1.09 - Inescapable Podcast - Blood and Bureaucrats

The US-Iran ceasefire is already fraying. We go through what's actually happened in the last 24 hours: the ten-point plan Iran had on the table for weeks before Trump presented it as a win, the Pakistan PM's copy-paste tweet, Israel's strikes on Lebanon, and the Strait of Hormuz closing again. The signals are contradictory and the official narrative doesn't hold up.

From there we get into Ben Roberts-Smith. His arrest and the campaign to strip his VC have split opinion sharply. We look at what his case reveals about how Australia treats its soldiers, what combat actually does to people, and whether this country still has any appetite for what war requires.

In the Plus+ extension: the Fabian Society, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, and the eugenics program that ran underneath progressive thought in the early 20th century. The Fabians wanted to remake society from the top down and they were patient about it. We trace how their ideas moved from the drawing room into education, law, and bureaucracy, and how utopian language kept covering for what was a project of population management and elite control.

• Watch on YouTube

Links

• New Deadline Looms for U.S. and Iran as Truce Wavers - The New York Times
• The Empire Backs Down, For Now
• Iran Rejects U.S. Narrative That It Must Adhere to Trump’s ‘Disingenuous’ Negotiation Framework
• Did Trump Just Make Iran Great Again?
• What the Hell Happened with the Rescue of the F-15E WSO in Iran?
• "Oh, this is unbelievable. The edit history on this tweet shows that Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif originally copied and pasted everything he was sent, including: "*Draft - Pakistan's PM Message on X*" Now, obviously, Sharif's own staff don't call him "Pakistan's PM," https://t.co/lm2vSEElkb" / X
• SAS hero Ben Roberts Smith arrested over alleged war crimes
• Patriotic Aussies rally behind war hero Ben-Roberts Smith
• Australian Defence Force takes out war breach adverts in newspapers | The West Australian
• Ben Roberts-Smith and the confused battlefield | The Spectator Australia
• The Truth of War: Lethality in Combat, a Study of the Real Nature of Battle eBook : Lewis, Doctor Tom: Kindle Store
• Overview | Air Force
• War Hero or Poli...