RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/09/meet-virginia-hall-one-of-the-unsung-heroes-of-d-day/

In the spring of 1944, behind enemy lines in occupied France, members of the French Resistance stayed close to their wireless devices, awaiting their call to action. Broadcasting from London, announcers at Radio Londres sent coded instructions to various Resistance factions, disguised as “Personal Messages.” The messages were specifically designed to sound silly but familiar, and as they weren’t a cipher, they drove the Axis powers mad trying to break their code.

Allied forces inundated the broadcasters with codes to send out, knowing that the invasion was in the planning stages, but coming soon. The Allies were depending on the Resistance to choke the German supply lines on the French railroad, and clear the way for their entry into France.

On June 5, as the allies prepared to launch Operation Overlord, a poem familiar to every French man and woman crackled over the airwaves, “Chanson d’automne.” The Resistance had been waiting for months to hear the prose of Paul Verlaine’s 1860 poem.

“Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne”

The first three lines served as a warning that the invasion would begin within 2 weeks

“Blessent mon cœur

D’une languer

Monotone”

The final part of the message indicated that the invasion would reach France in 48 hours. It was time. This was their official call to action. Plans to sabotage the German supply lines were to be enacted at once.

Outside of the Resistance, there were already members of the Allied Forces behind enemy lines, assisting the Resistance and paving the way for victory in France. Among them, Virginia Hall, a young American woman. Hall had already spent years living in occupied France, gathering information for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Early in her assignment, she lived openly as an American, though with a code name, masquerading as a journalist, while actually wreaking havoc on the Germans as an Allied spy. When The United States entered the war in 1942, and Germany officially seized the remainder of France, Hall was forced to flee the country — but she wouldn’t stay away for long.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/italys-populist-government/

In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League(Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate; the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio came second with just over 32 percent. The centre-left coalition, strongly pro-EU and led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, came a distant third with 23 percent.

On May 31, after 88 days of negotiations and several impasses, Giuseppe Conte was appointed prime minister, with Salvini of the League and Di Maio of the M5S as vice premiers. The news of this unlikely coalition has been greeted with dismay by les bien pensants on both sides of the Atlantic. The German magazine Der Spiegel published a deeply offensive cover (“Ciao, amore!”)which featured a fork of spaghetti with one piece dangling as a noose. “Italy is destroying itself—and dragging down Europe with it,” was the headline. “At a time when the EU could be proving itself as an alternative to Trump’s unilateralism,” it wrote, Europe may instead be facing months, if not years, of squabbling:

“If the populists now govern in Italy, the country could steer itself on a course of constant confrontation with Brussels—by for example, expressing its solidarity on key issues with right-wing populists in France, Austria or Finland or with the EU-critical governments in Hungary and Poland. Or it could take the side of half or full-on autocrats like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and undermine European unity in the process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/09/tommy-robinson-supporters-arrested-after-clash-with-police

A group of Tommy Robinson supporters has blocked off a major road in central London in a tense stand-off with police, who made several arrests.

Hundreds of demonstrators descended on the capital and blocked off the road around Trafalgar Square.

Rows of riot police blocked the gate down the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace, where the Royal Family has gathered on the balcony after celebrating Trooping the Colour just hours earlier.

The protest on Saturday afternoon was the latest in what appears to be a bid to secure the release from jail of the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL).

Supporters chanted “Free Tommy Robinson” and hurled missiles and smoke bombs at police.

Hundreds of supporters crowded on to an open-top sightseeing bus, waving union flags, while one supporter posed on the roof in a Donald Trump mask.

By 6pm, officers had removed protesters from the bus and had kettled many of the remaining protesters on the traffic island overhead.

Other Robinson supporters crowded on to the steps of Nelson’s Column and continued to chant slogans.

A spokesperson for megasightseeing.com said: “Our London sightseeing bus was on its normal route when it got caught up in the demonstrations. The bus was stormed by demonstrators, and the driver and a small number of customers got off.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ireland-abortion-referendum-irish-exceptionalism-ending-european-identity/

The long experiment in cultural transformation has proved to be a mere detour on the way to becoming West Britain.

In Bernard Shaw’s great play John Bull’s Other Island, an English liberal character who at first seems a silly-ass Englishman but who later emerges as a more Machiavellian one, exclaims enthusiastically at one point: “Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.” This is a surefire laugh line in the theater. It is also a prediction of something that finally happened on Friday, May 25, with the landslide passage of the referendum to liberalize Ireland’s abortion law more or less in line with English precedents. And it symbolizes the end of a 100-year diversion in Irish history from West Britain to a prickly independent Catholic Republic back to West Britain again.

That something this important was at stake was realized very early by William Butler Yeats, who had commissioned the play from George Bernard Shaw to open Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats rejected the play and gave several reasons for doing so, but his main motive was almost certainly that it was alien, both politically and in literary form, to the kind of Irish national theater that Yeats was trying to establish. Shaw thought so and many years later described the incident as follows: “Like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr Yeats got rather more than he bargained for. . . . It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.”

Andrei Gromyko believed that the so-called Westphalian system, in place at least until the Second World War, had been replaced by a duopoly in which only the USSR and the United States counted as powers that could truly affect things. Moscow these days is full of rumors and speculation regarding an impending bid by Putin to revive at least in part and in a new form, the Gromykan “duopoly” by reaching out to the Trump administration in Washington.

Putin knows that without reaching out to the US, he may not be able to consolidate his gains in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia, while he could become stuck in the Syrian quagmire with no prospect of getting out anytime soon.

Russia’s isolation was best illustrated during the big annual military parade in May 2017, when of all the foreign dignitaries invited by Putin only one turned up: the President of Moldova.

“Consolidation”. In Moscow these days this is the word that most flavors discussions in political circles. The idea is that, thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s bold and risk-taking strategy, Russia has made a number of major gains on the international scene and must now act to consolidate those gains and reduce the diplomatic, economic and political price it has had to pay for them.