Everyone in Moscow knew that the massive demonstration planned for March 1 was in some way meant to be dangerous. The mood harked back to the events that caused the 1917 Revolution, or the troubles on the streets that paved the way for Boris Yeltsin to seize power. The regime had already staged its Anti-Maidan,...
Author: Hugh Prysor-Jones (Hugh Prysor-Jones)
Post
Islamic State and the Theater of Jihad
The Al Khansa Brigade is the all-female fighting force of the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Al Khansa, we are most unreliably informed, has 60 members, many of whom are British. Their leader is reputedly a privately educated Scotswoman. These amazons are, we’re told, particularly cruel, force captive local women to be...
Post
Borderlines, Part 2
Tanks make good pictures—the idea of an invasion of Ukraine sends shivers down the spines of most of Europe—and keeping the tanks at bay is what the political class is expected, indeed offers, to do. The price, however, will be for nations to surrender just about everything else. And that price is now about to...
Post
Borderlines
On January 1, something like 20,000 people marched by torchlight through the center of Kiev to celebrate the 105th anniversary of the birth of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Some of the older participants even wore their old uniforms from the Ukrainian National Army. In Western Ukraine, Bandera is regarded as the founder of...
Post
Syria: Too Much “Intelligence”
Only a few weeks into the latest round of horrors in Syria, we are getting used to the debasement of “intelligence” to serve the crudest political ends. In September, President Hollande showed the U.N. secretary general and journalists round the French military intelligence HQ at Creil north of Paris, where the amazed visitors admired the...
Post
Iraq: Yesterday and Tomorrow
Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003). Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago...