Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Aaron Sorkin on writing

Just one minute, no, almost two minutes of your time...



or one hour in conversation with David Brookes about character and much more

Monday, August 28, 2017

James O'Neill on the need for Australia to change strategic direction.

Link to articles at
Independent Australia
See articles also at
New Eastern Outlook 
and New Matilda


James O'Neill, barrister at law and geopolitical analyst has been writing about the urgent necessity for review of Australian strategic policy.

I commend to readers to go and read other entries at James's website, including also about Korea. There much wisdom there, also consistent with and more powerful than some things I have been writing.

With permission, this is the most recent of his essays, which is here at James's web site also at John Menadue's blog.

It is important that arguments for serious review of Australia's strategic direction are posted far and wide.









AMERICAN BLUEPRINTS FOR WAR POSE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO AUSTRALIA

Standard

25 August 2017
See Elizabeth Farrelly's excellent article,
from which this image borrowed
The recent statement by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to the effect that on defence issues Australia and the United States were “joined at the hip” raises the serious question of how far Australia will actually go in support of the United States as it embarks on one foreign policy misadventure after another? A possible change of government in Australia after the next election will not make any appreciable difference. The Labor leadership is always quick to ensure minimum daylight between themselves and the Coalition whenever yet another pledge of fealty to the Americans is made.  
There are two useful tests to employ to gauge an answer posed to the above question.   The first test is one of history. There have been at least five major conflicts since World War 2 where Australia has followed the Americans when a vital national security issue was either difficult to discern or was invisible.
useful further reading
The Korean War 1950-53 has always been justified to the Australian public as a UN based “Police action,” with American led forces responding to an invasion of South Korea by the North. That explanation was never adequate. It ignored a large number of relevant factors, including a history of American interference in that country since at least the 1880s.
It further ignored American acquiescence in the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan after 1910 in exchange for Japan not interfering in America’s colonization of the Philippines (600,000 Filipinos died resisting that colonization.) With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided in two along the 38th Parallel, a line drawn by the US State Department without consulting the Koreans. Contrary to international maritime law, that boundary line then turned north, thus depriving the North Koreans of access to their own maritime exclusive economic zone.
Between 1945 and 1950 the promised national elections were never held. South Korea’s US installed military dictator made repeated forays into the North, killings tens of thousands of North Korean citizens. The “invasion”, more accurately a civil war, has never been resolved. (1) Several opportunities to steer North Korea away from nuclear weapons were squandered and there is now a level of belligerence that poses the risk of a further outbreak of war. Australia’s willingness to become involved has repeatedly manifested itself, although a rational basis for doing so remains elusive.
Useful further reading
The second great conflict was Vietnam, again a civil war initially and again a country divided artificially after the defeat of the former colonial occupiers. Another similarity with Korea was again, the Americans refused to allow an election as provided for in the Geneva Accords, no doubt because the “wrong” man would have won.
Australia’s involvement in the war was prefaced by Harold Holt’s infamous “all the way with LBJ” although the internal Vietnam conflict posed no national security threat to Australia, the blatant “red scare” propaganda notwithstanding. In common with so many American invasions, this one was justified on the basis of a blatant falsehood; in this case the alleged attack on an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Afghanistan, the third major conflict we entered at the behest of the Americans was similarly based on a number of lies, which have continued unabated in the nearly 16 years of subsequent occupation. The real causes of that intervention and continuing occupation have been well documented. (2) Trumps most recent speech on the topic (21 August 2017) was similarly an exercise in concealing the real purposes behind the continuing American occupation (3).


In 2004, my thoughts on Iraq war here
the 'cost of war' counters are still running.
Iraq in 2003 was a similar lie-based invasion and occupation, the disastrous consequences of which continue to this day. Australia’s presence there is so tenuous that there is no Status of Forces Agreement signed and all Australian military personnel carry diplomatic passports (4).
The fifth illustration is Australian participation in the US led “coalition” currently attacking Syria. Notwithstanding the nonsensical claims of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter, the American and Australian presence in Syria is in blatant breach of international law. It is worse than just being illegal. Australia is a party to the commission of war crimes, most notably at present in the current assault on Raqqa with an horrendous civilian death toll that even the UN was drawn to criticize (5).
With this history we should not be surprised that more wars are looming in which Australia will assuredly be involved unless there is a radical change in foreign policy.  [my emphasis added] This brings us to the second test that can be applied: what do the protagonists themselves say about their intentions?
text here
To assist in predicting future wars, the Americans have helpfully produced a document that might reasonably be described as a blueprint for future wars. These documents have valuable predictive power, as we have seen demonstrated with the PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defences (1997).
This 90-page document served as a blueprint for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.   It promoted policies to “preserve and extend” the US’s position of “global leadership” by “maintaining the preeminence of American military forces” that would better enable them to fight and win “multiple simultaneous major theater wars” which themselves provide a framework within which to “spread American principles of liberty and democracy.” That last phrase was used without a hint of irony.
We then had General Wesley Clark’s revelations that he was shown a document at the Pentagon in September 2001 that was a blueprint for war with “seven countries in five years.” (6) In the light of subsequent events, the list is instructive: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan.
Of the seven, only Lebanon and Iran have escaped direct US military intervention. Lebanon has suffered invasion and occupation by Israel before being driven out by Hezbollah. The US armed, financed and politically supported Israeli aggression, while Australia has always been slow to find fault with Israeli foreign policy and is one of a literal handful of countries that vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly on resolutions critical of Israel.
Iran has been the victim of hybrid warfare through sanctions, massive propaganda assault, US sponsored terrorist activity through their proxy group the MEK, and drug warfare through the US controlled heroin production and distribution from Afghanistan (7).
Text here
In 2012 the US published another Defence Department document entitled “Operational Environments to 2028: The Strategic Environment for Unified Land Operations. To the best of my knowledge its existence, let alone analysis of its contents, has never appeared in the Australian mainstream media.
The plan, written in 2012, foresees the economic and social collapse of Europe caused by massive immigration from Africa and the Middle East. It also predicts that Ukraine will become a NATO member. This was written two years before the US financed coup in February 2014.
There have been a range of events that have occurred since 2012, all of which were “anticipated” in the document. The whole document is worth reading, but some highlights illustrate the wider point.
  • The Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) transferring nuclear technology to North Korea, but blaming the Russians. (The CIA runs the SBU).
  • Blaming Pakistan for “WMD proliferation, being a direct threat to the Homeland, supporting terrorist organisations, and causing regional tensions with India.” All of these points appeared in Trump’s 21 August speech).
  • A cold war with China and a proxy military conflict using India’s military. This is currently being played out on the Bhutan-China border.
  • Azerbaijan is named as a future war zone. Azerbaijan not only shares borders with Iran and Russia (two prime targets for the Americans) but it is also a key link in the North South Transportation Corridor that is a key component of the Eurasian geopolitical transformation that is underway. That transformation, spurred by China’s massive One Belt One Road program, is in turn a fundamental threat to US hegemony.
  • A plan to trigger war between Russia and China. This is one of the major strategic miscalculations in the document. As a direct result of US policy in Europe and Asia, Russia and China have been driven into a closer strategic embrace than at any other time in their long history. Together they have the capacity to destroy US hegemony.
  • According to the 2012 plan, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen will continue indefinitely and can be used as launch pads for wars in Azerbaijan, China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan.
The arrogance implicit in these plans is astonishing. They are also exceedingly dangerous. Can it seriously be argued that Australia’s national interest is served by being a party to any of these plans? Does Australia really want a war with any of the named targets, several of whom are nuclear armed?
The history of the past seventy years demonstrates the folly of Australia’s blind fealty to US imperialism. A serious rethink is urgently needed before it is too late and we are dragged into yet another war, the results of which would be terminal in every sense of the word.


*Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au
References
  1.  Cumings The Korean War. The Modern Library 2010
  2. O’Neill The Ongoing Disaster of Australia’s Policy in Afghanistan johnmenadue.com 16 May 2017
  3. O’Neill Trump and Afghanistan: a Hidden Agenda journal-neo.org 25 August 2017.
  4. Tanter Australia in America’s Iraq 3.0 Nautilus Institute 2014
  5. telesurtv.net 23 August 2017
  6. Global Warfare. globalresearch.ca 30 January 2017
  7. Shoring Up a Flood of Drugs unodc.org 19 July 2011; Afghanistan’s Role in Iran’s Drug Problem www.cfr.org 13 September 2006.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

On Pine Gap and problems of the Australian-American alliance

This is a re-post from John Menadue's blog.

DENNIS ARGALL. Pine Gap and national strategic independence.

For a long time people have focused concern on Pine Gap.  But Pine Gap is but an element of our entanglement with United States strategic policy, which is the big thing to be addressed and turned around. 
Recently Andrew Farran wrote (http://johnmenadue.com/andrew-farran-we-should-discuss-pine-gap/)  expressing concern about the increased capabilities of the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap.  It is a big and impressive cart but nothing can be done about it without dealing first with the horse of strategic entanglement with the US.
Pine Gap: near Alice Springs in central Australia.
click on image to enlarge
Source google map
For the record… I am the surviving participant in the negotiations between Australia and the US from December 1972 to February 1973 in relation to Pine Gap, after the election of the Whitlam Government.  I reported directly to Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of the Defence Department.  The Department of Foreign Affairs was not party to those discussions.
Andrew wrote:
“Initially Australian authorities did not know as much as they would have liked about the…  operations [of defence facilities with the US in Australia, particularly Pine Gap] and saw this as a diminishment of national sovereignty.   Through negotiations in the 1970s, the Whitlam Government obtained the agreement of the US that it would be informed of and required to assent to all operational activity on the part of the facilities to ensure that nothing would be done there that would complicate or prejudice our own diplomatic relations or national interests.”
Governments prior to the Whitlam Government did not regard the bases as diminishing sovereignty, perhaps because they didn’t give it much thought, or had a sense of being joined at the hip to the US.
Prime Minister Whitlam [left] and
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence
Lance Barnard, December 1972 [source]
The Whitlam Government’s position on Pine Gap and other US bases in Australia was set out by Lance Barnard, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, on the second sitting day of the parliament at the end of February 1973.  http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1973/19730228_reps_28_hor82/
That statement was more slender than it would have been had Whitlam submitted the draft to the whole Cabinet and not to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of Cabinet.  By Whitlam’s account, Senator Lionel Murphy, chair of that committee, had snarled “you can have your bloody bases but I’m not wearing your bloody argument” — the ‘bloody argument’ being that Pine Gap and Nurrungar contributed to war avoidance and strategic balance, an argument extracted from the US with as much ease as wisdom tooth extraction without anaesthesia or consent.  It was my sad duty, having fought with Sir Arthur to get a big part of our text to cover strategic perspective, then to chop the guts out of the text.
I remain on the Pine Gap ‘silent list’ but I can say that the American judgement at the time was that the USSR did not distinguish between big bases and little bases and they did not want to attract attention to Pine Gap and Nurrungar.  For that reason alone there was no mention in the draft speech, contrary to our desires, of the place of Pine Gap and Nurrungar as elements of the National Means of Verification at the core of the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT1) between the US and USSR.
The latter part of the quote from Andrew’s text, above, is not quite correct.  Dealing especially with issues related to the North West Cape communications facility, with very low frequency capability of communicating with and sending commands to submerged nuclear missile submarines, one comes to Article II of the NPT: “Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices OR OF CONTROL OVER such weapons…” [emphasis added].
Time cover 11 February 1974
So we needed something other than ‘control’ and, when Barnard later visited Washington, the accord reached with Defense Secretary Schlesinger was that, as Australia associated itself with United States strategic policy, there arose an entitlement for Australia to have a consultative relationship on strategic policy.  As this process of consultation developed, it vanished on the Australian side down some hole in Defence with which I am only tangentially aware –  though recently looking at US archives for record of the Barnard-Schlesinger meeting, I find that there is nothing mentioned in their record of conversation of a significant new accord having been reached.
Leaving aside the quality, or not, of ongoing strategic consultation, we are now in a very different world from the days of strategic balance between two nuclear superpowers.
Now we have a world of one hyper-power, a hegemon that creates more conflict than it resolves and – by chauvinistic ambition and force structure and deployment momentum – seeks to denude other nuclear powers of security based on possession of second-strike capabilities.  This situation is now complicated by erratic and social discord in the US, though with a Clinton Administration the same hegemonic ambitions would likely be being pursued with greater efficiency.
Of course a clear minded strategic consultation process with the United States would have made that evident and perhaps enabled independent policy judgement by Australia…
Pine Gap is a very substantial element in, but best regarded as part of, a network of capabilities entangling us with the United States. Our involvement in all that network can only be altered by political resolve:
  • first to take back command of strategy from the Australian defence force to civilian government leadership,
  • second to enter into serious thoughtful strategic discussion with the US about the future of our region and
  • third to find our way to more overt and coherent public enunciation of a decent place for Australia in the region as an independent country among peers.
I have doubts about our capacity to do those things, not least given the drift into domestic militarism and continuing thoughtless international adventurism.
The keys must be the commitment of younger people to a democratic system that many of them think is broken, and the capacity of younger people to work to rebuild the system from within.

Friday, August 18, 2017

Korea, next week critical

click to enlarge....source
This, below, was reasonable concern at the time, but the worst did not come about.
The US and the DPRK remain competitive in huffing and puffing and as usual the testing of three minor missiles by the DPRK is more news than this Ulchi Freedom Guardian, see box.
Some more coverage here, here and here





Geoff Miller, former ambassador to South Korea, Director-General Office of National Assessment, etc, etc, wrote a piece for John Menadue's blog this morning pointing out that critical moments, determining war or peace on the Korean peninsula, are from Monday 21 August 2017.

I added comment on other sides of the situation, tidying up this version a little from my scrappy writing earlier:

One Response to GEOFF MILLER. Korea: Missiles or exercises or both?

  1. Yes indeed. And while calculated order at the top in Pyongyang, not so in Washington.
    The problem arising is that the asserted objectives of the UN Security Council, others involved with non-proliferation, the US, Australia, the EU, etc… are not going to be achieved. The DPRK is on the threshold of nuclear weapon state status, as much as India, Pakistan and Israel and their certain conviction is that their (regime, family) survival can only be assured by nuclear weapon state status. The NPT has failed in this case, the apparati of non-proliferation now well over 40 years old have failed. The exponents of non-proliferation need now to focus on motivation to nuclear weapon state status, which is an expensive buy for most states. Getting big heads around that will not be easy, harder than getting Australian leaders to read Article 1 of the ANZUS Treaty. Viz: “The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”
    Ulchi [the very large US-ROK exercise to which Australia is adding something] begins on Monday 21 August. Trump (and many more) will be focused on his going to a divisive rally in Phoenix Tuesday evening (11am Wednesday, Seoul time). Kim knows that, one hopes.
    General Kelly, White House Chief of Staff was reported to have difficulty finding perspective over the weekend of developments at Charlottesville and was then a distraught bystander during the Wednesday rant at Trump Tower.
    There are three generals in conclave on Korea at this moment, Kelly, Defence Secretary Mattis and National Security Advisor McMaster. McMaster author of a book scathingly critical of civilian ‘interference’ with command decisions at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Mattis is a marine general and despite his ‘Mad Dog’ labelling reportedly has a history of some ethical concern, presence among soldiers in hard places and relieving of dishonest or less than upright officers. Kelly seems to have been brought into the administration for his unblinking toughness, characteristic of the US Southern Command and perspective towards Latin America. Present at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, Wikipedia records that: “During the initial assault on Baghdad, Kelly was asked by a reporter for The Los Angeles Times if, considering the size of the Iraqi Army and the vast supplies of tanks, artillery and chemical weapons available to Saddam’s forces, he would ever consider defeat. Kelly’s archetypal response was “Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.”
    Timeline and cast.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Korea: our first need is to step back from mass hysteria.

We need to move beyond a rage against Australian Prime Minister Turnbull’s folly on Korea, calmly assess the provocations by Trump and Kim, respect the rights of south Korea and understand how destructive US global strategies have become.

A number of commentators have characterised DPRK strategy as pursued by acting, out of necessity, “ferocious, weak and crazy”.

In the 1990s they used their nuclear program as an economic bargaining chip. All that changed after 9/11 when G W Bush lumped the DPRK, Iran, Iraq and Libya together as the Axis of Evil.

North Korean leaders watched the fate of others identified in this axis by Bush. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, his regime was destroyed... and in the end Iraq more controlled by Iran than anyone else. In Libya Gadaffi submitted, undid his nuclear program and was still chewed up. Iran has done all asked of it and is now subject again to war threats.

Blind Freddy, or a Blind Kim, can see that the only security for the DPRK must therefore be to hasten to achieve a credible nuclear deterrent. They are at that threshold.

North Korea has never threatened first strike with a nuclear weapon. It has however lived with persistent first strike threat for a long time.

China once supported the notion of unification of Korea but now cannot tolerate the prospect of a US dominated South Korea taking command of the North.

In South Korea since May a reforming president who might make a Whitlam envious has been embarked on domestic reform as well as pursuit of sanity in intra Korean affairs. And has had Trump’s agreement that the ROK is to take the lead and there must be no war. Speaking thus also to Trump for an hour in the past week.

It is appalling that an Australian Prime Minister could so misread the ANZUS Treaty as to claim that we are automatically at war with North Korea if the US is at war. This is not 1939; Turnbull is not Menzies. Are we to think all bankers have such naive understanding of the world? Who advises Turnbull?

In 1965 the Menzies Government had the almost-decency to squeeze from the government in Saigon a request for troops we would send to Vietnam at US request. But in the post modern, why is Turnbull (why are so many) blind to the existence and the entitlements of South Korea to its own self-determination: as a country in the region, member of the G20, GDP same as ours, population double ours. Where do our heads live? Solely in a Murdoch-trumpian media world?

There are annually-scheduled major US-ROK exercises, with history of practising decapitation of the DPRK, planned for next week …when now also the DPRK leader may make a demonstration of nuclear status, firing a nuclear capable rocket or rockets targeted at points just outside the territorial waters of Guam. In the past week nuclear-armed US B1-B bomber have once again cruised over the ROK and very close to North Korean airspace. Who is entitled to demonstrate what?

The ROK is trying to speed up transfer of command over its own troops from the US in wartime, legacy of decades of dictatorship and the unfinished war.

from article at Concept News Central, Philippines
This recent article in a South Korean media outlet shows something of what the ROK president is trying to do in domestic reform. A progressive perspective we cannot imagine in Australia, lifting wages, getting more employees off casual to permanent, challenging commercial conglomerates, focus on human rights including migrants. Etc. Difficult.

Especially difficult with a big essential ally acting so badly and with the example of Venezuela for any challenges to hegemony. We should be alert and sensitive to actualities in a regional country and not acting like the fifth cockatoo on the branch.

The world has been led up a stupid path with fear of North Korea. More credibly the US is bent upon undermining every other nuclear power’s second-strike capability, ending all balance of power. While on the real front, away from unusable nuclear weapons, the US tears up one country after another.

Enough!



on war and the Australian-American alliance

In September 2003, early in the Iraq war I wrote to an Australian Foreign Minister (who did not reply) that:
".. I have become increasingly of the view... that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension."
This morning civil unrest and violence spreads in the United States, the right having been unleashed.

Meanwhile an Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has ludicrously suggested that the US goes to war with North Korea than automatically we are at war because of our defence treaty with the US. This, coming from a lawyer, is stupefyingly bizarre, inaccurate and unwise. The treaty states and one might use Art 1 against both Trump and Turnbull:



More, separately, on Korea...

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Writers group, homework: "Last night in Hampton Court"

I have joined an enjoyable, relaxed and stimulating writers group. Among other things we set a homework task from one week to the next. Arising from discussion last week the assignment for today is to write something beginning "Last night in Hampton Court..."

I had no idea, needed to research. Wikipedia told me that the last king to live at Hampton Court was George II. And one comes to the amazing idea that George II in a small Germanic court of Hannover was schooled first in French, as a baby, then German, then Italian, then English, then come to giant 1.5 million wild London. As ruler to yearn for Hannover where also ruler, in England denied power, in Hannover powerful. Living in this palace where the ghost of Anne Boleyn (perhaps others too) runs nightly from Henry VIII, perhaps a bit of a Trump in his era.

Thus armed I wrote, with some thought also to rhyme and meter and some adoption of the English obsession for centuries with the dismal-simple, brain-suffocating iambic pentameter, an iamb being

da dum

and the penta meaning five times, so a meter of five iambs is an iambic pentameter:

da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum

with the multilingual, castle-trapped George in my text below breaking away from such giddy simple brain-befogging meme into growls and lusty gurgles.

After writing this below I also found somewhere that historians had for a long time regarded George 2 as a mistress-chaser uninterested in affairs of state, but more recent historians deciding he was actually a diplomatic genius. Thus must speak the PhD candidate or the champion new history department chair. There is no new historical truth without, um, novelty: yoiks.

But I, I, have accidentally written the truth in this short yarn. As you will see. Set in 1755, the year before the Seven Years War and the Diplomatic Revolution. Those things, those skipping hypotheses both true, but at the core the truth is found arising midst lusty yearnings.

I didn't know any of this last week.

Here is what I wrote, my homework for today:

Assignment: A piece of writing to begin: “Last night in Hampton Court…”
PREFACE: Hampton Court Palace was built by Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop, in 1517, taken by Henry VIII when he fell out with Wolsey because Wolsey couldn't get his first marriage annulled. And – the Trumpian nightmare – the pope made this chancellor to the king a cardinal, higher ranking than the Archbishop of Canterbury, nice cover story in Time magazine equivalent, a bit like Trump's Bannon. As cardinal the exponent of rigidities of the alt-right of Rome from which Randy Hank, in pursuit of offspring, needs must distance himself. Becoming in the quest the Queen of Tarts, off with their heads.Anne Boleyn’s ghost reportedly haunts Hampton Court, as perhaps others. In the late 1600s extensions added entirely different style. The last monarch to live there was George II. Powerless almost, alongside a newly rowdy parliament, not changed much, compare Corbyn versus May and the creatures of that dark lagoon, the Bullingdon Club. The last king to lead British troops in war.

Dressed up, gazing out, musing in four languages,
fingers counting days till he can escape again to Hannova
on that sick-making ferry to The Hague.
1755 late winter: Thus spake George II unto himself
Last night in Hampton Court I lay awake and rose and paced and thought of Fred my first-born son, dead before me so inappropriately, heir to the throne of this reckless unkind country. I cursed my grandmother Sophie and her protestantism that yanked us from fifty-first in line to top of the maypole in this weird-dancing all-yelling no-manners land.
Why must I sit in this mishmash of architectural horror with ghosts of women running from randy Hank while out there the ruffians who run this place with gunpowder breath speak such a dreadful tongue and give me no heed. I can imagine dirty things they mutter. Would that I had their power to hang, draw and quarter them. Then they would sit straight, ha ha, with or without their guts.
I must go back to Hannover and find a war again. I miss it. Another good fight would ease the pain of loss of Fred. We could rival the other Fred, he the so-called Great in Prussia. Or perhaps together, Fred and I, Hannover and Prussia, we could fulfil dreams of greatness: of real courts, of real culture, of real power— so the children at Versailles who giggle at us would sit up and, well, hey, with a little or a big war, Fred and I could really make them sit up, or perhaps in their very French tradition, drop their heads in a bucket.
Out the window those bloody bleating sheep and those hunchy-humble-honcho workers bald-headed from yanking forelocks as they stoop ridiculously as I ride by.  One said “by George”. I yanked him down but then in their me-stopping indecencies they said it was something the hoi-polloi said instead of god. God. God: why can’t they think me god. In days past I would have been. Fred, no. I miss Fred but the simpering now dead dear lad never controllable, betrayed me to the parle-ia-ment and jumped into the negotiations for his own maybe f-ing marriage to a child of Prussian Fred, who wanted then for me to give my Fred my Hannover. Not bloody likely. And now these parliamenters, Fred dead, will have to cope with Fred’s boy, George. Right named. I can shape him, my willing godlet who will be George III.

Hank, courtesy of wikipedia
Riding stinking in the sheep-wool, sheep-skin things I must wear in winter here. Oh, someone fetch a cow and make decent leather garments. I love the sensation of leather… as much as bed-feathers. So does Freya, but I guess the wool stuff has some virtue as when she rolled off and fell to sleep the night too close to fire and woke with Hannoverian yowl, parboiled inside her sheepskin top. Mercifully she was not alight. And something to see her ripping off wool in morning shades…as did through all these past chilly shiver-giving months. I will take Freya with me when next to Hannover. We will talk about ‘when’ tomorrow. Or tonight. And tomorrow. Ah to be in Hannover with crispy fruit and Freya.


Where is that man who fetches baubles. Crap baubles of the town, but my lovely loves them. Am I, am I? … I am … somehow in Hank’s spell. There are vapours of Hank in my bedchamber.