Hard Right Peacemongers in Germany
Appalling Danger of Donbass Majority Rule?
6% of Russians Can’t Be Wrong?
Artificial Cleverness and Job Destruction
SpaceX Starship Still Unready
China Still Rising
Hard Right Peacemongers in Germany
From 2022 and the sabotage of a moderate peace that Zelensky almost accepted, the classic West German pattern of Christian Democrats / Social Democrats / Free Democrats went into swift decline.
Free Democrats had always been a significant partner in government or opposition: in 2025 they fell below 5% and are not in the Federal Parliament. Having once had seats in nine of Germany’s sixteen regional parliaments in 2022, they now have only four. The most recent in 2023, and the possibility of them being wiped out as a party with elected representatives is very real. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the region that just made the Rightwing AfD the largest party, the Free Democrats got seats in 2006 and 2021, but otherwise not.
In former East Germany, the Christian Democrats might be going the same way. They too got no seats in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where they had been significant in the past. They too get fewer seats nationally, though from a much larger starting point.
Why are these people being treated as failures? Alarming and mysterious, we are assured by ‘free’ Western media that just happen to be owned and run by right-wing super-rich. The people who benefit from mainstream politicians holding out against demands for a Wealth Tax etc.
The obvious answer is that they have failed the public, especially in former East Germany. Before Gorbachev decided to cut them loose and allow an uncontrolled collapse, they’d been rated as a rare success within the declining Soviet bloc. But when it became clear that the population was going to blindly trust West German benevolence, this abruptly changed. Suddenly everything East German was wicked and wasteful and must be swept away. And the happy population were assured that something much better would replace it.
Like most promises from the New Right, and from the Clinton-Blair camp of centre-leftists who swallowed the New Right’s economic nonsense, it would have been very nice if it had been true. And of course it was thoroughly untrue.
Had Reagan and Thatcher been functional conservatives rather than trusting New Right advice, they would have made the new Russia a reliable friend. Made a gigantic long-term gain for their values, in the same way that the former fascist or hard-right nations of Japan, Italy, Spain and Germany in its Western half were won over. Were vital to economic success and working-class contentment in the Cold War.
This massive blunder was not even callous or amoral self-interest for the West. It was based on a shoddy understanding of real material wealth. Wealth is supposed to be generated by a quest for profit, and this is assumed never to be far wrong. And anything state-funded or even non-profit is declared incapable of generating wealth or avoiding waste. That’s why the greedy failures running Britain’s privatised water industry are not replaced.
In the opportunity created by the Soviet collapse, Gorbachev and then Yeltsin thought that the West valued them. The West’s leaders were fools not to go with the generally friendly attitude that Russians then had. But any competent political leader should be on guard against betrayal even by apparently friendly forces.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were not competent in large-scale politics. Gorbachev understood only politics within the Party machine. He might have triumphed if he’d followed the advice of Deng Xiaoping and kept party authority solid while he transformed a society that was used to trusting the government, or at least obeying it. Which was also the reason Khrushchev failed: he generated mistrust among the conservative-minded without doing anything to satisfy the people with useful new ideas.
But the West’s leaders, and in particular those dominating the European Union, cannot possibly admit that they messed up. Instead, it has to be Deep Evil emerging unexpectedly in Russia. And if Russians were slow to do things that could be called evil, they could fake incidents. And expend the once-hopeful mixed-identity nation of Ukraine by playing up the Nazi-tinged hatreds of West Ukraine. Provoke normal Russian nationalism and call it evil.
We keep getting reminded of the 2018 nerve gas attack on exiled dissident Sergei Skripal as evidence of Russian evil. To me, it was blatantly False Flag. Ordinary British hired killers can’t be hard to find for a major government, so why do should Russians use a method that made them look guilty? And which also failed to kill the man they apparently wanted to kill (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/2018-labour-affairs/2018-04-magazine/2017-04-editorial-nerve-gas-attack/).
Germany’s Hard Right are foes of the European Union, and so have no reason to go along with the anti-Russian nonsense. On other matters, this variety of Hard Right are only hard on poor. Encouraging the home-grown working class and poor to blame immigrants rather than New Right nonsense economics. They may well decline after blundering and being ineffective when actually in power.
More hopeful is a potential coalition government in Berlin led by the Hard-Left ‘Die Linke’ [The Left], where hard Right gains were limited. Would they repeat the good work of Mamdani in New York? But sadly, a coalition of Social Democrats / Christian Democrats / Greens would also work. And ‘die Linke’ would need both Social Democrats and Greens to rule.
Appalling Danger of Donbass Majority Rule?
Anyone failing to hate everything Russian has no place in the New Ukraine. That at least is the view that President Zelensky came round to, after being elected on a promise of moderation.
Ukraine’s government is agreed to be full of corruption. I’m reminded of Baldwin’s memorable remark about ‘hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war’. That was World War One, and the British Empire did emerge victor, though weakened overall. You might forgive the hard-faced men for not realising this, though they were certainly callous and greedy. But the chances of Kiev reconquering the anti-Kiev territories of the Donbass and Crimea should have looked absurd to anyone involved since their failed big offensive in 2023.
With hindsight, it would have been smart to have realised in 1991 that the Soviet Ukraine authorised by Lenin was artificial. Just as the two halves of Czechoslovakia ended up deciding they’d be happier as centre-right Czechs and centre-left Slovaks, so a split based on the former Tsarist provinces of ‘Little Russia’ and ‘New Russia / South Russia’ would have been wise. As two sovereign states called West Ukraine and East Ukraine, both might have done very well.
West Ukrainians, who naturally rejected the name ‘Little Russia’, had been long-term victims of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A state ruled by an outsized gentry class, which was relatively nice to Jews but oppressive to Orthodox Christians. Frequent Ukrainian rebellions were crushed, leaving a legacy of hatred that exploded after the Tsarist collapse, and then again during the Nazi invasion. Some West Ukrainians directly served the Nazis, and others fought as a Third Force for part of the war. And back in 2016, there was a vivid Polish film describing just how bad it had been (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/West-Ukraine-The-Bitter-Past).
From 2022, Poland tried keeping quiet in the hope of seeing major damage to their old enemy Russia. This has been coming under strain, as the dominant West Ukrainian nationalists keep insisting on the heroism and virtue of mass killers of Poles in regions of mixed population.
West Ukrainians also made a decision while under Austro-Hungarian rule to see Russia as a foe and oppressor rather than a liberator. That was mostly not the feeling in the former Tsarist province that Lenin had bundled with the slice not taken by Poland.
There was anyway a mix of opinion in both halves, but East Ukraine had never been part of Kievan Rus. It had been settled by a mix of newcomers from both Ukraine and Russia, after Moscow ended its depopulation by Tartar slave raiders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean%E2%80%93Nogai_slave_raids_in_Eastern_Europe).
The Russian language and culture were dominant. Leonid Brezhnev was just the most notable of many who were born in Lenin’s definition of Ukraine, but who were happy with a Soviet Union ruled from Moscow.
The two Orange Revolutions were part of a ding-dong battle between the West-minded and East-minded. East-mindedness won the 2010 Presidential election, which is why in 2014 the President was driven out in fear of lynching rather than having his offer of a new election accepted.
Crimea and the Donbass had a minority of Orange-Revolution supporters. People who’d probably kill or drive out their pro-Russian neighbours if they got control.
It is for this that West Europeans are being asked to suffer.
6% of Russians Can’t Be Wrong?
Having given vast publicity to the anti-War Yabloko party not qualifying for national registration in the recent round of elections in Russia, Western media have gone silent. They are not reporting the weak results for individual Yablokocandidates who stood in one of the regional elections that were held at the same time.
“Yabloko did enter the regional parliament in western Russia’s Novgorod region. It said on social media that it received about 12,000 votes – just over six percent of votes and enough to enter the regional legislature.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/21/pro-putin-party-wins-supermajority-amid-ramped-up-ukrainian-attacks)
DeepSeek pointed me to a similar report from India, https://en.vijesti.me/world-a/evropa/827748/United-Russia-wins-record-number-of-Duma-seats%3B-anti-war-party-gains-small-regional-support
I had to dig and to use the Chinese service DeepSeek to get those basic facts. Our ‘free’ Western media thinks it best that the general public don’t hear off-message facts like that.
Most will also have missed the success of the refounded Russian Communists. They had peaked with nearly a quarter of the parliamentary votes in 1999. Since 2003, when it was clear Putin was restoring health to Russia, they have fluctuated between 11.57 and 19.19 percent. Seven million and 12.5 million votes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Russian_Federation#Parliamentary_elections). This time they got 8,938,889 million votes and 13.82%.
The Hard-Right Liberal Democrats came third, as usual. After getting nearly 23% in 1993, they got 13.14% in 2016 and less than 9% this time. A weak party of Moderate Socialists has lost ground, and fairly new centrist party has gained. But Putin retains the trust of a clear majority of the Russian people.
Artificial Cleverness and Job Destruction
Stories about evil computers taking over the world popped up almost as soon as the public realised that some sort of artificial brain was possible. And before that, a common theme was robots or androids as an oppressed underclass rising up against humans.
All such dramas assume that humans are foolish enough to give independent killing power to an artificial device. No one ever has, apart from enhanced mine fields where a defined area is intentionally made unfit for human life.
A 1986 film called WarGames filled this gap – it starts with an exercise in which some human employees failed to fire the missiles when they were made to believe it was a real war. Rather than cutting back to the loyalists who would trust, as I’m sure happened in real life, they decide to give total power to a computer.
Much more realistic was when the All-American-Lad hero seeks help from two young-adult hackers who appear to be employees of a small computer firm. I took them to be experts who got a lot more tolerance than most professionals because that sort of mind is good at fixing computer problems and keeping other hackers out of the company’s system. Both are comically asocial, though one worse than the other. That was before ‘autism’ became a familiar concept, but the thing was known before the word. Rising use of the word has since led fools like Robert Kennedy Junior to believe the long-discredited notion of blaming vaccines.
People who imagine themselves magic mystical healers are enraged by the awkward truth that vaccines and other medicines became much better than they were at actually saving lives and ending chronic illness. By contrast, those claiming no magic powers and who modestly give emotional support accept it as a supplement to the best available professional cures.
To get back to the film, I’d rate it as more like what a real intelligent machine would do, if this were ever possible. It does not want power. It may not even care whether it survives or not. According to the Wiki:
“WOPR [the sentient computer] nonetheless continues the simulation to trigger the scenario and win the game, as it does not understand the difference between reality and simulation.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames).
Meantime Microsoft seems to have added an AI function to the grammar checks for their Word software. It was always imperfect, but increasingly it is being silly in a way only AI can be. One instance – I was noting a news story for possible use here:
“A confrontation in Northern Ireland after a long-banned march was unexpectedly allowed.”
It asked if I possibly meant to say ‘March’, which is surreal.
Another time, I wrote about ‘working in vain’, and it asked if I’d actually meant ‘vein’.
Why do they do such things? Total arrogance, that gets worse as their successful control of events gets weaker. I’ve found other software insist that when I use British spelling rather than US, this is an error.
Anything they don’t do, isn’t proper.
Additional to this is the way that big corporations are pushing AI to replace skilled middle-class work. AI still makes silly errors in translations, as with a bizarre menu that spoke of cooking lawyers rather than avocado pears: both in French are avocats. But one qualified human vetting many decent AI translations can do work that would once have needed ten. And so for many other tasks that offer decent employment for humans, but the dogma now is that profit must always command.
SpaceX Starship Still Unready
An obsession with privatisation has crippled NASA’s efforts to get humans back to the moon. It no longer seems absurd that China might get there first.
NASA’s own big rocket has put people round the moon. But an extra vehicle will be needed to land and return. Alternate versions were promised by SpaceX (Elon Musk) and by Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos). But neither of them has yet shown they can do the job.
Before now, several versions of SpaceX Starship crossed the line between thin atmosphere and near-vacuum, and were defined as being ‘in space’. But did not go into orbit, which is a lot harder.
This time, Starship orbited despite one of its six engines failing. It deployed satellites. But then returned early.
No one currently has a rocket that can do what the Saturn 5 rockets did – fly alone to the moon with a moon lander craft. NASA chose not try to create an upgraded version: instead the Senate insisted on re-using engines from the failed Shuttle program. Maybe a mistake, though it wasn’t those engines that failed. But SpaceX seems to have done better by redesigning from scratch.
A rocket carrying enough of a payload for humans to land on the moon is a huge engineering task. It needs many large rocket motors working in harmony. They did get an amazing 33 engines on the first stage working reliably. But not so far the six on the vital second stage.
SpaceX will need to do better to pass the planned low-orbit rendezvous scheduled for late 2027. This was sensibly added by the man Trump appointed to head NASA, meaning that the planned 2028 moon landing can be postponed if there seem to be risks. It would avoid probable pressure to save prestige by taking extra risks if an actual landing had been promised as part of the mission.
Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, reportedly said the chances of his successful landing were 50/50, with a 10% chance of not returning. He took a risk actually landing when there were warnings. And later the first shuttle disaster was caused by taking off when the vehicle was too cold by existing rules: a series of launch delays over safety issues had become politically embarrassing,
Space X may have made an error in spending effort on recovering and reusing rockets. Needed for a long-term space program, including dreams of Mars. But getting the system ready on schedule for the moon landing should have taken priority.
The Soviet mission to put men on the moon was abandoned when their own giant rocket blew up on the ground four times in succession. Getting 30 separate rocket motors to work together was just too tough. And a promised gigantic Chinese Long March 9 is still in design, with many revisions of the basic idea.
The immediate Chinese idea is more modest – two separate launches by the smaller Long March 10 rocket, separately sending a crewed lunar orbiter and an uncrewed lunar lander to the moon. The crew would transfer, land, ascend, and transfer back to return to Earth. Scheduled for 2029 or 2030.
They might copy Apollo and Artemis and first do a lunar orbit mission that does not land, but I’ve not seen it mentioned. Also the parts are still being tested, but the USA must be worrying.
Someone else will be US President by then – Trump cannot get round the absolute Constitutional rule prohibiting a third term. Beyond that, a lot depends if we do get the expected triumph by US Democrats in the November Congressional election.
China Still Rising
President Xi could not be bothered speaking at a major UN gathering at which many national leaders gave their viewpoints. He left the task to his deputy.
President Trump spoke aggressively to the UN, and got mocked. But Xi talked directly to Trump, details unknown. Addressing a forum for almost-powerless posturing is not something he need bother with.
Though imperfect, China’s economic performance is the least bad of any major nation.
“The transition to raise consumption is a long-term process. Household consumption currently accounts for around 40 per cent of GDP in China.
“In the United States, it accounts for around 70 per cent. But the number is so high because it is driven by housing, healthcare and education expenses. In China, healthcare and education – which form the bulk of service consumption – are not priced according to the market and are pretty affordable. In the US, healthcare and college tuition are relatively expensive. Do we really want to depend on this to drive consumption? I don’t think so.
“Germany and Japan are better international benchmarks, with household consumption at around 50 to 55 per cent of their economies. But if China raises its consumption share by one percentage point per year, the rebalancing will still take over a decade.” https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3366326/economist-lan-xiaohuan-balancing-act-needed-boost-chinas-consumption
I write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams. I also post a lot on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GwydionMW
