By Gwydion M. Williams
- Iran – Regime Still Standing
- False Belief as a Root of Evil
- Iran: Not My Sort of Regime
- China and Compromise
- Snippets
- Taxing the Rich
- Ukraine – Predictable Disaster
- Intelligence Is Many Different Things
Iran – Regime Still Standing
British pop singer Elton John can’t have many followers in Iran. But his song I’m Still Standing would be apt for the ceasefire stand-off we have. An impasse after the six-week war waged by the USA and Israel. Someone should post a version to social media.
I noted early on how well they were doing:
“At the time of writing, 24th March, Iran can still reliably hit Israel. Thankfully, it seems their genuine religious faith would not let them use nerve gas, anthrax spores, or one of the many infectious diseases bred for germ warfare. Something that Saddam [Hussein of Iraq] thought about but did not carry through.” (https://labouraffairs.com/2026/04/01/notes-on-the-news-47/)
They avoided being a weak copy of the West, which Saddam’s Iraq was.
I had not foreseen that they’d keep their missile power and sea power through till the 8thof April, when Trump called a cease fire.
When the going gets tough, the guts go missing: someone should remould the popular song to Trump’s failure. And it’s not just Trump: there were ‘chickenhawks’ serving previous Presidents. There are still some very tough US citizens, but their numbers diminish. Fade as commerce becomes dominant, just as classical philosophers warned.
As at the 23rd April, Trump keeps extending the cease-fire. Iran remains defiant. They Are Still Standing.
False Belief as a Root of Evil
If political liars are bad news, politicians in the grip of violent delusions are far worse.
“At a ceremony in Jerusalem marking Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror attacks, PM Netanyahu said that ‘Iran’s ayatollah regime planned another Holocaust’ and that had Israel not acted ‘against this existential threat… the names of sites like Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan might have joined those of the Nazi death camps – Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.’” (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-04-21/ty-article/.premium/israel-marks-memorial-day-as-bereaved-families-urge-politicians-to-stay-away/0000019d-aedb-d45b-a39f-efdbd9820000).
Natanz etc. are in Iran. Iranian Jews live peacefully, and even have their own representatives in Iran’s powerful parliament. Historically, Jews were mostly safer among Muslims than among Christians. And the numerous Jews in the Ottoman Empire were free to move to Jerusalem or to other lands of the ancient Kingdom of Judea: lands split between several political units under the Ottomans. Or to the former heartlands of the Samaritans, Hebrews who rejected the interpretation of their faith upheld by the men who returned from Babylon and rebuilt the Jerusalem temple.
Who became Jews, but H G Wells in his Short History of the World notes how Carthaginians in the Iberian Peninsula suddenly vanish, and Jews suddenly appear in the same places.
People claim that Israel is looking to ancient history. But the northern half of the West Bank was a foreign territory where Jewish rulers sometimes controlled hostile population of the Samaritan faith. People who later converted to Christianity or Islam: yet now it is earmarked to become 100% Jewish as soon as Israel can get away with it.
Western politicians keen to defend inequality against leftists had the bright idea of endorsing the foolish idea that anyone criticising Israel must be guilty of antisemitism. Netanyahu, about to be thrown out by his fellow Zionists for accusations of influence-peddling, realised that this would allow Israeli troops to be much more brutal to Palestinian women and children than they had dared be before. The concept that people previously sympathetic to Zionism might just be asking for ordinary decency was rejected as a logical impossibility.
As for the grand tragedy of Jews in World War Two: the mass killings began when the British Empire decided not to make peace after the Fall of France. Early on, shipping Jews somewhere beyond Europe was seriously talked about. And many of the killings that did happen were of Polish Christians who were educated. Who were seen as future leaders of a nation Hitler was out to erase.
It is also an odd truth that most of the British cabinet were thinking of offering more than Hitler was thinking about settling for. Maybe his biggest blunder was to be arrogant in victory and fail to get this message through to the British public, who were certain at the time that he was determined to conquer and subjugate them. (See https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/how-hitler-might-have-had-a-victorious-peace/.)
But it is part of human nature to believe that ‘others’ have evil intentions for no other reason than that they are evil. The Russian Republic in 2014 accepted a plea from ethnic-Russian Crimea to be annexed after riots drove out the elected pro-Russian President who had overturned the first Orange Revolution in 2010 (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Punished-For-Rejecting-US-Values-in-2010.) Yet this happening convinced many Finns that they were in danger of being invaded by the Russian Republic. They ignored the fact that Finland had been allowed to stay safely neutral after they had been allied with Nazi Germany in World War Two. Ignored that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev abandoned Lenin’s dreams of indefinite expansion, abandoning East Germany and Middle-Europe. Or that Yeltsin in 1991 then dissolved the entire Soviet Union, which only the Baltic and Caucasian republics were moving strongly to leave. Somehow the panic spread.
But not all by itself. The USA has been actively spreading mistrust, with ‘Upper London’ and most other Western politicians encouraging this.
World Peace was a real prospect in 1991. But with the Soviet Union gone, it turned out that Western elites had never lost their taste for dominating the rest of the world. And most ordinary Westerners get pulled along with it, despite mostly having good intentions.
Iran: Not My Sort of Regime
Remember the time when the ‘wise persons’ of the New Right were sure that Iraq could be remade as a perfect capitalist parliamentary democracy? When weaklings like Tony Blair and the Clintons treated this folly as Deep Wisdom?
Myself, I was one of the few who said that Saddam’s Iraq was the main prospect of Iraq becoming Westernised. My main fear was that they’d make the sort of weak collaborationist regime of the sort occupying much of Africa. That didn’t really come off.
I’ve denounced the whole trend of Western politics from the 1990s. Called it foolish and failed, as well as morally bad: see https://gwydionmadawc.com/my-forecasts-over-past-years/ for specific predictions. These include calling the 1987 riots by Black Britons ‘reformist riots’, though I didn’t actually expect to see a black woman as Tory leader. And in 1989, I said that the Chinese Communist Party was still strong and might keep power for decades.
For Iran, I was one of the minority of leftists who said in 1979 that something new had begun, and that unfortunately it had shoved aside both leftists and pro-Western liberals. That it was foolish to pretend it was an oddity and would soon end. Hiding from unwelcome truths did no one any good. In its own terms, terms accepted by a hazy majority of ordinary Iranians, it is still doing OK.
“The economic performance of Iran since 1979 cannot be easily categorized as a simple success or failure. It is an economy that has proven remarkably resilient, building new industries and achieving scientific progress under duress. However, this has come at a tremendous cost. For the average Iranian, the past four decades have been defined by the erosion of purchasing power, chronic unemployment, and the constant pressure of inflation, leaving the country’s vast potential largely unrealized on the global stage.” (DeepSeek)
(Note that DeepSeek does not mention the sanctions regime that has been applied ruthlessly and relentlessly on Iran and explains much of its difficulties.)
Part of a wider trend – the Republic of India has moved further towards Hindu intolerance since its elite lost confidence in socialism. Elsewhere, we are dismayed to find that Buddhists can be as intolerant as any other religion.
All of this is the fruit of greed and foolishness in the 1990s (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations-2/).
One World might have been possible in the 1970s, though it was hampered by foolish fears of actual state authority. It won’t be back on the agenda for decades, if ever.
China and Compromise
- International Law is quite clear on the issue. There is only one Chinese state. It includes Tibet and Xinjiang and Taiwan. (The US acknowledges the Chinese position that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China.)
Western media tend to mislead with words that are not quite lies. China says that Tibet is Chinese, indeed. But unlike the rival claims to Kashmir, to call it a mere claim would be as misleading as saying that the USA claims that Alaska is part of the USA. Tsarist Russia sold its European claim and you could reasonably say it should have been left to its native Inuit, but the facts under International Law are clear enough. Just as they are for the rest of the USA, and Canada also.
This is separate from what we might see as a just outcome. International Law has never had a superior body that can enforce it. Nazis were punished because they were defeated, and though I agree they mostly deserved it, it degraded the law to pretend Nuremberg was a fair tribunal.
And it happened at the same time as real villains like Klaus Barbie were being helped to safety by the US government. As were vast numbers of criminal pro-Nazi Ukrainians, placed in Canada since Jews and Polish Christians might have gone after them in the USA.
Goering should not have been condemned for the mass killing of Jews, because there is genuine doubt that he knew that deportations had turned into extermination. Nor for terror bombings, given that Allied bomb commanders had done exactly the same.
International Law can be successfully defied, as it was with India using its army to create Bangladesh. But that’s just one of many cases of successful acts of military violence changing the realities of International Law.
Almost the whole of International Law reflects past successful acts of military violence. That’s the bald and bitter truth.
Annexation is a forceable seizure of territories that a particular state had not previously claimed. Which means that it is nonsense for the Wikipedia to say that Tibet was annexed: the current Dalai Lama was part of a long tradition of High Lamas being given rule over the Tibetan Plateau by whoever ruled the Chinese civilisation-state at the time. Tibet was ignored only when it had no coherent overall government.
(See https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/42-china/tibet/the-truth-about-the-dalai-lama/ for more on this. Including how the Central Government stepped in when three successive Dalai Lamas were presumed murdered by their Regent when they should have come to power.)
‘Han’ is a hazy term embracing most of the citizens of China’s civilisation-state. It includes those with a language descended from the Old Chinese that existed at least 3300 years ago. Regional ‘dialects’ are no more similar than English and Norwegian, and less so that Polish and Russian. But they do have a common written language, the Oracle Bones from 1250 BC, with a script long evolved from its original pictograms. And a script independent of the spoken language, which has helped keep unity.
Non-Han mostly speak some other language, though the Hui speak the same languages and are defined by being Muslim. And significantly different from Muslims like the Uighurs who speak various languages of the Turkic language family – mostly not mutually intelligible between named groups. But most of them also see themselves as part of the Chinese civilisation-state.
The Dalai Lama evades this, or is ignorant. In one of his books he speaks of the ‘Tibetan calendar’; but I recognised it as identical to the Chinese zodiac system, in which it’s been the year of the Fire Horse since February 17. And experts agree it began in the Han core, though it is sometimes used outside of the Chinese civilisation-state. It’s definitely wrong to claim it as Tibetan.
Taiwan was annexed by Japan in 1895. This was recognised under International Law, since the weak Chinese state had submitted to it. Different from the pseudo-independent state called Manchukuo, which few accepted. But the Soviet Union was one, from 1941, as part of a successful strategy of keeping Japan neutral while the Soviets held and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Why Hitler tolerated this is a puzzle: another of his massive blunders in world politics.
What the imperial powers had defined as Outer Mongolia within China briefly had an unrecognised independent government under very corrupt traditional rules. It then had a Communist revolution with Red Army support. Chiang Kai-shek recognised it after 1945, and then reneged when he falsely blamed the Soviets for losing the Chinese civil war. But Mao confirmed the original deal as part of a wider negotiation with Stalin. Meantime Inner Mongolia acquired a non-Mongol majority, and no one seems to care much.
Taiwan was seized by the USA after 1945, along with other parts of the Japanese Empire. And it could have been given its own independent existence, as happened to the two halves of Korea under US or Soviet supervision. But the USA during the war had already decided to award it to China, assumed to remain under Chiang Kai-shek. The Soviet Union had no part in this, since at the time it was not at war with Japan. It joined at the very end, and their decisive defeat and overrunning of the much-feared Kwantung Army that occupied north-east China may have done as much as the two atom bombs to make Japan surrender.
Both in Manchuria and Taiwan, many of those who had lived under the brutal Japanese rule said that the newly arrived Kuomintang were worse. You get this in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, the excellent book she wrote before switching alignments after the Soviet collapse. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/42-china/42-1-chinese-politics/a-review-of-mao-the-unknown-story/).
The Kuomintang after 1945 lost control of their economy, with inflation helping destroy them. I was surprised to find this not mentioned in an otherwise-excellent Chinese series about undercover Communists in Shanghai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_(Chinese_TV_series). A series you can watch with subtitles on Amazon Prime, at least in the UK.
The Kuomintang transferred much of their government and army to Taiwan, and Chiang Kai-shek kept promising to reconquer the mainland. There were Westerners in the 1950s and early 1960s who seriously believed this. I’d suppose that this evaporated when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, throwing the state into chaos but without a single sign of any movement within China that wished to be identified as against Mao. Yet it still took till 1971 and Nixon’s peace mission for the Taiwan regime to lose China’s superpower seat at the United Nations. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations.)
Deng Xiaoping came up with ‘one country two systems’, first for Hong Kong when the bulk of it was due to return to China in 1997. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/46-globalisation/46-1-more-on-globalisation/opium-city-the-story-of-hong-kong/) But there was Tory trouble-making. They missed the chance to build up one of the local Westernised Chinese as the last Governor of Hong Kong: it remained London’s show to the end. Out of 28 governors, 14 were born in England, 5 in Ireland, 4 in British India, 3 in Scotland, 1 in Wales and 1 in Germany. All had British or Irish parents. ChatGPT claims that Robert Brown Black was born in Hong Kong, but that’s a definite error.
The last and worst was Chris Patten, put in to make trouble. And he managed among other things to rule a fair chunk of a large Chinese group called the Hakha without having the faintest idea they existed. One of many absurdities I learned from his smug book on his time there.
Hong Kong citizens continued after 1997 with the same economy, and some rights to criticise. I ineffectively warned them when they were going too far, and that they were doomed when mainland liberals distanced themselves (https://www.quora.com/q/pwgwxusqvnzzrlzm/Hong-Kong-Committing-Suicide). Naturally, they were closed down politically. Economically, they are still protected and useful.
The pro-independence party in Taiwan is being used as grist to the US global mill, and China has demonstrated that it would be quite easy to ruin the island by blockading it. And even before the mess in Iran, the current leader of Taiwan’s largest political party had visited Beijing and made a distance from the fools seeking a confrontation they must lose:
“Xi tells Taiwan opposition leader people on both sides of strait are Chinese in rare meeting” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/10/xi-jinping-cheng-li-wu-china-taiwan-meeting-bejing)
Snippets
Taxing the Rich
Taxes are the way to control the super-rich. This was done successfully from the 1950s to 1980s, with economic growth that was at least as good as what we’ve got since.
Letting billionaires and multi-millionaires control politics hurts everyone else. Many inherited their wealth, and the self-made turn out to have done most of their useful work before becoming billionaires. In IT, most of them took things that many people were working on: they were good at making money with their version. (See https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/before-2018/labour-affairs-before-2014/business-success-a-mix-of-skill-and-luck/ and https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Real-Creators-and-Unworthy-Billionaires.)
Bill Gates stayed with what was then the IBM Personal Computer project because his mother was an old friend of a top IBM executive. And then companies he had no connection with cloned the IBM model, so Microsoft got its present dominance.
And he’s one of the better super-rich.
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Ukraine – Predictable Disaster
Many of the US elite are growing sick of the Ukraine War. A corrupt government keeps the war going, but cannot win it. So we have things like this:
“In March 2014, Henry Kissinger warned against Ukraine becoming a pawn in a competition between NATO and Russia, as this would tear apart Ukraine and redivide Europe for decades: – “Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge between them… The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other—as has been the pattern—would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West—especially Russia and Europe—into a cooperative international system” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-the-ukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html (pay site)
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Intelligence Is Many Different Things
There was a time when skill with arithmetic was a prime mark of intelligence. Humans were the first computers, and I can remember when it was common to say ‘electronic computer’. You can find this as a linguistic living fossil in a 1955 Asimov novel called The End of Eternity, where ‘Conputers’ are the planners and their machines are computaplexes.
Other bastions of human intelligence have been conquered, included word-skill and some sorts of understanding. But to me, it has always been likely we have various different centres for different tasks (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/A-Thousand-Brains-We-Think-as-a-Collective).
And a recent mainstream science paper says something similar :
“A.I. has always been compared to human intelligence, but that may not be the right way to think about it. What it does well can help predict what jobs it may replace…
«When he told various chatbots that he needed to take his car to a repair shop that was only 50 meters away and asked if he should walk or drive, the bots told him to walk.»
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I write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams. I also post a lot on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GwydionMW
Labour Affairs 