Tag Archives: G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association

Diary Blog, 9 November 2025

Afternoon music

[Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party_rally_grounds]

Historical note

8-9 November 1923, so 102 years ago, was the time of the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch. Despite having comic-opera elements, it put Hitler and the NSDAP on the map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch.

[1930s: Hitler at a memorial ceremony commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch]

Thought for today

I watched on TV a few minutes of the Remembrance Sunday march of old soldiers past the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Naturally, such an occasion is always tinged with sadness. So many failed to return, especially from the First World War. My own maternal grandmother had two brothers killed in that war (both captains in the Berks and Bucks Light Infantry); one killed in France in, I believe, 1915, the other on the Somme in 1916.

Of course, there would now be no WW1-serving soldiers on that march, and few, if any, from WW2.

I paused to wonder what might be the views of those marching about the state of the country today. At a guess, not favourable.

My overall feeling, watching the still-proud ranks marching, was that the march has really nothing to do with the UK and its society today. It might as well have been ranks of Roman legionaries marching there. The same goes for so many other ceremonies and institutions which, until quite recently, say 35 years ago, were an accepted part of the national fabric.

More music

[Volga, and the Cathedral of the Dormition, Yaroslavl]

Tweets seen

[“Former NATO Secretary General admitted that the alliance will not start World War III because of Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg stated that NATO will not enter into a direct conflict with Russia to protect Kyiv. He recalled that back in February 2022, Zelensky requested the establishment of a no-fly zone, but that would require strikes on Russian air defense systems and would mean the start of a large war.“]

Thank God for that (if true)…

The Jew Zelensky has been hoping for, and pushing for, war between Russia and NATO. That must not be allowed to happen, not least because it might well turn (tactically) nuclear, and that tactical use of nuclear weapons might then lead on to an utterly catastrophic strategic nuclear exchange.

[“The Ukrainian Armed Forces Have Lost Nearly Two Million Soldiers! The Western resource Military Watch Magazine reports that, according to estimates, the Ukrainian army has lost more than 1.7 million people killed and missing in action throughout the conflict. Moreover, experts have found that in some combat operations, the average lifespan of a Ukrainian soldier was a maximum of four hours after entering combat.“]

Ukraine, as a state on its present or pre-2022, or pre-2014 borders, has no future. Perhaps white European people from Western and Central Europe could settle in Eastern Ukraine, once Russia wins the war.

What Lavrov is saying, at core, is “buy from us“; Russia is of course a major weapons-exporting state.

More tweets seen

[“The woke oppression totem pole that has been flooded into our establishment is a massive reason why we’re experiencing two-tier justice so extensively here in the UK in modern times. The more protected characteristics you have from the Equality Act 2010, the more the state think you are in the right – or are the victim even when you’re not. That’s why straight White men have been punished so harshly in their own country.”]

Britain’s politically-brainwashed, socially-brainwashed woodentopped police.

Of course, that MP is just another pro-Israel drone, but leave that aside.

The migration-invasion is now the pre-eminent electoral issue in the UK (and elsewhere) but there is still a big bloc of “I’m OK” idiots for whom rubbish such as football, rugby, cricket, lesbianki “lionesses”, X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing etc take precedence in their little minds.

Translates to a Commons with about 428 Reform MPs, 80 Lab, 42 LibDem, 42 SNP, 14 Con, 9 Greens (etc).

My own opinion is that, by reason of the old System main parties, Lab and Con, now being equally hated and despised, very many people will vote Reform just to stamp on those two old parties; others will vote Reform because it is the only alternative now thought likely to have a chance.

Reform may end up with 450 MPs, it may end up with “only” 250, or even fewer; we shall have to see. I think that the “Conservatives” will slip lower as their natural hard core of elderly and very elderly pensioners start to pass away. Labour is also doomed, unless Starmer-stein is replaced by some figure able to appeal to a cross-section of voters.

At present, I see no sign of that. At one time I thought that Dan Jarvis might be a superficially-credible such figure, but his several years of toeing the Labour Party line, kow-towing to the Jewish/Israel lobby, and having nothing worthwhile to say about anything, have diminished him, visibly. No chance.

The present polling takes no account of either the Islamist independents or of Corbyn’s nascent “Your Party”.

I just fed my own speculations into Electoral Calculus, and came up with Reform 444 MPs, Lab 68, LibDems 50, SNP 40, Greens 15, and Cons…1 (etc). If “Your Party” were to get 5-10 MPs, then Labour would be reduced by the same amount accordingly.

Pie in the sky for now…

Then the same must be true, mutatis mutandis, of criticism of Jewish behaviour/Judaism/Zionism/Israel-ism/”holocaust” nonsense etc.

More tweets

I have to agree with her this time…

Our animal friends.

Talking point

[Lisa Nandy doing what she does best— hypocritically weaselling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nandy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigan_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s. Labour Friends of Israel member.]

More tweets

I wonder why?…

“Their” lack of self-awareness is always hard to believe.

[“The man who rebranded ‘repatriation’ as ‘,remigration’ confirms my point: It’s an empty piece of political grand-standing. There isn’t the faintest possibility of the grifters and conmen who run Europe’s populist parties either doing anything effective or being replaced in state power by genuine nationalists within 3 or 4 electoral cycles. Which means that remigration is not going to happen. Which in turn means that calling for it simply wastes time and resources which are desperately needed to prepare our peoples to be the largest minority in societies of minorities. Time for nationalists to stop writing ‘Dear Santa’ letters and get on with organising for the long run.”]

True, but once the idea of removing non-Europeans from Europe is out there, on the table, it does change the political dynamic, whatever the political and social realities —or apparent realities— might say about that.

Never bettered

Miles better than the facile Hollywood film made more recently.

I still regret having missed the (apparently excellent) talk given by John le Carre (David Cornwell), the author of Tinker Tailor and similar books, at the G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association offices and library circa 1984. That was an organization in Grosvenor Place, London S.W.1., funded by the Foreign Office as a kind of para-diplomatic/cultural thing; the small staff (librarian, assistant librarian, and Director) were paid and employed on Foreign Office pay and conditions. The organization went back to 1959; several ex-Prime Ministers had belonged.

I joined mainly in order to use their library of Russian and English books, the windows of which library, a few floors up from ground level, overlooked the gardens of Buckingham Palace. I also took part in basic Russian language sessions.

That organization no longer exists. It was renamed in the early 1990s, moved to a ghastly brown-coloured office building near the (also now gone, and redeveloped) Nine Elms vegetable market at Vauxhall, then closed down as a result, in part, of government spending cuts (circa 1996).

More music

Late tweets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Davie

Looking at the BBC’s coverage over several past years, he must have been pretty useless.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/09/obr-2025-budget-verdict-important-but-bond-market-key-rachel-reeves

“The markets” should serve society, not rule society.

First of all, get rid of Marianna Spring, whose provenance is suspiciously obscure, and who was a proven fraudster/liar even before she joined the BBC.

The BBC is but one of many many old-established, respected, even beloved institutions in the UK now trashed and all but ruined. Which? Well, among them I would name the Bar, the Inns of Court, the system of “KC” appointment, the legal system generally, the court system, the prison system, the police, the Foreign Office, the Church of England, the whole political system and electoral system, the Civil Service, local government, the banking system, the Monarchy, the wider honours system, the RNLI, the National Trust [etc].

Late music

[Levitan, Above Eternal Peace]

Diary Blog, 1 February 2020

The madness continues

The BBC, in the catchphrase of Private Eye, “getsmuchworse”.

I heard a BBC World Service interviewer, interviewing a Georgian lady about the Stalin-era sanatoria at Tsqaltubo, near Kutaisi, in former Soviet Georgia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsqaltubo

https://www.curiositymag.com/2018/08/24/georgia-soviet-spa-bathhouse-6-tskaltubo/

The item was quite interesting, but the absurd came in when the interviewee was asked who went there in Stalin’s day. The answer: Communist Party people, but also those who were considered to have been hard workers in their industry, such as mining. The BBC drone then referred to the miners as “the men and women miners”! Women miners?! To be fair to the BBC, there were a few in the Soviet Union at one time, but not many:

https://www.rbth.com/history/330385-soviet-women-workers-photos

At least the idiot did not make tick-box reference to LGBT etc stuff…

Sadly, it seems that the ornate Stalin-era sanatoria, i.e. spa hotels, have been allowed to decay; that does not take long in a subtropical climate.

Postscript

Bloody hell! Even as I finished the above paragraphs, the BBC World Service, which is now just another bad joke, struck again, with some idiot talking about Brexit and UK fishing rights, and referring to “fish sold by UK fishermen…and fisherwomen.” UK “fisherwomen”?! Ha ha! The BBC idiot only just remembered to add “and fisherwomen”, in order to make his sentence clearly “non-sexist”. This country is so screwed, it’s not true…

Meanwhile, the “political correctness” madness is being challenged

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7954389/SUE-REID-Orwellian-nightmare-befell-businessman-Harry-Miller.html

“[A] policeman told Harry that he was in trouble for retweeting a ‘transphobic’ limerick.” [Daily Mail].

This is not a reworked Fawlty Towers or Monty Python sketch. This actually happened!

He was told that he was also being investigated for tweeting support for BBC Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, who had been criticised by Oxford students after writing a newspaper article questioning whether transgender women are ‘real women’.” [Daily Mail]

Harry was told in the conversation at Tesco that he had not broken the law but was guilty of a ‘non-crime’ hate incident. According to court papers, the constable explained to him: ‘Sometimes, a woman’s brain grows a man’s body in the womb and that is what transgender is.’” [Daily Mail]

When Harry asked why the officer kept calling the person who had made the complaint a ‘victim’, when no crime had been established, he was told ‘that’s just how it works’.” [Daily Mail]

Since the catch-all guidance was released, police forces have recorded at least 87,000 non-crime hate incidents — none of which break the law.” [Daily Mail]

The police drone actually said to the citizen now fighting back, “I need to check your thinking.” This is the police state emerging in plain sight. 

I might add that I myself have been subjected to similar:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/

…and not only in that 2017 incident. A year later, in 2018, a mentally-disturbed Jewess (on medication), apparently resident in Barnet, North London, actually prevailed upon her local (((occupied))) police to telephone me and try to intimidate me into altering completely lawful posts on the GAB platform (the Jewish lobby had already had me expelled from Twitter).

The policeman (a constable) actually had the cheek to send me through the post a purported (but legally-ineffective) notice warning me about “harassment” (despite the fact that I had never had any direct contact with the said Jewess!)… In fact, I myself was the real victim of harassment, by that woman and by a pack of other Jews, all connected with the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” fake charity. I actually had to write to the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and to the Barnet Police Borough Commander! Even then the same policeman tried to continue for a short while!

This is how the “rule of law” decays: when the police become politicized, subject to backstairs pressure, biased etc (not to mention both ignorant of the law and over-estimating the scope of their own *lawful* powers…).

Radio 4

Just listened on BBC Radio 4 at 0545 to some poor lady, grieving for her father, and droning on endlessly (as it seemed). I felt sorry for her, but this was, imo, not good radio. Have some regard for the listeners, for God’s sake!

Voting intention

I am not sure whether it means much, 4+ years before any likely general election, but for whatever it is worth, Survation has come out with a new poll:

Nothing much there. Conservatives at top by default, because so far they have been cautious about doing anything. Labour still moribund, LibDems, at 10% rather higher than I would have thought (maybe Remain signallers), and Brexit Party on 3% (who are they, that 3%?!) alongside Greens.

“First day out of EU” music

More “anti-fascist” nonsense exposed

I saw the nonsense below on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/witchofpeace/status/1223580698558304256?s=20

What is the crazed “Witch of Peace” talking about now? As for the other one, with her Stars of David, she sounds completely off the wall…

5

John le Carre and Olof Palme (etc)

I just read this piece by John le Carre (David Cornwell) about Olof Palme and much else:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/01/john-le-carre-breaking-heart-brexit

John le Carre is a very fine writer in his chosen field and, unlike most “spy writers”, has a wide appreciation of world politics and events. Most writers of “spy fiction” have at best a cartoon view of the world. Ian Fleming. Alastair Maclean. Frederick Forsyth. Others. I regret that I missed out on a lecture that Le Carre/Cornwell gave in or about 1981 at the G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association in Grosvenor Place, London.

The G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association, to which I belonged at the time, was an entity founded in 1958 and funded mainly by the Foreign Office (later, Foreign and Commonwealth Office). It had its funding radically cut in the 1990s and was split into parts after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It even sold its library (a few volumes from which I was able to buy, though I came late to the party, having been overseas). It had by then moved from its fine building at the rear of Buckingham Palace to a soulless office tower in Vauxhall. The FCO finally cut off funds from its successor-entities in 2002.

Le Carre’s lecture was, I was told, one of the best talks ever given at the Association.

Having said the above, merely being a fine writer does not bestow infallibility. I doubt that there has ever been a better travel writer than Jan Morris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris

yet Morris is in some respects also very silly indeed, judging purely from the political point of view (e.g. Morris espousing faux Welsh nationalism on the strength of having been born half-Welsh and having resided for a number of decades in Wales).

I have to say that I am disappointed to see that Le Carre/Cornwell, in that Guardian transcript, said that he was a Remainer and a European, as if the EU equates to Europe. That oft-seen conflation. No. I myself am a European, a white Northern European, but have always, on balance, opposed the EU. I am ethnically and culturally European. That is what matters.

One apparent fact given by Le Carre/Cornwell in the Guardian transcript did, as people now say, “surprise but not shock” me: it seems that Olof Palme was once an “intern” at Swedish Intelligence. I did not know that. His Wikipedia entry does not mention it (neither does it mention Palme’s quite long-running secret affair with the American actress Shirley MacLaine; Wikipedia is likewise not infallible):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Palme

Shirley MacLaine’s own Wikipedia entry also omits mention of the affair:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_MacLaine#Personal_life

though she herself has talked about it on several occasions:

https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/shirley-maclaines-leading-loves-im-over-all-that-excerpt/4

What I know about Swedish intelligence and security would scarcely fill the back of a postcard, but I see that their security service has its own jaunty website:

https://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/en/swedish-security-service.html

https://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/en/swedish-security-service/counter-subversion/political-and-religious–extremism.html

though it seems that external intelligence-gathering is mainly handled by a separate organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Military_Intelligence_and_Security_Service

and see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontoret_f%C3%B6r_s%C3%A4rskild_inh%C3%A4mtning

Olof Palme always struck me as rather sinister. His assassination was never publicly solved, though two separate suspects were arrested, one eventually emigrating to the USA and the other being convicted of the assassination, but released on appeal two years later.

The famed “liberalism” of Sweden is not always very liberal. I recall the Westminster MP, Leo Abse [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Abse] writing about visiting the Swedish spy Stig Wennerstrom [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_Wennerstr%C3%B6m_(colonel)] in prison in Sweden and finding him chained to the wall of a subterranean dungeon (Abse was a penal reformer).

Admittedly, Swedish prisons are not usually like that. The original Swedish-language Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lost me at one point, when the investigative journalist seems to be in some kind of hostel or inexpensive hotel reception; it took me another viewing to understand that that was a Swedish prison!

Collapse of smug, virtue-signalling party...

Click on the tweet above to read the responses, many of them hilarious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolyon_Maugham

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/28/jolyon-maugham-qc-was-a-hero-to-many-then-he-beat-a-fox-to-death