Thucydides and Me

Posted on September 2, 2026 by Terry Miles

(Note for concerned readers: A philosophy not a medical report)

PREFACE: Living Inside the Trap

It is September 2026. The old idea that rising and falling powers always end up at war is no longer just history. It is the air we breathe. One empire is weakening but still armed with weapons that could wipe out complex life. Another is rising and cannot afford to look weak. The missiles are more numerous than in 1962, the leaders less stable, and the old emergency phone calls no longer work. We are not watching the doomsday clock from a safe distance. We are living inside it.

That is not the only trap closing around us. Bill McGuire, the scientist who has spent his career watching the Earth respond to what we have done to it, says global heating is coming faster and harder than the official reports admit. By 2040, when my grandchildren are old enough to understand what previous generations did to them, they may be living in a climate nightmare that no amount of late technology will fix. The physics does not care about our politics. The CO2 keeps accumulating. The feedback loops are already running.

I am also aware, writing this, that I may not see 2040. My body is telling me what the doctors confirm: things are very gradually and inevitably failing. This is not a plea for sympathy. It is a fact, as solid and inevitable as the melting ice. The same chain of cause and effect that produced the Big Bang, the stars, human beings, the industrial revolution, the arms race, and the heating atmosphere also produced the cells in my body that are now turning against me. From the Big Bang to this particular beer: everything is connected.

When people are faced with the collision of empires and the betrayal of the climate, they usually retreat into one of two comforting illusions. Either they decide nothing matters because we are all doomed anyway, or they decide that if they just recycle harder, vote smarter, or shout louder, they can reverse forces that were set in motion before they were born. Both are ways of avoiding reality.

What follows is not a political manifesto. I am just an observer in rural France, contributing nothing but words. It is instead a way of thinking about how to live honestly inside the trap. It is an attempt to bring together what I have learned from decades of reading and living: that we are shaped by forces far beyond our control, down to the last nerve cell; that the systems which formed us are not prisons but the very conditions that make anything possible; that the mind is the body and the body is the mind; and that being genuinely yourself is still possible even when you never chose who you are.

If you are looking for easy hope, you will not find it here. But you may find something more durable: a way of being fully present, fully shaped by forces beyond your control, and still fully engaged in an age that makes giving up seem like the only sensible option. The empires will do what they are going to do. The climate will do what the physics demands. But we are still here, now, and how we inhabit this moment is the only thing that ever mattered.

The Unified Theory of Me: A Plain Guide to Living Without Free Will

I. The Starting Point: You Never Had a Choice

There is no free will. Every thought, every action, every decision you think you made was the inevitable result of what came before. Your genes, your upbringing, the language you speak, the economy you were born into, the chance encounters that shaped your days – all of it leads to this moment with the same inevitability as a billiard ball rolling across a table after being struck. This is not depressing. It is liberating.

Once you really accept that you are determined, you stop blaming yourself for the architecture of your own mind. You stop calling yourself a moral failure for things that were simply the unfolding of cause and effect. The anger you could not control, the addiction you could not beat, the relationship you could not save – these were not failures of will. They were events in a chain that stretches back to the beginning of time.

But you still have to live. The question is not whether you choose (you do not), but how you inhabit the life you are living. You feel as if you are choosing. The experience of making a decision is as vivid as the experience of seeing colour or feeling pain. That experience is real, even if the choosing is not. The task is to live honestly inside that tension: knowing you are not the author of your actions, while still feeling the full weight of them.

II. The Hidden Structure: You Are Not Just You

You do not exist as a separate self floating above history. You are shaped by forces you never see: the schools you attended, the language you inherited, the class you were born into, the nation that claims you, the invisible threads that bind you before you are even aware of yourself. The Marxist thinkers of the 1970s understood this: the idea of the lone individual is itself a fiction produced by the very system that benefits from it. The real action is in the structures.

But structures are not just prisons. They are also what make anything possible. A fish does not exist outside water; you do not exist outside the structures that formed you. To understand the structure is to gain a kind of leverage, even if the desire to gain leverage was itself produced by the structure. You can work to change the systems that made you, knowing that your desire to change them was also made by those systems. The point is not to escape your conditioning but to redirect it.

Think of it like a river. You cannot step out of the river. But you can learn how the current works, and you can sometimes steer toward a different bank. The steering is also determined by the river, but the direction matters nonetheless.

III. The Body Knows: Feeling and Thinking Are the Same Thing

The mind is not a computer running inside a meat robot. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown this beyond doubt: feeling and knowing are inseparable. You do not reason your way to emotion. You feel your way to reason. The mind is the body, and the body is the mind. Any honest philosophy must start from the lived, felt experience of being a physical organism.

This has practical consequences. That morning routine some people find obsessive – the exercise, the chores, the careful preparation of the day – is not neurosis. It is the body’s own intelligence seeking equilibrium. It is a determined response to early damage, a structural adaptation that creates the conditions for creative work. To understand it honestly is to feel its necessity, to live it without shame, to recognise that your body is doing exactly what it was shaped to do.

Your anxiety is not a flaw in your character. Your restlessness is not a moral failing. They are the body speaking, in a language older than words, about what it has experienced and what it needs. Learning to listen is not self-indulgence. It is the only way to understand what you are.

IV. Being Real: Authenticity Without Freedom

Existentialism is often misunderstood as a philosophy of total freedom. In this framework, it is something more modest and more useful: a philosophy of radical honesty. You did not choose to be born when you were, where you were, to the parents you had, with the body you have. You were thrown into the world, as the philosopher Heidegger put it, without ever being asked. You cannot choose your thrownness. But you can relate to it honestly.

You can refuse the comfortable lie that you are self-made. You can refuse the success stories that ignore the luck and the structures behind them. And you can still commit yourself to projects, to people, to the creation of meaning. The struggle for a better world – the fight against exploitation, the refusal to accept that this is the best we can do – is not a choice you make in a vacuum. It is an expression of the structure of your being, transformed into solidarity through the lived experience of struggle.

You do not fight because you are free to fight. You fight because the person you are, shaped by everything that made you, cannot do otherwise. That is not less noble. It is more honest.

V. Living It: A Practical Guide to Determinism

This theory is not just for thinking about. It is for living. The FLIPSIDE framework – turning what you fear into what you do, reframing avoidance into action – is the practical application of living without free will. You do not resist your nature. You work with it, shaping the conditions that shape you.

The writer who rises before dawn, who lifts weights, who keeps the routine, who fights the impulse to drink because early loss wired his brain for anxiety – this is not a man exercising willpower. He is a man who has understood how he is wired and is redirecting that wiring toward creation instead of destruction. There is no willpower involved. There is only understanding, and the determined attempt to redirect what determines you.

The political helplessness of watching from France, the rage against empire, the knowledge that revolution is impossible under current rules – these are also determined responses. But they are responses that refuse to become cynical. To know that resistance is probably futile and to resist anyway is not contradiction. It is the highest form of being real.

VI. What You Are: A Field of Forces

The self is not a solid thing. It is a field of forces pulling in different directions. This theory does not smooth those contradictions into a comfortable story. It holds them together: the fact that you are completely determined and the fact that you feel like you are choosing; the fact that you are constrained by structures and the fact that you can sometimes redirect them; the fact that you are a body with feelings and the fact that you can think critically about those feelings; the fact that the political situation seems hopeless and the fact that you keep resisting.

To live this way is to live without the comfort of either believing you are in control or believing that nothing matters. It is to be fully shaped by forces beyond your control, and fully present within that shaping. It is to be, in the only sense that matters, free.

VII. The Clearing

The physicist Carlo Rovelli writes about how memory and anticipation open up a clearing in time. That clearing is sometimes a source of anguish, but it is also a gift. A precious miracle that the endless play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist.

“We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time – in our finite time – to savouring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence”.

To which this theory adds: the endless play of combinations is the same chain of cause and effect that produced the Big Bang, the stars, the body, and the brain that now remembers and anticipates.

That tiny clearing is determined. The anguish is determined. The smile is determined. And yet they are no less real, no less precious, no less worthy of our full attention.

Love, Peace and Overthrow of Capitalism…

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Terry Miles

As promised on eYou (try it) a couple of days ago, here is a short philosophical position for the modern Marxist-Lennonist

The Manifesto of Imagination

A Marxist-Lennonist believes that the struggle for human liberation is fought on two fronts: the material and the mental. While Marx focused on the “means of production,” the Lennonist adds the “means of perception.” We cannot seize the factory until we have first seized our own minds from the conditioning of religion, nationality, and greed.

The Abolition of Barriers

The core of this position is the removal of anything that separates one human from another. Marx argued for the abolition of private property to end exploitation, while John Lennon famously sang, “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can.” In this synthesis, property is not just a legal status but a psychological wall that prevents us from “sharing all the world.”

The Working Class Hero

In this framework, the “Proletariat” and the “Working Class Hero” are one and the same. The struggle is not just against the bourgeoisie, but against the “insult” of being made to feel small. As Lennon noted in his 1970 track society processes individuals like raw materials. A Marxist-Lennonist seeks to halt this processing, turning the worker from a “cog” into a conscious creator.

Practical Materialism via “Living for Today“.

Marxism is famously a materialist philosophy rejecting supernatural explanations in favor of physical reality. Lennon’s “Imagine there’s no heaven” is the ultimate secular-materialist anthem. The position holds that by removing the “pie in the sky” (the religious or ideological carrot), we are forced to deal with the reality of hunger and injustice right here on Earth.

Power to the People

The final synthesis is a call to action that is both political and personal. It suggests that a world “without borders” is not just a dream, but the logical end-point of human history once the structures of class and nation-state are dismantled.

And that’s where it all begins to unravel.

What if the ruling class – on behalf of whom the government wields state power and which had a monopoly of legitimised violence – objects? And objects with bullets.

See my previous post regarding the impossibility of revolution…and argue with me.

Being Flipping Flexible!

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Terry Miles

1. The Fear: Aches, Pains & Injuries

The Anti-Goal (Failure): Stop lifting anything heavy. Avoid all strain to “protect” yourself. Let muscles quietly waste away.

The Flip (Strategy): Resistance for resilience. Use light weights or bands 2-3x a week. Muscle is your insurance against falls and frailty.

Resources: TheraBand • “Body by Science” (Dr. Doug McGuff)

AI Tip: Even 2 x 20 minute sessions a week slows muscle loss significantly.

2. The Fear: Stiffness & Unsteadiness

The Anti-Goal (Failure): Sit in the same chair for 4+ hours without moving your joints. Let stiffness be your new normal.

The Flip (Strategy): The Daily 10. Ten minutes of hip, shoulder and spine mobility before your first coffee. “Oil” your joints daily!

Resources: “10 Minute Morning Mobility” (YouTube) • The Ready State

AI Tip: Tight hip flexors are the biggest predictor of lower back pain in the over-60s.

3. The Fear: Muscle Wastage & Weakness

The Anti-Goal (Failure): Eat mainly ultra-processed “beige” foods. Ignore protein. Let your body quietly lose the muscle it needs.

The Flip (Strategy): Protein-Forward Eating. Aim for 25-30g of protein at each meal to signal your muscles to stay strong.

Resources: Yuka app • NOVA food guide

AI Tip: Most over-60s eat only 50-60% of the protein they actually need.

4. The Fear: Isolation & Decline

The Anti-Goal (Failure): Let your social circle shrink. Stop learning. Let your brain run on autopilot.

The Flip (Strategy): Cognitive Novelty. One new mental challenge a month—a new skill, language, or person. The brain responds to resistance too.

Resources: Meetup.com (UK) • Local Mairie “Associations”

AI Tip: Social isolation is as harmful as 15 cigarettes a day.

My Politics Is Wandering

Posted on January 17, 2026 by Terry Miles

I sometimes consider giving up the expression of political opinion. I am not generally in normal, everyday contact with people. I am older now. More isolated here in France. I make no contribution to politics except through social media and yet I am angry at the state of things and find funny political posts hilarious. It is a dilemma.

The world has changed so much during my lifetime. The nuclear threat has been ever-present and seems more real now than since the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war could be avoided by a phone call between JFK and Nikita Kruschev. The weapons are far more sophisticated, infinitely more powerful more numerous and held by more nations. The bunkers are deeper. The physics still applies though. We are milliseconds to midnight. But I suppose as individuals we always are.

The US empire sometimes seems to be weakening even if militarily more advanced and probably more secure than ever. Biden seemed like a well-meaning, romantic Democrat trying to act “responsibly” but under his successor we can expect the Empire to strike back spectacularly in several areas of the world. Bombs and proxies not boots on the ground.

The UK is an island colony with business and property overwhelmingly owned by US capital. The Colonial Power is happy for us natives to argue among ourselves over the raising of taxes and any expenditure from within the tax take as long as it doesn’t impact them. The more the inequality and poverty they thrive on grows the less money there is available to tax. Seen on a graph it is a new – different – scissors crisis.

Borrowing to invest in better services that could guarantee to cut poverty in the short to medium term might be allowed up to a certain limited point but pressing a button to increase the money supply available to government – to “print” money – is still seen as a cardinal sin as it would worry the “markets” and threaten the ownership of the house.

Change is possible only within the Capitalist rules of the colonial power. There is plenty of room to move the furniture but don’t knock any walls down and don’t attempt to take ownership. Don’t upset the bond market. Truss did that and they brought her down and punished the population.

For me this was a seminal and revelatory moment. Truss and Boateng had hit “Reality”. Reality is the rules of the game; the outside Frame of the Sandbox., beyond which it is impossible to go. There was much celebration of that event but they’d do the same to any left wing government. And that government would come up against it.

Comply or be crushed. Resistance is futile.

I hadn’t appreciated that reality. I had assumed there would be a British Road to Socialism through ever-expanding democratic control that went through and beyond the “democratic” parliamentary rituals of an election every four years into the economic, financial and business fields.

Strong – and properly participatory trade unions and community organisations – could build up cultural and political commitment to challenge and overcome capitalist power to bring real change that released the creative and compassionate energy of all the people. The people themselves could colonise capital instead of capital colonising the people.

Fundamental stuff.

I was romantic and naive. The Holy Bond Markets wouldn’t stand for it. Revolution is not allowed.

How would that government react? It would be a real challenge to the myths of sovereignty and democracy. Outrageous but the government would lose.

You can go back to the country in a “Who Rules Britain?” Election but even if you won (doubtful) the Sandbox rules will still apply. The steel fist of the Bond Market will crush the economy, pensions, mortgages, services and politics.

The UK will be in Coup country. The government will be removed and replaced by an interim “Civil Stability Administration” which would commit to another election at the earliest opportunity so that a stern no-nonsense (and vengeful) government of the Right can be installed. All the suffering and impoverishment and violence that followed would be blamed on the Left government that came before.

The Left could resist in outrage against the injustice and the theft of democracy but its weapons are few. It is disunited, infiltrated, misled, spied upon, fragmented and manipulated by home and overseas security services.

They know where we work, where we live and what we think. They know our social media profiles, what we buy, where we bank, who we live with, where we live and where we are at this moment. They have their bunkers and weapons. They are undermined by a fear of civil instability. Once faced with it they will overcome that fear and come for us.

A Left Government would anyway be subverted and handed only rubber levers of control long before any Truss-like crisis. So…

Revolution is impossible. What now?

Beer and Determinism

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Terry Miles

Composed from notes written whilst drinking my second espresso, waiting for my motorcycle to be serviced…

I suppose I am only muttering to myself on paper really. Writing does calm me and does focus me, so that is a good thing. The art niggles away at artists until we create.

Mainly I want to get home and have a beer. So…

The pull of Beer illuminates an interesting challenge to the Determinism which I embrace.

If the weight and momentum of the universe – physics, chemistry, biology, history, politics, society, genes, environment, family and traumas – have brought me this far like a train with its buffers in the small of my back and I don’t have free will, what does it then mean when I am faced with a temptation I know is dangerous and/or destructive?

Has the force of the universe in my vicinity of space-time produced a human (the most sophisticated ape) who can’t say no to the bottle that is calling me with muffled cries of “drink me! It’s cold in here” from the fridge?

I’m doomed by the loss of my mother – when the world was suddenly revealed to me to be a very unsafe place – to be particularly vulnerable not only to depression but to the anxiety that I alleviate temporarily every day with the beer that exacerbates my anxiety and depression the following morning at 5am. (This is addiction. Thanks, history).

At the same time, I am doomed to have become aware of these vulnerabilities and doomed to resist them. It is not a choice, history, etc. blah blah dictates it.

It has produced a human being with a taste for beer and little willpower to resist even though it has also in the same body produced a human being that knows alcohol is a poison that is slowly killing him.

So I am a human who has no choice but to continue as well as no choice but to want to stop.

The full force of the universe, i.e. history, family, genes, environment, trauma, society, etc. gives this organism, me, no choice but to manage or resist my vulnerabilities to depression, alcohol and anxiety.

Given all the above, what will I do this lunchtime and afternoon? Maybe the correct question is not “what will I do?” but “what will happen”.

So let’s be inspired. Sometimes I win, sometimes I win….

Possibly…

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Terry Miles

Every second I float encumbered by my luggage like a leaf down a muddy delta of tiny streams of possibility opening into each other with the flood at my back.

When a stream is taken because the water is deep and flows fastest there all the other possibilities become irrelevant as I am washed on towards the next parting and joining of the streams with no idea of its existence or of which possibility I will find myself taking.

And all the time with no idea how far it is to the deep blue ocean or whether the tide is coming in or out.

Don’t mention the seagulls, the wading birds or the fish. Step carefully at the confluence…

The Ballet of Control

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Terry Miles

So, I am starting to write in the space we have made in the day. This has become difficult. I have made it so.

My morning routine had evolved – with good reason over time as with all evolutions – into a series of slick and economic movements; a kind of bedroom, garden, kitchen and bathroom ballet – sometimes to music, breakfast television or the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme – that delivers food for tropical fish and cats as well as – for humans – emptied bladders, emptied dishwasher, breakfast, teas and coffees, supplements, medications, news reading, email filtering, French language learning through an app, a “strong senior” fitness workout guided by an app, a cold plunge in the pool, a clean body from a hot bath, audiobook, clean teeth, wood stove emptied of ash and refilled with paper and kindling, a wheelbarrow-load of firewood brought from the wood store and stacked beside the stove, yesterday’s recycling hidden in the car’s boot, last night’s laundry hung on the washing line by the fish pond, in the right order, using two pegs per item. The pegs must match: wooden with wooden, light blue plastic with light blue plastic.

This modern ballet for one aged dancer with back and other aches progresses around the property: upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, upstairs, outside, upstairs, in and out of particular cupboards, using the appropriate, chosen tools – including particular teaspoons, particular dessert spoons, particular cereal bowls, a particular tea tray – without inelegant, sudden halts or extraneous doubling back for an overlooked detail because everything is in its place on the path through this first 90 minutes or two hours.

Then there is the drive to take the recycling to the recycling point and buy bread and beer from my friendly shops in town.

And then it is almost lunchtime.

Tickets are available now at reasonable rates for early-rising performance art enthusiasts who promise not to speak, to get in my way or draw wise conclusions about my psychological and/or physical condition. Preparation for the show begins the night before with a tidying, a loading of timed wash cycles in machines that use cheaper electricity after midnight and the cat’s evening meal. So for the full experience – including the rare but very special screaming nightmares at no extra charge – you might like to book the overnight stay.

Within these intense performance hours unexpected breakages, moved or missing utensils and people that might wander innocently across the stage with their own perfectly reasonable but – for me – unscripted interventions and destinations cause sudden irritation and frustration that is destructive if expressed.

This would appear strange and unwarranted unless a person that wasn’t simply struggling with anxiety and obsession to get everything precisely right so that everything is “done” but also – and very significantly – to get what he defends as necessary over and the space/time to write opened up even briefly. So, I must be that person.

I have never properly confronted or dealt with the pathological, chronic anxiety, the overthinking, the fear and the obsessive behaviour that has developed over the years. I have actually colluded with it and defended it as a necessary, reasonable, rational strategy to live in an insecure world ripe with the unexpected and potentially disastrous: a lesson I learned at the age of 9.

I feel a deep and frightening pain for all those children under the age of 10 in Gaza that have learnt that same lesson. Celebrate peace but thousands and thousands will never have peace.

Producing and publishing a written piece can provide a deep satisfaction. Today has been different. I am back on the journey to a personal and political confrontation. The road leads backwards and forwards. I might explore it here.

From Then To Eternity. A Long Personal Political Journey

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Terry Miles

Every morning I get up and I watch the world go mad before my eyes. That’s every single day. I don’t think I’m alone. Make a cup of tea and read on. It’s a long piece so a plate of biscuits or two is also advisable.

This is not the world I thought I grew up in.

I was political with a small p from quite an early age. Dad and I argued about most things but agreed that Moseley should be locked up and shouldn’t be holding a rally in Trafalgar Square.

I survived Dad’s involvement in the Civil Defence Corps, the Cuban missile crisis and eventually the Cold War. I survived watching “The War Game” in Mitcham Town Hall but I never forgot it.

I survived the Beatles and Mitcham Grammar School.

I was a weekend hippie from South London. I wanted love and peace; especially a lot more of the love bit. I “Imagined”. I wasn’t the only one. Sadly I survived John Lennon.

I wanted to save the whales. I demonstrated against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square. I failed to ban the bomb. I read International Times and Oz magazine. I loved prog rock. I watched the events in Paris in 1968 from afar but with enthusiasm. I dabbled with the softer recreational substances without much commitment and without addictions apart from the legal ones: beer and cigarettes.

I had one foot on the magic bus and one foot in one job or another at all times.

I became a union rep and a Friend of the Earth. I had my grandfather’s ambition.

At university as an unqualified mature (23 years old) student of Politics with no tuition fees, a grant and an indulgent grandma plus real experience as a proletarian I became what I now realise was a sort of noisy, uninformed, romantic revolutionary. I still Imagined but read Lenin instead of Lennon.

I became a member of the Communist Party but gravitated quickly towards the Euro-Communism of Santiago Carillo. In the absence of Conservative students at my university I distrusted everyone else: from the anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, Militant, the International Marxist Group, the Labour Party, even unto the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The Cubans were OK with me. I so wanted them all to do better. I was a sectarian increasingly in a sect of one.

Building on my Woodstock streak and Rolling Stone magazine I also (quietly) believed that there was a really strong streak of genuine democratic progressive idealism in politics, especially in US politics where there was no bending of everything by the dominant old public school class system of elites in the UK. I think I really believed that the USA – the home of rock – was capable of change, even after I’d argued violently with a Reaganite American long-haired hippie in a Paris youth hostel.

Years passed. And now I’m here with you.

When I first read Noam Chomsky’s “The Myth of American Idealism” just a few years ago, I thought he was going a bit far. As a by now an ex-Communist ( the Party had dissolved around me) I was suspicious of Chomsky as an anarchist but the events he described betrayed the reality of capitalist American politics, international manipulation, war and terror.

I’d thought at least Obama was a good guy doing his best. And Bernie Saunders was saying things I really believed in. Putin’s Trump Series One was clearly a dangerous aberration. But then came the disappointment of steady Joe Biden with all the rings Netanyahu and Putin and ultimately Comeback Trump ran around him and the unfortunate Kamala Harris, who with more time might have won.

With Trump Series Two the American Empire has been revealed in all its enthusiastic banal, fascist, bullying and openly bad taste corruption, guided by The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership. And celebrated idiocy. Don’t forget the idiocy. And whatever Putin’s got on Trump. Don’t forget that.

I have very little hope at all of a Democrat revival that might bring meaningful left change. The Democrats are bought. I now see the USA – even with divisions closing on civil unrest – with absolute clarity as just another Nuclear Empire among Nuclear Empires like the Russian empire and the Chinese empire.

I have lost an innocence. But to lose all hope in one empire does not mean a transfer of hope to another. We are powerless specks. Here’s a speck’s eye review of current empires…

The Russian Empire continues to rot slowly within (read Alexei Navalny) becoming more dangerous the more it feels endangered and surrounded by a NATO that simply has to surround and endanger it by the logic of its official raison d’etre: its defence of its constituent states.

The Chinese Empire is evidently going from strength to strength. They and Russian empires appear to be moving closer. Russia needs China. Perhaps China needs peace to continue to thrive and overtake the USA. The Chinese obsession from ancient times has been with stability. Without stability it becomes ungovernable. War would not be helpful to stability even if fought by robots. My personal hope is that the obsession with stability behind the wall of “peace through strength” – a strength to resist the US power that continues to target them with nuclear weapons from air, sea and neighbouring countries – will lead them to “assist” Putin to find peace with Ukraine and stability in his Empire. We’ll see. What China does next in relation to Russia and Ukraine will make things clear.

At the same time both Russia and China seem to feel the need to tidy up territories after the second world war and the Cold War. Hence Ukraine. Hence Taiwan?

When Empires compete economically and form a global ecosystem of mutually exclusive military alliances War is not far behind. We are somewhere before Sarajevo but with nuclear weapons.

I may have become harshly realistic, horribly so, even unto myself. So I’m not a romantic revolutionary anymore. My heart is still with the People but democratic power is not.

Someone in Trump’s administration is also being harshly realistic. When Trump is grabbing attention daily with some new outrageously fascist move at home, the Realist among his puppet masters has steered his attention to China and to the melting Arctic. He might (and I mean might) be embarrassed at the limits of his power to gather a Nobel Peace Prize via Gaza or Ukraine, both of which must manifest as really annoying taps on his shoulder from the east as he looks westwards across the Pacific and north beyond Canada and Greenland, The US empire may be in decay and become more dangerous as it proves untrustworthy and loses its global hegemony to China.

The UK, although a nuclear-armed vassal state to the nuclear US Empire is currently divided against itself by a nostalgic bitterness at the loss of its racist empire.

The UK has failed to look its decline in the face and become a nuclear free Scandinavian country high up the happiness index. Being mostly populated by descendants of Norsemen – Vikings and Normans – this should be a serious option. Imagine (that word again). Dump the “independent” nuclear deterrent that in reality won’t deter anyone when it all kicks off. Rebuild and renew health and public services, invest in humanity without breaking the Chancellor’s fiscal rules. Live well and wisely up until the apocalypse. Nothing else seems sensible. Imagine.

UK governments have not dared to go public to their own citizens about its vassal status. Most really believe they live in an independent sovereign liberal democracy where voting in a necessarily revolutionary socialist government could be allowed. UK industry, finance and commerce, IT infrastructure and privatised services are overwhelmingly owned by companies one can trace back to monopolies and billionaires in the USA but few people know. And if they did, what could they do?

The UK maintains a respectful stance towards the overwhelming power of the US Empire – Trump is coming to embarrass King Charles this month – while hiding its impotence behind strident admonitions and minimal gestures regarding Gaza and Ukraine. Sanctions yes but arms supples and spy flights from Cyprus. The UK government (a.k.a. Labour Friends of Israel) is just not to be trusted. But it is buying Trump’s weapons to give to Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops etc. Sneaking a more assertive role via Europe whilst not drawing it’s master’s wrath.

The European Union is standing with Ukraine as much as possible without provoking an attack by being all NATO unless attacked: having to buy arms from Trumperica to pass to Ukraine, ready to secure a peace if it’s ever declared. It’s a kind of mini empire without an emperor; almost independent and a complex irritant to both Trump and Putin.

An aside: I notice that the Germans have been very clever by using a lot of the defence spending increase demanded by Trump on strategic autobahns. There are historic precedents from the late 1930s I’d best not mention but it worked well then and if there’s no war they can drive even faster. Maybe the UK could pull a similar move to build the strategic HS2 or the infrastructure to better distribute power from solar and wind plants…

Europe is where I live, powerless, voteless (unless I count Runnymede in Surrey) but now realistically so. Perhaps an eyes-open pessimist but still able to post my outrage on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, on the repulsive X and even – if I hold my nose – on TruthSocial (an absolute toilet) where I like to tease MAGA.

It’s a futile form of artistic self-expression but it’s mine.

The last scales of my misguided romantic idealism about politics have now fallen away from my eyes. I might call myself a romantic realist to avoid the term romantic fatalist. Either by climate collapse, nuclear war, pandemic, geological extinction event or a simple idiocy that enables any or all of the above doom inevitably awaits. They are each in a very bleak race to get here first.

On the bright side, as Spike Milligan once said about the atom bomb they’ve made no progress since they invented the spear. They can only kill me once.

I’m 74. No need to hurry.

I have grandchildren so resistance remains futile but essential, even if we only Imagine.

It could be worse. I could be a citizen of the USA.

A blog can be a very dangerous thing.

Posted on August 13, 2025 by Terry Miles

Here I am with the space to write but presently having to overcome an immense inertia to move at all. There are a multitude of reasons/excuses that I will spill out across this entry:

It is too hot. It is 38 degrees in the shade outside this traditional stone farmhouse in France. It has always been a fine refuge from solar radiation. It has shutters, small windows and a shaded velux window at the top of the stairs – always open – to funnel the heat out. I keep all the other windows closed during the day. But after two weeks of very high temperatures and no rain apart from one brief thunderstorm a 3.30 last night I have the strong impression that the stone walls are themselves beginning to conduct heat. Nothing spectacular but the first floor is now noticeably warmer than the ground floor and considerably cooler than the top floor. Escape is becoming more difficult.

I have been ill. After a few weeks of good health as the stage one arthritis in my hip settled down I flew Ryanair to London crammed into the full plane, breathing in whatever my fellow ~~sufferers~~ passengers were breathing out I picked something up. After a suitable period for incubation my chest exploded with violent but unproductive coughing a few days later. This turned into a bronchitis that I’m only now – three weeks later – fairly confident I’ve overcome. I also began to develop a strange pain in my right eye for which my doctor back here in France has prescribed anti-biotic eye drops. A three day supply and on day two I see just a little sign of improvement. These are petty complaints in comparison to the dreadful diseases I hear about most days on the BBC. At least I am not being starved or bombed or – to my knowledge – being targeted by death squads. But this is me and I find them constantly, very irritating and debilitating as they intrude in every context, including the night. So…

I am tired. I am very tired. Giving into that tiredness brings on guilt at my inactivity and disgust at the hot, coughing, sweating-into-my-bad-eye slug I have become. Coffee and my morning fitness routine provides me with a positive bounce at the beginning of the day but it doesn’t last more than an hour or so. This week I have been racing the sun to get to my dry and dusty garden tasks before the radiation fries me. But I sweat and tire very quickly. I can only do a 90 minute stint before retreating frustrated to the morning bath I postponed to get out there early. The dust is not helping my chest or my eyes.

There are things I want to express that I dare not express. Wisdom has crept up on me late in my complicated determined life. Some mysteries will remain mysteriously mysterious.

I am crippled by outrage. I suffer outrage every day when I turn on the news and see genocide, war cruelty, starvation and a world full of governments unwilling or unable to stop it. Where the hell do I start? I don’t want my blog to be just a long succession of political revelations and justified anger. You can go anywhere for that. (I recommend Novara Media). But it might be time for some of that.

I am in danger of being disempowered completely; paralysed by the rapidly growing awareness that there is nothing we can do – nothing anyone of good empathetic will can do – except that which ultimately the global oligarchs and techno-feudalists actually allow us keyboard warriors to do. They know who I am. I’ve been on a file since 1974. They could come for me any time they need to. It’s just that I am too insignificant as well as a bit careful. A flea on the back of a flea. Conspiracies they know what to do with but I have lived my life inside out. They allow me to post my outrage on my blog and on social media because information is power and I give them mine – and yours – every time I post.

As ever I’m more useful than dangerous. When the round-ups begin it will depend on their arrest strategy. Will they take the insignificant first or last? I have a very low pain threshold and may reveal all I know under the threat of sharp sarcasm. They’ll kill me anyway. of course. Any mass revolutionary party that admits me needs to have a cell structure. I hope Jeremy and Sara are taking this advice into their account.

Resistance IS futile yet we are driven to resist. Revolution is impossible yet we are driven to revolt. What are we going to do? We have no choice.

Clearly – from the extent of the above – not having enough time is not a valid reason/excuse.

Just a bit balmy outside…

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Terry Miles

TerryMiles.blog

Adventures beyond expectations, personal writings and political outrage from an impotent observer