BSNews co-ed Alison Banville: “While on my recent trip to Syria I met the fabulous Pierre le Corf, who has not only helped so many children who have suffered in the conflict there, but has also opened an animal sanctuary in Aleppo. I put to Pierre while filming him that many people would ask why, amidst so much human suffering, he would choose to help animals? His reply was both moving and profound.”
Can you imagine being invited into an English school on the spur of the moment and getting a welcome like this?
USA, France and UK paid a collective cost of around $1.4 billion to fire their cruise missiles. It cost Syria about $1.4 million in air defence technology to defend itself against the attack. Call me a cynic but this looks awfully like a massive western money laundering operation to benefit Raytheon, Boeing and other corporate interests in the military industrial complex.
Anti-Russia hysteria reached parodical proportions in the ‘mainstream’ media in the wake of the Sergei Skripol ‘novichok’ incident in recent days but what this burlesque spectacle actually reveals is the toxic interdependence between the corporate state and the corporate media – the operative word there being ‘corporate’ – exposing how they always work together to sweep us all along on a tide of fast-rising nationalistic fervour into the next geopolitically convenient conflict.
He wasn’t boyfriend material He was too easy to draw into my orbit With only the gravitational pull Of my indifferent erotic ozone. I didn’t mean to do it I didn’t even direct it at him The aroma of it just hit his nostrils and he Followed its scent In a neanderthal stupour It wasn’t flattering He was just obeying […]
Life ain’t a major arcana It’s a flipped up board and spinning dice Life ain’t pre-written drama It’s the Universe in a grain of rice That’s wrong! It’s in ‘a grain of sand’ But it really means the same The Beauty and the Mystery Dwell not inside the brain The Great Imagination Is imagining the Mind Enfolding and unfolding In […]
ALISON BANVILLE takes to task the BBC flagship programme over its investigation of British foreign aid diversion to extremist groups in Syria
The great Ed Herman has died. As someone said on Twitter: ‘The world is a dumber, more dangerous place. Unless everyone goes back and reads his writing now.’
Sometimes I think – I love making love with a man who is sensitive, Who can hold a conversation about The important things afterwards A man interested in my psyche As well as my body and who conveys That sympathy in the depth of his embrace And the tenderness of words whispered in Poignant communion Then sometimes I think – […]
“The US is setting up its military bases in the territories that were liberated from Daesh by our fighters during the fight against terrorism,” ~ Senior Representative of the US armed, proxy, SDF forces. With very little fanfare from the western media, the US is quietly creating a hostile military footprint inside Syria. By establishing a chain of airbases, military outposts and missile bases inside Syria, the US […]
This fetishization of the ‘British Soldier’, emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity. The more profound the corruption, the greater the need for propaganda and, importantly, the cruder it needs to be as the most skilled propagandist of them all, Joseph Goebels, well understood when he declaimed that propaganda ‘must always be essentially simple and repetitious’ and must ‘appeal to the emotions and instinct, never the intellect.’ ‘Hero’, ‘Help For Heroes’, ‘our heroes overseas’, ‘our courageous men and women protecting our freedoms’, ‘protecting us’, ‘doing it for us’… ‘for us’, ‘for us’, for us’.
Back in 2011, my BSNews co-editor, Mike Raddie, reported to the Metropolitan Police that suspected British citizens were providing funding and support for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Two weeks later, after no response from The Met, Mike contacted them again to be told that his report had been logged, but that the content was redacted. This was ‘unprecedented’ […]
