under the grandstand, throwing the Nazi band off its stroke so its loses its bombastic march and only recovers by finding a waltz rhythm, leading the rally to dissolve as the rigid ranks melt into whirling dancers. A scene that shows the potential of people and nations to shift, affirm hope and life and fluidity over rigidity, conformity and racist militarism; and affirming that though Germany produced Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich, it also produced Beethoven and Schiller and Schubert.
In a way, when the Left is campaigning properly, it is attempting to do what Oscar does in this scene.
On the train on the way home there was that announcement; “if you see anything that doesn’t look right”…I see an awful lot of things, on the News mostly, but reporting them to the British Transport Police wouldn’t do a lot of good, sadly.
In his February article, Ukraine’s defeat and the fall of the West, Owen Jones argued that “if we were always going to end up at a point where Russia was going to take land, and Western leaders thought that, but claimed otherwise and made promises to Ukraine to keep the war going to achieving what they believed to be unachievable – well, what that means in terms of countless wasted lives is truly hideous“; noting that this has been in pursuit of what the Washington Post described as “a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill”.
We are now getting to that point.
The way the war ends, or is spun out, is of enormous consequence to whether Europe will remain locked in an escalatory spiral towards the fever dream of a further, wider, deeper – and suicidal – pan European war that infects the minds of General Staffs and newspaper editorial boards; or whether there is an attempt to find a sustainable modus vivendi with Russia that enables de escalation, avoids mutually assured destruction and dislocates Europe from the US imperative to shore up its slipping global dominance with ever more adventurist wars.
The media here reflexively dismisses Russia’s bottom lines for ending the war as “maximalist”; by definition unreasonable, to be dismissed with no further thought or examination. This is of a piece with their usual tactic of obscuring reality with adjectival clouds of emotive association, so it is vital for even those sections of the Left that have cheered on the war, and are still doing it even as a majority of Ukrianians want peace, to get beyond the emotional red mists and look seriously at what the Russians are actually proposing.
These are the key points from the published text of the draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees” that Russia presented to Biden in December 2021; and which the US/NATO dismissed out of hand and refused to discuss.
No further NATO expansion
The US would commit to preventing further enlargement of NATO, specifically barring Ukraine and other former Soviet republics from joining the alliance.
This also included a ban on NATO military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
2. No Deployment of US Forces or Weapons in Certain Countries
The treaty would forbid the US from deploying military forces or weaponry in countries that joined NATO after May 1997 (such as Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and others).
NATO infrastructure would have to be rolled back to pre-1997 locations.
3 Ban on Intermediate-Range Missiles
Both Russia and the US would be prohibited from deploying ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in areas of their own territory where such missiles could strike the other’s territory.
4 Limit Military Maneuvers and Activities
Limits on heavy bombers and surface warship deployments: Both sides would restrict the operation of heavy bombers and warships in areas from which they could strike targets on the other’s territory. (Note: In September 2020, Trump’s DOD authorized a B-52 to fly along the Ukrainian coast in the Black Sea.)
5 Nuclear Weapons Restrictions
All nuclear weapons would be confined to each country’s own national territory. Neither side could deploy nuclear weapons outside its borders. (Note: US just sent a batch of nukes to England.)
Withdrawal of all US nuclear weapons from Europe and elimination of existing infrastructure for their deployment abroad.
6 Mutual Security Pledge
Each side would agree not to take any security measures that could undermine the core security interests of the other party.
7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms
Proposals included the renewal or strengthening of direct consultation mechanisms, such as the NATO–Russia Council and the establishment of a crisis hotline.
8 Indivisibility of Security Principle
Included a reaffirmation that the security of one state cannot come at the expense of the security of another, formalising Russia’s interpretation of the “indivisible security” concept.
The three questions that supporters of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign should ask themselves is,
which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?
“Dead or dying children in a Calcutta Street. Photograph published by the Statesman, Calcutta, on August 22nd, 1943.”, Public Domain
Even right wing newspapers now have front pages showing Palestinian children who look just like these with headlines like “For Pity’s sake stop this” (Daily Express 23/7/25) without saying how. The limitations of the Excpress approach are well explored here.
The latest UN Report states
Gaza’s one million children continue to bear the brunt of continued bombardment, deprivation of access to life’s essentials, including food, water and adequate health care, and exposure to traumatic events. In a briefing to the UN Security Council on 16 July, Catherine Russell, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), stated that more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza over 21 months, which is the equivalent of a classroom of 28 children killed in Gaza on average each day.(My emphasis)
Starvation is already the common lived experience of everyone in Gaza.
Genocide by industrialised intent.
In the 1940s, the Nazi’s industrialised the mass extermination of people, mostly Jews, that they considered “untermensch”, lesser humans. Around 6 million were killed, initially by being shot by Einsatzgruppen, marching them out into the woods (see Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning) then by mass gassing, starvation and being worked to death in the extermination camps. No one kept exact records, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.
Genocide by neglect.
In the same decade, around 3 million colonial subjects of the British Raj in Bengal starved to death in the Bengal famine. Again, no one kept exact records, and estimates vary from just under a million to just under 4 million, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.
It is, however, much less well known. They died “from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies and lack of health care.” What Wikipedia describes as “poor British wartime policies” covers limiting food aid overall, on the argument that this was needed for the war effort, and manipulation of what food aid there was to communities that were considered politically loyal. This was a material factor in exacerbating communal tensions that were later to explode at partition.
Without food, people can survive for just over two months before they starve to death. In 1981, the longest lasting IRA Hunger Striker, Kieren Doherty, survived for 73 days, the shortest, Martin Hurson, died after just 46. Most died after 60, 61 or 62 days. Two months. And these were fit young men who were able to drink clean water.
Without food, the entire population of Gaza is a risk of starving to death by the end of the summer. 43 have died in the last three days, and this is accelerating.
The deliberate, calculated, performative cruelty of the GHF “aid” operation will slow the pace of this a little, spin out the suffering, but also aims to destroy community. As Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation puts it, “You can’t approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience. Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of survivors than the individual biological experience. All these traumas are why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this.”
So are we. This cannot be allowed. Demonstrate on Friday. Let’s break our government’s complicity in it. The six demands of the Bogota Declaration are a good basis for getting beyond David Lammy’s stance of wringing his hands while passing the ammunition.
Local actions so far
Thursday, 24 July
Hastings: Murial Matters House, TN34 3UY, 6pm
Friday, 25 July
Abergavenny: St. John’s Square, 6pm
Birmingham: Barclays Bank, 79-84 High Street, B4 7TE, 5pm
Cambridge: Addenbrooke’s Roundabout, 6pm
Cardiff: UK Government Building, Central Square, CF10 1EP, 6pm
True to form, the BBC reported the far Right riot in Epping last week, in which they attacked a peaceful anti racist demonstration while seeking to force the closure of an Asylum seekers hotel, on the same lines as the riots last year which tried to burn them down, as a “two sides” issue, even though their pictures clearly showed the far Right mob throwing bricks and bottles at a group of Stand Up to Racism people who were simply holding placards.
The disconnect between the words and images could not have been clearer..
On reading about the case in which armed police in Canterbury threatened a woman with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and holding signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide” – because her placard might be “reasonably interpreted” as expressing an “opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and that “mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all comes under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the government,” and that the phrase “Free Gaza” is “supportive of Palestine Action” – my daughter said “be careful what you write on your Blog Dad.”
Seeing that the Pope has just called for an end end to the barbarity in Gaza, I thought I’d draw something instead.
The question in all of this is whether this kind of insane over reach is an unintentional consequence of panic in the Home Office, faced with a mass movement that keeps on coming, keeps saying “we see you” and exposes a core ally as a genocidal state, and therefore puts into question the nature of our own state; or it is a deliberate attempt to freeze and intimidate that movement, while retaining plausible deniability. Was the armed Plod who threatened arrest just dimly applying his own limited understanding of the situation and relying on his tried and tested repressive instincts, or was he kite flying under instruction? Lets see how far we can get away with this?
Either way, it is backfiring. “Democracy” let us not forget, is supposed to be a “Fundamental British Value”. And, as the policeman put it so well, “the government has dictated that”.
Emperor Franz Josef V, sighed, pulled on his weaved mutton chop whiskers – now Imperial regalia – and twisted the dial on his wireless to shift the channel from Das Lichtprogramm – playing its usual diet of whirling Waltzes by Johan Strauss the very, very, very much younger, as if to prove that music, like History, had nowhere to go but interminable circles – over to Der Heimat- Service for the latest reports from Today in Parliament.
There was something oddly comforting about these reports. Like all the Sturm and Drang of the Shipping Forecast: all those rising squalls and Force Ten Gales, that menacing low visibility in Sea areas with comfortingly obscure and poetic names – Varangian, Black, Dogged, Austrian Bight, Trieste, Italian Sea, Palermo automatic lighthouse weather station – full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, to him, more than how much more comfortable it was to be sitting by the fire with a cup of tea and a crumpet.
Reports from the Diet were always incomprehensible. All the way across the Greater Austro-Hungarian – Balkan Empire, from Bavaria in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East and Naples in the South, members of the diet were allowed to make speeches in their own languages; on the proviso that no translations were allowed. This meant that members could sound off in full fury, to be approvingly written up in the local papers at home, blaming everyone else for local problems, securing their continuous re election as local champions – safe in the knowledge that no one else in the Empire, unless they understood Slovak, or Azeri, or Sicilian dialect, would have a clue what they were saying, so everyone could remain friends. All the broadcasts were also in the original languages, so everyone could tune into their own bit and be reassured that their worries were being expressed, if not heard. Thus, peace and harmony could be assured, as a grievance carefully nurtured, with no hope of resolution, is a soothing balm for everyone who enjoys suffering from it and being able to complain about it. If these problems were to be resolved, people would be lost. They wouldn’t know who they were any more.
Kaiser Franz scratched idly at his paunch, feeling a bit sleepy, when the newsflash he had been waiting for came up right on time. A solemn burst of Bruckner– titanic, overwhelming, monumental and oddly static, like the Empire itself – was followed by an announcer sounding even more po faced than usual. The troublesome, playboy heir apparent, Archduke Ferdy, had met with an unfortunate accident while trying to act out the bow flight scene from Titanic on the 3:30 Zeppelin from Zagreb to Odesa while drunk (and drugged too, though he knew it not) to be followed by an Inquiry and four days of official mourning – because there was no point in overdoing it – announced by the Prime Minister, in his familiar flat nasal tone; the one that sounds a bit like he’s been chewing cardboard most of his life. Satisfied that Plan B, with its aerodrome arson squad and threat of high profile collateral damage (and all the awkward questions that go with it) had not been necessary, the Kaiser chuckled to himself and put Zadok the Priest on his record player.
May the King live, may the king live, may the king live FOREVER, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Amen…
The new report on overseas military bases from worldbeyonwar.org makes it very clear that the United States not only has 70% of them, and that it has them dug into 95 different countries all around the world, but also that the lions share of the remainder are run by direct US allies like the UK and Turkiye.
All the countries that are direct allies of the US, or have a security arrangement with them, are coloured in varying shades of blue in the graph above.
Worth bearing in mind when people here talk about rising threats and “deadly quartets”.
A toddler, in the sort of pink for girls very popular with Eastern european families, is being pushed along past the park in her heavy duty pushchair. Her arms are determinedly folded, a fierce frown and pouted lips, like a minature Mussolini en route to his balcony.
A red faced little boy wearing spiderman pyjama’s and crying forcefully is walked back to the bus stop by his Mum, where his half a dozen siblings are standing about – all about the same size with the same bullet headed haircuts – where he promptly belts his brother in the face. The brother starts crying, as well he might. “Spiderman” looks satisfied for a moment, then cries even more fiercely, to maintain a parity of percieved pain.
On the Thameslink train heading for Farringdon a Scottish family with two small children gamefully keep them entertained. The Dad holds the toddler up by the doors and shows him sights out of the window, adverts, anything to keep him interested. The Mum reads a story to the litttle girl, who sometimes looks at the book, sometimes out of the window, following it intermittently. One of the main characters in the book is a dog called “tramp” and, at one point, she pronounces it as “Trump” and laughs.
Since December last year, more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; more than half of that since Israel collapsed the ceasefire in March.
About half as many have been killed in Syria since the HTS came to power on December 8th last year. At least 7,670, mainly civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). This includes more than 2,130 “extrajudicial executions” and “identity-based killings.”
Given the sheer continuous ferocity of the IDF assualt on Gaza, the total for Syria is alarming.
SOHR – which relies on a network of sources across Syria – documented “the killing of 7,670 people across Syria from December 8, 2024, to June 6, 2025,” adding that this number comprises “5,784 civilians, including 306 children and 422 women.”
The UK-based war monitor warned that “this grim toll is a result of ongoing violence and violations by local and external parties, alongside widespread security chaos,” and reflects “the fragility of the security situation and the increasing danger to the most vulnerable constituents of society.”
SOHR further pointed to what it said was an “escalation of extrajudicial executions and identity-based killings,” noting that it had documented 2,133 of such killings that were “committed in brutal ways.”
According to SOHR documentation, civilians constituted 75.4 percent of the total fatalities during these six months, while non-civilians accounted for 24.6 percent.
Sections of the Left in the UK welcomed the overthrow of the Assad government in December as a “liberation”. The reports above, and the HTS regime’s current discussions with Israel on possible partition of Lebanon, which appear to be animated by the United States, with with the prospect of Syria occupying the North of the country as far as the Med at Tripoli and occupying the Bekaa valley to act as pressure from the North to help secure Israel’s Northern border; should put that sharply into question in their own minds.
Israel is now indicating, with bombs, that it is far from reliant on such a deal and may simply want to hold hard to the Syrian territory it has occupied since the fall of Assad.
Or perhaps not. Today’s busker in the High Street is a woman playing an accordion. Slightly jazzy, fragments of a recognisable tune, skidded away from and improvised around, so the echoes are hard to identify. I’m half way down George Street before I realise its Zippety Doo Dah.
On the way back I give her a coin and said that her music makes you want to get out some spoons, clack along and dance; and asked if the buskers who are now pretty regular on that spot have to book it. It turns out that, apart from Central London pitches and a few suburbs, busking is unregulated. People just turn up. She said it can be a bit awkward if several come at once. She covers a lot of local centres, likes doing Corringham.
I ask, rather shyly, if she could play Captain Pugwash, which might spread a little happiness, but she says something at the same time and plays something else as I walk off. I’m halfway to the War Memorial before I realised its Thoroughly Modern Milly.
Urban ramblings 