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First published on January 11, 2023

I asked Ed Dowd if I could have space in his book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” for an article about what we saw around the world as mass vaccination commenced.

In light of Dowd’s stunning analysis, it is particularly instructive to look at data for those countries that did not have high numbers of COVID-19 deaths prior to mass vaccination, because they afford the simplest comparison:

1. They had very low rates of death attributed to COVID-19.
2. Then they commenced mass vaccination.
3. Then they experienced huge increases in deaths attributed to COVID-19.

South Korea gives us a fast example among many: Prior to the country’s wide rollout of mRNA vaccines, Korea had almost no COVID-19 deaths. You see that nearly all their COVID-19 deaths occurred after mass vaccination.

Due to frequent supply problems, South Korea’s mass vaccination program really took off after the third quarter of 2021 when they borrowed hundreds of thousands of Pfizer doses from Israel. Their COVID-19 deaths soon followed. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

In November 2021, President Moon began a massive campaign to push boosters: “The vaccination can be completed only after receiving the third jab.” His citizens complied, reaching more than 90% of adults fully vaccinated — the chart shows the COVID-19 deaths that followed.

The same pattern repeats all over the world, and since seeing is believing, I’ll pause here and resume in more detail after some quick sample charts …

Israel was the world’s poster child for Pfizer’s vaccine product: Like all these countries, Israel had the majority of its COVID-19 deaths after mass vaccination.

And finally, Vietnam: They began mass vaccination in March 2021, purchasing five different vaccine products from around the world — and they saw no jump in COVID-19 deaths.

However, in early July 2021, the U.S. government began donating millions of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines — and that’s exactly when Vietnam experienced the massive spike in COVID-19 deaths you see in the chart.

Any way you think about it, those charts should not look like that if vaccination was effective.

Why would so many countries big and small, rich and poor, in different parts of the world, some with congested cities, some sparsely populated, cold weather or hot weather, tropical or desert, high altitude or low altitude, small islands or landlocked — why would they all see increases in COVID-19 deaths after mass vaccination?

That’s a question one imagines public health officials and media would be motivated to carefully analyze and answer. Instead, they’ve been united in keeping such facts out of public discourse.

The reality displayed on the graphs you’ve seen is undeniable, cannot be unseen and is available to anyone more interested and more industrious than media and government have been.

In this unusual book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” Edward Dowd proves an undeniable and urgent reality, laid out with facts that can be confirmed by any reader, point by point, page by page.https://t.co/QKKGbktQF0

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 20, 2022

For curious minds, one explanation to consider is revealed through extensive pre-COVID-19 research establishing that people’s immune systems are weakened by some vaccines. Just a few examples among many:

• 2011 study: Annual vaccination for influenza “may render young children who have not previously been infected with influenza more susceptible to infection with a pandemic influenza virus of a novel subtype.”
• 2013 study: Vaccination may make flu worse if exposed to a second strain [as has been the case with COVID-19 for billions of people].
• 2018 study: Acute respiratory infections increase following vaccination. This study compared vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.

More recently, a Danish study of healthcare workers showed a massive increase in COVID-19 infection in the two weeks after the first shot.

Aware of this Danish study, The BMJ published a letter calling for an urgent investigation:

“Given the evidence of white cell depletion after COVID vaccination and the evidence of increased COVID infection rates shortly after vaccination, the possibility that the two are causally related needs urgent investigation.”

The Danish study showed “a 40% increase in infections in the first two weeks after Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination, despite not vaccinating in homes with recent outbreaks,” meaning they knew it wasn’t because people happened to already be infected at the time they were vaccinated.

The 40% number comes up again, in The BMJ letter:

“The original Pfizer trial demonstrated a statistically significant 40% increase in suspected COVID.”

Looking for a more comfortable answer to the sad riddle, some people might speculate that the deaths you’ve seen on all those graphs occurred because people became less cautious after vaccination.

The BMJ considered and discounted that theory, citing several studies that show increased infections in the weeks after vaccination, and pointing out the example of care home residents, who actually shielded more after vaccination:

“No one is suggesting there was a change of behaviour within care homes. However, care homes in every corner of the country saw outbreaks from December. What changed?”

Excellent question. Obvious answer.

If these new Pharma products had been bound by the same laws as all other Pharma products, their TV commercials would have to end with the familiar announcer hurriedly rushing through side effects:

COVID-19 vaccines will leave some people more vulnerable to infection and sickness. Some people will experience side effects including cardiac arrest, blood clots, stroke and sudden death.

It wouldn’t make for a very good sales pitch.

Of course, Pfizer and Moderna didn’t need any sales pitch for these vaccines — since the products were developed, ordered, purchased, promoted, defended, indemnified and even mandated by our own government.

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First published by Global Research on May 19, 2013

Image Patrice Lumumba

Five decades since the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) while the Pentagon and NATO escalates its war drive on the continent

The following lecture was delivered at the Africa & U.S. Imperialism Conference held in Detroit on May 18, 2013. The event was sponsored by the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI)

May 25, 2013 represents the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the forerunner of the present African Union which formed in 2002. This conference today is taking place at a critical time within the history of Africa and the Diaspora.

Even though there has been tremendous progress in Africa and throughout the African world since 1963, the imperialists have devised mechanism to continue and expand the exploitation and consequent oppression of African people on the continent and indeed throughout Europe, North America and Latin America. This conference sends congratulatory messages to the AU in the midst of this anniversary.

We are following the situation surrounding the summit which begins on May 19 and extends through May 27. The meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is being held under the theme of “Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance,” in an attempt to return the continental organization back to its political origins born in the ferment of the African revolutionary struggle of the 1960s.

According to the description on the African Union website publicizing the 21st Summit of the AU, it says that

“The year 2013 marks the 50th anniversary celebration of the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). It will also be a little more than a decade since the formation of the African Union, which seeks to promote ‘an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena.’ Consequently, the Heads of State declared 2013 the Year of Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance.”

This same synopsis goes on to say that

“The anniversary is expected to facilitate and celebrate African narratives of past, present and future that will enthuse and energize the African population and use their constructive energy to accelerate a forward looking agenda of Pan-Africanism and renaissance in the 21st century. It provides a unique opportunity, and comes at a moment when Africa is on the rise, and must therefore build its confidence in its future. The 50th Anniversary commemorations will be anchored by the Theme Pan Africanism and the African Renaissance.” (AU website)

During the course of the following days through the Pan-African News Wire we will cover the deliberations and addresses extensively to provide the African world and the international community in general with the most comprehensive review of developments taking place in Addis Ababa. The peoples of Africa scattered throughout the globe are intensely awaiting the outcome of the summit in order to gain clearer insight into the character of the thinking and actions being advanced by the heads-of-state and other leading organs of this esteemed institution.

Nonetheless, our purpose here today is to reflect on the significance of the history of Africa and the African liberation struggles that have evolved over the last five decades. Where have we been and where are we going into the successive decades of the 21st century must be the questions that are paramount in our minds.

African Heads of State. Foundation of the OAU in May 1963

The Post World War II Political Situation

It has been acknowledged by the leading progressive and revolutionary African historians that the advent of the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialism shaped the character of African societies throughout the world. Beginning in the 15th century, Africa engaged Europe coming out of the so-called “Dark Ages”, a society and culture desperately seeking to advance its own internal development at the expense of other peoples around the globe.

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, millions of Africans were subjected to super-exploitation through slavery and colonialism. This period in the history of the continent spawned the conquering by Europe of the Western hemisphere and the building of an industrial empire which intensified the exploitation of both the indigenous people of the West as well as those of the African continent, Asia and the South Pacific.

Africans and other oppressed peoples of course resisted the onslaught of slavery and colonialism with vigor. History today is revealing even more detailed accounts of the heroic role that Africans played in the struggle against imperialism in its infancy and continuing into its maturity and consequent devolution under the present system of neo-colonialism.

All exploitative and oppressed systems meet resistance from within leading to the organization and mobilization of the forces which are victimized by the ruling interests within the society. These internal struggles along with challenges from the outside result in the transformation of the system into something different that could be an advance or a step backward in the development of humanity.

Although imperialism attempted to create a system of exploitation and oppression that was insulated from internal and external attacks, these efforts proved to be futile. By the conclusion of World War I, national liberation movements and communist tendencies were well in evidence in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and colonialism.

Rebellions and revolutionary uprisings spread throughout North America, Europe, Africa and Asia beginning in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, the first total overthrow of capitalism and the replacement of this exploitative system with socialism which is based upon empowering the working class and the oppressed.

The 1920s saw additional uprising and attempts to build a worldwide alliance between national liberation movements and socialist parties. By the conclusion of the 1920s, the capitalist world would fall into its worst economic crisis which lasted for over twelve years until the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941.

This collapse of the capitalist system during the 1930s would also lead to the spreading of fascism in Europe and Japan. However, the fight against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s brought to the fore the communist and national liberation organizations which served as the decisive factor in the outcome of the war in 1945.

Beginning in 1945 the communist and national liberation movements accelerated their efforts aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and colonialism leading to decisive victories in Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and eventually China. By 1947, India had gained its independence from British imperialism and the African continent had begun popular uprising aimed at breaking the yolk of colonial rule.

The aftermath of World War II resulted in the dominance of the U.S. ruling class throughout the capitalist world. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan had experienced extensive fighting within its borders during the 1930s and 1940s leaving the U.S. unscathed by the military impact of the war.

The Soviet Union which had experienced some of the most intense fighting during 1942 and 1943 at the “Battle of Stalingrad” emerged from World War II as a major power internationally only second in military might and political strength to U.S. imperialism. Socialism spread throughout Eastern Europe during this period and the people of Yugoslavia had largely liberated themselves through their resistance to fascism where they later would establish a socialist system.

Despite the devastation of World War II and the founding of the United Nations in 1945 whose objective in part was to avoid another international conflagration, war erupted on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 after the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. The DPRK and the people of China under Mao Tse-Tung fought to preserve their national sovereignty and socialism in Asia.

By 1954, the people of Vietnam defeated French imperialism forcing the U.S. to take total responsibility for the continued occupation of the south of that Southeast Asian nation. That same year, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) began its armed struggle against French imperialism in North Africa, where it had occupied the country since 1830.

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Ghana independence struggle through the Convention People’s Party (CPP), founded on June 12, 1949, and the chief strategist and tactician of the African Revolution between the late 1940s and the time of his death in 1972, pointed out that the movements led by Africans against colonialism and imperialism were not isolated but very much connected with the global struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination. Nkrumah placed the rising tide of the African liberation movements and the struggle for socialism on the continent within the context of the worldwide efforts against all forms of exploitation and oppression.

Nkrumah wrote that “A number of external factors affect the African situation, and if our liberation struggle is to be placed in correct perspective and we are to KNOW THE ENEMY, the impact of these factors must be fully grasped. First among them is imperialism, for it is mainly against exploitation and poverty that our peoples revolt.” (Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, p. 1, 1968)

This Pan-Africanist revolutionary leader continues by pointing out that

“It is therefore of paramount importance to set out the strategy of imperialism in clear terms: the means used by the enemy to ensure the continued economic exploitation of our territories and the nature of the attempts made to destroy the liberation movement. Once the components of the enemy’s strategy are determined, we will be in a position to outline the correct strategy for our own struggle in terms of our actual situation and in accordance with our objectives.” (Nkrumah, p. 2)

With specific reference to the period after World War II, Nkrumah observes that

“after the war, serious economic, social and political tensions arose in both spheres” being the colonial territories and the industrialized capitalist states in Europe and North America. He notes that “Inside the capitalist-imperialist states, workers’ organizations had become comparatively strong and experienced, and the claims of the working class for a more substantial share of the wealth produced by the capitalist economy could no longer be ignored. The necessity to concede had become all the more imperative since the European capitalist system had been seriously shaken up by the near-holocaust which marked the experience of imperialist wars.”

During the same time period, he continues that

“While the capitalist system of exploitation was coming to grips with its internal crisis, the world’s colonized areas were astir with the upsurge of strong liberation movements. Here again, demands could no longer be cast aside or ignored especially when they were channeled through irresistible mass movements, like the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), the Parti Democratique de Guinee (PDG) and the Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP) in Ghana. In certain areas, for example in Vietnam, Kenya and Algeria, direct confrontation demonstrated the readiness of the oppressed peoples to implement their claims with blood and fire.”

Nkrumah stresses that “Both in the colonial territories and in the metropolitan states, the struggle was being waged against the same enemy: international finance capital under its external and internal forms of exploitation, imperialism and capitalism. Threatened with disintegration by the double-fisted attack of the working class movement and the liberation movement, capitalism had to launch a series of reforms in order to build a protective armor around the inner workings of its system.”

Within the U.S. during the late 1940s through the 1970s, a deliberate division was institutionalized between the white working class and middle classes and the African American people, most of whom were working class with a shrinking number of farmers and agricultural proletarians in the rural areas. The advent of the mass Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s served to crack open the cloak of McCarthyism and bring broader sections of the oppressed into the struggle against racism and national discrimination.

By 1960, the student sector of the African American people would take the lead as the most militant force in the struggle against legalized segregation. These efforts by the youth led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and others awakened a generation of young people within the Latino, Native and Asian communities along with their counterparts inside the white community. A culture of resistance and protracted programmatic struggle was born which was able to challenge U.S. imperialist militarism in Southeast Asia and in other parts of the world.

There developed during this period a movement against the status-quo which had not been experienced since the height of the Great Depression of 1929-1941. The role of the Left in building resistance to capitalist exploitation and racism created the conditions for the general strikes of 1934 and the subsequent formation of the Committee on Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Autoworkers Union (UAW).

The period of struggle between the Great Depression–interrupted with the force of the state during the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s–and the burgeoning mass movements of the late 1950s leading into the early 1970s, opened up new avenues of struggle which threatened the ruling class and its system of exploitation. In response the system embarked upon a period of major restructuring by the mid-to-late 1970s which was specifically designed to preserve and enhance the world capitalist system.

Of this period, Nkrumah wrote that

“To avoid an internal breakdown of the system under the pressure of the workers’ protest movement, the governments of capitalist countries granted their workers certain concessions which did not endanger the basic nature of the capitalist system of exploitation. They gave them social security, higher wages, better working conditions, professional training facilities, and other improvements. (Nkrumah, p. 4)

Nkrumah points out that

“These reforms helped to blur fundamental contradictions, and to remove some of the more glaring injustices while at the same time ensuring the continued exploitation of the workers. The myth was established of an affluent capitalist society promising abundance and a better life for all. The basic aim, however, was the establishment of a ‘welfare state’ as the only safeguard against the threat of fascism or communism.”

Nevertheless, the objective was to maintain the system of ever-increasing profits for the banks and other multi-national corporations. Even with the establishment of the so-called “Welfare State” in Western Europe and North America in the aftermath of World War II extending through the early 1970s, the system of exploitation and oppression remained intact.

The world capitalist and imperialist system extended reforms not only inside the industrialized states but also within the oppressed nations outside its borders. The system began to depend to greater degrees on the extraction of strategic resources from Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as the exploitation of labor in these geo-political regions.

In assessing this strategy by imperialism, Nkrumah said that

“The urgent need for such reforms was made clear by the powerful growth and expansion of the liberation forces in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where revolutionary movements had not only seized power but were actually consolidating their gains. Developments in the USSR, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, and in Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Algeria and other parts of Africa, showed that not only was the world balance of forces shifting, but that the capitalist-imperialist states were confronted with a real danger of encirclement.” (p. 5)

Some Concrete Examples in the National Liberation Revolution

The imperialist states utilized its extensive resources and networks of global finance and political intrigue to undermine the independent African states as well as the Civil Rights, Black Power, Anti-War, Women and Left movements inside the U.S. and Western Europe. In this section we want to briefly review some of these developments which occurred between the 1950s and the 1990s in Africa and throughout the Diaspora.

These events can in no way be separated from trends within the world capitalist system. Africa is still very much integrated into the networks of finance capital making the continent dependent upon mineral extraction and the extension of credit from Western financial institutions for survival.

Ghana: The Fountainhead of Pan-Africanism

Kwame Nkrumah studied in the U.S. during 1935-1945 when he went to Britain to work with George Padmore in the organization of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in October of 1945. The outcome of the Fifth Pan-African Congress which was chaired by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, led to the mass mobilization of the workers, farmers and youth of Africa for the national independence movement.

The Gold Coast in 1951 established a transitional government after Nkrumah was released from prison in order to move toward national independence in 1957. Nkrumah placed tremendous emphasis on state spending for education, social services, healthcare, economic plans for industrialization and unconditional support for the national liberation movements in other parts of Africa and the Diaspora along with a stated aim of building socialism in Ghana and throughout the continent.

The First Conference of Independent African States was held in Accra in April 1958 bringing together the peoples of Africa both north and south of the Sahara. In December of that same year, the First All-African People’s Conference was also held in Accra, bringing revolutionary Pan-African deliberations to the continent itself.

By 1960, when Ghana became a Republic, Nkrumah and the CPP had committed to building a socialist state where the formation of a United States of Africa was the principle foreign policy objective of the government. These actions were met with tremendous opposition by imperialism led by the U.S. in league with internal reactionaries who succeeded in overthrowing the Ghana state on February 24, 1966 through a military and police coup.

Nkrumah took refuge in Guinea where he had made an alliance with the ruling Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) in 1958 at the time of independence under President Ahmed Sekou Toure. Nkrumah was made Co-President of the country and continued to write and organize for the realization of Pan-Africanism and Scientific Socialism in Africa.

Guinea followed similar policies as Ghana through state control of the economy and an anti-imperialist foreign policy. Like Ghana under Nkrumah, Guinea under Sekou Toure gave maximum support to the national liberation movements and progressive states on the continent.

Guinea played a key role in the liberation of neighboring Guinea-Bissau which waged an armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism and NATO during the period of 1961 to 1973. Nkrumah after the coup placed more emphasis on the class struggle taking place throughout Africa as is reflected in his writing published after 1966.

Algeria and the Armed Phase of the African Revolution

The FLN triumphed in its national campaign to win independence in 1962. What is often overlooked is the support given to Ben Bella and the Algerian revolutionaries by the All-African People’s Conference and in particular the independent government of Mali under President Modibo Keita.

The opening of a southern front in Algeria after 1960 ensured the success of the revolutionaries. Dr. Frantz Fanon, an African born in the Caribbean, Martinique, played a critical role in the foreign policy of the FLN during the late 1950s to 1961 when he died of cancer.

Algeria provided the first military training to the African National Congress military leaders known as Um Khonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) co-founded by Nelson Mandela. In fact when Mandela was arrested in 1962 he was charged with leaving the country to undergo military training in Algeria.

Algeria is rich in natural gas and oil and is strategically located in North Africa. The split within the FLN in 1965 leading to the coup against Ben Bella, although tragic, did not result in lessening the country’s commitment to the African Revolution.

Algeria played a key role in apprehending and liquidating the CIA-backed neo-colonialist agent Moise Tshombe of Congo. In 1967 Tshombe was captured and later died in an Algerian prison two years later.

In 1969, Algeria hosted the Pan-African Cultural Festival which re-ignited the international struggle of Black people in the aftermath of the coup against Nkrumah three years earlier. That same year, Algeria would grant political asylum to the Black Panther Party, then under vicious attack by the U.S. government through its counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO).

The Black Panther Party set up an international section in Algiers and remained there until 1972. Algeria continued to support the national liberation movements in the still-colonized regions of the continent.

The Congo Crisis and the Consolidation of Neo-Colonialism in Africa

Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the former Belgian Congo made his international debut at the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana held during December 1958. Lumumba would win the support of the majority of people within Congo in his efforts to build revolutionary Pan-Africanism and a United States of Africa.

The imperialists saw developments in Congo in 1959-1960 as a threat to its neo-colonial designs for post-independence Africa. Lumumba was soon deposed, kidnapped, tortured and executed at the aegis of the CIA and other Western states.

For over three decades Congo remained within the orbit of imperialism serving as a vast reservoir for exploitation of its natural resources by the multi-national mining firms and international finance capital. Under Mobutu it also served as a rear base for the imperialists in their efforts to stifle and defeat the genuine liberation movements fighting for the total liberation of Southern Africa which was not realized until 1994 with the coming to power of the African National Congress in South Africa under Nelson Mandela.

Today, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains a bastion of Western intrigue and exploitation. Whole sections of the large country are still not under the control of the central government in Kinshasa.

Since 1996, it has been estimated that as many as six million people have been killed in the DRC through civil wars that are largely the result of imperialist intervention. This pattern of mass killings has its origins in Belgian colonialism where under King Leopold II, anywhere between 8-10 million were slaughtered between 1876 and 1908.

The OAU Compromise of 1963

With the efforts of the imperialist states to sabotage the African Revolution there developed to major political blocs on the continent after the Congo crisis of 1960-61. The Casablanca Group was composed of the anti-imperialist states committed to Pan-Africanism and the Monrovia Group, which encompassed the moderate and conservative forces still wedded politically to the former colonial powers and the now dominate U.S. government.

Nkrumah described the new situation in Africa as “collective imperialism.” He wrote that

“The modifications introduced by imperialism in its strategy were expressed through the disappearance of the numerous old-fashioned ‘colonies’ owing exclusive allegiance to a single metropolitan country through the replacement of ‘national’ imperialisms by a ‘collective’ imperialism in which the USA occupies the leading position.” (Handbook, p. 5)

He later goes on to highlight that “The militarization of the U.S. economy, based on the political pretext of the threatening rise of the USSR and later of the People’s Republic of China as socialist powers, enabled the U.S. to postpone its internal crisis, first during the ‘hot’ war (1939-1945) and then the during the ‘cold’ war (since 1945). “ (p. 6)

Nkrumah says that

“Militarization served two main purposes, it absorbed, and continues to absorb, an excess of unorganized energy into the intense armaments drive which supports imperialist aggression and many blocs and alliances formed by imperialist powers over the last twenty years. It also made possible an expensive policy of paternalistic corruption of the poor and oppressed people of the world.” (p. 7)

The formation of the OAU brought together both the majority of moderate and conservative states with the smaller number of anti-imperialist governments led by Egypt, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Tanzania and Algeria. Such a compromise would limit the capacity of the continental organization to take a firm position against imperialism and neo-colonialism, the major enemy of the African Revolution.

Despite these limitations Nkrumah continued to call for the formation of a United States of Africa. In 1963 at the founding summit of the OAU, Nkrumah distributed his newly-completed book entitled “Africa Must Unite” in an effort to wage ideological struggle against imperialism and its agents operating within various states on the continent.

A chapter entitled “Towards African Unity” it states that

“There are those who maintain that Africa cannot unite because we lack the three necessary ingredients for unity, a common race, culture and language. It is true that we have for centuries been divided. The territorial boundaries dividing us were fixed long ago, often quite arbitrarily, by the colonial powers.”(Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, p. 132)

Yet Nkrumah goes on to stress that “All this is inevitable due to our historical background. Yet in spite of this I am convinced that the forces making for unity far outweigh those which divide us. In meeting fellow Africans from all parts of the continent I am constantly impressed by how much we have in common. It is not just our colonial past, or the fact that we have aims in common, it is something which goes far deeper. I can best describe it as a sense of one-ness in that we are Africans.”

In this book a strong emphasis is placed on the successes of the Soviet Union and China in regard to economic development. Nkrumah attributes these advances in the socialist states to national unity, state planning and the empowerment of the working class and the peasantry.

He rightfully observes that the development of Western Europe and the United States was based upon centuries of enslavement and colonization of Africa and other regions of the world. The fact that Africa needs to develop rapidly and on an egalitarian basis rooted in collective planning, there is a chapter dedicated to Ghana’s commitment to socialist construction.

Also in 1964 and 1965, Nkrumah called for the formation of a United States of Africa at the OAU summits in Egypt and Accra respectively. This same theme was later taken up by Libya under Muammar Gaddafi through the Sirte Declaration of 1999 and the opening summit of the African Union in 2002 in South Africa.

OAU Liberation Committee: A Success Amid Challenges

Perhaps the most successful aspect of the OAU’s history between 1963 and the early 1990s was the Liberation Committee which coordinated continental and international assistance to the national liberation movements. The decolonization process would reach a watershed in 1975-76 with the attempted sabotage of the national independence of Angola by imperialism.

The divisions between the three liberation groups provided an opening for the U.S. in alliance with the-then racist apartheid regime based in South Africa and Namibia to intervene in coordination with the CIA to impose a reactionary leadership over the state. The appeal by Dr. Agostinho Neto, leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), to the Cuban government under President Fidel Castro resulted in the deployment of 55,000 Cuban internationalist forces.

These forces in cooperation with anti-imperialist states in Africa such as Guinea-Conakry resulted in the first military defeat of the racist South African Defense Forces in early 1976. Cuban internationalists remained in Angola until 1989 when a comprehensive agreement for the withdrawal of South African Defense Forces from the country and the liberation of Namibia along with the release of political prisoners in South Africa and the beginning of negotiations to end the apartheid system was assured.

Earlier in Zimbabwe, the armed revolutionary forces of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriot Front and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union-Patriotic Front led to the national independence of the country formerly known as Rhodesia in April 1980. Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Lesotho all served as rear bases for the ANC military and political forces which fought for the liberation of South Africa.

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) Reveal the Economic Face of Neo-Colonialism

After the overthrow of the CPP in Ghana in 1966, the country no longer took a progressive stand in regard to building socialism and Pan-Africanism on the continent. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank virtually took over the management of the state leading to the abandonment of state enterprises and the emphasis on industrialization and a progressive foreign policy.

By the 1980s this method of restructuring post-independence African states began to spread throughout the continent. In Ghana, the so-called Economic Recovery Program (ERP) was instituted in 1983 under military leader Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings who had come to power for a second time in a military coup on January 31, 1981.

The ERP would later be named the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) and these methods were managed by the IMF and the World Bank in various African states. Uganda, after the coming to power of National Resistance Army leader Yoweri Museveni, the East African state moved in the same direction as Ghana.

Both Ghana and Uganda had been at the forefront of the Pan-African states attempting to advance continental unity and socialism during the 1960s. Ghana under Nkrumah was closely allied with Uganda under President Milton Obote who was overthrown by Gen. Idi Amin in a Western-backed coup in 1971.

Today there are many reports that would suggest that Africa is undergoing and economic revival. Nonetheless, there is still a heavy reliance on foreign exchange earnings from exports and unemployment and poverty remains high although there has been a reduction in poverty in several states.

During the so-called “Arab Spring” of late 2010 and early 2011, the underlying causes of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria were related to the failure of these governments to provide employment to youth and workers in general. The governments of Tunisia and Egypt were forced to resign in January and February 2011 respectively where Algeria was able to weather the demonstrations which seemed to be related to the country’s long term positions that were independent of the West.

In Libya, even though the imperialists and the corporate press attempted to link the western-backed rebellion which erupted in February of 2011 to developments in Tunisia and Egypt, the character of these demonstrations quickly proved to be of a totally different character politically. When the Libyan rebellion took up arms against the Jamahiriya, the revolt was suppressed by the Gaddafi government.

Utilizing the successful military and political defense of the Jamahiriya as a pretext, the imperialist states rapidly went to the United Nations Security Council to pass two resolutions, 1970, placing an arms embargo on the Gaddafi government but not the CIA-trained rebels and defectors and 1973, which imposed a so-called “no-fly zone” over Libya which was a code name for a massive bombing operation that lasted for seven straights months and was carried out by the U.S. and NATO. In addition to an arms embargo and blanket bombing of Libya, the country foreign assets were frozen and the CIA was sent into the country to identify targets for aerial bombardment.

Several attempts were made on the lives of Gaddafi and his family during the course of the war. His family members were killed in airstrikes and eventually on October 20, 2011 Gaddafi’s convoy was struck by bombs in Sirte. He was later captured, brutally beaten, tortured and shot to death by an alleged militia group that was supported by the Pentagon, the CIA and NATO.

Since the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, the oil-rich North African state has sunk into chaos. Four U.S. CIA officers were killed in Benghazi last September 11 posing as Washington diplomats. The New York Times reported that the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the other three Americans was the greatest blow to the CIA in three decades.

AFRICOM-NATO and the Militarization of Africa

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was formed officially in early 2008 with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. Attempts to place the AFRICOM headquarters in Africa was met with substantial resistance from individual states and the African Union. However, the U.S. does have a military base in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti.

In addition to this base, there are drone stations, CIA stations and other joint operations between the U.S. and various African states in Somalia, Ethiopia, Seychelles, South Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana and other states. Obama announced in December of 2012 that his administration was dispatching 3,500 Special Forces and military trainers to 35 African states in purported efforts to assist in the fight against “terrorism.”

Yet the horrendous war crimes carried out by the U.S. under Obama gets relatively no opposition within the U.S. Congress even among the Congressional Black Caucus. In Libya some two million people were displaced and anywhere between 50,000-100,000 people were killed by the U.S.-NATO war of aggression and regime-change.

Thousands of Africans remain in post-Gaddafi Libyan jails that are run by militias who are given free reign by the U.S.-NATO backed General National Congress (GNC). An International Criminal Court (ICC) delegation which visited Libya during 2012 to investigate the conditions surrounding the detention of Seif al-Islam, the oldest son of Gaddafi and his heir apparent, was detained by the Zintan militia holding this political prisoner.

The ICC, commonly referred to as the “African Criminal Court” due to its sole preoccupation with African statesmen and rebel leaders, had indicted Gaddafi and members of his government during the imperialist war against Libya in 2011. These leaders were indicted on false charges related to the efforts to defend the country against the western-led rebels who had terrorized the country for months but have escaped the scrutiny of the ICC based in The Hague.

The United Nations and other international bodies have remained largely silent on the crimes against humanity being committed in counter-revolutionary Libya. This also holds true of developments in Somalia, where the CIA and the Pentagon has carried out drone and airstrikes that have resulted in the murder of thousands of people.

Africans have continued to resist the onslaught of AFRICOM and its surrogates on the continent. It was reported in May 2013 that at least 3,000 AMISOM troops have been killed in Somalia in efforts to attempt to suppress the resistance by Al Shabaab to imperialist-backed interference in this Horn of Africa state.

The wars in Libya and Somalia have spilled over into neighboring Mali, Niger and Kenya respectively. Kenya has 2,000-3,000 troops occupying southern Somalia at the aegis of the U.S.

The military intervention by the Pentagon, the CIA and NATO countries will escalate in the short term due to the growing strategic role Africa is playing within the world capitalist system. Throughout East and Central Africa there have been large finding of oil, natural gas and other strategic resources. At present at least 25 percent of the oil that is imported into the United States is coming from the African continent, which now exceeds the amount of petroleum that is exported to the U.S. from the entire Arabian Peninsula.

The Way Forward For Africa and the Diaspora

In order for Africa and its people to develop there must be decisive a break with the imperialist system of finance capital. With the deepening crisis of the world capitalism, the economic system is providing no real solutions to the problems of Africa, nor for its own peoples in Europe and North America.

Europe remains in deep recession with the countries of the South facing astronomical unemployment rates that exceed 25 percent. Even in France, Britain and Germany, the economic crisis has drained the national reserves compelling the central banks to bailout the financial institutions in order to stave off a total collapse.

In the U.S. the rates of poverty and unemployment in real terms are staggering. Nearly half of the people in the U.S. consider themselves to be living in poverty or near poverty.

This economic crisis has become a political one since the White House, Congress, Downing Street, Brussels and Paris are providing no alternative ideas on how to extricate the capitalist system from the economic malaise impacting hundreds of millions of workers, farmers and youth. The only proposals coming out of the halls of the ruling class and their surrogates in government call for greater austerity measures and mechanism to limit any semblance of democratic debate, discussion and collective action.

Our task relates to political education, mobilization and organization of the masses of people to work towards the solutions of these challenges. The crisis in Africa and the Diaspora is by no means isolated from the broader struggle of the peoples of the world.

In Africa there has been a tremendous degree of movement towards alliances with other states on the continent and throughout the so-called Global South. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has held five summits since 2000 resulting in an escalation of both economic and political cooperation between the two regions. Africa is now the largest trading partner with the People’s Republic of China.

In Zimbabwe the ZANU-PF government in 2000 took decisive action by seizing the land which the people fought long years for during the armed revolutionary struggle. The government of President Robert Mugabe was vilified by the West and its allies where today research has shown that the land seizures have improved both productivity and income for the African agricultural workers and farmers.

This experience in Zimbabwe is being looked at by other African states in the Southern Africa region and other areas. In South Africa and Namibia the masses of workers, youth and farmers long for the full realization of the objectives of the national democratic revolutions.

South Africa has the largest and most organized working class on the continent. The unrest in the mining industry and the agricultural sector is pushing the country towards looking at nationalization and seizure of the land and the means of production.

The African Union must take action to remove the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Israel and other imperialist states and their partners from the continent. The ongoing problems of Africa can be traced back to the dominance of the imperialist system throughout the continent.

With reference to the African Diaspora in North America and Europe, the struggle against racism and national oppression takes on critical significance. The forces of the African Diaspora, motivated by Pan-African ideals has and can continue to play a decisive role in the overall consolidation of the African independence movement and the move towards Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance.

Nkrumah in Africa Must Unite wrote that

“The expression ‘Pan-Africanism’ did not come into use until the beginning of the twentieth century when Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad, and William Edward Burghhardt Du Bois of the United States of America, both of African descent, used it at several Pan-African Congresses which were mainly attended by scholars of African descent. A notable contribution to African nationalism and Pan-Africanism was the ‘Back to Africa’ movement of Marcus Garvey.” (p. 133)

Since 1963, the African American and Caribbean African people have played a pivotal role in the struggle to popularize the concept of African liberation. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Southern African solidarity struggle influenced by African Americans brought into existence the first legislative and administrative actions against the apartheid regime.

With the advent of the Obama administration the need to emphasize a class character to the Pan-African struggle is essential. Africa is not the backyard of U.S. imperialism and must be given the opportunity to exercise full and genuine independence and sovereignty.

In the U.S. the cities in which African Americans reside are facing monumental economic crisis and the evisceration of political power won through the popular struggles of the post-World War II period. Principled alliances with progressive African states and mass organizations will provide avenues for the struggle to eradicate underdevelopment and neo-colonialism from the continent and among the oppressed nations held captive by the West.

Therefore as Nkrumah stressed in the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare “African unity implies that imperialism and foreign oppression should be eradicated in all their forms. That neo-colonialism should be recognized and eliminated and that the new African nation must develop within a continental framework.” (p. 27)

Nkrumah goes on to say that “At the core of the concept of African unity lies socialism and the socialist definition of the new African society. Socialism and African unity are organically complementary. There is only one true socialism and that is scientific socialism, the principles of which are abiding and universal. “(p. 29)

Short of revolutionary Pan-Africanism based on scientific socialism, Africans and their allies throughout the world must work toward defining and exercising the maximum degree of organization and mobilization aimed at the transformation of capitalist society and the world imperialist system. These are the lessons of the last five decades and they must be assessed in order to move forward with the total liberation of Africa and its people.

Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire

The lecture was delivered at the Africa & U.S. Imperialism Conference held in Detroit on May 18, 2013. The event was sponsored by the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) and also featured presentations by Atty. Jeff Edison of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, Dr. Rita Kiki Edozie, Director of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Cheick Oumar and Moussa Rimau, two graduate students at MSU from Mali, Tachae J. Davis of Workers World Youth Fraction and a student at Macomb Community College. A special address was delivered by the Venezuelan Consulate in Chicago Jesus Rodriguez Espinoza. To watch the video of the address delivered by the Venezuelan diplomat just click on the website below:

(Part 1)

(Part 2)  

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The Iranian-Saudi rapprochement presents Pakistan with some unexpected challenges that it arguably would have been in a much better position to deal with had last year’s post-modern coup not taken place. The past 11 months have crippled its capability to respond to game-changers such as this one, which means that it’ll probably miss out on the opportunities connected with this black swan event while remaining at risk of sliding further into regional isolation.

The Chinese-mediated Iranian-Saudi rapprochement is unquestionably a positive development for all members of the international community apart from the US and Israel, both of which have a stake in dividing-and-ruling West Asia by indefinitely perpetuating those two’s rivalry. Pakistan had previously been victimized by their competition so it makes perfect sense why it praised their unexpected reconciliation, but it might also struggle to adapt to the new grand strategic reality that it created.

On the one hand, Pakistan is now no longer tacitly conceived by either of them as an object of rivalry against the other, within whose territory they previously competed with their counterpart by proxy. This will in turn relieve enormous pressure on that country at one of its most sensitive security moments in decades characterized by unprecedented political polarization, rising terrorist attacks from Baloch sub-nationalists and the TTP, and an ever-worsening economic-financial crisis.

On the other hand, however, there’s an inadvertent chance in the short-term that the Baloch aspect of its security challenges might worsen. The Cradle, which is a popular Alt-Media outlet with exclusive sources known for their reliability, cited an unnamed individual who was part of the Beijing-based negotiations to report that one of the hidden security clauses agreed to was that Riyadh “pledges not to fund organizations designated as terrorists by Iran, such as…militants operating out of Pakistan.”

This can be understood as a reference to Jundallah, an extremist group that operates out of Pakistan’s Balochistan region allegedly with the tacit approval of that country’s military leadership and which has been previously accused by Iran of being a Saudi proxy. Upon being cut off by Riyadh and out of work, its fighters might join other extremists like the TTP or sub-nationalists like the BLA unless Islamabad successfully detains them first or begins their disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.

It can’t be taken for granted that the post-modern coup regime that came to power last April will do so, however, since it’s irresponsibly redirected a significant share of the security services’ attention from preemptively addressing those threats to persecuting their peaceful political opponents. That’s one of the reasons for the upsurge of terrorism across the country in the past 11 months, and it’s unlikely to be rectified in a timely enough fashion even if the political will was present (which it isn’t) to deal with this.

Failure to proactively address the abrupt rise of unemployed anti-Iranian militants could further exacerbate Pakistan’s already difficult security challenges in the coming future, thus contributing to its cascading crises that are pushing that geostrategically positioned country closer to the brink of chaos. Not only that, but it can no longer take the scenario of Saudi bailouts for granted either since the Kingdom appears poised to invest more in Iran than in Pakistan going forward.

The Iranian-Saudi rapprochement will unlock the North-South Transport Corridor’s (NSTC) maximum potential by connecting the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to this promising series of Eurasian megaprojects between Russia and India that run through the Islamic Republic. This is the official assessment of influential Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky, which he shared with his country’s publicly financed international media flagship TASS.

Pakistan can “piggyback” on these projects by using them to comprehensively enhance its connectivity with Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia, which would align with the geo-economic grand strategy promulgated by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, but economic stability and political will are the prerequisites. Both are presently lacking, however, which reduces the chances that it’ll benefit from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC’s participation in the NSTC anytime soon.

With the Kingdom likely to focus more on mutually beneficial Iranian investments than on dumping billions into seemingly never-ending Pakistani bailouts that haven’t ever brought it anything in return, Islamabad will predictably become more dependent on the US-controlled IMF. China will always provide the bare minimum required to keep Pakistan afloat in the worst-case scenario, but even it seems to be getting cold feed nowadays for a variety of reasons, thus meaning that US influence might further grow.

About that, last year’s post-modern coup restored American suzerainty over Pakistan to a large degree, which now makes that country a regional anomaly in the geopolitical sense considering the broader region’s drift away from that declining unipolar hegemon. The very fact that previously US-aligned Saudi Arabia patched up its seemingly irreconcilable problems with Iran as a result of Chinese mediation reinforces this factual observation. Pakistan now stands alone as the broader region’s only US vassal.

That country’s military leaders will predictably try to leverage this to their benefit, both personally as well as in terms of what they believe (whether rightly or wrongly) is the national interest, but the power asymmetry is obviously in the US’ favor and therefore places Pakistan at a supreme disadvantage. It’ll thus probably continue being exploited and led down the counterproductive path charted by last year’s post-modern coup due to Pakistan’s desperate hunger for the carrot of American financial aid.

Just like international perceptions of Pakistan will continue moving in a negative direction due to its status as the broader region’s only US vassal, so too will domestic ones of its post-modern coup regime as a result of the counterproductive path that its patron will continue leading it down. Political polarization will expectedly spike with uncertain consequences for stability considering the brutal methods that the authorities have employed for persecuting peaceful protesters.

Their perception management efforts will also be dealt a blow by the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement since The Cradle’s previously mentioned source also reported that neither party will “engage in any activity that destabilizes either state, at the security, military or media levels.” This is only relevant in the Pakistani context to Saudi Arabia’s clandestine funding of anti-Iranian propagandists who coincidentally happen to be the post-modern coup regime’s loudest supporters.

The authorities turned a blind eye to the activities of these literal foreign influence agents as a quid pro quo for their support against the opposition, but now this increasingly bankrupt country is forced into the dilemma of either having to foot the bill for their propaganda or have them shill for someone else. Levers of pressure might be exploited to coerce them into remaining loyal despite the cut in their pay if the regime replaces the Saudis as their boss, but others might still work elsewhere or even emigrate.

For all the reasons shared in this analysis, the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement presents Pakistan with some unexpected challenges that it arguably would have been in a much better position to deal with had last year’s post-modern coup not taken place. The past 11 months have crippled its capability to respond to game-changers such as this one, which means that it’ll probably miss out on the opportunities connected with this black swan event while remaining at risk of sliding further into regional isolation.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Transcript

On March 6, Seymour “Sy” Hersh spoke about the Nord Stream explosion on September 26, 2022. He reveals in his substack how it was the result of Washington Administration authorizing C4 explosives be planted on the pipelines in June under the cover of a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, and then setting them off using a signal from a sonar buoy dropped on the surface. Hersh discusses the discussion of the sabotage at the UN, the decline of his brand of journalism in mainstream media and more!

Watch on bitchute 

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh is an investigative journalist and a political writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre and the cover-up. At the New York Times he covered the Watergate scandal, the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program on Domestic spying. He has written eleven books and has also won a record five George Polk awards, and two National Magazine Awards.

Select quotes from the interview:

“When they’re talking about two dark ships, they’re talking about images, electronic pulses. And I can tell you that, on a mission like this – I’ve actually asked that question – open-source becomes a great asset, because you can make up anything.

“People in the intelligence community, that I know of, this is – the NSA, the National Security Agency was involved in this too, the mission to build – to give the President an option to bomb the pipelines. They could have recreated a major Japanese task force scheming towards Hawaii, you know, for Pearl Harbor, you know. They could have created anything they wanted in the water. So, when you start talking about, ‘They couldn’t track this and they couldn’t track that,’ they’re just ignoring the possibility that there are people that know exactly what an open-source intelligence does. And rather than ignore it, you use it as part of a cover. Of course he didn’t have his transponder on, of course he wasn’t seen, of course the ship, the Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper, whatever it was – it could have been squawking on a different frequency. It turns out, when you’re given a code, detonating code, you have to punch in the code. But you can punch in any code in an emergency, you don’t have to punch in your own. You could fake it up, it’s that simple.”

…

” I’ve been in this business for 50 or 60 years and I’ve never had anybody that – who talked to me ever get in trouble.”

…

“You know, the President, when he went to Kyiv he took a walk in mid-day. And you know what happened? The bombing alarm signal, the sirens that indicated a Russian bombing was coming, a Russian attack – their warning signal, I guess, I forget. In World War II – I don’t know what they called it – you know, the sirens would ring. And it hadn’t rung in 10 days before, and it – I know for a few days afterwards it hadn’t rung. But when they were taking the walk, the warning signals came on of an imminent air attack. And you know what I say? I say, if I’d been a reporter I would have said to the White House, ‘Did you guys set it up so it rang when he was walking in mid-day in the middle of Kyiv so he could look more heroic?’ But that’s what I basically – that’s the only explanation I have for it. Because there was no air raid. So, here comes all these air raid sirens and the press all writes about it. It’s amazing.”

…

“If I had a chance to ask a question of Mr. Biden…I would just say…’why don’t you just test the American intelligence community to do a deep study and tell you who did it?’ Because we monitor everything, we could find out who did it. You could ask the guy who runs the intelligence – for the Director of National Intelligence – has access to everything. Everything: covert, non-covert, signals. The CIA has a branch called the Directorate of Intelligence that does great work. And another lower level if you have a group in the field like there was in Norway, at that time there/s a special unit in the CIA that – and an agency that monitors even local phone calls to make sure they’re still covert, they’re not being exposed. Or somebody’s neighbour is saying there’s something funny going down, you know, across the street. Of course they’re on an island, but still. Why didn’t they ask that question?”

…

“Well, of course they’re going to want to downplay it because they obviously know what happened and can’t admit they know. The whole purpose of – you have to know historically, since the Kennedy days there’s been an enormous amount of worry of America in the Cold War in our days of containment – that was the big theory, containment – containing the evil spread of communism or the spread of evil communism. And so, they’ve always been worried about the enormous reserves of Russian gas and oil that they were selling to Western Europe even back then. And pipelines were just beginning to go into Europe and there was a lot of stuff coming through Ukraine. And there was a lot of worry – constantly phrased, again and again – about Russia weaponizing its gas, cheap gas, and oil for sale to Germany and Europe in order to get some leverage with them. And maybe it diminished the power of NATO, diminished the cohesiveness. Western Europe has no gas or oil, they get raw materials from elsewhere.”

…

“In Stalingrad, the last Stalingrad, the Russians lost 2,400 dead and wounded every four hours and they beat Germany, the Nazis then. They’re not going to lose that war, they’re not going to win that war. And so, I think by Fall that was clear to everybody and I think Biden and his zeal to keep the war going because it was politically useful to him. Americans, we love our Presidents at war. I think at that point he chose to destroy the pipeline so that Chancellor Scholz, who controls – and that’s the second pipeline called Nord Stream 2 – he controlled – he had shut it down at the request from us, he sanctioned it. It was full of gas, 750 miles of methane gas, that’s why there was such a big outpouring of gas. It hadn’t started delivering yet, it was just frozen. He had the – or the chance to unfreeze it. I think Biden decided to take that away from him. And I think, ultimately, that’s going to be the big problem for Biden, particularly maybe next winter if it’s a bad winter.”

…

“The politics of the destruction of the gas line, whether it’s an act of war or what, but it was a slap in the face of Europe. Saying, you know, ‘If you’re not going to play ball with me and Ukraine –’ says the President, ‘–I don’t care what happens there.’ ‘I don’t care if it’s going to be harder to keep your people wealthy and warm,’ basically that’s what he’s done. And that’s the real input of the story.”

…

“It’s as if what I hear from people who write me, who read stuff from the Substack and other places, is that they understood that this kind of journalism did exist and has existed before. They just weren’t seeing enough of it. I mean, we actually had a story that the New York Times ran on Page 1 for two days about two or three years ago when the Afghan War was still going on. And there were occasions where the Aghans would shoot an American, because they were very angry at what happened there. The Afghan army wasn’t happy with our total control of most things there. And so, one of the stories said that Afghan soldiers – quoting anonymous sources, speaking of anonymous sources – that the Kremlin was paying bounties to Afghan soldiers that killed an American GI on duty in Afghanistan. And that story disappeared because it was a complete fraud. But when you run that kind of stuff, you really lose credibility, you know, that kind of madness.”

…

“I guess they think it doesn’t – you know, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, wouldn’t go to a meeting with his peers in China because of a balloon….Weather balloon or whatever it was. I mean, a balloon? He cancelled a meeting because he was – they’re just, you know… They’re just children. And this is a really serious business. And I’m sorry, about the President’s leadership isn’t there on this issue.”

…

“And so, I come to My Lai 10 years later as a police reporter and I worked for the United Press covering a State House in South Dakota which was fun. I’d never been there. I spent the winter in South Dakota. And then I worked for the AP in Chicago where I had a great time. And then, in Washington where I had covered the War. Covered the Pentagon. And then, a couple years later I do My Lai. And I’m 11 years out of college. I know no rich people. And I do this story sticking two fingers to the My Lai story about a massacre that was covered up by everybody: Kissinger, Nixon, you name ‘em. And Westmoreland, who ran the War. I’m sticking two fingers in the eye of a sitting president, Richard Nixon. And in many countries in the world, I would’ve been in a gulag for doing that. Not here.”

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A sustained violent attack by hundreds of Jewish settlers on the Palestinian town of Huwwara last week – as well as the response of Israel’s new far-right government – has divided Jewish opinion in Israel and deeply discomfited Jews abroad.

The Board of Deputies, which claims to represent Britain’s Jewish community and is usually a reliable defender of Israel, felt compelled last week to issue a short statement condemning comments by a senior Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, after he called for Huwwara to be “wiped out”.

At the weekend, the distinguished British historian Simon Schama described the events in Huwwara as “absolutely, utterly horrifying” and urged fellow Jews to speak up.

He was joined by Margaret Hodge, a veteran Labour MP who was at the forefront of attacks on the party’s previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over his activism in solidarity with Palestinians. She said Israel was at a “dangerous moment” and British Jews could not just “stand by”.

Even Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli army commander whose soldiers allowed the settlers to rampage, described the attack as a “pogrom”, a word with especially troubling connotations for Jews. It is historically associated with massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities in eastern Europe that served as a prelude to the Nazi Holocaust.

But Palestinians don’t need very belated sympathy from Israel or its supporters, least of all from the Israeli army, any more than they need empty calls for “restraint” and “calm” from western capitals.

What they need is genuine solidarity and real international protections, all the more so as the appeal of overt religious fascism sweeps across Israel. Instead, much of the rhetoric in the wake of the attack, even if it is well-meant, misleads far more than it clarifies.

Reign of terror

On 26 February, a mob of several hundred settlers stormed Huwwara and spent several hours terrorising the local inhabitants, looting and burning homes and cars.

A Palestinian man was shot dead during the events, and some 100 other Palestinians were injured. Videos show that Israeli soldiers and armed police either stood by or assisted in the settlers’ attack.

The rampage followed the shooting of two settlers by a Palestinian gunman earlier that day. For many months, there has been growing unrest among Palestinians – both at the continuing failure of their leaders to secure any kind of diplomatic achievement, and at the steady rise in Israeli state and settler violence. Last year was the most deadly for Palestinians in the West Bank for nearly two decades.

Huwwara is especially vulnerable. It sits on a major intersection close to the large Palestinian city of Nablus. It is a critical artery for settlers because most traffic, whether Palestinian or Jewish, needs to pass through Huwwara to move between the southern and northern parts of the occupied West Bank.

It was close to this intersection, hours before the attack, that the two settler brothers were killed.

The settlers in this area are among the most extreme and violent in the occupied territories, the kind who vote solidly for the religious fascists who are now key partners in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The Religious Zionism faction, led by Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, emerged from last year’s general election as the third largest in the parliament.

Nearly 30 years on from the signing of the Oslo Accords, with Israel still refusing to honour a process that was expected to lead to the dismantling of the settlements and Palestinian self-rule, Huwwara has found itself permanently trapped under Israeli military control.

Israeli soldiers are supposed to guarantee the security of the town’s Palestinian inhabitants. Instead, like so many other Palestinians in the West Bank, those inhabitants live under a reign of terror from unwelcome Jewish settler “neighbours” endlessly indulged by the Israeli army.

At the weekend, the United Nation’s rapporteur for the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, told the BBC that Israel should be investigated for crimes against the Palestinian people.

‘Merciless attacks’

Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, who has also been awarded unprecedented powers by Netanyahu to run the occupation, responded to the Huwwara attack by urging greater violence. He called for the town to be “wiped out”.

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As we witness the collapse of various mainstream narratives, especially those surrounding the U.S./NATO war with Russia in Ukraine, Americans should begin to reassess their understanding of U.S. national leadership. Most American citizens have no notion of the great disparity between what their government does overseas and the stories they hear from its mouthpieces. As a result, Americans unwittingly support all sorts of foreign operations with little or no understanding of what is actually going on. For years, they have been misled by a non-stop propaganda campaign that is only now beginning to crumble.

We are experiencing the death throes of the United States’ unipolar hegemony over large parts of world. Until citizens begin to realize the magnitude of their government’s policy deceptions, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the United States’ changing global position and adjust to the effects of the growing negative perception of our country held by many people around the world.

Since World War II, and particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was the dominant and unrivaled world power. Instead of being a peacekeeper and honest “world’s policeman,” the U.S. has increasingly been a destabilizing bully. Many leaders worldwide have been reluctant to speak up about the increasingly destructive nature of U.S. foreign policy for fear of being punished. But as U.S. stature and power declines, large parts of the world have been seeking arrangements to protect themselves from U.S. predation.

Most Americans do not understand why such realignments are occurring, thanks to a constant stream of propaganda about America being the “most generous,” the “exceptional nation,” a “nation that sets aside its interests for the benefit of the world,” an “important source of good” around the globe as the “protector of the rules based order,” always shouldering the heavy responsibility to protect the international system and weak nations from bad actors, ad nauseam. According to a number of sources, U.S.-caused wars have been directly responsible for the deaths of more than 10 million people since World War II. The neoconservatives will scoff at these facts and their sources, but most of the rest of the world believes this to be true.

Most Americans cannot accept these observations because they contradict the narrative given them by the omnipresent state propaganda machine. While the ever growing list of American misdeeds abroad has for years been largely unchallenged at home, it has become increasingly obvious to many across the globe. Americans should take note. For example, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has just published an overview of what they see as U.S. misbehavior. The U.S. establishment and well-meaning patriots may dismiss the Chinese observations, but they ring true to many who live outside of the neoconservative propaganda bubble.

Contrary to establishment mythology, the U.S. is famous for breaking its promises, violating treaties, and abandoning agreements. The list is long: the U.S.’s 1990 promise not to move NATO east into former Warsaw Convention countries, the abrogation of the ABM, INF, Open Skies, START treaties, the JCPOA, the  agreement with Libya, and others. The U.S. has also repeatedly flouted international law by invading countries that do not bow to U.S. hegemony.

There are a number of U.S. agencies that covertly fund NGO election interference operations. Most Americans have no idea that the Cold War–era National Endowment for Democracy was created to influence elections in countries around the world, and has interfered in many. (The National Endowment for Democracy was spending money in Russia until the Russians expelled them.) Then there are the famous “Color Revolutions” sponsored by various U.S. agencies. Some estimate the U.S. has interfered in as many as fifty countries.

The days of pretending to ignore this destructive behavior are drawing to a close. We are entering a period in which the populations of many countries may decide that being subject to American hegemony is not in their interests. Increasing numbers of countries have joined and formed alternative alliances outside U.S. influence. SCO, BRICS+, OPEC+, and others have experienced growing membership as countries that believe their interests are better protected by these non-U.S. affiliated alliances sign on.

The fallout of the tragic and unnecessary Ukraine war has accelerated this movement to seek other cooperative associations. As America’s European allies are learning, there can be huge political and economic costs to being associated with the U.S. The populations of Europe have watched their own economies suffer and paid dearly for energy because of the ten rounds of self-destructive sanctions imposed on Russia.

The purveyor and protector of the “rules-based order” decided that Germany should not import cheap Russian natural gas. America’s president and a senior State Department official threatened to cut off the pipeline supplying Russian natural gas if Russia did not bow to Washington’s wishes. Coincidentally, the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up not long after. The U.S. Secretary of State said the sabotage was an “opportunity,” and the assistant secretary of State appeared to be satisfied. The neoconservatives lauding this act of terrorism against an ally of the U.S. may believe pretending Washington was not responsible will reassure America and Europe, but the rest of the world believes otherwise.

Many will ignore or diminish the consequences of a possible U.S. role in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. But this addition to the list of callous acts believed abroad to be perpetrated by the U.S. further would undermine the narrative of America as the “generous nation,” “leader of the free world,” “protector of the rules-based order.” For years, these contradictions were skillfully finessed and ignored by a compliant press and complicit institutions that profited from these deceptions. But as the U.S. appears less powerful, the rest of the world is beginning to take notice and are moving to seek other protective friendships.

Less than two years ago, the “most powerful military in the history of man” was chased out of Afghanistan by a group of ragtag militants armed with small arms and mounted on donkeys, bicycles, and motor scooters. The Taliban now has $80 billion worth of U.S. military equipment our leaders left behind. The excuses may have been convincing to the Washington elites and were sold strenuously by regime-aligned media outlets. The rest of the world knows better. The old post-Vietnam collapse tropes, claiming “we would have won if only we were really allowed to fight,” ring hollow after twenty years, hundreds of thousands killed and made homeless, and several trillion dollars spent on that disaster.

Contrary to the many assertions that the Russians would collapse from the shock and awe of the “sanctions from Hell,” the ruble has not turned into rubble as Joe Biden predicted. The U.S. and its NATO clients are running out of ammunition and arms to send to Ukraine, which is being bled white at their behest. It appears that Russia will steadily grind down the Ukrainian military. All of this is reminiscent of World War I. The proto-neoconservatives sold that war as a quick engagement that would be over by Christmas 1914. Four years later, 20 million were dead and many more were wounded or displaced; subsequently most of the European Christian monarchies collapsed, Russia descended into communism’s seventy-year nightmare, and the “War to End all Wars” to make the world “safe for democracy” set the stage for the even more horrific World War II.

A century later, we are sleepwalking into World War III. Americans should ignore the state-sponsored propaganda (eerily similar to that which led up to WWI), wake up, look at what their leaders have wrought, and do all they can to end support for this cruel war before we face a Great War–like conflagration or worse.

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George D. O’Neill, Jr., is a member of the board of directors of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes The American Conservative, and an artist who lives in rural Florida.

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***

The Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shia Republic of Iran have agreed – in a China brokered deal – to re-establish diplomatic relations within the coming two months.

Question is, will this new Riyadh-Tehran diplomacy bring an end to the horrendously atrocious war in Yemen? The worst killing and maiming of a most impoverished people in the last hundred years. Maybe this was a key objective of China’s in bringing these two countries back together.

Background

Diplomatic relations between the two countries broke down in January 2016, when Iran’s Foreign Minister claimed that Saudi warplanes had “deliberately” targeted Iran’s Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city.

As a precursor to that event, on 2 January 2016, the Saudi Government executed 47 people throughout Saudi cities, one of them was a prominent Shia scholar. Iranian protesters about the execution ransacked and set ablaze the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.

This prompted the Saudi Sunni Foreign Minister to cut diplomatic ties with Shia enemy Iran. In hindsight and knowing what we know today, this rather harsh action by the Saudis, smells like provoked and directed by the powers that be – the US and the UK; those who also are the principal arms suppliers to Riyadh for their war against Yemen.

The Riyadh-Tehran conflict is, in fact, a triangular conflict involving Yemen in the first degree.

In September 2014, the Houthis, a humanitarian rebel group, invaded and took control of Sana’a to oust then Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, whose government was controlled by Riyadh. The Shiite Houthis have links to Iran.

The Houthis also had a history of rising up against the Saudi Sunni government which for years has played an influential role in Yemen’s internal affairs.  

Yemen, being situated in an extremely strategic geographic location overseeing the Sea of Arabia, where 70% of the world’s energy is shipped through, it is likely that the Saudi influence on Yemen is “peddled” by the Pentagon, which has several military bases in Saudi Arabia.

They are Washington’s counterpart – a solid military protection – to the US deal with the Saudi King in 1971, that Saudi Arabia, leader of OPEC, would henceforth trade all hydrocarbons in US-dollars.

This resulted in the world being flooded by petro-dollars. It became an important cornerstone in the US-dollar-hegemony over the world.

Yemen’s so-called civil war began in 2014 when the Houthis took control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The Houthis had – and still have – the support of a large majority of the Yemeni people.

Image: Brendan Bell-Taylor, Action Corps Idaho organizer, and Laura Burton protest the war on Yemen in front of the Idaho State Capitol, in Boise, on January 25, 2021, as part of a Global Day of Action: World Says No to War on Yemen. Sen. Jim Risch, U.S. senator from Idaho, is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [Source: twitter.com]

In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, presumably leading a large coalition of nine countries from West Asia and North Africa, launched a “military intervention” – a war against Yemen – which officially is still called, as of this day, the Yemeni Civil War.

The official version is that the Saudis reacted to deposed Yemeni President Hadi’s call for military support to bring him back as the head of Yemen and to get rid of the Houthi movement.

Looking back, and knowing what we know today, the real instigators of this atrocious war against one of the world’s poorest countries, are the US and the UK. They finance the Saudis and supply them with weapons to literally slaughter Yemenis. Predominantly suffering are women and children.

They also starve Yemenis to death by closing vital ports for shipments of food and other life-necessities, the port of Aden and the Red Sea port of Hudeidah, the second largest port in the country.

The US is again fighting a proxy war. Sounds familiar? One of many precursors to the war in Ukraine. How many more are to follow before the killer-empire falls?

This eight-year-old conflict in Yemen is a confrontation between the internationally recognized government, which is backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, and of course, the US and the UK, against the Houthi rebels, supported by the people of Yemen and by Iran.

The country’s humanitarian crisis is said to be among the worst in the world, due to widespread hunger, disease, and attacks on civilians.

According to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in Yemen, as well as an estimated more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war. Yemen’s population as of March 2023 is estimated 31.6 million.

There are no reliable statistics about the death toll of this war. But it is estimated that at least a third of the victims are women and children. When it comes to starvation, mostly children are concerned.

According to an Oxfam spokesperson, “The armed conflict in Yemen has exacerbated discrimination and inequalities.Women are, in general, struggling from unequal access to services and resources, as decision-making is often made by men in their communities.”

Looking forward

Will this new diplomatic agreement between Riyadh and Tehran, mediated by China over several days in Beijing, bring the long overdue peace to Yemen and the necessary aid funding to rebuild Yemen’s infrastructure and social rehabilitation?

Both countries, Iran and Saudi, committed to “non-interference” in each other’s internal affairs, according to a joint statement by Saudi, Iranian, and Chinese officials.

Representatives of both countries also said that they would resume a security cooperation agreement signed in 2001 and would work to enhance “regional and international peace and security.”

Does this latter include peace in Yemen?

The regional conflict between Riyadh and Tehran is further exacerbated by the two countries supporting opposing sides also in Syria, while Iran backs the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, along with the US and Israel, consider Hezbollah a terrorist group.

China’s initiative to bring these two Middle-East countries again together and in peace is multi-faceted. It is a major achievement. Iran and Saudi Arabia are among the world’s largest oil and gas producers. Their common interests go way beyond joint OPEC membership.

Both are keen in detaching themselves from the western ever-more chaotic, sanction-prone, fraudulent economic system, intending to shift eastwards – into eastern coalitions led by China and Russia.

Both countries would like to join the BRICS alliance, which is in turn hoping to be admitted to the China-Russia led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has during the last year or so provided strong support to the BRICS-plus, an indication that the BRICS association with eastern groupings and eventually full integration is welcome.

The BRI may also become instrumental in rebuilding Yemen – which would be a positive development for Yemen, plus a quasi– invitation to move towards eastern alliances.

Beijing’s role in brokering the agreement is a major diplomatic win for China, but also for Iran, Saudi Arabia and hopefully also for Yemen. It is a true win-win solution.

While Iraq and Syria conflicts are still lingering on, there are prospects that the dynamics created by China through the renewed diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran, may eventually bring lasting Peace to the Middle East.

*

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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***

Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists.  These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring.  They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred bank for start-ups, is the bitter fruit of that harvest.  Three days prior to the second-largest failure of a US financial institution since the implosion of Washington Mutual (Wamu) in 2008, lobbyists for the banking sector had reason to gloat.  They had the ears of a number of GOP lawmakers and were pressing the case that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had little reason to sharpen regulations in the industry.

As a matter of fact, the converse case was put: the financial environment was proving too stringent, and needed easing up.  This effort built on gains made during the Trump administration, which saw the passing of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.  Then House majority leader Kevin McCarthy was particularly keen on winding back elements of the Dodd-Frank banking measures introduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.  In 2018, he got much of what he wished for.

Lobbyists for SVB were particularly aggressive in that endeavour, and even went so far as to seek exemptions from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the body responsible for insuring bank deposits in times of crisis and institutional oversight.  Two former staffers for McCarthy so happen to be registered lobbyists for SVB, a fact that shows how the US revolving door between politics and business continues to whirr at some speed.  The SVB lobby list also includes figures who found employment under former President Bill Clinton, former Senator Mike Enzi (R-My), former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and former Senator Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), just to name a few.

The crisis duly came.  On March 9, startups and venture capitalists made a run on SVB as its share price took a tumble.  SVB had sold its available-for-sale (AFS) portfolio for US$21 billion at a US$1.8 billion loss.  In a patch-up, capital raising response, SVB then announced that it would sell US$2.25 billion in new shares.

By the next day, the FDIC had placed SVB into receivership.  The corporation promised that insured depositors would have access to their insured deposits on March 13; uninsured depositors would have to wait a bit longer, expecting an “advance within the next week.”  But given that 90% of the bank’s deposits exceeded the amount guaranteed by the FDIC, the prospects for adequate recovery proved uncertain, at least till the FDIC, Federal Reserve and US Treasury promised protection for them.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo proved rather green in suggesting that the financial system, as things stood, would be resilient enough to hold off any contagion.  “Federal regulators are paying attention to this particular financial institution,” he told CNN, “and when we think about the broader financial system, we’re very confident in the ability and the resilience of the system.”

This is bound to be misplaced.  It’s certainly not the view held by former FDIC head, Sheila Blair, who argues that there are other banks in the system with large amounts of uninsured deposits and unrealised losses.  “These banks that have large amounts of institutional uninsured money … that’s going to be hot money that runs if there’s a sign of trouble.”

David Sacks of Craft Ventures is also of the view that immediate intervention at the government level was required.  “Where is Powell?” he wondered.  “Where is [US Secretary of the Treasury Janet] Yellen?  Stop this crisis NOW.”  SVB, he proposed, should be placed with a top four bank. “Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.”

Questions are being asked whether the anti-regulatory bug has gotten to the various authorities and agencies. Mike Novogratz, founder of Galaxy Digital, pondered whether all banks were now being treated like hedge funds.  “Seems like a policy mistake.”

Economists such as Peter Schiff are even more damning, claiming that the entire US banking sector is set for a cathartic clean-up that will be greater than that following 2008.  US banks were holding “long-term paper at extremely low interest rates.  They can’t compete with short-term Treasuries.”  In such an environment, depositors, in the pursuit of higher yields, would initiate mass withdrawals, resulting in a tidal wave of bank collapses.

Blame for the SVB debacle has been extensive. “This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs [venture capitalists],” opined Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor based at Restive Ventures.  “This is going to be remembered as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting off its nose to spite its face.”

The oversight advocates are bound to agree.  Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the non-profit Better Markets, is certainly one.  “SVB’s stunningly quick collapse should put an end to the nonstop attempts by banks, lobbyists and their political allies to weaken capital and other financial regulations that protect depositors, consumers, investors and financial stability.”

This is likely to prove to be a flight of fancy.  The banking lobbyists have destructive form and staying power.  In 2019, the International Monetary Fund published a working paper noting that bank lobbying, in general, produced “regulatory capture, which lessens the support for tighter rules and enforcement.  This, in turn, allows riskier practices and worse economic outcomes.”

As the great financial crisis showed, financial regulation is often the antidote to banditry.  The pillaging and frontier types will always resist such tendencies. Again, they have been found wanting, and again, the harmful consequences of their ideas are going to prove deep and extensive.

*

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: An office building at 3003 Tasman Drive in Santa Clara, California; at the time this photo was taken, it was home to the headquarters of Silicon Valley Bank. Photographed by user Coolcaesar on September 4, 2022. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

In order, the Twitter Files threads:

1. Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbiTWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

   Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

   Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

   1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi

   THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER

   A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

2. Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

   Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

   Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

3. Twitter Files, Part 3, by @mtaibbi, December 9, 2022THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 – January 6th, 2021

   First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.

4. Twitter Files Part 4, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 10, 2022THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 7th, 2021

   This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.

   Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.

5. Twitter Files Part 5, by @BariWeiss, December 11, 2022THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 8th, 2021

   As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.

   Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”

6. Twitter Files Part 6, by @mtaibbi, December 16, 2022TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

   Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.

   Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”

7. Twitter Files Part 7, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 19, 2022THE FBI AND HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP

   The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.

   Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

8. Twitter Files Part 8, by @lhfang, December 20, 2022HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN

   Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.

   Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Postin 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.

   Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:

9. Twitter Files Part 9, by @mtaibbi, December 24th, 2022TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES”

   The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.

   Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”

10. Twitter Files Part 10, by @DavidZweig, December 28, 2022HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

    David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”

    Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.

11. and
12. Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN

    and

    TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”

    These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

    The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

13. Twitter Files Part #13, by @AlexBerenson, January 9, 2023HOW TWITTER COVERED UP COVID TRUTHS

    New addition Alex Berenson details how Twitter throttled down or erased true information about COVID-19, with the help of a former Pfizer lobbyist, Scott Gottlieb.

    Key Revelations: Twitter senior political liaison Todd O’Boyle feared that onetime acting FDA commission Brett Giroir’s correct observations about the effectiveness of natural immunity were “corrosive” and might “go viral,” and put a misleading label on the tweet. Gottlieb also pressured Twitter to remove Berenson himself.

14. Twitter Files Part #14, by @mtaibbi, January 12th, 2023THE RUSSIAGATE LIES

    One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag

    Internal communications at Twitter show that Russian bots were not in fact hyping the classified memo of Republican congressman Devin Nunes in January of 2018.

    Key Revelations: Three key Democrats — Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, and former House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff — cited a think tank called Hamilton 68 in denouncing a memo by Nunes as aided by “Russian influence operations.” Yet all three were told by Twitter executives there were no Russians in the picture. Said former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

    Twitter Files Supplemental, by @mtaibbi, January 13th, 2023

    MORE ADAM SCHIFF BANS, AND “DEAMPLIFICATION.”

    A brief thread of 10 tweets showing that the former head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, sent repeated requests for bans of people critical of their office.

    Key Revelation: Schiff and the DNC both not only asked for the takedown of an obvious satire by “Peter Douche,” but requested takedowns of accounts that were critical of the Steele dossier and outed the name of the supposed “whistleblower” in the Ukrainegate case, Eric Ciaramella. Schiff staffers said that while they “appreciate greatly” efforts by Twitter to deamplify certain accounts, they worried such effort s “could… impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter.”

15. Twitter Files #15 by @mtaibbi, January 27, 2023MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD Internal communication about Hamilton 68, a project by the Alliance for Securing Democracy purporting to track 600 account “linked” to “Russian influence activities.” Reporters used Hamilton 68 as the basis for countless news stories, from CNN’s “Russian bots are using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms” to “After Florida School Shooting, Russia’s Bot Army Pounced.”

    Key Revelation: Twitter’s Yoel Roth was suspicious of Hamilton 68’s methodology and reverse-engineered their list, which he quickly discovered to be bogus, full not of Russians but “legitimate right-leaning accounts” who were being implicitly called Russian assets. “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard],” Roth wrote, “will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” Roth urged Twitter to “call this out on the bullshit it is,” but Twitter higher-ups worried about the political consequences, choosing instead to play a “longer game.” Neither the actors involved, nor any of the media outlets who ran Hamilton-based stories intitally commented, though the ASD later replied, prompting a back-and-forth (and forth) with this site.

16. Twitter Files #16, by @mtaibbi, February 18, 2023COMIC INTERLUDE: A MEDIA EXPERIMENT

    Mainstream outlets finally cover the Twitter Files with excitement, after House testimony elicited a claim that Donald Trump complained, unsuccessfully, to Twitter about a tweet by Chrissy Teigen (who in turn complained that she didn’t “know how to go on” after her tweet about Trump being a “pussy ass bitch” was read to congress). Irritated that this became the big censorship story after releasing thousands of takedown requests from government agencies involving people all over the world, I decided to do an experiment.

    Key Revelations: We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,” and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department, Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to look into and delete.” Surely, if the main objection to the Twitter Files is that they’re “one-sided,” someone will cover a Republican doing the bad thing? But no, more crickets. With help from @Techno_Fog

17. Twitter Files #17: by @mtaibbi, March 2, 2023NEW KNOWLEDGE, THE GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER, AND STATE-SPONSORED BLACKLISTS

    A review of the activities of the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, what one source called “an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex.”

    Key Revelations: A GEC-funded think tank, the DFRLab, sent Twitter a list of 40,000 names of people suspected of supporting “Hindu nationalism” that somehow had scads of ordinary Americans with handles like @mad_murican and @TrumpitC on the list; GEC sent Twitter a list of 5500 “Chinese accounts” that among other things had three CNN contributors on it (“Not exactly Anderson’s besties, but CNN assets if you will,” commented Twitter’s Patrick Conlon), GEC sent another list of 499 accounts deemed Iranian disinformation, using criteria like: used Signal and Telegram to communicate and used hashtags like #IraniansDebateWithBiden. Other GEC reports deemed various actors part of foreign propaganda “ecosystems” for offenses like following more than one Chinese diplomat, retweeting an Iranian-created “FREE PALESTINE” meme, and for retweeting material that was “anti-Macron in nature.”

Glossary of “Twitter Files” Terms

1. Government Agencies and NGOsCISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

   CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces

   ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

   FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI

   “OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA

   GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department

   USIC: United States intelligence community

   HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts

   EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter

   DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council

   IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin

2. Twitter or Industry-specific termsPII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”

   JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided

   PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”

   SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings

   SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review

   CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity

   SRT: Strategic Response Team

   GET: Global Escalation Team

   VF: Visibility Filtering

   GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account

   VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.

   GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence

   BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically

   BME: Bulk Media Exploitation

   EP Abuse: Episodic abuse

   PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception

   FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts

   IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.

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I am frequently asked: why are the government agencies still pushing COVID-19 vaccination after there have been calls in the US Senate and all around the world to pull them off the market for lack of safety and efficacy?

In a March 10, 2023 letter from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, to Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, the agencies give their rationale. While Walensky does not have a compelling academic track record, her FDA counterpart Califf has been considered a staunch advocate of randomized trials and a hawk on safety of cardiovascular drugs over his career which was notable for building the Duke Clinical Research Institute, one of the most impressive academic research organizations in the world.

Here are 10 assertions that Califf and Walensky make to Ladapo and Americans on why the COVID-19 vaccines should be “pushed.”

1. “The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.” They are assuming unproven benefit at the start. The Bradford Hill criteria have been applied to VAERS and causality has been met. Autopsy studies have conclusively demonstrated causality for fatal syndromes. Doctors use the VAERS system when they believe COVID-19 vaccines caused the death, NOT when the death is unrelated to the vaccine in practice.
2. “The FDA-approved and FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines have met FDA’s rigorous scientific and regulatory standards for safety and effectiveness and these vaccines continue to be recommended for use by CDC for all people six months of age and older.” The FDA has relied on the false surrogate of antibody elevations after injection eight times. This is neither rigorous nor valid. Large randomized, double blind placebo controlled trials with hospitalization/death as the primary endpoint are required to prove efficacy in all age groups.
3. “Despite increased reports of these events, when the concern was examined in detail by cardiovascular experts, the risk of stroke and heart attack was actually lower in people who had been vaccinated, not higher.” They cite a nonrandomized study with inadequate control for the known determinants of cardiovascular disease. Both selection bias and confounding eliminate any valid claims of benefit. There is no mechanism by which COVID-19 vaccination would reduce cardiovascular events. There are >200 published manuscripts on COVID-19 vaccines mechanistically causing cardiovascular events including myocarditis, accelerated atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, aortic dissection, hypertensive crisis, etc.
4. “FDA and CDC physicians continuously screen and analyze VAERS data for possible safety concerns related to the COVID-19 vaccines. For signals identified in VAERS, physicians from FDA and CDC screen individual reports, inclusive of comprehensive medical record review. Most reports do not represent adverse events caused by the vaccine and instead represent a pre-existing condition that preceded vaccination or an underlying medical condition that precipitated the event.” The agencies have not produced a report giving their analysis of what caused death after vaccination. Since many deaths occur on the day of the shot or in the next few days that follow, the public deserves to see regulatory evidence for cause of death.
5. “In addition to VAERS, FDA and CDC utilize complementary active surveillance systems to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.” CDC V-safe is one of the active systems mentioned. The CDC refused to release to the public until ordered by the courts, demonstrated an unacceptable 7-8% rate of hospitalization, emergency care, or urgent office visit caused by vaccine side effects. So agency use of systems demonstrate lack of safety and are not reassuring to the public.
6. “Based on available information for the COVID-19 vaccines that are authorized or approved in the United States, the known and potential benefits of these vaccines clearly outweigh their known and potential risks. Additionally, not only is there no evidence of increased risk of death following mRNA vaccines, but available data have shown quite the opposite: that being up to date on vaccinations saves lives compared to individuals who did not get vaccinated.” There are no randomized placebo controlled trials demonstrating hospitalization/death are reduced as primary endpoints. Thus the agencies cannot make an efficacy claim from a regulatory perspective. Nonrandomized studies have the following threats to validity: 1) selection bias—healthier more health conscious people take vaccines, 2) vaccinated are more likely to seek early treatment which reduces hospitalization/death, 3) no control over prior COVID-19 infection which greatly influences risk of hospitalization/death, 4) no adjudication of COVID-19 endpoints.
7. “Another study using mathematical modeling estimated that the vaccines saved an estimated 14 million lives from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between December 8, 2020, and December 8, 2021.” Modeling studies start with the unproven assertion that vaccination reduces death which has not been demonstrated in proper randomized trials, hence extrapolations to large populations are invalid.
8. “The most recent estimate is that those who are up to date on their vaccination status have a 9.8 fold lower risk of dying from COVID-19 than those who are unvaccinated and 2.4 fold lower risk of dying from Covid-19 than those who were vaccinated but had not received the updated, bivalent vaccine. Roughly 90% of deaths from COVID-19, as carefully classified by the CDC, in recent months have occurred among those who were not up to date on their vaccines.” This estimate did not account for the two known determinants of COVID-19 mortality: early treatment and natural immunity.
9. “Over the course of the pandemic, FDA and CDC have held numerous public meetings to discuss the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines where detailed safety data are shared with outside experts and public comment is encouraged. Further, FDA publishes the full regulatory action package containing hundreds of pages summarizing clinical studies and review for each COVID-19 approval on FDA’s website (see “COVID-19 Vaccines Authorized for Emergency Use or FDA Approved”) and CDC publishes an extensive amount of information on their clinical use in Interim Clinical Considerations. Complete information about both benefits and risks helps health care providers better care for their patients.” The FDA/CDC have never reviewed or commented on the Pfizer 90-day post-marketing data which reported 1223 deaths shortly after the shot. The FDA attempted to block these data to the public for 55 years. The agencies have never conducted a symposium to review the >1000 peer-reviewed published papers on serious adverse events and death after COVID-19 vaccination.
10. “Unfortunately, the misinformation about COVID-19 vaccine safety has caused some Americans to avoid getting the vaccines they need to be up to date.” The Rasmussen Report indicates 28% of Americans know someone who has died after the vaccine. Nothing in that report suggested “misinformation” was leading to hesitancy, moreover it was word of mouth on the horrifying outcomes Americans are witnessing among their family and friends that is leading to refusal rates of boosters.

There are easily another ten invalid assertions made by the agency that could be handled by experienced clinical investigators. Take a look at the letter yourself. Keep in mind the FDA/CDC deceived America by asserting that SARS-CoV-2 did not come out of the Wuhan Laboratory and just a few days ago the US House of Representatives voted to declassify our documents from the laboratory after multiple agencies and witnessed capitulated on the lab origin. This casts doubts on truthfulness of any agency public health assertions during the crisis.

The important message to Americans is that our agencies have no intention of carefully considering vaccine safety or changing course on their relentless pursuit of frequent, mass, indiscriminate COVID-19 vaccination down to 6-month old babies. It will be up to you to protect yourself and your family.

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Sources

Califf R, Walensky R, letter to Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida Surgeon General, March 10, 2023

McCullough PA. US FDA Willfully Blind on the Safety of COVID-19 Vaccination

McCullough PA. Found Dead at Home after COVID-19 Vaccination

McCullough PA. Modeling Study Makes False Conclusions on COVID-19 Vaccination

McCullough PA. McCullough Protocol©: Risk Stratification

McCullough PA. Good News on Omicron Outcomes from Prison

Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency

National Survey Finds finds 28% Personally know of a Death Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines

Kaplan R. House votes 419-0 to declassify intelligence on COVID-19 origins, sending bill to Biden’s desk Mar 10 2023

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China has repeated calls for the US to end its illegal military occupation of Syria and stop looting the country’s resources, stressing that its continued presence has worsened Syria’s humanitarian crisis.

“We call on the United States to sincerely respect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of other countries and to immediately stop its illegal military presence and marauding in Syria,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said during a news conference on 11 March.

“The United States has illegally intervened in military activities related to the Syrian crisis, which has led to the death of a large number of innocent civilians and a serious humanitarian disaster,” Mao added before calling on US officials to lift crushing economic sanctions on Syria.

Beijing’s call came just two days after US lawmakers voted against a War Powers Resolution that called for withdrawing troops from Syria.

Around 900 US troops are currently deployed in the Levantine nation, controlling nearly a third of the country and a large portion of its oil fields. Their deployment is illegal under international law as it was not approved by the government in Damascus.

This is not the first time Beijing has bashed Washington’s illegal presence in Syria. Back in January, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Syria’s energy crisis and humanitarian disaster are a result of the US and its proxy militias plundering its resources.

“US stationing troops in Syria is illegal. US smuggling oil and grain from Syria is illegal. US missile attacks against Syria are also illegal,” he said then.

A year ago, Chinese and Syrian officials signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) welcoming Damascus into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Launched nine years ago, the BRI is a mega-infrastructure project that seeks to bring capital and infrastructure to Global South countries while dramatically strengthening connectivity for commerce, finance, and culture.

China was among the first nations to send aid to Syria following last month’s devastating earthquake when aid deliveries from the west were being held up due to US sanctions.

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I am unable to read the Foreign Affairs take on Georgia. It is sealed behind a paywall, available only to those willing to shell out money for Council on Foreign Relations war propaganda.

The article in question, “Make Russia Pay: Lessons From the West’s Botched Response to Moscow’s 2008 Assault on Georgia,” was penned by Vasil Sikharulidze, the former defense minister of Georgia, now a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a Founder of the Atlantic Council of Georgia.

Considering this gentleman’s bio, the positions he held in the Georgian government, and his association with an institute once led by the neocon Daniel Pipes, we can assume the post is simply more anti-Russian propaganda, as the headline suggests.

First and foremost, let’s address the historically incorrect assertion Russia “assaulted” Georgia. An honest reading of history—which usually results in an allergic reaction on the part of the CFR—dispels the myth Russia invaded South Ossetia, an ethnic Russian enclave.

“Late in the evening of the 7th of August, 2008, when the whole world anticipated the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili ordered his [western-trained] troops to invade the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinval,” writes Anatoly Kudryavtsev.

The Georgian military shelled Tskhinval, and the villages of Dmenis, Znaur, Tsunar-Khetagurovo, and Khetagurovo with GRAD rockets, howitzer artillery, and large-caliber mortars, according to the RES Information Agency.

Georgian SU-25 aircraft strafed South Ossetia. Infrastructure was attacked, including an irrigation pipeline in the northern part of Tskhinval. Basements, where civilians huddled to escape the bombardment, were flooded by Georgian troops.

Civilian population, elderly and children are under intensive fire of GRAD artillery systems, as well as large-caliber cannons and mortars. At the entries to Tskhinval, street fighting is ongoing. Majority of projectiles and shells are blowing up in the center of the town. There are killed and wounded. It is still impossible to bring the wounded to the hospital. Tens of houses in the capital of South Ossetia are burning. The fire is opened from the Georgian territories in the direction of Gori adjacent to the borderlines with South Ossetia… Georgian aggressors are bombing houses of civilians. People have no place to find shelter from the enemy’s fire, they are killed in their houses. It is impossible to estimate the number of casualties.

At this point, there were only Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, positioned there in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Calls for independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia resulted in ethnic conflict.

Prior to this, the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast of the Georgian SSR had peaceful relations with Georgia (with the exception of the Georgian–Ossetian conflict of 1918–1920). Georgia targeted Russian peacekeepers. It was reported ten were killed and 30 were wounded. However, it was later reported around 2,000 civilians and 71 Russian peacekeepers were killed.

Within hours of the attack on civilians in South Ossetia, Russia demanded an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. A few hours later, Russian leader Putin warned there would be “retaliatory measures” in response to the attack. In addition, Dmitry Medvedev, recently elected as president, said Georgian actions in South Ossetia would not go unpunished.

Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said the Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, was encouraged by NATO at a summit in Bucharest. Rogozin said the attack was “an undisguised aggression accompanied by a mass propaganda war.”

Georgia moved to block access to the Roki Tunnel, the only passage between South Ossetia and Russia. “However, before this could happen, Russia entered the war, with the support of almost the entire population,” writes Christian Wipperfürth for Global Research.

“Within two days after the beginning of the war, defeat was already apparent, and Georgia claimed that its own operations had been carried out in reaction to a Russian attack.”

Saakashvili told CNN Russia “is waging war against Georgia,” an assertion plainly at odds with the facts.

“What is playing out in the Caucasus is being reported in US media in an alarmingly misleading light, making Moscow appear the lone aggressor,” author F. William Engdahl wrote at the time.

The USG, under the sway of Bush neocons, accused Russia of “bullying” Georgia while ignoring the fact the conflict was precipitated by Georgia with its illegal act of aggression.

The defeat of Georgia did not settle the matter. In 2012, the president of South Ossetia informed international intermediaries activity near South Ossetia’s border suggested Georgia was preparing a new war, according to RT.

Leonid Tibilov told the representatives of the European Union, OSCE and United Nations that South Ossetian intelligence possessed serious information that the Georgian side was building fortifications and creating ammunition dumps in the villages near the border between the two countries. He added that such events invoked thoughts that Georgia plans [as a USG-NATO proxy]… military action against the people of South Ossetia.

In fact, NATO and the USG have planned destabilizing conflict across the span of Russia’s western border for some time. This was apparent prior to Russia’s SMO in Ukraine. In January 2022, during a NATO meeting, USG Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued brazen statements indicating, according to a summary by Anti-Bellum,

Russia has the choice of capitulating to NATO’s terms and demands regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine (and implicitly the return of Crimea) and NATO’s absorption of any former Soviet republics not already in the bloc or NATO will revert to its role as the military alliance it has been for 73 years: it will employ the military expedient against Russia. As it has not hesitated to do in Europe, Asia and Africa in the past twenty-three years.

The current government in Tbilisi, in the opinion of the USG and its NATO attack dog, is far too friendly with Russia, and therefore a USAID-spawned color revolution is required.

If the current street violence in Georgia successfully overthrows the government, NATO membership for Georgia will be fast-tracked. South Ossetia will once again be brutally attacked, as ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine were mercilessly attacked after the USG-orchestrated 2014 coup in Kyiv.

The “protests” in Georgia have little to do with the aspirations of the Georgian people, as disingenuously claimed, or a previously tabled bill designed to eject USAID and its subversive NGOs (subsequently withdrawn).

The objective, as publicly stated by USG war boss Lloyd Austin, is to “weaken” Russia.

In the case of Georgia, following the conflict in Ukraine, the plan is to tie down Russia in a two-front war for an indeterminate amount of time, and thus hope the Russian people will turn against Putin and the government. This will not happen.

The USG is looking for a repeat of the Soviet defeat and retreat from Afghanistan, a climatic event that we are told resulted in a Russian “Vietnam” and the fall of the Soviet Union soon thereafter.

Russia, while somewhat naive in the past and preferring to hedge its bets, is now fully aware of the existential threat it faces. It is acting accordingly. The Russian economy is now on a war production footing, ready to face the inevitable.

Meanwhile, in the “collective West,” death merchants are unable to produce enough armaments to help Ukraine fight to the “last Ukrainian,” and it will certainly be unable to supply Georgia with the required amount of armament and munitions required to push Russia out of South Ossetia.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing Thursday on the Twitter Files, which are exposing pervasive federal browbeating to suppress free speech.

Congressional Democrats championed the National Lampoon definition of censorship: Unless there is a photo of an FBI agent holding a gun to the head of a Twitter employee, the feds did nothing wrong.

Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were on the witness stand. Though both are bestselling authors with long records of excellent reporting, they were treated as shameless grifters who were basely smearing noble federal agencies.

Taibbi and Shellenberger labored under the misconception that congressional hearings seek to reveal facts.

Instead, Democratic members viewed them as sacrifices on the altar of boundless federal prerogatives. Democratic members continually cut off the witnesses, signaling that their role was to shut up and take a whupping.

Click here to read the full article on NYP.

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Former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, slammed the IMF for callously unleashing riots on nations the IMF is dealing with; he pointed out that the riots are written into the IMF plan to force Nations to agree with the average 111 conditions laid down by the IMF, that destroys a country’s democracy and independence.   

Having captured political power in Sri Lanka on the back of a CIA instigated jockstrap-insurrection that delivered the country to the jaws of the IMF, there are ominous signs that the Americans are now hatching the classic IMF-riot to consolidate their triumph and create a climate to induct Quad military forces into the island; American occupation of Sri Lanka would then be a fait accompli.

The IMF (one of the two global money lenders purposefully favoured with the monopoly and authority to lend to world governments, from Bretton Wood days) controls Sri Lanka’s Executive, the Administration, and the Legislature.

The words attributed to Amschel Rothschild are perhaps relevant here; he reportedly said, I care not who makes a country’s laws; any fool can do it. Give me control of that country’s money supply and I shall rule that country.”

To give context to these words in today’s geopolitical situation, a watershed in history, during WW2, is briefly visited.

Completely overwhelmed by Heinz Guderian’s “blitzkrieg” approach to warfare, a dispirited British Army, routed in battle, fled in disarray abandoning their armaments and deserting their French allies on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.

With no munition to fight with, with no money to re-equip a weaponless Army, with an army left with no stomach to do battle, Britain faced the stark reality of being overrun by an unstoppable Wehrmacht.

A desperate Allied high command sought a meeting with Roosevelt.

At that secret meeting held on the seas of the Atlantic, the Allied forces begged of the US, which had artfully kept out of the war, to join them in their fight against the Nazis.

Resorting to patent blackmail the US responded that it would do so, on condition that Britain and France agree to decolonize all their colonies and release them from their respective jurisdictions at the end of WW2.

Churchill and De Gaulle capitulated to American blackmail; this was the basis of the ‘Atlantic Charter’ of 1941 and of the New ‘World Order’ that emerged, with the US at the helm.

So much for the tommyrot of many leaders in the former colonies who boast that it was their valour which won independence for their countries.

With the colonies now unshackled from European colonialism, American imperialism had a carte blanch to prey and devour these former colonies in Africa and Asia, in a manner and time appropriate to the US; a major impediment to US hegemony and ambitions were the Soviet Union and subsequently the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement).

To lure the former European colonies into their net, Washington adopted a long-term strategy; they set-up the ingenious debt-trap that Rothschild had previously alluded to.

At the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 that followed the Atlantic Charter, two institutionalised money lenders, the IMF, and the World Bank, were granted a right to lend to World Governments.

The IMF and the World Bank are governed by member-nations whose voting rights are not based on ‘one- country-one-vote,’ but rather on monies that each country has invested in these two organisations.

The Americans have the largest share of votes in both the IMF and the World Bank; consequently, the IMF and the World Bank operate as extensions of Washington foreign policy.

Bretton Woods established America as the money-lender to the world with a virtual monopoly to lend to World governments.

The comments of Joseph Stiglitz on the IMF are indeed revealing.

This economist, prolific writer, and Nobel Prize winner, does not mince his words when in a series of scathing and damning critiques of this American money-lender, accuses it of causing great damage to countries through the economic policies it has prescribed countries to follow, to qualify for IMF loans.

In his analyses, Stiglitz justifies the intermix in the use of terminology relating to the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO; ‘they are interchangeable masks of a single governance system.’ (The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are three of the five traps laid out by the Americans at Bretton Woods to re-ensnare the former European colonies, this time into the American pen. The two other snares laid by Washington were the ‘United Nations,’ in its present format, and the ‘non-governmental organisations’, a concept first propagated at Bretton Woods).

Stiglitz expressed grave concern that IMF plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. He confessed that the so-called ‘Poverty-Reduction- programs’ for the developing world, undermines democracy and the economy.

Often, IMF remedies made things worse for Nations” said a chastened Stiglitz, critically at odds with the IMF and who had the discernment only an insider could possess.

Stiglitz had the intestinal fortitude to rubbish the disinformation-line often parroted by Washington and their liegeman, when he said, It is not China, which has a large trade surplus, that makes “trade wars”; it is the United States, which has a large trade deficit.”

Stiglitz let the world in on a secret when he revealed that the IMF adopts a single template to destroy the sovereignty of the Nation States established after Bretton Woods; he traced out the deadly 4-phase strategy.

The IMF’s “Four Steps to Damnation”

Stiglitz states that the IMF process begins with an ‘investigation’ that usually takes place in a 5-star hotel where a mendicant finance minister is handed a pre drafted ‘restructuring Agreement’ for his ‘voluntary’ signature.

The IMF hands every minister the same exact four-step program.

(In 2015, Sri Lanka’s Finance Minister at the time – Karunanayake –responding to summons from Washington, just days prior to the first bond-scam, reported to IMF’s Lagarde for a briefing. Following that briefing Karunanayake hurried back to Colombo and, on his tail, came a high-powered IMF team, led by Todd Schneider and Pacific Department Director, Changyong Rhee, charged with monitoring at first hand the goings-on at the Central Bank; the bond- scam was done virtually under the watchful eyes of the IMF monitoring team). 

Step one – In this phase, Privatisation of State assets is the aim; Stiglitz says that it is better described as ‘Briberization’ of State assets. National leaders are bought off, to facilitate the sale of State assets

When a nation sells-off its national assets there is a discontinuation of revenues flowing into State coffers from that asset. It is one sure method of depleting a country’s financial reserves as would, the exercise of slashing taxes, spurring multiple scams in the commodity market, engendering new imports by deliberately destroying entire sectors of the economy such as agriculture and peculating directly from the country’s ‘vault,’ the Central Bank and Treasury.

With the promise of monies being deposited in off-shore bank accounts, leaders happily flog the National assets of the country.

Step two – The objective in this phase is to ultimately reduce a country’s financial reserves to zero; to this end, the ‘Capital Market Liberalization’ plan (popularly referred to as the Hot Money Cycle” plan) is often executed; capital is ‘steered’ into the country as speculative investments in real estate and currency; at the first whiff of trouble, an exodus of this investment takes place.

As was the experience in Indonesia and Brazil, the reserves were drained out within days. (In Sri Lanka, described later in more detail, the modus-operandi of emptying the coffers differed a trifle).

And when the investment flees, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands that high interest rates be set, rates ranging from 30% to 80%.

“The results are predictable; the higher interest rates demolish property values, savage industrial production and drains out national treasuries”, said Stiglitz.

Simultaneously, the temperature of social unrest is brought closer to the boil.

Step Three – IMF initiated Riots.

Stiglitz says, without a degree of ambiguity, Riots are written into the IMF plan”. The IMF drags the gasping nation to ‘Market-Based Pricing;’ this, as Stiglitz explains, is a fancy term for raising prices of food, water, cooking gas, medicines, and all essentials necessary to sustain life.

This leads to the painfully predictable IMF riots. New flights of capital, resulting from the IMF riots, lead to even more pronounced social unrest and government bankruptcies.

The food and fuel riots in Indonesia, the water riots in Bolivia and cooking gas riots in Ecuador are examples.

Step 4 – “Poverty Reduction Strategy”

When this phase is reached, the country put through the wringer is all but done. The IMF has the country eating out of its hand, be it postponing elections, rolling-up Constitutions, turning a blind eye to dictatorial tendencies, interfering in, and obstructing the judicial process or selling strategic ports or be it anything.

When IMF-riots cause capital to flee the country, it gives the money-lender a further opportunity to add more conditions.

The IMF holds the key to life and death of the people in a country reduced to this phase; it controls the ‘money’ supply that buys the ‘essentials’ needed by the people; the money for these essentials will be forthcoming, only if that country were to do the IMF’s bidding.

Stiglitz states that on an average, the IMF imposes 111 conditions on National governments, dictating to the Executive, the Judiciary, and the Legislature in those countries the courses of action they should take, grossly violating in the process the sovereignty of the people, the essence of a democracy.

In this scenario, the IMF has replaced the National government as the sovereign authority; the sovereign power of a country is now vested with Washington.

When this phase is reached, America has successfully colonised that country.

When Stiglitz was asked whether any nation facing this dilemma was able to avoid this fate, he identified Botswana which had told the IMF To go packing.”

In comparison, Sri Lanka has a decided advantage; it has a friendly nation, China, which had proffered – even at the time of the bizarre conduct of Nandasena and Sabry to declare the country bankrupt when it was not so – to underwrite all of Sri Lanka’s external debts and gave the island nation the opportunity to negotiate with self-respect the repayment terms of the underwritten value, with no attached conditions.

This information is somehow deliberately kept out of the public domain.

And Sri Lanka has another friend too, India, which could match China’s benevolence.

To go the path of the IMF is self-destructive with the 111 plus conditions that the country is required to comply with; it is diabolical that the people’s transitory representatives refuse to divulge to the very people with whose sovereignty they reside in the legislature, the 111 conditions laid down by the IMF.

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In 2018, ignoring the vocal warnings of experts and advocacy groups, the then-Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation that weakened post-financial crisis regulations for banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets, sparking fears of systemically risky failures and more taxpayer bailouts.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the California-based firm that collapsed on Friday, controlled an estimated $212 billion, leading analysts and lawmakers to argue that the 2018 law made the institution’s market-rattling failure and resulting federal takeover more likely.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was an outspoken opponent of the deregulatory measure, said in a statement Friday that “President Trump and congressional Republicans’ decision to roll back Dodd-Frank’s ‘too big to fail’ rules for banks like SVB—reducing both oversight and capital requirements—contributed to a costly collapse.”

But the GOP wasn’t alone in its support for Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-Idaho) Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which critics dubbed the Bank Lobbyist Act.

As Warren noted as the bill was flying through Congress, a number of Democrats—including Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and Jon Tester (D-Mont.)—were integral to the legislation’s passage, which led almost immediately to more bank consolidation.

Prior to the enactment of the Crapo bill, which then-President Donald Trump signed into law on May 24, 2018, banks with more than $50 billion in assets were subject to enhanced liquidity mandates and more frequent stress tests aimed at ensuring they could weather economic turmoil.

The 2018 law raised the threshold for the more stringent regulations to $250 billion or higher, a gift to banks like SVB that had been working for years to gut post-crisis regulations implemented under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The diminished oversight, some argued, is at least partly to blame for SVB’s crisis.

“The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was totally avoidable,” Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. “In 2018, Wall Street pushed a deregulation bill that allowed banks like SVB to take reckless risks. It passed, even as I and many others warned of the risks. I am writing legislation to reverse that law.”

As The Lever reported Friday, SVB specifically pushed Congress in 2015 to hike the regulatory threshold to $250 billion, with the bank’s president touting its “strong risk management practices.”

“Three years later—after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying—lawmakers obliged,” the outlet added.

The collapse of SVB, a major lender to tech startups, was the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history and the biggest since the 2008 crisis. SVB’s failure came days after it announced it sold $21 billion worth of bonds at a substantial loss, triggering fears about the firm’s health and a run on the bank that was intensified by venture capitalists’ calls for startups to pull their money.

The bank’s last-ditch efforts to raise capital and find a buyer failed, prompting regulators to seize its assets and begin efforts to make depositors whole. (SVB reportedly paid out bonuses to U.S. employees just hours before federal regulators took over.)

The American Prospect‘s David Dayen noted that “because the depositors holding the bag at SVB are Very Important People, there’s going to be intense pressure for a bailout.”

“Hedge fund titan Bill Ackman is already calling for one,” Dayen observed. “Larry Summers told Bloomberg that the financial system should be fine, as long as depositors get every penny of their money back, which would be a $150 billion bailout.”

In an appearance on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged that “we are not going to do that again,” referring to the bank bailouts of 2008.

“But we are concerned about depositors,” Yellen said, “and we’re focused on trying to meet their needs.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is currently seeking a buyer for SVB, with final bids due by Sunday afternoon, according to Bloomberg.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that “federal authorities are seriously considering safeguarding all uninsured deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, weighing an extraordinary intervention to prevent what they fear would be a panic in the U.S. financial system.”

“Although the FDIC insures bank deposits up to $250,000, a provision in federal banking law may give them the authority to protect the uninsured deposits as well if they conclude that failing to do so would pose a systemic risk to the broader financial system,” the newspaper reported. “In that event, uninsured deposits could be backstopped by an insurance fund, paid into regularly by U.S. banks.”

In a statement on Saturday, Liz Zelnick of the watchdog group Accountable.US said that “this mess was left behind by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration, who were too deep in the big banks’ pocket to care about the consequences of gutting financial industry oversight.”

“The chickens came home to roost this week in the Republican war against Wall Street reform and consumer financial protections,” Zelnick continued. “This predictable disaster should give serious pause to the current MAGA House majority who are pursuing further rollbacks of consumer financial protections after taking money hand over fist from Wall Street banks—but don’t count on it.”

Some expert observers were quick to voice concern that SVB’s collapse is just the start of broader chaos in the financial industry and the overall economy.

Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, warned that the fall of SVB “is going to cause contagion and almost certainly more bank failures,” noting that the Federal Reserve’s rapid and large interest rate increases left many financial institutions without “time to reposition their balance sheets and portfolios.”

“That’s why SVB is just the beginning,” Kelleher argued. “Contagion, likely more bank failures, and various bailouts are almost certainly coming. While the immediate financial stability threats will materialize or be addressed, the underlying fundamental problems caused in large part by the Fed will remain and likely get worse.”

“The Fed’s actions to fight increasing inflation will need to be materially adjusted, which it should be anyway because inflation is driven by many factors that are beyond the Fed’s control,” he said. “Causing financial instability and a recession (of any depth and length) while missing the mark on inflation should cause a fundamental rethinking of the Fed’s powers, authorities, and role.”

This story has been updated to include comments from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

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The Pentagon is helping to shield Russia from International Criminal Court accountability for its atrocities in Ukraine, fearing such a reckoning could set a precedent allowing the tribunal to prosecute U.S. war crimes, a report published Wednesday revealed.

According toThe New York Times, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III and other Pentagon brass are blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the objections of officials in those agencies, as well as in the State and Justice departments.

Neither Russia, the United States, nor Ukraine are party to the Rome Statue, the treaty governing the ICC. However, according to “current and former officials briefed on the matter” who were interviewed by the Times, Austin and others are wary of the Hague tribunal targeting the crimes of countries outside its jurisdiction. Ukraine last year accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction so the court could open an investigation of Russia’s conduct during the invasion.

“The Pentagon is flouting the rest of the U.S. government to try to block sending evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine to the International Criminal Court,” tweeted human rights expert Kenneth Roth. “It fears a precedent: prosecuting non-parties on the territory of governments that accept the ICC.”

Author and war correspondent Megan K. Stack wrote on Twitter that “basically, we want others punished, but not ourselves.”

US tensions re The Hague are old; basically we want others punished, but not ourselves. The ICC is now investigating war crimes in Afghanistan. I’m not surprised by Pentagon stonewalling; I’m more intrigued by calls to cooperate, especially from Graham.https://t.co/cVPXAofXDi

— Megan K. Stack (@Megankstack) March 9, 2023

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—whose resolution urging accountability for Russian war criminals and encouraging ICC member states to investigate documented and alleged atrocities unanimously passed the Senate last year—told the Times‘ Charlie Savage that the Pentagon “opposed the legislative change—it passed overwhelmingly—and they are now trying to undermine the letter and spirit of the law.”

“It seems to me that [Department of Defense] is the problem child here, and the sooner we can get the information into the hands of the ICC the better off the world will be.”

Documented and alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and contractors in Ukraine include—but are not limited to— massacres and other murders of civilians and soldiers; indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas; attacking critical civilian infrastructure; bombing hospitals and shelters; torture; rape and sexual enslavement of women and children; and stealing children.

American troops and contractors have perpetrated each of those war crimes in U.S. attacks, invasions, occupations, and peacekeeping operations in the years since the ICC was established in 1998.

A year of war in Ukraine. A year of Russian forces' atrocities. A year of civilian suffering.

In the year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, here is a glimpse at some of the war crimes and attacks HRW has documented:https://t.co/j1R39K4uXF pic.twitter.com/c5L4glr2iz

— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) February 24, 2023

President Joe Biden has called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and demanded he be tried for Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. The Biden administration and Congress even explored ways of helping the ICC prosecute Russian war crimes without the U.S. being subjected to the tribunal’s authority.

As Savage noted:

Lawmakers enacted two laws aimed at increasing the chances that Russians would be held accountable for war crimes in Ukraine.

One was a stand-alone bill expanding the jurisdiction of American prosecutors to charge foreigners for war crimes committed abroad. The other, a provision about the International Criminal Court embedded in the large appropriations billCongress passed in late December, received little attention at the time.

But that provision was significant. While the U.S. government remains prohibited from providing funding and certain other aid to the court, Congress created an exception that allows it to assist with “investigations and prosecutions of foreign nationals related to the situation in Ukraine, including to support victims and witnesses.”

“The Ukrainian people deserve accountability,” Rosie Berman, a project manager at the advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, asserted via Twitter. “By blocking the sharing of evidence with the ICC, the administration, contrary to its stated position, is undermining it.”

Under a law signed by former President George W. Bush, not only is the U.S. Congress barred from funding the ICC or from providing other assistance to the court, but the U.S. may use “all means necessary and appropriate”—including invading NATO ally the Netherlands—to secure the release of any U.S. or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the tribunal.

In March 2020 the ICC, then led by Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, determined that an investigation into documented and alleged war crimes committed by all sides in the war in Afghanistan, and at secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, could proceed.

In retaliation, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Bensouda and other ICC lawyers and investigators, as well as on journalists who provide evidence of U.S. war crimes. A federal judge later blocked former President Donald Trump’s executive order authorizing sanctions.

In September 2021, human rights defenders were outraged when the ICC, under new Prosecutor Karim Khan, said the investigation would focus only on potential war crimes perpetrated by the Taliban and Islamic State in Afghanistan, while excluding U.S. and allied atrocities.

“If we oppose investigations into countries, like our own, that haven’t joined the ICC, how can we support an investigation into Russia, another country that hasn’t joined the court?” Omar asked at the time.

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***

Lord Arthur Ponsonby was a British diplomat and politician, dates 1871–1946.

This keen and cagey fellow pinpointed 10 rules of propaganda. They are these:

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.

4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.

5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.

6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.

8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.

9. Our cause is sacred.

10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Just Look at the News

A daily scan of the newswires calls to mind three or more of these propaganda rules. On some days, six or seven. On others still, all 10.

We refer specifically to the conflict presently arage in the eastern European nation of Ukraine.

Let us now consider these rules. We will not take up each of them since some rules relate closely to others. We will instead weld these together. To proceed…

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

On how many occasions have you read or heard condemnations of Mr. Putin’s “unprovoked” act of aggression?

To phrase it differently, when has it not been described as unprovoked?

Yet a man can argue very persuasively that Mr. Putin’s war was indeed provoked.

The Russian autocrat warned on several occasions that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a “red line.”

Russia would not abide the NATO dagger pressing against its vitals (parts of Ukraine actually lie east of Moscow).

Yet the NATO alliance had announced its intentions to incorporate Ukraine — despite Vladimir’s moans and grimaces.

A de Facto NATO Member

It is true that no formal offer of membership has come. Yet for years the United States and its NATO allies were arming and training Ukrainian forces.

Why do you think these Ukrainian forces have performed so excellently?

Some have in fact referred to Ukraine as a de facto NATO member. It has merely been awaiting the de jure formality of actual membership.

You may argue that Mr. Putin’s invasion was unjustified. You may argue that it was unnecessary. Your editor himself has maintained these very points.

Yet you cannot argue that it was unprovoked.

Putin’s Evil!

3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.

9. Our cause is sacred.

Here is a very condensed sample of headlines regarding the blackened state of Mr. Putin’s soul:

“Vladimir Putin — ‘Evil on the Level of Joseph Stalin’”

“Yes, Putin Is Evil”

“Putin Is Evil, Not Mentally Ill, a Psychological Explanation”

“’Terrifying’ Putin Driven by ‘Evil Forces,’ Says ECB’s Christine Lagarde”

“How Vladimir Putin Became Evil”

And is this not the very face of evil?

The title of the magazine article affixed to this caption bears the title:

“The Secret Source of Putin’s Evil”

Now you have the flavor of it. We could continue but mercy forbids it.

Is Putin Really Evil?

Yet how do these demonologists know if the man is evil? Have they looked under the hood… and glanced his soul?

Perhaps the man is psychologically impaired. Perhaps he goes by a different morality. Perhaps he is simply misguided.

Or perhaps he simply believes his nation is under threat and that his invasion is justified.

No — not justified — necessary.

We would not claim that he is an especially congenial fellow. We would not claim that he is “nice.”

But evil? That we are not prepared to say.

Yet we are prepared to say — and will say — that for the past year propaganda has enjoyed a very brisk circulation.

Evil on the level of Joseph Stalin, as the one headline screamed? This is the work of the propagandist.

No Special Interest?

4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.

Defending Ukraine may certainly qualify as a “noble purpose.” We do not contend otherwise.

Yet there are several arms manufacturers who presently drive an excellent trade.

They must replace all the armaments that have been dispatched to — and continue to be dispatched to — Ukraine.

Are they not a special interest?

Meantime, our spies inform us that a disturbing portion of monies parading under the banner of “Ukrainian aid” has been diverted to the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs.

We would sort these oligarchs into the category of  “special interest.”

“We Don’t Do Those Things”

5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.

We are told that Russia’s calendar of sins is endless. These hellcats are shooting projectiles into apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, churches.

Yet we are likewise told that Russia suffers from an acute ammunition lack. Why would these Russians waste valuable ammunition on these valueless targets?

Perhaps such targets were struck by accident. It is war and incidents as these are nearly inevitable.

Perhaps even Ukrainian forces struck some of these structures unintentionally.

We recall one instance in which a Russian missile struck very near the Polish border, murdering two. As chance would have it the “Russian missile” was an erring Ukrainian air defense missile.

Perhaps Ukrainian forces fired upon Russian forces from these sites. Russians would be justified to return the fire.

Reports of Russian massacring of civilians proliferate widely. Yet closer examination reveals that at least some of these claims are of very dubious validity.

We would be stunned and gobsmacked if atrocities of various sorts have not occurred — perpetrated by both sides.

It is, after all, war. And war is the very negation of civilization.

Yet there is little to no evidence that atrocities are official Russian policy.

That, we hazard to say, is propaganda.

He’s Using Chemical Weapons!

6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.

“Kyiv Claims Russia Used Banned Chemical Weapon”

“Russia’s Tear Gas Bombings in Ukraine May Be First Step in Dangerous Chemical Escalation”

“Ukraine’s Battlefield Is Haunted by Putin’s Chemical Weapons Legacy”

We assigned our spies the case. They inform us there exists no evidence of Russian chemical weapons use.

Videos have circulated — however — of Ukrainian soldiers preparing chemical weapons for battlefield use. Other videos circulate of Russian soldiers gagging on these chemical agents.

We cannot confirm their trueness.

270,000 Russian Casualties?

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.

Source after source cites claims of unspeakable Russian deaths and woundings. Figures of 270,000 Russian casualties have been proposed.

Yet the original invasion force consisted only of 190,000 men. Are they all — plus 80,000 others — dead or injured?

The British Broadcasting Corporation decided to so some spade work. They attempted to discern the true number of Russian fatalities. This they did by poring through death notices, funeral announcements, social media and other venues.

What did they discover?

They could only identify the names of 16,071 confirmed Russian fatalities. They concede the possibility that they are undercounting the butcher’s bill by as much as 40%.

In all, BBC places Russia’s total irretrievable losses (wounded, killed or missing people) at some 144,500.

These figures nonetheless place the actual casualty roster — both killings and woundings — far below the mainstream telling.

We are loathe to employ the word “only” when discussing deaths and woundings. It is a morbid affair. Each man is a unique human creature crafted in the image of his creator.

Yet the BBC’s sleuthing indicates strongly that Russian casualty figures are extravagantly exaggerated.

It is in keeping to Propaganda Rule no. 7.

8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.

How many intellectuals and artists boast Twitter accounts bearing an image of the Ukrainian flag?

They are nearly beyond count.

10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Your patriotic editor has been labeled traitorous on many, many occasions — by readers and colleagues alike.

The Propaganda War

Does Russia transmit its own propaganda? We are certain that it does.

Upon reflection we must amend the prior statement — we suspect strongly that Russia transmits its own propaganda. We cannot be certain.

That is because none of it is allowed in. It is all censored out by the Western press. They have erected a great cordon walling off Russian propaganda.

How else does one explain the universal media claims of Ukrainian righteousness and Russian evil? Of Ukrainian brio and Russian incompetence? Of Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat?

We will merely state that we have been privy to… conflicting… reports.

Yet we are aware that by posting the 10 Rules of Propaganda… we will be accused ourself of distributing propaganda — Russian propaganda.

We plead nolo contendere… comrade.

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Brian Maher is the Daily Reckoning’s Managing Editor. Before signing on to Agora Financial, he was an independent researcher and writer who covered economics, politics and international affairs. His work has appeared in the Asia Times and other news outlets around the world. He holds a Master’s degree in Defense & Strategic Studies.

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***

Slovakia and Poland want to deliver MiG-29’s to Ukraine and are incessantly urging all other EU members with these fighter jets follow suit, but with the caveat of receiving American-made F-16’s in exchange. In addition, these are old Soviet-made fighter jets that have not been modernised, and because of this, they will not be able to change the course of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.

In a recent interview with CNN, Polish President Andrzej Duda said his country was ready to hand over their remaining operational MiG-29’s to Ukraine.

Responding to Duda’s remark, Slovak Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad said on March 9 that he talked to his Polish counterpart at the meeting of the EU defence ministers in Sweden on March 8 and received confirmation that Poland “would agree with the joint progress of Slovakia and Poland in handing over the redundant MiG-29s of both countries to Ukraine.”

For his part, the Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, warned NATO countries that the delivery of fighter jets to Ukraine would mean their direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

“Imagine that those planes take off in Poland, enter Ukrainian airspace, and then return to Poland for maintenance. Will Poland be involved in that case? I think it will. It’s direct involvement. So, a lot of questions and not enough thought in the West,” said Polyansky.

None-the-less, any final decision by Poland and Slovakia to deliver MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine would not surprise Moscow at all. Although these countries are former Warsaw Pact members, they are today heavily anti-Russia and choose to serve the interests of Washington and Brussels.

Since Poland and Slovakia have virtually no relationship with Russia today, they are unable to modernise their fleet of MiG-29’s or receive spare parts. It is for this reason that the two countries want to give away their fighter jets, especially if they can receive American-made F-16 fighter jets in exchange.

At the same time, the expected deliveries of MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine from Slovakia and Poland indicates that the US is unlikely to deliver F-16’s to Ukraine. It is likely that the US will adopt the German model of encouraging allied states to send their old military equipment to Ukraine in exchange for more modern replacements.

If Slovakia and Poland do eventually deliver the MiG-29’s to Poland, it would amount to about 140 fighter jets. These are unlikely to make a difference in Ukraine’s war effort as they are primitive versions compared to the Russian fleet. Russia’s fleet includes many fourth-generation fighter jets like MiG-31 and fifth generation fighter jets like Sukhoi Su-57. Meanwhile, Slovakia’s and Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets are third generation.

Even if these fighter jets were delivered to Ukraine, there is still the issue that nearly all airports are destroyed. Due to this issue, it cannot be discounted that the MiG-29’s could remain in Slovakia and Poland but be operated by Ukrainian pilots. If this is the case, not only would it justify a Russian retaliation against these countries, but it would make very little difference in the war effort since, like already said, they are inferior aircraft, and, for the fact that virtually all of Ukraine’s airspace is under Russian control. Due to this, any Ukrainian fighter jet would be immediately shot down by Russia’s superior fighter jets and air defence systems like the S-400, S-500 and Buk missile systems.

The Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said that Kiev wants a direct NATO involvement in the conflict because it is the only chance for Volodymyr Zelensky to maintain power.

Kiev has regularly demanded fighter jets from Western countries. In this context, Ukrainian authorities mention the American-made F-16 in spite of the reality it would take a minimum of six months for Ukrainian pilots to become somewhat capable in using them.

At a recent congressional hearing, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Affairs Colin H. Kahl said that Kiev has asked Washington for up to 128 fourth-generation fighter jets. However, NATO does not have a unified position on the issue.

For example, US President Joe Biden stated on February 25 that Ukraine does not need F-16’s for now and that he currently rules out their delivery to Kiev. At the same time, Biden noted that at this stage of the conflict, Washington considers other support a higher priority – such as supplying Ukraine with tanks, artillery, and air defence systems.

Although Washington has promised to continue supporting the Kiev regime, there is likely a contradictory acknowledgement that Russia will achieve its aims in Ukraine. For this reason, the US is using the war as an opportunity for its defence industries to profit. It is also under this context that Slovakia and Poland hope to attain new fighter jets under the guise of supplying Ukraine.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.

“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)

When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”

It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.

Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.

By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “that there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.

In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.

Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.

As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character.  Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”

With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.

The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.

As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.

Scholz's visit underscored that US media is state media. No joint presser, for obvious reasons: they can't risk a question from a German reporter about Sy Hersh's Nord Stream scoop.

Everyone here got the memo: no US outlet covering Scholz's visit even mentioned Hersh's story. pic.twitter.com/9xeBJMtc38

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 6, 2023

US media outlets got the memo: in a sit-down interview with Scholz, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did not find the time to mention Hersh’s reporting. In covering the German Chancellor’s visit, US media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar vow of silence.

Not one question from Fareed Zakaria about Nord Stream as German Cuckmeister Olaf Scholz rambles on about his country's supposed energy independence

Fareed intervenes only to push Scholz to commit more money to Ukraine's military – and therefore less to German social welfare pic.twitter.com/GQJxK27pis

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 6, 2023

Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.

Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.

Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.

In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.

In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.

In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).

That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.

The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.

The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.

*

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***

The breakup of banks that is now occurring in the United States is the inevitable result of the way in which the Obama administration bailed out the banks in 2008.

When real estate prices collapsed, the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with 15 years of quantitative easing (QE) to re-inflate real estate prices – and with them, stock and bond prices.

What was inflated were asset prices, above all for the packaged mortgages that banks were holding, but also for stocks and bonds across the board. That is what bank credit does.

This made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets – the One Percent and a bit more.

The economy polarized as stock prices recovered, the cost of home ownership soared (on low-interest mortgages), and the U.S. economy experienced the largest bond-market boom in history, as interest rates fell below 1%.

But in serving the financial sector, the Fed painted itself into a corner. What would happen when interest rates finally rose?

Rising interest rates cause bond prices to fall. And that is what has been happening under the Fed’s fight against “inflation,” by which it means rising wage levels.

Prices are plunging for bonds, and also for the capitalized value of packaged mortgages and other securities in which banks hold their assets against depositors.

The result today is similar to the situation that savings and loan associations (S&Ls) found themselves in the 1980s, leading to their demise.

S&Ls had made long-term mortgages at affordable interest rates. But in the wake of the Volcker inflation, the overall level of interest rates rose.

S&Ls could not pay higher their depositors higher rates, because their revenue from their mortgages was fixed at lower rates. So depositors withdrew their money.

To obtain the money to pay these depositors, S&Ls had to sell their mortgages. But the face value of these debts was lower, as a result of higher rates. The S&Ls (and many banks) owed money to depositors short-term, but were locked into long-term assets at falling prices.

Of course, S&L mortgages were much longer-term than was the case for commercial banks. And presumably, banks can turn over assets for the Fed’s line of credit.

But just as QE was followed to bolster the banks, its unwinding must have the reverse effect. And if it has made a bad derivatives trade, it’s in trouble.

SVB bank melts down following a Thursday where its stock fell off the cliff, dropping 60% in one day. For those in the crowds, it’s feeling like 1929 all over again as customers converge on the bank’s locations in a modern-day bank run. https://t.co/ghLkVaDJKR

— Boston Herald (@bostonherald) March 10, 2023

Any bank has a problem of keeping its asset prices up with its deposit liabilities. When there is a crash in bond prices, the bank’s asset structure weakens. That is the corner into which the Fed has painted the economy.

Recognition of this problem led the Fed to avoid it for as long as it could. But when employment began to pick up and wages began to recover, the Fed could not resist fighting the usual class war against labor. And it has turned into a war against the banking system as well.

Silvergate was the first to go. It had sought to ride the cryptocurrency wave, by serving as a bank for various brand names.

After vast fraud by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was exposed, there was a run on cryptocurrencies. Their managers paid by withdrawing the deposits they had at the banks – above all, Silvergate. It went under. And with Silvergate went many cryptocurrency deposits.

The popular impression was that crypto provided an alternative to commercial banks and “fiat currency.” But what could crypto funds invest in to back their coin purchases, if not bank deposits and government securities or private stocks and bonds?

What was crypto, ultimately, if not simply a mutual fund with secrecy of ownership to protect money launderers?

Silvergate was a “special case,” given its specialized deposit base. Silicon Valley Bank also was a specialized case, lending to IT startups. First Republic Bank was specialized, too, lending to wealthy depositors in San Francisco and the northern California area.

All had seen the market price of their financial securities decline as Chairman Jerome Powell raised the Fed’s interest rates. And now, their deposits were being withdrawn, forcing them to sell securities at a loss.

Reuters reported on March 10 that bank reserves at the Fed were plunging. That hardly is surprising, as banks are paying about 0.2% on deposits, while depositors can withdraw their money to buy two-year U.S. Treasury notes yielding 3.8% or almost 4%. No wonder well-to-do investors are running from the banks.

This is the quandary in which banks – and behind them, the Fed – find themselves.

The obvious question is why the Fed doesn’t simply bail them out. The problem is that the falling prices for long-term bank assets in the face of short-term deposit liabilities now looks like the new normal.

The Fed can lend banks for their current short-fall, but how can solvency be resolved without sharply reducing interest rates to restore the 15-year, abnormal Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP)?

Interest yields spiked on March 10. As more workers were being hired than was expected, Mr. Powell announced that the Fed might have to raise interest rates even higher than he had warned. Volatility increased.

And with it came a source of turmoil that has reached vast magnitudes beyond what caused the 2008 crash of AIG and other speculators: derivatives.

JP Morgan Chase and other New York banks have tens of trillions of dollars worth of derivatives – that is, casino bets on which way interest rates, bond prices, stock prices, and other measures will change. For every winning guess, there is a loser.

When trillions of dollars are bet on, some bank trader is bound to wind up with a loss that can easily wipe out the bank’s entire net equity.

There is now a flight to “cash,” to a safe haven – something even better than cash: U.S. Treasury securities. Despite the talk of Republicans refusing to raise the debt ceiling, the Treasury can always print the money to pay its bondholders.

It looks like the Treasury will become the new depository of choice for those who have the financial resources. Bank deposits will fall. And with them, bank holdings of reserves at the Fed.

So far, the stock market has resisted following the plunge in bond prices. My guess is that we will now see the Great Unwinding of the great Fictitious Capital boom of 2008-2015.

So the chickens are coming home to roost – with the “chickens” being, perhaps, the elephantine overhang of derivatives.

*

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Featured image: A run on American Union Bank in 1932 (Source: GER)

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***

A prominent French intellectual has written a book arguing that the United States is already waging World War Three against Russia and China.

He also warned that Europe has become a kind of imperial “protectorate”, which has little sovereignty and is essentially controlled by the US.

Emmanuel Todd is a widely respected anthropologist and historian in France.

In 2022, Todd published a book titled “The Third World War Has Started” (“La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé” in French). At the moment, it is only available in Japan.

But Todd outlined the main arguments he made in the book in a French-language interview with the major newspaper Le Figaro, conducted by the journalist Alexandre Devecchio.

According to Todd, the proxy war in Ukraine is “existential” not only for Russia, but also for the United States.

The US “imperial system” is weakening in much of the world, he observed, but this is leading Washington to “strengthen its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

This means that “Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO”, Todd said, and NATO is really a “Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev” bloc.

US and EU sanctions have failed to crush Russia, as Western capitals had hoped, he noted. This means that “the resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice”, and “the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse”.

The French public intellectual pointed to UN votes concerning Russia, and cautioned that the West is out of touch with the rest of the world.

“Western newspapers are tragically funny. They don’t stop saying, ‘Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated’. But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small”, Todd observed.

He also criticized the GDP metrics used by Western neoclassical economists for downplaying the productive capacity of the Russian economy, while simultaneously exaggerating that of financialized neoliberal economies like in the United States.

Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the “Third World War has started.”

Small translating the most important points in this fascinating interview.https://t.co/eYdKoBJx7B

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 13, 2023

In the Le Figaro interview, Todd argued (all emphasis added):

This is the reality, World War III has begun. It is true that it started ‘small’ and with two surprises. We went into this war with the idea that the Russian army was very powerful and that its economy was very weak.

It was thought that Ukraine was going to be crushed militarily and that Russia would be crushed economically by the West. But the reverse happened. Ukraine was not crushed militarily even if it lost 16% of its territory on that date; Russia was not crushed economically. As I speak to you, the ruble has gained 8% against the dollar and 18% against the euro since the day before the start of the war.

So there was a sort of misunderstanding. But it is obvious that the conflict, passing from a limited territorial war to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia backed by China on the other hand, has become a war world. Even if military violence is low compared to that of previous world wars.

The newspaper asked Todd if he was exaggerating. He replied, “We still provide weapons. We kill Russians, even if we don’t expose ourselves. But it remains true that we Europeans are above all economically engaged. We also feel our true entry into war through the inflation and shortages”.

Todd understated his case. He didn’t mention the fact that, after the US sponsored the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014, setting off a civil war, the CIA and Pentagon immediately began training Ukrainian forces to fight Russia.

The New York Times has acknowledged that the CIA and special operations forces from numerous European countries are on the ground in Ukraine. And the CIA and a European NATO ally are even carrying out sabotage attacks inside Russian territory.

Nevertheless, in the interview, Todd continued:

Putin made a big mistake early on, which is of immense sociohistorical interest. Those who worked on Ukraine on the eve of the war considered the country not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a ‘failed state’ in the making.

I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock, or even say ‘welcome Mom’ to holy Russia. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope. The Russians could not have foreseen it. No one could.

Todd said he shares the view of Ukraine of US political scientist John Mearsheimer, a realist who has criticized Washington’s hawkish foreign policy.

Mearsheimer “told us that Ukraine, whose army had been taken over by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate a NATO member Ukraine,” Todd said.

For Russia, this is there a war that is “from their point of view defensive and preventative,” he conceded.

“Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because, since this is an existential question for them, the harder it was, the harder they would hit. The analysis seems to hold true.”

However, Todd argued that Mearsheimer “does not go far enough” in his analysis. The US political scientist has overlooked how Washington has restricted the sovereignty of Berlin and Paris, Todd said:

Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is nothing but a power “game” among others. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, one debacle more or less… What does it matter?

The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: ‘We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us’. Nothing would be existential for America. Insufficiency of analysis which today leads Biden to a series of reckless actions.

America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

The French public intellectual went on in the interview to argue that, by resisting the full force of Western sanctions, Russia and China pose a threat to “the American monetary and financial controls of the world”.

This, in turn, challenges the US status as the issuer of the global reserve currency, which gives it the ability to maintain a “huge trade deficit”:

If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained backed by China, the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund its huge trade deficit for nothing.

This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.

Todd warned that, while the United States is weakening in much of the world, its “imperial system” is “strengthening its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

He explained:

Everywhere we see the weakening of the United States, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates.

If we read [Zbigniew] Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard), we see that the American empire was formed at the end of the Second World War by the conquest of Germany and Japan, which are still protectorates today. As the American system shrinks, it weighs more and more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here).

The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the United States in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid.

As an example of a moment in recent history when Europe was more independent, Todd pointed out, “Let us remember the war in Iraq, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint press conferences against the war” – referring to the former leaders of France (Jacques Chirac) and Germany (Gerhard Schröder).

The interviewer at Le Figaro newspaper, Alexandre Devecchio, countered Todd asking, “Many observers point out that Russia has the GDP of Spain. Aren’t you overestimating its economic power and resilience?”

Todd criticized the overreliance on GDP as a metric, calling it a “fictional measure of production” that obscures the real productive forces in an economy:

War becomes a test of political economy, it is the great revealer. The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (the US, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), practically nothing. One can ask oneself how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles.

The reason is that GDP is a fictional measure of production. If we take away from the American GDP half of its overbilled health spending, then the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, by the most filled prisons in the world, then by an entire economy of ill-defined services, including the “production” of its 15 to 20 thousand economists with an average salary of 120,000 dollars, we realize that an important part of this GDP is water vapor.

War brings us back to the real economy, it allows us to understand what the real wealth of nations is, the capacity for production, and therefore the capacity for war.

Todd noted that Russia has shown “a real capacity to adapt”. He attributed this to the “very large role for the state” in the Russian economy, in contrast to the US neoliberal economic model:

If we come back to material variables, we see the Russian economy. In 2014, we put in place the first important sanctions against Russia, but then it increased its wheat production, which went from 40 to 90 million tons in 2020. Meanwhile, thanks to neoliberalism, American wheat production, between 1980 and 2020, went from 80 to 40 million tons.

…

Russia has therefore a real capacity to adapt. When we want to make fun of centralized economies, we emphasize their rigidity, and when we glorify capitalism, we praise its flexibility.

…

The Russian economy, for its part, has accepted the rules of operation of the market (it is even an obsession of Putin to preserve them), but with a very large role for the state, but it also derives its flexibility from training engineers, who allow the industrial and military adaptations.

This point is similar to what economist Michael Hudson has argued – that although Moscow’s economy is no longer socialist, like that of the Soviet Union was, the Russian Federation’s state-led industrial capitalism clashes with the financialized model of neoliberal capitalism that the United States has tried to impose on the world.

*

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Featured image is from GER

Short List of USAID Subversion Operations

By Kurt Nimmo, March 12, 2023

The first thing to know: the agency is run out of the State Department. Its pubic relations cover is to provide “international development.” This is code for fomenting regime change and undermining elected governments not on-script with the neoliberal agenda.

COVID-19 Vaccinated High School Children Are Having Cardiac Arrests, Heart Attacks While Playing Sports — Plus 31 Shocking VAERS Reports, Some of Them Fatal

By Dr. William Makis, March 13, 2023

Ebonie Sherwood is a High school athlete in Ohio. She collapsed during track practice on March 7, 2023 and had no pulse. She was brought back with CPR and is currently on a ventilator and ECMO machine. (click here)

China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI): Beijing has Mediated the Resumption of Iran-Saudi Arabia Ties

By Andrew Korybko, March 12, 2023

This remarkable development removes one of the most destabilizing factors in regional security for decades, the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, which was exploited by the US to divide-and-rule West Asia.

The Existential Crisis of Meaning and Human Significance Resulting from Global Capitalism and Corporatocracy

By Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu, March 12, 2023

Marxian concepts such as “commodification”, “objectification”, “alienation”, “vanity consumption” and “consumerism” are helpful paradigms in unlocking the present existential crisis of meaning and of human significance as experienced by workers worldwide and are beneficial conceptual frameworks in elucidating the psychological, mental, emotive, and existential burdens that laborers and workers face and experience in living their respective careers in the midst of capitalist hegemonic globalism.

EU-Russia’s “Unforgettable Divorce”

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, March 12, 2023

With the current geopolitical developments and the new processes of re-configuration, seriously affecting the landscape of economic cooperation, the basic question many researchers and observers are monitoring is to understand why Russia after the Soviet collapse aspired to transform into an European country. Russia wanted to develop and extend Europe down to the Pacific.

Corporatism Will Kill Us All

By Rodney Atkinson, March 12, 2023

One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.

1.2 Million French Workers Strike Again

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 12, 2023

For several months, unions and students in France have engaged in periodic general strikes and mass demonstrations in protest against a pension reform plan advanced by President Emmanuel Macron.

Will Regime Change Now Come to Riyadh?

By Gavin OReilly, March 12, 2023

Friday’s announcement that Iran and Saudi Arabia had restored bilateral ties for the first time in seven years marks a major geopolitical development in the Persian Gulf.

A Hard-Edged Rock: Waging Economic Warfare on Humanity

By Colin Todhunter, March 12, 2023

Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture? Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.

The Ghost of Hugo Grotius: The UN High Seas Treaty

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 12, 2023

Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting.  The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts as freedom of navigation and trade (commeandi commercandique libertas), terms that have come to mean as much assertions of power as affirmations of international legal relations.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)

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***

18 yo Ohio high school athlete had a heart attack 

Ebonie Sherwood is a High school athlete in Ohio. She collapsed during track practice on March 7, 2023 and had no pulse. She was brought back with CPR and is currently on a ventilator and ECMO machine. (click here)

“She is a three-sport athlete. She is one of the healthiest kids we know. She is so active”

Doctors are baffled. “Her doctors want to see if her heart will be able to heal itself, or if a device will have to be put in to help her heart.

“Worst case scenario she would need a heart transplant.

17 yo North Carolina cheerleader had a heart attack

17 year old Keianna was warming up for a cheer competition in Raleigh, NC when teammates noticed she was acting “weird”. Her muscles were flexing and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Keianna was having a seizure and was not breathing. She also had no pulse (cardiac arrest) (click here).

CPR was started, then she was given a shock with a defibrillator. She had 3 more seizures in the hospital and had to be intubated.

17 yo Florida high school cross country runner had a heart attack after 5K race

17 year old Gabe Higginbottom, a high school cross country runner had a heart attack on Sep.10, 2022, after finishing a 5K race in Pensacola, Florida. (click here)

He was rushed to the hospital and was found to have a blocked right coronary artery requiring an angioplasty. Later, they performed a 3-hour surgery inserting two stents and found two blood clots.

17 yo Florida golfer died suddenly while practicing for upcoming Golf Tournament

17 year old Tyler Erickson, senior high school student in Florida, was found lifeless at a golf course due to a “heart attack or blood clot” while practicing for an upcoming golf tournament, according to a statement from the family. (click here)

He spent the day practicing on the golf course, and in the evening his family found him slumped over on the floorboard of his golf cart. His body was lifeless and CPR did not revive him.

16 yo Idaho high school athlete suffered heart attack while weight-lifting

16 year old Travis Johnston was lifting weights in the gym on Oct.21, 2021 when he suffered a cardiac arrest. Once resuscitated, his body went into a coma and stayed in coma for 48 hours. (click here)(click here)

Since coming out of the coma, the high school junior is suffering from “severe delirium” and is “extremely confused.”

16 yo Nevada high school athlete suffered heart attack while playing flag football and died

16 year old Nevada high school student Ashari Hughes collapsed during a varsity flag football game on Jan.5, 2023, was hospitalized and died later that night. (click here)

According to the Clark County coroner, the cause of death was reported to be a congenital heart condition (anomalous origin of the right coronary artery). Her death was described to have been of “natural causes” (click here)

However, there was no testing done to examine the possibility of COVID-19 vaccine damage to her heart.

14 yo North Carolina high school student died while riding a bull at a rodeo

14 year old Denim Bradshaw died on Jan.28, 2023, after riding a bull at a rodeo for the first time and suffering from a cardiac arrest. He died at the hospital (click here)

Singapore Ministry of Health awards $225,000 to 16 year old boy who had a cardiac arrest while lifting weights after 1st Pfizer dose: 

Singapore’s Ministry of Health has awarded a 16 year old boy $225,000 compensation after suffering a cardiac arrest 6 days after receiving 1st Pfizer dose on June 27, 2021and requiring intensive care (click here).

Medical investigations revealed he had developed acute severe myocarditis which led to the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The myocarditis was likely a serious adverse event arising from the COVID-19 vaccine he received, which might have been aggravated by his strenuous lifting of weights (click here)

Under the Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Programme (VIFAP) provided by the Ministry of Health (MOH), a one-time financial assistance of $225,000 has been extended to the youth and his family because his condition was severe and critical

31 US VAERS cases of high school children having cardiac arrests after COVID-19 mRNA vaccines

VAERS 1187918: 15 yo girl with complex medical issues had cardiac arrest 3-4 days after 2nd Moderna dose & died on April 6, 2021 (New Hampshire)

VAERS 1199455: 17 yo girl had difficulty breathing & chest pain, suffered cardiac arrest 8 days after 1st Pfizer dose & died on April 10, 2021 (Wisconsin)

VAERS 1225942: 16 yo girl had cardiac arrest at home 9 days after 1st Pfizer dose & died on March 30, 2021. Had pulmonary emboli (Wisconsin)

VAERS 1328262: 17 yo girl presented 29 days after 1st Pfizer dose, severe bilateral pulmonary embolism with severe right ventricular hypertension and heart failure, had cardiac arrest, required ECMO in PICU, managed in Cardiac ICU (Georgia)

VAERS 1340501: 16 yo boy presented with 36 hours of chest and left arm pain, had myocardial infarction 1 day after 2nd Pfizer dose, ST elevation, Troponin in 1000s, hospitalized (California)

VAERS 1387747: 17 yo boy woke up with sudden chest pain, had myocardial infarction 2 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, ST elevation, was hospitalized (Missouri)

VAERS 1420762: 17 yo girl had cardiac arrest 6 days after Pfizer dose, and died on June 23, 2021 (location unknown)

VAERS 1431289: 13 yo boy had out-of-hospital cardiac arrest 17 days after 1st Pfizer dose, had large cerebellar hemorrhage and died on June 20, 2021 (Minnesota)

VAERS 1446789: 15 yo autistic boy with ADHD was coughing 6 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, had two cardiac arrests (New Jersey)

VAERS 1474063: 16 yo boy had severe chest pain, myocardial infarction 2 days after 1st Pfizer dose, elevated troponins, hospitalized (foreign)

VAERS 1651389: 16 yo boy had severe chest pain, myocardial infarction and pericarditis 3 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, Troponins 7000+, was hospitalized (Texas)

VAERS 1693654: 15 yo boy had cardiac arrest while driving a friend 10 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, suffered severe anoxic brain damage, on life support (Texas)

VAERS 1702154: 16 yo boy had out-of-hospital cardiac arrest 6 days after 1st Pfizer dose & died on Sep.1, 2021 (foreign)

VAERS 1796194: 14 yo boy had myocardial infarction and pericarditis 19 days after 1st Pfizer dose and was hospitalized in ICU. Permanently disabled (did not recover) (foreign)

VAERS 1828901: 17 yo girl presented with chest pain & dyspnea for 48hr, 36 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, had cardiac arrest and died on Oct.21, 2021 (Washington)

VAERS 1830419: 16 yo boy had cardiac arrest while running, after 2nd Pfizer dose, had hypoxic encephalopathy, permanently disabled (foreign)

VAERS 1959638: 15 yo girl presented with chest and arm pain, had myocardial infarction 1 day after 1st dose of Pfizer, permanently disabled (foreign)

VAERS 1971636: 14 yo girl had dizziness, headache, then cardiac arrest 15 days after 1st Moderna dose, same day brain injury, died in hospital on Oct.10, 2021 (foreign)

VAERS 1991078: 14 yo girl presented with dyspnea, seizure, had cardiac arrest 8 days after 1st Pfizer dose, died Nov.6, 2021 (foreign)

VAERS 2042005: 13 yo boy had cardiac arrest 7 months after 2nd Moderna dose & died suddenly on Jan.1, 2022 (New Hampshire)

VAERS 2112926: 13 yo girl had heart attack symptoms 14 days after 1st Pfizer dose and was hospitalized for 5 days (Pennsylvania)

VAERS 2151665: 14 yo boy had cardiac arrest while at friends home 41 days after 2nd Pfizer dose, CPR started, had to be revived 3 times, defibrillator installed (New York)

VAERS 2152560: 7 yo boy had cardiac arrest 13 days after 1st Pfizer dose & died on Feb.16, 2022 (Washington)

VAERS 2171205: 17 yo boy had acute myocardial infarction same day as 3rd dose of Pfizer, increased troponins, recovered (foreign)

VAERS 2263095: 15 yo boy had myocardial infarction same day after 3rd Pfizer dose, was seen in emergency (foreign)

VAERS 2264954: 13 yo boy had myocardial infarction and pericarditis 3 days after 1st Pfizer dose, permanently disabled (foreign)

VAERS 2398786: 17 yo boy had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest 6 days after 3rd dose of Pfizer and died on Jun.22, 2022 (foreign)

VAERS 2458174: 15 yo girl had a cardiac arrest after 2nd Moderna dose and died (location unknown)

VAERS 2535782: 11 yo boy had 3rd dose of Pfizer at 340pm, at 715pm was found face immersed in bathtub, cardiac arrest, died 9pm Dec.13, 2022 (foreign)

VAERS 2543364: 14 yo girl had 1st dose of Moderna, 16 days later had headache, dizziness, fever, then cardiac arrest, died on Oct.11, 2021 (foreign)

VAERS 2582452: 12 yo girl had acute myocardial infarction 5 days after 1st Pfizer dose and died on Nov.10, 2021 (foreign)

My take…

Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines can cause both cardiac arrests (myocarditis) and heart attacks (blood clots), both of which can lead to sudden death.

We are seeing more and more cardiac arrests and heart attacks in COVID-19 vaccinated high school students. Many of these incidents are fatal.

I have provided 31 VAERS cases in this article.

Parents must be made aware of the very serious risks posed by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in all children, but especially in children who are physically active.

Pfizer & Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should never have been introduced in children of any age.

*

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***

Let’s take a look at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.

The first thing to know: the agency is run out of the State Department. Its pubic relations cover is to provide “international development.” This is code for fomenting regime change and undermining elected governments not on-script with the neoliberal agenda.

Second point: USAID is basically a cutout for CIA activity. David H. Price, in his “Cold War Anthology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology,” documents how “activists” working for USAID pass on information of use to the CIA.

Moreover, according to former USAID director, John Gilligan, the agency “served as a sort of graduate school for CIA agents,” and “many AID offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan added “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

Third: USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) was shut down in 1974 after James Abourezk, a senator from South Carolina, disclosed OPS was involved in training Latin American police to torture activists. The public cover for OPS was to end corruption and promote professionalism. In reality, it was a CIA proxy. (See “Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione,” Brett Wilkins, Antiwar.com, August 11, 2020.)

Four: in 2021, USAID funded (to the tune of $39 million) Ecohealth Alliance, a group studying emerging viruses. President Trump shut down the operation after it was revealed it collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ecohealth Alliance funded “gain of function” experiments.

Five: information on the shady and illegal behavior of USAID briefly emerged when it was discovered the agency had established a fake social media platform in Cuba. “Supposedly concerned with public health and civics, its operatives actively targeted likely dissidents,” Wired reported in 2015.

Today [August 4, 2014], the Associated Press broke a story that USAID backed a program in Cuba that brought Latin American youth to the island in an alleged effort to stir up political dissent. The youngsters from Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru traveled to Cuba posing as tourists or health workers leading HIV prevention workshops, but with the real goal of grooming opposition activists. (See “With HIV regime-change ruse in Cuba, another black eye for USAID,”  Whitney Eulich, The Christian Science Monitor.)

Six: according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, an “extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.” USAID put out a call for contractors interested in subverting Nicaragua following its 2021 election.

The latest escalation in intervention began under the Obama presidency and continued under Trump, although the motivation probably has more to do with the US administration’s ongoing concerns about the success of the Ortega government’s development model since it returned to power in 2007 and began a decade of renewed social investment.

Seven: in 1966, USAID established the Office of Population. The first director was Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt. “He would hold the post until 1979, using it to create a global empire of interlocking population control organizations operating with billion-dollar budgets to suppress the existence of people considered undesirable by the U.S. Department of State,” writes Robert Zurbin for The New Atlantis. (Emphasis added.)

“Ravenholt also had no compunction about buying up huge quantities of unproven, unapproved, defective, or banned contraceptive drugs and intrauterine devices (IUDs) and distributing them for use by his population control movement subcontractors on millions of unsuspecting Third World women, many of whom suffered or died in consequence.”

Eight: USAID is at the forefront of numerous color revolutions. “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there,” writes Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer, writer, and journalist. (See “Colored Revolutions: A New Form of Regime Change, Made in USA,” posted at WikiLeaks.)

The recipe is always the same. Student and youth movements lead the way with a fresh face, attracting others to join in as though it were the fashion, the cool thing to do. There’s always a logo, a color, a marketing strategy. In Serbia, the group OTPOR, which led the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, hit the streets with t-shirts, posters and flags boasting a fist in black and white, their symbol of resistance. In Ukraine, the logo remained the same, but the color changed to orange. In Georgia, it was a rose-colored fist, and in Venezuela, instead of the closed fist, the hands are open, in black and white, to add a little variety.

Golinger adds, “The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, Freedom House, AEI and ICNC.”

The pattern is now being repeated on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia.

In 2020, according to NATO,

USAID/Georgia launched a new Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) to guide its assistance to Georgia through 2025.  Under the new strategy, USAID will strategically partner with Georgia on its journey to self-reliance [neoliberal servitude], helping advance its Euro-Atlantic integration [specifically targeting the Caucasus and Central Asia] and strengthen its resilience to malign influence [defined as diplomatic, economic, and security initiatives with the Russian Federation].

The above is a short list. In order to cover all the subversive activities of USAID, we would need a book length monograph.

Rest assured, USAID is not in Georgia to promote “democracy.” It is there to subvert the government, which is not sufficiently pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian, according to Samantha Power and the USG State Department.

The only difference this time is the neocon Vicky Nuland isn’t on the edge of the orchestrated demonstrations passing out cookies.

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***

Doctor and nurse deaths from COVID-19 vaccines were always going to be the focus of cover-ups. The reason is practical: the state needs doctors and nurses to enthusiastically push COVID-19 vaccines on their patients, and it needs these same doctors and nurses to stay silent about COVID-19 vaccine injuries and deaths.

Doctors and nurses mustn’t know that their colleagues are dying suddenly from the same COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that they are pushing daily on their own patients.

31 year old NZ nurse died 4 days after booster shot

Divya Simon, 31, a rest home nurse, had her third COVID-19 booster vaccination four days before suffering a massive heart attack, according to a decision from coroner Luella Dunn released today. (click here)

“She had the booster on January 25 last year, and took the next day off work because she felt unwell. She complained of pain in the left side of her neck and shoulder.

Simon, who had two children aged 4 and 2, worked a night shift on January 28 returning home early the next morning and went to sleep at 10am. After she woke mid-afternoon she went to have a shower and told her husband she felt dizzy and had chest pains. That evening she had a cardiac arrest.

Ambulance arrived and Simon was given adrenalin, shocked and taken to Waikato Hospital. There she was intubated and taken to ICU but was not responsive and continued to deteriorate, dying the next day at 11am.

Dunn said an angiogram was unable to determine the cause of the cardiac arrest and there were no medical records to indicate why Simon would suffer a heart attack.

The pathologist who conducted her autopsy told the coroner Simon’s death was most likely related to an underlying weakness in her coronary arteries.

The pathologist found no evidence to suggest Simon’s vaccination contributed in any way to her death and the Centre for Adverse Reaction Monitoring came to the same conclusion.”

Case Closed!

That’s it. Case closed. A healthy 31 year old nurse had a massive heart attack 4 days after her COVID-19 booster shot and it was definitely not the booster shot, although the pathologist had no idea why she died.

But the pathologist is lying. And I can prove it.

New Zealand does not perform autopsies with immunohistochemical staining of tissue samples for the COVID-19 vaccine spike protein.

So when the pathologist said he “didn’t find evidence” of COVID-19 vaccine damage, that was a lie. He “didn’t find evidence” because he didn’t look for it – he did not conduct the proper staining of the pathology samples, because no one in New Zealand does.

“There is no current test (in New Zealand) that will show the Covid-19 vaccine in the heart tissue” as reported by One News New Zealand (click here)

26 year old NZ man died of myocarditis due to Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccination

Let’s look at a different case where the pathologist linked a sudden death to the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine – the case of 26 year old NZ man Rory Nairn (click here)

Rory Nairn died of myocarditis after 1st dose of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

Coroner Sue Johnson opened an inquiry into his death. After hearing evidence from pathologist Dr Noelyn Hung, Johnson said she is satisfied that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the myocarditis from which Nairn died.

Hung carried out an intensive pathological examination of the heart. She stated that the cause of the myocarditis came down to a diagnosis by exclusion.

There is no current test that will show the Covid-19 vaccine in the heart tissue, but Hung was able to exclude other causes of myocarditis. Hung also excluded all other known potential causes including certain medicines..

There was no sign of any infection or any other reason for Nairn’s death except in the myocardium (the middle muscular layer of the heart). Johnson accepted Hung’s medical opinion that the direct cause of Nairn’s death was acute myocarditis – consistent with vaccine-related myocarditis.

What this means 

If there is no test available to check for COVID-19 vaccine injury to body tissues, you cannot exclude the vaccine as the cause of death. In the case of the 31 year old nurse Divya Simon, the pathologist cannot conclude “the COVID-19 vaccine didn’t do this” or “there is no evidence the COVID-19 vaccine did this”. It is not possible to come to this conclusion, because the pathologist had no way of proving this.

In the case of 26 year old Rory Nairn, COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis was declared the cause of death because every other possibility was excluded. It was the diagnosis of exclusion.

Notice the difference?

The 31 year old nurse death was a cover-up. The pathologist lied. New Zealand’s Centre for Adverse Reaction Monitoring lied. They covered-up her death. Almost certainly because she was a nurse.

My Take…

It should not surprise anyone by this point, that deaths of doctors and nurses will be treated very differently and will be covered up at all costs.

When 3 Canadian doctors died within days of each other in the same Trillium Health Hospital in Mississauga, Ontario, days after the rollout of the 4th COVID-19 vaccine (2nd booster shot), mainstream media called it a coincidence (click here) (click here)

That’s why my reporting on 132 Canadian doctor sudden deaths since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines has been so “controversial”.

The fiercest attacks I have faced from mainstream media so far, were about me exposing the sudden deaths of fully COVID-19 vaccinated Canadian doctors.

I was attacked by Global news (click here), Toronto Star (click here), Reuters (click here), AAP (click here), Politifact (click here), Logically (click here), Lead Stories (click here).

So whenever you see a case like this where a coroner or pathologist declares that “COVID-19 vaccine didn’t cause this death”, you will know they are lying, and you will be able to explain exactly why they are lying.

They can allow the occasional citizen’s death to be linked to the COVID-19 vaccine. But they cannot and will not allow a doctor or nurse’s death to be linked to the vaccine.

*

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***

This remarkable development removes one of the most destabilizing factors in regional security for decades, the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, which was exploited by the US to divide-and-rule West Asia. Washington might still try to sabotage their rapprochement, but it’s unlikely that it’ll achieve anything in this respect, especially since both Tehran and Riyadh are likely aware of its intentions. Although it’ll never publicly admit to it, the US is furious at them for this, especially since China mediated their deal.

China’s newly published Global Security Initiative (GSI) just scored its first success after the publication of a trilateral statement on Friday between that country, Iran, and Saudi Arabia regarding the resumption of diplomatic ties between those two West Asian countries. Beijing helped mediate the deal between Tehran and Riyadh whereby they agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs and to respect their counterpart’s sovereignty, the two principles of which form some of the key pillars of the GSI.

This remarkable development removes one of the most destabilizing factors in regional security for decades, the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, which was exploited by the US to divide-and-rule West Asia. Washington might still try to sabotage their rapprochement, but it’s unlikely that it’ll achieve anything in this respect, especially since both Tehran and Riyadh are likely aware of its intentions. Although it’ll never publicly admit to it, the US is furious at them for this, especially since China mediated their deal.

After all, Iran and Saudi Arabia aren’t just aligning themselves with the Sino-Russo Entente ahead of the impending trifurcation of International Relations between that de facto New Cold War bloc, the US-led West’s Golden Billion, and the Global South, but are also advancing the “petroyuan” scenario too. That last-mentioned outcome could deal a deathblow to the petrodollar and thus unprecedentedly accelerate the global systemic transition to complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”).

The US’ unipolar hegemony would enter into the dustbin of history much sooner than anyone expected, which has serious grand strategic reverberations, both for itself as well as the international community. That already declining hegemon would no longer exercise the disproportionate influence over currency and financial markets as it presently does, thus neutralizing one of its most powerful Hybrid War weapons, which could in turn reduce the likelihood of other states being destabilized via related means.

Having explained the significant geo-economic implications of this latest development, which could literally change the world in the coming future, it’s now time to briefly touch upon its comparatively less important geopolitical ones. To be clear, they’re still extremely meaningful, but there’s no doubt that they pale in comparison to the insight shared in the preceding two paragraphs. Most immediately, there’s finally a credible window of opportunity for ending the years-long Yemeni War.

Iran and Saudi Arabia back the Houthis and the UN recognized Yemeni authorities respectively, who’ve been fighting each other for the last nine years in what’s since become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN’s World Food Programme. With the top patrons of both primary participants now at peace with one another, there’s a chance that they might build upon their Chinese-media rapprochement to finally bring an end to their proxy war in Yemen, which could save countless lives.

The challenge, however, will be in meeting the legitimate interests of the South Yemeni people who aspire to restore their country’s independence. If Iran and Saudi Arabia go over their heads, and by extension those of their Emirati allies, then their potential efforts to end one proxy war might inadvertently spark another. For instance, the Southern Transitional Council (STC) might oppose any deal that results in the Houthis obtaining any sort of influence – real or perceived – over South Yemen.

It’s too early to speculate what might ultimately unfold in that peninsular country, but the point is that observers shouldn’t rule out the scenario of Iran and Saudi Arabia symbolizing their newfound Chinese-mediated rapprochement by trying to bring an end to their proxy war in Yemen. Irrespective of whatever could happen in this respect, it’s still a remarkable development that China successfully convinced those two rivals to put an end to their competition.

This outcome speaks to its rising status as a diplomatic superpower, which comes shortly after the People’s Republic shared its 12-step peace plan for ending the Ukrainian Conflict. Just like the scenario of Iran and Saudi Arabia joining forces to end the Yemeni War is too premature to speculate about in detail, so too is it equally premature to speculate about the prospects of China’s success in ending the NATO-Russian proxy war, but potentially forthcoming progress on this front can’t be ruled out either.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Many workers across the globe are feeling bored and at the same time are constantly tired with their respective job careers. Many workers in our present milieu are feeling worn-out and burnt-out in their work and with their life in general.

Marxian Politico-Economic Philosophy in a nutshell is a scathing critique of the manner by which global corporatist capitalism spawned and generated our contemporary existential crisis of meaning and of human significance. Reflecting on life and living using the lens of Karl Marx’s critique of how extractive capitalism exploits employees, workers, laborers and peasants will allow us to transcend our present extractive consumeristic lifestyle and see what is ahead of life and living—beyond merely working for the sake of money and greed: beyond merely working for wants and for vain luxuries.

Marxian concepts such as “commodification”, “objectification”, “alienation”, “vanity consumption” and “consumerism” are helpful paradigms in unlocking the present existential crisis of meaning and of human significance as experienced by workers worldwide and are beneficial conceptual frameworks in elucidating the psychological, mental, emotive, and existential burdens that laborers and workers face and experience in living their respective careers in the midst of capitalist hegemonic globalism. It is crucial to emphasize that the above Marxist conceptual paradigms are still extremely relevant if we are to truly understand ourselves as homo faber (working human) whose goal is to become what the ancient Greek philosophers termed as anthropos me skopó kai telos (human person who realizes one’s value and significance in the light of humanity’s ultimate purpose).

We can look at the boredom and the ennui in our respective careers as the result of commodification: when we are treated as objects to produce commodities that the economic and political “powers-that-be” have unilaterally imposed upon and demanded from us; and we are forced to deliver these commodities even though we are being depersonalized and dehumanized in the process of production. Commodification happens when we are treated as objects or as things in the process of our work—to the point that we feel that we are like the proverbial goose that is forced to lay golden eggs for the consumption of the goose’s extractive and greedy master.

Our career paths follow a triple movement of labor-consumption-fulfillment, so on and so forth, following a dialectical cycle. We labor (work or employment) in order to satisfy our needs (consumption), and we seek to satisfy our needs to have some sense of fulfillment or happiness (goals for working) in our lives. We work because we want to be purposeful, to be fulfilled, and to be happy in our life. Alienation happens when we simply work, work, and do more tedious work; yet not being able to find fulfillment, satisfaction and happiness in our life. We work hard and work ourselves unto sickness and death only to find out that our bosses, our employers, and our superiors are becoming richer and happier but we have become poorer, sicker, and more unhappy with our self and with our condition. This is what Karl Marx termed “alienation”.

In our consumeristic and capitalistic society, those economic and political “powers-that-be” are the ones who are reaping the fruits of our blood, sweat and tears; while the workers’ lives are miserable famished and impoverished. Marx calls this situation “exploitation” or “oppression”. Objectification, dehumanization, depersonalization, oppression, exploitation, alienation, marginalization—for Marx, these are just synonymous malevolent terms brought about by international corporatist capitalism, extractive consumerism, and exploitative imperialism. Dehumanization and exploitation are the results of our being commodified by this consumeristic society bent only on the monetization of human worth, marketability of human existence and economic profitability of human life. Once we are commodified by our consumeristic and capitalistic society for its own utilitarian and pragmatic interest; we feel used, abused, worn-out, and alienated from our work and from our very own self—and we do not anymore find fulfillment, satisfaction and felicity in what we do and in what we are: in short, we are burnt-out from and traumatized by our work.

There is an inherent monstrous problem with global corporatist capitalism that Marx clearly saw—this is the “profit motive” that will deform and mutate itself into a ravenous and insatiable Beast, making humans its helpless slaves in order to satisfy this voracious Beast’s greed for power, profit, influence, money, and market. When one subjects the whole value of human existence into mere “economism”, “marketability”, “money-fetishism” and look at our human significance and worth solely in the language of consumption and monetary consideration, then the human person becomes only an instrumental and utilitarian tool in the hands of an extractive, exploitative and oppressive capitalistic society. As a tragic result, the human person is not treated as a value in itself, not treated as having intrinsic worth, and treated only as animal-of-burden in a capitalistic and consumeristic society!

We are bored with our work and we feel oppressed by our respective jobs because our contemporary society values things more than people. Our present society values money more than relationships. Nowadays, even schools, churches, and so-called humanistic organizations as well as philanthropic foundations are not immune to the cruel tentacles of global extractive capitalism spreading its rabid virus even upon these so-called humane, spiritual, educational, and charitable institutions, foundations and organizations. We see a sad and gloomy state-of-affairs as of the present: universities and educational institutions are now offering courses solely for global marketability, offering courses that caters to the economistic demands of the consumerist and capitalist world-out-there.

It is scandalous to observe that even contemporary universities all over the world are now succumbing to the demands of consumerist globalism and neglect the university’s real role in society: that of critical thinking and of making persons proper human beings—more human and more humane! How sad life would be if our minds and hearts are simply brainwashed by our consumeristic society to think that success is all about raking and hauling money for ourselves, and working only to satisfy our wants and caprices! How subhuman life is, when we simply live for things, money and commodities dictated by cleverly engineered media propaganda and brainwashing advertisements paid for by greedy capitalists, when in fact these trivial commodities and artificial products are not truly needed in our lives but are projected and propagandized to be necessities by aggressive advertisement and consumerist conditioning and capitalistic social engineering.

One ought to realize that Marxian Thought is not just dealing with collective praxis—it also converts us from within our innermost being. Marxian praxis of societal engagement requires us to reform ourselves by fighting with all our might and strength against all the false consciousness and the overt as well as covert conditionings that global capitalism have nested for a long time in our mind and heart—making us alienated of who we truly are as persons of intrinsic worth as human existents. It is an implicit presupposition in Karl Marx’s philosophy of the revolutionary struggle that before one can fight the insidious malevolence of capitalism in our consumerist society, one must face and struggle against our greedy, exploitative, vain, and selfish consciousness. Before one could ever attempt to liberate the society from the shackles of greedy capitalism, we need to aggressively resist and strive against all forms of greedy, extractive, egotist, vain, and selfish propensities lurking within our very own being.

Individual liberation and collective societal liberation against this oppressive consumeristic society are inseparable.

One cannot stand without the other. One could not fight extractive capitalism within the collective struggle if one’s heart and mind is not yet liberated and weaned-away from the heavy tentacles of capitalism buried and hidden in our false consciousness of created wants, vanities, greed and caprices fanned by consumerist propaganda and capitalist advertisements. Our collective struggle against the false consciousness of capitalism must go together with our personal disavowal of our own consumeristic, slave-driving, and exploitative behavior. The value of our individual struggle must not be pitted against the value of our collective struggles against exploitative and oppressive capitalism. We equally need the “power of one” and the “power of the collective” to win our battle against alienation, commodification, objectification, marginalization, and dehumanization brought about by greedy commercialism, reductionist corporatocratic capitalism and extractive consumerist economism in our present world milieu. 

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Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu is Associate Professor-7 of Philosophy and Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines (UP), Cebu City, Philippines. He was Academic Coordinator of the Political Science Program at UP Cebu from 2011-2014, and Program Coordinator of Gender and Development (GAD) Office at UP Cebu from 2015-2016 and from 2018-2019.

His research interests include Theoretical and Applied Ethics, Islamic Studies particularly Sunni jurisprudence (Sunni Fiqh), Islamic feminist discourses, Islam in interfaith dialogue initiatives, Islamic environmentalism, Classical Sunni Islamic pedagogy, the writings of Al-Ghazali on pluralism and tolerance, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, Turkish Sufism, Ataturk Studies, Ottoman Studies, Genghis Khan Studies, Marxian Political Thought, Muslim-Christian Dialogue, Middle Eastern Affairs, Peace Studies, and Public Theology.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) Canada.

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With the current geopolitical developments and the new processes of re-configuration, seriously affecting the landscape of economic cooperation, the basic question many researchers and observers are monitoring is to understand why Russia after the Soviet collapse aspired to transform into an European country. Russia wanted to develop and extend Europe down to the Pacific.

In linguistics, phrases appeared in the direction, such as “developing solid economic cooperation from Lisbon to Vladivostok” and transform the entire vast region into European.

On different occasions, the Kremlin has held several exclusive interactive meetings with European corporate business people. Those meetings raised various issues of fundamental importance for broadening economic cooperation. Throughout the 2000 to 2010, and at one point, Russian and EU businesspeople called on the Russian and EU authorities to resolve the issue of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and begin work on a new basic agreement. President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, took part in the discussions.

Interesting and worthy to note that during his presidency, Dmitry Medvedev sent his greetings to the participants in the second European-Russian Forum held on December 8, 2008. The message read in part:

“This big event has an important part to play in resolving issues concerning Russia and Europe. I am sure that this forum will help to bring Russia and Europe closer together and create opportunities for promising new business and humanitarian projects.”

Participants in the forum, which took place in Brussels, included associations of Russians living abroad, Russian public organisations, and also representatives of the European Parliament, the European Commission and the European Council. The forum’s theme was ‘The European Union and Russia: New Challenges’.

As far back on November 24, 2006, President Vladimir Putin and the European Union leadership held an extensive meeting with participation of the members of the Russia-EU Business Cooperation Council. Taking part in the meeting with Russian and EU business community leaders were Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, and Javier Solana, secretary general of the EU Council and EU high representative for the common foreign and security policy.

The meeting between Putin, the European Union leadership and the business leaders took place behind closed doors just before the start of the Russia-European Union summit. The Russia-EU Business Cooperation Council was created in October 2005 and brings together the Russian and EU business leaders most interested in developing economic relations between Russia and the EU.

The Business Cooperation Council acts as a coordinator for practical action to develop new forms and vectors for cooperation between Russian and European businesspeople. The Council sets the objective of ensuring that the business community plays an active part in work to draft a new basic agreement between Russia and the European Union to replace the current partnership and cooperation agreement that expired in 2007.

The Council is responsible for coordinating work by industry and business associations to implement the project for creating a common economic space between Russia and the EU and advancing major forward-looking projects that can have a considerable impact on the structure and level of economic relations between Russia and the European Union.

Projects of this kind include cooperation in the energy sector, joint operation of satellite communications and navigation systems and the formation of mechanisms for cooperating in sectors such as aviation, car making, metals production, energy and machine building.

The Business Cooperation Council is a ‘union of equals’ and has no strong link to any one organisation. The principles on which the Council is formed enable it to expand and involve interested parties in its work. At that time, the Council was co-chaired by Anatoly Chubais, chairman of the board of RAO Unified Energy Systems, for Russia, and by Jukka Harmala, head of Finnish company Stora Enso, for Finland.

Back in 2015, Vladimir Putin took part in the plenary session of the Delovaya Rossiya celebrating the 10th year Russian Entrepreneurs’ Day, praised European business presence in the Russian Federation.

Precisely that year on May 26, Putin said

“Entrepreneurship has come to be considered one of the most important factors of Russia’s confident development. We clearly need to ensure the influx of the largest possible number of self-motivated business-minded people to production companies, people who are ready to take on responsibility for both the work of their companies and their employees. Society and the state are interested in the appearance of a large number of successful, promising foreign companies. Their creation will become a worthy response to the challenges that are currently facing the Russian economy.”

Nevertheless, it would be important to note that during these years both Medvedev and Putin spoke at the plenary session of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. In these platforms, Medvedev and Putin have paid special focus on European businesses compared to Asian counterparts. In fact, Africa was completely not known those earliest formative years of SPIEF.

Not long ago on June 17, 2016, Putin at the plenary session of the 20th St Petersburg International Economic Forum emphasized that the platform served as a venue for discussing strategic issues. In his views on Russia in the changing world, he explained the systemic problems that are besetting the global economy and practically all countries.

According to him, the world’s leading economies are looking for sources of growth, and they are looking to capitalise on the enormous existing and growing potential of digital and industrial technologies, robotics, energy, biotechnology, medicine and other fields. Discoveries in these areas can lead to true technological revolutions, to an explosive growth of labour productivity. This is already happening and will happen inevitably; there is impending restructuring of entire industries, the devaluation of many facilities and assets. This will alter the demand for skills and competencies, and competition will escalate in both traditional and emerging markets.

Putin underlined the fact that it was necessary to proceed from a network of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements that envisage a varying pace, extent and level of interaction and the extent of market openness, depending on specific national economies’ readiness for teamwork, with understandings on joint research, educational and high-tech projects. All these agreements should be future-oriented and provide the basis for harmonious joint development resting on equal and effective cooperation.

“As early as June we, along with our Chinese colleagues, are planning to start official talks on the formation of comprehensive trade and economic partnership in Eurasia with the participation of the European Union states and China. I expect that this will become one of the first steps toward the formation of a major Eurasian partnership. We will certainly resume the discussion of this major project at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in early September. Colleagues, I would like to take this opportunity to invite all of you to take part in it,” he said at the forum.

The “greater Eurasia” project – is, of course, open for Europe, and that such cooperation be mutually beneficial. Despite all of the well-known problems in the relations, the European Union remains Russia’s key trade and economic partner, Putin said and added:

“It (EU) is our next-door neighbour and we are not indifferent to what is happening in the lives of our neighbours, European countries and the European economy.”

The challenge of the technological revolution and structural changes are no less urgent for the EU than for Russia. I also understand our European partners when they talk about the complicated decisions for Europe that were made at the talks on the formation of the Trans-Atlantic partnership. Obviously, Europe has a vast potential and a stake on just one regional association clearly narrows its opportunities. Under the circumstances, it is difficult for Europe to maintain balance and preserve space for a gainful manoeuvre.

As the recent meetings with representatives of the German and French business circles have showed, European business is willing and ready to cooperate with this country. Politicians should meet businesses halfway by displaying wisdom, and a far-sighted and flexible approach. It is necessary to return trust to Russian-European relations and restore the level of cooperation.

He, however, acknowledged there were some pitfalls. Russia did not initiate the current breakdown, disruption, problems and sanctions.

“All our actions have been exclusively reciprocal. But we don’t hold a grudge, as they say, and are ready to meet our European partners halfway. In this context, let me repeat that we are interested in Europeans joining the project for a major Eurasian partnership. This can, by no means, be a one-way street,” Putin added in his speech.

In closing, the plenary session moderator, CNN host Fareed Zakaria, offered Putin for his last remarks. Putin said:

“We agree on some points and disagree on others but there are still more things that unite us – this is absolutely clear. After all, Europe is Europe. The foundations of its economy don’t give us reason to believe that Europe will come to an end at any point, no matter what internal processes are playing out. It is our leading trade and economic partner. We have here the leader of a European country – Italy, and the leader of Kazakhstan – our closest partner and ally with which we are building an integration association. Today, we have gathered everyone together.”

Quite recently, Putin rained praises on French businesses in the Russian Federation. It was precisely on 29 April 2021, Putin held videoconference with leaders of several French companies – members of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI France-Russia) to discuss some aspects of Russian-French trade, economic and investment cooperation, including the implementation of large joint projects as well as the prospects for collaborative work.

From the historical records, France has been and remains a key economic partner for Russia, holding the 6th place among EU members in the amount of accumulated investment in the Russian economy and 5th place in the volume of trade. Despite a certain decline in mutual trade in 2020 (it went down by 14 percent compared to 2019) the ultimate figure, quite acceptable, at $13 billion. French investment in Russia was hovering around $17 billion, while Russian investment in France was meagre at $3 billion.

Over 500 companies with French capital were operating in various sectors of the Russian economy. French business features especially prominently in the Russian fuel and energy complex, automobile manufacturing and, of course, the food industry.

“It could have been more if the French regulatory and state authorities treated Russian businesses as Russia is treating French businesses. We appreciate that in a difficult economic environment, French companies operating in Russia have not reduced their activity,” Putin pointed out in the speech, addressing them.

“We are interested in involving foreign companies that would like to invest in Russia and in projects we consider high priority. In order to do this, we will continue to use preferential investment regimes and execute special investment contracts, as you know. A lot of French companies successfully use these tools on the Russian market. For example, more than one third of 45 special investment contracts have been signed with European, including French, partners,” he explained during the meeting.

He further mentioned continuous efforts to attract foreign companies to localise their production to state purchases and to implementing the National Development Projects, as well as existing opportunities for French businesses in special economic zones. Today, there are 38 such zones created throughout the Russian Federation.

Russia pays particular attention to attracting high-quality foreign specialists. Their employment is being fast-tracked, and their families can now obtain indefinite residence permits, with plans to launch a special programme of ‘golden visas’ whereby to issue a residence permit in exchange for investment in the real economy, a practice is used in many other countries.

Taking his turn, Co-Chair of the CCI France-Russian Economic Council, Gennady Timchenko, noted that the pandemic has changed the world, people and business, and that French companies in Russia are responsible employers and socially responsible members of Russian society.

Despite the crisis and the geopolitical situation, a number of French companies have launched production in 2020–2021. Despite the current geopolitical conditions and information field, there are important signals for French business and the Russian side to strengthen economic cooperation, attract investment, and create partnerships on a new mutually beneficial basis.

Co-Chair of the CCI France-Russian Economic Council, Patrick Pouyanne, noted that the meeting has become an excellent tradition, the presence of 17 CEOs and deputy CEOs of French companies showed the importance of these joint meetings, and further reflect the deep interest of French business in Russia.

In addition to above, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has several times held meetings with European Union members. With the same perception, despite the challenges today, that diplomacy has to continue playing an important role in settling differences, and that businesses could convincingly create bridges to strengthen investment and economic cooperation between Russia and the European Union.

Lavrov has oftentimes reiterated Russia’s recognition of the enormous significance and invaluable contributions of European businesses. The stark reality is that Russians simply adore European brands at the expense of their local brands. That makes European businesses, their products and services solid in the Russian Federation. The European enterprises has prominently made their presence always at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. As an association, it adheres to the principle of mutual cooperation. It marked 25 years in 2020 in Russia.

Over the years, the Association of European Business has held corporate meetings with participation of top Russian politicians and business stalwarts. In St. Petersburg, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has always been the guest speaker during special panel sessions, with participation of the Association of European Business, highlighting with an appreciation their various efforts in promoting economic, investment and trade ties, laying the solid foundation for building good relations between Europe and Russia.

The last time Lavrov addressed the gathering, he stressed the fact there were alarming geopolitical trends that have also affected Russia-EU relations.

“We regret that trade and economic cooperation is becoming increasingly politicized. Trade and economy have been viewed as a safety net in relations among nations. Nowadays though, things seem to have shifted into a somewhat different phase,” Lavrov told the business gathering.

“Politicized energy cooperation is yet another blow at the foundations of what we call European security. Energy is the area of cooperation dating back over 50 years. Protectionism and other barriers and restrictions will only aggravate the economic situation, which is already complicated. By the way, we noted that the Confederation of European Business published recommendations aimed at protecting European businesses amidst sanctions-related restrictions,” he added.

Nevertheless, Lavrov suggested the discussions become a global economic driver, firmly believe that it is in common interests to prevent the appearance of undesirable dividing lines in the new economic spheres created by the new technological paradigm. It is strong conviction that this calls for combining efforts rather than trying to play zero sum games again, as was the case in the past. Russia is ready for cooperation on the broadest possible basis.

Obviously, the future Russia and European business relations can still be consolidated despite the current political differences, Lavrov said with high optimism. Russia is ready to build its relations with the European Union along some principles. The European Union remains as its important trade partner. As before, there is optimism that both are open to cooperation, European partners are keen on building businesses in the economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, this vast country and in the Eurasian region.

The interest in strengthening and diversifying trade and economic ties have been growing since Soviet collapse. According to statistics, trade with the European Union reached almost $300 billion in 2019. The Association of European Business, which unites European companies, believes that both business circles and business diplomacy can and should make a useful contribution to restoring mutual trust and confidence in the business sphere. Under its aegis, European businesses show readiness to expand cooperation and to implement mutually beneficial joint projects across Russia.

Here is a bit of interesting point about Russia’s demography. Records show that European Russia accounts for about 75% of Russia’s total population. But the documents further indicate that 1.8 million Russians live in the European Union (majority in Britain, Germany and France). But then, the rhetorical questions are: Can Russia lead the emerging global economic order? Is Moscow a financial hub and host to international organizations’ offices as in New York and Washington, and in Europe? Is this the end of Russia’s European dream?

During the past several years, Putin’s meetings with EU members included those, such Germany, Italy, France, Spain et cetera. In addition to Putin’s meetings, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and, the Economic and Development Minister held series of meetings, both the Federation Council and the State Duma discussed consistently issues relation to their point cooperation. Today, with the global changes and the war on Ukraine that necessitated the imposition of stringent sanctions, Russia has gunned down its the post-Soviet dream of becoming purely European. What remains in this emerging new world, despite the sharp differences among them Russia might only and eventually become Greater Eurasian.

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This article was originally published on Freenations in September 2022.

My first post on Corporatism described the nature of the disease from an analytical point of view, the ingredients from left and right which make it so virulent and hard to fight and how it is a destroyer of the basic pillars of a civilised society – democracy, truth and prosperity. In fact it is even more dangerous than that! Here we deal with the power of corporatism to destroy humanity itself. In wars, by corruption and by disease.

Big Pharma

One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.

Nowhere is that more blatant than in pharmaceutical corporations and their vaccines where deadly viruses are created with the excuse that “if we don’t create them nature or an enemy will and we need to develop a vaccine.”

The vaccines for COVID 19 have proven obscenely profitable for the vaccine producers who have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves, despite tens of thousands of deaths following vaccination and a cover up of deaths and abortions in vaccine trials (not disclosed until long after millions were vaccinated). See this.

The 1918-1920 flu pandemic killed millions. It was over within two years and no vaccine was developed. Now scientists in the USA and Canada have created by “reverse engineering” an even more deadly version of that flu “in order to create a vaccine for it”: see this.

But we know that COVID emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan China which was doing dangerous “gain of function” work in collaboration with America scientists – who had been forbidden by law to carry out that research in the USA. There is no reason why this new recreation of the 1918 flu should not bring the same disaster.

These dangerous projects are totally out of the control of democratic representatives and are classic corporatist collaborations between ignorant governments who have access to the public’s pocket and corporations whose main incentive is profit seeking.

The Ukraine War

No one denies the value of a strong defence for the democratic nation state but today big multi national corporations seeking markets and armament manufacturers seeking profits (both through lobbying and donations, especially in the USA) are driving NATO and the EU’s Eastern expansion in Europe. Ukraine is a big prize. Despite being the politically ruined, most corrupt and poorest country in Europe (GNI of only $3,540 per head) it is rich in iron ore, manganese, coal reserves, titanium, rock salt, mercury. It is one of the world’s leading steel producers. Fertiliser, chemicals, pesticides, sugar and vegetable oil are significant and it is one of the world’s leading grain exporters  – although nowhere near as big as Russia, the USA and Australia.

The potential for multi national corporate investment and profit is great while the war itself (with tens of billions of US, UK and EU aid used to buy western arms) has proved extremely profitable for those armament corporations. The five largest companies in the world that manufacture weapons are all American: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. While the US Stock market has slumped these corporations’ shares have risen between 12 and 20%. What incentive is there for corporate American and its “military industrial complex” (or Congressmen and women funded by defence corporations?) to promote peace in Ukraine?

The profitability of the Ukraine war for US Defence contractors is seen in the invitation to President Zelensky to chair their defence industry conference!

Even more profits will result from EU countries and the UK committing to raise defence spending.

Climate

Trillions of Dollars have been committed world wide to “fighting climate change”, funded by extortionate taxes on energy consumers and flowing into the coffers of big business and academic institutions (provided they provide the right kind of climate propaganda). If they dare question that agenda the corporatist fascist media censor and “cancel” them.

Housing and Farms

The giant American investment fund, Blackrock and Lloyds Bank in the UK are buying up homes (in competition with individuals and families, driving up prices) and then letting them to individuals and families. Of course as the beneficiaries of “other people’s money” they are using the people’s own capital (as savers and pensioners) against them and doing so behind the wall of corporate tax privileges not available to individuals, families and small businesses.

The multi billionaire Bill Gates is buying up farms to lease to farmers

The Netherlands government is threatening to reduce farmers by 30%

“Angel Cushing found her way into a meeting of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a tool of the World Economic Forum to convince farmers to produce less, accept global dictates on how and what to produce, and be happy about it — for the Climate. The meeting was held in the headquarters of Cargil, one of the four packing companies that control the American beef industry. And here’s a shocker – Cargil is experimenting with producing fake meat from plants!” From Catching Fire news

Democracy

In recent years there have been no shortage of elections. In the UK for instance we have mayoral elections, parish elections, district elections, county elections, national elections and (until recently) European elections. The only trouble is since the major parties all support the same corporatist statist policies votes mean nothing – because the ideological corporatist lockstep of the major parties means there is no real choice.

The dominance in parliament of the professional politician, with no professional background outside parliament, is a denial of democracy. Elections are supposed to send MPs to parliament to represent the people against the power of the State but when they get there those MPs are paid , expense accounted and pensioned by the State with candidate selection tightly controlled by the corporate party apparatus! Those who pay the MP call the tune.

Even that other form of vote – the “money vote” whereby we spend our own money freely in a competitive market means less and less because of corporate market dominance, State interventions, monopolistic markets and corporate tax privileges.

Elections

Whether or not it was Joseph Stalin who said “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how” it has never been clearer that this is the case today.

In the USA – and increasingly around the world we don’t have public spirited citizens counting votes but counting machines controlled by corporations! And we know from executives of the USA’s Dominion Voting Systems corporation that many of those responsible have clear and pernicious political agendas. Dominion’s Eric Coomer said he had “f….ed Trump”. The full extent of the vote rigging/vote count rigging in that 2020 election is yet to be acknowledged by the corporatist US media. See this.

Health

There is no greater source of anti democratic corporatist corruption than in supranational organisations who are unelected but claim to represent the “people of the world”. One such organisation is of course the “World Health Organisation” whose first Director General from 1948 to 1953 Dr George Brock Chisholm said:

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.”

The typical world government megalomaniac has of course utter contempt for individuals, families and nations because they are barriers to his world hegemony – and there is no greater source of that well managed fear which allows the accretion of power than infectious disease.

The head of the WHO Dr Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, was an Ethiopian communist who as Health Minister was complicit in denying treatment, food and medicines to the Somali people of the Ogaden. At the outset of the COVID 19 crisis he refused to listen to  warnings by Taiwan but went along with the initial cover up by Chinese communists. China is now the biggest donor to the WHO.

The WHO went along with the Pfizer lies about vaccine safety despite trial figures which showed a massive increase in failed pregnancies while WHO tetanus vaccines in Africa covertly contained a sterilisation shot.

That is typical well funded, politically manipulating, unaccountable CORPORATISM

Charities

At both the national and international level “charities”, funded with blithe ignorance by politicians, given costly tax allowances, exploiting cheap or unpaid workers and subsidised retail shops are a big source of corruption, tax avoidance and money laundering – and arrogant and exploitative behaviour in the third world as we know from OXFAM’s disgusting behaviour in Haiti (see this). In Britain there are over 160,000 “charities”.

Leading politicians set up charitable “Foundations” (Blair, Clintons** etc) which are a source of gross corruption as donations during and after holding political office are used (after extortionate “expenses”) to “aid” groups and countries where many of the same corporations who donated are employed to carry out the work.

In corporatism, the elitists control the many:

Elitists are not the true elite, they are the self appointed “elites” working in or for big business, big government and the corporate media who control the definition of “elites”. And this will be the subject of the third post in this series on Corporatism where we will consider the rise of the unelected in national and world politics.

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This article was originally published on Freenations.

Sources

https://www.americanlibertyreport.com/articles/clinton-honoree-jailed-for-biggest-clean-energy-scam-in-history/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/clinton-foundation-whistleblowers-have-come-forward-with-hundreds-of-pages-of-evidence-meadows-says

https://russia-insider.com/en/former-cia-officer-exposes-clinton-charity-fraud-biggest-scandal-us-history/ri22753?ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=60feda4280&mc_eid=072b05302a

http://theduran.com/clinton-foundation-and-its-networks-are-the-largest-set-of-unprosecuted-charitable-frauds-in-american-history/

Featured image is from Freenations

And Into The Fire

Fascist elements in post war Europe and the development of the European Union

By Rodney Atkinson

With contributions from William Dorich and Edward Spalton

Publisher: ‎ GM Books; 1st edition (July 25, 2013)
Publication date: ‎ July 25, 2013
Print length: ‎ 164 pages

Click here to view this and other titles by Rodney Atkinson.

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For several months, unions and students in France have engaged in periodic general strikes and mass demonstrations in protest against a pension reform plan advanced by President Emmanuel Macron.

The new scheme being debated in the National Assembly and Senate would not only raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 these new regulations require 43 consecutive years of employment to receive full benefits.

On March 7 and 8, over one million people stayed away from work and school impacting the public services, transport and energy supplies. Workers prevented trucks carrying oil shipments from leaving their production facilities. Oil shipments on March 7 were halted when they were exiting the refineries of TotalEnergies, Esso-ExxonMobil and Petroineos groups.

In addition, truck drivers sporadically clogged major highway arteries and interchanges in successful efforts to slow down traffic. Approximately 20% of flights could not take off at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport while 33% were cancelled at Orly Airport. Transport rail lines to Germany and Spain came to a halt, and those to and from the United Kingdom and Belgium were reduced by one-third, according to the SNCF rail authority. Others were left without adequate electricity and heating services due to striking employees.

The General Confederation of Trade Unions (CGT) had called for the country to be paralyzed until the demands of the workers were met. Rising energy prices have contributed to the level of inflation aggravating an already decline in real wages.

French President Emmanuel Macron has refused to listen to the broad criticism of his pension reform policies. The president rebuffed two offers during the week of March 6-10 for urgent discussions with the trade union movement and students.

After winning reelection during 2022, Macron has rapidly moved to engineer the cuts in the retirement system. The official response from his office to the more than one million workers and youth who have staged rolling strike actions is that the issue is now under consideration in the Senate after already being discussed in the lower house of the National Assembly.

The government’s position is that the reforms are necessary in order to prevent the pension funds from becoming insolvent. Macron and his allies supporting the bill, which includes the neo-fascist National Front led by Marine Le Pen, are claiming that if the changes are not implemented it would jeopardize younger generations from ever receiving retirement benefits.

A report published on March 10 by the leading French newspaper Le Monde noted that:

“Macron told the unions he understood ‘the anguish of the many French people worried they may never get a pension.’ But he said the government had already made concessions, such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years, instead of the 65 initially planned. Unions across the board have demanded that the government drop its plan to hike the retirement age altogether. An official in Macron’s office told Agence France-Presse that the government ‘will be open to anything so long as there is a willingness for dialogue and compromise.’ Unions have vowed to keep up the pressure on the government, with another day of mass protests planned for Saturday (March 11), and some have even said they would keep up rolling indefinite strikes. On Tuesday (March 7), more than a million people marched across France and strikes disrupted transport and schools.”

The work stoppages and mass demonstrations were largely peaceful on March 7-8. However, there were clashes between strikers and the police in several locations throughout France.

These policies are part and parcel of the neo-liberal framework under which many capitalist states operate in the present century. Macron was supported by some workers because they perceived the National Front as a far greater threat to their interests.

However, in the existing capitalist governments, the influence of finance capital remains paramount. Defined pensions and the enhancement of social spending measures are largely discounted as long-term policies. The ruling class in these states advance the notions that larger payments to retirees, those unable to work and the poor are wasteful and unsustainable. Nonetheless, resources are routinely gathered for spending on war and subsidies for the large corporations.

The Broader Significance of the French Struggle for Pensions

Although these strikes and mass demonstrations have continued since the beginning of the year, they are taking place during a period of rising uncertainty within the western industrialized capitalist states. Since the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the subsequent economic decline, the world financial system is clearly responded to the cumulative effects of rising interest rates ostensibly to reduce inflation, the closing of small and medium-sized businesses, substantial layoffs within the tech service sector and the economic impact of the United States proxy war against the Russian Federation in Ukraine.

Energy prices have risen sharply while the salaries of workers have witnessed precipitous declines over the last year. The administrations in London, Washington, Brussels and Berlin are largely preoccupied with the NATO arming of the U.S. and European Union-backed regime in Ukraine.

Workers in the U.S., Britain and other capitalist states are facing the same attacks against their living standards. The French trade unions and student organizations are setting an example for their counterparts internationally. It will be the overall political balance of forces that will determine the outcome of the campaign to end the Macron pension reform program.

Interestingly enough, one financial publication in the U.S. did at least partially understand the plight of retired workers both domestically and around the world. In an opinion article in Forbes magazine, Teresa Ghilarducci, a former professor at Notre Dam University who now teaches at the New School for Social Research, shared some of her findings on the developing crisis of retirement in the U.S.

In the piece published on March 9, Ghilarducci emphasizes:

“While the French take to the streets, Americans worry about outliving their money and tell stories of kind strangers raising money on GoFundMe Accounts so they can retire. Until American voters and workers show the kind of unity and outrage the French workers show when their government aims to cut pensions, American politicians will continue to push for Social Security retirement ages to be raised to age 70 or older. Until American workers unite to improve pensions, it will be normal that millions of Americans approaching retirement age do so with no savings. If we do nothing, the U.S. will be in the awkward and embarrassing position of being a world power with sky-high senior poverty rates and small periods of retirement.”

One key element missing from Ghilarducci’s assessment is the role of the Pentagon budget in draining the U.S. national economy in light of millions facing evictions, food deficits due to inflationary pressures and the deterioration of the medical, educational and environmental infrastructure throughout the country in urban, suburban and rural areas. By initiating a proxy war against Moscow and raising tensions with the People’s Republic of China to heightened levels, can only ensure that military spending will increase.

The White House and Pentagon are once again attempting to convince people in the U.S. to accept yet another “permanent war”, this time in Eastern Europe. Despite the failures in Vietnam, Southern Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti, Libya, Palestine, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc., the administration of President Joe Biden has prioritized conventional warfare against Russia as the first priority leading into the 2024 national elections.

Nonetheless, in Western Europe opposition to the arming of Ukraine is being manifested in rallies and protest demonstrations involving thousands of people. These demonstrations have not been replicated as of now in the U.S. although a recent poll taken by the Associated Press indicated that support for sending weapons to Ukraine among the electorate was down to 48%. Everyone must keep in mind that these responses by voters are occurring while all news being transmitted across major corporate and government-controlled networks is heavily biased against Russia which is consistently portrayed as the aggressor in the war. See this.

The only response to the escalating crisis in the U.S. is the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Bank and the ignoring by government officials of the thousands of layoffs taking place in important sectors of the economy. During the week of March 6, two large banks which are intertwined with the tech sector collapsed. In addition, the four largest banks based in the U.S. lost $52 billion in value on March 7-8 while Fed Chairman Jerome Powell addressed the Senate and House of Representatives. Stocks markets plummeted during this same week with almost no acknowledgement from the White House. See this.

What these events illustrate from France to the U.S. is that workers and youth throughout the capitalist states must recognize that the existing system cannot deliver the necessities of life in the 21st century. There should be a renewal of socialist thought and programmatic direction which views the current problems as an opportunity to advance militant solutions aimed at ending all forms of exploitation and oppression.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

WHO VigiAccess Database

As of March 9, 2023, WHO’s VigiAccess database recorded 158,649 Adverse Events involving “Eye disorders” following COVID-19 vaccination: (click here)

Most notable are:

• Vision blurred: 32,935
• Visual impairment: 25,413
• Blindness 3,982
• Blindness, unilateral 1,370

VAERS

In 2021, a total of 717,577 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events were reported to VAERS (click here), and 55,313 of those involved ocular side effects.

One study examined 6688 of these VAERS ocular side effects (Nyankerh et al.)

• 74% of adverse event reports were women
• age group 40 to 59 years old had most frequent adverse events
• age group 18 to 29 had a fairly very high frequency of adverse events
• Moderna and J&J vaccines had higher proportion of adverse ocular events

Top 3 ocular adverse events out of the 6688 cases examined:

1. eyelid swelling, ocular hyperemia, conjunctivitis (33.3%) – 2229 cases
2. blurred vision (26.7%) – 1785 cases
3. Visual impairment (19.8%) – 1322 cases

Recent Research – Spain

A Spanish study looked at 70 cases of ocular side effects post COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca) (click here)

• 57% were women
• average age was 51
• 50/70 (71%) had uveitis, 10% scleritis, 19% other
• Most concerning were 5 out of 65 patients (7.2%) who had reduced visual acuity

Recent Research – Iraq

A study from Iraq, published Feb.2023, examined 60 cases with ocular side effects post COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca). (click here).

• 53% were women
• 36/60 (60%) had uveitis, 15% scleritis, 10% VKH, 7% Neuroretinopathy, 8% other
• Most concerning were 4 out of 60 patients (6.7%) who had loss of visual acuity

Government of Canada on ocular adverse events:

Government of Canada lists more types of ocular adverse events and eye injuries following COVID-19 vaccination, than for COVID-19 infection (click here):

How COVID-19 vaccines can damage the eyes: 

1. Autoimmune reactions (eg. uveitis, optic neuritis, Graves) (click here)(click here)
2. Viral Reactivation of herpes, varicella zoster virus (click here)
3. Parasite reactivation (toxoplasma) (click here)(click here)
4. Blood clots (eg. retinal artery/vein occlusion) (click here)(click here)
5. Blood vessel inflammation (eg. retinal vasculitis, Behcet’s) (click here)(here)
6. Bleeding or hemorrhage (eg. retinal hemorrhage) (click here)
7. Demyelination (eg. multiple sclerosis lesions in the brain (click here)(click here)
8. Reaction to Polyethylene glycol (PEG)-2000 lipid in mRNA vaccines (click here)
9. Corneal graft rejection (click here)

Post vaccine visual disturbances that can’t be explained 

Epoch Times ran an excellent article on Dec.16, 2022 called: “Eye Problems? You may have been blinded by your trust of COVID-19 vaccines” (click here):

Dr. Lynnell Lowry is an ophthalmologist in private practice in San Antonio, Texas. She said that she has seen more unusual eye problems since the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines than she ever has in 25 years of practicing medicine.

“A lot of folks are coming in with a visual disturbance that we can’t explain”

My take… 

COVID-19 vaccines have adversely affected the eyes of 100,000s of people and 10,000s have suffered permanent visual impairment up to and including blindness.

These are often very serious side effects and unfortunately, they are common.

Women suffer eye injuries more often than men, and age group 40-59 is most impacted. Autoimmune reaction seems to be the most common mechanism of COVID-19 vaccine injury.

As with all other adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, the side effects involving eyes have been downplayed by health authorities and doctors.

A thorough discussion of the risks of eye injury should be conducted as part of informed consent, with any doctor who recommends COVID-19 vaccination.

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***

How coincidental. USAID boss Samantha Power visited Tbilisi, Georgia the other day, and now there are violent protests in the streets outside parliament.

Meanwhile a Western-led regime change effort is happening in Georgia.

Once again a fake EU revolution.

Same script as Maidan 2014…..
🥴🥴 pic.twitter.com/lD0til5v5y

— Richard (@ricwe123) March 9, 2023

The announced adoption of a “foreign influence” bill provided an excuse for the usual suspects to begin a coordinated effort to overthrow the ruling Georgian Dream party and install a new government (or, more specifically, a pro-USG client state, similar to that in Ukraine).

Of course, it does not matter the Georgian government withdrew the legislation. The proposed law was merely an excuse to get yet another color revolution going on Russia’s border.

Don’t expect a Russophobic, nuclear war-taunting corporate media to point out the obvious fact this entire episode is the next phase in an effort to surround Russia and dismember it.

The USAID wrecking crew doesn’t care about the people of Georgia, “democracy,” or the fact the Georgian Dream party won 48.22 percent of the vote in 2020. The Strength Is in Unity party, led by former president Mikheil Saakashvili, came in at 27.18 percent.

Saakashvili was convicted in absentia of corruption and abuse of power.

“Mr Saakashvili was arrested in 2021 after making a surprise return to Georgia by smuggling himself into the country on a ferry from Ukraine. He called for mass anti-government demonstrations, but was quickly arrested by Georgian authorities,” the BBC reported. “Among the world leaders calling for his release were Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Mr Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship in 2015, and spoke only in Ukrainian at his court appearance, wearing a t-shirt with “I am Ukrainian” printed on it. He also served as the governor of the western province of Odesa between 2015 and 2016.

In 2018, Georgia was tight with NATO. “Georgia is one of the Alliance’s closest operational partners, and an Enhanced Opportunities Partner,” the Voltaire Network reported from Brussels.

It should be noted both “Georgian Dream and United National Movement [founded by Saakashvili] are pro-Western, with goals of establishing better relations and possible eventual membership of NATO and the European Union,” the AP reported in October 2020.

Salome Zourabichvili, the current president of Georgia, made it known last year that she supports Zelenskyy and the ultranationalists in Ukraine, despite her party demanding neutrality on the issue. Zourabichvili went so far as to travel to Paris and Brussels to signal her support for the prospect of a thermonuclear war. She is a politician, of course, and most politicians are primarily concerned with staying in office.

Despite this affinity for the EU (and hopeful of NATO membership), billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the Georgian Dream party, made the critical mistake of advocating a full restoration of relations with Russia following the 2008 conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two “breakaway” republics in the strategically important South Caucasus region on the Russian border.

For the USG, the EU, and NATO, red flags went up last March when Anatoly Bibilov, the leader of South Ossetia, declared “I believe that unification with Russia is our strategic goal, our path, the aspiration of the people,” according to the press service of the United Russia party. “The republic of South Ossetia will be part of its historical homeland—Russia.”

Thus, almost a year later, we are witnessing Maidan-style protests in Georgia, supposedly in opposition to legislation that would ban “NGOs” (USAID and USG State Department subversion units) from undermining an elected government.

For the USG and its criminal neocons, neutrality is not an option—you are, to paraphrase Bush Junior,  either with the USG-EU-NATO combine, or you’re with the terrorists, in this instance Russia.

USAid at work in Georgia. Another country soon to be plunged into chaos. Hungary and Austria should take note. Being neutral is not something America takes lightly… pic.twitter.com/JfKNvRkgts

— Ursula Bank Account (@ukrofigaro) March 7, 2023

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***

Friday’s announcement that Iran and Saudi Arabia had restored bilateral ties for the first time in seven years marks a major geopolitical development in the Persian Gulf.

As the region’s two main powerhouses, Tehran and Riyadh had found themselves supporting opposing sides in conflicts in both Syria and Yemen over the past decade, resulting in tensions that would culminate in the ending of diplomatic relations in January 2016, following the execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr by Saudi Arabia; seen as the dominant Sunni power in the Islamic world, with Iran regarded as the Shia equivalent.

Thus, the restoring of diplomatic relations between both nations should lead to increased stability in a region beset by conflict over the past two decades.

Reaching beyond west Asia, Friday’s announcement also signifies the establishment of a new multipolar world order, with China having brokered the deal between both countries. With Saudi Arabia being a key US-ally and trading partner in the region, this may also indicate that should Washington now feel that Riyadh is moving into Beijing’s sphere of influence, it may vie for regime-change in Saudi Arabia in a bid to maintain hegemony in west Asia.

Indeed such an occurrence has a historical precedent.

In July 1979, the-then US administration of Jimmy Carter would launch Operation Cyclone, a covert CIA programme which would see the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi militants known as the Mujahideen, who would then go on to wage war on the Socialist government of previously Western-friendly Afghanistan, which had come under Soviet influence following the 1978 Saur Revolution.

Five months prior to the commencement of Operation Cyclone, Iran – also a former Western ally in the region – would come under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, following the Islamic Revolution which saw the overthrow of the US and UK-backed Shah Pahlavi. A major threat to US hegemony in the region, the Iranian Revolution was a key factor in the White House’s decision to arm the Afghan Mujahideen, lest its influence be weakened even further in west Asia, as well as drawing the Soviet Union into a costly military misadventure.

Should the United States now feel that Saudi Arabia is slipping away from its sphere of influence into China’s instead, and decides to pursue regime-change in response, one of the first steps it may take is a significant overhaul in corporate media coverage of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on neighbouring Yemen.

In March 2015, following the seizure of the capital Sana’a by the Ansar Allah movement, Riyadh would begin an air campaign in a bid to restore the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to power.

Using US and British-supplied bombs, and with military advisors on hand from both countries to assist in the selection of targets, Saudi Arabia has laid waste to the agricultural, medical and water infrastructure of Yemen over the past eight years, resulting in widespread starvation and the largest recorded Cholera outbreak in history in what is already the most impoverished country on the Arabian Peninsula. A situation exacerbated even further by a Saudi blockade preventing food and medical supplies from entering the country.

Despite the brutality of the Saudi campaign, it has received scant coverage from the corporate media over the past eight years, owing to the lucrative arms trade between Riyadh and the West, as well as the use of Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iran in the region, with Tehran long being accused of providing military aid to Ansar Allah.

Should the Chinese-brokered détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran now result in tensions between Washington and Riyadh however, and especially in a scenario where the Gulf Kingdom may decide to purchase weapons from China rather than the United States, a newfound concern for the situation in Yemen may arise amongst the western media, in a manner not dissimilar to their sudden coverage of the war in Ukraine following the Russian intervention last February, in spite of their miniscule coverage of the conflict during the previous eight years it had actually been taking place.

Such coverage of Saudi war crimes in Yemen may pave the way for a colour revolution attempt in Riyadh with the intention of bringing a more US-aligned leadership to power.

Indeed such an attempt is currently taking place in Iran, where the US has been supplying arms to the ‘Iranian opposition’ in a bid to install a client regime, and with officials from US-ally Israel already expressing their opposition to the Iran-Saudi deal, it may only be a matter of time before something similar occurs on the other side of the Persian Gulf.

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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Support him on Patreon.

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***

Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture?

Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.

In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years.

Fink Stated:

“Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”

Unsurprisingly then, just three years later, in 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, were capitalising on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.

Funds tend to invest for a 10-15-year period, resulting in good returns for investors but often cause long-term environmental and social devastation. They undermine local and regional food security through buying up land and entrenching an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture.

In September 2020, Grain.org showed that private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – were being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world.

This money was being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. Offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had targeted Ukraine in particular.

Western agribusiness had been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. A 2015 article by Oriental Review noted that, since the mid-90s, Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council have been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.

In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds.

In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month, strings-attached $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine.

Even before the conflict, the World Bank incorporated measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

It is interesting to note that Larry Fink and BlackRock are to ‘coordinate’ investment in ‘rebuilding’ Ukraine.

An official statement released in late December 2022 said the agreement with BlackRock would:

“… focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channelling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.”

With more than $813.5 billion invested in arms manufacturing companies, BlackRock is in a win-win situation – profiting from both destruction and reconstruction.

BlackRock is a publicly owned investment manager that primarily provides its services to institutional, intermediary and individual investors. The firm exists to put its assets to work to make money for its clients. And it must ensure the financial system functions to secure this goal. And this is exactly what it does.

Back in 2010, the farmlandgrab.org website reported that BlackRock’s global agriculture fund would  target (invest in) companies involved with agriculture-related chemical products, equipment and infrastructure, as well as soft commodities and food, biofuels, forestry, agricultural sciences and arable land.

According to research by Global Witness, it has since indirectly profited from human rights and environmental abuses through investing in banks notorious for financing harmful palm oil firms (see the article The true price of palm oil, 2021).

Blackrock’s Global Consumer Staples exchange rated fund (ETF), which was launched in 2006 and, according to the article The rise of financial investment and common ownership in global agrifood firms (Review of International Political Economy, 2019), has:

“US$560 million in assets under management, holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, with agrifood stocks making up around 75% of the fund. Nestlé is the funds’s largest holding, and other agrifood firms that make up the fund include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Anheuser Busch InBev, Mondelez, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.”

The article also states that BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P 500 Index ETF has $150 billion in assets under management. Most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms are part of the S&P 500 index and BlackRock holds significant shares in those firms.

The author of the article, Professor Jennifer Clapp, also notes BlackRock’s COW Global Agriculture ETF, has $231 million in assets and focuses on firms that provide inputs (seeds, chemicals and fertilizers) and farm equipment and agricultural trading companies. Among its top holdings are Deere & Co, Bunge, ADM and Tyson. This is based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018.

Jennifer Clapp states:

“Collectively, the asset management giants – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and Capital Group – own significant proportions of the firms that dominate at various points along agrifood supply chains. When considered together, these five asset management firms own around 10%–30% of the shares of the top firms within the agrifood sector.”

BlackRock et al are heavily invested in the success of the prevailing globalised system of food and agriculture.

They profit from an inherently predatory system that – focusing on the agrifood sector alone – has been responsible for, among other things, the displacement of indigenous systems of production, the impoverishment of many farmers worldwide, the destruction of rural communities and cultures, poor-quality food and illness, less diverse diets, ecological destruction and the proletarianization of independent producers.

Due to their size, according to journalist Ernst Wolff, BlackRock and its counterpart Vanguard exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.

BlackRock currently has $10 trillion in assets under its management and to underline the influence of the firm, Fink himself is a billionaire who sits on the board of the World Economic Forum and the powerful and highly influential Council for Foreign Relations, often referred to as the shadow government of the US – the real power behind the throne.

Researcher William Engdahl says that since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and now the Biden Administration.

Engdahl describes how former top people at BlackRock are now in key government positions, running economic policy for the Biden administration, and that the firm is steering the ‘great reset’ and the global ‘green’ agenda.

Fink recently eulogised about the future of food and ‘coded’ seeds that would produce their own fertiliser. He says this is “amazing technology”. This technology is years away and whether it can deliver on what he says is another thing.

More likely, it will be a great investment opportunity that is par for the course as far as genetically modified organisms in agriculture are concerned: a failure to deliver on its inflated false promises. And even if it does eventually deliver, a whole host of ‘hidden costs’ (health, social, ecological, etc) will probably emerge.

And that’s not idle speculation. We need look no further than previous ‘interventions’ in food/farming under the guise of Green Revolution technologies, which did little if anything to boost overall food production (in India at least) but brought with it tremendous ecological, environment and social costs and adverse impacts on human health, highlighted by many researchers and writers, not least in Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials and the work of Vandana Shiva.

However, the Green Revolution entrenched seed and agrichemical giants in global agriculture and ensured farmers became dependent on their proprietary inputs and global supply chains. After all, value capture that was a key aim of the project.

But why should Fink care about these ‘hidden costs’, not least the health impacts?

Well, actually, he probably does – with his eye on investments in ‘healthcare’ and Big Pharma. BlackRock’s investments support and profit from industrial agriculture as well as the hidden costs.

Poor health is good for business (for example, see on the BlackRock website BlackRock on healthcare investment opportunities amid Covid-19). Scroll through BlackRock’s website and it soon becomes clear that it sees the healthcare sector as a strong long-term bet.

And for good reason. For instance, increased consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019 according to a recent peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The findings are significant not only for Brazil but more so for high income countries such as the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake. Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.

Due to corporate influence over trade deals, governments and the WTO, transnational food retail and food processing companies continue to colonise markets around the world and push UPFs.

In Mexico, global agrifood companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items. In Europe, more than half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese, with the poor especially reliant on high-calorie, poor nutrient quality food items.

Larry Fink is good at what he does – securing returns for the assets his company holds. He needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. He needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits.

When capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.

And that means laying the political and legislative groundwork to facilitate this. In India, for example, the now-repealed three farm laws of 2020 would have provided huge investment opportunities for the likes of BlackRock. These three laws – imperialism in all but name – represented a capitulation to the needs of foreign agribusiness and asset managers who require access to India’s farmland.

The laws would have sounded a neoliberal death knell for India’s food sovereignty, jeopardized its food security and destroyed tens of millions of livelihoods. But what matters to global agricapital and investment firms is facilitating profit and maximising returns on investment.

This has been a key driving force behind the modern food system that sees around a billion people experiencing malnutrition in a world of food abundance. That is not by accident but by design – inherent to a system that privileges corporate profit ahead of human need.

The modern agritech/agribusiness sector uses notions of it and its products being essential to ‘feed the world’ by employing ‘amazing technology’ in an attempt to seek legitimacy. But the reality is an inherently unjust globalised food system, farmers forced out of farming or trapped on proprietary product treadmills working for corporate supply chains and the public fed GMOs, more ultra-processed products and lab-engineered food.

A system that facilitates ‘going long and going to the beach’ serves elite interests well. For vast swathes of humanity, however, economic warfare is waged on them every day courtesy of a hard-edged rock.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

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Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent.  Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them.  It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of mankind”, a concept pioneered in the 1960s, has retained some force.

Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting.  The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts as freedom of navigation and trade (commeandi commercandique libertas), terms that have come to mean as much assertions of power as affirmations of international legal relations.

The thrust of his argument was directed against the Portuguese claim of exclusive access to the East Indies, but along the way, statements abound about the nature of the sea itself, including its resources.  While land could be possessed and transformed by human labour and private use, the transient, ever-changing sea could not.  It is a view echoed in the work of John Locke, who called the ocean “that great and still remaining Common of Mankind”.

With empires and states tumbling over each other in those historical challenges posed by trade and navigation, thoughts turned to a relevant treaty that would govern the seas.  While there was a general acceptance by the end of the 18^th century that states had sovereignty over their territorial sea to the limit of three miles, interest in codifying the laws on oceans was sufficient for the UN International Law Commission to begin work on the subject in 1949.

It was a project that occupied the minds, time and resources of nation states and their officials for decades, eventually yielding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.  Brought into existence in 1982, it came into effect in 1995.  UNCLOS served to define maritime zones, including such concepts as the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, the continental shelf, the high sea, the international seabed area and archipelagic waters.

What was missing from the document was a deeper focus on the high sea itself, lying beyond the “exclusive economic zones” of states (200 nautical miles from shore) and, by virtue of that, a regulatory framework regarding protection and use.  Over the years, environmental concerns including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution became paramount.  Then came those areas of exploration, exploitation and plunder: marine genetic resources and deep-sea mining.

The High Seas Treaty, in its agreed form reached by delegates of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity and Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, retains the object of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.  The goal is in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) which was adopted at the conclusion of Biodiversity COP15 in December last year.  This, it is at least hoped, will partially address what has been laboriously described as a “biodiversity governance gap”, especially as applicable to the high seas.  (To date, only 1.2% of the waters in the high seas is the subject of protection.)

The Treaty promises to limit the extent of a number of rapacious activities: fishing, busy shipping lane routes and exploration activities that include that perennially contentious practice of deep-sea mining.  As the Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority explained to the BBC, “any future activity in the deep seabed will be subject to strict environmental regulations and oversight to ensure that they are carried out sustainably and responsibly.”

Laura Meller of Greenpeace Nordic glowed with optimism at the outcome.  “We praise countries for seeking compromises, putting aside differences and delivering a Treaty that will let us protect the oceans, build our resilience to climate change and safeguard the lives and livelihoods of billions of people.”  There were also cheery statements from the UN Secretary General António Guterres about the triumph of multilateralism, and the confident assertion from the Singaporean Conference president Ambassador Rena Lee, that the ship had “reached the shore.”

The text, however, leaves lingering tensions to simmer.  The language, by its insistence on the high seas, suggests the principle of “Freedom of the High Seas” having more truck than the “Common Heritage of Humankind”.  (The ghost of Grotius lingers.)  How the larger powers seek to negotiate this in the context of gains and profits arising out of marine genetic resources, including any mechanism of sharing, will be telling.

The text also lacks a clear definition of fish, fishing and fishing-related activities, very much the outcome of intense lobbying by fishing interests.  Given the treaty’s link to other instruments, such as the Agreement on Port State Measures, which defines fish as “all species of living marine resources, whether processed or not”, the risk of excluding living marine resources from the regulatory mechanism is genuine enough.

Then comes the issue of ratification and implementation.  Signatures may be penned, and commitments made, but nation states can be famously lethargic in implementing what they promise and stubborn on points of interpretation.  Lethargy and disputatiousness will do little to stem the threat to marine species, complex systems of aquatic ecology, and disappearing island states.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: International waters are the areas shown in dark blue in this map, i.e. outside exclusive economic zones, which are in light blue. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 cl)

Defense ministers of the 27 EU countries, meeting in Stockholm, approved the plan – presented by Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy – for “joint procurement of large caliber munitions.”

The meeting was attended by the Ukrainian Defense Minister (despite the fact that Ukraine is not part of the EU), who “explained what Ukraine’s military needs are.” Borrell stated “We are in times of war and we have to have a war mentality.” He then outlined the Plan, which includes three steps:

1) Draw from the stockpiles of EU member states artillery shells, particularly 155 mm, and supply them immediately to Ukraine. The money comes from the European Peace Fund (EPF), which has already earmarked 3.6 billion euros (paid for by EU citizens) for this purpose.

 2) Realize an Agreement among the 27 EU member states for the joint purchase of 155 mm projectiles from the side, signing the first seven-year contracts as early as next month. This is a “massive order” both to restore and increase national stockpiles and to secure supplies to Ukraine

 3) Ensuring the long-term increase of ammunition production in Europe by supporting Defense industries to secure supplies to Ukraine in the long run. (The EU plans to supply it with about one million artillery shells).

 Borrell also reported that

“by the end of March, our Military Assistance Mission will have trained more than 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers. By the end of the year, we expect to have trained 30,000 soldiers.”

For support to Ukraine, the EU has allocated 18 billion euros (again paid for by European citizens).

 Josep Borrell summed up the purpose of the Plan in these words,

“To win the peace, Ukraine must win the war. And that is why we must continue to support Ukraine to win the peace.”

The European Union thus openly descends into war with Russia as part of the increasingly dangerous U.S.-NATO strategy.

 The assassination of Konstantin Malofeev, CEO of the Tsargrad Group, was foiled in Moscow.

This is the same type of bomb attack with a bomb placed under the car as the one by which journalist Daria Dugina was killed in August 2022. It is part of a series of terrorist attacks against Russian journalists and media managers carried out by Ukrainian intelligence services under U.S.-NATO direction.

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“The politics of the destruction of the gas-line – whether it’s an act of war or what – but it was a slap in the face of Europe, saying, you know, “if you’re not going to play ball with me in Ukraine,” said the president… “I don’t care if it’s going to be harder for you to keep your people wealthy and warm.” Basically, that’s what he’s done. And that’s the real input of the story.”

– Seymour Hersh, from this week’s interview

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When politicians right across the political spectrum, in support of NATO’s role in supplying military support for Ukraine, when major media support this position with extremely one-sided, context-free coverage, and when recent demonstrations in support of peace pale in comparison with the “Stand With Ukraine” rallies, people with a dissenting opinion can feel extremely lonely.

Early in the Vietnam War, people could totally relate. When the war was in its first year, one tenth of Americans said they felt the need to organize a protest and of those individuals one in ten said they would protest the Vietnam War. One in six by contrast said they were more inclined to protest the antiwar demonstrators! [1]

But it was actual journalism doing incisive work that arguably helped turn the tide and contributed to the Vietnam War finally coming to an end. One of many critical pieces of work in this regard was the reporting of a cover-up of the My Lai massacre, in which as many as 500 civilians in South Vietnam were murdered by several members of the 11th Infantry Brigade. The deaths included women and children and infants.[2]

This story helped massively shift attitudes about the promise of a military effort bravely “freeing the people from communism.” Despite bipartisan support, the U.S. was defeated in large part by massive domestic popular opposition.[3]

The author who wrote this report was Seymour Hersh. The story earned him a Pulitzer prize for International Reporting in 1970. He has since done more reporting on other major issues, including Watergate, the detention and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the dispute of the Syrian government’s attacking citizens with chemical gas in a Damascus rebel-held suburb in 2013. [4]

In February, just a month ago, the investigative journalist now at 85 has now written another bombshell of a story, this time in relation to the sabotage of pipelines responsible for supplying Germany with copious amounts of natural gas. He claims, based on an anonymous source, that the action was orchestrated by the United States government! [5]

The consequence is that the cost of heating and electricity across Europe is rising and will get even worse by next year. If any independent non-partisan investigation could confirm that the U.S. was indeed to blame, what could this mean for the future of the war? How does it make sense that members of a hostile organization like NATO can be attacked by a fellow member and then be expected to help cover it up?

The future of the “unity of NATO” is questioned in the streets, if not in Parliaments everywhere. The future of NATO, like the future of the Vietnam War may be in jeopardy…

Thanks in large part to Seymour Hersh!

On this episode of the Global Research News Hour, we spend a great deal of time speaking to Sy Hersh about details of the pipeline story not addressed in his report, about the positions of the various individuals at the UN not supporting a non-partisan investigation of the Nord Stream Explosions, the differences between the way investigative journalism of his caliber has changed from the 60s and 70s to the present, and his attitude toward the My Lai massacre nearly 55 years later.

Filling out the show, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst once focusing on Soviet foreign policy, disagrees with mainstream appraisals of Putin suddenly becoming a sick, irrational, war-mongering despot. He speaks about how he makes sense of the Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh is an investigative journalist and a political writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre and the cover-up. At the New York Times he covered the Watergate scandal, the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program on Domestic spying. He has written eleven books and has also won a record five George Polk awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He lives in Washington DC.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year C.I.A. career he supervised intelligence analysis as Chief of Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, as editor/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief, as a member of the Production Review Staff, and as chair of National Intelligence Estimates. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

(Global Research News Hour Episode 383)

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Edited Transcript of Seymour Herst interview (March 6, 2023)

Global Research: The founder of SpaceKnow, Jerry Javornicky, reported that there were two dark ships in the vicinity just a few days previous to when these attacks happened. And Otto Tabuns, director of the Baltic Security Foundation said it would not – “It would not be common practice to have AIS turned off, unless the vessels have a declassified military mission or they would have some clandestine objectives, because the Baltic Sea is one of the busiest seas in the world in terms of commercial traffic.” I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your facts or anything like that, but I’m saying that, you know, is this a part of the bigger picture, you know? Or is it just a red herring? What are your thoughts about that?

Seymour Hersh: I’m not sure what you’re asking. Are you asking that – are you asking that because there are others who work in open-source intelligence have a different understanding? Well, people in open-source, they’ve sort of quieted down in the last couple of weeks.

GR: Yeah.

SH: But basically they said, for example I describe an airplane, an American surveillance airplane that was flown out of a base in Norway, was to trigger the bombs. And the bombing took place on September the 26th. They were – about sometime in the morning they dropped the sonar beam which was going to go through – you know, you have to use very low frequency in low water. If you go to a high frequency, the water just absorbs it. Low frequency hits a receiver down below, that’s 260 feet where the pipeline’s end and they trigger device that triggers the explosion. And all it takes is 20, 30, 40, I don’t know how long. Usually about two minutes for the divers to get out – two hours, rather, for the divers to get out to safety. So, they usually set for 48 hours, but I have no idea how long they set them for in this case.

And so, the open source guys, they said there’s no such claim there. And they also described the ship I use, it was Alta-class minesweeper – or minelayer, there are two different designs, I don’t remember which it was. One lays the mine, and one finds it – hunts it. There’s a mine hunter and a mine sweeper, and they’re slightly different. And one couldn’t find that at any time that’s compatible with the time that I said the explosion took place.

And I will tell you about open-source intelligence. I can just tell you about what happened a couple – about 10 days ago, more than that: our president, President Biden, flew to see Zelensky, if you remember. They had a visit – he went to Kyiv, he showed up in Kyiv and took a walk with him. I don’t know if you remember reading that but it was in the newspapers. And the account – it was either the Washington Post or the New York Times account, a very detailed account of this security risk that he took.

And it describes as the plane got into Poland, at some point it turned off their transponder. If you don’t know what a transponder is, it’s an IFF signal, IFF signal that all commercial – all planes have to use, so everybody knows where they are in case of a problem. They turned it off. Why did they turn it off? Because they didn’t want to be seen. So, maybe just the American plane that dropped the buoy on a very highly classified mission, maybe they did tune off their transponder rather than be – you know, open-source intelligence doesn’t see anything. When they’re talking about two dark ships, they’re talking about images, electronic pulses. And I can tell you that, on a mission like this – I’ve actually asked that question – open-source becomes a great asset, because you can make up anything.

People in the intelligence community, that I know of, this is – the NSA, the National Security Agency was involved in this too, the mission to build – to give the President an option to bomb the pipelines. They could have recreated a major Japanese task force scheming towards Hawaii, you know, for Pearl Harbor, you know. They could have created anything they wanted in the water. So, when you start talking about, ‘They couldn’t track this and they couldn’t track that,’ they’re just ignoring the possibility that there are people that know exactly what an open-source intelligence does. And rather than ignore it, you use it as part of a cover. Of course he didn’t have his transponder on, of course he wasn’t seen, of course the ship, the Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper, whatever it was – it could have been squawking on a different frequency. It turns out, when you’re given a code, detonating code, you have to punch in the code. But you can punch in any code in an emergency, you don’t have to punch in your own. You could fake it up, it’s that simple. But you know, you can’t fight people who are… And you know, the whole source issue…

I left some string in there that people in the White House – there were a couple of phrases I used that they knew I had something going, you know. So they just denied the story, they’re going to deny it, they’re never going to admit it, I don’t think, the White House, how could they? Even if somebody came out and acknowledged that they did it,

GR: Yeah.

SH: I’ve been in this business for 50 or 60 years and I’ve never had anybody that – who talked to me ever get in trouble.

GR: Right, yeah.

SH: That’s because I take the heat, being opaque about sources. I say a source who accessed the information. I don’t indicate that there’s no sign that anybody I knew was actually in a meeting, none whatsoever. And that’s all purposeful. It makes it – if you really don’t what the story, it makes it easier just to pretend that it’s not a good story.

You know, the President, when he went to Kyiv he took a walk in mid-day. And you know what happened? The bombing alarm signal, the sirens that indicated a Russian bombing was coming, a Russian attack – their warning signal, I guess, I forget. In World War II – I don’t know what they called it – you know, the sirens would ring. And it hadn’t rung in 10 days before, and it – I know for a few days afterwards it hadn’t rung. But when they were taking the walk, the warning signals came on of an imminent air attack. And you know what I say? I say, if I’d been a reporter I would have said to the White House, ‘Did you guys set it up so it rang when he was walking in mid-day in the middle of Kyiv so he could look more heroic?’ But that’s what I basically – that’s the only explanation I have for it. Because there was no air raid. So, here comes all these air raid sirens and the press all writes about it. It’s amazing.

It’s just like there’s no skepticism about anything anymore in the media. I worked at the New York Times for seven or eight years, and I republished story after story about important stuff: the CIA and Allende and the CIA spying on American citizens without naming a source.

GR:Yeah.

SH: There was no trouble then. You could do it, that’s part of the business. To get explicit about a source, puts you in jail.

GR: Logic suggests that if anything else, given your reputation for protecting whistle-blowers and accepting it and being vindicated you would think that this justifies a further expansion of an objective investigation. And I recall during February 22nd-24th, I mean there was Jeremy Sachs and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, who were presenting a deposition to the UN Security Council, you know, talking about the need for a further investigation. You know, it seems that Russia wanted to have the UN Security Council bring about a more objective investigation, because you know, the people there from Denmark and Germany and Sweden are saying, ‘Well, no, then we’re doing our own investigation.’ But, I mean, Russia was saying, ‘Well, we don’t necessarily trust these people who are kind of compromised belonging to NATO.’ And yet, the British representative was saying, ‘Well, actually, the Russians are just trying to stir up – create a platform for spreading disinformation, they don’t want objectivity.’ I’m not going to ask you which of those views you believe, but I think it does seem to suggest that, you know, it’s not just the United States. Like all of the NATO allies seem to be willing to collaborate with this. What are your thoughts?

SH: Well —

GR: Are they being blackmailed, or what?

SH: You know, what difference does it make what I think? Come on. What you’re missing is that one of the most strident objections to an investigation came from the United States. Absolutely. And it came from the US. And so, that, to me, would be the most salient point, that the Americans don’t want an investigation. Why doesn’t anybody ask the White House, since the President of the United States – we don’t know what the President thinks. Well, he just had his spokesperson say, “No,” and his spokesperson for the CIA say, “No, it’s a lie.” I guess if I were – if I had a chance to ask a question of Mr. Biden, but he seems to be in a controlled environment most of the time – which President’s are, that’s legitimate – I would just say: “Well, you’re President, and you didn’t do it, you say. You worry about Russia. But you know, you’re President, why don’t you ask your intelligence community?” There’s something called the ONI, Office of National Intelligence which is the top dog among all of the dogs in the intelligence world. Why doesn’t – the term of artist called “Teske” – why doesn’t the President – why don’t you just test the American intelligence community to do a deep study and tell you who did it? Because we monitor everything, we could find out who did it. You could ask the guy who runs the intelligence – for the Director of National Intelligence – has access to everything. Everything: covert, non-covert, signals. The CIA has a branch called the Directorate of Intelligence that does great work. And another lower level if you have a group in the field like there was in Norway, at that time there/s a special unit in the CIA that – and an agency that monitors even local phone calls to make sure they’re still covert, they’re not being exposed. Or somebody’s neighbour is saying there’s something funny going down, you know, across the street. Of course they’re on an island, but still. Why didn’t they ask that question?

Why does nobody want to ask that question? I don’t know why somebody in the White House Press Corps doesn’t. When I was at the New York Times, I was given the honour of being asked to be the White House corespondent, this was in the ‘70s, and I was an investigative reporter. I didn’t want to have a beat, even at the White House. And I was under pressure to do it on grounds that this is the way you could become a columnist and become an editor, you know, that kind of stuff. They wanted me to do it. 1973-1974 during Watergate. And I went for one day, and I saw the press record, yell, and scream at Ron Ziegler – who was Richard Nixon’s press secretary – yell and scream at him and call that reporting. And after one day, I told Abe Rosenthal, the editor of the paper, that I don’t want the job. I won’t cover the White House, that’s not being a reporter, it’s being a yahoo. They were very angry at me about it, and I eventually threatened to quit. And I got my way, I got taken off the beat. And got back to being a reporter.

There’s something about the White House beat that’s very insidious, because if you make trouble, you don’t get access. That’s what it’s all about. Apparently, a secret source now is the press secretary calling you into her office or his office with a senior official and gives you a private briefing about something. And in you go with it, no questions asked. That’s what’s passed for intelligence these days – or good reporting. It’s very sad, it makes me sad. I was there in a different world. We need to be much more skeptical of everything.

GR: Okay, so if you look at Germany, okay? This is an area where, I mean, they were directly affected by this attack on the pipeline. And yet, in the parliament, nobody is talking about this report seriously of you —

SH: It’s not so,

GR: — they’re discrediting —

SH: — it’s just not so. I’ve been in the Bundestag, there’s been a lot of debate. I mean, it’s not an —

GR: Well, there’s the AfD and the Die Linke that were saying that but most of the other people, like the government is saying that they want to downplay it, you know, for security reasons.

SH: Well, of course they’re going to want to downplay it because they obviously know what happened and can’t admit they know. The whole purpose of – you have to know historically, since the Kennedy days there’s been an enormous amount of worry of America in the Cold War in our days of containment – that was the big theory, containment – containing the evil spread of communism or the spread of evil communism. And so, they’ve always been worried about the enormous reserves of Russian gas and oil that they were selling to Western Europe even back then. And pipelines were just beginning to go into Europe and there was a lot of stuff coming through Ukraine. And there was a lot of worry – constantly phrased, again and again – about Russia weaponizing its gas, cheap gas, and oil for sale to Germany and Europe in order to get some leverage with them. And maybe it diminished the power of NATO, diminished the cohesiveness. Western Europe has no gas or oil, they get raw materials from elsewhere.

And so, a fair question would be: why did Joe Biden choose the – it was the second pipeline, Nord Stream 2. The first pipeline, we’re talking about producing billions of cubic whatever it is measurements of gas hourly, daily. It just an incredible amount of gas. The first pipeline went online in 2011 and over the next 10 years, Germany became just wealthy, so much cheap, very good gas. Clean gas, methane gas. This industry is, you know, they have the largest chemical plant in the world, chemical company in the world, BASF, 100,000 employees. They were going full bore. You had the automobile dealers there, Mercedes, you know, all those wonderful cars they make. Expensive BMWs. They are there, big industrial powerhouse. And there was so much gas that the German government bought that gas at a fixed price from Russia, and was able to resell some of the gas Russia was selling at a fixed price for more money downstream to other distributors in Western Europe and make a profit from the gas that Russia was making and Russia let them do it. Putin – if you want to say Putin – but this all began very early in his career, 2009.

The second pipeline, Nordstream 2, was completed at the end of 2021. At that point, the war was – it seems clear Russia was talking about going to war. For whatever reason, it was sanctioned. The government of Chancellor Scholz, who was just here in a mysterious visit to Washington in which he never was at a public appearance, except for a few minutes with the President, no big deal, no dinner for him, nothing. It was just sort of a secret visit, I don’t know what the purpose was. Maybe they have Scholz show his face and not be asking any questions about anybody. Nobody even had a chance to ask him about the pipeline. But if you’re coming to the White House, you don’t want to ask those questions because you might not get called on again. If you ask a nagging bit of questions. I know it sounds stupid, but I’ve been there and I can tell you that’s the way it is. You want to make nice, you want to be a good guy. Well, you got the drift of what I’m saying.

GR: Yeah.

SH: The Germans have had a lot of debate about this.

GR: Yeah.

SH: And it’s not done. When he takes out the pipelines in late September —

GR: — it’s an act of war.

SH: — a winter is coming.

GR: Hm.

SH: Well —

GR: An act of terrorism—

SH: I just don’t know. I did a lot of – I did a lot of law review reading to find out. There’s actually no fixed law that says yet, that a pipeline, destroying it is a criminal offence. It clearly is but it hasn’t been adjudicated because nobody’s done it. There is a law dating back to 1884 about a telegraph line going across the ocean, and if you interfere with that, advertently or inadvertently, you’re guilty of the damages. So, we’re talking about something that produces X-number of billions. And maybe that’s the White House issue, they don’t want to be in the court of – you know.

It just – I mean, America – you know, you can do all the UN investigations you want. We basically control a lot of institutions. You know, exceptionalism. America’s exceptionalism is a big deal. Anyway, I’m just saying that in Germany, there is more conservation. Because what Biden did, by knocking off the pipeline, the war by then was going to be a stalemate, at best. Certainly not going to be a – you’re not going to beat Russia.

GR: This —

SH: In Stalingrad, the last Stalingrad, the Russians lost 2,400 dead and wounded every four hours and they beat Germany, the Nazis then. They’re not going to lose that war, they’re not going to win that war. And so, I think by Fall that was clear to everybody and I think Biden and his zeal to keep the war going because it was politically useful to him. Americans, we love our Presidents at war. I think at that point he chose to destroy the pipeline so that Chancellor Scholz, who controls – and that’s the second pipeline called Nord Stream 2 – he controlled – he had shut it down at the request from us, he sanctioned it. It was full of gas, 750 miles of methane gas, that’s why there was such a big outpouring of gas. It hadn’t started delivering yet, it was just frozen. He had the – or the chance to unfreeze it. I think Biden decided to take that away from him. And I think, ultimately, that’s going to be the big problem for Biden, particularly maybe next winter if it’s a bad winter.

GR: I mean, you’re seeing the people rising up on the outside, and tens of thousands recently in Berlin. I mean, is this going to lead to the end of this war, but the end of – dismantling NATO? Or are they going to perhaps to do something else to, maybe you know,push up the pressure to maybe even a – I don’t know – heaven forbid a nuclear false flag or something like that? What’s…

SH: There’s no question that we haven’t heard the end of the destroying of the pipeline. What Biden did is he basically told Europe, Germany and Western Europe: ‘we’ve had the backs of Western and Germany since World War II, we helped rebuild it, we turned it into model democracies, which is – they were, European countries are fun to visit. They are open, friendly. I mean, things are tenser now because of immigration, et cetera, and crime. But basically, they are – Western Europe is, if there was a success story for us after the War, that was in Western Europe in places like Greece – particularly Greece and Italy – we were so crazed about the extent of communism, we actually sided with some of the people who fought for the Nazis, in Greece in particular because they were anti-communist. I mean, after the War, we made a lot of horrible, really awful things we did in terms of anti-communism.

But not in Western Europe. It was left. And it became, ‘We’ve always had their back.’ America has been the bulwark of NATO of making sure Europe was – we spent a lot of money on tourism, we helped build things. Deeply avowed. And all that may be unraveled, because Biden showed that, when push came to shove, if he thought that the Germans would start taking Russian gas again by opening up the pipeline and thus maybe have less incentive to help him in the war in Ukraine, with money and tanks and planes which they were reluctant to do, particularly after what they did in World War II – they spent a decade burning, raping and destroying Western Europe. And so, there we are. That’s what it ultimately – and your question, you know, who knows what’s going to happen? It can’t be good for the cohesion of Western Europe in terms of supporting NATO. It can’t be good for NATO, even. You know, will some countries want to withdraw from NATO? Who knows.

GR: Hm.

SH: I just don’t know. It doesn’t matter what I think. I just know that it’s going to get much tougher. Germany survived this winter, it was a mild winter, and they also subsidize 20 percent, sometimes even more, of gas prices. But even so, it’s hurt the German economy quite a bit. BASF, for example, has been talking to China about moving some stuff there. And someone, I was just reading the other day, something with the largest bakers with 12 ovens produce wonderful, whatever it is the Germans like – they like a lot of schnecken, goodies – shut down eight of the ovens because they didn’t have enough gas or couldn’t afford to buy the gas. Gas has just jumped 19 percent there. But in Spain and France, people are paying as much as five times as much for electricity, which is fueled by turbines. Power turbines are fueled by gas. It’s three to four times as much for natural gas in Italy. That’s going to happen too throughout Western Europe this winter. And that’s when you’re going to see some serious dislocation.

The politics of the destruction of the gas line, whether it’s an act of war or what, but it was a slap in the face of Europe. Saying, you know, ‘If you’re not going to play ball with me and Ukraine –’ says the President, ‘–I don’t care what happens there.’ ‘I don’t care if it’s going to be harder to keep your people wealthy and warm,’ basically that’s what he’s done. And that’s the real input of the story.

GR: Your work was lauded in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s and beyond. But now, it seems suddenly unwelcome around a time when you criticized, I believe, Barack Obama over the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the deceptive way his conclusions about the Syrian government was using chemical weapons in Ghouta, when Syrian opposition was also a likely target. I mean, what, in your view, has changed to the degree that your brand of journalism is not as welcome at the New York Times or the Washington Post was in the past?

SH: What do I know about it? I mean, I don’t – I don’t know if the numbers of people who’ve read the papers haven’t run the story. But you know, I will tell you the response that Substack – I don’t even know much about Substack. But a friend of mine, Matt Taibbi, told me that, ‘Don’t underestimate it.’ And it’s quite powerful, the story is out there, it’s really out there everywhere. They had 1,000,000 hits on that story within a day and it’s been going on and on and on. And I’ve written three or four more and I’m writing another one. I’m going to be writing more about it.

It’s as if what I hear from people who write me, who read stuff from the Substack and other places, is that they understood that this kind of journalism did exist and has existed before. They just weren’t seeing enough of it. I mean, we actually had a story that the New York Times ran on Page 1 for two days about two or three years ago when the Afghan War was still going on. And there were occasions where the Aghans would shoot an American, because they were very angry at what happened there. The Afghan army wasn’t happy with our total control of most things there. And so, one of the stories said that Afghan soldiers – quoting anonymous sources, speaking of anonymous sources – that the Kremlin was paying bounties to Afghan soldiers that killed an American GI on duty in Afghanistan. And that story disappeared because it was a complete fraud. But when you run that kind of stuff, you really lose credibility, you know, that kind of madness.

The xenophobia about Putin is, I guess, inevitable. We’ve always liked that. There’s a long list of Hitlers we’ve had since Hitler, you know? We’ve just got a list of about 30, you name them. Gaddafi was a Hitler at one time. Bashar Assad is, Saddam was. Mao was, Zhou Enlai was. Gorbachev was. And whoever – you know, we just go through it. We have this great penchant for hating. And Putin right now. And by the way, let me say, anybody that starts the most deadly war, bloody war, in Western Europe since 1945 as Putin has done, you can’t – you know, you can just marvel at what made him commit this incredibly stupid act, no matter how much provocation he had. It wasn’t unjust. We lied about expanding NATO to the East, among other things. And we put missiles 800 miles capable of taking out downtown – most of Moscow, because the warheads we have are so powerful now. One hundred times more powerful than – vastly more powerful than the bombs we dropped over Hiroshima and Tokyo – Hiroshima and Tokyo, yeah too, God damnit. I’m thinking, we’re the only country in the world that worries when others have the bomb, we’re the only country that actually used one. Actually, we did it twice.

So anyway, we can talk all week about it. The media today, as you just said earlier, isn’t the media it was when I was around. It’s a lot different. You either have – you either like Fox, or like CNN, or MSNBC, and none of them come close to giving you news. You know?

GR: Yeah.

SH: MSNBC, if they’re not talking about January 6th, they’re talking about this guy who was elected a Republican to the House who’s sort of a – he’s not only just a liar, he’s probably very sick, too. He enjoys being called out. I think he’s very delusional. He’s not interesting to me, he’s so crazy. What’s his name? Sandoval? The one that’s in trouble. Remember he was elected from a House district that had some in West Chester. Or I think it was some in Brooklyn, and some in the New York Counties farther East. But anyway, I don’t know whatever his name is. He’s more of a crazy man than anything else.

GR: Yeah. Well, I’ll just ask one more question, I guess just to kind of tack it off, because we are 10 days away from the 55th anniversary of My Lai. I know that I heard that you went back to My Lai decades later to actually, you know, check it out and at the response – at the invitation by the Vietnamese government. And it turns out that you actually met a survivor of the massacre. So, I was just wondering how that experience may have resolved or capped off this really historic story that basically set you as a force to be reckoned with in the journalistic world.

SH: You could never cap it off. It’s always there. I didn’t know the anniversary is coming up. I don’t take pleasure in that story. Obviously, it was a big story for me, I was a freelance writer. And I was writing about a massacre that took place a year and a half earlier. And it did change the course of the war, I think.

But still, you know, I was in the Army as a grunt, with a rifle M1. And I went through basic training with a bunch of kids. And I remember distinctly that there was some alert that there was a dispute between North and South Korea. We were put on alert, which was crazy. We were – you know 1961/1962. We couldn’t care less about the Army. We did our thing but we just waited to get out. I remember I probably would’ve gotten on the plane to Korea and fight the North Koreans or maybe the Chinese, who knows, and be murdered like we were in 1950. Not because of the flag but because of my colleagues, I had my buddies and friends. And so, you wonder, the kids that did what they did, you know, what their motives were. Look, it’s just – the truth of the matter is, anybody who starts a war is – you know, like Putin did. Although, I must say the provocation was acute and we had to know what we were doing. I think this administration has lost its mind about communism, the way they talk to the Chinese and the way they talk to the Russians, it’s just not credible. It’s just crazy, it just doesn’t make sense, it’s just being totally provocative.

I guess they think it doesn’t – you know, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, wouldn’t go to a meeting with his peers in China because of a balloon. Remember that?

GR: Yeah.

SH: A couple of weeks ago because of a balloon.

GR: Sure.

SH: Weather balloon or whatever it was. I mean, a balloon? He cancelled a meeting because he was – they’re just, you know… They’re just children. And this is a really serious business. And I’m sorry, about the President’s leadership isn’t there on this issue.

GR: Mm-hmm.

SH: And so, let me leave it at that. No, I don’t take pleasure in – no, I – you know. And by the way, I was a ghetto kid. And by that I mean, even though I went to the New York Times in the heyday of, you know, people there were the editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Daily News and stuff like that. I grew up in Chicago, my first language wasn’t even English, even in the house. You know, my father ran a small laundry cleaning shop in Chicago’s black ghetto, on 45th Street in the area. I worked there since 13, and when he got cancer I was just 15 when he died two years later after a long and horrible evolving cancer that went from everywhere to his brain. And I was the least afraid of him in my house, so I could take care of him.

Then I got a scholarship – or got – I don’t think – a no-fee, $800 a quarter to the University of Chicago. And I got an education there in the middle-late 1950s, in which you did read textbooks, you just read the original material. So, you learned to think for yourself. Critical thinking was the whole idea.

And so, I come to My Lai 10 years later as a police reporter and I worked for the United Press covering a State House in South Dakota which was fun. I’d never been there. I spent the winter in South Dakota. And then I worked for the AP in Chicago where I had a great time. And then, in Washington where I had covered the War. Covered the Pentagon. And then, a couple years later I do My Lai. And I’m 11 years out of college. I know no rich people. And I do this story sticking two fingers to the My Lai story about a massacre that was covered up by everybody: Kissinger, Nixon, you name ‘em. And Westmoreland, who ran the War. I’m sticking two fingers in the eye of a sitting president, Richard Nixon. And in many countries in the world, I would’ve been in a gulag for doing that. Not here. Fame, fortune, and glory, right?

GR: Yeah.

SH: Changed my life, I became a player then.

There’s no way I’m going to ever underestimate America and the freedom it has. Even though we have all of these problems with guns, of awful legislature, I mean, give me a break. When I was doing stuff on the War in the ‘70s for the New York Times, my friends were in the Senate, in the House, in the Democrats. And also there were many moderate Republicans. The famous War Powers bill of 1973 barred Nixon from using forces again in Vietnam, was written by a Republican. A Republican senator of many years. I mean, then we had a different Congress. Can you imagine now Chuck Schumer, who’s now the head of the Senate, calling for an investigation into whether or not the White House was involved in the hitting of a pipeline? Not a chance. So, it’s a bad time.

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Notes:

1. https://news.gallup.com/vault/190886/gallup-vault-urge-demonstrate.aspx
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/My-Lai-Massacre/Cover-up-investigation-and-legacy
3. https://blogs.dickinson.edu/hist-118pinsker/2017/04/19/2895/
4. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/prize-winning-reporter-seymour-hersh-no-stranger-controversy-2023-02-09/
5. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

I ministri della Difesa dei 27 paesi della UE, riuniti a Stoccolma, hanno approvato il piano – presentato da Josep Borrell, Alto Rappresentante della UE per gli Affari Esteri e la Politica di Sicurezza – per “l’acquisto congiunto di munizioni di grosso calibro”. Ha partecipato alla riunione il ministro della Difesa ucraino (nonostante che l’Ucraina non faccia parte della UE), che ha “spiegato quali sono le esigenze militari dell’Ucraina”. Borrell ha dichiarato: “Siamo in tempi di guerra e dobbiamo avere una mentalità di guerra”.

Ha quindi illustrato il Piano, che prevede tre fasi:

1) Trarre dalle scorte degli Stati membri della UE proiettili d’artiglieria, in particolare da 155 mm, e fornirli immediatamente all’Ucraina. Il denaro proviene dal Fondo Europeo per la Pace (EPF), che ha già destinato a tale scopo 3,6 miliardi di euro (pagati dai cittadini europei).
2) Realizzare un Accordo tra i 27 Stati membri della UE per l’acquisto congiunto di proiettili da 155 mm da parte, firmando già il mese prossimo i primi contratti della durata di sette anni. Si tratta di un “ordine massiccio” sia per ripristinare e accrescere le scorte nazionali sia per garantire le forniture all’Ucraina
3) Assicurare l’aumento a lungo termine della produzione di munizioni in Europa, sostenendo le industrie della Difesa per garantire le forniture all’Ucraina nel lungo periodo. (La UE prevede di fornirle circa un milione di proiettili da artiglieria).

Borrell ha inoltre comunicato che “entro la fine di marzo, la nostra Missione di Assistenza Militare avrà addestrato più di 11.000 soldati ucraini. Entro la fine dell’anno, prevediamo di aver addestrato 30.000 soldati”. Per il sostegno all’Ucraina la UE ha stanziato 18 miliardi di euro (sempre pagati dai cittadini europei. Ha anche riassunto lo scopo del Piano con queste parole: “Per vincere la pace, l’Ucraina deve vincere la guerra. Ed è per questo che dobbiamo continuare a sostenere l’Ucraina per vincere la pace”. L’Unione Europea scende così apertamente in guerra contro la Russia nel quadro della sempre più pericolosa strategia USA-NATO.

A Mosca è stato sventato l’assassinio di Konstantin Malofeev, amministratore delegato del gruppo Tsargrad. Si tratta dello stesso tipo di attentato con una bomba posta sotto l’auto come quello con cui nell’agosto 2022, è stata uccisa la giornalista Daria Dugina. Esso fa parte di una serie di attentati terroristici contro giornalisti e responsabili di media russi, effettuati dai servizi segreti ucraini sotto regia USA-NATO.

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First published on August 30 2022

***

Excess mortality in Germany 2020–2022 is a preprint by Christof Kuhbandner (a psychologist at Regensburg) and Matthias Reitzner (a statistician at Osnabrück) that applies sophisticated actuarial analysis to the publicly available all-cause mortality data provided by the German government. It turns out that when you account for historical mortality trends, the virus no longer looks so dangerous, and the vaccines no longer look so great.

From the abstract:

In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.

What happened in April 2021 was the beginning of mass vaccination across Germany.

Here’s an overview of mortality deficit or excess by age bracket:

As I’ve said many times, the first year of the German pandemic was a total nothingburger. There was no heightened mortality trend save for among the oldest groups, briefly, in December. In 2021, however, the Year of Maximum Vaccination, the authors estimate almost 32,000 excess deaths. Mortality rose across the board, especially among youngs, with those in their 40s seeing 9% more deaths than expected by their model.

Here are the same figures visualised:

Just looking at that 2021 graph, you can tell there’s something really wrong here. If it’s virus doing all this killing, why is it hardest on people aged 15 to 79? How is it leaving the oldest Germans almost entirely unscathed?

The authors also provide a month-by-month breakdown for the 15-59 age-group:

They note that “The significant excess mortality in December 2020 continues slightly in January 2021, and then is mostly compensated until March 2021. That is, by the end of March, the cumulative excess mortality was close to zero.” These are what the funeral industry would call “pull-forward” deaths. In Germany, the virus mainly kills people who are about to die anyway, such that mortality spikes are followed by counterbalancing mortality deficits.

The authors continue:

In April and May 2021, a significant increase in excess mortality is observed, followed by a decrease up to August. However … the increase in excess mortality in April and May is not compensated for. In September there is again a significant excess mortality, which increases in November and is more than doubled in December 2021.

The April increase obviously coincides with the vaccine rollout, while the Fall increase aligns fairly well with the booster campaign. It’s noteworthy that dose 2 doesn’t seem as dangerous as dose 1 or 3; and that the mortality signal is very tightly correlated with the date of vaccination. As soon as you stop vaccinating, excess deaths recede.

As for people 60 and older, there are two distinct trends: Rising mortality coinciding, again, with the mass administration of doses 1 and 3 in the 60-79 bracket, and nothing special in the 80+ bracket:

The vaccines obviously do most of their harm by inducing adverse immune reactions, and thus they’re relatively safe in the very elderly, who have weaker immune systems. This makes the oldest Germans a useful control, as they are the most sensitive to virus-associated mortality, and the least sensitive to vaccine-associated mortality. Thus, to anyone who objects that it’s really the April case spike that’s making the vaccines look bad here, or that it’s Delta causing those problems in the Fall, the reply is simple: The olds aren’t dying in April or September 2021, just the youngs. What kills mainly the youngs and spares mainly the olds? The answer is not SARS-2.

As the authors note:

The maybe most surprising fact is that [2021] produces in all age groups a significant mortality increase, which is in sharp contrast to the expectation that the vaccination should decrease the number of COVID-19 deaths. The only exception is the last age group [80+] … However, when interpreting this finding, it has to be taken into account that there wa sa huge mortality deficit in 2019 and until October 2020 which was compensated in November [and] December 2020 and January 2021.

It becomes very hard to doubt that the excess mortality of 2021 is vaccine related, when you compare the relative chronology of deaths and mass vaccination:

There are also more specific mortality correlations by age bracket. Thus the authors note the “further hint” that the vaccines are implicated in these deaths, “is the fact that the age group 0–29 has a peak in the excess mortality in June 2021 instead of April 2021,” precisely when these younger cohorts were lining up for their first dose.

A final intriguing finding relates to the relationship between official Corona death numbers and excess mortality. Nobody will be surprised to learn that the SARS-2 death toll is egregiously inflated, but the age-cohort patterns are worth a look:

The official figures are most accurate for those in their 60s and 70s. For those over 80 years old, they are almost entirely meaningless. This group saw less than 20,000 excess deaths in two-and-a-half years of Corona, while their official death count is approaching 100,000.

It’s no wonder that nothing—not lockdowns, not vaccines, not masks, not all the tests in the world—can drive down all-cause mortality in Germany. Most of the people the virus kills are on the verge of dying anyway, and if you spare them a death from SARS-2, they’ll just die of something else next month.

*

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***

Since the 1878 League of Prizren onward, any Albanian program on the creation of a Greater Albania was supported by unproven claims that the Albanians are direct descendants of the ancient Balkan Illyrians.

What was Illyrian?

While the Serbs who lived on the territory of present-day Serbia had already achieved the national consensus of their identity, other South Slavic ethnicities were still striving for this end. In particular, Slavic-speaking people living in then Austria-Hungary undertook steps to identify themselves and thus gain some kind of autonomy or even independence.[i] These efforts were partly in concordance with the aims of the Serbs, both from Serbia and not, but at many points in the clash with them. In particular, the Croats were very eager to contrive their own nationality, for which they sometimes used a number of extreme arguments and means. Renowned Serbian linguist, ethnologist, and historian, Vuk Stefanović-Karadžić used to say ironically, within the context, that the Croats had everything, except land, people, and language.[ii] 

Present-day Croatia was under Austro-Hungarian rule, with land consisting of Croatia proper, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, with a vague determination of the nationality of people living in these regions. The language was also poorly determined, and among several dialect options, the Croat cultural leaders chose the so-called Štokavian dialect, the variant of the Slavic language spoken in Serbia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.[iii] That nationalism often has nothing to do with anthropology and race shows the case of the most prominent leader of the Croat cultural renewal, the so-called Illyrian Movement.[iv] This leader, Ljudevit Gaj (Ludwig Gay) was of German origin (both parents were purely ethnic Germans). The term Illyrian deserves, however, our particular attention.[v]

In attempting to define, or determine their national identities, the principal aim of nationalistic leaders is usually to display the presumed antiquity of their presumed nation. The political-cultural leaders of the Illyrian (in fact, the Croat) movement have been no exception. It is known, in passing, that this passionate striving for antiquity was not the romantic era invention. For instance, around the New Era, disputes between the Jewish community in Alexandria and the Greeks and the Egyptians over “cultural supremacy” took the form of the Jewish claims of their supreme antiquity. A Jewish writer Joseph Flavius wrote the book entitled Jewish Antiquity (a kind of remake of the Old Testament)[vi] and dedicated another treatise specifically devoted to the disputed “Jewish supremacy” regarding the antiquity of the nations in the region.[vii] These claims appear as conspicuous attempts to substitute present (feelings of) inferiority by alleged “past superiority” (like, for instance, in the Croat and Albanian cases since the 19^th century up to today).

Now, what was “Illyrian” in this Croat claim? It is generally believed that the coinage was aimed at disguising a genuine political ambition (as a part of a general nationalistic movement) in cultural clothing.

But a more thorough analysis reveals that the matter is far from tactical moves. The temptations of the “call of remote past” were so appealing, that some historians took the “Illyrian hypothesis” seriously, claiming that all Slavs are of Illyrian descent.[viii] These claims were particularly popular among the South Slavs from the 16^th to early 19^th centuries, and even some authors from Poland and Russia accepted them for genuine historical truth, but, however, those claims have been, in fact, founded in several authentic historical sources.[ix] According to these claims and sources, the South Slavs were descendants of the Balkan Illyrians and are thus autochthonous populations in the region. These Slavs were recognized by the surrounding nations, like the Greeks, as the Illyrians. In the early Middle Ages, one group of these Slavs migrated to Central Europe (West Slavs), whereas one group moved to East Europe (East Slavs).

According to some medieval authors, South Slavs descend from the Illyrians, Thracians, and Macedonians. Hence, Alexander the Great, Constantine the Great, Diocletian, and St. Hieronymus were nobody else but Illyrian Slavs. This line of thought was particularly popular among Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation South Slavs. Vinko Pribojević from Hvar  (the island in the Adriatic Sea) wrote that all Slavs speak one common “our”, “Illyrian”, or “Slavic” language.[x] Mavro Orbini from Dubrovnik (Ragusa), a renowned author of his time (De Regno Sclavorum, 1601), and Bartol Kašić from Dalmatia (Institutionem Linguae Illyricae, 1604) also championed the thesis of the Illyrian origin of all South Slavs.[xi]

Count Đorđe Branković (1645−1711), a Serb nobleman from Transylvania,[xii] was first accepted by Austria as the hair of Serbia’s Despots Brankovićs, but when he tried to found an independent Serbian state on Austrian territory he was dismissed as an imposter.[xiii] Đ. Branković wrote 1688 a political program for the South Slavic unification into a semi-independent state which he called the Illyrian Kingdom.[xiv] It is interesting to note that M. Orbini’s treatise was translated into Russian in 1722. Finally, as we mentioned above, the Croatian national renewal movement in the mid-19^thcentury was launched under the name of the Illyrian Movement.[xv]

Before we go on with “Illyrization of the Balkans” a few words on some features of the “Illyrian” hypothesis are in order. What is the common characteristic of the claims just mentioned? First, the efforts to establish the South Slavs not only as an autochthonous Balkan population but also as the progenitor of all Slavs.[xvi] Another important point is to be noticed. All authors mentioned did not belong to the core of the Slavic territories at the time but came from its margins. All of them, in fact, have been part of the surrounding, more culturally advanced regions, some of them at least partially foreign to the proper Slavic populations. As we shall see immediately, this pattern of “Illyrization” will be followed closely by ethnic Albanians, in their endeavor to establish an Albanian nation and endow it with the territory and language.

The Illyrians, Dinariods, guns, and banks

The Indo-European Illyrian population inhabited the West Balkans and some regions to the northwest of the Balkan Peninsula.[xvii] They never developed the letter and thus did not enter history by their own means. Almost all we know about them came from the Greek and Roman testimonies – names of tribes, rulers, kings, and queens.[xviii] They were regarded as hardy and violent people, engaged mainly in plundering lowlands and Adriatic Sea piracy. The Romans raised several times massive offensives in order to suppress piracy.[xix] When they conquered the Illyrians, the Roman emperors used to make use of them as a military barrier against other barbarians. Henceforth, the entire Illyricum (Roman Prefecture in the Balkans) served as a bulwark against attacks from Central and East European peoples. Because they played a prominent role in the military sector of the Roman Empire (they were employed as a praetorian guard, for instance),[xx] during turmoil times, when military leaders used to seize power, a number of these emperors, like Diocletian, were of Illyrian origin.[xxi]

When in the 6^th and the 7^th centuries AD, according to the mainly forged official historiography of the Slavs, they invaded Balkan Peninsula from the north, and they pushed the local population into mountainous regions, which we call today the Dinaric area. Present-day Dinariods (Yugoslav and West Balkan highlanders), Slavophone and Albanophone alike, are supposed to be of Illyrian origin, although it comes mainly by implication rather than by direct evidence.[xxii] In the absence of material artifacts that may be attributed to Illyrians with certainty, what remains in making links with this ancient tribal population appears inevitably of conjectural nature. In particular, the mental structure of modern Dinariods matches closely the anthropic features one attributes to Illyrians. Language and religious differences among Balkan Dinariods are of minor importance, compared with the principal common attributes just mentioned. One of these features is their notorious stubbornness and inflexibility. As many psychiatrists testify, in particular those dealing with convicts, it appears practically impossible to “reach their mind”, unlike other patients.

Mixing of reality as it is and as they want to be (as they fancy). One of the ensuing effects have been numerous demands in politics and otherwise, based on false images of history or actual political situation. The lack of appreciation of the state as an institution. This has come as a consequence of their millennia of living at the margins of existing states, foreign or not. They never experienced states as their own and always tried to take advantage of their marginal position and profit maximally, without feeling any responsibility for the common welfare. There is an extreme impulse for striving for power among all Balkan Dinariods including Albanians as well. Since the male population of Dinariods, as the dominant familiar and social factor, was never engaged in production and used to be engaged in plundering and stealing, they feel strong repulsion towards manual work and always try to rule the surroundings instead.

Weaponry cult is strongly present among Dinariods and appears particularly prominent with ethnic Albanians. This cult of guns deserves particular attention, for it will play a decisive role in the coming historical events. It can be quoted a few examples as an illustration of the point. For instance, when the Serbian soldiers, in their retreat from Serbia in the autumn of 1915,[xxiii] before the powerful German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian armies, were crossing Albania,[xxiv] many of them lost their lives because they carried guns. Not only they were killed by Albanians while the exhausted soldiers were crossing Albanian mountains, but some of them were assassinated while sleeping in Albanian houses. The latter instance bears particular weight to the point, bearing in mind the Albanian traditional hospitality, in particular, their cult of protecting guests.[xxv] When receiving guns at the beginning of their military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army (the YPA), many ethnic Albanian conscripts used to kiss the rifle.[xxvi] The rifle is considered by the ethnic Albanians as a precious tool and almost the best friend. The same tradition was present among the Montenegrins too, as the many instances in the dramatic mid-19^th-century poem Mountainous Wreath (Gorski vijenac) by the Montenegrin ruler Petar II Petrović Njegoš testify.[xxvii]

When the scandal of the so-called pyramidal bank affair took place in Albania in 1997, it caused such a revolt of the deceived Albanians that the Government of Sali Berisha was on the brink to collapse. The latter then decided to resort to the ultimate means in the attempt to save the Government (and life, for that matter). The Government decided to have the army magazines open and the crowd rushed in and took all the weaponry out. The regime was saved, and the majority of the weaponry found its way to KosMet where it was used against Serbia’s authorities by a notorious terrorist organization – the Kosovo Liberation Army.[xxviii]

During these riots, Albania was practically deprived of the state as an institution for several days. After the riots were over, the state was reinstituted formally, but practically it has never recovered again. In principle, a society with armed civilians cannot have a real state, as is the case with the USA,[xxix] for instance, for the very reason that the Government in such cases possesses no real control over its (armed) citizens. As for the revolt of the gamblers towards their authorities, it was partly justified. What concerns the authorities, they not only knew what was going on with those quasi-banks but in all probability, the authorities have been directly involved in the organized robbery of their naïve citizens. This was certainly the case with S. Milošević’s regime in Serbia, which played the role of the partner both to Dafina Milanović’s Dafiment Bank and Jezdimir Vasiljević’s Yugoscandic Bank. The gray eminence behind Dafina Milanović turned out to be certain Clara Mandić, an obscure figure,[xxx] with close relationships with the Milošević’s family. She made the company to Marko Milošević, son of Slobodan Milošević, when he was visiting Israel. It was surely part of the whole scheme, for both Dafina Milanović and Jezdimir Vasiljević fled from Serbia to Israel, with the money, of course.[xxxi]

*

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] On this issue, see more in [R. A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526−1918, Berkeley, US−Los Angeles, US−London, UK: University of California Press, 1980].

[ii] About the 19^th-century ideas of the Serbian nationhood and statehood developed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Ilija Garašanin see in [V. B. Sotirović, “Nineteenth-century Ideas of Serbian ‘Linguistic’ Nationhood and Statehood”, Slavistica Vilnensis, Kalbotyra 49 (2), 2000, 7–24].

[iii] I will not dwell on this issue here, but direct interesting readers to my comprehensive article [V. B.  Sotirović, “National Identity: Who are the Albanians? The Illyrian Anthroponomy and the Ethnogenesis of the Albanians”, Liaudies Kultūra, Vol. 3, № 84, Vilnius, 2002, 31–43].

[iv] See [V. B. Sotirović, “The Croatian National Revival Movement (The “Illyrian Movement”) and the Question of Language in the Phase from 1830 to 1841”, Наслеђе, year III, № 4, Kragujevac, 2006, 101–116.

[v] On the ethnic identity from the anthropological perspective, see in [M. Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions, London, UK: Routledge, 1996]. In this book, the author outlines the major anthropological and sociological approaches to ethnicity, focusing on traditional paradigms of British and American anthropologists, the notion of “ethnos” developed by the Soviet anthropologists, and UK’s and US’ case studies.

[vi] J. Flavius, The Antiquities of the Jews, J. Flavius, Complete Works, London: Nelson & Sons, 1859, 27.

[vii] J. Flavius, Against Apion, J. Flavius, Complete Works, London: Nelson & Sons, 1859, 784. On Jewish history, see in [Д. Џ. Голдберг, Џ. Д. Рејнер, Јевреји: Историја и религија, Београд: Clio, 2003]. On the history of Greece and Hellenism, see in [Џ. Бордман, Џ. Грифин, О. Мари (eds.), Оксфордска историја Грчке и хеленистичког света, Београд: Clio, 1999].

[viii] The Illyrians were the ancient inhabitants of the Balkans well-known to the Greek and Roman historians and geographers. See in more detail on them in [A. Stipčević, The Illyrians: History and Culture, Noyes Press, 1977]. About Illyrian-Roman relations, see in [J. R. Abdale, The Great Illyrian Revolt: Rome’s Forgotten War in the Balkans, AD 6−9, Barnsley, UK−Pen and Sword Military, 2019].

[ix] One of them is a chronicle by monk Nestor: Povest’ vremennyh let. The chronicle was written in the final form in 1113 based on previous writings. It is the most important source of ancient Russian history [J. Anisimov, Rusijos Istorija nuo Riuriko iki Putino. Žmonės. Įvykiai. Datos, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2014, 46].

[x] V. Pribojević, On Origin and History of the Slavs, 1532, Venice.

[xi] About more details, see for instance in [Ј. И. Деретић, Д. П. Антић, С. М. Јарчевић, Измишљено досељавање Срба, Београд: Сардонија, 2009; М. Милановић, Историјско порекло Срба, Друго допуњено и проширено издање, Београд: Вандалија, 2011].

[xii] He claimed to be the heir of the Brankovićs dynasty, the last Serbian (vassal) ruling family, before the final fall of the Serbian state to the Ottoman Empire in 1459. The last Branković in power ruling Serbia before the Ottoman occupation was Lazar (1456−1458) [С. Станојевић, Сви српски владари, Београд: Отворена књига, 2015, 75−76].

[xiii] It was at this time that Austria launched the false thesis that Vuk Branković, the progenitor of Branković dynasty, betrayed duke Lazar during the 1389 Kosovo Battle.

[xiv] About Count Đorđe Branković and his time see in [J. Radonjić, Grof Đorđe Branković i njegovo vreme, Beograd, 1911].

[xv] Vladislav B. Sotirović, “National Identity: Who are the Albanians? The Illyrian Anthroponomy and the Ethnogenesis of the Albanians”, Liaudies Kultūra, Vol. 3, № 84, Vilnius, 2002, 31–43.

[xvi] Today, many historians claim that the “Illyrian” hypothesis of the Slavic origin is based on relevant historical sources of the time. See, for instance [Ј. И. Деретић, Д. П. Антић, С. М. Јарчевић, Измишљено досељавање Срба, Београд: Сардонија, 2009].

[xvii] An Illyrian tribe occupied territory close to the present-day Vienna.

[xviii] A. Stipčević, Iliri: Povijest, život, kultura, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1989, 7−14.

[xix] М. Ростовцев, Историја Старога света. Грчка и Рим, Нови Сад: Матица српска, 1990, 268. There were two “Illyrian Wars” launched by the Romans: The First (229−228 B.C.) and the Second (219 B.C.)

[xx] On one of the Albanian websites it is proudly (and out of context) stated that Albania provides military support to Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[xxi] This situation will repeat many times during the Balkan history, in particular during WWII and civil wars in Yugoslavia (1991−1995).

[xxii] However, there is no single evidence in historical sources that present-day Balkan Albanians are of any Illyrian origin as they came to the Balkans only in 1043 from Sicily. Originally, they are from the Caucasus where in ancient times they had their state – Caucasus Albania. On this issue see the book [Кавкаски Албанци лажни Илири, Београд: Пешић и синови, 2007].

[xxiii] The estimate is that around 350.000 Serbians, soldiers, and civilians alike, lost their lives during this retreat through Albania. The crossing is known as the Serbian Golgotha [P. R. Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, Revised and Expanded Edition, Seattle, US: University of Washington Press, 2002, 123].

[xxiv] With permission of the Albanian local Muslim leader Essad-pasha, a great friend of Serbs, whom the latter had helped in his political activities in Albania [Д. Т. Батаковић, Косово и Метохија у српско-арбанашким односима, Друго допуњено издање, Београд: Чигоја штампа, 2006, 201; M. Radojević, Lj. Dimić, Serbia in the Great War 1914−1918, Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga−Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals, 2014, 194−204].

[xxv] In some cases, the Serbian soldiers retaliated for these murders, like setting houses to fire.

[xxvi] When a captain asked such a conscript why he kissed the gun, he obtained this remarkable answer: “I will need it some-day”.

[xxvii] The last chapter of the poem, which concerns the broken gun of Vuk Mandušić, is a true apotheosis of weapons. About Petar II Petrović Njegoš and his works, see in [Проф. Др Лазо М. Костић, Сабрана дела. Четврти том:Његош и Српство, Београд: ЗИПС СРС, 2000 ].

[xxviii] It has been estimated that about 700.000 weaponry was “taken over” by “revolting civilians”, with the majority of them sold to Kosovo “civilians”. About the Kosovo Liberation Army from the Western political perspective, see in [J. Pettifer, The Kosova Liberation Army: Underground War to Balkan Insurgency, 1948−2001, London: UK: C. Hurst & Co (Publishers), Ltd, 2012].

[xxix] On this issue, see more in [T. Diaz, Making A Killing: The Business of Guns in America, New Press, 2000; L. A. Eargle, A. Esmail (eds.), Gun Violence in American Society, Lanham, USA: University Press of America, 2016; D. J. Campbell, America’s Gun Wars: A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2019].

[xxx] She turned out to be nymphomaniac.

[xxxi] They both returned to Serbia and were arrested. D. Milanović died of cancer in 2008.

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First published on January 12, 2023

***

Thursday, January 26, 2023. 

Professor Tremblay’s Important Statement

Under these circumstances, with the escalation of the war in Ukraine, it would be useful and desirable for the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. António Guterres, to convene the United Nations General Assembly, in order to discuss the question of peace in the world, considering the great risk that the deterioration of the war in Ukraine currently poses to humanity.

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Since the end of the Second World War (1939-1945), there have been many civil wars and several important regional military conflicts between two or more countries, but none has evolved into a general world war involving all the most heavily armed countries. The most serious regional wars were the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1955-1975), the Iraq War (2003-2011), the Syria War (2011- ), and the Ukraine War (2022- ).

Indeed, with no sign yet of peace in Ukraine, nine years after the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government, in February 2014, and nearly one year after the Russian military invasion, last February 24—and with a real danger that such a prolonged proxy conflict between great powers could escalate into a nuclear world war—it may be appropriate to search for reasons why, in this 21st Century, the world is still threatened with murderous and destructive wars.

There are basic tendencies in human nature, structural institutional failures and geopolitical factors for why this is the case.

Let us identify the most important causes, which can explain why wars of aggression and proxy wars are still taking place today.

• Human nature: Warlike instincts as the basis for wars

Basic human instincts of control, conquest, domination, and exploitation have often been the very background to conflicts and wars between states.

That may be because some countries are, over time, ruled by men who are bent on using violence to gain and expand their power: they may be kings, emperors, dictators, autocrats or hardliners, even in so-called advanced societies.

If war belongs to the very nature of man, in order to escape this atavism, civilization would need to be more commonly based on humanistic principles, and democratic rules and laws, in order to curb the tendency of autocratic governments of oligarchies to dominate other peoples.

• Attempts to prevent wars, with ethical principles or through international cooperation

The Just War Theory

Ever since the philosophical works of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the most well known religious thinkers about the Just war theory (jus ad bellum), there have been several attempts to introduce some morality and some fairness, if not more justice, into the practice of organized military violence between nations.

According to thinkers of the ‘just war theory’, a war must not be pre-emptive but be defensive. It must rest on self-defense. Its purpose must be to defend a nations’ peace against serious injury, and be a lesser evil than the alternatives, after all diplomatic options have been exhausted. For that, a war must meet some criteria, such as being based on a just cause (ex: protect innocent life), seeking a just long-term peace, being under the control of a legitimate authority, being proportional in the means used and being waged as a last resort.

Needless to say, with no practical means to prevent wars of aggression, the Just war theory has not prevented wars of aggression, or wars of conquest, from taking place since its inception.

Indeed, when unscrupulous and arrogant leaders subscribe only to the law of the jungle in international relations, it leads to the application of the dictatorial rule that “might makes right”.

The League of Nations (1920-1946)

The League to Enforce Peace published this full-page promotion in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1918. It resolved that the League “should ensure peace by eliminating causes of dissension, by deciding controversies by peaceable means, and by uniting the potential force of all the members as a standing menace against any nation that seeks to upset the peace of the world”. (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The League of Nations was created in the first part of the 20th Century, in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 10, 1920, by 41 member states, representing 70 percent of the world population. It was a multilateral attempt to prevent a repetition of World War I (1914-1918) and to “achieve international peace and security”.

Before WWI, the international system for keeping peace and stability was very primitive. It was based on a few military alliances regrouping several countries. They were supposedly designed to protect smaller states, and their objective was to be a deterrent to war through a so-called “Balance of Power”.

Nevertheless, the alliance system was very unstable, because any serious localized military incident could easily escalate and trigger a wider war. Indeed, member nations of any given military alliance were expected to join in the mêlée, when a single country declared a war.

Before World War I, there were two rival military alliances: the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, joined later by Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire; and the Allies, which included France, the United Kingdom and Russia, joined later by Japan and the United States.

The spark that ignited WWI happened in Bosnia, in the city of Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. With that, military alliances came into play.

Without the military alliances, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would have only caused a regional war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. However, because of alliances, Russia came to assist Serbia, which in turn led Germany to declare war on Russia.

A question needs to be asked: Are military alliances powder kegs for creating large wars?

Even though, after WWI, the League of Nations was designed to prevent wars, it was too weak to prevent arms races between countries and to enforce disarmament agreements. It was also too weak to impose solutions to conflicts through negotiation or arbitration in cases of international conflicts.

The United Nations (1945)

The Second World War (1939-1946) is considered to have been a legacy of WWI. And, just like WWI, it involved two opposing military alliances. On one side was the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and on the other, the Allied Powers (France, Britain, Canada, the U.S., the Soviet Union and China).

1943 sketch by Franklin Roosevelt of the UN original three branches: The Four Policemen, an executive branch, and an international assembly of forty UN member states (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The immediate cause of WWI was the German military invasion of neighboring Poland, on September 1, 1939. Britain and France then both declared war against Germany, on September 3, 1939, in accordance with the defense treaties that they had signed with Poland.

However, historians have placed a lot of the blame for WWI on the failure of the League of Nations to prevent regional wars. They single out the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, which imposed the payment of severe war reparations on Germany (the Weimar Republic) and on its economy, besides depriving Germany of several territories along with other exactions. Such a a severe humiliation of an entire nation, in turn, promoted the rise of the Nazi movement and of militarism in Germany, but also in Italy and in Japan.

The creation of the United Nations on June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, represents an attempt to ban wars of aggression, after the failure of the League of Nations. Indeed, the United Nations Charter states that its main purpose is to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.

Even though the U.N. Charter makes wars of aggression illegal, powerful states nevertheless continue to engage in wars of aggression against other less powerful nations, under different pretexts, claiming that their violent aggression is ‘necessary’, while resorting to an abusive interpretation of the Self-defense article 51.

That is why it can be said that the post-Second World War era has not left the world in a better position today for avoiding wars of aggression, than during the pre-World War I period. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

• Geopolitical factors and the danger of military alliances

The Cold War I (1945-1991)

During WWII, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. However, once the war ended, they engaged in building two powerful opposing ‘defensive’ military alliances.

On the one hand, in 1949, the U.S. government was instrumental in creating The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a ‘defensive’ military alliance initially regrouping 12 countries (the United States and Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom). Presently, it has 30 members, with a number of countries waiting to join (Sweden, Finland and Ukraine).

Its official objective was to provide a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and Eastern Europe after World War II.

NATO’s Article 5 stipulates that:

“an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.“

On the other hand, the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1955, in order to counterbalance the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It had 8 Eastern European member states: the Soviet Union (USSR), Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.

The founding treaty of the ‘defensive’ Warsaw Pact called on the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force, and it set up a unified military command.

During more than three decades, these two opposing ‘defensive’ military alliances, a Western bloc and an Eastern bloc, served as counterweight to one another through the establishment of a balance of power in Europe.

However, the East European Warsaw Pact was officially disbanded in 1991, when the Soviet Union went through a severe political crisis and disintegrated, on December 25, 1991, being replaced by the Russian federation and 15 new states. That ended the thirty-six year Cold War.

Such an event left the Western bloc alliance, NATO, without a potential enemy to counterbalance.

The U.S. government, under President George H.W. Bush (1924-2018), as the promoter of NATO, then had two choices: either to dismantle the Western military alliance or to reorient its purpose and develop new missions.

The choice was made not to dismantle NATO, in order to maintain American influence in Europe.

Such a decision was not exempt from raising many misgivings on the part of the Russian government, which feared to be placed in the position of facing a potentially belligerent NATO. In order to allay such fears, the U.S. administration of George H.W. Bush gave assurances, through the Secretary of State James Baker (and representatives of other Western governments did the same) that NATO “would not expand into Eastern Europe” and therefore, would not pose a military threat to Russia.

As a counterpart, the Russian government was expected to go along with the reunification of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) and West Germany (the German Federal Republic) into a single sovereign state, within the NATO alliance.

However, things changed in 1994 and even more so in 1999.

Cold War II (1999- )

Indeed, during the 1994-1996 period, under pressure from the Republican Party, but also influenced by neoconservatives in favor of a unilateral neo-imperialist foreign policy, President Bill Clinton made speeches indicating that his administration would not respect anymore the assurances given to Russia by the H.W. Bush administration, i.e. that NATO would not expand “one inch Eastward”.

His administration had been convinced by neoconservative advisors that the U.S. government should take advantage of the extreme economic weakness of Russia to encircle the latter militarily.

In October 1996, President Clinton made it official that NATO enlargement was part of his foreign policy when he openly called for former Warsaw Pact countries and post-Soviet republics to join NATO. This was implemented, beginning in March 1999, when three East European countries (Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic) officially joined NATO.

In March 1999, the Clinton administration went one step further. It sidestepped the United Nations Charter, which forbids acts of aggression, and instead relied on the cover of NATO to initiate an aerial bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, against Serbian military targets. On that date, the U.S. government rendered the United Nations de facto impotent to prevent or stop wars of aggression. Since then, the U.S. government has relied on the NATO substitute to justify its military interventions abroad.

• Pretexts, provocations, lies and other deceptive tactics are commonly used to initiate war

There are panoply of indirect possibilities and treacherous strategies to initiate interstate warfare, besides directly bombing a country or sending armies to invade a foreign country.

For instance, a nation with warlike intentions can use provocations and threats as a prelude to war, or to incite an enemy to retaliate; an aggressor may also try to disrupt and destabilize a country by simulating a military attack through war games and covert operations. The recourse to a false flag operation (when a country commits an act of war and blames another country for it) has often been employed.

Another trick to hurt an unfriendly country is to resort to a proxy war (i.e. a war waged by a client-state against a targeted enemy, but being financed and armed by a major third party instigator). A mixture of a proxy war and a false flag operation can then be part of a plan to enlarge a conflict into an open war.

A war plan on the part of an aggressor can go as far as sabotaging the installations of a foreign country for military or political motives, through covert operations. An aggressor can also impose a siege on a victimized nation without any formal declaration of war.

One tactic commonly used to start a war is to denigrate and demonize an adversary, through lies and deceptive propaganda about that country’s armaments or real intention.

Another way to push a targeted country to war is to impose trade embargoes of some essential commodity that it must import, such as oil. Indeed, the unilateral imposition of economic and financial sanctions against a country, in order to hurt its economy, is another hostile act that could result in a war.

That is why it is so arduous to prevent a war only through legal and diplomatic means, or through mediation, when a powerful nation is bent on going to war against another country.

Neither the League of Nations nor the United Nations made it illegal for a warlike nation to provoke a war through indirect means.

This is an indication of how complex and difficult it remains to make the curse of wars of aggression a truly obsolete event. Nevertheless, wars of aggression, now with the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons, must be prevented, if humanity is to survive on this planet.

Finally, a not too cheery fact: A recent study has concluded that democracies are more likely to start wars than autocratic regimes.

Conclusion

Currently, the international political and legal framework to prevent or to end war is in shambles. The United Nations has been sidelined and its authority as an arbiter of military conflicts, as stipulated in the U.N. Charter, has been undermined and replaced with a comeback of more or less arbitrary raw power politics.

Like in a not so glorious past, military alliances have been reconstituted and the reliance on a new “Balance of Power” is again the only bulwark against a worldwide military conflagration.

A more civilized world would free itself of the trap of atavistic military alliances, a proven historical recipe for permanent wars, high public indebtedness and persistent inflation. Wars of aggression and proxy wars should be eliminated as a barbarous human institution, once and for all.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: A U.S. Navy Lockheed SP-2H Neptune (BuNo 140986) of patrol squadron VP-18 Flying Phantoms flying over a Soviet freighter. The freighter is most probably the Okhotsk, which left the port at Nuevita carrying 12 IL-28 airplanes on 5 December 1962 (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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Important article first published on October 11 2022

***

“We are not threatening anyone.… We have made it clear that any further NATO movement to the east is unacceptable. There’s nothing unclear about this. We aren’t deploying our missiles to the border of the United States, but the United States IS deploying their missiles to the porch of our house. Are we asking too much? We’re just asking that they not deploy their attack-systems to our home…. What is so hard to understand about that?” Russian President Vladimir Putin,

YouTube, Start at :48 seconds

Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do?

Would he brush it off like a big nothing-burger and move on or would he threaten the Mexican government with a military invasion that would obliterate the Mexican Army, level their biggest cities, and send the government running for cover?

Which of these two options do you think Biden would choose?

There’s no doubt what Biden would do nor is there any question what the 45 presidents who preceded him would do. No US leader would ever stand by and do nothing while thousands of Americans were savagely slaughtered by a foreign government. That just wouldn’t happen. They’d all respond quickly and forcefully.

But if that’s true, then why isn’t the same standard applied to Russia? Isn’t the situation in Ukraine nearly identical?

It is nearly identical, only the situation in Ukraine is worse, much worse. And if we stretch our analogy a bit, you’ll see why:

Let’s say, the US Intelligence agencies discovered that the Mexican government was not acting alone, but was being directed to kill and maim American ex-pats on orders from the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. Can you imagine that?

And the reason the Chinese government wants to kill Americans in Mexico is because they want to lure the US into a long and costly war that will “weaken” the US and pave way for its ultimate splintering into many pieces that China can control and exploit. Does any of this sound familiar? (Check out the Rand Strategy for weakening Russia here)

So, let’s say, the Chinese are actually the driving force behind the war in Mexico. Let’s say, they toppled the Mexican government years earlier and installed their own puppet regime to do their bidding. Then they armed and trained vast numbers of troops to fight the Americans. They supplied these warriors with cutting-edge weapons and technology, logistical support, satellite and communications assistance, tanks, armored vehicles, anti-ship missiles, and state-of-the-art artillery units all of which were provided with one goal in mind; to crush America in a proxy war that was concocted, controlled and micro-managed from the Chinese Capital of Beijing

Is such a scenario possible?

It is possible, in fact, this very same scenario is playing out right now in the Ukraine, only the perpetrator of the hostilities is the United States not China, and the target of this malign strategy is Russia not the US. Surprisingly, the Biden administration isn’t even trying to hide what they’re up-to anymore. They’re openly arming, training, funding, and directing Ukrainian troops to prosecute a war aimed at killing Russian soldiers and removing Putin from power. That’s the objective and everyone knows it.

And the whole campaign is based on the sketchy claim that Russia is guilty of “unprovoked aggression”. That’s the whole deal in a nutshell. The moral justification for the war rests on the unverified assumption that Russia committed a criminal offense and broke international law by invading Ukraine. But, did they?

Let’s see if that assumption is correct or if it’s just another fake claim by a dissembling media that never stops tweaking the narrative to build the case for war.

First of all, answer this one question related to the analogy above: If the US deployed troops to Mexico to protect American expats from being bombarded by the Mexican army, would you regard that deployment as an ‘unprovoked aggression’ or a rescue mission?

Rescue mission, right? Because the primary intention was to save lives not seize the territory of another sovereign country.

Well, that’s what Putin was doing when he sent his tanks into Ukraine. He was trying stop the killing of civilians living in the Donbas whose only fault was that they were ethnic Russians committed to their own culture and traditions. Is that a crime?

Take a look at this map.

This map is the key to understanding how the war in Ukraine started. It tells us who did the provoking and who was being provoked. It tells us who was dropping the bombs and who was getting bombed. It tells us who was causing the trouble and who was being blamed for the trouble-making. The map tells us everything we need to know.

Can you see the yellow dots? Those dots represent the artillery strikes that were documented in daily summaries by “observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontlines.” The vast majority of the strikes were in the area inhabited by Russian-speaking people who have been under military siege for the last 8 years. (14,000 ethnic Russians have been killed in the fighting since 2014.) The Minsk Agreements were drawn up to resolve the issues between the warring parties and end the hostilities, but the government in Kiev refused to implement the agreement. In fact, the former President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, even admitted that the treaty was just a vehicle for buying time until another full-scale offensive on the Donbas could be launched.

In short, the Ukrainian government never had any intention of reaching a peaceful settlement with leaders of the Donbas. Their goal was to intensify the conflict in order to provoke Russia and draw them into a protracted war that would exhaust their resources and collapse their economy. The long-range objective was to remove Putin from office and replace him with a Washington-backed stooge that would do as he was told. US officials– including Joe Biden- have even admitted that their plan involved regime change in Moscow. We should take them at their word.

The map provides a visual account of the events leading up the Russian invasion. It cuts through the lies and identifies the true origins of the war which can be traced back to the heavy artillery strikes launched by the Ukrainian Army more than a week before the Russian invasion. (February 24) The massive shelling was aimed at the Russian-speaking people living in an area in east Ukraine. These are the people who were being bombarded by their fellow Ukrainians.

What Really Happened?

On February 16—a full 8 days before the Russian invasion—the shelling of the Donbas increased dramatically and steadily intensified for the next week “to over 2,000 per day on February 22.” As we said, these blasts were logged in daily summaries by observers of the OSCE who were on the frontlines. Think about that for a minute. In other words, these are eyewitness accounts by trained professionals who collected documented evidence of the Ukrainian Army’s massive bombardment of areas inhabited by their own people.

Would this evidence hold up in a court of law if a case against the Ukrainian government was ever presented before an international tribunal trying to assign accountability for the hostilities?

We think it would. We think the evidence is rock-solid. In fact, we have not read or heard of even one analyst who has challenged this vast catalogue of documented evidence. Instead, the media simply pretends the proof doesn’t exist. They have simply swept the evidence under the rug or vanished it from their coverage altogether in order to shape a Washington-centric version of events that completely ignores the historical record. But facts are facts. And the facts don’t change because the media fails to report them. And what the facts suggest is that the war in Ukraine is a Washington-concocted war no different than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. Once again, Uncle Sam’s bloody fingerprints are all over this sorry affair.

Check out this summary of ceasefire violations posted on podcast host Martyr Made’s twitter account:

Martyr Made @martyrmade

On Feb 15, the OSCE recorded 41 ceasefire violations as Kiev’s forces began shelling Donbas.
Feb 16: 76 violations
Feb 17: 316
Feb 18: 654
Feb 19: 1,413
Feb 20-21: 2,026
Feb 22: 1,484
…virtually all by the Kiev side. Feb 24: Russian forces intervene

Notice how the shelling of the Donbas increased every day before the invasion?

I’d call that a thoroughly-calculated provocation, wouldn’t you?

Why does this matter?

It matters because the vast majority of people have been hoodwinked into supporting a war for which there is no moral justification. This is not a case of “unprovoked aggression”. Not even close. And Putin is not an out-of-control tyrant bent on reconstituting the Soviet Empire by terrorizing his neighbors and seizing their territory. That is a complete fabrication based on nothing but speculation. In Putin’s own words, he invaded Ukraine because he had no choice. His own people were being ruthlessly exterminated by an army that acts on Washington’s orders alone. He had to invade, there was no other option. Putin felt a moral obligation to defend the ethnic Russians in Ukraine who could not defend themselves. Is that aggression? Here’s a bit more background from an article at The Intercept by James Risen:

Despite staging a massive military buildup on his country’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

In December, the CIA issued classified reports concluding that Putin hadn’t yet committed to an invasion, according to the current and former officials. In January, even as the Russian military was starting to take the logistical steps necessary to move its troops into Ukraine, U.S. intelligence again issued classified reporting maintaining that Putin had still not resolved to actually launch an attack, the officials said.

It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added. With few other options available at the last minute to try to stop Putin, President Joe Biden took the unusual step of making the intelligence public, in what amounted to a form of information warfare against the Russian leader. He also warned that Putin was planning to try to fabricate a pretext for invasion, including by making false claims that Ukrainian forces had attacked civilians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The preemptive use of intelligence by Biden revealed “a new understanding … that the information space may be among the most consequential terrain Putin is contesting,” observed Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution.”

Biden’s warning on February 18 that the invasion would happen within the week turned out to be accurate. In the early hours of February 24, Russian troops moved south into Ukraine from Belarus and across Russia’s borders into Kharkiv, the Donbas region, and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.” (“U.S. Intelligence Says Putin Made a Last-Minute Decision to Invade Ukraine”,James Risen, The Intercept)

There’s so much baloney in this excerpt, it’s hard to know where to begin. But just review the timeline we provided earlier; a timeline that has been verified by officials from the OSCE. Can you see the discrepancy?

Biden issued his warning on February 18; that’s two days after monitors from the OSCE reported an intensification of the bombing in the Donbas. In other words, Biden already knew that his buddies in the Ukrainian army were bombing the shit out of east Ukraine when he tried to make it look like he was privy to some sensitive, insider information about the upcoming invasion.

Of course, he knew Putin was going to invade! They created the provocation that forced him to invade! They were bombing the hell out of the people Putin is obliged to protect. What else could he do? Any leader worth his salt would have done same thing.

What bothers me is that people continue support the war in Ukraine because they have no idea of what actually happened in the lead-up to the invasion.They know nothing about the relentless bombing of civilians, or the defiant rejection of Minsk or the repeated military attacks on the Donbas,or the or the plan to retake Crimea through force of arms. or the laws directed against ethnic Russians, or the rise of Nazi fascism in Kiev. They know nothing about any of these things. Their views on Ukraine are entirely shaped by the rubbish they read in the western media or hear on the cable news channels where the deluge of propaganda issues like a mighty river pulling the population inexorably towards another vicious neocon bloodbath.

People must know the truth or this war will escalate into something far worse.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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First published on March 7, 2023

***

It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.

And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.

USAID was founded in 1961 and it was intended to serve as a vehicle for nurturing democratic government and associated civic institutions among nations that had little or no experience in popular government. That role has become less relevant as nation states have evolved and the organization itself has responded by becoming more assertive in its role, pushing policies that have coincided with US foreign policy objectives. This has led some host nations to close down USAID offices. Within the US government itself, participants in foreign policy formulation often observe that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) now are largely in the business of doing what the CIA used to do, i.e. interfering in local politics by supporting opposition parties and other dissident or even terrorist groups. Both organizations were very active in Ukraine in 2014 and served as conduits for money transfers to the opposition parties and those who were hostile to Russia’s influence for “democracy building.”

Samantha Power, who is married to another Democratic Party affiliated power broker, lawyer Cass Sunstein, traveled to Hungary on her diplomatic passport but took pains to cover her travel as a routine bureaucratic visit to an overseas post. Hungary is undeniably a democracy, is a member of the European Union, and also of NATO, but Power reportedly did not clear the travel with the Hungarian government and apparently did not meet with any government officials, even as a courtesy. She tweeted that her visit was to reestablish USAID in the Hungarian capital, “Great to be here in Budapest with @USAmbHungary where @USAID just relaunched new, locally-driven initiatives to help independent media thrive and reach new audiences, take on corruption and increase civic engagement.”

By “independent media” Power clearly meant that the US will be directly supporting opposition press that is anti-government and which embraces the globalist-progressive view currently favored by the White House. A US Embassy press release on the visit revealed that Power was in town as part of a project to relaunch seven USAID programs throughout Eastern Europe. It did not elaborate on the “corruption” that Power intended to address, which, of course, would have been a direct insult to the local governments wherever she intended to visit, nor did the document reveal that many of the groups that will be supported are likely to be affiliated with “globalist” George Soros.

In Budapest, Samantha Power did indeed meet with opposition political figures and civil organizations and groups, with particular emphasis on the homosexual community including “Joined @divaDgiV, @andraslederer, and @viki radvanyi for lunch in Budapest where we spoke about their work to advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and dignity in Hungary and around the world @budapestpride” as described in one of her tweeted messages after arrival. Power was also accompanied throughout by the highly controversial US Ambassador David Pressman, who is openly homosexual, of course, married to a man, and who has been highly critical of the conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which was reelected in 2022 by a landslide margin in a vote that was considered free and fair. Orban is disliked by Joe Biden’s Washington because he is conservative and a nationalist, not because he is incompetent or dishonest while Pressman was and is a perfect example of the Biden State Department sending a terrible fit as ambassador to an extremely conservative country just to make points with the gay community in the US. Pressman has persisted in telling Hungarians how to behave not only on foreign policy but also on sexual diversity and cultural issues and, for his efforts, was finally told to “shut up” by Hungary’s Foreign Minister.

To be sure, Hungary’s undeniably democratic government, which is politically and economically tied to Washington, does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong and even escalate the Russia-Ukraine war and will not contribute to arming Ukraine. It does not accept “globalist” open immigration that seeks to challenge the established national culture, and also opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It does not allow LGBTQ material to be presented to minors in state schools, which it considers to be morally correct anti-pedophilia legislation. For that reason, the time was clearly right, in the “woke” view of the Biden Administration, for Samantha Power to show up with a little dose of regime change in her portfolio. Hungarian officials had already expressed their concern over what they consider extreme pressure coming from the United States, largely because Hungary is a conservative country that values its culture and political independence. The visit by Power sent a signal to the Hungarian government and people that the pressure will likely increase and that Washington will not hesitate to use its embassies and overseas military bases to actively support groups that promote views that are not generally embraced by the local populations.

The Samantha Power story is of interest, to be sure, because it demonstrates that since the United States is the self-appointed enforcer of the “rules based international order” nothing in the world is off limits. Far too many US politicians and media pundits think that other states are not really sovereign and have to submit to US dictates in everything, and if they dare to step out of line they can be punished. If a conservative Christian country or leader – by which one might include Hungary, Russia or Brazil – believes that homosexuality or even abortion on demand are morally objectionable the US now believes that it has a mandate to use federal government resources to change that perception including by actively engaging with a foreign nation and its government on its own soil. To put it bluntly, the United States must certainly be considered the world leader in compelling all nations to conform to the political and moral values that it insists be adhered to.

So if one wants to learn why US Foreign Policy is so inept in terms of actually serving the interests of the American people, look no farther than was has happened and continues to roil in Ukraine as well as the implications of the Samantha Power visit to Hungary. For Foreign Service Posts, providing support for the agendas of the collection of freak shows that make up the Democratic Party has become manifestly as or even more important than promoting genuine national interests overseas or assisting American businesses and travelers.

What is perhaps most interesting is the way the “woke” foreign policy is being largely concealed from the American public and is being run as some kind of stealth operation. One initiative run by USAID in Macedonia in 2016 under President Obama included a $300,000 grant for “suitable” Macedonian applicants to “fund” a program entitled “LGBTI Inclusion” to counter how “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance.” How many American taxpayers would be happy to learn that their hard-earned money has been going to support programs run in nonconsenting foreign democracies to make them more “woke?” Of course, no one in the Biden Administration is telling the public about it, nor is the story likely to appear in the mainstream media, so presumably no one will know!

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Did the US Department of Defense, NATO, and the EU coordinate a military response, employing tactics like 5th Generation Warfare and military-grade tools to hide the truth behind the release of a US DoD synthetic bioweapon into the European member states under the banner of “COVID-19 vaccines”?

Operation Warp Speed was a centralized military-controlled response to the COVID-19 pandemic, so why think for one moment that the EU response to this very questionable public health emergency wasn’t treated as a trans-border CBRN defense/security threat to the EU?

By looking into the regulatory processes that have applied for the Conditional Marketing Approval (CMA) which was necessary for the deployment of the so-called COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ on European soil, we hope to detect anomalies and perhaps even wilful misconduct carried out by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Commission (EC).

The aim of this two parts series is to identify patterns within the EU COVID-19 pandemic response that match those observed during Operation Warp Speed in the US. 

We will establish if the European Commission (EC) and European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European regulator had pre-knowledge of the US DOD plan to unleash an experimental biodefense countermeasure, with the help of NATO, into the European population with perhaps as researcher Sasha Latypova would have said, “an intent to harm“.

Was the EU and NATO’s answer to the COVID-19 pandemic a military response, and if so, what does it look like? We need to ask:

• What was France’s military response to COVID-19?
• What was Germany’s military response to COVID-19?
• What was Italy’s military response to COVID-19?
• What was Spain’s military response to COVID-19?
• What was NATO military response to the COVID-19
• What was The EU Military response to the COVID-19

The technology known as Synthetic Biology has been at the forefront of the US Department of Defense R&D’s investment with agencies such as DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office and InQTel at the helm amongst many other actors from the academic world.

We have already identified Moderna and Pfizer as the US government’s (USG) biodefense (biowarfare) top partners, so the question is: what were they working on since 2013, and is it possible these so-called mRNA COVID-19 vaccines came out of the same program?

Following our investigation and the disturbing information we were able to gather regarding the development of unsafe medical countermeasures by the US Department of Defense (thanks to Sasha Latypova’s work), we decided in 2022 to launch an investigation in Europe to see how much the European Commission and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) actually knew about the history behind the development and manufacturing of the COVID-19 vaccines.

With the help of Big Pharma, military biodefense countermeasures were developed, marketed, and deployed around the world under the pretext of a highly debatable ‘public health emergency of international concern’ declared by the WHO at the end of Jan 2020.

After more than two and half years of tracking this operation, we began to see a much clearer picture emerge from behind the fog of 5^th Generation Warfare (5GW) and the domination of the global information space and public perception (previously falling under the heading of propaganda operations). What has emerged is a joint government-media-military effort that has relentlessly censured scientists and true journalists around the world, whilst shielding the public from the truth. The recent revelations from the Twitter Files by journalist Matt Taibbi and others, clearly show the US government-led component of controlling speech and information across major social media platforms. But there is more.

What do we know so far in a nutshell?

Read the document here.

What has been reported so far about the Covid-19 injections?

• mRNA ‘vaccine’ material does not stay at the injection site, but instead can travel throughout the body and accumulate in various organs,
• If the Pharma industry’s claims about the mRNA technology are correct, then the COVID vaccines may induce long-lasting expression of the “SARS-CoV-2 spike protein” in many organs,
• mRNA vaccine-induced expression of the toxic ‘spike protein’ could induce autoimmune-like inflammation,
• and vaccine-induced inflammation triggered by injection contents, including Lipid Nanoparticles (LNP), cause grave organ damage, especially in vessels, sometimes with deadly outcomes.

Vascular and organ damage are clearly induced by mRNA vaccines, and here is additional scientific proof of causality.

Why were studies such as immuno-histochemistry never conducted nor requested by government regulators to detect either the widespread expression of ‘spike protein’ or reactions to LNPs in animal trials during preclinical development?

This question burdens the minds of people like Prof. Arne Burkhardt, a very experienced pathologist from Reutlingen, Germany, who heavily contributed to this August 2022 article published on the Doctors for COVID Ethics website.  With the help of his colleague Prof. Walter Lang, Prof. Burkhardt has studied numerous cases of death which occurred within days to several months after vaccination. In each of these cases, the cause of death had been certified as “natural” or “unknown.” Burkhardt became involved only because the bereaved families doubted these verdicts and sought a second opinion.

It is remarkable, therefore, that Burkhardt found not just a few, but the majority of these deaths to be due to vaccination. Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong here, and so it forces us to reflect on the central question:

“If these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines were not safe, not efficacious, not prophylactic, and were harming people (which is what a Bioweapon does) why would regulators such as FDA, MHRA, EMA, Health Canada, etc….would  grant vaccine companies marketing approval?”

Burkhardt Group Conclusions can be found here.

With this basic knowledge in hand, it has become clear that the people of Europe need to start questioning the true nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and also investigate the biodefense programs that have flourished over the years in countries like US, Georgia, Germany, Ukraine, and China just to name  a few.

The need to increase the debate regarding the safety and efficacy of these Biodefense COVID-19 ‘countermeasures’ (pandemic policy measures and ‘vaccines’) is being felt more than ever, and so part of our recent discussions with various parties was to establish the level of awareness regarding the European Commission and its regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the control they actually had over these US military bio-defense countermeasures which were granted “Conditional Marketing Approval” (CMA) characterised as “mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” by these two institutions.

Research in Genome Editing

While the Soviet Union stumbled and lesser nations mixed radical ideology with a commitment to counterbalance the West’s conventional advantage, the revolution in biotechnology accelerated.

The human genome project, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and recombinant technologies were carrying the promise of a better life, but at the same time reminded us all that, historically, beneficial technological advancements are sometimes exploited by unscrupulous people, often driven by profits ( like big pharma). Non-biological terrorist incidents close to home have raised our awareness and concern that a new generation of corporate biological terrorists might use bacteria, viruses, toxins, or even designer agents against populations to justify the deployment of expensive covered countermeasures known to us as vaccines.

Throughout the cold war, proliferators had independently selected nearly the same list of weapons agents for tactical use on the battlefield or strategic use to be delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was a relatively small group (10-20) of agents drawn from hundreds available in nature that had physical and biological characteristics such as pathogenicity, toxicity, ease of production and stability qualifying them for aerosol dissemination.

The following quote comes from a book written by Dr. David R. Franz titled Medical Countermeasures to Biological Warfare Agents. This book is part of NATO Sciences Book series (ASDT, volume 34). Dr. Franz is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and a former Commander United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and this is what he wrote:

“To produce a true mass casualty attack the terrorist will likely have to use agents from that threat list developed and tested for biological warfare application. However, because a small non-lethal attack, or even a biological hoax, is adequate to cause panic and lead to coveted national television coverage, the modern bioterrorist probably has a much wider spectrum of agents from which to choose. However, the terrorist spectrum, while much broader, is not necessarily more lethal.”

Although the concept and stories surrounding the use of biological weapons are as old as King Herod, modern technology brings many new possibilities, especially with the field of synthetic biology, recent advances in gene editing technology, and so much more – it seems that the sky is no longer the limit. A US Intelligence Community report published in 2016 provided a Worldwide Threat Assessment. It was written by James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, and technologies such as “Genome Editing” were listed in the “weapons of mass destruction” and proliferation section:

“Research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products. Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications”.

Article by 21st Century Wire: Click here to continue reading…

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***

The Blue Nile, the primary contributor of water in the Nile basin, directly influences life in Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia, which have a combined population of more than 260 million (World Bank, 2021). This number does not include the people inhabiting the White Nile areas of South Sudan and the Central and East African Great Lakes states.

The population in eastern African countries, which includes almost all riparian countries except the DRC, will constitute almost half of Africa’s total.

With this population bulge, it is expected that consumption of water, food, energy, and other essential commodities will surge.

Trans-boundary river basins are under increasing pressure due to population growth, agricultural and industrial developments, climate change, and river pollution. Water scarcity is on the rise due to the increasing gap between demand and supply.

The Nile Water Agreements and the upstream-downstream polemics express clearly that the downstream actors are firm in their positions and political-military maneuvers that the upstream nations should stay away from any substantive use of the water resources (Yacob, 2007: 198). Scholars like Yakob and Nowrath (1920: 32-41) boldly state about the Egyptian historical attempt to control the source of the Nile waters. And they wanted to do it through war. The Egyptian leader Khedive Ismail Pasha had an extremist vision of unifying the Nile Valley countries under his leadership.

According to Yakob (2007) and Kinfe (2004), the relations among the countries of the Nile Basin have been unequal, which has been exacerbated by the actions of Britain since the late 19th century. For such reasons, an equitable share of Nile waters could not be acceptable to Egypt.

Ethiopia, which is 86% of the Nile’s water source, has indicated its interest in utilizing the Nile’s water since the 1930s (Kinfe, 2004). In the late 1920s, the Ethiopian government discussed with the American diplomatic mission the possibility of conducting a physical survey on the Blue Nile River. Upon the agreement, the US government sent a company called White Engineering, and a feasibility study was conducted. But Ethiopia lags behind by years before it can undertake any project on the Blue Nile River.

Map of the Nile River (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Comparison of Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt 

Annual freshwater consumption (2000 est.) Ethiopia (5.56 BCM, 72 CM/capita),  Sudan (37.5 BCM, 807 CM/capita), and Egypt (68.3 BCM, 923 CM/capita).

Alternative water resources (other than the Nile): Ethiopia (some rivers, but they only account for 30% of the total), Sudan (the White Nile, huge groundwater reserves), Egypt (the White Nile, huge groundwater reserves, and sea water).

Contribution to the Nile:

Ethiopia (86%); Sudan (0%); Egypt (0%). Population 2020: Ethiopia (114,963,588), Sudan (43,849,260),Egypt(102,335,000).

Access to electricity (% in 2017):

Ethiopia (44.3), Sudan (56.5), Egypt (100).

Access to potable water (% in 2017):

Ethiopia (41), Sudan (60), and Egypt (99).

Egypt and Sudan have huge reserves of groundwater in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS). They should learn from Libya’s great man-made river instead of sticking to their historical rights on the Nile. The NSAS is estimated to have 150,000 BCM; Libya currently uses 2.4 BCM (70% of its total consumption). If Egypt uses 10% of the reserve, they can have sufficient water for 220 years.

Water Resource Development in Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan

Egypt

Aswan Dam on the Nile in Egypt (1898–1902), the High Aswan Dam (also known as Nassir Dam) on the Nile in Egypt (1960–1970/76), El Salam diversion to the Sinai, Toshqa to the Western Valley, Hamam Canal diversion, Komombo Canal diversion in upper Egypt

Sudan

Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile in Sudan (1925), Jabal Awliya Dam on the White Nile in Sudan (1937), Khsham El Girba Dam on Atbara in Sudan (1964), Rossaries Dam on the Blue Nile in Sudan (1966, 2013), and Merowe Dam on the Blue Nile in Sudan (2009).

Ethiopia

Fincha Dam on the Abbay/Blue Nile tributary in Ethiopia (1970), Abobo Dam on the Baro-Akobo/Sobat in Ethiopia (1980s), Tekeze Dam on the Tekeze in Ethiopia (2009), Tana-Beles Diversion (2010), Chara-Chara in the 1990s, GERD on the Abbay/Blue Nile (under construction 2011–), and 33 projects anticipated (1958–64).

Egypt’s Illogical Arguments and Colonial Period Agreements on the Nile River

The 1891 Treaty of Rome (April 15, 1891) was signed in 1891 between Italy and Britain. Based on such a protocol, Italy pledged to not conduct irrigation projects on the Tekeze River.

By signing this treaty, Italy acceded to British demands and agreed to sign an article referring to the river. At the time of this pact, the Italians had already established themselves in Eritrea but not in Ethiopia. According to Tesfaye (2001), the vague phrase “sensibly modify” limits neither the utilization of the river nor the fair share of the Nile’s waters. Had the treaty even excluded the usage of the Nile water by Ethiopia, which was not the case then as it is now, it should have ceased to have any relevance after the demise of the British and Italian colonial rules in the region. The Treaty, however, exemplified the British motive in safeguarding their colonial subjects, the Egyptians, as early as this period.

The 1902 treaty was signed between Britain and Ethiopia during Emperor Menelik’s regime in Ethiopia. It was basically an agreement that states the need for British consultation on any water projects Ethiopia wants to undertake, especially on Lake Tana. The above agreement was instigated as part of a grandiose British stratagem to fully control the Nile waters.

To do this, Anglo-Egyptian forces first conquered the Sudan in 1898 and then resorted to striking a deal with independent Ethiopia by way of a treaty.

According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs report from September 1997, the pact, which is said to have an Amharic version that is different from the original English text, has never been ratified by both the Ethiopian and British parliaments to this date. The debatable phrase is “not to arrest the flow of Nile water.” The Egyptian negotiator at the GERD negotiation table always raised this issue. But on the ground, the real definition of the debatable phrase in that treaty means Ethiopia cannot stop the river from flowing downstream to riparian nations.

The 1906 tripartite treaty was signed among Great Britain, France, and Italy. This treaty acknowledges Ethiopian territory in the Nile basin and, in return, marks the French and Italian spheres of influence within the Ethiopian boundary (Knife, 2004; 85).

The 1929 agreement was signed between Great Britain and its former colony Egypt. By this agreement, Egypt has been given the right to take all the water, supervise the river basin, and have the British recognize its “historical” and “natural” right to the Nile’s water. The agreement went further by giving Egypt the right to veto any project on the Nile that could adversely affect its interests. But this agreement could not have any binding effect on Ethiopia for two reasons: it was a bilateral agreement and did not include Ethiopia, and it was struck by a colonial power, which makes it null and void as stipulated in the Nyerere Doctrine that was stipulated in 1961.

In the 1959 agreement, Sudan and Egypt agreed to the full utilization of the waters of the Nile. Based on the yearly runoff of the water, which is 84 BCM, they allocated 55 BCM of water for Egypt, 18.5 BCM for Sudan, and they left the remaining 10 BCM for losses due to evaporation (Nebiyu, 2013: 3-4). The 1959 Agreement created a watershed in the hydrological and environmental history of the Nile Valley in the sense that it invigorated a monopoly on the waters of the Nile by Egypt and Sudan. By implication, the agreement has literally set up a zero-sum game in the Nile Basin by ignoring the natural and legal rights of Ethiopia to the bounty of the Nile’s water resources. Ethiopia never participated in that agreement and cannot be punished by any legal means.

Is Ethiopia considered the “water tower” of the region?

It is a water-stressed country with a per capita renewable freshwater resource of about 1200 m3 per year.

Annual rainfall in Ethiopia is estimated at 848 mm (936 BCM). But because of its high spatial and temporal variability, accessible freshwater is only about 13% (124 BCM).

There are 12 major lakes in Ethiopia, which collectively store about 87 BCM of water. This amount is a little more than what the GERD will retain (74 BCM).

Groundwater potential at the national level is estimated to be in the range of 12 and 30 BCM. But more study is needed!

Groundwater is mainly used for domestic and industrial purposes. Egypt argues that Ethiopia is full of rivers and water supplies and thus should not touch the Nile.

This argument doesn’t hold water due to the following reasons: To begin with, it is not the business of any country, including Egypt, to enlist the natural resources that Ethiopia within its own territory possesses, as that will entail a breach of national territorial integrity. Ethiopia may have adequate water supplies in certain parts of the country.

However, Ethiopia has been hit by repetitive and severe droughts in the past and currently is also one of the drought-affected Horn of Africa nations if this argument is true. But the fact of the matter is that Ethiopia has been struggling to free itself from the cycle of drought, poverty, and backwardness for the last decades. This is why Ethiopia, and for that matter, the other riparian countries, are determined to exploit their natural resources, including the Nile, in order to produce adequate food for their growing populations, to light millions of their households both in urban and rural areas, to power their emerging factories and industries, and in general to enhance their economies and improve the livelihoods of their poor people. The total hydropower potential of Ethiopian rivers is only about one-sixth of Japan’s current (2014) electricity production (1,061,000 GWh/yr), but Ethiopia is only using less than 10% of it.

Importance of Building Dams in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt 

Many scholars wrote about the values and importance of dams in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt. In 1945, a British hydro-geologist in the service of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, Harold Hurst, published “The Future Conservation of the Nile,” proposing dams at the outlets of the great lakes and Lake Tana in Ethiopia, which would provide reservoirs of minimal evaporation for every year, or “Century Storage.” (Erlich, 2009,  The Cross and the River, pp. 2–3). In 1958, H.A. Morrice and W.N. Allen, British experts representing the government of Sudan, proposed dams and hydro-electric stations on the Blue Nile and the Baro in their “Report on the Nile Valley Plan.” In 1964, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation published the results of a five-year study ordered by the Ethiopians, “Land and Water Resources of the Blue Nile Basin: Ethiopia,” which envisioned twenty-six projects in Ethiopia, including four dams designed to turn Lake Tana and the Abbaye gorge into the primary all-Nile reservoir and to supply electricity and irrigation for Ethiopia while significantly enlarging and regulating the amount of water flowing to Sudan and Egypt. Founded on all the above suggestions of scholars, Haggai Erlich commented, “But for such all-Nile solutions to materialize, a unified action was needed.” In other corners of the globe, around other trans-boundary rivers, such unity and cooperation have been occasionally achieved. But the mysterious Nile, since its beginning, has never experienced such human unity. Behind the failure to reach equitably shared use of the Nile River is Egypt’s sticking to historic rights and colonial period agreements. But, in reality, there is no such thing as historical right but only historical facts.

The Masks of Egypt’s Water Security Policy

Egypt’s “water security” policy is based on the Nile River obsession, an attempt to block all venues that can lead to a fair and equitable distribution of the Nile’s waters.

Whenever any basin country lays out a plan to use the Nile water in its own territory, the Egyptians have often reacted by making threats of war and conflict-laden statements.

Conversely, when they are asked to renegotiate the distribution of water in the basin, they put up conditions by saying colonial and postcolonial treaties are non-negotiable and we can discuss anything outside of these limitations. “As Egyptians, we think that the other riparian’s have real plans to utilize the waters of the Nile.”  Ethiopia already did this by launching and constructing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

The current geopolitical reality in the Nile Basin cannot carry over colonial-period agreements. The Egyptian Hegemony in the Nile River Basin was time frozen.

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Silabat Manaye is international relations professional based in Addis Ababa. His research interests include water politics, Horn of Africa geopolitics, and war journalism. He wrote two books focused on Nile geopolitics.

Featured image: The Blue Nile Falls fed by Lake Tana near the city of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia (Licensed under FAL)

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In its response to the EU/US pressuring Serbia to accelerate, step-by-step, her recognition of unilateral and illegal secession of Kosovo and Metohija, the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals hereby recalls the following:

Priština’s unilateral secession is the outcome of NATO aggression carried out 24 years ago.

The purpose of this armed aggression was to assert dominance in the Balkans, as a part of NATO’s strategy of expanding eastwards and setting the grounds for confrontation with Russia.

U.S Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, 

Regional Command-East of the U.S. Army, troops from Greece, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey.

The goal of the extended aggression, articulated as the ultimatum for Serbia to recognize Kosovo, remains the same – to formalize the wresting the Province out of Serbia by force, to pit Serbia against both Russia and China, and to get ready for the global face-off.

The armed part of the aggression ended with negotiations, and negotiations ended with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244 that, inter alia, guarantees the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) whereas for the Province of Kosovo and Metohija is foreseen substantial autonomy within Serbia (the FRY).

UN SC Resolution 1244 is a document of the highest legal authority and force within the existing global legal order, one that binds each of 193 members of the United Nations, without exceptions and without any time constraints. This legal act is still in force and no other than the UN Security Council is entitled to cancel or alter it, nor violate it by imposing any kind of a different solution. Serbia’s vital interest is that this Resolution be duly observed and fully implemented.

From its opening recital to its closing Article 11, the “EU Proposal-Agreement on the path to normalisation between Kosovo and Serbia” published on the European Union website on February 27, 2023, is but a gross violation of UN SC Resolution 1244, the principles of international law, and the Constitution of Serbia. EU’s endeavors vis-à-vis Serbia, as an old European country and a member of the United Nations and other international organizations, employing threats and extortion to compel Serbia to concede to becoming an equal in terms of rights and obligations with her own Autonomous Province, now entrusted to an interim UN mandate, makes a one-of-a-kind episode in recent history that embodies arrogant and arbitrary behaving, violation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, abuse of a UN General Assembly mandate, and setting of a precedent with a hard-to-predict consequences for peace and security in the Balkans and in Europe.

Serbia is requested to reduce own constitutionally established and internationally recognized state territory with which she became member to the United Nations, OSCE, and all other international organizations, by ceding it to a criminally superimposed creation (Articles 2 and 4).

The ‘Proposal-Agreement’ is teeming with contradictory provisions and formal symmetries, each detrimental to Serbia’s vital interests. The authors made sure to leave room for ‘Parties’ to sell victory to their respective public, each in its own way. If the ‘Proposal-Agreement’ were accepted, it is beyond any doubt that disputes would be decided by the EU/US, just as is clear that their ruling, as always before, would be to Serbia’s detriment.

The official narrative is that ‘Proposal-Agreement’ was not signed, without stating whether it was verbally endorsed or not; differing information and interpretations swirling around only cause confusion among the public. In given backdrop, the consent of all participants to negotiate the implementation of this ‘Proposal-Agreement’— one that has not been signed or confirmed as endorsed, that has not been published in any institution or official medium in Serbia — is nothing short of amazing. Such an attitude is incompatible with the fateful significance of the matter at hand.

Serbia and the Serbian people are faced with EU/US attempt of a historic hoax. The solution is not in acceptance of this hoax while citing the preserving of peace and prospects for progress and a better life as an excuse.

Any solution that is inherently unjust and imposed under threats and fraud and that serves the global confrontation, can be anything except a contributing factor to peace, development, and a better life. We must diverge from any plans or forecasts still based on theses invoking ‘end of history’ and any inducements to permanently renounce our enduring life interests for the sake of small shiny offers and benefits.

The EU has shown its true colors also back in 2013, by compelling Serbia to withdraw state institutions in the north of the Province, the police and judiciary including, for the promise of an established Community of Serbian Municipalities (the CSM). We all know what followed there, and in particular the outcome of NATO’s broken promise not to allow deployment of anyone’s long-barreled arms to the north: not only did we get long-barreled guns but also erected military camps, land grab, and full militarization in the north! Ten years on, the EU/US once again offer promises of the CSM, only this time as a package – “both implementation of the ‘EU Proposal- Agreement’ and a CSM compliant with the Constitution of the so-called Kosovo”. Suffice to say of respecting the document signed. And we may as well have a déjà vu – implementation of the ‘EU Proposal-Agreement’ only! But – we are soothed – there will be guarantees! Whose?! Of  those same ones who have previously been granting but never honoring them?!

The promises of investments and donations should Serbia renounced her state rights to a part of her state territory, at the expense of her dignity and identity, is an example of aggressiveness exerted by the revived neo-colonial and neo-racist mentality and utter hypocrisy, which we have mistakenly believed had been long ago consigned to history.

The time we live in is of historical significance. It requires Serbia to be inspired and invigorated by her greatest feats in the most grueling historical turning points, to get back to self-respecting, and to generally endorsed principles, the Constitution and UN SC Resolution 1244 as the only reliable supports. To not put up with the deviously planted mentality of subservience, dependance and powerlessness. To respect to a greater degree her own human, scientific, cultural, spiritual,

economic, geopolitical, and natural potentials. And to not negotiate the issues that restrict her sovereignty and territorial integrity in the same package with the foreign-granted benefits, and especially not for fear of losing someone’s mercy. Whatever the volume of such benefits, it will never come close to the amount of damage sustained by the criminal ‘Merciful Angel’.

In our relationship with the EU, as well, we should be guided by the principle that Serbia needs others as much as they need Serbia, instead of being guided by ‘realism’ into accepting of our own free will to succumb the inferiority complex. It is high time we took more into account and in a more responsible way, all that Serbia and the Serbian people have experienced and survived throughout history and who from, while keeping in mind that neocolonial appetites are insatiable.

In our relations with the EU and the West in general we must embed, once and forever, the feeling of what Serbia gave to Europe while sacrificing millions of human lives, whom no one has yet acknowledged and for whom no one has yet apologized. If they belittle us, if they blackmail us, this is because we belittle ourselves.

We must not rely on promises and guarantees offered by those who most often betrayed us.

BELGRADE FORUM FOR THE WORLD OF EQUALS

Belgrade, March 7, 2023

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Živadin Jovanović is President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)

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You can’t be neutral” in NATO’s proxy war with Russia, foreign ministers of the U.S., Germany and Ukraine told leaders of Global South countries at the Munich Security Conference on February 18. “Neutrality is not an option,” said Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, “because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor.” In January Baerbock told the Council of Europe “We are fighting a war against Russia.”

U.S. Secretary of State Blinken echoed his German counterpart, stressing “You really can’t be neutral.”

Why not? What motivates this Mafia style pressure?

“Nearly 90 percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine,” blared a Newsweek opinion piece last September 15. “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87 percent of the world’s population has declined to follow us. Economic sanctions have united our adversaries in shared resistance. Less predictably, the outbreak of Cold War II has also led countries that were once partners or non-aligned to become increasingly multi-aligned.”

In 2002, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, George Bush Junior told western European leaders “You are either with us, or against us,” even if they didn’t believe Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.”

“My Way or No Highway” is the title of a section of the Munich Security Report. Some Non-Aligned members felt this was a warning not to participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative—their preferred “highway.” The section cites Chinese President Xi Jinping that “Mechanisms for countering foreign sanctions, interference, and long-arm jurisdiction will be strengthened.”

Immediately after the Munich conference, at a summit in Bengaluru, India (aka Bangalore), U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to U.S. sanctions against Russia. But India, the chair of the G20, demurred. Indian officials said “India is not keen to discuss or back any additional sanctions on Russia during the G20… The existing sanctions on Russia have had a negative impact on the world.”

Instead of isolating Russia, the U.S./NATO sanctions are isolating the west against the rest of the world.

‘Losing the trust of the Global South’

French President Macron said at Munich “I am struck by how much we are losing the trust of the Global South.” Macron’s “we” refers to the NATO countries, especially the G7. He added that “The west has been losing the Global South and hasn’t done enough to respond to the charge of double standards, including by not helping poor countries fast enough with Covid vaccines.” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris observed glumly that “many countries sit on the fence.”

Colombia’s new Vice President Francia Márquez, speaking at a Munich panel on “defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order,” said “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers, and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”

Namibian Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. [Source: twitter.com]

“Our focus is on resolving the problem… not on shifting blame,” said Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict” in Ukraine. “The money used to buy weapons could be better utilized to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships.”

China’s Top Diplomat Weighs In

China’s top diplomat, State Counselor Wang Yi, stole the show at Munich. He told the delegates “it is imperative to return to the Minsk II agreement… as quickly as possible.” That means a ceasefire and autonomy for the Donbas, and getting NATO out of Ukraine. Wang said Minsk II “is a binding instrument negotiated by the parties concerned and endorsed by the UN Security Council.” He said “Russia and the EU both support Minsk II,” and claimed U.S. Secretary of State Blinken had expressed U.S. support “in a recent phone call.” He called for “the relevant parties [to] sit down together” to work out a roadmap and timetable for implementation of the agreement.

Wang announced China’s 12-point plan for peace in Ukraine. It calls for “abandoning the Cold War mentality, saying “All parties should… prevent bloc confrontation, and work together for peace and stability” by promoting talks for peace, and “help parties to the conflict open the door to a political settlement as soon as possible.” It says “Nuclear proliferation must be prevented and nuclear crisis avoided” and concludes that “China opposes unilateral sanctions unauthorized by the UN Security Council.”

Blinken responded by changing the subject, saying China “is considering providing lethal support” to Russia, “and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.” Joe Biden dismissed China’s plan: “I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed.”

Ukraine’s President Zelensky indicated he was willing to consider aspects of the Chinese proposal, according to a February 24 Guardian report. He said he planned to meet President Xi Jinping and said it would be “useful” to both countries and global security.

Following the Munich conference Wang Yi flew to Moscow. He told Russian President Putin “our relations are always not directed at third countries and, of course, they are not subject to pressure from third parties, since we have a very strong foundation – from the economy, politics, and culture.”

On February 21, China issued its “Global Security Initiative” Concept Paper—a broad statement of principles “calling on countries to adapt to the profoundly changing international landscape in the spirit of solidarity, and address the complex and intertwined security challenges with a win-win mindset.” At its center the document says “War and sanctions are no fundamental solution to disputes; only dialogue and consultation are effective in resolving differences… Major countries must uphold justice, fulfill their due responsibilities, support consultation on an equal footing, and facilitate talks for peace.”

China’s former ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, who is now Foreign Minister, introduced the Concept Paper saying “we urge relevant countries to immediately stop adding fuel to the fire, stop blaming China and stop provoking the situation by using references like ‘Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow’.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, said “China issued its position paper on the political settlement of the crisis, whereas the U.S. imposed sanctions on Chinese and other foreign companies. Who is promoting peace and de-escalation, and who is fueling the tension and making the world more unstable? The answer is fairly obvious.”

‘US Hegemony and Its Perils’—China takes the gloves off

As if to clarify it doesn’t always have to be polite and diplomatic, China’s foreign ministry issued a frank and forceful document which is a detailed indictment that “the United States has acted… to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.”

The document traces U.S. interference in other countries from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, including the 61-year blockade of Cuba, and a succession of “color revolutions” over the past two decades, the plot to intervene in Venezuela, attacks on UN agencies for their support of Palestine, forcing an “Indo-Pacific Strategy” with “exclusive clubs like the Five Eyes, the Quad and AUKUS, and forcing regional countries to take sides.”

“The U.S. arbitrarily passes judgment on democracy in other countries, and fabricates a false narrative of ‘democracy versus authoritarianism,’ the document says. It mentions the failed 2021 “Summit for Democracy” in Washington which “drew criticism and opposition from many countries for making a mockery of the spirit of democracy and dividing the world.” Another such summit planned for this March, “remains unwelcome and will again find no support.”

The document quotes former U.S. President Jimmy Carter that “the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” It cites a Tufts University report, “The Military Intervention Project: A new Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776-2019,” which says the United States undertook nearly 400 military interventions globally in those years.

Source: lewrockwell.com

“Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions, and displaced tens of millions… So far, the United States… has imposed economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries across the world, including Cuba, China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela, affecting nearly half of the world’s population. See partial list and map of countries and/or officials [in specific countries] sanctioned.

Source: sanctionkill.org

Source: wikipedia.org

‘The United States of America’ has turned itself into ‘the United States of Sanctions.’ And ‘long-arm jurisdiction’ has been reduced to nothing but a tool for the United States to use its means of state power to suppress economic competitors.”

Source: unitelive.org

The document concludes that “The United States must… critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.”

Anniversary Speeches: Brave Talk & Grim Realities

After a dramatic February 20 visit to Kiev, U.S. President Biden flew to Warsaw for his February 21 speech on the first anniversary of the Ukraine Conflict. He warned of “hard and bitter days ahead” as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears the one-year mark, but vowed that no matter what, the United States and allies “will not waver” in supporting Ukraine. “NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire,” Biden declared bravely.

However, the Washington Post’s “Today’s WorldView” reporter Ishaan Tharoor says “An Awkward tension lies beneath the West’s support for Ukraine.” He writes that “for all of the bravura on show last week, with Biden journeying to Kyiv and Warsaw, it’s still uncertain that a united West won’t blink first.”

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier… that Ukraine cannot win the war against Russia and it should begin peace talks with Moscow this year, the Wall Street Journal reported. “The public rhetoric masks deepening private doubts among politicians in the U.K., France and Germany that Ukraine will be able to expel the Russians from eastern Ukraine and Crimea…, and a belief that the West can only help sustain the war effort for so long.”

Former senior British diplomat Alastair Crooke asks ominously: “Can we imagine the U.S. throwing up its hands and conceding Russian victory?  ‘No’. NATO might disintegrate in the face of such spectacular failure. Will Biden become desperate? And, as many suspect, gamble by doubling-down into a worsening situation?” Crooke asks “Can Biden be trusted (again) to not be reckless in the wake of his erratic decision to blow up the gas lifeline of close NATO ally, Germany?  No, it’s not just one instance of recklessness (Nord Stream) at issue, but that of multiple misjudgments, giving rise to mounting Deep State anger directed at Biden, and more particularly at his close team of neocons with their immature political judgments.”

Speaking to a February 21 UN Security Council special session on Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the U.S. destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines last September, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern said “no one wants to go back 20 years to [former U.S. Secretary of State] Colin Powell’s speech before this Security Council. We all know about that.” [Powell embarrassed himself by officially lying to the UN.] McGovern commented that those U.S. government spokespeople who are smearing Hersh, “don’t have a good record for credibility.”

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs also spoke at the Security Council session: “As the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines on 26 September 2022 constitutes an act of international terrorism and represents a threat to peace, it is the Council’s responsibility to take up the question of who might have carried out the act, help bring the perpetrator to justice, pursue compensation for the damaged parties and prevent such actions from recurring in the future.”

China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun testified that “Recently, we have come across a lot of… relevant information concerning the Nord Stream incident, which is alarming… Faced with such detailed materials and comprehensive evidence, a simple statement of ‘utterly false and complete fiction’ is obviously not enough to answer the many questions and concerns raised around the world. Finding a way to dodge today’s meeting does not mean that truth can be concealed. We expect convincing explanations from relevant parties. Such a request is entirely legitimate and reasonable.”

Putin: NATO’s Goal is Strategic Defeat of Russia

In Moscow, Russian President Putin delivered a remarkably philosophical—and upbeat—February 22 speech. He said “This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future…”

Analyst Pepe Escobar, writing in The Cradle, paraphrases Putin that “Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said ‘became hostile to us.’ So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.”

Escobar says Putin emphasized that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia… The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

So this war will be long—and painful, Escobar concludes. “Putin remarked on how ‘our relations with the west have degraded, and this is entirely the fault of the United States;’ how NATO’s goal is to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia.”

Escobar reports that the U.S. ambassador was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after Putin’s address. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov demanded a detailed explanation of the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, a halt to U.S. interference, and an independent inquiry to identify the responsible parties. He added that Washington must remove all U.S. and NATO military forces and equipment from Ukraine.

Antiwar Forces Mobilize

On February 19, thousands of people crowded the Lincoln Memorial to protest the war in Ukraine.

Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov

Another major anti-war mobilization is planned in Washington, DC, and other cities for March 18, on the 20th anniversary weekend of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, demanding “Peace in Ukraine—Say NO to Endless U.S. Wars” and “Fund People’s Needs, Not the War Machine.”

The call says “since 2003, the U.S. has engaged in sanctions (economic war) on more than 40 countries. These targets of U.S. economic warfare include the people of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran and many other nations. “Even in the wake of the worst disasters, like the recent deadly earthquake, Washington keeps its cruel sanctions in place against Syria.”

The call says the Biden administration is “determined to escalate the Ukraine war. The real goal of the massive arming and training of Ukrainian forces has nothing to do with the interests of Ukrainian, Russian or American people. The aim instead is to ‘weaken Russia’ as stated by the U.S. Secretary of Defense himself, even at the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war that could end life on Earth. It adds that “A U.S. General commanding 50,000 troops in the Pacific also issued a letter to his sub-commanders in recent days informing them that he believes that the United States will be at war with China within two years.”

Key demands include:

• Peace in Ukraine – No weapons, no money for the Ukraine War
• Abolish NATO – End U.S. militarism & sanctions!
• Fund people’s needs, not the war machine!
• No war with China!
• End U.S. aid to racist apartheid Israel!
• Fight racism & bigotry not war!
• U.S. hands off Haiti!
• End AFRICOM!

In Europe, massive protests were held during February in Berlin, Germany, over providing weapons to Ukraine in its war against Russia. Thousands took to the streets holding banners and posters saying ‘negotiate and not escalate’ and ‘not our war.’ Demonstrations also took place in London, Warsaw, Paris and other French cities such as Bordeaux, Rennes and Montpellier, and in Brussels, Belgium.

Anti-NATO protesters in Warsaw. [Source: sputniknews.com]

This is a sign of growing antiwar sentiment and disdain for U.S. policy and NATO that may soon have a significant political ripple effect.

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Dee Knight is a member of the DSA International Committee’s Anti-War Subcommittee. He is the author of My Whirlwind Lives: Navigating Decades of Storms, soon to be published by Guernica World Editions. Dee can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image is from popularresistence.org

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***

Americans should stop believing propaganda and reconsider their idea of ​​​​Washington’s world leadership, writes George D. O’Neill Jr., a member of the board of directors of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes The American Conservative.

“We are experiencing the death throes of the United States’ unipolar hegemony over large parts of the world. Until citizens begin to realise the magnitude of their government’s policy deceptions, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the United States’ changing global position and adjust to the effects of the growing negative perception of our country held by many people around the world,” wrote O’Neill Jr in his article “Death of a Myth”.

The author stressed that although the US emerged as the “dominant and unrivalled world power” after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country became “a destabilising bully” instead of “a peacekeeper and honest ‘world’s policeman’.”

Writing about the situation in Ukraine, O’Neill Jr mocks the idea

“that the Russians would collapse from the shock and awe of the ‘sanctions from Hell’,” or how “the ruble has not turned into rubble as Joe Biden predicted.”

He adds that “the US and its NATO clients are running out of ammunition and arms to send to Ukraine, which is being bled white at their behest. It appears that Russia will steadily grind down the Ukrainian military.”

In effect, the author is providing a bleak but realistic situation in Ukraine and the global system. In fact, he is so frank with his analysis that he calls out slogans like the “exceptional nation,” a “nation that sets aside its interests for the benefit of the world,” and an “important source of good” as examples of the propaganda that American citizens are constantly exposed to.

American citizens are led to believe in the idea that US leadership on the global stage, backed by its military might, are a categorical imperative needed so its own values ​​and self-interests can be imposed all around the world. Successive military failures over the last two decades should have functioned as a self-reflective moment for not only US citizens, but especially foreign policymakers in Washington.

This did not occur because Washington continues to cling to the myth that the world needs more US military might, despite many failures. Rather than learn lessons from the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the US encouraged renewed conflict in Ukraine, clearly indicating that the Biden administration is just continuing Washington’s long held policy of global war and destruction.

US President Joe Biden and his administration routinely describe the Ukraine crisis in ways that suggest an old-fashioned, self-righteous, and a grandiose view of American power. Biden’s portrayal of Ukraine as a crucible for a new era of military-backed American dominance could lead to an entirely different and more disastrous reckoning.

The conflict with Ukraine has led the US to believe that it must once again take the helm of history, despite the fact that Russia does not pose a threat to the well-being of its citizens. This is precisely the kind of arrogance that has led the US astray and it is the same arrogance that their Anglo brethren had before the collapse of the British Empire in the early 20th century.

It is for this reason that O’Neill Jr stresses that “as US stature and power declines, large parts of the world have been seeking arrangements to protect themselves from US predation.”

He explains that we are entering a period, without giving it a title (such as Multipolar), where countries no longer ignore the US’ destructive behaviour and “may decide that being subject to American hegemony is not in their interests.” The author directly lists the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS as “alternative alliances outside US influence” that are seeing an “increasing numbers of countries” wanting to become members as they “believe their interests are better protected by these non-US affiliated alliances.”

O’Neill Jr highlights that the “tragic and unnecessary Ukraine war has accelerated this movement to seek other cooperative associations. As America’s European allies are learning, there can be huge political and economic costs to being associated with the US. The populations of Europe have watched their own economies suffer and paid dearly for energy because of the ten rounds of self-destructive sanctions imposed on Russia.”

For now, though, most of Europe has fallen in line with Washington’s demands. However, many experts are sceptical that Europe will want to experience another brutal winter with high energy costs that are directly attributed to their own self-destructive sanctions policy against Russia.

None-the-less, what O’Neill Jr does highlight is that regardless of Europe falling deeper into US control, there are many non-Western countries that are moving towards greater sovereignty and autonomy without fear when taking into consideration the interests of Washington, which are nothing more than self-serving. He essentially calls on American citizens to wake up from their inertia and realise that they are being fed a lie that the US is a force for good and the sole superpower in the world.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

A London hospital removes Palestinian children’s art because it upset some patients. Meanwhile, seemingly unassociated, far away in The West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians men, women and children are being ‘removed’ from their homes through a daily sustained process of genocidal cleansing.

So abundant are the grievances of Palestinians, so relentless the attacks on their bodies, their voices, their land and the very idea of Palestine, that any record or explanation of these erasures becomes buried behind the latest onslaught.

Crippling economic sanctions on Gazans have been underway for years. Life there is simple endurance.

Military occupation of the entire West Bank never eases; Israeli forces enter at will to raid, threaten, arrest, maraud, plunder, wound and kill. The killing of 64 Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the first two months of this year were so ‘routine’ that outside agencies–neither politicians, nor human rights officials, nor news outlets– barely noted them.

It matters not if those targeted are children, stone throwers, armed fighters or bystanders. The February 6^th murder of five is one episode among many. Only when 11 Palestinians died on February 22^nd were the events reported in some international media outlets. Or perhaps it was the deaths of two Israelis that day which warranted outside attention? Daily incursions onto Palestinian property by settlers, the destruction of their crops, the theft of their water is as common and inexorable as assaults against individual Palestinians. The same for Israel’s demolition of Arab homes—the extrajudicial response to suspicions that a member of that household had assaulted an Israeli Jew.

Image: Soldering West Bank town of Huwara, torched by Israeli settlers

Uninhibited,—indeed they’re often protected by Israeli soldiers – Jewish settlers residing across the West Bank who now number more than five hundred thousand, attack Palestinians residing in nearby villages. With their numbers purposefully set to increase. Without a viable leadership, Palestinians have only one way to answer the encroachments, losses and killings—they protest. Whether with stones, shouts, or weapons, their actions seem as irrepressible as the expanding settlements. The death of any Israeli leads to revenge terror either by its military or by armed settlers. Until an inevitable atrocity results. Last month’s cycle of violence peaked with an hours-long massive attack by settlers against an entire Arab community, Huwara, near Nablus. That assault was nothing less than a ‘cleansing’ operation. Images of the smoldering Palestinian town evoke The Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma 102 years ago.

The shocking footage of the blazing town provided barely a momentary distraction from the battles in Ukraine. Then, Palestinian losses are eclipsed with this week’s massive protests in Tel Aviv by Israelis fearing their democracy will be undermined if announced judicial reforms are carried out.

Meanwhile assaults on Palestinian identity at the intellectual and cultural level proceed unabated. To note a few recent examples, we had the rejection of human rights scholar Kenneth Roth’s appointment at Harvard’s Carr Center for his comments regarding Israel. The decision was only rescinded after a vigorous campaign supporting Roth. Not so fortunate was law professor James Cavallaro; his appointment to serve on the Biden administration’s human rights commission was cancelled last month. This in the same month that Sarah Margon, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, who’d voiced support for boycott of Airbnb in the Occupied Territories, resigned after repeated delays to her state department appointment. Filling out the month comes an unsuccessful challenge to the anti-BDS movement in the U.S. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an Arkansas appeal means that this egregious anti-boycott law stands. Arkansas, along with 34 other states, can legally withhold government funds or appointments to any American company or institution that supports boycotting Israeli goods.

These are among the grossest denials of Palestinian rights, only a few of which come to the attention of American citizens. So what can we expect of a vibrant Gaza Children’s art exhibit in a London hospital? Last month, The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital announced it would remove a display by Palestinian children in the hospital lobby. The UK lawyers for Israel group, representing offended Jewish patients, were delighted by the hospital’s decision.

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Barbara Nimri Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon. 

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

“Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”

By Barbara Nimri Aziz

A century ago Yogmaya and Durga Devi, two women champions of justice, emerged from a remote corner of rural Nepal to offer solutions to their nation’s social and political ills. Then they were forgotten.

Years after their demise, in 1980 veteran anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz first uncovered their suppressed histories in her comprehensive and accessible biographies. Revelations from her decade of research led to the resurrection of these women and their entry into contemporary Nepali consciousness.

This book captures the daring political campaigns of these rebel women; at the same time it asks us to acknowledge their impact on contemporary feminist thinking. Like many revolutionaries who were vilified in their lifetimes, we learn about the true nature of these leaders’ intelligence, sacrifices, and vision during an era of social and economic oppression in this part of Asia.

After Nepal moved from absolute monarchy to a fledgling democracy and history re-evaluated these pioneers, Dr. Aziz explores their legacies in this book.

Psychologically provocative and astonishingly moving, “Yogmaya and Durga Devi” is a seminal contribution to women’s history.

Click here to order.

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***

Predictions are a notoriously painful exercise. In the world of geopolitics, especially during a time of seismic global transformation, they are nigh near impossible to make.

In West Asia, a depressed and neglected region that acts as a punching bag for Great Power competition elsewhere, much relies on the settlement of major power battles in the realms of economy, politics, and (proxy) war.

Rather than outright predictions, it might be more useful to characterize the trends likely to develop further in 2023. I’ve asked some of my fellow writers at The Cradle to weigh in with their own takes. But let’s first jump in with a few of my own observations for the year ahead:

The Ukraine war was the defining event of 2022, and if the conflict hadn’t unfolded there, it would have done so elsewhere. It is essentially a war to stop a multipolar future from fully unseating the unipolar past. It could have unfolded in Taiwan, Iran, the Koreas, or even Venezuela, for that matter.

In 2023, we will see clear signs of disruption in the Atlantic alliance. As things stand, Europe can no longer afford to take instruction from Washington when their fortunes and fates are so clearly at odds. Ukraine made this clear, but Europe does have a choice that its Atlanticists have frantically buried for years.

The fact is that Europe’s extreme wealth and privilege has been historically derived from Asian resources, and that will become manifestly clear in 2023. Germany wasn’t wrong to launch its Nordstream pipelines with Russia – Berlin was merely securing its future until the Americans sabotaged it.

2023 will remind Europe that its desire to remain prosperous – and continue to grow economically – is intricately linked with the east and the promise of “Eurasia.” Asia and Europe are connected by land, after all, as opposed to the vast Atlantic Ocean that separates current allies.

So expect this year to reveal the splits between various European stakeholders, and prepare for the battle of Eurasianism versus Atlanticism to play across the continent’s power corridors. You will find, at its core, that the world of commerce will be at odds with government for the first time in decades.

In and around West Asia, I have my eye on two developments that could have major repercussions on both regional and international affairs.

First is the rapidly-evolving India-Russia relationship that sprung out of nowhere last year. This new dynamic has single-handedly revitalized the BRICS and inserted itself onto the global chessboard. In Moscow, New Delhi now has a reliable and useful partner to resolve disputes with Beijing, which makes things infinitely smoother for Asian integration projects.

It also left Washington in the dust, something the US experienced in a variety of theaters in 2022, including with regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia. But India is a big catch, and this lining up of Indo-Russian interests in multiples theaters cannot be sitting well with Atlanticists anywhere.

Second, the re-emergence of Turkiye as a critical player in West and Central Asia. After nearly a decade of relative isolation stemming from myriad differences with Europe and Arab states – coupled with a collapsing economy – Turkiye is now on the rise. Russia recently offered Ankara its long-coveted ambition of becoming a major oil and gas hub to Europe, and China seeks to build a key section of its New Silk Road through Turkiye.

Facing his toughest elections to date in June 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looked like a sure loser until the Ukraine war flipped his fortunes. Overnight, the NATO state became a desired intermediary for both sides, and Erdogan didn’t miss a beat.

He is playing the game of his life right now, positioning Turkiye as a key Eurasian fuel hub for Europe, and trying to milk this regionally in Syria, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and other Turkic states of the South Caucasus. While offering resolution of conflict on one hand, Erdogan is also dangerously fueling conflict on the other.

Nowhere is this more noticeable that on the Armenia-Azerbaijani-Iran borders, where the Turkish president is aggressively advancing Ankara’s ambitions to steer Central Asia’s new transportation routes and reshape its borders.

Turkiye and Syria

Turkiye featured heavily in 2023 predictions by The Cradle writers. Yeghia Tashjian goes so far as to predict a new major war in the South Caucasus this year:

“The Azerbaijani land blockade on Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh has entered its 30th day. Russian peacekeepers are unable to lift the blockade out of concern about the Turkish reaction. Meanwhile, Baku is forcing Armenia to provide a corridor connecting Azerbaijan to Turkiye and thus cutting the Armenia-Iran border.”

While Turkiye fuels conflict in one region, it also appears to be winding down strife elsewhere. A number of writers predict a resolution of the Syria-Turkish conflict in 2023, with different degrees of confidence.

Ceyda Karan believes Erdogan to be opportunistic in his Syria plans: “It all depends on the Turkish elections,” she says, reflecting the view of several Cradle authors who also believe that all may not be smooth in the run-up to the polls.

Erdogan is working every angle to win the elections, says Mohammad Salami:

“In the international arena, he mediated between Ukraine and Russia, with no result. In the energy scene, he plans to turn Turkiye into an energy hub, but it won’t be easy. Erdogan then attempted to rebuild relations with the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, and now, in a last ditch effort, has announced his retirement after the upcoming election.”

On a more positive note, Washington-based Ziad Hafez believes that rapprochement between Syria and Turkiye will move much faster than people expect.

“Erdogan has to provide a major political success before the elections. Whether the Syrians will give him that is hard to know. But it will be beneficial for both, and at the same time completely isolate the US position in Syria. I don’t think either NATO or regional states are in a position to derail the talks. What the Russians and Iranians have offered Turkiye cannot be matched by either the US or Europe,” Hafez writes promisingly.

But Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik offers a reality check on the hazards of rapprochement talks, where many regional and international stakeholders have vested interests.

He predicts “the US will make every effort to prevent any improvement in Turkish-Syrian relations, even going so far as to forge ties between Turkiye and the US-backed Kurds.”

“The Syrian economic situation will worsen in 2023 because neither Russia and China are helping, Iran has already done its maximum, and the US is still occupying the resource rich areas in Syria’s northeast and slapping more sanctions on the state.”

On the highly-anticipated meeting between Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Illaik warns that even this poses serious difficulties: “Turkiye needs to pay a price for this meeting because it has done a lot of damage to Syria and occupies its lands, but Russia is pushing for a meeting ‘for free’ – to suit its own strategic goals with Ankara.”

Palestine, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf

Regionwide, Illaik predicts that 2023 will not see much change, because “the whole Levant will be subject to continuing US hostility – sanctions, military occupation of Syria, threats, blackmail, and pressure in Lebanon and Iraq.”

Other Arab states will rush in to secure their own interests primarily. The UAE, for instance, has offered to participate in Turkish-Syrian talks “to gain some influence in post-war Syria and  balance Iran’s influence there.”

Ceyda Karan weighs in on how the global power stand-off is affecting regional behaviors: “Gulf states, even the Saudis, are sensing US weakness, so they are now establishing direct beneficial relations with China, Russia. I don’t see them continuing to remain staunch partners of the US in the region, and we will see more signs of this in 2023.”

A fairly unanimous view is that this year will see the ratcheting up of tensions in Palestine.

“Netanyahu’s rightwing government has placed Israel in a precarious position,” argues Ziad Hafez. “It can’t launch a major military offensive inside Palestine, or against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, nor is it in a position to undertake any political settlement, domestically as well as regionally. Tensions are rapidly rising in the West Bank, US Jews are no longer providing unconditional support, and the balance of power on the ground is not to Israel’s advantage.”

Hafez warns that “the far-right racism of cabinet members like (National Security Minister) Itamar Ben Gvir, will make it impossible for Israel to claim self-defense over anything. Some of these elements will try to force a major confrontation or conflict, but this will be Israel’s undoing.”

They’re ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’ is Israel’s predicament in a nutshell.”

Illaik says the Israelis can’t afford to look beyond their borders, as in the past:

“Inside Palestine, the atmosphere is readying for a Third Intifada, in the WestBank and Jerusalem – and perhaps even inside 1948 lands, as we witnessed in May 2021. The reason for this is that Israelis have and are continuing to weaken the Palestinian Authority (PA), are slapping on more arbitrary measures and punishments on the Palestinian people, and are trying to alter the status quo of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa.”

He also believes that Israel will intensify its targeting of Iran, but that Hezbollah will remain its biggest actual security threat. Illaik predicts stronger Resistance Axis deterrence measures in 2023: “Iran may retaliate for Israeli sabotage and assassination operations – inside Israel – while Hezbollah will continue its project of securing more precision-guided missiles, UAVs, and maybe even Cruise missiles.”

Journalist Zafar Mehdi predicts that the current stalemate in Iran nuclear talks with world powers will continue in 2023, following a slew of fresh recent sanctions by western states linked to Iranian riots in the country and accusations of drone shipments to Russia – all basically designed to gain leverage in Vienna talks.

“Despite Iran’s readiness to restore the deal, it’s clear other parties are not interested, which will obviously prompt Tehran to further ramp up its uranium enrichment this year. Brace for more baseless claims against Iran in the coming months, and expect the UN nuclear watchdog to increase its pressure campaign against Tehran at the behest of Americans, Europeans and Israelis,” writes Mehdi.

He also expects Saudi Arabia to “come out in the open about its dalliance with Israel” this year, “especially with Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s friend (Netanyahu) back in power in Tel Aviv.” But Mehdi warns that this “won’t help Riyadh in Yemen, as Ansarallah continue to pummel the Saudi-led coalition forces and the US is now batting for truce between the warring sides.”

The often stalled Iran-Saudi talks, “are now reportedly set to advance to the political and diplomatic level, which may provide the breakthrough needed to wind down the Yemeni war in 2023,” particularly in the context of Riyadh’s closer ties to Moscow and Beijing, both keen to restore and maintain Persian Gulf security, but within a new regional paradigm.

The Ukraine war and multipolarism

If one solely considers outlooks on the Ukraine war, Cradle writers appear to be immune to the western narrative. For them, a Russian victory is inevitable for various reasons, but at what cost?

Ziad Hafez predicts an end to the devastating conflict by the end of Spring, largely because Ukraine’s fighting forces have been severely depleted and its western allies do not have the means to provide uninterrupted qualitative and quantitative military support. “The US industrial base is simply not equipped and ready to meet that demand,” he states blankly. That, and “Russian pressure on Putin to wrap it up and not this to become a war of attrition.”

One alternative for NATO, of course, noted by several writers, is to expand the conflict once Ukraine is clearly losing: “Drag in the Poles and the former Warsaw Pact armies.”

Karin Kneissl, Austria’s foreign minister until 2019, has her eye firmly on the energy ramifications of this war and how Europe’s institutions will be impacted:

“In the EU, further tests of strength are to be expected, which go beyond freezing of funds for (Hungarian Prime Minister) Viktor Orban. Corruption is widespread inside the EU and its institutions.”

“A massive weakening of the common currency, the euro, is to be expected. This will make the already scarce energy imports even more expensive, especially as they are still settled in US dollars. The burdens on societies will lead not only to a loss of purchasing power and recession but also to social unrest that will go beyond strikes for higher salaries and climate protests throughout Europe,” Kneissl warns.

As the global recession weighs on commodity markets and drives prices down, she believes “producers, such as those 23 producing countries of the OPEC+ format, will further reduce their production.” But because of “the lack of investment in fossil energies, now intensified in the face of recession fears, prices could also swing upwards at any time.” Which basically translates into increased volatility in the energy markets in 2023.

In the end though, Kneissl believes “we will see new banks, new lending, new currency baskets, and, no doubt, new insurance companies” emerge in the place of existing ones.

Note: This is essentially what the end of world wars looks like: the rejigging of the old order, and the creation of new global institutions and networks – with new rules and helmsmen.

The Cradle columnist Pepe Escobar, who has long forseen the global handover to multipolarism, may see every item on his predictions list ticked off in 2023. He keeps it short and sweet:

“The expansion of BRICS to BRICS+, with Algeria, Iran and Argentina in the first wave, and dozens following. They will prioritize trade in their own currencies leading to an alternative currency, that will be shared by BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).”

Escobar further predicts the corrosion of key European institutions, including the transatlantic military alliance:  “Mirroring the internal polarization taking place in the west today, both the EU and NATO will be getting closer and closer to completely breaking up.”

The Ukraine war, he says, is a major trigger for this collapse because of the “complete humiliation of NATO,” and anticipates that “if the war continues – which it will, in hybrid war terms,” we will likely see “terror attacks against the Russian Federation.”

The problem with 2023

This isn’t going to be an easy year, anywhere. The constellation of events in the recent past – wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya; the targeting of Iran, China, Russia; the global pandemic and the securitization that ensued; the re-emergence of Salafi terrorism; widespread economic recession; failure of globalization; replacement of international law with the self-serving ‘rules-based order’ – these have all contributed to a collapse of existing systems.

Yet, if efficient actors with design are present within times of chaos, collapse needn’t be a frightening thing. It is clear the old ways were not working; here is a chance then to fix things from the ground up. But the journey will be painful.

The BRICS, SCO, BRI, EAEU are forging ahead with their programs. Relationships are strengthening (Russia-China, India-Russia, Iran-China, Saudi Arabia-China, Russia-Iran, etc). Atlanticism is being replaced not only because Atlanticists have failed, but because they’ve been treading water for decades while others have been taking quantum leaps forward.

In West Asia, the balls for 2023 are still up in the air. Turkiye, Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, India, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Brazil, Venezuela, and many other states, institutions, and decision-makers will all take significant action this year. Many moves will be made, some succeeding, others failing. Everything is hard to predict other than nothing will remain the same as we enter 2024.

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***

“Safe and Effective”? Every parent who is fighting to protect their children from Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should have cases like this saved in their records and ready to give to their lawyers, to health authorities, or to the Courts.

Below are 16 cases of serious adverse events in children following Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, as recorded in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system (VAERS).

VAERS 1406268: 13 yo boy (Nebraska)

One day after 1st dose of Pfizer he developed headaches, extreme fatigue, disconnect with reality. He stopped communicating, developed paranoia, began to have self-neglect, not caring for self or doing normal hygiene. Within days had visual and tactile hallucinations, flat affect. Began cutting himself.

VAERS 1507168: 13 yo boy (New Mexico) 

8-10 hours after 2nd Pfizer dose he became disengaged in social activity. Following days major loss of appetite and further withdrawal. Complaints of delusions, voices giving him “bad thoughts” and “bad visions”. Voices come as either “monsters” or “a little boy”. When he seems to be battling with these thoughts his eyes tend to go absent and twitches his mouth as if wanting to speak.

VAERS 1513678: 12 yo girl (New Mexico)

Patient reported having suicidal thoughts, hearing voices. Patient started self-harming after 1st dose of Pfizer. After 2nd dose of Pfizer, the self-harm got worse and she became very depressed.

VAERS 1526191: 13 yo girl (Indiana) 

Healthy 13 yo girl, headache 11 days after 2nd dose of Pfizer, fainted, had altered mental status and hallucinations. Developed orofacial dyskinesias and choreoathetoid movements (uncontrollable movements).

Couldn’t recognize family members, was intubated with autonomic instability. Was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis. Permanently disabled.

VAERS 1673304: 13 yo girl (Virginia) 

13 yo girl received 1st Pfizer dose. 3 days later experienced complete personality change. She began having panic attacks, couldn’t leave the house, wouldn’t go outside. She had horrible headaches every day. Overcome by scary thoughts and images. Felt like bugs are everywhere. Anxious and scared of everything that used to be easy for her. Permanently disabled.

VAERS 1826794: 12 yo boy (Foreign)

Day after 2nd dose of Pfizer, developed fever, state of unrest and suddenly acted violently. Taken to hospital in ambulance. Had memory impairment, could not remember his father’s and brother’s names, abnormal behavior and speech, was hospitalized for 3 days.

VAERS 1857960: 13 yo boy (Virginia) 

Same day after 1st Pfizer dose, had high fever, extremely elevated anxiety, nonstop worries and fears, irrational thoughts OCD thoughts and behaviours, separation anxiety, lying on couch under a blanket for hours and scared of the entire world, requiring nonstop reassurance, unable to function with virtual school or focus and had to be removed from school for the remainder of the school year, restricted eating and fears to eat , psychosis, inability to complete daily functions, severe sleep disruption and lack of sleep, challenges showering, dressing and bathing self, repetitive speech, blank stares, dilated pupils,

electric like jolts of pain sensation in his brain and head, crying and emotional, anger outbursts and aggression, tingling in all of his limbs, tics and other neurological symptoms, need for significant medical treatment from three specialists/ doctors including neurology/ immunology/ pediatrician and ER visit and many labs for the last five months plus. Needed to have significant special education support and IEP in place upon return from school and 1:1 case manager and much assistance from staff to function daily.

VAERS 1909455: 7 yo girl (Minnesota) 

8 hours after 1st dose of Pfizer, she developed fever, chills, headache. Developed auditory hallucinations which have persisted intermittently since then. Persistent, tension type headaches also persisting.

VAERS 1980939: 11 yo boy (Florida) 

On same day after 2nd dose of Pfizer, he developed severe headache, fever, sleepwalked. At one point he believed he was possessed, was hallucinating and wanted to jump out the window.

VAERS 1995385: 9 yo girl (California) 

One day after 2nd Pfizer dose, she awoke with auditory hallucinations that repeated multiple times, extreme abdominal pains, threw up 3 times. Dry heaving for 12 hours nonstop.

VAERS 2018697: 9 yo boy (New Jersey) 

One day after 1st Pfizer dose, he had a severe headache for 2 days. Could barely speak, not really talking and not really responding. Had hallucinations and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Everything looked small. Has not fully recovered.

VAERS 2035795: 7 yo boy (Georgia)

One day after 1st dose of Pfizer, he had fever, started to hallucinate at night, thought his dad wanted to kill him, was screaming, started to vomit. Had more hallucinations following days, saw everything very big and that he could touch the ceiling.

Mood swings from excited and talking fast to talking really slow, slurred speech, photophobia. Mother will not allow another vaccine dose.

VAERS 2043532: 12 yo boy (Washington)

Got 3rd dose of Pfizer, next day he had 5 min episodes of hallucinations in which he says and does things that do not make sense. At 1am woke up, extremely agitated, yelling, screaming, crying, heart racing, started saying he was going to die or needed to die. He is not lucid.

When asked questions he does not make sense or does not know basic information such as his age or birthdate. He walked to the banister from his room on the 2nd story and began climbing over the edge. My husband grabbed him and took him to his bed holding him down and asking him to count to 10. He slowly begins to calm and all of a sudden becomes lucid again and starts making sense. He has no memory if his actions during the hallucinations.

He began having a 2nd hallucination. He enters he hallways and began yelling at his brother as if he was there, but his brother was in his room sleeping. He ran downstairs to my bedroom and started yelling he was going to die. I walked him back upstairs and he told my husband to kill him. When we asked him what he did that day he said he jumped over the edge and jumped off a cliff. He then began answering questions correctly and became lucid again. He had no memory of the episode.

VAERS 2105455: 13 yo boy (Maryland)

After 3rd dose of Pfizer, he developed strong night terrors, hallucinations, sleep walking – started the night of vaccination and has continued every few nights since the shot. Usually lasts about 20 minutes.

VAERS 2163473: 8 yo girl (Virginia) 

40 days after 1st Pfizer dose, girl changed mentally. Appears to have seizure but it’s not a seizure. She cannot respond during these episodes and began to see and hear things that aren’t there. Happens over and over, has 5 emergency visits.

A month later she is still undiagnosed and having memory loss, regression, delirium in waves. Unaware of age, year of birth, season, counting 1 to 10. Before 1st Pfizer dose, she had no neurological troubles, she was a straight A student who was bright and happy. She has lost memory and regressed. Woke up a different person who became unable to be touched or consoled. Permanently disabled.

VAERS 2187799: 10 yo boy (New Jersey) 

44 days after 1st dose of Pfizer, he starts having what has become an almost daily “episode” that would be described as a panic attack with hallucinations. He becomes very disoriented, stating that images appear and words sound very fast to him. After episode is over, he is able to articulate what he experienced. This is completely out of character for him, he is very social, good student and athlete.

My take… 

It is important to remember that only a very small fraction of events like these make it to the VAERS database, so this is only a small sampling of what is happening in the real world. This is not a pharmaceutical product I would call “safe”.

If parents were aware of these kinds of side-effects, and I have not included any cases of “sudden deaths” of children following COVID-19 vaccination in this article, they would probably think twice about proceeding with vaccinating their child with these mRNA products which clearly affect the brain.

Pharmaceutical products with this type of safety profile cannot be put on the childhood vaccination schedule, or be mandated in any form. That is a crime.

The health authorities, doctors and politicians are all fully aware of these harms that are being inflicted on children. They just don’t care.

*

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Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) has sent a letter to Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly urging the imposition of sanctions against Israeli officials in response to their attempted annexation of the occupied West Bank. In recent weeks, Israel has intensified its illegal colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), dramatically expanding illegal settlements and moving to restructure its governance over the West Bank in a way that experts say amounts to de jure annexation. CJPME argues that these Israeli actions have crossed a red line, and urges Canada to impose sanctions on the Israeli officials who are responsible, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister Smotrich.

Click here to download the full letter as a PDF.

“Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank amount to annexation, one of the gravest violations of international law,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “Canada must assert that a red line has been crossed and act accordingly to hold Israeli authorities for these crimes,” added Bueckert. CJPME notes that Canada can model its response on its existing sanctions on individuals and entities related to Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine, and encourages Canada to impose similar restrictions on those involved in Israel’s occupation and attempted annexation of Palestinian territory.

CJPME’s letter warns that Israel’s far right-government has made a significant change to its governance structure over the occupied West Bank, transferring sweeping powers out of military control and into civilian hands. This move is widely understood to amount to the de jure annexation of the territory, according to experts including prominent Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, Israeli human rights NGOs, the editorial board of Haaretz, and more. Additionally, CJPME’s letter notes that within the past month, Israel has advanced more than 15 new illegal settlements and more than 7,000 illegal settlement units in the OPT, and is preparing to approve major new settlements, including the so-called “doomsday” E-1 project which would connect Jerusalem with the Ma’ale Adumim settlement and sever the West Bank in half.

In response to Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank, CJPME is urging Canada to:

1. Condemn Israel’s recent change of governance in the West Bank as an act of de jureannexation;
2. Prohibit trade and all dealings with businesses and entities related to Israeli settlements and annexation in the OPT, including a ban on the import of goods from settlements and an asset freeze on individuals involved in settlement activity and acts of annexation;
3. Support the International Criminal Court (ICC) in its investigation of alleged war crimes in the OPT, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its inquiry into the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the OPT.

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***

The antiviral drug remdesivir, brand name Veklury, is approved for use against COVID-19 despite research showing it lacks effectiveness and can cause high rates of organ failure

John Beaudoin is calling for a criminal investigation into remdesivir, citing data that it may have killed 100,000 people in the U.S.

Beaudoin received all the death certificates in Massachusetts from 2015 to 2022, finding 1,840 excess deaths from acute renal failure from January 1, 2021, to November 30, 2022, which he believes may be due to remdesivir

A study published in The Lancet found “no clinical benefit” from the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients

The U.S. government pays hospitals a 20% upcharge on the entire hospital bill when remdesivir is used

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, brand name Veklury, for emergency use against COVID-19 in May 2020.¹ By October 2020, it had received full approval.² It remains a primary treatment for COVID-19 in hospitals, despite research showing it lacks effectiveness³ and can cause high rates of organ failure.⁴

On Twitter, John Beaudoin is calling for a criminal investigation into the drug, citing data that it may have killed 100,000 people in the U.S. “They know,” he says, “or they willfully refuse to know. Either way, it’s homicide.”⁵

Using drugs that cause organ failure, like remdesivir, isn’t in the best interest of public health. The fact that U.S. health authorities have focused on this and similarly harmful drugs to the exclusion of all others, including older drugs with high rates of effectiveness and superior safety profiles, sends a very disturbing message.

Did Remdesivir Kill Thousands in Massachusetts?

Beaudoin has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court and believes a spike in deaths from acute renal failure (ARF) in Massachusetts is due to remdesivir, which is produced by Gilead Sciences. Using a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Beaudoin received all the death certificates in Massachusetts from 2015 to 2022.

He then graphed the FOIA data, finding 1,840 excess deaths from acute renal failure from January 1, 2021 to November 30, 2022. Beaudoin also revealed an increase in deaths from acute rental failure in every age group over 15 years old, from 2015 to 2022.⁶ “Thousands dead in Massachusetts ARF likely due to Remdesivir. This requires CRIMINAL investigation,” he tweeted.⁷

Deaths, Kidney Injury Common With Remdesivir

Remdesivir use didn’t become widespread until 2020. From that time until October 2021, at least 7,491 adverse drug reactions were reported to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) VigiAccess, including 560 deaths, 550 serious cardiac disorders and 475 acute kidney injuries.⁸

For comparison, only 5,674 adverse drug reactions were reported for ivermectin from 1992 to October 13, 2021.⁹ Despite its strong safety profile and efficacy, ivermectin was widely vilified during the pandemic. Not to mention, remdesivir costs between $2,340 and $3,120,¹⁰ while the average treatment cost for ivermectin is $58.¹¹ Do you think this has anything to do with remdesivir’s promotion and ivermectin’s vilification?

While WHO updated its guidance in April 2022 to recommend the use of remdesivir in “mild or moderate COVID-19 patients who are at high risk of hospitalization,”¹² a study published in The Lancet found “no clinical benefit” from the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients.¹³ Further, the investigators believed three deaths during the study were related to remdesivir.¹⁴

Gilead’s Political Ties Questioned as Remdesivir Use Persists

Still, the question remains why remdesivir continues to be used at all. In November 2020, WHO issued a bulletin recommending against the use of remdesivir in COVID-19 patients, stating, “There is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.”¹⁵

Is it possible that Gilead’s strong political connections have influenced the government’s approvals and recommendations? It’s worth noting that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of Gilead from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001. Rumsfeld had previously served as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, and again under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006.

FDA Even Approved Remdesivir for Children

In late April 2022, the FDA even approved remdesivir as the first and only COVID-19 treatment for children under 12, including babies as young as 28 days,¹⁶ an approval that boggles the mind, considering COVID-19 is rarely serious in children while remdesivir is ineffective and carries a risk of serious, and deadly, side effects.

What’s worse, the drug is also approved for outpatient use in children, which is a first. Dr. Meryl Nass expressed her concerns about the FDA’s approval of remdesivir for outpatient use in babies, stating:¹⁷

“The FDA just licensed Remdesivir for children as young as one month old. Both hospitalized children and outpatients may receive it. The drug might work in outpatients, but the vast majority of children have a very low risk of dying from COVID. If 7 deaths per 1,000 result from the drug, as … European investigators thought¹⁸ … it is possible it will harm or kill more children than it saves.

Shouldn’t the FDA have waited longer to see what early outpatient treatment did for older ages? Or studied a much larger group of children? Very little has been published on children and remdesivir …

When we look at the press release issued by Gilead,¹⁹ we learn the approval was based on an open label, single arm trial in 53 children, 3 of whom died (6% of these children died); 72% had an adverse event, and 21% had a serious adverse event.”

More Lawsuits Filed Against Remdesivir

Two women are suing Kaiser Permanente and Redlands Community Hospital in California for giving remdesivir to their husbands without consent. Both men died from kidney and organ failure after being administered remdesivir. “The day he was admitted on August 12 they started the remdesivir and on [August 17] is when they were done,” Christina Briones told CBS News. “Five doses. [On] the 17th his kidneys started to fail.”²⁰

In California, lawsuits have been filed on behalf of at least 14 families against medical providers for prescribing remdesivir without providing necessary information about it, leading to the patients’ deaths.²¹ Another wrongful death suit was filed in Nevada, after a patient died of kidney failure and respiratory failure a week after being given remdesivir.²²

Safety Signal Revealed for Remdesivir and Kidney Failure

Meanwhile, a study published in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics in April 2021 detected a potential safety signal for remdesivir and acute renal failure:²³

“The combination of the terms ‘acute renal failure’ and ‘remdesivir’ yielded a statistically significant disproportionality signal with 138 observed cases instead of the nine expected. ROR [reporting odds ratio] of ARF with remdesivir was 20-fold that of comparative drugs.

Based on ARF cases reported in VigiBase, and despite the caveats inherent to COVID-19 circumstances, we detected a statistically significant pharmacovigilance signal of nephrotoxicity associated with remdesivir, deserving a thorough qualitative assessment of all available data.”

In May 2021, another pharmacovigilance analysis revealed red flags against remdesivir. “Compared with the use of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, dexamethasone, sarilumab, or tocilizumab, the use of remdesivir was associated with an increased reporting of kidney disorders,” the study found.²⁴ It concluded:²⁵

“Our findings, based on postmarketing real-life data from >5000 COVID-19 patients, support that kidney disorders, almost exclusively AKI [acute kidney injury], represent a serious, early, and potentially fatal adverse drug reaction of remdesivir. These results are consistent with findings from another group. Physicians should be aware of this potential risk and perform close kidney monitoring when prescribing remdesivir.”

In March 2022, yet another pharmacovigilance analysis warned of a significant association between remdesivir and acute kidney injury, especially in male patients and those over the age of 65 years. “Although causality was not confirmed,” they noted, “the association between remdesivir and AKI should not be ignored, especially in the older, male COVID-19 inpatients.”²⁶

US Government Pays Hospitals to Use Remdesivir

Remdesivir was developed as an antiviral drug and tested during the Ebola breakout in 2014. The drug was found to have a very high death rate and was not pursued further. In the early months of 2020, however, the drug was entered into COVID trials.²⁷ Those trials were also beyond disappointing.^28,29,30

Not only was the drug ineffective against the infection but it also had significant and life-threatening side effects, including kidney failure and liver damage.³¹ Dr. Paul Marik, a pulmonary and critical care specialist and founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), explained that during the pandemic the only drug he was allowed to prescribe was remdesivir.

When he refused to follow the remdesivir protocol, he was subjected to a “sham review,” an unofficial but well-known process in which a “troublesome” doctor is accused of wrongdoing and basically railroaded out of practice. In the end, he was fired and reported to the National Practitioner Databank and the Board of Medicine.

The financial motivations to report doctors going against the grain run deep. According to Marik, the U.S. government pays hospitals a 20% upcharge on the entire hospital bill when remdesivir is used.³² Citizens Journal also reported that the U.S. government pays hospitals a “bonus” on the entire hospital bill if they use remdesivir.³³ It described this practice as a bounty placed on your life, with payouts tied to declining health instead of recovery:³⁴

“For remdesivir, studies show that 71% to 75% of patients suffer an adverse effect, and the drug often had to be stopped after five to 10 days because of these effects, such as kidney and liver damage, and death.

Remdesivir trials during the 2018 West African Ebola outbreak had to be discontinued because death rate exceeded 50%. Yet, in 2020, Anthony Fauci directed that remdesivir was to be the drug hospitals use to treat COVID-19, even when the COVID clinical trials of remdesivir showed similar adverse effects.

… We now see government-dictated medical care at its worst in our history since the federal government mandated these ineffective and dangerous treatments for COVID-19, and then created financial incentives for hospitals and doctors to use only those ‘approved’ (and paid for) approaches. Our formerly trusted medical community of hospitals and hospital-employed medical staff have effectively become ‘bounty hunters’ for your life.”

Officials Push Expensive, Risky Treatments

In addition to remdesivir, Pfizer’s Paxlovid was granted emergency use authorization to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 in December 2021.³⁵ The drug consists of nirmatrelvir tablets — the antiviral component — and ritonavir tablets, which are intended to slow the breakdown of nirmatrelvir.³⁶

But like remdesivir, there are many problems with Paxlovid. In this case, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning to health care providers and public health departments about the potential for COVID-19 rebound after Paxlovid treatment.³⁷ Further, Pfizer stopped a large trial of Paxlovid in standard-risk patients because it didn’t show significant protection against hospitalization or death in this group.³⁸

Paxlovid costs $529 per five-day treatment³⁹ and has cost U.S. taxpayers $5.29 billion,⁴⁰ while safe and less expensive options exist. An investigation by Cornell University, posted on the University’s preprint server January 20, 2022, found ivermectin outperformed 10 other drugs against COVID-19.⁴¹

Since the FDA and CDC cannot be trusted, and even physicians’ hands are often tied by regulatory red tape, it’s imperative to take responsibility for your own health. In the case of COVID-19, seek early treatment using an effective and safe protocol — not one that puts profits over patients.

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Notes

¹ FDA, May 1, 2020

² FDA, October 22, 2020

³ The New England Journal of Medicine February 11, 2021

^4, 23 Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2021 Apr;109(4):1021-1024

⁵ Twitter, John Beaudoin, Sr. February 12, 2023

⁶ Twitter, John Beaudoin, Sr. February 12, 2023, 4

⁷ Twitter, John Beaudoin, Sr. February 12, 2023, Graph

^8, 9 Nebraska AG Opinion October 14, 2021, page 11

¹⁰ AJMC June 29, 2020

¹¹ JAMA 2022;327(6):584-587

^12, 15 WHO November 20, 2020

¹³ The Lancet September 14, 2021, Interpretation

¹⁴ The Lancet September 14, 2021, Findings

¹⁶ FDA April 25, 2022

¹⁷ MerylnassMD.com April 30, 2022

¹⁸ The Lancet September 14, 2021

¹⁹ Gilead Press Release April 25, 2022

²⁰ CBS News October 24, 2022

²¹ Ehline Law Firm November 8, 2022

²² The Nevada Globe November 25, 2022

^24, 25 Kidney Int. 2021 May; 99(5): 1235–1236

²⁶ Front. Pharmacol., 25 March 2022

²⁷ BMJ, 2020;371:m4457

²⁸ New England Journal of Medicine, 2021;384:497

²⁹ Scientific Freedom, June 1, 2020

³⁰ The Lancet, 2020;395(10236):P1569

³¹ International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2020; doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2020.06.093

³² JDsupra.com November 6, 2020

^33, 34 Citizens Journal December 20, 2021

³⁵ U.S. FDA December 22, 2021

^36, 38 Science June 29, 2022

³⁷ U.S. CDC May 24, 2022

³⁹ Precision Vaccinations, November 19, 2021

⁴⁰ Reuters November 18, 2021

⁴¹ Cornell University, January 20, 2022

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***

Israel attacked the Aleppo International Airport in northwest Syria on March 7 and caused the international humanitarian aid for the earthquake victims to be canceled due to the damages of the airstrike.

While the world is watching the suffering of Turkey and Syria following the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, Israel was targeting the place in Syria which was hardest hit by the natural disaster with the man-made destruction of a civilian airport that connects Syria to Europe and the world.

Foreign donors including the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria have flown aid into Aleppo airport following almost 5,000 deaths reported in Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and Jeblah.  Hundreds were injured and hundreds of thousands have been made homeless after the quake. The Syrian government has said the resources needed to meet the needs of the affected areas are more than they have on hand after over a decade of the US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change.

This was the second attack by Israel on Aleppo airport in six months and was Israel’s third air strike in Syria this year. In January, Israel attacked the Damascus International Airport. Last year, Israel carried out more than 30 air strikes in Syria.

Last month, Israel attacked a civilian neighborhood in Damascus, Kafr Sousa, killing 15 sleeping in their beds.

Yankee Go Home

Republican Representative from Florida, Matt Gaetz, introduced a bill in the House to withdraw all US troops illegally occupying Syria.

“Congress has never authorized the use of military force in Syria,” Gaetz said. He added, “The United States is currently not in a war with or against Syria, so why are we conducting dangerous military operations there?”

There are about 1,000 US troops in Syria. They are partnered with the separatist militias, SDF and YPG, who have set up a communist semi-autonomous government in the northeast. This has angered Turkey, a fellow NATO member with the US because the YPG is aligned with the PKK, a terrorist group responsible for over 30,000 deaths in Turkey over decades.

On March 4, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, arrived in Syria, where he met with US troops there and said Washington’s military presence there was critical to the security of both the US and its allies. The ally he referred to was not Turkey, which has the largest army in Europe, but rather the SDF and YPG who are a stateless militia following communist political ideology, and in open armed conflict with Turkey, a US ally that hosts a US airbase at Inderlik.

The US troops occupying Syria illegally are there for two purposes. Firstly, they protect the SDF and YPG from serious attack, or dismantlement by Turkey, which views them as the enemy. Secondly, the US troops stationed at Al Tanf, on the Baghdad-Damascus highway, serve to prevent goods from being trucked from Iraq to Syria.

The US troops at Al-Tanf are partnered with a militia Maghawir al-Thawra, who are Radical Islamic terrorists not far different than Al Qaeda. There is an ethical question surrounding the US occupation in Syria: is it ethical for a western democracy like the US to partner with a communist militia, or a militia following Radical Islam?

The answer to that question came from an unnamed former US military member,

“The US uses any asset they have access to, regardless of ideology.”

In response to Milley’s visit to Syria, Gaetz said,

“America has no discernible interest in continuing to fund a fight where alliances shift faster than the desert sands. … If General Milley wants this war so bad, he should explain what we are fighting for and why it is worth American treasure and blood.”

Gaetz, legislators, and activists are seeking to return war-making power to Congress. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution is clear: Only Congress can declare war.  This resolution would have removed the US troops from Syria, but it did not pass.

On March 7, Gaetz tweeted,

“Obama got us into a civil war in Syria. President Trump did everything to get us out of Syria. The Deep State is doing everything to keep us in Syria. My War Powers Resolution puts AMERICA FIRST and brings our troops home!”

Milley’s visit to occupied Syria explains Biden’s Syria policy. Biden is dead-set on continuing the occupation of Syria, maintaining Idlib as an Al Qaeda safe-haven, maintaining the SDF and YPG as a semi-autonomous communist enclave opposing both Damascus and Ankara, and preventing the reconstruction of Syria following a decade of armed conflict by terrorists aligned with the US, and the recent earthquake.

Some have said that the US, SDF, and YPG are fighting to keep ISIS from a comeback. However, with less than 1,000 US troops, and their lightly-armed partners, this cannot be considered an effective military force against terrorists. The Iraqi Army, the Syrian Arab Army, and their Russian military partners are effective military forces capable of keeping ISIS on the run. This proves that the US occupation serves no military purpose, but is strictly a political ploy.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged in 2021 that it was US policy to “oppose the reconstruction of Syria,” and the policy hasn’t changed. Buildings, homes, businesses, and hospitals have been destroyed and need to be rebuilt. These are civilian properties deserving to be rebuilt, and yet the US policy is to keep the Syrian people suffering, homeless, unemployed, and lacking medical facilities.

Blinken’s representative for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, has toured her area of responsibility but has never visited Damascus. The Biden administration views the small province of Idlib, under the occupation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as the only legitimate government in Syria.  Muhammed al-Julani is the leader in charge of his Salvation government there. He is the man to whom all international aid is delivered. He has ordered his men to raid aid warehouses, held aid workers for $60,000 ransom, distributed aid only to his Radical Islamic ideology supporters, denied aid to civilians who oppose the Islamic Law interpretations imposed on Idlib, and denied women from aid programs.

Julani fought against the US troops in Iraq while with Al Qaeda, became personally associated with the ISIS leader Baghdadi while in Iraq, and then came to Syria and formed Jibhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group that was reported to be even more vicious than ISIS, and now is the supreme leader of the US-EU protected enclave of Idlib. All UN aid, and that of every international humanitarian aid organization, passes through his hands alone.

An ethical question arises from Idlib: how do international aid organizations balance the need to help about 3 million civilians in Idlib, with the fact that they are enabling a terrorist leader and his fighters to hold the basic needs of unarmed civilians hostage?

*

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

According to information recently published by local authorities in Transnistria, a terrorist attack was planned by Ukrainian saboteurs in Tiraspol, the aim of which was to kill the current president of the autonomous republic, Vadim Krasnoselsky. The case reveals that in fact Kiev maintains regular terrorist activities abroad, using sabotage tactics to eliminate civilians considered “enemies” of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime.

The plan was discovered by the intelligence services of the secessionist republic. According to Tiraspol’s officials, the Ukrainian scheme was discovered in time to avoid the tragedy. It is believed that not only President Krasnoselsky would be targeted by the saboteurs, but also some other top Transnistrian officials would be assassinated. The agents behind the maneuver were linked to the Ukrainian Secret Service.

In a statement published on March 9, the Ministry of State Security says that “criminal cases have been opened and are being investigated with regard to the crimes”, despite the threats have already been neutralized. With this, it is possible to say that there is evidence of other plots within the republic aiming at damaging the local political system. Certainly, more information about these criminal cases will be revealed in the course of the next few days.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Transnistria Vitaly Ignatiev also commented on the case. He stated that the situation is under control and that the president is working normally in his office, with assured security. Ignatiev also said that the republic will formally ask Ukraine to cooperate in the investigation of the sabotage attempt, providing all the necessary information to identify and capture those responsible for the failed attempt at terrorist attack.

Tiraspol’s authorities believe that Ukraine’s possible willingness to cooperate in punishing the saboteurs is the only way to prevent tensions from escalating. If Kiev refuses to cooperate, it will be making clear that in fact there was a deliberate operation by the regime to destabilize Transnistria, and not a unilateral action by some Ukrainian spies. More than that: by denying cooperation Kiev will also be saying that it does not regret having planned the attack and suggesting that it will continue to plot against Transnistria, thus becoming an existential threat to the Republic.

In this sense, Foreign Minister Ignatiev also stated that if nothing is done by Kiev to help with the investigations, the Transnistrian government will request that the issue be discussed at the UN Security Council – a measure that would certainly be supported by the Russian Federation, which is greatest responsible for peace in the republic, keeping troops in the region to prevent illegal advances by the Moldovan government or foreign invasions.

Ukraine is unlikely to cooperate as Kiev has long practiced a policy of open terrorism against its opponents, carrying out illegal operations abroad. The assassination of Daria Dugina, the Bryansk attack, repeated drone incursions into undisputed Russian territory, and the recent assassination attempt on businessman Konstantin Malofeev make Ukrainian terrorism evident. However, to better understand the motives for sabotaging Transnistria, it is necessary to go beyond Ukraine and investigate the interests of the sponsors of the neo-Nazi regime: the Western governments.

It is necessary to take into account that the West has recently implemented a strategy of multiplying fronts. Faced with NATO’s imminent defeat in its war against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy, the objective now is to generate as many combat fronts as possible to distract Russian forces, forcing Moscow to keep soldiers in several conflict zones simultaneously.

This explains the Western pressure for Georgia to invade Abkhazia and South Ossetia – as well as the ongoing color revolution against the pro-peace government. It is also possible to understand the Azerbaijani sabotage against Artsakh and Armenia. And even the recent tensions between Kosovar terrorists and Serbian authorities can be analyzed from this perspective. All these are conflicts in which Russia would intervene supporting one of the sides, so it is in the West’s interest to intensify tensions so that Moscow maintains several combat fronts and increases its losses.

As it is possible to see, NATO tries to open these new combat fronts only in countries that are not part of the alliance, thus guaranteeing that new confrontations are fought without the need to involve the regular troops of the western countries – which are preserved for an eventual situation of direct war against Russia or China.

Indeed, Moscow has been actively working with local Transnistrian authorities to ensure that law and order is respected in the autonomous republic. The Western attempt to open new combat fronts has already been understood by Russian strategists, who work precisely trying to prevent tensions from escalating to open confrontation. It is possible that new eruptions of military frictions will arise in the coming months, but first the Russian government will do everything possible for these cases to be resolved through intelligence and diplomacy.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

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***

This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, ‘figures of courage’.

***

I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.

My own high point was when a judge in the Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench and growled at me: ‘You are just a peripatetic Australian like Assange.’ My name was on a list of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this judge spotted me as the one who had reported his role in the notorious case of the expelled Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered me a compliment.

I saw Julian in Belmarsh not long ago. We talked about books and the oppressive idiocy of the prison: the happy-clappy slogans on the walls, the petty punishments; they still won’t let him use the gym. He must exercise alone in a cage-like area where there is sign that warns about keeping off the grass. But there is no grass. We laughed; for a brief moment, some things didn’t seem too bad.

The laughter is a shield, of course. When the prison guards began to jangle their keys, as they like to do, indicating our time was up, he fell quiet. As I left the room he held his fist high and clenched as he always does. He is the embodiment of courage.

Those who are the antithesis of Julian: in whom courage is unheard of, along with principle and honour, stand between him and freedom. I am not referring to the Mafia regime in Washington whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a warning to us all, but rather to those who still claim to run a just democracy in Australia.

Anthony Albanese was mouthing his favourite platitude, ‘enough is enough’ long before he was elected prime minister of Australia last year. He gave many of us precious hope, including Julian’s family. As prime minister he added weasel words about ‘not sympathising’ with what Julian had done. Apparently we had to understand his need to cover his appropriated posteria in case Washington called him to order.

We knew it would take exceptional political if not moral courage for Albanese to stand up in the Australian Parliament — the same Parliament that will disport itself before Joe Biden in May — and say:

‘As prime minister, it is my government’s responsibility to bring home an Australian citizen who is clearly the victim of a great, vindictive injustice: a man who has been persecuted for the kind of journalism that is a true public service, a man who has not lied, or deceived — like so many of his counterfeit in the media, but has told people the truth about how the world is run.’

‘I call on the United States,’ a courageous and moral Prime Minister Albanese might say, ‘to withdraw its extradition application: to end the malign farce that has stained Britain’s once admired courts of justice and to allow the release of Julian Assange unconditionally to his family. For Julian to remain in his cell at Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the United Nations Raporteur has called it. It is how a dictatorship behaves.’

Alas, my daydream about Australia doing right by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of hope by Albanese is now close to a betrayal for which the historical memory will not forget him, and many will not forgive him. What, then, is he waiting for?

Remember that Julian was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government in 2013 largely because his own government had abandoned him. That alone ought to bring shame on those responsible: namely the Labor government of Julia Gillard.

So eager was Gillard to collude with the Americans in shutting down WikiLeaks for its truth telling that she wanted the Australian Federal Police to arrest Assange and take away his passport for what she called his ‘illegal’ publishing. The AFP pointed out that they had no such powers: Assange had committed no crime.

It is as if you can measure Australia’s extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the way it treats Julian Assange. Gillard’s pantomime grovelling to both houses of the US Congress is  cringing theatre on YouTube. Australia, she repeated, was America’s ‘great mate’. Or was it ‘little mate’?

Her foreign minister was Bob Carr, another Labor machine politician whom WikiLeaks exposed as an American informant, one of Washington’s useful boys in Australia. In his published diaries, Carr boasted knowing Henry Kissinger; indeed the Great Warmonger invited the foreign minister to go camping in the California woods, we learn.

Australian governments have repeatedly claimed that Julian has received full consular support, which is his right. When his lawyer Gareth Peirce and I met the Australian consul general in London, Ken Pascoe, I asked him, ‘What do you know of the Assange case.’

‘Just what I read in the papers,’ he replied with a laugh.

Today, Prime Minister Albanese is preparing this country for a ridiculous American-led war with China. Billions of dollars are to be spent on a war machine of submarines, fighter jets and missiles that can reach China. Salivating war mongering by ‘experts’ on the country’s oldest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Melbourne Age is a national embarrassment, or ought to be. Australia is a country with no enemies and China is its biggest trading partner.

This deranged servility to aggression is laid out in an extraordinary document called the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement. This states that American troops have ‘exclusive control over the access to [and] use of’ armaments and material that can be used in Australia in an aggressive war.

This almost certainly includes nuclear weapons. Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, ‘respects’ America on this, but clearly has no respect for Australians’ right to know.

Such obsequiousness was always there — not untypical of a settler nation that still has not made peace with the Indigenous origins and owners of where they live — but now it is dangerous.

China as the Yellow Peril fits Australia’s history of racism like a glove.  However, there is another enemy they don’t talk about. It is us, the public. It is our right to know. And our right to say no.

Since 2001, some 82 laws have been enacted in Australia to take away tenuous rights of expression and dissent and protect the cold war paranoia of an increasingly secret state, in which the head of the main intelligence agency, ASIO, lectures on the disciplines of ‘Australian values’. There are secret courts and secret evidence, and secret miscarriages of justice. Australia is said to be an inspiration for the master across the Pacific.

Bernard Collaery, David McBride and Julian Assange — deeply moral men who told the truth – are the enemies and victims of this paranoia. They, not Edwardian soldiers who marched for the King, are our true national heroes.

On Julian Assange, the Prime Minister has two faces. One face teases us with hope of his intervention with Biden that will lead to Julian’s freedom. The other face ingratiates itself with ‘POTUS’ and allows the Americans to do what they want with its vassal: to lay down targets that could result in catastrophe for all of us.

Will Albanese back Australia or Washington on Julian Assange? If he is ‘sincere’, as the more do-eyed Labor Party supporters say, what is he waiting for? If he fails to secure Julian’s release, Australia will cease to be sovereign. We will be little Americans. Official.

This is not about the survival of a free press. There is no longer a free press. There are refuges in the samizdat, such as this site. The paramount issue is justice and our most precious human right: to be free.

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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20^th century. Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here.  

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The US can’t seem to understand that the rest of the world, including Africa, doesn’t like to be pushed around. African nations’ refusal to reinforce US foreign policy in the UN General Assembly is a case in point.  During the Assembly’s February 16 vote on a resolution “deploring” Russia’s action in Ukraine, nearly half the nations who abstained were African, 15 of the 32, although only 54 of the UN’s 193 member nations are African. Those abstaining were Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

No African nations were on the list of nations introducing the resolution, and two of the seven who voted no—Eritrea and Mali—were African.

In 2022, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor deplored Congressman Gregory Meeks’s Countering Malign Russian Activities Act as “a totally unwarranted” intrusion that goes against international law, and the South African Development Corporation joined South Africa in that sentiment. The House had passed the Act on a voice vote, but the Senate at least seems to have realized that it was counterproductive, and not brought it up.

Nevertheless, on February 21, Republican legislators in the House introduced “H.Res.145 – Opposing the Republic of South Africa’s hosting of military exercises with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, and calling on the Biden administration to conduct a thorough review of the United States-South Africa relationship.”

The joint military exercises proceeded as planned, and security analysts rightly described the proposed US legislation as an act of desperation.

US uses trade preference to bully Ethiopia, China steps up

On January 1, 2022, the US canceled Ethiopia’s eligibility for the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) because of alleged human rights violations during Ethiopia’s Tigray War, a civil conflict waged from November 2020 to December 2022. The act had granted tariff free access to the US market to firms manufacturing in Ethiopia.

At the outset of the war, Ethiopia had the fastest growing economy on the African continent and the tariff free access had been stimulating the growth of its industrial capacity and generating foreign exchange. Two international firms, Hela Indochine Apparel PLC and Submarine Garment, left Ethiopia’s industrial park in Addis Ababa after the tariff free access was suspended, costing 5,000 Ethiopians, mostly poor women, their jobs.

The war ended in December, when federal forces defeated the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a longtime US proxy,  but the US is refusing to restore Ethiopia’s tariff free access unless the country agrees to cooperate with a UN investigation of war crimes.

International criminal investigations and prosecutions are typically a form of judicial imperialism designed to advance the foreign policy objectives of the US and its Western allies. Ethiopia has established its own process for investigating and prosecuting war crimes and moved to have the UN investigation terminated.

Meanwhile, as the US attempts to use AGOA as a carrot and stick to impose its will on Ethiopia, China has stepped up to offer Ethiopia tariff free access to its own, much larger market. In early March, Chinese Global Television Network host Zhong Shi spoke with Ethiopian Finance Minister Ahmed Shide.

“Chinese Global Television Network host Zhong Shi: China will grant zero tariff treatment to 98% of taxable items originating from Ethiopia starting March 1. How important is that for Ethiopia? And what are your expectations when that kicks off?

“Ethiopian Finance Minister Ahmed Shide: First of all, we would like to commend the leadership of China under President Xi Jinping for offering this zero tariff treatment for Ethiopia’s taxable export items, and also other countries. This shows very timely, and the proper decision from the People’s Republic of China to advance our cooperation. This will also facilitate export from Ethiopia to China, which is very, very important and the investment we made in the past, the fundamental objective was to enhance our production capacity. And this new decision is fully welcomed by our prime minister and the government and the companies, Ethiopian companies and international companies who are in Ethiopia, will benefit from this.

“And as a result of this, the production capacity in Ethiopia will be enhanced, and particularly at this point, where there is multiple challenges of COVID, International price increase due to conflict in Ukraine, climate related problems we have of drought, this will support a Ethiopia’s growth and development and as a solidarity, the purpose of political China has shown for the spirit is very useful and we are very thankful of this.”

China is already Ethiopia’s largest trading partner, source of investment, and project contractor. It is constructing the railroad between Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa and Djibouti’s ports on the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, at the interface of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

With its economy ravaged by the US’s two-year proxy war, Ethiopia has also turned to China for debt relief, which it hasn’t received from the IMF, where the US has veto power, or from the G20.

Imagining that it is still in an age of economic dominance rather than competition with the world’s other great powers, the US is shooting itself in the foot in Africa again.

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Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann(at)anngarrison.com.

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Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right, demagogic administration which includes Zionist bigots, setter colonizers, anti-multiculturalism preachers, and hate mongers have received an appropriate blowback over its monstrous and barbaric raids in the West Bank. The ruthless shedding of Palestinian blood has been followed by a societal implosion which is coming from within Israeli society as protestors attacked Netanyahu’s wife Sara and chanted slogans of ‘shame, shame’ while besieging the beauty parlor she attended. The ensuing chaos is symptomatic of how countries built as settler colonial projects will eventually meet an unenviable fate of self-destruction as authoritarianism is agitated against by the very polity it seeks to subjugate. The protests which rallied around calls to reverse sweeping reforms to the Israeli Supreme Court are now targeting the very foundations of the apartheid regime. 

As emblematic of countries that combine hard-line nationalist ideologies based on religious exclusion with crass capitalism that fills the coffers of one religious group at the expense of the other, “Israel” is witnessing glaring internal fissures. India is another country that comes to mind where Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party’s hardline Hindutva ideology has not only isolated the Muslim minority but resulted in farmer protests and a movement to establish an independent Sikh state called ‘Khalistan’. Ironically, with no counterarguments or proposals to pacify angry protestors, the Netanyahu government has conveniently labeled the protestors as ‘anarchists.’ Ironically, a government that has touted “Israel’s” façade of a Jewish democracy to legitimize Palestinian oppression is now facing ‘anarchy’ from the very society it seeks to govern through a social contract. This is a quintessential case of internal implosion.

Enabling factors of the crisis point at how the entire Israeli system is infested with corruption. Critics have argued that Sarah Netanyahu’s opulent life style and flaunting of wealth marks a stark contrast to the economic affairs of the Israeli entity or the plight of the common Israeli citizen. The Zionist regime has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the world with a corporate Jewish elite benefitting from profits through military-industrial complexes at the expense of the well-being for the common man. From 2017 onwards, “Israel’s” youth unemployment rates have witnessed persistent increases which includes a 0.84% increase to 8.79% in 2021.

Astronomical corruption reaches the very top. Sara Netanyahu has misappropriated public funds, overspent on household expenses, and sealed gifts from world leaders in the absence of accountability. In 2019, she accepted a plea bargain to settle the misusage of $100,000 in public funds for lavish meals from celebrity chefs at Netanyahu’s residence. Alongside cooks on the government’s payroll, she was also enmeshed in Netanyahu’s corruption trial which brought about “Israel’s” worst political crisis. The ugly nature of the Israeli political system and its culture of impunity for corruption is made worse as Netanyahu accepted gifts from billionaire friends which included extravagant jewelry for Sara. Through his influence, the Zionist Prime Minister tried to muzzle out voices by striking backroom deals for more favorable coverage of his wife in the press. Furthermore, the Knesset committee unabashedly approved new spending for the Netanyahu family which included thousands of expenses on trivial items such as makeup kits. These measures are deplorable and have backfired on the Netanyahu regime.

As a testament to the very nature of the Israeli regime and the bigoted society that it governs, internal political fissures have also accompanied the corrupt profile of Netanyahu’s wife. Scenes of occupation police forces, secret services, and helicopters calling to extract Netanyahu from her appointment demonstrate how “Israel” lacks the democratic maturity to apprehend, convict and put controversial political figures on trial. The truth is that many of the pseudo-pro-democracy protestors would never push for holding Israeli war crimes and the proliferation of settlements on occupied Palestinian territories, accountable. Even the media with so-called pseudo-liberal news outlets are bypassing state-sponsored apartheid and refraining from discussions while debating on corruption scandals in a society that remains polarized and divided yet ironically united on the subject of Palestine.

From the top echelons of power down to the common Israeli who resides on occupied land, the problem lies within. On the 4th of January, 2023 Yariv Levin announced plans to reform the judiciary which granted the governing coalition, a majority on a committee that appoints judges. Such unconstitutional moves do not represent democratic norms, customs, or principles which clearly means that “Israel” is not a civilized country. The supremacy of the law, constitution, and writ of the state should ideally reign supreme. That is not the case with “Israel”. According to a new report by The Conversation, Israeli politicians remain strongly motivated to strengthen ‘Haganah-minded politics’ with Haganah being one of the main Zionist paramilitary organizations till 1948.

The militarized orientation of the regime, the societal chaos, the corruption scandals, and the hollow ground on which this Netanyahu administration stands clearly show that Israeli society is imploding. There is little end in sight as protests continue to remain defiant with even members of the occupier security services joining the unrest. According to the New York Times, democracy cannot be saved in “Israel” when it never existed in the first place. The shaky foundations also serve as a wake-up call for the international community to call out the repression of the Netanyahu cabinet. Only then, can peace truly prevail in the Middle East and beyond.

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Hamzah Rifaat is a broadcast journalist, analyst, and visiting fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C., 2016.

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***

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted on Thursday that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were “impossible”, and he did not plan on implementing them.

Weeks before the Ukraine war broke out, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was yet to hear Ukraine’s words about readiness to swiftly start the implementation of the Minsk agreements during the meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Kremlin had previously said Russia did not expect any decisive breakthrough from the talks between President Putin and Macron.

“From what was said at the press conference [after Macron and Zelensky meeting], there were positive signals that a solution in Ukraine could only be based on the implementation of the Minsk agreements, which is true,” Peskov said.

“Economic risks that everyone faces. Because this tension is projected onto the situation both in the markets and on the stock exchanges of our country and others,” the spokesperson told reporters.

“As for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: we will not be able to implement it like that,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Spiegel published on Thursday.

According to Zelensky, he said the same thing to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the first and last meeting with him in the Normandy format in 2019.

“I told him the same thing as the other two. They were surprised and replied: ‘If we knew in advance that you would change the meaning of our meeting, then there would be problems even before the summit,'” Zelenskyy added.

The Ukrainian president said Kiev used the agreement only for the exchange of prisoners of war.

Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was in office from 2005 to 2021 said in an interview published in early December that the Minsk accords were signed to “give Ukraine time” to strengthen itself.

Merkel said

“The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

According to her,

“it was clear to everyone” that the conflict had been put on hold, noting that the issue had not been settled, “yet this was what gave Ukraine invaluable time.”

Merkel was the German chancellor when Ukraine’s state coup happened in 2014, and the Minsk accords on resolving the Donbass war were signed with her contribution.

Previously, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Merkel discussed her final encounters with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that during the ex-chancellor’s farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021 she felt “in terms of power politics, you’re done,” adding that “for Putin, only power counts.”

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