Rat Lines

The House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg is the senior surviving line of the 925-year-old House of Oldenburg, and it still reigns over 16 Realms, two of which are in Europe. On Saturday, one of those lost a football match to part of the other one. Yesterday, Bastille Day saw the defeat of the French Republic by a Bourbon monarchy, whose monarch has a Glücksburg mother. Like our own dear King, he is a descendant of Queen Victoria through both of his parents. To his dying day in 1979, King Felipe VI’s grandfather bore the surname “de Borbón y Battenberg”. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

And this evening, one of the world’s two Welsh-speaking states will face part of the other one. Javier Milei’s Argentina is a major headache for the nominally British Right, which always needs a Fatherland somewhere away from the NHS. Liz Truss has said that she would have endorsed Milei as a candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party. Yet in his designs on Canada, Donald Trump has been doing no more than express the fundamental principle of the American Republic, namely the expulsion of the British Empire from the Americas. And therefore, that Republic has only ever recognised de facto British administration of the Falkland Islands, but never British sovereignty over them. The Reagan Administration was little or no help in 1982, when it was closely allied both to Margaret Thatcher and to General Galtieri, and the Trump Administration is closely allied to only one of Milei and of Keir Starmer, never mind Andy Burnham.

Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge on the part of Menachem Begin. Thatcher had not wanted to meet Begin when he had visited London, and she had regretted changing her mind. That generation knew. My late father, who had served in Palestine, could not abide the sight of Yitzhak Shamir, while his old comrade, my erstwhile Senior Tutor, remains forthright on the subject to this day. The Israelis fulsomely returned the compliment to the tune of one billion dollars of military assistance to Galtieri. In those days, a billion dollars was a lot of money. And in those days, Erich Priebke was only one of the Nazis and what might now be called the Nazi-adjacent who were still very much alive in Argentina, which was simultaneously conducting at home the Dirty War of which 10 to 12 per cent of the 30,000 or more victims were Jewish even though Jews were only one per cent of the population, making it to this day the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Why not? In Ottawa, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism could not be unveiled as planned on 2 November 2023, and it now features no names of specific individuals, since it was originally to have borne those of numerous Nazi collaborators and war criminals. The new President of Chile is José Antonio Kast, the son of Michael Kast, a ratline escapee and political patriarch who had been refused a denazification certificate, and thus the brother of the late Miguel Kast, the Chicago Boy who was President of the Central Bank under Augusto Pinochet, whose regime his little brother enthusiastically supported. The Kast background did not seem to bother Milton Friedman, as it expressly does not bother Benjamin Netanyahu.

While you do not choose your ancestors, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ nevertheless vet to Kingdom Come those of applicants to their ranks. How, then, can the bullying, fearmongering and manipulative Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service be Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was possibly still alive in 1969 after having been an infamous defector from an Allied Army to collaboration with the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine, such that he had been called “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” by the Allies when they had placed on his head a bounty equivalent to £200,000 today? Well, why not? If anything, such a background is a qualification for the job. Indeed, that may well have swung it for her.

The Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel are displayed by Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

How could the Manchester synagogue attack have happened in the land of the Kindertransport? Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until last August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Another founder member of NATO was Canada, where at that time, just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting in, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions. In Mark Carney’s party and into Carney’s adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau’s father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join the Waffen SS. Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined that? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of Saint George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka’s Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22 May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find. Hunka himself lived in Britain from the end of the War until 1954, and his late wife was British. In 1951, in Britain, she married an SS veteran.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. It really has been more than 80 years, has it not? But while there may be no more Iron Cross or Arrow Cross, they will always have Vauxhall Cross.

How David Miliband Failed Upwards

Will David Miliband’s coat of arms feature a banana? If not, why not? But nobody just gives up a million dollar salary in the capital of the world for the £67,505 of a British Cabinet Minister, and that without even the £98,599 of a member of the House of Commons. Indeed, a peerage would in practice prevent David Miliband from ever becoming Prime Minister, which David Cameron had already been in addition to being independently wealthy. At 60, why is Miliband considering this? There must be something very badly wrong with the International Rescue Committee, and he needs to get out of town. Who is going to take a look? Perhaps it will be Ian Birrell:

David Miliband is on manoeuvres. Westminster’s lobby stenographers have been busy quoting “friends” on his readiness to serve in the Cabinet if offered a top job, backed up by a barrage of claims that Andy Burnham is lining him up for a return to frontline politics as foreign secretary. Reports suggest that such an appointment, bringing back a trusted political operator with contacts and experience, would free the incoming prime minister to focus on domestic issues.

The drumbeat grew louder last week, with breathless reports that the veteran New Labour figure, who has spent more than a decade in the United States running a refugee charity, was preparing to “break his silence” with a landmark speech. And then — surprise, surprise — this key acolyte of Tony Blair used the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks memorial lecture at the London School of Economics to reveal that he was actually a Burnham fanboy. Titled, unironically, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: Power and its Missing Guardrails”, Miliband spoke of backing the former Manchester mayor’s devolution agenda, claiming this “big change” was “long overdue”. He argued that centralisation of power in London had inflamed Britain’s dissatisfaction with democracy alongside issues such as inequality, technology and the failure of international institutions.

He was right to highlight these challenges facing our country. Barely one-in-five British citizens feel well represented by their government, while three in four are worried about the state of their democracy. Yet this is precisely why it would be absurd for Burnham to bring back this man. For there are few people who better symbolise the arrogance, elitism, political failures and shameless sense of entitlement of the political class than David Miliband.

The boyish-looking Miliband is now 60, and seemingly desperate to come home after a disastrous 13-year stint at the helm of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). His tenure saw him rapidly expand the charity co-founded by Albert Einstein only to then drastically scale it back again, with spiralling deficits as several major donor nations of differing political complexions slashed aid spending. While a necessary realignment, given the serial failures of a bloated aid system that poured cash into conflict zones and the pockets of gruesome regimes, it triggered shock waves across the industry. There were staff cuts and predictable shroud-waving claims about disastrous consequences.

“There is a clear path through this period,” Miliband told IRC staff in a letter last year, as he announced job losses. “I am just so sorry at the price to be paid to get there.” Yet insiders told me how this charity’s bosses used the donor cuts to cover up their own ineptitude. They passed me documents two years ago showing the IRC faced a $50 million deficit due to fund-raising shortfalls, accounting mistakes and cost overruns, despite one bequest of $16.5 million. Miliband warned his top team they had found a “larger deficit than anticipated” and bemoaned there had been “no humanitarian emergency that has significantly buoyed our unrestricted incomes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine”.

Miliband had expanded his charity fast, which boosted his profile and won applause, but then the approach was laid bare by the aid cuts. As investor Warren Buffet famously said about financial crashes exposing poor strategies, “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked”. These fiscal woes came amid festering internal concerns over management. So there was disquiet over the IRC’s muted initial response to Israel’s attack on Gaza, in contrast with its forceful reaction to Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, which coincided with rumours that Miliband wanted Sir Keir Starmer to make him Britain’s ambassador to Washington. This job, of course, went instead to Peter Mandelson with disastrous consequences — although recent reports suggest Miliband still fancies this plum diplomatic posting.

Almost 1,700 staff signed a petition complaining over the “absence of prompt, resolute and non-discriminatory condemnation that we expected from our leadership”. There were claims of self-censoring statements, soft-pedalling on Israel and top-down interference, driving a wedge between the leadership and frontline staff. One top figure from the Middle East, looking upset, told a meeting she could not understand their “complicit stand”, saying the IRC was “failing” both itself and Palestinians under attack. “We have not gotten everything right, and for many, this has shaken your trust in the IRC,” admitted a senior executive.

Perhaps such unrest is inevitable in a global organisation that at one point had 19,300 staff around the world. But Miliband was already ruffling feathers before he started cutting staff. He faced claims of bullying from minority staff who accused the leadership of reinforcing a “white supremacy culture”, although these were dismissed by a law firm that reviewed discrimination policies. Staff previously circulated a petition calling for top executives to be made more accountable. There were also complaints over their use of unpaid interns — ironic given their mighty salaries.

Underlying these concerns is a clear belief among some insiders that Miliband saw the post as a platform for his self-aggrandisement. “My strong sense is that the majority of people connected to the IRC will welcome David’s departure,” said one executive, who left recently. “His 13 years at the IRC increasingly appear to have been driven by his ambition to accumulate wealth and stay relevant and connected to global centres of power, just waiting for the moment when the return to real power was finally within his grasp.”

“For many current and former IRC staff, especially in the last five years, the organisation has come to be associated with a toxic culture of compliance, mismanagement of funds and teams, and retaliation against anyone who challenged David and his COO [chief operating officer]. These concerns have been accompanied by publicly documented accusations of racism, iniquity and evolving values based on their interests as opposed to the IRC’s mission. There’s no doubt that change is both needed and long overdue.”

Such dissent — breaking into the media on several occasions — indicates at the very least deficient diplomatic and leadership skills, although it is hard for outsiders to determine the truth about internal rows at major organisations. Yet one thing is clear: David Miliband has done very well financially for himself while running his charity, even as he tours the world condemning aid cuts and pleading for more cash for impoverished refugees.

It is instructive here to take a closer look at the astonishing sums involved. When Miliband took over as president and chief executive of the IRC in 2013, he succeeded George Rupp, a former head of Columbia University, whose package was $466,209 a year — an impressive sum for a charity chief, even by US standards. Yet in his first year, this former Labour Cabinet minister who once railed against fat cats saw this bumped up to $600,000. His pay package more than doubled over subsequent years: according to the most recent financial filings, from 2023, he was handed $1,246,992 — including a $150,000 bonus and a $55,000 housing allowance. This is “one of the highest in the humanitarian sector”, noted The New Humanitarian drily as it reported on the leadership board’s decision to take a temporary 20% salary cut while laying off thousands of their staff. He has also been promoted by booking agencies as a “wonderful” conference speaker, with fees starting at £25,000.

No wonder staff have told me that it is “demoralising” to be led by someone earning “a millionaire’s salary” at a time when they face intense humanitarian and financial pressures. His IRC spokespeople, of course, insist that he gets fair reward for his labours set by the charity’s compensation committee. To his critics, however, it is seen as obscene to pocket such sums from a heavily taxpayer-funded charity dedicated to helping the poor and dispossessed.

Miliband has been charitable to his friends, though. According to tax filings, the second highest-paid IRC executive is Madlin Sheerman, the senior vice-president who pocketed $550,151 in 2023. She just happens to be Miliband’s former special adviser who ran his botched 2010 leadership campaign. His former speechwriter, Laura Kyrke-Smith, was appointed head of the IRC’s British arm, collecting a six-figure salary, before becoming a Labour MP in the 2024 election. His Westminster researcher, Ollie Money, ended up as IRC’s global communications director before joining The Economist group two years ago. Even Lord Doyle — Starmer’s communications chief who sparked a furore over his ties to a sex offender after being given a peerage — spent some time in Miliband’s well-paid team, as did Miliband’s former speechwriter Ravi Gurumurthy, who now runs Nesta.

Burnham says politics in Britain is broken. He is right. Yet putting Miliband back in the Foreign Office is hardly going to fix it — and not just because of his self-enrichment and cronyism while running a respected charity. After all, his track record on international affairs is appalling. He was a firm supporter of the disastrous Iraq War, a misguided conflict that did much to demolish public faith in Westminster. Although Miliband later expressed regret for the neo-colonial misadventure, he told the Chilcot Inquiry how he believed this conflict — which sparked chaos in the region and spurred the rise of Islamic State — had strengthened Britain’s reputation in the Middle East. This was a ridiculous claim to make of a war that so tainted our nation’s reputation, even for one of Blair’s most dedicated cheerleaders.

That conflict was useful to Vladimir Putin, who used it to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It also undermined Western arguments about the importance of backing a democracy’s defence against unwarranted foreign attack. And, at a time when the Kremlin is on the attack, unleashing covert attacks on the West in league with an alliance of autocratic allies, we should not forget that Miliband was the supine foreign secretary when Putin launched his first European land grab in 2008, sending Russian tanks into Georgia to stymie the growth of its democracy and frustrate its desire to join Nato.

The Kremlin stirred up separatist tensions, made baseless claims of genocide, then sparked a short war that ended with Russian forces 30 miles from the capital Tbilisi and two chunks of the country breaking away as self-declared republics. Here was Putin’s template for later events in Ukraine, a clear warning for the West that smart historians will see as leading directly to the atrocities 14 years later in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol. Miliband condemned the Georgia invasion as “entirely unjustified”, yet for all his tough talk, he did nothing. Not even a single sanction. “Isolating Russia would be counterproductive because its international economic integration is the best discipline on its politics,” he trilled. “Our approach must be hard-headed engagement.” So how did that realpolitik work out?

Travelling the world, delivering grandstanding speeches, making new contacts and opining in interviews — you would think he should be great at diplomacy. But, according to journalist Tim Shipman, he’s one of the rudest men in politics. “I was reminded of the comment by a Labour adviser that if David Miliband was at a party talking to Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela,” he wrote in the Spectator, “he would still be looking over their shoulders to see if there was anyone more important to talk to.” Similarly today, as he seeks to escape from his IRC travails, it is like he is looking over shoulders for a more important opportunity.

Miliband often pontificates on his theory that we live in an “age of impunity”, which he defines as “the exercise of power without accountability…the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers”. If Burnham delivers his desired post of foreign secretary, Miliband will have proved this point with painful precision.

Internationalism Was Never About Open Borders

Paul Knaggs writes:

On 14 July 1889, socialist delegates from across the world gathered in Paris to form the Second International. Their principle was simple: “The workers’ struggle has no borders,” because capital crossed them too.

Modern liberals have spent decades twisting that principle into an argument for the unrestricted movement of cheap labour. They are wrong.

Ask them what internationalism means today and you will hear about open borders, labour mobility and the free movement of people as an unquestionable good. What you will rarely hear is the word that mattered most to the socialists who met in Paris: capital.

Nearly 400 delegates from around 20 countries attended the founding congress. They did not meet to abolish nations. They met to stop capital using nations, and the workers within them, as weapons against one another.

That distinction has been buried. The left has paid dearly for it.

Modern internationalism asks workers to celebrate a system in which corporations move money, factories and labour wherever wages are lowest. When that movement drives down pay and weakens unions, we are told the resulting competition is solidarity.

It is nothing of the sort. It is capital’s oldest trick, wrapped in the language of the people who first organised against it.

A German coal miner and a French textile worker in 1889 were not enemies. They spoke different languages and lived under different flags, but they breathed the same dust, worked the same brutal hours and watched the same class of owner grow rich from their exhaustion.

Internationalism meant refusing to let that owner turn them against each other.

When workers struck in one country, workers elsewhere were not supposed to fill the gap, move the scab goods or help break the picket line. When governments prepared for war, workers were urged not to slaughter one another for the profits of kings, bankers and industrialists.

The Paris congress did more than issue fine words. It demanded international action for the eight-hour day and fixed 1 May 1890 as a common day of workers’ demonstrations.

Every May Day march since carries the remains of that decision. It began as a demand aimed at employers, not at the worker standing beside you.

The movement’s position on migration was also far more serious than anything offered in British politics today.

In fact, when the International met in Stuttgart in 1907, they explicitly condemned the capitalist “importation of cheap labour” used by the bosses to destroy labour organisations and depress wages. They knew that unregulated migration was a weapon wielded by the employers, not a gift to the working class.

Its answer was not racial exclusion. Nor was it a blind celebration of labour mobility. Its answer was class politics.

Stop employers trafficking strikebreakers across borders. Outlaw coercive contract labour. Set minimum wages. Cut working hours. Organise migrant workers into trade unions on equal terms.

The target was the boss importing cheap labour to undercut the union rate. The answer was organisation, not a border fence, and certainly not a blind eye.

Of course, liberals find it unsettling when left wingers like Bernie Sanders say the quiet part out loud: open borders is “a right-wing proposal” that right-wing people would love.

Today we are offered a false choice. On one side stands corporate globalism. It hollows out communities, suppresses wages and treats human beings as freight to be moved wherever the balance sheet demands.

On the other stands a cartoon nationalism that blames the worker who arrived yesterday while ignoring the employer who recruited him, underpaid him and used him to weaken everyone else’s bargaining power.

Both sides let capital off the hook. That is no accident.

The old socialists understood this more than a century ago. You can love your country, defend your community and demand democratic control over your economy while recognising that a delivery driver in Chesterfield, a warehouse worker in São Paulo and a nurse in Tokyo are being squeezed by the same corporate machinery.

Solidarity never meant abolishing nations. It meant workers in every nation refusing to be used against workers elsewhere.

Internationalism was never capital’s right to move labour around the world like freight. It was workers standing together against the people who profited from dividing them.

United we stand. Divided, we get robbed one wage packet at a time.

The question, 137 years later, is whether the left still remembers which side it was supposed to be on.

There Has To Be Some Representation

Jack Hunter writes:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died unexpectedly on Saturday at the age of 71.

I was born and raised in South Carolina and was his constituent for most of his three decades in Congress.

Graham became a member of the U.S. House in 1995. In 1996, my own political journey began in my early 20s as a Pat Buchanan conservative who avidly supported his insurgent populist bid for the Republican presidential nomination that year.

Graham entered the Senate in January 2003, three months after Buchanan cofounded this magazine as a much-needed conservative outlet opposing any potential war with Iraq. Three months after Graham became a senator, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

For all of that time, through the Clinton, Bush-Cheney, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies, right up until Saturday, Graham was arguably the most vociferous advocate in Congress for the neoconservative vision of American foreign policy. More than even most other neocons, Graham thirsted for U.S. intervention anywhere, at any time, for virtually any reason, and at any cost, including lives, foreign or domestic.

In this light, I can’t help but remember now how cheap Graham considered the lives of so many others throughout his entire political career.

In the early years of the U.S.–Iraq war, Graham was less distinguishable from other Republicans, almost all of whom considered unquestioning support for the war their core party identity.

But by 2008, the country had significantly soured on the war (by then, 63 percent of Americans were calling it a mistake), the Democrats had a rock star presidential candidate in then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose primary campaign message included a resounding rejection of Bush-Cheney and particularly the Iraq boondoggle.

Campaigning for his longtime neocon-brother-in-arms and 2008 GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ)—who, on the campaign trail, said he’d be fine with the U.S. spending “a hundred” years in Iraq—Graham said the following:

Calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq was one of the most unpopular things John McCain could have done. Some said it was political suicide. But you know what? It was the right thing to do… because losing in Iraq would have been a nightmare for America.

America had already lost in Iraq, and for most Americans, it had already long been a nightmare. By the end of 2008, there were over 4,000 U.S. military deaths. The Pentagon concluded that nearly 77,000 Iraqis had died in the same period.

These numbers never seemed to be a consideration for Graham when he advocated sending even more U.S. soldiers into wars most Americans were done with.

Four years after the U.S. formally declared the Iraq War over, McCain and Graham lobbied in 2015 for President Obama to send 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Iraq and Syria.

This didn’t happen, about which Graham would say in 2015, right before he launched a presidential campaign of his own, “At the end of the day, I blame President Obama for the mess in Iraq and Syria, not President Bush.”

The U.S. didn’t wage war enough in Iraq. Surely that was the problem.

Graham’s visions of war-related death and destruction had become increasingly more bizarre with age.

In 2013, Graham was pushing for U.S. military action against Syria, declaring, “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months—and you can quote me on this—there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.”

Graham also warned of Iran-backed terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb into America if the U.S. didn’t drop bombs on Syria soon.

“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” Graham said.

As a native Charlestonian, I can report that a nuclear bomb never did detonate in my home city, then or since.

A big war with Iran, however, did come 13 years later, launched not just by Israel but also by President Donald Trump, with Graham as the lead cheerleader. The war, still ongoing, is the culmination of a long-simmering Israel–Iran conflict that intensified after Israel launched its war in Gaza.

Barely two years ago, in May 2024, Graham said of Israel’s war on Gaza and Hamas, “When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.” He called that “the right decision.”

“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war,” the nuke-happy senator added. “They can’t afford to lose.”

The August 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities are estimated to have killed over 200,000, overwhelmingly Japanese civilians. President Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963 of those bombings, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Eisenhower, a former general and no stranger to the horrors of war, here showed some regret for what had been done. Graham’s comments, by contrast, were flippant to the point of inhumanity about possible nuclear use. Moreover, Ike had been talking about a world war in which the U.S. was a direct participant, not a regional war waged by a foreign nation in a strip of land the size of Portland, Oregon.

Graham wasn’t finished beating his chest about using nukes on Gaza.

“Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that?”

Graham said he was OK with it. “So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state,” he added. “Whatever you have to do.”

“Whatever” you have to do. This is not remotely in the realm of just war theory, not that Graham could have been expected to care about that. His reasoning did fit comfortably within Al Qaeda terrorists’ theories of war.

In late March of this year, roughly three months before his death, Graham basically said he didn’t mind if Americans died invading Iran.

You would think that at least this line would be a no-go zone. Apparently not.

On potentially sending U.S. ground troops to Iran’s Kharg Island, Graham told Fox News, “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”

‘Wait, what did he say?’ was the reaction of many.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was dumbfounded by Graham’s remark.

“Today Lindsey Graham, who for some reason has been the White House’s top spokesman for this war, went on TV and invoked Iwo Jima while calling for more escalation in Iran,” Walsh wrote. “Iwo Jima of course involved 26 thousand US casualties. It's extremely troubling that Graham has so much influence with the administration and has been so empowered to speak on its behalf.”

Walsh continued, “He is not conservative, he is not America first, he has never done a single thing in his career to advance the interests of actual American citizens, and he clearly wants this war to continue indefinitely and doesn't care how many Americans die in the process.”

Walsh was not overstating his case. Graham really didn’t appear to care about prioritizing any lives that happened to conflict with his political agenda.

Maybe some of this registered with me more than it should have because of my own antiwar politics. Yet for my entire adult, politically conscious life, this is what I saw year after year in this callous man—and I’m leaving out a lot due to the practical confines of this essay.

But from a South Carolinian, American, and certainly a pro-life perspective, I strive to never be dismissive of life (though I don’t always succeed), even that of someone who was so dismissive of it throughout his own.

Humans should never strive for inhumanity. I wish Lindsey Graham had thought the same.

And:

As the establishments of both major parties remain firmly wedded to Washington’s foreign policy consensus, particularly on U.S.-Israel relations, hard ideological factions on the right and left now seem willing to work together to present new challenges to that unanimity.

Exhibit A: In late June, Tucker Carlson announced he was done with the Republican party.

“How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interest of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?” Carlson said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast. He noted that he has been a lifelong defender of the GOP. Carlson is also an outspoken critic of U.S.-Israel relations and both countries’ war on Iran.

“I would not support the Republican party; there’s no chance I would support the Republican party,” the popular rightwing podcaster continued. “Not going to support the Democratic party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Then Carlson did something. He called for a new, antiwar party.

Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this month, “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.”

He said both Republicans and Democrats are in “lockstep” with each other on matters of “war and finance.” “If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war… then we need options,” he said. Those options are pretty limited when, as Carlson puts it, “(Democratic Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy.”

Fellow America First conservative and former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed with Carlson, telling Piers Morgan recently that she was “in talks with people” and that “serious conversations” were underway about creating a new party.

“There is a group of us that have literally fought the system, and I think there’s a group of us that, if we decide to align, we could launch a true America-focused party that doesn’t fall into the traps of Democrats and Republicans, but could align some serious players from the right and the left, and move forward,” Greene said.

While still in Congress, Greene was the first Republican to call the bloodshed in Gaza a “genocide.”

The difficulties facing the launch and success of a third party of course are immense. The requirements for ballot access are different in each of the 50 states and in many cases prohibitive. Competing with the two major parties in fundraising is hard enough, much less the high bar from access to public funding. The election landscape is littered with third parties that had emerged over similar bouts of voter frustration but were unable to break through the inherent obstacles.

But the fact that Republicans Greene and Carlson are even talking about a third party is an important signal, even if a new political vehicle never materializes.

Carlson is a formidably popular voice on the right. He is despised by the most hawkish conservative figures, who are constantly trying to cast him out for alleged demagoguery and antisemitism, but it's the threat he poses to the old neoconservative foreign policy consensus they appear to fear most.

For those who might recall Rush Limbaugh’s massive influence on the Republican party and the popular culture in the 1990s, particularly during the Clinton era and the Bush-Cheney aughts, the notion that Limbaugh would ever break away from the GOP for a third party was unthinkable. 2026 is very different than that time in so many ways, but it’s not hard to make an argument that Carlson is the most Limbaugh-esque rightwing influencer today, who now threatens to completely sever ties with Republicans and go his own electoral way. (That said, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, also promised a similar “America Party” a year ago, and not much has been heard about it since).

It is also notable that there are progressives and even Democrats who say they recognize the need for eschewing old left-right labels.

Progressive Young Turks host Ana Kasparian told Carlson in a 2025 interview that critics smear Carlson (rightwing antisemite) and herself (leftwing antisemite) as a way of preventing the two sides from getting together.

“It’s meant to discredit. And yeah, you’re right. It’s meant to stop these types of conversations from happening. Now, you are very conservative. I’m not very conservative. I have some views that lean more conservative than progressives feel comfortable with and that’s okay,” she said.

She added that she appreciated there was common ground on the populist message.

“I think that some of what you’ve been talking about lately hits at the heart of what I care most about, and that’s the importance of this country representing the American people,” Kasparian said. “The importance of the United States being a sovereign country that has politicians and a government that prioritizes the American people as opposed to a foreign government.”

This is an “America First” sentiment regularly shared by Kasparian’s co-host Cenk Uygur (who has also appeared on Carlson’s show), Glenn Greenwald (a left-leaning civil libertarian), Jimmy Dore (populist), and others. Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s have modeled their popular podcast on elevating both left and right visions of putting U.S. interests first.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Hawaii) are two members of Congress from the right and left who regularly join forces on matters of war and peace, including recent efforts to stop both major parties’ establishments from integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, giving Israel unprecedented access to Pentagon contracts and weapons manufacturing.

Of course, the House Rules Committee blocked Massie and Khanna’s amendment.

Massie just lost his Kentucky Republican primary in large part because of his opposition to AIPAC, which spent major dollars to defeat him.

“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first,” Massie said in October 2023 about a $14 billion aid package to Israel, which he voted against along with “Squad” Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib and (D-Mich.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

“I do believe that there are issues that populists on the right and left can collaborate on,” Khanna told Politico last year. He was speaking directly about the effort to open up the Epstein files for which he and Massie were the lead proponents in the House, but in the same interview he said, “obviously, we come from different ideological perspectives, but there are areas where we have agreement in making sure that we’re preventing wars of choice overseas and transparency.”

While there are schisms over Israel and the Iran war on the right, the Democrats are experiencing their own shake-up, with insurgent — and vocally anti-Israel — socialist Democrats defeating pro-Israel establishment Democrats in the recent New York primary. Trump’s eagerness to paint these Democrats as “communists” taking over the party seems hyperbolic given that there have been only a half dozen such primary victories to date, in New York and a few other states. But these outspoken antiwar political newcomers are making party leaders nervous.

As Politico framed it two days after the NYC elections, “Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak.”

Carlson says he has no plans to run for president, for any potential new third party or any other, but to focus on what Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos said on her most recent podcast, that there “is a War Party in this town, and it’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s both. It draws in the energy from the left and the right for more war, for using more militarism as the first tool in the toolbox.”

“There has to be some representation it would seem for all of us, particularly on foreign policy.”

That representation exists. How weak or strengthened, or even formalized it could become in the long term, we cannot know.

But the uniparty is not impenetrable. This, we know.

Failing The Test

Keir Starmer would watch England at the World Cup Final on his last day in office. But he has never met the nuclear test veterans. Such are the people who have spent more than a decade discrediting the anti-austerity, anti-war and anti-racist movement to keep the freebies that we hope, but do not expect, that they are now days away from losing.

For example, Natalie Fleet would have it that, “Nigel Farage and his gang of bin men get the same security as the rest of us. Sick of the faux outrage. None of them cared when a senior Reform UK politician was sharing my death threats!” Her predecessor as Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, has been known to describe Ann Widdecombe as “a little fascist beast”.

Kai Stephens and Laurence Fox will each be standing as one of those at Clacton, where they and everyone else look increasingly likely to be defeated, not by a bin man, but by a bin. While he waited for the next General Election to give him the chance to revive 3-2-1, Jon Harvey would presumably be in his seat, even if not in his Count Binface costume, on the next International Women’s Day, when Phillips would read out the names of every woman in Britain who had been killed by a man in the previous year. Including Ann Widdecombe.

It Tolls For Thee

Well, of course the Ann Widdecombe suspect was unknown to Prevent. Prevent is based on a proven hoax, and whenever these things happen, then it has either never heard of the perpetrators, or it had let them slip. When Essa Suleiman was referred to it to no effect whatever, then the responsible Ministers were Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick.

Prevent will no doubt turn out never to have heard of anyone who was sent down for 14 years for having expressed approval of what will be the efforts of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is effectively the Government of Iran since Donald Trump took out its rivals, to open the Strait of Hormuz free of Trump’s 20 per cent tolls. And be in no doubt that they will be Trump’s tolls. He is now literally a pirate, the head of a pirate state that is beggaring our people. Yet to say that will very soon be to face a 14-year stretch. Prevention, indeed.

Just So Lucky To Have Known Her

Claire Fox writes:

There’s been so many wonderful, heartfelt and heart-breaking tributes paid to Ann Widdecombe, written by close friends and colleagues, that when asked to write this I hesitated. What can I add? I see this as a postscript to those tributes, based on very specific circumstances that led to a rather peculiar but rewarding relationship.

When I agreed to stand as a Brexit Party candidate in the European elections in 2019, I was entering an alien political environment to that associated with my directorship of the Academy of Ideas, or my regular perch on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze or the Sky News paper review, or indeed my previous life as co-publisher of LM magazine (the successor to Living Marxism). If that was discombobulating, what was terrifying was my first meeting with Ann, the well-known Thatcherite and former Conservative shadow home secretary.

We were to share a platform at a Brexit Party rally, and she had asked to see me privately beforehand to ‘clear the air’. I had been told she was unhappy with my candidacy after something of a media storm about my previous – albeit decades-old – involvement in the Irish Freedom Movement, a UK-based organisation that campaigned against British rule in Northern Ireland. She had lost a friend in the IRA Brighton bombing in 1984 and had been at the Conservative conference which was being held at the time. So, as I nervously introduced myself, her opening words were: ‘So, you wanted to blow me up.’

After 45 minutes of forensic grilling, during which we enjoyed a frank exchange of views, she smiled wryly, squeezed my hand and said she respected honesty and principles. She concluded in that unmistakable school ma’am voice: ‘We’d better get on with saving Brexit then.’

She went on to deliver a barnstorming speech without notes. I followed her on to the stage with a sheaf full of notes, far more nerves and far less verve. But the cheering crowd was generous to both of us. We were all on the same side on this issue at least. As I left the stage, she gave me a warm hug and, with a twinkle in her eye, said ‘you’ll do’. We never looked back.

That seriousness, generosity of spirit and humour rather set the tone for our relationship when we were elected as MEPs, along with the rest of the victorious Brexit Party candidates who ended up in Brussels. Her experience as a proper, grown-up politician, as opposed to those of us who were new to the field, was invaluable.

She was meticulously professional. When she explained why it was important to answer all correspondence, even from those who were hostile, I took note. She taught me that accountability to the public was paramount. She was forthright and intelligently probing in all our group meetings, forcing us to think through tactics and positions. She was ferociously loyal to the Brexit Party as a group, but she was also her own woman, and fervently independent.

Inquisitive about people, she was always keen to look beyond the surface and find out what made others tick. In our many conversations, we discovered how much we had in common – from our shared commitment to free speech as a core pillar of democracy to our opposition to assisted dying. And when we disagreed, we both took time to explain why we believed as we did, disagreeing civilly, and always learning something from each other. This taught me that whatever the media caricature or public persona, when you actually dig deeper, people are always more complicated and interesting.

It helps explain why now, since the tragic circumstances of her untimely death, social media are littered with hundreds of photos of Ann with countless people from all social backgrounds. Having dinner with them, chatting to them, sharing a bottle of wine with them. And she is always looking as though she is having a ball. She honestly seems to have known everyone! And that’s because she was the opposite of a snob. She was distinguished – as a political figure, novelist, celebrity – but never too grand to be approachable. She was great company and a model public servant.

One thing I really loved was the delight that Ann took in our unlikely friendship – although she did sometimes tut-tut at my blaspheming. Whenever she was approaching me, she held her arms open wide and just embraced me with such warmth, often calling me ‘comrade’, with a cheeky grin. She joked about us being united as rebels from across the political divide, and her greatest compliment was when she laughingly admitted I may have brought out a bit of revolutionary spirit in her.

She had far closer chums, deep friendships with many, and we were only colleagues temporarily. But she made a huge impression on me – not so much in terms of my politics but how to behave in the political arena. She was unbiddable, unbuyable and uncompromising in speaking truth to power. She worked bloody hard, too. Indeed, she was one of the most tireless, diligent and irrepressible women I’ve ever met.

Since her death, many have noted that she would have been an obvious person to be nominated for a peerage. We might speculate about whether grandees in the Conservative Party were – as rumoured – so sectarian and spiteful that they denied this renowned elder stateswoman that honour. Despite this, Ann was lovely when I joined the House of Lords, and showed no envy whatsoever. Instead, she gave me invaluable advice on how to operate in parliament: ‘Gird your loins when encountering condescension and sneers; speak out as often as you can, but only on issues that matter to you; don’t be bullied by others; and only act on your conscience.’ It could be a charter for all politicians.

As for Ann, the truth is she was far too busy to sit on the red benches. Having already experienced life as an elected legislator, she rightly felt she could be far more effective at realising the project of Brexit by escaping the confines of Westminster.

I hate that she was struck down so cruelly while living her best life politically. She was behaving like a Young Turk, dashing around the country speaking at Reform UK rallies and local meetings, endlessly offering forthright advice to Reform UK bigwigs and her vast range of journalist mates without fear or favour. And she appeared regularly in the media, ensuring that distinct voice of common sense was heard loudly and clearly by millions. Perhaps someone thought an act of violence would silence that voice.

There is some minor consolation that, since her death, clips of Ann have been greedily shared on social media, with some even trending. Let’s help that endeavour by sharing Ann’s uncompromising defence of free speech at the Oxford Union a few years ago far and wide. Do listen – and you might just recognise me in one of her anecdotes (ouch!).

I was just so lucky to have known her.