Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2026

Worrying about post-combat lawfare will crush initiative and morale

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Law, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As mentioned in Dr. Robert Lyman’s account yesterday, the British government wants to turn back the hands of time to change the rules of engagement under which British Army troops and police conducted themselves during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. It may be an exciting prospect for law firms, activists, and other anti-military groups, but it would set a terrible precedent for British use of military force from this moment onwards. At The Critic, Alexander Gray explains why this is a dangerous and stupid idea that should be dropped forever:

“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

The debate about the hounding of veterans through the courts has long been presented in terms of fairness. This is indeed one side of the story. No decent country should tolerate servicemen being dragged through repeated investigations decades after the events in question, often without new evidence and after previous inquiries have already reached their conclusions.

But focusing only on veterans misses an even more urgent point: this has become a national security threat.

Over the past two decades, the legal framework governing military operations has changed. Courts have increasingly applied standards developed for peacetime to scrutinise wartime situations of uncertainty and danger which often demand split-second judgement. Human rights law, designed principally to regulate relations between the state and individuals, has increasingly been applied to military operations, including to situations already governed by the Law of Armed Conflict.

This is having consequences on the battlefield. Personnel who believe that a lawful decision taken in combat may be reconstructed years later in a civilian courtroom are now incentivised to be more cautious, more process-driven and less willing to exercise initiative. That hesitation can slow decisions in situations where delay may place lives and the success of an operation at risk. The prospect of repeated investigations and prolonged legal uncertainty is also damaging morale and contributing to experienced personnel leaving the service, depriving the Armed Forces of skills and judgement that are difficult to replace.

This is why the Prosperity Institute has published the Military Operations Bill, presented to Parliament this week by Sir David Davis MP. It reasserts the principle that combat operations should be judged primarily by the Law of Armed Conflict. Courts have an important role in punishing wrongdoing, but they should not become alternative command structures reviewing military judgement from the safety of hindsight.

Update, 19 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 17, 2026

British government seeks to retroactively change the Rules of Engagement during “The Troubles”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m old enough to have had lengthy conversations with British soldiers and officers who were serving or had recently served in Northern Ireland at the tail end of “The Troubles”. It was a dangerous situation the troops found themselves in and the Rules of Engagement they worked under at least recognized that it wasn’t a normal day at the office back home. On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman explains why the current government’s plan to retroactively change the rules that governed the actions of the British military forces is one of the worst possible things they could do:

Lieutenant Robert Lyman in the Ballymurphy, 1983, in a photograph snapped by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Elliott, CO of 1LI at the time. He was driving past in his Landrover and spotted a photo opportunity.
Photo via The War Room

For those who know me well, the idea that I might now be encouraging young men and women not to join the Armed Forces might sound that I had lost my marbles. I can assure you that is not the case. I am deadly serious. This government’s determination, building on the surrender of the previous Conservative government to the varying dictats of the ECHR, will drive an impossible moral and legal wedge between the people who the country ask to do its dirty work, and the government that sends them in harms way. It is an intolerable set of affairs that all sensible people in his country should oppose. What sort of perversity might think that this behaviour is acceptable from any government? I despair, yet it seems that this is precisely what our current morally impoverished government seems to desire.

[…]

The central concern is that the proposed changes will expose servicemen and women, many of whom have already undergone judicial scrutiny for actions undertaken during the Troubles, to further litigation and investigation. In practice, this is likely to encourage a new wave of cases brought by individuals seeking to revisit or reinterpret events from a campaign in which terrorist organisations such as the IRA and INLA were ultimately defeated.

The immediate implications are troubling enough. The longer-term precedent, however, is far more serious. If this legislation proceeds, it will send a clear message to today’s servicemen and women, that even after they have acted lawfully, completed investigations, and fulfilled their duty to the State, they may still face renewed legal jeopardy in later decades. It undermines the fundamental bond of trust between those who serve and the government that sends them into harm’s way.

Every member of the British Armed Forces operates within a strict and clearly defined legal framework. These rules, embodied in the Laws of Armed Conflict and implemented through Rules of Engagement (RoE), govern the use of force in military operations. During my own service, I spent countless hours learning these rules, teaching them to my soldiers, and ensuring they were followed in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

This debate is not about whether soldiers should be above the law. Of course they are not, nor should they be. Rather, it is about whether the rules that governed military operations at the time can be retrospectively reinterpreted after a conflict has ended. The concern is that former adversaries will be able to pursue legal action against veterans for actions that were considered lawful under the Rules of Engagement in force at the time.

Today, Policy Exchange published an excellent report examining this issue in relation to former members of the SAS who served in Northern Ireland. The report sets out the problem clearly and persuasively, concluding that the proposed changes should be abandoned. I agree.

Predictably, some MPs have defended the legislation. Diane Abbott, for example, has argued on X that opposition to the changes amounts to “a call for armed forces personnel to be placed above the law.” That characterisation is deeply misleading. The debate has never been about exempting soldiers from the law. It is about subjecting veterans to repeated investigations and additional layers of judicial scrutiny many years after the events in question, often in ways that were never demanded of those they fought against on behalf of the nation.

At its core, this issue is one of fairness. It raises questions about double standards, retrospective judgment, and the constant shifting of the goalposts. Veterans who served under one set of rules are now being told that those rules may no longer be sufficient protection against further legal action.

September 11, 2026

Capturing 9/11: Bill Biggart’s Final Images

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Imperial War Museums
Published 2 Sep 2026

On 11th September 2001, photojournalist Bill Biggart headed to the World Trade Center to document the unfolding attacks. Bill Biggart tragically passed away when the North Tower collapsed, but he left behind a remarkable final record of the day. Featuring testimony from his widow, Wendy Doremus, and photographs recovered from the damaged camera found in the rubble, this film tells the story behind some of the last images taken at Ground Zero, now available to see at IWM London.

00:00 The Morning of 9/11
01:06 Bill goes to Lower Manhattan
01:25 The South Tower is Hit
03:08 The South Tower Collapses
03:57 Bill Photographs the Emergency Workers
04:48 The North Tower Collapses
05:57 Bill’s Last Ever Photo
06:09 The Days After 9/11
07:30 Finding His Cameras and Photos
09:10 Visit Bill’s Photos at IWM London

Visit the 9/11 Photography Display at IWM London: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-lon…

“Let’s roll!”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the Neil Young song — yes, that Neil Young — that best captured the events on Flight 93 on the eleventh of September, 2001:

“Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, after a Boeing 767 hits each tower during the September 11 attacks.”
Photo by Michael Foran via Wikimedia Commons.

[T]here was one striking exception to the stultifying conformity of cultural critique, one lonely example of an A-list star confronting a specific 9/11 event head-on and offering his voice in full-throated support of authentic American heroism. Even more impressively, it came from a Canadian — and at a time when Jean Chrétien’s ministry was mostly engaged in petty sniping about alleged offenses to its amour propre. When I was, oh, fourteen years old I saw Neil Young with Crosby, Stills, Nash & … plus his compatriot Joni Mitchell and The Band. And to be honest in the intervening decades I can’t say I gave Neil Young much thought — and, whenever I’ve chanced to be tootling around and “After the Gold Rush” or “Heart of Gold” comes on the radio, I’m reminded of why I haven’t much missed him. Nevertheless, just a few weeks after September 11th, Neil Young offered a new song that took its inspiration from what I called in the papers that week “the only good news of the day” — the turn of events on Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one supposedly headed for the White House or the Capitol or Camp David that Tuesday morning but whose passengers rose up and overpowered the hijackers. Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but its fallen heroes saved hundreds of lives, including perhaps the Vice-President’s or multiple congressmen, and denied Osama bin Laden an even more iconic remaking of the Washington skyline and the symbolic (and potentially actual) decapitation of the Great Satan. Todd Beamer’s last words, heard by a GTE telephone operator to whom he’d been speaking, were, “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!”

It was hard to credit from the disposition of even moderate Democrats just a couple of years later; but Young, a very leftie celebrity, was genuinely moved by Lisa Beamer’s account of her husband’s sacrifice. As he put it:

    She was talking about how he always used to say that (‘let’s roll’) with the kids when they’d go out and do something, that it’s what he said a lot when he had a job to do. And it’s just so poignant, and there’s no more of a legendary, heroic act than what those people did. With no promise of martyrdom, no promise of any reward anywhere for this, other than just knowing that you did the right thing. And not even having a chance to think about it or plan it or do anything – just a gut reaction that was heroic and ultimately cost them all their lives. What more can you say? It was just so obvious that somebody had to write something or do something …because it’s just such a great image – the whole story about the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. I think it’s a legendary story that’s gonna go down through the ages; it’ll never be forgotten.

It was indeed “just so obvious”, and for writers there are two reactions to that: you jump on it and write it immediately — as a book, a play, a poem, a movie — or you figure some other guy must surely have got to it. Except in this case no one did. Neil Young was perhaps being too naïve with regard to contemporary culture’s ambivalence about unabashed heroism. So he waited, and waited. “I was very surprised,” he said, “that I didn’t hear any songs.”

And eventually he got tired of waiting. “So, I just wrote it. I couldn’t stop it anymore.” He took Todd Beamer’s catchphrase, turned it into a song title, and sang it out for real — no playing for irony or nuance.

Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” is a dark, driving anthem that begins with a church organ (Young’s own, acquired in Europe) and over its ominous drone the sound of cellphones ringing. That was the most important weapon the passengers had: the mobile telephone. By all accounts, the hijackers of Flight 93 weren’t exactly the cream of Osama’s toxic crop. The flight was halfway across the continent before the boobs made their move and started meandering back east to their target. It was getting on for 9.30 on that Tuesday morning. By the time the passengers began calling home, their families were aware of what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unlike those on the earlier flights, the hostages on 93 knew they were not on a conventionally hijacked aircraft bound for Cuba or Libya, but were conscripts on an airborne missile intended to kill thousands of their fellow citizens. So, unlike the earlier passengers, they understood the FAA’s cobwebbed 1970s hijack procedures would not save them. The terrorists took charge at 9.28am. The pushback started at 9.57. In those 29 minutes, ordinary American citizens decided that, if they had to die, they would die as warriors. Put yourself in their shoes, on those phones, in that time-frame. Neil Young does, and, after the plaintive unanswered phones, and the organ, and a bit of guitar, an aged rock star’s familiar rasp captures the moment:

    I know I said I love you
    I know you know it’s true
    I got to put the phone down
    And do what we gotta do…

The song can’t be said to be of much melodic interest. In those first four bars, 17 of the 27 monosyllables are all set to the same single note: “know I said”, “love”, “I know you know”, “I got to put”, “phone”, “do what we got”, and what follows plonks along in the same vein. It’s what Sammy Cahn used to call “the kind of tune a lyricist writes”; the words are set as you’d expect, without any of the great transformative intervals that can give a bi-syllable a power way beyond what it would have as mere speech. But it’s urgent speech, and the track is great. At the time Young was working on an album with Booker T and the MGs, and in the studio one day unveiled the song to the guys somewhat sheepishly. Booker T Jones liked it. “You don’t have to figure out what to do on a song like that,” he said. “We were just able to pull it off.” He and the MGs aren’t much into vocals (as you’ll know from “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight” and their other killer instrumentals), but they gamely provide the old croaker with some discreet background support here. And of course Jones’ Hammond organ and Donald “Duck” Dunn’s bass keep driving the narrative relentlessly forward. Above the band, Neil Young distills the essence of those last, haunting cell conversations in a way few songwriters had either the courage or the inclination to do.

August 1, 2026

Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:

This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.

This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.

That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.

The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:

RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.

So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.

RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.

The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should not “talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.

RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.

What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?

In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.

More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.

July 30, 2026

Intramural conflict in the progressive “big tent”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies some of the major fault lines among the temporary coalition-of-convenience on “the left”:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The modern woke worldview keeps colliding with reality because it sorts people into fixed moral categories: oppressed people are presumed good, while designated oppressors are presumed guilty. Once that framework takes hold, facts become secondary.

That is why some progressives can condemn “Christian nationalism” before breakfast, then struggle to name radical Islam when an Islamist attacks the very people they claim to defend.

The contradiction is obvious. Radical Islam is deeply hostile to homosexuality, women’s equality, free expression and secular liberalism. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone tolerant. It makes society dishonest and vulnerable.

This does not mean every Muslim is dangerous, nor does it justify collective blame. It means an ideology should be judged by what it teaches, what its extremists do, and whether its institutions openly confront the problem. The same standard should apply to every religion and political movement.

The woke response is usually predictable: redirect attention toward the far right, blame Western society, or accuse anyone raising the issue of hatred.

That protects the ideology, but it does nothing to protect ordinary people. Compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.

A healthy society needs openness, but openness is not the absence of judgment. Immigration, asylum and multiculturalism require enforceable limits, cultural confidence and a clear expectation that newcomers accept the laws and basic freedoms of the country receiving them.

You cannot build social trust by demanding that citizens ignore obvious conflicts. You cannot defend gay people while excusing movements that despise them. You cannot defend women while tolerating misogyny from politically protected groups.

Reality does not care which side has the approved slogans. Eventually, contradictions collect a human cost.

June 27, 2026

“To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, ‘Even I am impressed’. It would be more merciful to just hang them.”

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Tom Kratman discusses the recent trial and sentencing of a group of Antifa terrorists:

On 4 July, 2025, a group of ANTIFA engaged in a baited ambush outside an ICE facility, using fireworks and various riotous behaviors to entice out some members of law enforcement and shooting one of those.

They were quickly identified, in anything from some hours to two days. Of the presumed eleven of them on site, ten were also arrested within two days. Only Benjamin Song, the ringleader, managed to evade arrest for a while. Song, however, was captured within eleven days. Of those who were not present at the site but were part of the conspiracy, all were arrested within a few weeks. The total number of defendants is twenty-two, but six of those, so far, face only state charges.

Seven of the sixteen have already made plea bargains. So much for revolutionary solidarity. These have not yet been sentenced, though sentences of up to fifteen years in the big house can be expected. Of the nine who have already been tried in federal court, eight have been sentenced and one is pending. The eight sentenced, and their sentences, are as follows:

  • Benjamin Hanil Song: 100 years
  • Maricela Rueda: 70 years.
  • Cameron Arnold (aka Autumn Hill): 50 years.
  • Savanna Batten: 50 years.
  • Zachary Evetts: 50 years.
  • Bradford Morris (aka Meagan Morris): 50 years.
  • Elizabeth Soto: 50 years.
  • Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada: 30 years.

Think about it, an average of fifty-six years and three months each. To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, “Even I am impressed”. It would be more merciful to just hang them.

Think, too, dear lefty, about how you would face that sentence.

So what can you, left-wing reader, take away from this incident? First and foremost, you should understand that you’re not going to get a lot of mercy in a federal court (and probably none from any southern state court) for this kind of behavior. Song and Rueda, for example, are somewhat unlikely ever to see the outside world again. Yes, there is time off for good behavior — Good Conduct Time, or GCT — in federal prison, but, Song, for example, will still serve eighty-five years even if he gets all of that GCT to his credit. There is another kind of mercy the Bureau of Prisons can grant, First Step Act sentence reductions, which can chop a sentence by up to fifty percent. However, since these convictions are for terrorism or terrorism-related crimes, FSA does not apply. Yes, Song is still going to stay in prison for at least eighty-five years.

Secondly, you should be very wary of ex-military types who might claim to know how to do things like train for, rehearse for, and conduct even comparatively simple operations like ambushes. It is hard to imagine a less competent ambush than the one run by Song. No, he had no idea what he was doing. We don’t know what Song’s (he was a Marine Reservist) MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) or even unit were, but the fact that that area has only artillery and aviation should have given the people he recruited some pause to reflect on how likely he was to understand how to do any of this or anything beyond, perhaps, shoot qualification on an administrative range. No, Marine REMFs,1 are still REMFs. Yes, they are REMFs who can to some extent shoot a rifle. This does not change them from REMFs. Yes, I know that few, if any, of you are knowledgeable enough even to suspect the difference between an MOS of tutu wearer and an MOS of cold-blooded killer. Take your ignorance into account, too, before taking direction from those who can talk the talk – or seem to you, in your incarnate ignorance, to be able to – but are unlikely to be able to walk the walk.

No, I am not going to tell you – and, yes, I definitely do know how to run an ambush – how it’s to be done properly. I will tell you that calling out “Get to the rifles”, as Song did, is not the way to do it.

Your movement probably has a bare handful of people who actually know what they’re doing, violence-at-scale-wise. So before signing your life away to someone claiming to be one of them, ask yourself, “What are the odds?” And then walk the other way. No, I’m not about to tell you how to tell the difference.

  1. Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers

June 25, 2026

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

May 17, 2026

Why the US Invaded Iraq

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 21 Nov 2025

The US invasion of Iraq was the culmination of several developments that started at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In 2002, the Bush administration used the excuse of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to justify the invasion.
(more…)

April 28, 2026

Echoes of Spain in the 1930s

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens discusses how the Spanish Republic disintegrated in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War:

After the Spanish Right won the 1933 elections, Communists in Asturias launched a revolution, killing thousands before the army was deployed to finally put an end to the chaos.

They did the same thing in Catalonia, and when that too was quelled, they engaged in a low-level terrorist campaign all over the country, planting bombs, sabotaging infrastructure, assassinating newspaper editors and political figures, and staging general strikes all over Spain.

They kept doing this until they finally won the 1936 election, at which point the Left went full mask-off and began unleashing thousands of criminals into the streets, ransacking businesses, dragging conservatives out of their homes to beat them, and going into the countryside to expropriate private property. The entire country descended into a state of near-total anarchy in a matter of months.

The Left spent years agitating for a Marxist revolution in Spain and refused to obey the legal system because they saw the Spanish Republic as a mechanism to achieve Leftism, not as a neutral system intended to uphold democracy, the constitution, or the rule of law.

And thus, any deviation from the march towards Leftism was seen as an illegitimate act of treason and proof of an imminent fascist takeover of the state. As a result, ANY electoral victory by the Right was inherently treated as illegal by the Left, and ANY attempt to actually govern in accordance with Right-wing principles was seen as just cause to engage in violent insurrection.

You cannot have a country like this for long. If one side treats the process as illegitimate unless it produces their desired ideological outcome, they will inevitably win unless they’re physically stopped.

March 19, 2026

QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.

That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.

Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.

The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.

Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.

Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.

Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.

As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.

Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.

March 3, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t bothered trying to keep up with the firehose of “news” about the combined US/Israeli operations against the Islamic State, as much of what is initially reported will be re-stated, retracted, refuted, and other words starting with “R” until something vaguely resembling objective analysis can be done. There are uncounted mainstream, specialist, and advocacy sites and there’s no point trying to keep up with them (for me, anyway). Here are a few bits of internet flotsam on issues arising from Operation Brass Balls (or whatever name they chose for it):

First up, J.D. Tuccille on the legality around President Trump’s decision to strike Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

The world is undoubtedly a better place after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and roughly 40 of his murderous colleagues by joint Israeli and American military strikes. Iran’s Islamist regime has slaughtered its own people while encouraging terrorism around the world for decades. But those strikes carry serious risks and costs. Are they worth the tradeoffs? The Trump administration should have made its case to Congress and the already skeptical public and satisfied the Constitution’s requirements by doing so.

War Without Debate

On Saturday, the U.S. and Israel launched much-anticipated strikes after claiming negotiations with the Iranian regime over the status of its nuclear weapons program had stalled.

“A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran,” President Donald Trump announced. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years the Iranian regime has chanted ‘death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”

True enough. The president recited a litany of crimes in which the Islamist regime has been implicated, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut by Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which Iranian forces helped plan. To this list we can add the attempted assassinations of Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn and of then-presidential candidate Trump himself. Trump also called out Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. And he urged the suffering Iranian people, who have weathered brutal attempts to suppress protests, to take advantage of the military strikes to overthrow the regime.

Unfortunately, this was the first time many Americans — members of the public and lawmakers alike — heard the Trump administration make a somewhat coherent argument for taking on Iran’s government. It came as strikes were already underway despite the Constitution reserving to Congress the responsibility to “provide for the common Defence”, “to declare War”, “to raise and support Armies”, and “to provide and maintain a Navy”. Lawmakers were informed of the attack on Iran, but only after the country was committed to hostilities and their related dangers and expense.

Congress and the People Were Never Consulted

“I am opposed to this War,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) objected. “This is not ‘America First’. When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran. The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) shares Massie’s skepticism towards military action. He and Massie might have voted against authorizing war with Iran even if they’d heard the administration’s arguments. Or perhaps they and other lawmakers would have been persuaded. We don’t know, because the president didn’t make a case until bombs and missiles had already been launched.

Andrew Doyle on the need for regime change:

The end point of armed conflict is impossible to predict. In her book On Violence (1970), the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that when it comes to political violence, “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals”. However well planned and executed, wars have a tendency to spiral out of control in ways never envisaged.

Whether Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran will pay off depends upon the fates as much as anything else. The goal is regime change, which – given the appalling tyranny under which the Iranian people have suffered for five decades – is admirable and just. Yet the numerous unknown variables make this war the biggest risk that Trump has yet taken as president.

This war has the potential to escalate and engulf the entire region. Iran is already striking neighbouring Arab states allied with the US in a scattershot and desperate manner. With the death of the Ayatollah, it may be that the regime will be forced into a ceasefire while it seeks to re-establish its power. Yet the scenes of wild celebration on the streets of Iran would suggest that domestic revolution is its greatest threat. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (not the country’s national army, but a kind of Praetorian guard for the mullahs) can be turned, the regime will fall.

Perhaps the worst case scenario is a widespread power struggle between competing militias and separatist groups. The IRGC itself could fragment, and we may see the kind of chaos that ensued after the Iraq war of 2003. The Trump administration has the advantage of the latest military technology and will insist that this enterprise will never require “boots on the ground”. It may be right, but who knows what factions will emerge with no centralised authority?

Those of us without a crystal ball should get used to the phrase: “we don’t know”. Various social media pundits are asserting with absolute certainty where all of this will lead. They would be wise to exercise greater caution. After the Twelve-Day War last June in which Israel and the US destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and air defence capabilities, many on the “America First” right were quick to prophesy the advent of World War III. Their claims to clairvoyance were unfounded.

CDR Salamander argues in favour of the punitive expedition as a legitimate tool in the nation’s war locker:

I support the strikes on Iran because it firmly fits into a view I have held on the use of national military power for decades, based on thousands of years of military practice. If you are not up to speed with the thousands of Americans dead and maimed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies over the last 47 years, then I have nothing more to discuss with you.

While I understand the academic argument of many that before any action takes place, there is a whole series of hoops, barriers, and puzzles of our own creation that we need to go through — I firmly believe that not only are those Constitutionally unnecessary for punitive expeditions in 2026, if done, needed and deserved strikes like we have seen in Iran could not take place without

Fortunes were made, institutions funded, and employment justified for legions under the old and failed post-WWII process swamp and GWOT nomenklatura that gave us unending and stillborn conflicts. To go that route again wouldn’t just be folly, it would be a self-destructive folly to refuse to change in the face of evidence.

I’ve seen older versions of OPLANS for Iran. Huge, bloody, and frankly undoable. They were only that way because they met the requirements of an old system that everyone nodded their heads to because all the smart people from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton and all the usual places said we had to do it this way.

Enough. Bollocks to all that. They have been measured the last quarter century and have been found wanting.

A series of events since October 7, 2023, including the 2024 election, has opened a window to do what we have not been able to do for a whole host of reasons — and there is a debt waiting to be paid.

We’ve been here before with Iran. In the modern context, we sank two warships and three speedboats of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy in 1988 during Operation Praying Mantis as punishment for damaging USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) and Iran’s mining international waters in the Persian Gulf. We’ve played slap-n-tickle with them here and there while they have brutalized us at every turn when they are not brutalizing their own people.

Yes, it’s personal — but part of the reason we have been hesitant is that our national security intellectuals have been stuck in a world view that prevented action, by design.

Though not exclusive, the Powell Doctrine’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (that it appears he got from one of Thomas Frack’n Friedman’s columns), made it appear that we could only take action if we took the entire country and then remade it in our image.

We know how that operationalized over the last couple of decades.

We’ve done plenty of punitive expeditions in our nation’s history — but in the last few decades as a certain pedigree of policy maker held sway over our national security doctrine, it fell out of favor.

They failed the nation. Their institutions failed the nation. Their worldview was little more than a self-licking ice cream cone of self-regard.

There are also those who can find the funny aspects of any serious situation:

February 8, 2026

QotD: Life of Brian in modern day Europe

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“What bad has mass immigration to Europe ever done for us?”

– “The raping?”

“What?”

– “The raping”

“Oh yeah yeah. They do rape an awful lot that’s true yes.”

– “And the welfare costs”

– “Oh yes the welfare costs, Rich. The unemployment benefits alone.”

“Ok, I will grant you the raping, and the welfare costs, are two bad things mass immigration have done for us.”

– “And the terrorism”

“Oh yeah obviously the terrorism. I mean the terrorism goes without saying. But apart from the raping, the welfare costs, and the terrorism …”

– “Violent crime”

– “Honor killings”

– “Car bombings”

“Yeah, you are all right, fair enough.”

– “Burqas”

– [nodding among the group] “Yeah, that is something we’d really not miss if the immigrants left.”

– “Political support for bad economic policies.”

– “And it’s less safe to walk in the streets at night now, Rich.”

Ok, but apart from the raping, the welfare costs, the terrorism, the violent crime, the honor killings, the car bombings, the burqas, political support for bad economic policies and the unsafe streets, what bad has mass immigration ever done for us?

Jonatan Pallesen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-06.

January 19, 2026

British Islamists scare Islamic governments more than the British government

Filed under: Britain, Education, Government, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Rakib Ehsan discusses the recent efforts by the governments of some Gulf states to limit potential radicalization of their own people by reducing support for students attending British universities:

Flag of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

In yet another blow to Britain’s reputation on the global stage, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has curbed state funding for its citizens seeking to enrol at UK universities, over concerns they will be radicalised by Islamists.

As reported in the Telegraph last week, the Gulf state has taken this drastic step because of the influence in the UK of the Muslim Brotherhood – a transnational Sunni Islamist organisation, which is a designated terror group in the UAE. It is also banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The UAE has long offered Emirati students generous grants – including rent and living allowances – for studying “priority” subjects at British universities. These scholarships have now ended because, according to a source quoted in the Telegraph, “the UAE doesn’t want its kids to be radicalised on campus”.

This is not the first time that the UK has been embarrassed for being a soft touch on Islamism by a Muslim country. In January last year, the UAE placed eight UK-based organisations on its local terror list on the grounds of their alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Most of these entities, which range from property firms to video-production outlets, are registered in London. Then, in April, the head of the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, warned that the UK should treat poor integration as a national-security issue. He said that young British Muslims had grown disillusioned because of conflicts in the Middle East, advising the UK that “a political situation outside should not interfere with integration inside”.

The UAE’s latest decision should hardly come as a surprise. Indeed, for some time, British universities have embraced the very extremism that Muslim-majority countries have long sought to root out.

December 31, 2025

The Royal Canadian Navy … a terrorist organization according to Iran

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

An unexpected post from True North Strategic Review, as Noah shares the details of a new announcement from the Islamic Republic of Iran about that well-known terrorist group known as His Majesty King Charles’s Royal Canadian Navy (RCN):

Statement from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via True North Strategic Review

Welp. Sometimes you wake up to the most random things imaginable. This is certainly one of them in my books.

The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released a statement today officially designating the Royal Canadian Navy as a Terrorist Entity under the “Tit-for-Tat” trigger outlined in Article 7 of the Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States Act.

Here is the translated statement for those curious:

    Since the Canadian government has declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is recognized as one of the pillars of the country’s official armed forces, a terrorist organization, contrary to the fundamental principles of international law, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on the principle of reciprocity and based on Article 7 of the “Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States” Act passed in 2019, which stipulates that “all countries that in any way comply with or support the decision of the United States of America to declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization shall be subject to reciprocity,” considers the Royal Canadian Navy to be subject to the aforementioned Act and its provisions, and therefore, within the framework of reciprocity, identifies and declares it as a terrorist organization.

For a bit of context, under the Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States Act, the Iranian government includes a clause stating that any country that supports or complies with the U.S. decision to label the IRGC as terrorists is also subject to reciprocity.

This retaliation clause is in direct response to the Canadian government’s decision last June to declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. Although quite late to respond, the decision to designate the Royal Canadian Navy specifically is a curious one.

The likely scenario is that the choice was made based on operational proximity. The Royal Canadian Navy is the branch of the Canadian military most likely to physically encounter Iranian forces. They’re really the only branch that maintains a tangible, visible presence near Iranian territory. By designating the Navy specifically, Iran is creating a legal pretext to harass or target Canadian vessels in these international waters under the guise of Counter-Terrorism operations.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress