There's new horror in the old world of the Middle East, says Neil Oliver

As often as not, they're about oil, the removal of inconvenient, uncooperative regimes, and the replacement with those deemed compliant. The rich and powerful insist they act only to make the world a better, safer place. Is that right? All I see are piles of corpses, heaps of rubble, and a world made more dangerous every day for the likes of you and me.

I see the likes of US presidents W Bush, Clinton, Bill, of course, and also Hillary and Obama are dreadful people with blood on their hands. So too, past British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Also dreadful. He and his little wizards lied about weapons of mass destruction in the arsenal of Saddam Hussein, and then he and George Bush launched an illegal war.

If you don't believe me that that war was deemed illegal, then how about the word of Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, who said in 2004 “I have indicated that it's not in accordance with the UN Charter. From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, the war was illegal”.

The world is littered with aging ghouls, bloody to their elbows, but somehow hailed as statesmen, their cynical advice eagerly sought by their successors. And in spite of the body counts, in spite of illegality, in spite of the deliberately fermented international instability, in spite of the revolving door between politics and the military industrial complex that sees the suits serve up time in elected office, declaring wars and signing off on billion dollar contracts to arms manufacturers before quitting the scenes of their crimes and taking up lucrative executive positions with the Boeings, Raytheons and Northrop Grummans of the world, never are there consequences for any of them. Not in this life at least.

It's not fingerprints that are left behind by the guilty parties, it's news stories and sometimes even recordings of their voices calling for the necessary dirty work. In early 2014, civil war broke out in the Donbas region of Ukraine after a US backed coup d'etat cleared away the Russian favouring government in Kiev. The coup was the work of Victoria Newland, then US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

Newland talked about it all in a phone call to the then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. And we know this because someone leaked a recording of it all. Newland and Pyatt discussed who was to be the next Prime Minister of Ukraine. Newland wanted anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk. in her own words, I think Yatz is the guy. Kat warned her the Europeans might not support Yatsenyuk, to which she replied F the EU, except she didn't limit herself to the letter F. Yatsenyuk ended up as Prime Minister right enough and the rest, including the latest war there by the shouting is history. Any consequences for Newland?

Well in 2021 she was made Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, so that's nice for Victoria. The desiccating ghouls are everywhere. Former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's net worth has rocketed since the 2008 financial crisis with the help of her husband's lucrative stock trades. She's one of the richest people in Congress, pocketing $140 million since the crash.

And while she strenuously denies sharing information with her husband, venture capitalist Paul Pelosi, many and angry have been the questions asked about trades made by Paul that just happened to coincide with major decisions by her Congress.

I say again that dreadful things keep happening, because dreadful people are in charge and suffer no consequences. I also say those dreadful people are invariably cowards, which partly explains why they do those dreadful things, or at least stand by while dreadful events unfold. Cowards are easy to spot, just as dreadful people are easy to spot, just as weak people are easy to spot, for they'll sacrifice, actively or passively, anyone and everyone they perceive as a threat to the position and burgeoning wealth.

And so French, Macron, Canadian Trudeau and Kiwi Ardern, and more besides, keep stepping backwards while simultaneously nudging their populations forwards into harm's way. Another British former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, locked down the country in lockstep with all the rest, leading to death and economic destruction on an unmeasured scale, and pushed medical products that were questionably neither safe nor effective, not even in terms of Big Pharma's own self regulating policies on millions of people, children included.

It was the NATO bag carrier who scuppered hopes of an early peace deal in Ukraine. Like Blair, like the Clintons, like Obama and the rest, he's now on the luxury lecture circuit, treasuring a fortune along the way. The wages of sin, as it turns out, come in seven figures or eight. Well, that's my guess.

In the 20th century it was primarily war that the dreadful people turned to for the purposes of keeping themselves safe. Now it's more sinister and certainly more cold blooded, as the powers that be increasingly and enthusiastically enter into unholy partnerships with big business and the central banks. This is the naked fascism of stakeholder capitalism, the even more unforgivable, cynical sacrifice of people and the well-being of people on the altar of profit.

Our rights are erased, freedoms are erased, and a person would have to be blind to fail to notice that while the bullets fly and the blood flows, all manner of legislation scuttles through our various parliaments like thieves in the night, systematically and inch by inch, stealing our ways of life. The online safety bill to arguably censored dissent. The energy bill giving fascist power to kick in the doors of private homes. And next on the slate, the amendments to the International Health Regulations that are foundational to the WHO’s Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.

Unless our elected representatives, those we pay for and that notionally serve us, take action before December, by default our national sovereignty will slip from our hands and into those of the unelected, faceless, unaccountable servants of the World Health Organisation. They'll tell us when there's an international health emergency, and that could easily be on the grounds of their arguably questionable interpretation of the climate crisis. And if so, what the likes of you and me have to do as a result, including being potentially locked down and ordered to submit to medical procedures.

And will our Prime Minister, or any of our MPs, act to ensure none of this is possible for the people of Britain? I suspect at most a shiver runs along the benches in the Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, desperately in search of a spine to run down. One of two, perhaps the usual honourable exceptions. Thank you, Andrew. Bridgen, as always, standing plaintive defence of ancient liberty. But not enough, not nearly enough to prevent the inevitable hammering into place of the final nail in the coffin of our freedom.

The cowards have taken over, and now we see how much harm weak men and weak women can cause. I ask again, where are the consequences for any of this? Will we ever again see anyone fall on their sword, accept the failure and go?

In 937 AD a battle was fought at a place called Brunenborough, likely somewhere near the Mersey and England's west. Two armies clashed, one led by King Athelstein of the Anglo Saxons, the other a North Celtic alliance led by King Constantine of the Scots. Those that fought in that battle had never known anything so terrible in its scale and violence. None that witnessed Brunenborough or heard about Brunenborough ever forgot it. For generations it was remembered as the Great War.

The two armies fought from sun up until sundown, and then the results, still unclear, withdrew from one another to contemplate terrible wounds, terrible heaps of slain. As a consequence of Brunenborough in 937 a line was drawn once and for all, separating a smaller Kingdom in the north of the Long Island of Britain from a larger Kingdom in the South. In that way, where the destinies of Scotland and England set in train.

King Constantine's own son, not spared the draft, you might say, died in the fighting and some few years afterwards, a reign of more than 40 years, he walked away from his unchallenged throne forever. Having seen enough, and likely fearing for his immortal soul, he lived out the rest of his life as a penitent in a cave on the East Coast of Scotland near Saint Andrews.

Once upon a time we were warriors and led by warriors, and sometimes those warriors with more blood on their hands than could ever be washed away, turned their backs on power and sought forgiveness instead. Not anymore. Now there's new horror in the old world of the Middle East. I condemn and totally and without qualification any wickedness that kills civilians, children and babies, being especially innocent and utterly undeserving of anything of the sort.

Who will suffer the consequences of whatever nightmares unfold as Russia, China, the US, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Syria must make their moves? Will the fighting age children of leaders of nation states, those bellicose men and women in designer suits eager for all out war, be compelled to take part in a draft for a ground invasion of Gaza or elsewhere in the region? Will those same leaders stand over the bodies of the slain, civilian dead among them children too, and declare the all's fair and love and war?

Will they leave office when the dust settles and set out in pursuit of lucrative new jobs, or speaking to us, paying $1,000,000 a time? And will the deadly consequences play out only for the people who always suffer, civilians, black, white and brown, and of whatever creed. Here's the thing, we're set at each other's throats by those who don't give a damn about any of us. Not Christians, not Jews, not Muslims, or anyone else.

Instead of joining in being for more blood, we should see all for what it is, the ugliest, most brutal, most obscene game of all. It's time we the people stopped watching them play it. If not for us, then for our children and for everyone's children.