Alumni of one Old School will recognise the motto which means constancy
amid things that must change, if I remember correctly.
On Sunday 19 April,for the first time in five weeks, I got hold of the
“hard copy” of a newspaper. It was the Sunday Times, stablemate of
THE TIMES of London.
Its culture section has a review of a book on Vladimir Putin, by a former
Financial Times Moscow correspondent, who like every Western commentator
I’ve read,is hostile to him personally and not particularly concerned for
legitimate Russian or Arab, African, Asian, interests,
The author, Catherine Belton,oncedes that claims that its subject and the KGB
orchestrated the so-called”Red Brigade” terrorists in Italy and
“The Baader-Meinhof”
gang in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s is impossible to verify .But it seems
that she and the reviewer, Arkady Ostrovsky,are inclined to believe that such
an apprenticeship for Putin and his KGB comrades might explain their ”
subversive operations against the West across half the globe.”
I suspect that my origins are more deeply Western than those of Mr Ostrovsky. I
can’t see how any of Mr Putin’s known actions have injured or threatened my interests
or those of people from further West -in Latin America, for instance. He has
been instrumental in defeating the attempt at the total
dismemberment of Syria.
The owner of the SUNDAY TIMES. and THE TIMES, Rupert Murdoch hopes to profit
from Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, in Syria’s soveieign territory.
(See my BLOG -Serious About Syria?)
While certain things change, THE TIMES and media of its ilk have a certain
consistency –
“The native Irish…defy all ordinary attempts to tame them into
agricultural labourers… hence that miserable and helpless being the Irish
cottier…(Its) condition
and character has been so often described…that we need not prove the
existence of such a class incompatible with civilization…. Calamitous as are
the events
by which it has come to pass, we now thank Heaven that we can speak of a class
that has been….We resign ourselves without reserve…to (Ireland’s) continued
depopulation until only a half or a third of the nine millions claimed for her
by O’Connell remain. We may possibly live to see the day when her chief product
will
be cattle and English and Scotch the majority of her population.”
THE TIMES
(London)
2 January 1852
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