My favourite non-fiction book is ...

... Jeremy Bowen's, 'The Making of the Modern Middle East', pub 2022.

Reading this illuminating and timely book, I can only think that the Mighty Oil Rich Middle East was made in our image over more than 100 years of exploitation and domination and, oh so well meaning, intervention.  Actually, all those lagoons of oil were far too valuable for those native Arabs to have any control of!  We needed them for our wars, anyway.

TODAY'S NEWS

Jimmy Lai - businessman and pro democracy activist - sentenced today in Hong Kong. 

"Politically motivated prosecution", is how we see it.  Found guilty of national security offences - guilty of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces.  Sentenced to 5 years in prison.

Would Jimmy have been so pro liberal democracies and on the side of the White, West is Best, if we had never invaded China to start the Opium Wars?

Our great victories meant we owned and ruled a tiny piece of China for 100 years.  Is that really right?

Or, was it a terrible mistake to give Hong Kong back to China?  But it was the only lawful thing to do.

Was it a terrible mistake to give Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005?  It could have been the Two State Solution?  Pack all the Palestinians from Judea and Samaria into Gaza and our Israeli allies would be on their way to Likud's Charter ambition to have "the land from the River to the Sea" as the sole Jewish State?

Would there have been the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre if we had behaved even decently and honourably and not made war on China?

"The Chinese authorities want everyone to forget that they killed hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989."  (Amnesty website)

Why, perhaps, soon the biggest embassy in London?

Did China join in the Scramble for Africa like the  European colonialists?

Why is China criticised by the West for helping out in Africa?

Or is it only out of self-serving, self-interest that we, the upright, noble, Civilised Nations would do such a thing.  And, in addition, sail our £3.5 bn, state of the art aircraft carrier, provocatively parallel to the coast of China?  To teach China a lesson?  Who is boss?  Not them!