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Israel’s former military intelligence chief has said Israel convinced the US that Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani posed an “immediate threat” to American soldiers, the same language former President Trump used to justify his assassination at the time, although no evidence was ever provided for the claim.

Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force and was killed in Baghdad by a US drone strike in January 2020. At the time, Tamir Hayman served as the head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate. Hayman toldJewish News that Israel had provided the US with information to convince the US Soleimani posed a threat.

“We supplied the intelligence and shared analysis and over a long period of time they were eventually convinced that Soleimani was an immediate threat to American lives and its strategic posture in the Middle East,” Hayman said.

Trump told reporters at the time of the killing that Soleimani was “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.” The claim was never confirmed, and according to then-Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Soleimani was in Baghdad as part of an Iraqi mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

“I was supposed to meet him in the morning the day he was killed, he came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered from the Saudis to Iran,” Abdul-Mahdi said after the assassination.

Trump’s justification for the assassination later changed, and members of Congress briefed on the killing said the administration provided no evidence of “imminent attacks.” In a legally mandated memo to Congress issued in February 2020, the administration dropped the “imminent attacks” claim altogether.

The memo said the assassination was done to “protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against United States forces and interests, to degrade Iran’s and Quds Force-back militia’s ability to conduct attacks, and to end Iran’s strategic escalation of attacks.”

The series of events that led to Soleimani’s assassination was sparked by a rocket attack on a base in Kirkuk, Iraq, that killed a US contractor on December 27th, 2019. The US blamed the Kirkuk attack on Kataib Hezbollah, a Shia militia the US views as an Iranian proxy.

The US responded to the Kirkuk attack by launching airstrikes on several Kataib Hezbollah targets, killing 25 of the group’s fighters. The airstrikes enraged many Iraqis, and protesters stormed the US embassy. After the embassy incident, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Soleimani.

The US never substantiated the claim that Kataib Hezbollah was responsible for the Kirkuk attack. In February, Iraqi intelligence officials told The New York Times that it was more likely that ISIS carried out the Kirkuk attack. ISIS would also have the motive to spark fighting between the US and Iran and the Shia militias as they were previously allied against the Sunni terror group.

The drone strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, who led the Popular Mobilization Forces, a group of mostly Iraqi Shia militias that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS. The killings enraged many in Iraq and brought the US and Iran to the brink of war, but the standoff was defused after Iranian missile strikes on bases in Iraq housing US troops that didn’t result in any deaths. But to this day, Iran vows revenge for Soleimani’s death.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from American Herald Tribune

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As a teenager in the 1970s, I recall talking to my dad about fears of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. My dad took a broad view, suggesting that if U.S. and Soviet leaders were stupid enough to blow each other to smithereens, a billion Chinese people would be left to pick up the slack and move the world forward.

My dad was right about many things, but what he didn’t realize was that U.S. nuclear war plans (known as SIOPs) often called for the elimination of the USSR and China, even if China had had no involvement in events leading up to the war. Basically, the ruling U.S. nuclear war philosophy was: If you’re red, you’re dead.

Daniel Ellsberg wrote about this in his book, The Doomsday Machine. As I wrote in my review of that book:

“U.S. nuclear war plans circa 1960 envisioned a simultaneous attack on the USSR and China that would generate 600 million deaths after six months.  As Ellsberg notes, that is 100 Holocausts.  This plan was to be used even if China hadn’t directly attacked the U.S., i.e. the USSR and China were lumped together as communist bad guys who had to be eliminated together in a general nuclear war.  Only one U.S. general present at the briefing objected to this idea: David M. Shoup, a Marine general and Medal of Honor winner, who also later objected to the Vietnam War.”

What’s truly startling is that only one U.S. military leader present, General David Shoup, objected to the SIOP that would lead to the death of 600 million people in six months. A decade later, scientists learned that such a huge nuclear exchange would likely cause a nuclear winter that would kill billions due to famine. Truly, the (few) living would envy the (many) dead.

Mention of David Shoup’s name leads me to this fine article: “The Marine Corps legend who tried to stop the Vietnam War,” by James Clark. Shoup was a remarkable American who helped to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 from escalating to a nuclear war. Once he retired from the Marines, he became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and militarism in general, a worthy successor to General Smedley Butler.

The Joint Chiefs in 1961. General Shoup is on the far right, next to General Curtis LeMay, architect of SAC and of a possible nuclear doomsday

I urge you to read Clark’s article on Shoup, who quotes Shoup’s hard-won wisdom here:

About the Vietnam War, Shoup said “I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.”

In the Atlantic Monthly, Shoup, echoing the warning of Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex, wrote bluntly about America’s war culture and its anti-democratic nature:

Somewhat like a religion, the basic appeals of anti-Communism, national defense and patriotism provide the foundation for a powerful creed upon which the defense establishment can build, grow, and justify its cost. More so than many large bureaucratic organizations, the defense establishment now devotes a large share of its efforts to self-perpetuation, to justifying its organizations, to preaching its doctrines, to self-maintenance and management.

You would think that a Medal of Honor recipient who’d proved his bravery and patriotism at Tarawa during World War II would be immune from charges of being unpatriotic or weak on defense, but you’d be wrong.

Where are today’s Shoups among the U.S. military brass? Where are the leaders who are against genocidal nuclear war and who are willing to speak out against it? Where are the leaders who reject a new cold war with China and Russia? Where are the leaders with the courage to advocate for peace whenever possible in place of more and more war?

Have we fallen so far under the spell of militarism that America no longer produces leaders like Dwight Eisenhower, Smedley Butler, and David Shoup, generals who truly knew war, despised it, and wanted above all to put an end to it?

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In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed.

Uranium mills that helped fuel the weapons also dumped radioactive and toxic waste into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in Colorado. Thousands of sheep turned blue and died after foraging on land tainted by processing sites in North Dakota. And cancer wards across the West swelled with sick uranium workers.

The U.S. government bankrolled the industry, and mining companies rushed to profit, building more than 50 mills and processing sites to refine uranium ore.

But the government didn’t have a plan for the toxic byproducts of this nuclear assembly line. Some of the more than 250 million tons of toxic and radioactive detritus, known as tailings, scattered into nearby communities, some spilled into streams and some leaked into aquifers.

Congress finally created the agency that now oversees uranium mill waste cleanup in 1974 and enacted the law governing that process in 1978, but the industry would soon collapse due to falling uranium prices and rising safety concerns. Most mills closed by the mid-1980s.

When cleanup began, federal regulators first focused on the most immediate public health threat, radiation exposure. Agencies or companies completely covered waste at most mills to halt leaks of the carcinogenic gas radon and moved some waste by truck and train to impoundments specially designed to encapsulate it.

But the government has fallen down in addressing another lingering threat from the industry’s byproducts: widespread water pollution.

Regulators haven’t made a full accounting of whether they properly addressed groundwater contamination. So, for the first time, ProPublica cataloged cleanup efforts at the country’s 48 uranium mills, seven related processing sites and numerous tailings piles.

Uranium Mill Waste Is Concentrated in the Four Corners Region

Data obtained by ProPublica via public agency documents and satellite imaging tools; map by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

At least 84% of the sites have polluted groundwater. And nearly 75% still have either no liner or only a partial liner between mill waste and the ground, leaving them susceptible to leaking pollution into groundwater. In the arid West, where most of the sites are located, climate change is drying up surface water, making underground reserves increasingly important.

ProPublica’s review of thousands of pages of government and corporate documents, accompanied by interviews with 100 people, also found that cleanup has been hampered by infighting among regulatory agencies and the frequency with which regulators grant exemptions to their own water quality standards.

The result: a long history of water pollution and sickness.

Reports by government agencies found high concentrations of cancer near a mill in Utah and elevated cancer risks from mill waste in New Mexico that can persist until cleanup is complete. Residents near those sites and others have seen so many cases of cancer and thyroid disease that they believe the mills and waste piles are to blame, although epidemiological studies to prove such a link have rarely been done.

“The government didn’t pay attention up front and make sure it was done right. They just said, ‘Go get uranium,’” said Bill Dixon, who spent decades cleaning up uranium and nuclear sites with the state of Oregon and in the private sector.

Tom Hanrahan grew up near uranium mills in Colorado and New Mexico and watched three of his three brothers contract cancer. He believes his siblings were “casualties” of the war effort.

“Somebody knew that this was a ticking atomic bomb,” Hanrahan said. “But, in military terms, this was the cost of fighting a war.”

A Flawed System

When a uranium mill shuts down, here is what’s supposed to happen: The company demolishes the buildings, decontaminates the surrounding soil and water, and encases the waste to stop it from leaking cancer-causing pollution. The company then asks the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the lead agency monitoring America’s radioactive infrastructure, to approve the handoff of the property and its associated liability to the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management for monitoring and maintenance.

ProPublica’s analysis found that half of the country’s former mills haven’t made it through this process and even many that did have never fully addressed pollution concerns. This is despite the federal government spending billions of dollars on cleanup, in addition to the several hundred million dollars that have been spent by companies.

Often, companies or agencies tasked with cleanup are unable to meet water quality standards, so they request exemptions to bypass them. The NRC or state agencies almost always approve these requests, allowing contaminants like uranium and selenium to be left in the groundwater. When ingested in high quantities, those elements can cause cancer and damage the nervous system, respectively.

The DOE estimates that some sites have individually polluted more than a billion gallons of water.

Bill Dam, who spent decades regulating and researching uranium mill cleanup with the NRC, at the DOE and in the private sector, said water pollution won’t be controlled until all the waste and contaminated material is moved. “The federal government’s taken a Band-Aid approach to groundwater contamination,” he said.

The pollution has disproportionately harmed Indian Country.

Residents of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in southeast Utah protest the last active uranium mill in the country, called the White Mesa Mill, which is operated by Energy Fuels. Credit: Liz Moughon and Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica

Six of the mills were built on reservations, and another eight mills are within 5 miles of one, some polluting aquifers used by tribes. And the country’s last conventional uranium mill still in operation — the White Mesa Mill in Utah — sits adjacent to a Ute Mountain Ute community.

So many uranium mines, mills and waste piles pockmark the Navajo Nation that the Environmental Protection Agency created a comic book superhero, Gamma Goat, to warn Diné children away from the sites.

A comic book produced by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999 warns children about the dangers of abandoned uranium mines, mills and waste in the Navajo Nation. Credit: Illustrations by Jay Robinson. Graphic composition by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

NRC staff acknowledged that the process of cleaning up America’s uranium mills can be slow but said that the agency prioritizes thoroughness over speed, that each site’s groundwater conditions are complex and unique, and that cleanup exemptions are granted only after gathering input from regulators and the public.

“The NRC’s actions provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety and the environment,” David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, said in a statement to ProPublica.

“Cleanup Standards Might Suddenly Change”

For all the government’s success in demolishing mills and isolating waste aboveground, regulators failed to protect groundwater.

Between 1958 and 1962, a mill near Gunnison, Colorado, churned through 540,000 tons of ore. The process, one step in concentrating the ore into weapons-grade uranium, leaked uranium and manganese into groundwater, and in 1990, regulators found that residents had been drawing that contaminated water from 22 wells.

The DOE moved the waste and connected residents to clean water. But pollution lingered in the aquifer beneath the growing town where some residents still get their water from private wells. The DOE finally devised a plan in 2000, which the NRC later approved, settling on a strategy called “natural flushing,” essentially waiting for groundwater to dilute the contamination until it reached safe levels.

In 2015, the agency acknowledged that the plan had failed. Sediments absorb and release uranium, so waiting for contamination to be diluted doesn’t solve the problem, said Dam, the former NRC and DOE regulator.

In Wyoming, state regulators wrote to the NRC in 2006 to lambast the agency’s “inadequate” analysis of natural flushing compared to other cleanup options. “Unfortunately, the citizens of Wyoming may likely have to deal with both the consequences and the indirect costs of the NRC’s decisions for generations to come,” the state’s letter said.

ProPublica identified mills in six states — including eight former mill sites in Colorado — where regulators greenlit the strategy as part of a cleanup plan.

When neither water treatment nor nature solves the problem, federal and state regulators can simply relax their water quality standards, allowing harmful levels of pollutants to be left in aquifers.

First image: A photo of a site marker at the Gunnison disposal cell taken in September 2022 by government officials. Second image: A 1992 report from the Department of Energy showing how to move waste from the Gunnison mill. Credit: Graphic composition by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

County officials made a small area near the Gunnison mill off-limits to new wells, and the DOE suggested changing water quality standards to allow uranium concentrations as much as 475 times what naturally occurred in the area. It wouldn’t endanger human health, the agency said, because people wouldn’t come into contact with the water.

ProPublica found that regulators granted groundwater cleanup exemptions at 18 of the 28 sites where cleanup has been deemed complete and liability has been handed over to the DOE’s Office of Legacy Management. Across all former uranium mills, the NRC or state agencies granted at least 34 requests for water quality exemptions while denying as few as three.

“They’re cutting standards, so we’re getting weak cleanup that future generations may not find acceptable,” said Paul Robinson, who spent four decades researching the cleanup of the uranium industry with the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit. “These great mining companies of the world, they got away cheap.”

NRC staffers examine studies that are submitted by companies’ consultants and other agencies to show how cleanup plans will adequately address water contamination. Some companies change their approach in response to feedback from regulators, and the public can view parts of the process in open meetings. Still, the data and groundwater modeling that underpin these requests for water cleanup exemptions are often wrong.

One reason: When mining companies built the mills, they rarely sampled groundwater to determine how much contamination occurred naturally, leaving it open to debate how clean groundwater should be when the companies leave, according to Roberta Hoy, a former uranium program specialist with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality. She said federal regulators also haven’t done enough to understand certain contaminants at uranium mills.

In one recent case, the NRC fined a mining company $14,500 for incomplete and inaccurate groundwater modeling data. Companies use such data to prove that pollution won’t spread in the future. Freeport-McMoRan, the corporation that owns the fined mining company, did not respond to a request for comment.

At a 2013 conference co-hosted by the NRC and a mining trade group, a presentation from two consultants compared groundwater modeling to a sorcerer peering at a crystal ball.

ProPublica identified at least seven sites where regulators granted cleanup exemptions based on incorrect groundwater modeling. At these sites, uranium, lead, nitrates, radium and other substances were found at levels higher than models had predicted and regulators had allowed.

McIntyre, the NRC spokesperson, said that groundwater models “inherently include uncertainty,” and the government typically requires sites to be monitored. “The NRC requires conservatism in the review process and groundwater monitoring to verify a model’s accuracy,” he said.

Water quality standards impose specific limits on the allowable concentration of contaminants — for example, the number of micrograms of uranium per liter of water. But ProPublica found that the NRC granted exemptions in at least five states that were so vague they didn’t even include numbers and were instead labeled as “narrative.” The agency justified this by saying the groundwater was not near towns or was naturally unfit for human consumption.

This system worries residents of Cañon City, Colorado. Emily Tracy, who serves on the City Council, has lived a few miles from the area’s now-demolished uranium mill since the late 1970s and remembers floods and winds carrying mill waste into neighborhoods from the 15.3-million-ton pile, which is now partially covered.

Uranium and other contaminants had for decades tainted private wells that some residents used for drinking water and agriculture, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The company that operated the mill, Cotter Corp., finally connected residents to clean water by the early 1990s and completed cleanup work such as decontaminating soil after the EPA got involved. But the site remains without a final cleanup plan — which the company that now owns the site is drafting — and the state has eased water quality standards for molybdenum, a metal that uranium mining and milling releases into the environment.

First image: Golfers watch as wind blows uranium mill waste off a now-covered pile at the Cotter Uranium Mill. Second image: Drone footage shot in July 2021 that shows the site of the former Cotter mill. Credit: Photos courtesy of Emily Tracy. Graphic composition by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

“We have great concerns about what it might look like or whether cleanup standards might suddenly change before our eyes,” Tracy said.

Jim Harrington, managing director of the site’s current owner, Colorado Legacy Land, said that a final cleanup strategy has not been selected and that any proposal would need to be approved by both the EPA and the state.

Layers of Regulation

It typically takes 35 years from the day a mill shuts down until the NRC approves or estimates it will approve cleanup as being complete, ProPublica found. Two former mills aren’t expected to finish this process until 2047.

Chad Smith, a DOE spokesperson, said mills that were previously transferred to the government have polluted groundwater more than expected, so regulators are more cautious now.

The involvement of so many regulators can also slow cleanup.

Five sites were so contaminated that the EPA stepped in via its Superfund program, which aims to clean up the most polluted places in the country.

At the Homestake mill in New Mexico, where cleanup is jointly overseen by the NRC and the EPA, Larry Camper, a now-retired NRC division director, acknowledged in a 2011 meeting “that having multiple regulators for the site is not good government” and had complicated the cleanup, according to meeting minutes.

Homestake Mining Company of California did not comment on Camper’s view of the process.

Only one site where the EPA is involved in cleanup has been successfully handed off to the DOE, and even there, uranium may still persist above regulatory limits in groundwater and surface water, according to the agency. An EPA spokesperson said the agency has requested additional safety studies at that site.

“A lot of people make money in the bureaucratic system just pontificating over these things,” said William Turner, a geologist who at different times has worked for mining companies, for the U.S. Geological Survey and as the New Mexico Natural Resources Trustee.

If the waste is on tribal land, it adds another layer of government.

The federal government and the Navajo Nation have long argued over the source of some groundwater contamination at the former Navajo Mill built by Kerr-McGee Corp. in Shiprock, New Mexico, with the tribe pointing to the mill as the key source. Smith of the DOE said the department is guided by water monitoring results “to minimize opportunities for disagreement.”

Tronox, which acquired parts of Kerr-McGee, did not respond to requests for comment.

All the while, 2.5 million tons of waste sit adjacent to the San Juan River in the town of 8,000 people. Monitoring wells situated between the unlined waste pile and the river have shown nitrate levels as high as 80 times the limit set by regulators to protect human health, uranium levels 30 times the limit and selenium levels 20 times the limit.

“I can’t seem to get the federal agencies to acknowledge the positions of the Navajo Nation,” said Dariel Yazzie, who formerly managed the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Program.

A 1977 report from the EPA acknowledging water pollution at the Shiprock mill Credit: Photo by the Department of Energy. Graphic composition by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

At some sites, overlapping jurisdictions mean even less cleanup gets done.

Such was the case near Griffin, North Dakota, where six cows and 2,500 sheep died in 1973; their bodies emitted a blue glow in the morning light. The animals lay near kilns that once served as rudimentary uranium mills operated by Kerr-McGee. To isolate the element, piles of uranium-laden coal at the kilns were “covered with old tires, doused in diesel fuel, ignited, and left to smolder for a couple of months,” according to the North Dakota Geological Survey.

The flock is believed to have been poisoned by land contaminated with high levels of molybdenum. The danger extended beyond livestock. In a 1989 draft environmental assessment, the DOE found that “fatal cancer from exposure to residual radioactive materials” from the Griffin kilns and another site less than a mile from a town of 1,000 people called Belfield was eight times as high as it would have been if the sites had been decontaminated.

But after agreeing to work with the federal government, North Dakota did an about-face. State officials balked at a requirement to pay 10% of the cleanup cost — the federal government would cover the rest — and in 1995 asked that the sites no longer be regulated under the federal law. The DOE had already issued a report that said doing nothing “would not be consistent” with the law, but the department approved the state’s request and walked away, saying it could only clean a site if the state paid its share.

“North Dakota determined there was minimal risk to public health at that time and disturbing the grounds further would create a potential for increased public health risk,” said David Stradinger, manager of the Radiation Control Program in the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality. Contaminated equipment was removed, and the state is reevaluating one of the sites, he said.

“A Problem for the Better Part of 50 Years”

While the process for cleaning up former mills is lengthy and laid out in regulations, regulators and corporations have made questionable and contradictory decisions in their handling of toxic waste and tainted water.

More than 40 million people rely on drinking water from the Colorado River, but the NRC and DOE allowed companies to leak contamination from mill waste directly into the river, arguing that the waterway quickly dilutes it.

Federal regulators relocated tailings at two former mills that processed uranium and vanadium, another heavy metal, on the banks of the Colorado River in Rifle, Colorado, because radiation levels there were deemed too high. Yet they left some waste at one former processing site in a shallow aquifer connected to the river and granted an exemption that allowed cleanup to end and uranium to continue leaking into the waterway.

Uranium contamination extends several miles in an aquifer under the Bluewater disposal site in New Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

For a former mill built by the Anaconda Copper Company in Bluewater, New Mexico, the NRC approved the company’s request to hand the site off to the DOE in 1997. About a decade later, the state raised concerns about uranium that had spread several miles in an aquifer that provides drinking water for more than 15,000 people.

The contamination hasn’t reached the wells used by nearby communities, and Smith, the DOE spokesperson, said the department has no plans to treat the uranium in the aquifer. It’s too late for much more cleanup, since the DOE’s Office of Legacy Management’s mission is to monitor and maintain decommissioned sites, not clean them. Flawed cleanup efforts caused problems at several former mills after they were handed off to the agency, according to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report.

“Uranium has been overplayed as a boom,” said Travis Stills, an environmental attorney in Colorado who has sued over the cleanup of old uranium infrastructure. “The boom was a firecracker, and it left a problem for the better part of 50 years now.”

“No Way in Hell We’re Going to Leave This Stuff Here”

Mining companies can’t remove every atom of uranium from groundwater, experts said, but they can do a better job of decommissioning uranium mills. With the federal government yet to take control of half the country’s former mills, regulators still have time to compel some companies to do more cleanup.

Between 1958 and 1961, the Lakeview Mining Company generated 736,000 tons of tailings at a uranium mill in southern Oregon. Like at most sites, uranium and other pollution leaked into an aquifer.

“There’s no way in hell we’re going to leave this stuff here,” Dixon, the nuclear cleanup specialist, remembered thinking. He represented the state of Oregon at the former mill, which was one of the first sites to relocate its waste to a specially engineered disposal cell.

First image: A warning sign at the Lakeview disposal site. The photo appeared in a DOE annual report. Second image: A 1984 report from the Oregon Department of Energy discusses possible sites to host relocated mill tailings. Credit: Graphic composition by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica

A local advisory committee at the Lakeview site allowed residents and local politicians to offer input to federal regulators. By the end of the process, the government had paid to connect residents to a clean drinking water system and the waste was moved away from the town, where it was contained by a 2-foot-thick clay liner and covered with 3 feet of rocks, soil and vegetation. Local labor got priority for cleanup contracts, and a 170-acre solar farm now stands on the former mill site.

But relocation isn’t required. At some sites, companies and regulators saw a big price tag and either moved residents away or merely left the waste where it was.

“I recognize Lakeview is easy and it’s a drop in the bucket compared to New Mexico,” Dixon said, referring to the nation’s largest waste piles. “But it’s just so sad to see that this hasn’t been taken care of.”

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Mark Olalde is a Reporter at ProPublica covering the environment in the Southwest.

Mollie Simon is a research reporter at ProPublica.

Alex is a research reporter for the Local Reporting Network at ProPublica.

Gerardo del Valle is a Video and Film Fellow with ProPublica.

Liz Moughon is a Video and Film Fellow at ProPublica.

Mauricio Rodríguez Pons is a visual journalist.

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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Two years after the traumatic experience of leaving Tehran at the time of the start corona, in December I had the opportunity to visit Iran again. Colleague Vladimir Trapara and I participated in a large international conference sponsored by Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and organized by their leading institute for international relations, IPIS.

The opportunity to visit Iran at this time has aroused great interest among Serbian and International, especially western colleagues. Namely, if you follow the western media and especially various foreign services in Persian language, you get the impression that everything is on fire there, that hundreds of thousands of people are protesting and that the country is facing great instability. So this was an extraordinary opportunity to see what is really happening, and to evaluate the reports I hear about the situation in both domestic and foreign media with the most competent Iranian colleagues.

As is well known, Iran experienced a wave of protests after September 22, when a young woman, Masha Amini, died in the custody of the Iranian moral police. A prominent place among the protesters was occupied by women, especially younger ones, then students and other parts of the urban population. The Western media covered all of this with rhetoric about a spontaneous protest, about the struggle for the emancipation and liberation of women who allegedly live in a servile and humiliating position in Iran, etc. This version from the cartoons or fairytales, of course, also has another side, which unfortunately you cannot hear in the Serbian and western media.

Image is from InfoBrics

The prehistory of these events begins in July, when the media announced that Iranian services had carried out hacking attacks on Albania’s cyber space. This happened again in September, which led to the expulsion of Iranian diplomats and the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Why Albania? Well, this open Balkan friend and partner of ours has a very interesting and specific place in the intelligence world. In addition to being the center of the Gulenist network in the Balkans since 2016, Albania is also one of the two most important centers for the activities of the Iranian opposition. During my last visit to Tehran in 2020, colleagues from their Strategy Institute showed me photos of troll factories located in this country, where hundreds of Iranians sit in hangars and wage cyberwars, write comments as bots acting subversively against the current order in Tehran. Everything happens, of course, with the support of the host, in coordination with the Western intelligence systems, and the money is provided by the Middle Eastern country that most often finances such things, which happens to be the patron of Wahhabism around the world.

So the supposedly spontaneous protests that began after September 22 were prepared months in advance in coordination with Western intelligence systems. We will remember the protests from 2009, and on several other occasions the same actors tried to undermine or overthrow the regime in Iran. Let’s remember that in the meantime, evidence was disclosed that MI6 and the CIA organized a coup in 1953 that overthrew the democratic government of Muhammad Mossadegh, so the accusations of the same actors today have full logic and legitimacy. The Americans have not had an embassy there since 1979, and the former embassy where the hostages were kept, today is a museum that can be visited with everything found there, including interrogation rooms or a special section for encryption and similar operations. Today the institution exists under the name Museum of the USA Den of Spionage.

But the British are also present with the embassy, and Iranian officials again accused them of subversion. It is also extremely interesting that the late Masha was from the Kurdish part of Iran, which has also become the subject of serious international interest in recent months. This part of the imaginary Kurdistan was the only one that was peaceful during the last decades and there were no serious rebellions and unrest in it. In the Iraqi and Syrian parts, separate states within the state were created, and in the Turkish part, there are constant fights between the central government in Ankara and parts of the PKK, which Turkey defines as a terrorist organization. That is why many international actors are interested in burning that part as well.

As a result of the protests, the regime abolished the so-called Moral Police, which the opposition considers a great victory. On the streets of Tehran, girls and women walking without covering their hair can be seen en masse. This is especially pronounced in the north, where the wealthier parts of the elite live, as well as around the universities. In the southern parts of the city and in other places, this is not the case. The authorities believe that in these conditions it was necessary to show a certain flexibility so that the protests would not turn into even more serious manifestations, where dissatisfaction could go to the side of social protests due to inflation and the like.

The protests have slowly died down and life is going on normally. From time to time, for example, several hundred protesters gather around some university or in Tajriz square, and in the evening, even from the apartments of young people, you can hear chants of “death to the dictator”, directed against the supreme leader. The future will show whether this episode was another failed attempt at destabilization or the beginning of some more serious processes of westernization of society. In an increasing number of newly opened cafes, young people drink coffee instead of tea, while the music that can be heard in any western bar, but is not yet on the radio, comes from the speakers.

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Misa Djurkovic is a researcher from Belgrade, Serbia and at the time director of the Belgrade based Institute of European Studies.

Featured image: Iranian protestors on the Keshavrz Boulvard (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

Today, the Foreign Ministers of Turkey and Syria will meet in Moscow.  This is the highest level meeting between the two countries who have been on opposite sides of the US-NATO war on Syria for regime change since 2011.

The outcome of that meeting, and the expected follow-up meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, may form the basis for the recovery of Syria, circumventing the UN resolution 2254, which has failed to produce results.

The US has lost the war, but has used armed militias to remain occupying parts of Syria, and to impose a stalemate which prevents a peaceful solution and recovery for Syria.  America is no longer the only superpower, and decisions made in the new Middle East no longer depend on orders from the US State Department.

Erdogan is up for re-election in June and faces heavy opposition. The economy is dismal, and people blame the Syrian refugees for lost jobs and social ills.  Erdogan and the opposition promise to send the refugees packing.

The Turkish export market to Syria in 2011 represented half of the entire global export market for Turkey.  That was lost when Damascus banned all Turkish imports because of their participation in the war on Syria. Erdogan could get the Syrian market restored by repairing the relationship.

In order to win re-election, Erdogan proposes a rapprochement with Assad.  The US has voiced its displeasure at any attempt of any country to repair relations with Syria.  However, Erdogan will not be swayed by US opinion or threats, in light of the fact that the US supports, trains and supplies weapons to the Kurdish militia (SDF and YPG) linked to an internationally banned terrorist organization (PKK), which have killed thousands in Turkey over three decades of terrorism. The Kurds know that Turkey is a much more important ally to the US, and the US will never fight Turkey to save the Kurds.  Former US envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, told the Kurds they should repair their relationship with Damascus for protection. The US never supported a “homeland” for the Kurds.

Syria and Turkey are united in their goal to demilitarize the Kurdish northeast of Syria.  Syria and Turkey share a common enemy (the Kurds), and a common ally (Russia). This may be the basis of forming a new foreign policy between the two neighbors.

Syria

Syrian officials have met with Turkish officials and Arab Gulf officials.  Some Arab embassies in Damascus were re-opened, and Assad made a visit to the UAE.

The Assad administration in Damascus controls the vast majority of the Syrian territory.  The exceptions are: Idlib province in the northwest is under the occupation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Radical Islamic terrorist group which was the former Al Qaeda branch in Syria, and the Kurdish administration region in the northeast under the occupation of about 600 US troops and two local Kurdish militias (SDF and YPG) which follow a communist political ideology first promoted by the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Syria and Russia have been prevented from attacking and liberating Idlib from terrorist control. The US uses the three million civilians living under occupation as human shields to prevent attack. The US and its allies in the UN demand that the UN food and medical supplies be delivered to Idlib. The civilians are being fed and clothed, but the terrorists and their families are as well. The international community is supporting the welfare of the terrorists, who are there at the behest of the US, to prevent peace and recovery in Syria.  Despite the UN protocol which demands all UN members to fight Al Qaeda, or their affiliates, anywhere on earth, the US and Turkey have circumvented the protocol and use the terrorists as guards of the political stalemate which the US imposed on Syria.

The US

America has maintained an iron grip on Syria through the use of US sanctions and a brutal military occupation which has prevented the Syrian citizens from fuel for transportation and home heating, and to generate electricity.  Syrian houses, hospitals, schools and businesses have between 15 minutes to 1 hour of electricity in four intervals per day because of the US imposed sanctions, which have not affected the Syrian government, but have brought the Syrian people to desperation. Kidney dialysis machines require electricity constantly.  A gasoline powered generator can suffice when there are blackouts, but the US sanctions also prevent the importation of gasoline.  How can Syrians survive?

Despite Richard Haass writing in 1998 that US sanctions are ineffective and immoral against civilians, the US State Department hangs on to sanctions as a tool for regime change.

Iran

Iran and Syria have been united in their resistance to the occupation of Palestine Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms.  Iran stood firmly with Syria during the US-NATO attack on Syria because it is a key in the land route from Iran to Lebanon. Recently, there are some cracks appearing in the relationship between Damascus and Tehran.  Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s meeting in Damascus was postponed recently. Some experts feel Iran has been asking too much of Syria, and with new opportunities for improved relations with the Arab Gulf and Turkey, Syria may be taking time to evaluate its options.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries want to see Iran out of Syria.  As long as Iran is in Syria the Israeli airstrikes will continue, which have been deadly and destructive.

There were 32 Israeli raids in 2022 that destroyed and struck 91 targets, including civilian infrastructure, buildings, weapons caches and vehicles. Eighty-eight military personnel were killed and 121 wounded in the attacks.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is the United States’ largest foreign military sales customer, with more than $100 billion in active cases.  In the US there is a saying, “The customer is always right.”

Perhaps this may explain why the US takes no action against Saudi Arabia even when there have been deadly issues, or when Biden asked the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to pump more oil, and he refused.

MBS is making huge reforms, which includes loosening restrictions on women, and creating new tourism and international sports opportunities.

MBS and Netanyahu are united in a common issue: to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite Iran insisting on wanting nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes, such as energy production and medical research.  Netanyahu has stated one of his main priorities in office will be to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia.

The Arab League

The upcoming Arab League Summit will take place in Saudi Arabia, traditionally scheduled yearly in March.  Depending on the outcome of meetings between now and spring, Syria could possibly be reinstated and occupy their seat at the table.  Big changes have been taking place in the region involving the relations between Arab countries and the US, China and Russia. Saudi Arabia is in the driver’s seat and will use their hosting of the summit to project their ranking as the Middle East’s power broker.

Israel

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has announced that the next Abraham Accords summit will be held in Morocco in March 2023.

The US had brokered in 2020 the Abraham Accords for the normalization of relations between Israel, Morocco, the UAE and Bahrain. Later, Sudan joined the accords.  Areas of shared interests are: defense, investment, agriculture, tourism, and energy.

The meetings and realignments between Syria and Turkey, mediated by Russia, may produce lasting changes in the Middle East, and bring enemies together as new friends.  The Israeli occupation of Palestine will continue to be the primary cause of instability and violence in the region.  It fuels religious extremism and terrorism. If Israel values the establishment of relations with their Arab neighbors, they must first look at their closest neighbors in Gaza and the West Bank.  The Middle East and the world wait for a peace summit to begin the process of peace for Israel and Palestine, and the host country will not likely be the US.

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Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

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***

The latest demand by neocons that Russia must be wiped off the map is locked up behind a paywall at the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post. In order to read what former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote, I used a browser text reader to bypass the paywall.

Rice and Gates argue:

The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future is to help Ukraine push back the invader now. That is the lesson of history that should guide us, and it lends urgency to the actions that must be taken—before it is too late.

In other words, this must happen prior to Russia concluding its SMO and its eradication of neo-Nazis elevated and empowered after the USG staged a 2014 coup in Kyiv.

For Putin, defeat is not an option… He cannot cede to Ukraine the four eastern provinces he has declared part of Russia. If he cannot be militarily successful this year, he must retain control of positions in eastern and southern Ukraine that provide future jumping-off points for renewed offensives to take the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, control the entire Donbas region and then move west. Eight years separated Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its invasion nearly a year ago.

When Rice and Gates claim Russia intends to “move west,” they are exploiting a Big Lie—invented by the USG and telegraphed by a corporate propaganda media—that Russia intends to occupy the whole of Ukraine, and who knows, possibly Europe and maybe the whole world!

Vladimir Putin remains fully committed to bringing all of Ukraine back under Russian control or — failing that — destroying it as a viable country. He believes it is his historical destiny — his messianic mission — to reestablish the Russian Empire and, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed years ago, there can be no Russian Empire without Ukraine.

The Russian SMO objectives say nothing about conquering all of Ukraine or the absurd lie that Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Empire. Rice and Gates know this. They are repeating falsehoods because Big Lies must be repeated over and over in order for lies to become faux “facts” (that do not require corroboration or evidence) similar to the way the Gulf of Tonkin lie resulted in the Vietnam War and three million dead people in Southeast Asia.

There is but one “messianic mission”—that of total neoliberal conquest, domination, and neutralization of any nation that does not play by “rules-based” authoritarianism.

Gates and Rice cite Zbigniew Brzeziński on Ukraine. His mention provides an opportunity. Brzeziński, the architect of intervention in Afghanistan and a Russophobe, wrote at length about the objectives of the global financial elite.

The three grand imperatives of imperial [neoliberal] geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. (“The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.”)

The “barbarians” are those in opposition to the “geostrategy” of psychopaths.

The lesson of Moammar Gadaffi, raped with a knife, and brutally assassinated, is that if you refuse to participate in the neoliberal game of theft and murder, you will be eliminated, and gruesomely so.

In the past, this was accomplished in the dark by covert means. Now it is performed at high noon, with the sun blazing above, so all can see and take stock. The message sent: either accept the fiat dollar-dominated financial swindle or be turned out as a corpse.

Rice and Gates lay out what they consider unacceptable.

Absent another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces, Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months of military stalemate pass. Under current circumstances, any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their invasion whenever they are ready. That is unacceptable.

Really, these people can’t help it. They are pathological liars.

The Ukronazis have yet to realize a “breakthrough and success” in preventing Russia’s SMO from terminating their murderous ethnic cleansing agenda.

It is now virtually impossible for Ukraine’s decimated armed forces to push Russia out of the eastern and southern regions of the country. Donbas is now part of the Russian Federation. It is the will of the people living there who have suffered eight years of Ukronazi bombardment and terrorism. Gates and Rice have nothing to say about that ongoing war crime. For them, the lives of ethnic Russians are immaterial. The “rules” demand they be terrorized, executed, tortured, and raped.

The solution is simple, according to Rice and Gates. Forget about a negotiated settlement, a peace deal. According to the neocon duo, defeating Russia is a simple matter—it requires battle tanks, more artillery, Lockheed Martin HIMARS, Patriot missiles, drones, fighting vehicles, etc., thrown into the cauldron. Not to worry, though. Future generations will pay down the massive debt incurred—if there are future generations.

Let’s face it—our “elder statesmen” (and women) are conscienceless psychopaths. They are addicted to war and its organized mass murder to achieve globalist political ends. They are unable or unwilling to accept that by far most people on the planet are disgusted by their threats, self-serving “rules,” forever wars, and insistence on calling the shots, never mind how many people must die.

Increasingly, members of Congress and others in our public discourse ask, “Why should we care? This is not our fight.” But the United States has learned the hard way — in 1914, 1941 and 2001 — that unprovoked aggression and attacks on the rule of law and the international order cannot be ignored. Eventually, our security was threatened and we were pulled into conflict. This time, the economies of the world — ours included — are already seeing the inflationary impact and the drag on growth caused by Putin’s single-minded aggression. It is better to stop him now, before more is demanded of the United States and NATO as a whole. We have a determined partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to do so ourselves in the future.

The above quote is riddled with lies.

1914, 1941, 2001. Indeed, unprovoked aggression.

If not for the economic warfare imposed on Japan by FDR and the USG (similar to the economic warfare now waged against Russia and China), the Japanese would not have attacked Pearl Harbor and FDR’s “day of infamy” would have never occurred. FDR and the USG would not have had an excuse to enter another disastrous war, a hedious war concluded with the use of atomic weapons.

If not for the financial support of Wall Street and German industrialists, Hitler would have never come to power, and war in Europe would have been avoided. Harsh “war reparations” imposed on a defeated Germany at Versailles following WWI resulted in the destruction of the German economy and the rise of radical fascism, adopted from Mussolini’s Italian version.

France and Pax Britannica wanted a war to stop a unified Germany from embarking on colonial ventures. France and Britain, previous rivals, came together to stop Germany and Russia from partaking in the spoils of imperialism. All it took was the assassination of a Hapsburg archduke and his wife to get things rolling.

The German colonial empire held East Africa, Togoland, Southwest Africa, and the Cameroons. German Far East territories consisted of New Guinea, Samoa, the Chinese leasehold of Kiaochow, and a number of small islands.

The effort to roll back the German empire resulted in more than 15 million dead. It also precipitated a Bolshevik revolution that claimed five million lives during the Red Terror and the Russian civil war. In addition, another five million starved to death during famines and purges under Stalin.

According to the late Professor Antony Sutton, who taught economics at California State University, and was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Wall Street and the City of London assisted in funding the Five-Year Plans of Lenin. This was accomplished through finance, technology and industrial transfers, and technical assistance.

Winston Churchill is now cited when the state and its media talk about the Man in Green, the hapless president of a corrupt failed state overtaken by psychopaths, a state that will not rest until ethnic Russians (and Jews, Roma, and other resented minorities) in Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine are either dead or ethnically cleansed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech before Congress last month reminded us of Winston Churchill’s plea in February 1941: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” We agree with the Biden administration’s determination to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. However, an emboldened Putin might not give us that choice. The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future is to help Ukraine push back the invader now. That is the lesson of history that should guide us, and it lends urgency to the actions that must be taken — before it is too late.

Churchill was an unrepentant psychopath, a racist, and a war criminal. He suggested aircraft should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” against Irish revolutionaries in 1920. Churchill advocated using poison gas on rebellious Arabs, what he described as “uncivilized tribes.”

In Afghanistan, he demanded “all who resist will be killed without quarter,” because, as he insisted with racist arrogance, the Pashtuns need to “recognize the superiority of race.”

“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation,” he bragged about the crimes committed by the British Empire in Afghanistan.

He was also responsible for massacring protesters in Athen, excluding Iran from its own oil reserves (the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refused to pay Iran its share of dividends, thus resulting in the nationalization of oil by Iran, followed by a Brit-USG orchestrated coup overthrowing the elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953).

Then there was Britain’s “declared a state of emergency in Kenya in 1952 to protect its system of institutionalized racism that they established throughout their colonies so to exploit the indigenous population,” notes Crimes of Britain.

150,000 men, women and children were forced into concentration camps. Children’s schools were shut by the British who branded them “training grounds for rebellion”. Rape, castration, cigarettes, electric shocks and fire all used by the British to torture the Kenyan people under Churchill’s watch.

Palestine, South Africa, China, and “British Guiana,” all suffered the criminal behavior of Winston Churchill and the British Empire.

It makes perfect sense Rice and Gates, along with the USG and its war propaganda media, put Zelenskyy on a pedestal along with the racist war criminal Churchill.

It’s said the Man in Green cannot possibly be a neo-Nazi because he is Jewish. This is nonsense to be consumed by the cognitively handicapped and incurious headline skimmers.

Zelenskyy has closed down political opposition; his neo-Nazi brownshirts kill activists, dissidents, and journalists; the Russian Orthodox Church was forcibly shuttered, told to leave the country, and Ukrainians attending services are now deemed traitors. Add to this the wanton murder of fellow Ukrainians for the crime of their heritage, culture, and language, and you have a man paralleling Churchill, although not with the vile intelligence of Churchill.

Rice and Gates will not rest until the USG and NATO are fully involved, with soldiers on the ground in Ukraine, and participating in killing Russians and threatening the national security of Russia.

Putin has repeated what Russia will do if it faces an existential threat, the sort of threat Gates, Rice, the neocons, Biden, and practically the entire USG are calling for. It will undoubtedly result in an endgame none of them want.

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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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***

Britain has deployed its armed forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, in episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest

The British military has used or threatened to use military force much more in the postwar world than is conventionally remembered or believed. Declassified has documented 83 interventions by the UK armed forces since 1945, in 47 different countries.

The most striking of the British uses of force have been the overt invasions or armed attempts to overthrow governments such as in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

The brutal colonial counter-insurgency wars of the 1950s and 1960s – in Kenya, Malaya, Aden and Cyprus – involved the widespread use of torture and, often, pernicious operations to displace large numbers of people to control the local population.

In Malaya between 1948 and 1960, British forces herded hundreds of thousands of people into fortified camps, heavily bombed rural areas and resorted to extensive propaganda to win the conflict.

British brutality fighting ‘Mau Mau’ forces in Kenya demanding independence from the UK resulted in tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths, often from starvation in concentration camps.

UK military interventions since 1945

Click on a country here to see the number of interventions.

Colonial control

But this pattern of armed intervention – which was of course routine during the nineteenth century empire – was in the postwar period set immediately after Allied forces defeated Japan and Germany in 1945.

Britain’s first interventions in the postwar world sought to suppress budding, popular movements fighting European imperialism. In 1945-46, British forces intervened in Vietnam and Indonesia to restore French and Dutch, respectively, colonial control. In Vietnam the British rearmed defeated Japanese imperial troops to fight pro-independence forces.

The deployment of force continued as routine over the decades, notably to prop up favoured regimes. Armed forces were dispatched to Oman (1957), Nyasaland (now Malawi, 1959), Brunei (1962), Anguilla (1969) and Jordan (1970) to bolster pro-British governments being threatened by independence or popular movements.

In 1964, British forces put down army mutinies in three countries in close succession in East Africa – Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania – to shore up pro-British governments just after they had become independent.

Click here to read the document.

Covert wars

Covert military operations have been planned by Whitehall officials in numerous instances where their strategy would be unpopular at home or controversial abroad. British governments have if anything become less and less transparent about these covert operations over time.

The beginnings after the war were when UK forces sought to stir up opposition to emerging communist rule in Albania, Ukraine and the Baltic States in the late 1940s – operations which all failed to prevent these countries coming under communist control.

Covert wars continued in the 1950s in Indonesia – in an attempt to promote a rebellion against nationalist president Sukarno – and in the 1960s in Yemen – in a war to bog down the forces of Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in which tens of thousands of people died.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government executed Britain’s largest postwar covert operation to date, in backing mujahideen warriors to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The strategy involved not only supplying arms and training for combat inside Afghanistan, but also the sabotage of Moscow’s supply lines inside the then Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

British covert operations have recently proliferated again in view of the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011-13, Whitehall planners secretly launched at least four covert wars involving special forces on the ground in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Mali.

Overt intervention

Some of the UK’s most brutal interventions have been with the US, notably the bombing of and occupation of Afghanistan after 2001, the UK’s supportive role in Washington’s near-destruction of Vietnam from the 1960s and the forcibledepopulation of the Chagos Islands from 1968-73, to make way for a US military base in the Indian Ocean.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the UK acted as the US’ junior partner in a ferocious bombardment of Iraq the following year that destroyed much of the country’s civilian infrastructure. Anglo-American bombing of Iraq continued for a decade after the Gulf War until the 2003 invasion.

On several occasions, the British military has been used to counter threats to favoured allies from neighbouring countries, such as the deployment to Kuwait in 1994 to deter a threat from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the dispatch of troops to Aqaba in Jordan in 1949 to fend off a territorial threat from Israel.

The UK intervened at least four times in British Honduras (which became independent as Belize in 1981) – in 1948, 1957, 1962 and 1977 – to deter Guatemala from its claims over the territory. The Falklands war of 1982 – after Argentina invaded the islands – was far from being the first time a Latin America state had claimed territory it saw as a relic of the colonial period.

Imposing order

Still more frequent when Britain was a formal colonial power was the despatch of forces to quell riots and protests – which occurred in countries as diverse as Singapore (1950), Bermuda (1968), New Hebrides (now Vanuatu, 1980), Hong Kong (1967), Mauritius (1965 and 1967) and the Maldives (1959) – and to break strikes – such as in the Bahamas (1958) and Swaziland (1963).

Britain’s longest-running military deployment, lasting nearly three decades from 1969, was in Northern Ireland, where the armed forces and intelligence services’ countering of the IRA also involved sectarian support for, and collusion with, loyalist paramilitary forces that contributed to hundreds of further deaths.

Only a handful of these interventions might be regarded as truly benign. The UK’s deployment of forces to Sierra Leone in 2000 prevented the vicious Revolutionary United Front taking control of the capital, Freetown.

Britain’s involvement in the Korean war in the early 1950s – one of the most destructive conflicts of the past century – upheld the non-communist south of the country, and allowed a future South Korea to prosper.

But most of the UK military deployments have been to maintain colonial or postcolonial control of states and key resource interests, uphold British prestige or great power status, and demonstrate to the US – Whitehall’s key ally – that London is, with Washington, still prepared to continue to rule the world by force.

Not included

The list of interventions is far from exhaustive. It is unlikely to have found all the British military deployments for combat since 1945. Further, it does not include mercenary operations by British personnel, often backed by Whitehall, or purely intelligence operations to overthrow governments.

It also excludes military involvement in international peacekeeping missions, relief activities and actions to evacuate UK nationals from countries. Finally, it does not include training and advisory military operations which, often linked to British arms exports, are another key way Whitehall officials try to maintain their global influence.

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Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.

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***

You might have heard of killer robots, slaughterbots or terminators – officially called lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) – from films and books. And the idea of super-intelligent weapons running rampant is still science fiction. But as AI weapons become increasingly sophisticated, public concern is growing over fears about lack of accountability and the risk of technical failure.

Already we have seen how so-called neutral AI have made sexist algorithms and inept content moderation systems, largely because their creators did not understand the technology. But in war, these kinds of misunderstandings could kill civilians or wreck negotiations.

For example, a target recognition algorithm could be trained to identify tanks from satellite imagery. But what if all of the images used to train the system featured soldiers in formation around the tank? It might mistake a civilian vehicle passing through a military blockade for a target.

Why do we need autonomous weapons?

Civilians in many countries (such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Yemen) have suffered because of the way global superpowers build and use increasingly advanced weapons. Many people would argue they have done more harm than good, most recently pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022.

In the other camp are people who say a country must be able to defend itself, which means keeping up with other nations’ military technology. AI can already outsmart humans at chess and poker. It outperforms humans in the real world too. For example Microsoft claims its speech recognition software has an error rate of 1% compared to the human error rate of around 6%. So it is hardly surprising that armies are slowly handing algorithms the reins.

But how do we avoid adding killer robots to the long list of things we wish we had never invented? First of all: know thy enemy.

What are Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs)?

The US Department of Defence defines an autonomous weapon system as: “A weapon system that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator.”

Many combat systems already fit this criteria. The computers on drones and modern missiles have algorithms that can detect targets and fire at them with far more precision than a human operator. Israel’s Iron Dome is one of several active defence systems that can engage targets without human supervision.

While designed for missile defence, the Iron Dome could kill people by accident. But the risk is seen as acceptable in international politics because the Iron Dome generally has a reliable history of protecting civilian lives.

An Israeli missile defence system ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

There are AI enabled weapons designed to attack people too, from robot sentries to loitering kamikaze drones used in the Ukraine war. LAWs are already here. So, if we want to influence the use of LAWs, we need to understand the history of modern weapons.

The rules of war

International agreements, such as the Geneva conventions establish conduct for the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians during conflict. They are one of the few tools we have to control how wars are fought. Unfortunately, the use of chemical weapons by the US in Vietnam, and by Russia in Afghanistan, are proof these measures aren’t always successful.

Worse is when key players refuse to sign up. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) has been lobbying politicians since 1992 to ban mines and cluster munitions (which randomly scatter small bombs over a wide area). In 1997 the Ottawa treaty included a ban of these weapons, which 122 countries signed. But the US, China and Russia didn’t buy in.

Landmines have injured and killed at least 5,000 soldiers and civilians per year since 2015 and as many as 9,440 people in 2017. The Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor 2022 report said:

Casualties…have been disturbingly high for the past seven years, following more than a decade of historic reductions. The year 2021 was no exception. This trend is largely the result of increased conflict and contamination by improvised mines observed since 2015. Civilians represented most of the victims recorded, half of whom were children.

Despite the best efforts of the ICBL, there is evidence both Russiaand Ukraine (a member of the Ottawa treaty) are using landmines during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine has also relied on drones to guide artillery strikes, or more recently for “kamikaze attacks” on Russian infrastructure.

Our future

But what about more advanced AI enabled weapons? The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots lists nine key problems with LAWs, focusing on the lack of accountability, and the inherent dehumanisation of killing that comes with it.

While this criticism is valid, a full ban of LAWs is unrealistic for two reasons. First, much like mines, pandora’s box has already been opened. Also the lines between autonomous weapons, LAWs and killer robots are so blurred it’s difficult to distinguish between them. Military leaders would always be able to find a loophole in the wording of a ban and sneak killer robots into service as defensive autonomous weapons. They might even do so unknowingly.

San Francisco, CA – December 5, 2022: Activists opposed to the implementation of armed police robots rallied at City Hall. Phil Pasquini

We will almost certainly see more AI enabled weapons in the future. But this doesn’t mean we have to look the other way. More specific and nuanced prohibitions would help keep our politicians, data scientists and engineers accountable.

For example, by banning:

• black box AI: systems where the user has no information about the algorithm beyond inputs and outputs
• unreliable AI: systems that have been poorly tested (such as in the military blockade example mentioned previously).

And you don’t have to be an expert in AI to have a view on LAWs. Stay aware of new military AI developments. When you read or hear about AI being used in combat, ask yourself: is it justified? Is it preserving civilian life? If not, engage with the communities that are working to control these systems. Together, we stand a chance at preventing AI from doing more harm than good.

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Jonathan Erskine, PhD Student, Interactive AI, University of Bristol

Miranda Mowbray, Lecturer in Interactive AI, University of Bristol

Featured image: Killer robots don’t look like this, for now. Denis Starostin/Shutterstock

Michael Inside is a new Irish movie which looks at the prison system in Ireland and the people who serve their time in it.

The film is about a young man who is sent to prison for the first time after being caught with drugs he had stashed in his grandfather’s house who he shares with. In prison he is taken under the wing of an older experienced prisoner who helps him to stand up for himself but also ensnares him in a cycle of violence in the prison itself.

We see the emotional and psychological growth and strengthening of Michael with these harrowing experiences. The big question of the film is then: will he become like his father, also in jail, or learn from his grandfather’s advice?

The most important aspect of this new Irish film is its cinematic approach to telling the story. Ireland has a long history of theatre and successful drama which spilled over into its film-making too. Irish films in the past have been worthy and wordy with directors more comfortable with theatrical styles than cinematic imagery. It was also difficult to achieve cinematic lift-off with the gravity of so many winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ireland won four times in the 20th century: W. B. Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Séamus Heaney (1995), all of whom wrote plays. Not forgetting, of course, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Moore, Oscar Wilde and Seán O’Casey. The developing language of cinema filtered slowly into Irish film-making either for reasons of fear of audience reaction (more used to theatre) or a lack of an appreciation of the idea that sometimes less is more.

Michael Inside has at times an almost documentary feel to it in the way the prison and the prison officers are portrayed. They come across as empathetic and generally respectful of the prisoners. The director of Michael Inside, Frank Berry, stated the story-line was “researched with former prisoners” and authenticity was desired even to the point of using former prisoners as extras.

Michael Inside official trailer

The use of the camera has a Tarkovskian feel with long takes, blurring and choreography before the camera. Some scenes like in the grandfather’s house are performed in front of a stationary camera with minimal lighting and wonderful blocking as actors move in and out of shot during the dialogue. Michael’s life outside of prison seems almost as oppressive as inside. Sparse dialogue, sparse rooms and ennui add to this feeling.

The tyranny of montage is felt though when Michael goes into his cell for the first time and sits down on the bottom bunk. This would have been a perfect moment to let the camera linger and linger to illustrate the timelessness of prison life. Steve McQueen, the British director, does this brilliantly in Hunger (2008) (also a great movie) when he has a fixed camera on one end of a long prison corridor pointed at a person washing the floor and stays on him until he finally gets to the other end. A similar very long take is used in the Irish Traveler film (2005), Pavee Lackeen to illustrate the difficulty of such basic things as making a cup of tea as we see the young girl go outside and walk to a hose behind a metal fence, fill the bucket and walk back to the mobile home. However, in Michael Inside, it cuts all too soon in the prison cell to the next shot.

Cinema fans who liked A Prophet (French: Un prophète), the 2009 French prison drama-crime film directed by Jacques Audiard will also enjoy Michael Inside. Unlike A Prophet, the protagonist of Michael Inside is exposed to alternative paths for his future as a former prisoner who has studied for an MA and is progressing towards a PhD gives the inmates a talk on the importance of education. This is an important moment in the film as it demonstrates one way with which to break the cycle of violence and transgenerational incarceration. Indeed Michael plans to further his education despite the bias against former prisoners.

Michael Inside is a wonderful film about the Irish penal system, the sparseness of some working class lives and the potential for positive change. The irony of this depiction of working class poverty and hopelessness is the fact that the film is conceived, researched, and acted using the imagination, talents and experience of Irish working class people. It points to a new self-awareness and education happening in sections of Irish society that augur well for the future.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Seeing Is Believing: What the Data Reveal About Deaths Following COVID Vaccine Rollouts Around the World

By Gavin de Becker, 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.

US Never Ending Wars: Thirty-one Years Ago, America’s “First War” against Iraq

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 11, 2023

The 1991 Gulf War on Iraq began on 17th January. However, after the 28th February ceasefire was agreed and signed – following the Basra Road massacre of withdrawing soldiers and fleeing civilians on 26th/27th February – the US 24th Mechanised Infantry Division slaughtered thousands on 2nd March.“

Against Undiplomatic Diplomacy

By Sen. Rand Paul, January 11, 2023

When ambassadors or secretaries of State come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I ask them to detail what policy changes have been achieved as a result of America’s sanctions on Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea.

White House Colluded with Twitter to Censor RFK, Jr., Emails Reveal

By Michael Nevradakis, January 11, 2023

Citing documents and emails between social media employees and White House officials, Bailey exposed how the White House sought to censor Kennedy for a tweet questioning “suspicious” deaths of elderly individuals after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and seeking a good faith investigation into the true causes of the deaths.

32 Years Years Ago: The Gulf War

By Manlio Dinucci, January 11, 2023

Thirty years ago, in the early hours of January 17, 1991, Operation “Desert Storm” began in the Persian Gulf, this war against Iraq opened the sequence of wars after the Cold War. The USA and its allies launched it at the moment when, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were about to dissolve.

“The Republic of Kosovo”, A Classical Mafia State. The History of Kosovo and Metohia

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, January 10, 2023

Kosovo and Metochia (KosMet) is a southwestern province of the Republic of Serbia – a central region of the political, national, economic, cultural, and religious life of Serbia in the Middle Ages. The region was occupied by the Ottoman authorities in 1455 and subsequently was under the Islamic-Ottoman yoke until the beginning of the 20^th century.

The Upcoming Global South Summit Paves the Path for India’s Permanent UNSC Seat

By Andrew Korybko, January 10, 2023

Next week’s virtual summit will secure the support of the Global South for India’s permanent UNSC seat while the conclusion of its G20 chairmanship in September will do the same with respect to the Golden Billion. Once the vast majority of the international community unites around this cause, India will then likely draft a UN General Assembly resolution on this issue in order to prove the overwhelming support that it has.

Video: US Military Oversaw Secret Contents of COVID Jabs

By Sasha Latypova, Dr. Sam Dube, Lara Logan, and et al., January 10, 2023

Sasha Latypova, former owner and executive of multiple contract research organizations and former pharmaceutical executive, presented evidence on the DoD involvement with COVID countermeasures worldwide.

Propaganda’s Mask

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, January 10, 2023

The propagandist’s mask depicts one thing while behind the mask is another. The smiling urgent face of Dr. Anthony Fauci informing us that the Covid inoculations are safe and effective and necessary to prevent death is the hypocritical mask of the propagandist: the real Anthony Fauci knew differently, just as the real Fauci well understood that there was no actual science behind the mandates for masks, distancing, lockdowns and mass inoculation.

South Korea Wants to be World’s Fourth Arms Exporter

By Karsten Riise, January 10, 2023

South Korea wants to overtake the UK and Israel to become the world’s fourth biggest arms exporter. With big arms contracts to both Poland and Saudi Arabia, South Korea is well underway expanding. See this.

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Summary

• CDC’s VAERS safety signal analysis based on reports from Dec. 14, 2020 – July 29, 2022 for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines shows clear safety signals for death and a range of highly concerning thrombo-embolic, cardiac, neurological, hemorrhagic, hematological, immune-system and menstrual adverse events (AEs) among U.S. adults.
• There were 770 different types of adverse events that showed safety signals in ages 18+, of which over 500 (or 2/3) had a larger safety signal than myocarditis/pericarditis.
• The CDC analysis shows that the number of serious adverse events reported in less than two years for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009 (~73,000 vs. ~13,000).
• Twice as many mRNA COVID-19 vaccine reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%). This meets the CDC definition of a safety signal.
• There are 96 safety signals for 12-17 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure and heartrate, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetencies, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmias, thromboses, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain, increased troponin levels, being in intensive care, and having anticoagulant therapy.
• There are 66 safety signals for 5-11 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction and cardiac valve incompetencies, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis & appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities, vitiligo, and vaccine breakthrough infection.
• The safety signals cannot be dismissed as due to “stimulated,” exaggerated, fraudulent or otherwise artificially inflated reporting, nor can they be dismissed due to the huge number of COVID vaccines administered. There are several reasons why, but the simplest one is this: the safety signal analysis does not depend on the number of reports, but whether or not some AEs are reported at a higher rate for these vaccines than for other non-COVID vaccines. Other reasons are discussed in the full post below.
• In August, 2022, the CDC told the Epoch Times that the results of their safety signal analysis “were generally consistent with EB [Empirical Bayesian] data mining [conducted by the FDA], revealing no additional unexpected safety signals.” So either the FDA’s data mining was consistent with the CDC’s method—meaning they “generally” found the same large number of highly alarming safety signals—or the signals they did find were expected. Or they were lying. We may never know because the FDA has refused to release their data mining results.

Introduction

Finally! Zachary Stieber at the Epoch Times managed to get the CDC to release the results of its VAERS safety signal monitoring for COVID-19 vaccines, and they paint a very alarming picture (see his reporting and the data files here, or if that is behind a paywall then here). The analyses cover VAERS reports for mRNA COVID vaccines from the period from the vaccine rollout on December 14, 2020 through to the end of July, 2022. The CDC admitted to only having started its safety signal analysis on March 25, 2022 (coincidentally 3 days after a lawyer at Children’s Health Defense wrote to them reminding them about our FOIA request for it).

[UPDATE: T Coddington left a link in comments to a website where he made the data in the Excel files more accessible.]

Like me, you might be wondering why the CDC waited over 15 months before doing its first safety signal analysis of VAERS, despite having said in a document posted to its website that it would begin in early 2021—especially since VAERS is touted as our early warning vaccine safety system. You might also wonder how they could insist all the while that the COVID-19 vaccines are being subjected to the most rigorous safety monitoring the world has ever known. I’ll come back to that later. First I’m going to give a little background information on the analysis they did (which you can skip if you’re up to speed) and then describe what they found.

Background on Safety Signal Analysis

Back in June 2022, the CDC replied to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the safety signal monitoring of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)—the one it had said it was going to do weekly beginning in early 2021. Their response was: we never did it. Then a little later they said they had been doing it from early on. But by August, 2022, they had finally gotten their story straight, saying that they actually did do it, but only from March 25, 2022 through end of July. You can get up to speed on that here.

The analysis they were supposed to do uses what’s called proportional reporting ratios (PRRs). This is a type of disproportionality analysis commonly used in pharmacovigilance (meaning the monitoring of adverse events after drugs/vaccines go to market). The basic idea of disproportionality analysis is to take a new drug and compare it to one or more existing drugs generally considered safe. We look for disproportionality in the number of adverse events (AEs) reported for a specific AE out of the total number of AEs reported (since we generally don’t know how many people take a given drug). We then compare to existing drugs considered safe to see if there is a higher proportion of particular adverse events reported for the new drug compared to existing ones. (In this case they are looking at vaccines, but they still use PRR even though they generally have a much better sense of how many vaccines were administered.)

There are many ways to do disproportionality analysis. The PRR is one of the oldest. Empirical Bayesian data mining, which was supposed to be done on VAERS by the FDA, is another. The PRR is calculated by taking the number of reports for a given adverse event divided by the total number of events reported for the new vaccine or the total number of reports. It then divides that by the same ratio for one or more existing drugs/vaccines considered safe. Here is a simple formula:

So for example, if half of all adverse events reported for COVID-19 vaccines and the comparator vaccine(s) are for myocarditis, then the PRR is 0.5/0.5 = 1. If one quarter of all AEs for the comparator vaccine are for myocarditis, then the PRR is 0.5/0.25 = 2.

Traditionally, for a PRR to count as a safety signal, the PRR has to be 2 or greater, have a Chi-square value of 4 or greater (meaning it is statistically significant) and there has to be at least 3 events reported for a given AE. (This also means that if there are tons of different AEs reported for COVID vaccines that have never been reported for any other vaccine, it will not count as a safety signal. I found over 6,000 of those in my safety signal analysis from 2021.

Of course a safety signal does not necessarily mean there is a problem or that the vaccine caused the adverse event. But it is supposed to set off alarm bells to prompt closer inspection, as in this CDC pamphlet:

Ah yes, shared with the public — after first refusing to share the results and months of foot-dragging following repeated FOIA requests! We will see that the CDC has not done a more focused study on almost any of adverse events with “new patterns” (AKA safety signals).

So What Did the CDC Actually Do?

The Epoch Times obtained 3 weeks of safety signal analyses from the CDC for VAERS data updated on July 15, 22 and 29, 2022. Here I will focus on the last one, since there is very little difference between them and it is more complete. The safety signal analysis compares adverse events[1] reported to VAERS for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020 through July 29, 2022 to reports for all non-COVID vaccines from Jan 1, 2009 through July 29, 2022.

PRRs are calculated separately for 5-11 year-olds, 12-15 year-olds and 18+ separately. For each age group, there are separate tables for AEs from all reports, AEs from reports marked serious and AEs from reports not marked as serious.[2] Recall that a serious report is one that involves death, a life-threatening event, new or prolonged hospitalization, disability or permanent damage, or a congenital anomaly. I will focus on the reports for all AE’s.

They also have a table that calculates PRRs by comparing reports for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to reports for the Moderna vaccine and vice versa, again for all reports, serious reports only and non-serious reports. There were no remarkable findings in those tables, so I will not discuss them. [Edit: I forgot what Norman Fenton noted in his analysis: the overall proportion of reports with serious adverse events is 9.6% for Modern compared to 12.6% for Pfizer.] This isn’t that surprising since both vaccines are very similar and so should present relatively similar adverse events when compared to each other, and any differences are likely not large enough to be picked up by a PRR analysis. [Though the difference in the overall rate of serious adverse events, which are not specific to a particular type of event only how serious it is, was significant.]

The CDC seems to have calculated PRRs for every different type of adverse event reported for all the COVID vaccines examined – though it’s possible they only analyzed a subset. What seems clear is that, among the AEs they examined, the only ones included in the tables satisfy at least one of two conditions: a PRR value of at least 2 and a Chi-square value of at least 4 (Chi is the Greek letter χ and is pronounced like ‘kai’). When both conditions were met, they highlighted the adverse event in yellow, which appears to indicate a safety signal. There were no COVID vaccine AEs listed with fewer than 3 reported events, though for non-COVID vaccines there were many AEs listed that had only 1 or 2 reported since 2009. The CDC tables still include these and highlight them in yellow when the PRR is greater than 2 and the Chi-square value is great than 4, indicating these events are counted as safety signals.

What Safety Signals Did the CDC Find?

I’m going to divide this up by age groups and the Pfizer v. Moderna comparison. Let’s start with the 18+ group.

There are 772 AEs that appear on the list. Of these, 770 are marked in yellow and have PRR and Chi-square values that qualify them as safety signals. Some of these are new COVID-19 related codes, and we would expect those to trigger a signal since they didn’t exist in prior years to be reported by other vaccines. So if we take those off, we are left with 758 different types of non-COVID adverse events that showed safety signals.

I grouped these 758 safety signals into different categories. The figure below shows the total number of AEs reported for each of the major categories of safety signals:

Let’s dig into some of these categories to look at what types of AEs generated the most number of reports:[3]

You can peruse the adverse events using the Excel tables provided by the CDC, which were posted by The Epoch Times and Children’s Health Defense at the links at the top of this post.

What about The Children?

If there is anything that looks remotely like a bright spot in all of this is that the list of safety signals for 12-17 and 5-11 year-olds is much shorter than for 18+. There are 96 AEs that qualify as a safety signal for the 12-17 group and 67 for the 5-11. When we take out the new COVID-era AEs, there are 92 safety signals for 12-17 year-olds and 65 for 5-11 year-olds. Here are the most alarming ones:

I don’t know why the list of AE’s is so much shorter for these age groups. It could be that the list of AE’s for other vaccines for these age groups is much shorter, so in a case where AEs have been reported for the mRNA COVID vaccines but not for other vaccines, it will not be counted as a safety signal by definition.

Comparisons to Myocarditis and Pericarditis

We are told that the existence of a safety signal doesn’t necessarily mean the AE is caused by the vaccine, and I accept that premise. But the current practice seems to be to ignore safety signals, dismiss them as noise without any evidence, and stall any investigation into them as long as possible. The precautionary principle, however, dictates we should presume that a safety signal indicates causality, until proven otherwise. Since, it has been acknowledged that the mRNA COVID vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis (often referred to as myo-pericarditis), we can take those AEs as a kind of benchmark, and propose that, at minimum, any AE with a signal of equal or greater size should be considered potentially causal and investigated more thoroughly.[4] After dropping the new COVID-era AEs, there are 503 AEs with PRRs larger than myocarditis (PRR=3.09) and 552 with PRRs larger than pericarditis (PRR=2.82).[5]

This means that 66.4% of the AEs had a bigger safety signal than myocarditis and 77.3% were larger than pericarditis. You can see what those were by use this Excel file provided by the CDC and sorting the 18+ tab by the 12/14-07/29 PRR column (Column E). Then just look at which AEs have PRRs larger than the ones for pericarditis and myocarditis.

For 12-17 year-olds, there is 1 safety signal larger than myocarditis (it’s ‘troponin increased’) and 14 safety signals larger than pericarditis (excluding myocarditis), which include: mitral valve incompetence, bell’s palsy, heavy menstrual bleeding, genital ulceration, vaccine breakthrough infection, and a range of indicators of cardiac abnormalities.

For 5-11 year-olds, the comparison to myo/pericarditis is less germane, as they seem to suffer less from this side effect. But we can still make the comparison: there are 7 safety signals larger than pericarditis, including bell’s palsy, left ventricular dysfunction, mitral valve incompetence, and ‘drug ineffective’ (presumably meaning they still got COVID). There are 16 safety signals larger than myocarditis (excluding pericarditis), which in addition to those listed above also include: pericardial effusion, diastolic blood pressure increase, tricuspid valve incompetence, and vitiligo. Sinus tachycardia (high heart rate), appendicitis, and menstrual disorder come in just below myocarditis.

Now if we think of a safety signal as having both strength and clarity, then the PRR can be thought of as an indicator of how strong the signal is, while the Chi-square is a measure of how clear or unambiguous the signal is, because it gives us a sense of how likely the signal is due to chance alone: the larger the Chi-square value, the less likely the signal is due to chance. A Chi-square of 4 means there is only a 5% chance the observed signal is due to chance. A Chi-square of 8 means there is only a 0.5% chance of it being due to chance.[6] For the 18+ group, there are 57 AEs with a Chi-square larger than myocarditis (Chi-square=303.8) and 68 with a Chi-square larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=229.5). Again, you can see what these are by going the Excel file linked above and sorting on Column D.

For the 12-17 group, there are 4 AEs with a larger Chi-square than myocarditis (Chi-square=681.5) and 6 larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=175.4).

For the 5-11 group, there are 22 AEs with a Chi-square larger than myocarditis (Chi-square=30.42) and 34 AEs with a Chi-square larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=18.86).

Responding to Objections

Let’s dispense with some of the criticisms used to dismiss VAERS data, which will undoubtedly be raised if you try to bring the CDC’s analysis to people’s attention.

1. Objection: Anybody can report to VAERS. The reports are unreliable. Anti-vaxxers made lots of fraudulent reports. Nobody was aware of VAERS in the past, but now they are. So many people were afraid of the vaccine so they blamed all their health problems on it. Health workers were required by law to report certain adverse events, like deaths and anaphylaxis. Etc. Etc.

   All of these objections ultimately rely on the notion that VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccines have been artificially inflated over previous years for one reason or another. The thing of it is, though, that the CDC has a method for distinguishing between artificial inflation and real signal. The idea is simple: if adverse events are artificially inflated, they should be artificially inflated to the same degree. Meaning, the PRRs for all of these safety signals should be about the same. But even a casual glance at the PRRs in the Excel file show they vary widely, from as low at 2 to as high as 105 for vaccine breakthrough infection or 74 for cerebral thrombosis. This method does not on the number of reports, but the rate of reporting for certain events out of all events reported. If anything, this method would tend to hide safety signals in a situation where a new vaccine generates a very large number of reports.

   The CDC has even done us the favor of calculating upper and lower confidence intervals, meaning that we can be at least 95% confident that two PRRs are truly different if their confidence intervals don’t overlap. So for example the lower confidence interval for pulmonary thrombosis is 19.7, which is higher than the upper confidence interval for 543 other signals. Artificially inflated reporting cannot explain why so many different adverse events have large PRRs that are statistically distinct from one another.

2. Objection: The safety signals are due to the huge number of COVID vaccines given out. Never before have we given out so many vaccine doses. By the end of July, the US had administered something like 600 million vaccine doses to people aged 18+. But the CDC analysis compares VAERS reports for these doses to all doses for all other vaccines for this age group since Jan. 1, 2009. But from 2015-2020 there were over 100 million flu doses administered annually to this age group alone. In previous work, I estimated 538 million doses of flu given to people 18+ from July 2015-June 2020. The number of flu and other non-COVID vaccines for this age group administered from Jan 1., 2009 through July 29, 2022 must be well over double this number, meaning VAERS reports for COVID vaccines are being compared to reports for at least double the number of doses for other vaccines. In addition to this, as already noted, the PRR methodology does not depend, strictly speaking, on the number of doses, but rather the rate of reporting of a specific AE out of all AEs for that vaccine.
3. Objection: the vaccines are mainly being given to older people who tend to have health problems, whereas other vaccines are given to younger people. This objection is dealt with, since the analyses are stratified by age groups. It might be still be somewhat valid for the 18+ group, except that in the safety signal analysis I did in the fall of 2021, I stratified by smaller age bands and still found safety signals. In any case, this objection is not enough to dismiss the safety signal analysis out of hand, but rather calls for better and more refined research.
4. Objection: The VAERS data is not verified and cannot be trusted. I’ll be the first person to agree that VAERS is not high quality data, but if it is completely untrustworthy, then how is it that the CDC uses these data to publish in the best medical journals such as JAMA and The Lancet? If the data were worthless, then these journals shouldn’t accept these papers. In that JAMA paper, they reported that 80% of the myocarditis reports met their definition of myocarditis and were included in the analysis. Many other reports simply needed more details for validation. Furthermore, the CDC has the ability and budget to follow-up on every report VAERS receives to get more details and even medical records to verify the report.

   So if myocarditis shows a clear signal in the CDC’s analysis, and 80% of those reports were apparently high quality enough to be included in a paper published in one of the world’s top medical journals, how is it possible that all the rest of the reports are junk? That all of the other safety signals are meaningless? Answer: it isn’t.

   And since we’re on the topic of safety signals that turned out to be real, it’s instructive to find appendicitis turn up as a safety signal in all 3 age groups, since a study published in NEJM based on medical records of over a million adult Israelis found an increased risk of appendicitis in the 42 days following Pfizer vaccination (but not following a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test). That study also found an increase in lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes) after vaccination, but not after positive COVID test. Lymphadenopathy was another safety signal.

5. And that brings us to our last objection to be dispensed with: all of these AEs were due to COVID. There was an epidemic and so people were falling ill due to COVID and having all of these problems that were then blamed on the vaccine. Well to begin with, as we just saw, at least two of them (appendicitis and lymphadenopathy) do not appear to have increased risk ratios following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, and we know that the mRNA vaccines increase risk of myo/pericarditis independent of infections. So how can we assume the rest of these are and dismiss them with the wave of a hand? We can’t. At minimum, they need further investigation. Furthermore, in the safety signal analysis I did in 2021, I dropped all VAERS reports where any sign of a SARS-CoV-2 exposure or infection was indicated on the report, and I still found large, significant safety signals.

Putting It All Into Perspective

The Epoch Times article quotes my esteemed colleague and friend, Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Management and an world renowned expert in Bayesian statistical analysis: “from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID-19 vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID-19 vaccines is essentially zero…. The onus is on the regulators to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference if they wish to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine AE results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines.” (See his post on the CDC analysis here.) The same is true for all the safety signals they found.

The CDC’s VAERS SOP analysis document lists 18 Adverse Events of Special Interest says they are going to pay close attention to. In their 2021 JAMA paper (and similar presentations to ACIP), the researchers responsible for analyzing the millions of medical records in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) using the ‘Rapid Cycle Analysis’ only studied 23 outcomes. A Similar analysis in NEJM from Israeli researchers focused on only 25 outcomes. Compare this to over 700 safety signals found by the CDC when they finally decided to look—and that’s not even counting all the adverse events that have never been reported for other vaccines so cannot ever show a safety signal by definition. How can the CDC say that these safety signals are meaningless if almost none of them have been studied any further? And yet we are assured that these vaccines have undergone the most intensive safety monitoring effort in history. It’s complete and utter hogwash!

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Notes

[1] To be precise, the ‘adverse events’ are for ‘preferred terms’ (PTs) which is a type/level of classification used in the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), which is the classification system used by VAERS and in other pharmacovigilance systems and clinical research for coding reported adverse events. Not all preferred terms are a symptom or adverse event per se. Some refer to a specific diagnostic test that was done or a treatment that was given.

[2] It’s not entirely clear how they divided these up, since there are clearly AEs that should be considered serious that don’t show up in the serious Excel table — though maybe they don’t come up simply because they are looking within serious reports. I believe that they just filtered the reports to include only serious reports or non-serious reports, then did the safety signal analysis on all the AE’s coded in those reports. The reason I think this is that I used the MedAlerts Wayback Machine, selected just the serious COVID-19 vaccine reports, and the numbers of total reports was very close to the one in the table provided by the CDC (MedAlerts actually had a bit less). The files obtained by the Epoch Times do not include much in the way of a description as to how the analyses were done, so I had to infer some details, which might be incorrect. I will try to note when I am drawing an inference about how the analysis was done.

[3] Generally speaking, these figures show the top ten AEs in each category. In some cases I combined AEs that indicated the same thing, such as combining ‘heart rate irregular’ with ‘arrythmia.’ [UPDATE: Note that the charts of all categories, cardiac and thrombo-embolic events were updated on Jan 7, 2023. The reason is that I had previously categorized acute myocardial infarction as a cardiac issue and myocardial infarction as thrombo-embolic. To be consistent, I have now combined myocardial infarction and acute myocardial infarction into one AE category in the thrombo-embolic events (which made the total AEs reported for that category larger than for pulmonary ones) and then added a different cardiac AE to the cardiovascular AE category, ventricular extrasystoles, AKA premature ventricular contraction (PVC), which dependent on frequency and the presence of other cardiomyopathies is associated with sudden cardiac arrest.]

[4] Note that using the myo-pericarditis signal as a yardstick doesn’t mean that these are the only signals that matter. To give one example, anaphylactic reactions don’t even show up in the list of safety signals, even though that was one of the very first risk of the vaccine that became apparent from day one of the vaccine rollout.

One potential objection to this benchmark is that it is too low of a bar, since myo-pericarditis appears to disproportionately affect younger men and so a proper safety signal should be stratified by age and gender then compared with myocarditis similarly stratified. I agree, and it is the CDC’s job to do that. But the fact is that any adverse reaction might disproportionately affect some subgroup of people, in which case the safety signal for that group would be similarly faint or diluted when we look at everyone together. So objection overruled.

[5] In their Standard Operation Procedures document, the CDC said they would combine these and related codes together to assess a safety signal, but never mind – at least they finally got around to doing something.

[6] In this context, the Chi-square is largely driven by the sheer number of adverse events: the more adverse events reported, including for the comparator vaccine, the larger the Chi-square. For example, the PRR for pericarditis and subdural haematoma is the same (2.82), but there were 1,701 incidents of pericarditis reported for mRNA COVID vaccines versus 221for the comparator vaccines, with Chi-square of 229.5. For subdural haematoma, these numbers are 162 verus 21, for a Chi-square of 21.2.

Featured image is from NaturalNews.com

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When ambassadors or secretaries of State come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I ask them to detail what policy changes have been achieved as a result of America’s sanctions on Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea.

To date, no official of our government has been able to describe behavioral changes due to the sanctions we impose. The response I have received that came the closest to an answer was that sanctions under President Barack Obama prompted Iran to come to the negotiating table to forge the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement. Perhaps. But one might argue that it was the lure of removing sanctions that actually brought Iran to the table.

Too often, loud voices on both sides of the aisle appear to believe that imposing more and more sanctions will change an adversary’s policy, rather than understanding that it is actually the offer of removing sanctions that can move our adversaries.

When the Iran agreement was initially negotiated, I had my doubts. I felt the U.S. could have insisted upon a more gradual release of impounded funds to Iran based on continued compliance with the pact. But as time went on, inspectors ascertained that Iran adhered to the uranium enrichment restrictions. In fact, the loudest criticism of Iran was not that they abrogated the JCPOA, but rather their continued development of ballistic missiles that were not restricted in the JCPOA.

Subsequently, the Trump Administration pulled out of the JCPOA, not because Iran was evading the pact but because Iran was building and improving weapons not regulated by the pact. But Trump and then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s maximum pressure campaign did not, in fact, influence or change Iran’s behavior in the least, nor did leaving the Iran agreement.

Instead, if we desire a ballistic missile treaty with Iran, the first thing to do is to ask why Iran develops ballistic missiles. Iranians live in a world dominated by nuclear powers. Europe, the U.S., Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, and India all have nuclear weapons. In addition, Iran sees the Sunni sheikdoms as its adversaries.

Under what circumstance would Iran choose to limit their ballistic missiles as the surrounding Sunni sheikdoms enhance their own missiles and house U.S. troops? Anyone seriously desiring a ballistic missile pact with Iran should understand that no such agreement will ever occur between the U.S. and Iran unless it includes the Sunni sheikdoms. A useful diplomatic goal would be to have a regional dialogue among the countries actually in the Middle East.

Now, some may reasonably argue that the U.S. can only use the removal of sanctions as a negotiating tool if sanctions are imposed in the first place. Fair enough. But while we have imposed sanctions on Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea for decades, there has been little U.S.-led dialogue about trading sanctions relief for policy change. The Russian–Ukraine war should present such an opportunity.

Instead, the loudest voices in the Senate continue to shout about labelling the killing of civilians in Ukraine a genocide, as if that will somehow push the Russians to the negotiating table. Contrary to what those noisy Senators assert, pushing a narrative that ultimately requires Russian leaders to be tried at the Hague for war crimes and jailed in perpetuity is unlikely to facilitate negotiations.

No one questions that the war has caused and continues to cause civilian deaths, or that Russia started the war and is the aggressor nation in defiance of all international norms. But genocide has a definition; it is a mass killing of an ethnic or religious group of people. To those eager to label Russia’s killing of civilians a genocide, how would they respond to a Japanese claim that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocide? Fortunately for the U.S., Japan was in no position to make such claims; Japan’s defeat was unconditional surrender.

But most wars do not end with unconditional surrender. Most wars end through negotiation.

Now, the people who want to label the killing of civilians in Ukraine a genocide also oppose negotiation in Ukraine. They argue that there should be no negotiations until every Russian leaves all Ukrainian territory. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the no-negotiations-until-victory crowd, but someone must also assess what Ukraine will ultimately look like if this war drags on interminably.

In addition to $100 billion already sent from U.S. taxpayers to Ukraine, the loud voices against negotiation are already talking of a trillion-dollar reconstruction plan for Ukraine. I guess they assume China will continue to loan us the money. One thing is certain, though: Instead of 1 to 2 percent interest on the borrowed money we airmail to Ukraine, the rate will likely be double that. Last year, the U.S. interest on our debt was about $400 billion. Expectations are that U.S. interest rates will continue to rise to over a trillion dollars a year over the next decade, ultimately exceeding what we spend on our military.

To those who advocate endless intervention in every foreign war on the planet, it might be prudent to ask if our national security is enhanced by having debt payments that exceed our defense spending.

No negotiation until victory resembles a position of no peace until unconditional surrender. Over and over again, the strategy of more and more sanctions has proved ineffective. The loud, chest-thumpers on Capitol Hill may believe they are the noble ones, but as the destruction of Ukraine continues, history may ultimately judge them the naïve.

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Senator Angus King said the US should not put a timetable on support for Ukraine and remain involved in the war until “Putin is out.” Comparing the current situation with Russia to the Allies’ failure to stop Nazi Germany before World War II, the Maine senator insisted on more Western aid for Kiev.

During a virtual press conference following his recent visit to the Ukrainian capital, King was asked how long the United States should continue its role in the conflict, replying that support for Kiev should be indefinite.

“I believe we should remain there until Putin is out,” he said.

It is unclear if King was calling for Putin’s removal from power in a coup d’etat, or merely for Russian troops to vacate all Ukrainian-claimed territory. The two warring parties maintain conflicting territorial claims and King acknowledged the war is now in a stalemate, but he nonetheless claimed the conflict would not be a “20-year struggle” like America’s experience in Afghanistan.

Throughout the virtual presser, King referenced a historical need to prevail over Russia, saying nothing of the potential for escalation to nuclear war between the world’s largest atomic arsenals.

The senator noted that he often receives questions from constituents about the wisdom of US involvement in the war, but went on to cite his own version of a Bush-era epithet: ‘We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.’

“I get letters every now and then, people saying, ‘Why are we doing this? Ukraine’s far away. It’s not our fight.’ Well, it is our fight, because if we don’t fight it now, it will spread,” King said. “And it will become something that we can’t avoid being involved in, just as occurred in the late 1930s at the beginning of World War II.”

He went on to claim that if Putin was not stopped in Ukraine, he would go on to conquer more of Europe, comparing the Russian leader to Adolf Hitler several times.

King also suggested the US could give additional aid to Ukraine, pointing to allies who are giving more when compared to their overall gross domestic product. “If you measure it in terms of GDP, we’re between fifth and tenth in the world, and other countries are contributing actually larger shares of their GDP to the defense of Ukraine,” he continued, “Why? Because they recognized, as hopefully we will continue to recognize, that this is really a fight for Western values.”

Since Russia’s invasion kicked off last February, Congress has authorized nearly $120 billion in aid for Kiev, including more than $21 billion in direct military assistance and a series of other financial and humanitarian aid packages. King claimed the American tax dollars are being well spent and accounted for, arguing “The software that they’re using, working with Deloitte and SAP, to track everything coming in – every spare part, every dollar.”

However, CNN has reported that US arms sent to Ukraine quickly fall into a “black hole” and are nearly impossible to track. In October, Finland’s national law enforcement agency warned that weapons being shipped to Ukraine are ending up in the hands of criminal gangs, while Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned weeks later that “the situation in the Sahel and the raging war in Ukraine serve as major sources of weapons and fighters that bolster the ranks of the terrorists in the Lake Chad Region.”

King’s latest presser followed a trip to Ukraine last week, where he said he held a “thrilling” meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and described him as among “the great leaders of the century.”

While the senator claimed Zelensky and Ukraine are champions of democracy, some analysts have argued that Kiev has only continued its transformation into an authoritarian state under his rule. As commentator Ted Galen Carpenter wrote in The American Conservative, “genuine democracies do not ban multiple opposition parties or close opposition media outlets. Nor do they rigorously censor (and put under strict government control) media outlets that they allow to remain open. Genuine democracies do not outlaw churches that advocate policies the government dislikes.” He added, “yet the Ukrainian government has committed not just one or two, but all of those abuses.”

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Kyle Anzalone is news editor at the Libertarian Institute, assistant editor at Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.

Connor Freeman is a writer and assistant editor at the Libertarian Institute, and co-hosts Conflicts of Interest.

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***

The bipartisan consensus in the Beltway on the United States being the ‘indispensable’ world power is usually attributed to the neocons who have been the driving force of the US foreign and security policy in successive administrations since the 1970s.

The op-end in the Washington Post on Saturday titled Time is not on Ukraine’s side, coauthored by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush presidency and Defence Secretary Robert Gates (who served under both Bush and Barack Obama), highlights this paradigm.

Rice and Gates are robust cold warriors who are enthusiastic about NATO’s war against Russia. But their grouse is that President Biden should ‘dramatically’ step up in Ukraine. 

The op-ed harks back to the two world wars that marked the US’ ascendance as world power and warns that the US-led ‘rules-based order’ since 1990 — code word for US global hegemony — is in peril if Biden fails in Ukraine. 

Rice and Gates indirectly acknowledge that Russia is on a winning streak, contrary to the western triumphalist narrative so far. Evidently, the expected Russian offensive ahead is rattling their nerves. 

Equally, the op-ed is contextual to American politics. The House speaker stalemate and its dramatic denouement in a bare-knuckle political fight among Republicans presages a dysfunctional Congress between now and 2024 election. 

Kevin McCarthy, who had former president Donald Trump’s backing, finally won but only after making a series of concessions to the populist wing of the GOP, which has weakened his authority. The AP reported, “Fingers were pointed, words exchanged and violence apparently just averted… It was the end of a bitter standoff that had shown the strengths and fragility of American democracy.”

A senior Kremlin politician already commented on it. McCarthy himself, in his statement after election as the new House speaker, listed as his priorities the commitment to a strong economy, counteracting illegal immigration through the Mexican border and competing with China, but omitted any reference to the Ukraine situation or providing funds to Kiev. 

Indeed, earlier in November, he had asserted that the Republicans in the House would resist unlimited and unjustified financial aid to Ukraine. 

Now, Rice and Gates refuse to march in lockstep with Trump. But, although a diminished player, Trump still remains an active player, a massive presence and exercises functional control and is by far the largest voice in the Republican Party. Arguably, what defines the GOP today is Trump. Therefore, his backing for McCarthy is going to be consequential.

Biden understands that. Conceivably, the Rice-Gates op-ed was mooted by the White House and the US security establishment and scripted by the neocons. The op-ed appeared on the day after the January 5 joint statement by Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz underscoring their ‘unwavering solidarity’ with Ukraine. 

Under immense pressure from Biden, Germany and France caved in last week to provide Ukraine with Infantry Fighting Vehicles. Scholz also agreed that Germany will supply an additional Patriot air defense battery to Ukraine. (A top SPD politician in Berlin has since voiced reservations.) 

On the same day as the op-ed appeared, Pentagon arranged, unusually for a Saturday, a Press briefing by Laura Cooper, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia. Cooper stated explicitly that the war in Ukraine threatens the US’ global standing: 

“From an overall strategic perspective, it is hard to emphasise enough the devastating consequences if Putin were to be successful in achieving his objective of taking over Ukraine. This would rewrite international boundaries in a way that we have not seen since World War II. And our ability to reverse these gains and to support and stand by the sovereignty of a nation, is something that resonates not just in Europe, but all around the world.” 

The cat is out of the bag, finally — the US is fighting in Ukraine to preserve its global hegemony. Coincidence or not, in a sensational interview in Kiev, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov also blurted out in the weekend that Kiev has consciously allowed itself to be used by NATO in the bloc’s wider conflict with Moscow! 

To quote him,

“At the NATO Summit in Madrid (in June 2022), it was clearly delineated that over the coming decade, the main threat to the alliance would be the Russian Federation. Today Ukraine is eliminating this threat. We are carrying out NATO’s mission today. They aren’t shedding their blood. We’re shedding ours. That’s why they’re required to supply us with weapons.” 

Reznikov, an ex-Soviet army officer,  claimed that he personally received holiday greeting cards and text messages from Western defense ministers to this effect.The stakes couldn’t be higher, with Reznikov also asserting that Ukraine’s NATO membership is a done thing.

Indeed, on Saturday, Pentagon announced the Biden Administration’s single biggest security assistance package for Ukraine so far from the Presidential Drawdown.Evidently, the Biden Administration is pulling out all the stops. Another UN Security Council meeting has been scheduled for Jan. 13.

But Putin has made it clear that “Russia is open to a serious dialogue – under the condition that the Kiev authorities meet the clear demands that have been repeatedly laid out, and recognise the new territorial realities.”

As for the war, the tidings from Donbass are extremely worrisome. Soledar is in Russian hands and the Wagner fighters are tightening the noose around Bakhmut, a strategic communication hub and lynchpin of Ukrainian deployments in Donbass. 

On the other hand, contrary to expectations, Moscow is unperturbed about sporadic theatrical Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia. The Russian public opinion remains firmly supportive of Putin.

The commander of the Russian forces, Gen. Sergey Surovikin has prioritised the fortification of the so-called ‘contact line,’ which is proving effective against Ukrainian counterattacks.

Pentagon is unsure of Surovikin’s future strategy. From what they know of his brilliant success in evicting NATO officers from Syria’s Aleppo in 2016, siege and attrition war are Surovikin’s forte. But one never knows. A steady Russian build-up in Belarus is underway. The S-400 and Iskander missile systems have been deployed there. A NATO (Polish) attack on Belarus is no longer realistic.

On January 4, Putin hailed the New Year with the formidable frigate Admiral Gorshkov carrying “cutting-edge Zircon hypersonic missile system, which has no analogue,” embarking on “a long-distance naval mission across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea.”

A week earlier, the sixth missile-carrying strategic nuclear-powered submarine of the Borei-A class, The Generalissimus Suvorov, joined the Russian Navy. Such submarines are capable of carrying 16 inter-continental ballistic missiles Bulava. 

The fog of war envelops Russian intentions. Rice and Gates have warned that time works in favour of Russia: “Ukraine’s military capability and economy are now dependent almost entirely on lifelines from the West — primarily, the United States. Absent another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces, Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months of military stalemate pass. Under current circumstances, any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position.” 

This is a brutally frank assessment. Biden’s call to Scholz on Friday shows the angst in his mind, too. With the fragmentation of the political class within America, Biden can ill afford cracks in allied unity as well.

Curiously, this was also the main thrust of an article a fortnight ago by a top Russian pundit Andrey Kortunov in the Chinese Communist Party daily Global Times titled US domestic woes could push Ukraine to sidelines of American public discourse. 

Kortunov wrote: “Putting emotions aside, one has to accept that the conflict has already become existential not only for Ukraine and Russia, but for the US as well: the Biden administration cannot accept a defeat in Ukraine without facing major negative implications for the US positions all over the world.”

Kortunov was writing almost a fortnight before Rice and Gates began getting the same metaphysical perception. But the neocons aren’t yet prepared to accept that the choice is actually staring at them — Biden swimming alongside Putin toward a multipolar world order, or sinking in the troubled waters.

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***

A series of Jan. 6 tweets by newly sworn-in Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey detailed how Biden officials sought to censor tweets by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and others.

Citing documents and emails between social media employees and White House officials, Bailey exposed how the White House sought to censor Kennedy for a tweet questioning “suspicious” deaths of elderly individuals after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and seeking a good faith investigation into the true causes of the deaths.

The White House specifically targeted Kennedy’s Jan. 22, 2021, tweet about the then-recent death of baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, 18 days after he publicly received the Moderna vaccine.

#HankAaron's tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of #COVID #vaccines. He received the #Moderna vaccine on Jan. 5 to inspire other Black Americans to get the vaccine. #TheDefenderhttps://t.co/vbuHt22bJz

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 22, 2021

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry on Jan. 7 also weighed in on Twitter about efforts to censor Kennedy on Facebook:

Facebook also told the White House how they could censor @RobertKennedyJR pic.twitter.com/aMDwN7c9KW

— Jeff Landry (@JeffLandry) January 7, 2023

Kennedy responded on Jan. 7 with this pair of tweets:

Compare Joe Biden’s approach with my uncle John Kennedy’s strategy on censorship:

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 7, 2023

Here, a White House employee asks Twitter to silence Robert Kennedy, Jr., a known critic of the White House’s COVID-19 narrative. (3/9) pic.twitter.com/kIVv60W8Gt

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

In a press release issued today, Landry said, “Government censorship is bipartisan; if they don’t like you, they will censor you — regardless of your political affiliation. No one is safe when the First Amendment is violated.”

Missouri and Louisiana in May 2022 sued President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other Biden administration officials, alleging they violated the First Amendment by colluding with social media platforms to censor COVID-19-related content and content related to the 2020 U.S. presidential elections that contradicted the official government narrative.

“Throughout our case, we have uncovered disturbing collusion between Big Tech and Big Government,” added Landry. “Today’s reveal is yet another example of the ongoing coercive efforts by the White House to pressure social media companies into censoring American citizens.”

Legal experts familiar with the ongoing Louisiana and Missouri lawsuit told The Defender that Biden administration and federal government officials have until now claimed during their depositions that they never explicitly directed social media companies to remove content.

Instead, they claimed the government provided these platforms with “the science,” with no expectation, partnership or knowledge of what they would do with it.

According to legal experts, Meta claimed Kennedy and CHD were never targeted by name in the federal government’s communications with the platform.

However, Bailey cited an email showing government officials clearly called for the removal of Kennedy’s tweet about Hank Aaron’s death.

White House wanted Kennedy tweet ‘removed ASAP’

Over a span of nine tweets posted Jan. 6, Bailey revealed several emails and documents showing how Biden officials tried to censor social media content that opposed the government’s COVID-19 narrative.

“When I took office, I swore that I would protect the Constitution. Here’s why,” Bailey tweeted. He followed up with this tweet:

We now have hard evidence that President Biden’s Administration colluded with social media companies to censor differing viewpoints and silence “misinformation” that was later deemed true. (2/9)

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

The first example Bailey used to demonstrate collusion pertained to Kennedy:

Here, a White House employee asks Twitter to silence Robert Kennedy, Jr., a known critic of the White House’s COVID-19 narrative. (3/9) pic.twitter.com/kIVv60W8Gt

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of a Jan. 23, 2021, email by White House official Clarke Humphrey, digital director for the White House’s COVID-19 Response Team, to unidentified individuals at Twitter and copied to Robert Flaherty, White House director of Digital Strategy.

In the message, Humphrey “wanted to flag the below tweet” and asked about “the process for having it removed ASAP.”

Specifically, what Humphrey “flagged” in her email was a tweet by Kennedy from Jan. 22, 2021, addressing the death of baseball great Hank Aaron just days after he received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

Kennedy’s tweet was accompanied by a link to a story about Aaron’s death published on Jan. 22, 2021, by The Defender.

Humphrey, in the same email, also suggested “we keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~[general] genre,” adding that this “would be great.”

When questions arose about Aaron’s death following his COVID-19 vaccination, the federal government and the media sought to quash that conversation, Kennedy told The Defender.

Kennedy said:

“The White House was working to suppress this, and the implication is that they didn’t want Blacks in particular to understand the risks of vaccination. And so, they asked Twitter to suppress such content.

“At that point, it became clear that I was being shadow banned at that time, because my account simply stopped growing. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. And I had been growing my audience at a very, very high rate.”

A Jan. 31, 2021, “fact check” by The New York Times claimed that the Fulton County, Georgia, medical examiner determined Aaron’s death was not related to his vaccination.

However, Kennedy said that in a conversation he had with the Fulton County medical examiner subsequent to the publication of that article, the medical examiner claimed he had never examined Hank Aaron’s body. A subsequent letter Kennedy wrote to the Times was never published.

“They never printed that letter,” said Kennedy. “They’ve abolished the traditional right to reply. They always gave you a right to reply and they have denied that to me consistently. Apparently, at the same time, the White House was working to suppress this.”

Tucker Carlson and others also targeted by the Biden administration

Bailey and Landry also cited documents confirming “the Biden White House direct[ed] Facebook to shut down conservative voices Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren.”

Here, the Biden White House directs Facebook to shut down conservative voices @TuckerCarlson and @TomiLahren (4/9) pic.twitter.com/BlFunGWc3Z

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

This tweet was accompanied by an April 14, 2021, email exchange between Flaherty and an unnamed Facebook official in which Flaherty appeared to suggest the platform was not doing enough to provide “reduction” to posts by these two personalities.

Flaherty wrote:

“Since we’ve been on the phone — the top post about vaccines today is Tucker Carlson saying they don’t work. Yesterday was Tomi Lehren [sic] saying she won’t take one.

“This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like — if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with Tucker Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!”

The Facebook official responded, “Thanks — I saw the same thing when we hung up. Running this down now.”

In a tweet, Landry then shared this content, adding, “Rob Flaherty told Facebook to censor @tuckercarlson.”

However, Landry’s tweet included one additional document, apparently a continuation of the April 14, 2021, email exchange between the White House and Facebook, in which the Facebook official was “working on…running down question on Tucker [Carlson] and working on getting you report [sic] by end of week.”

In a follow-up tweet, Landry described the above exchange as a “clear effort at government-directed social media censorship,” and tagged Elon Musk.

And in two more follow-ups, Landry stated:

“A viral video was demoted 50% pending a 7-day fact checking period. That demotion continued by Facebook even though no ‘fact checking’ actually occurred. Follow [this account] for more coercive and collusive efforts by the @WhiteHouse to pressure @Facebook to censor @TuckerCarlson.”

Landry said, “Facebook continued to demote the Tucker Carlson video even though no fact checking actually occurred.”

In another tweet, Bailey wrote, “Here is an example of Big Tech toeing the line for Biden.”

The tweet was accompanied by a July 20, 2021, email from an unnamed Google official to Flaherty, explaining how YouTube (which is owned by Google) was working to limit the distribution of “borderline content” on that platform, stating:

“It is important to keep in mind that borderline content accounts for a fraction of 1% of what is watched on YouTube in the United States. We use machine learning to reduce the recommendations of this type of content, including potentially harmful misinformation.

“In January 2019, we announced changes to our recommendations systems to limit the spread of this type of content which resulted in a 70% drop in watchtime on non-subscribed recommended content in the U.S. and our goal is to have views of non-subscribed, recommended borderline content below 0.5%.

“I will keep you updated with any new policy or product improvements that we make as we continue our work to help people find authoritative health information on YouTube.”

Bailey also tweeted:

The truth no longer matters to the White House. They “Really couldn’t care less about products unless they’ve having measurable impact” on suppressing speech. (7/9) pic.twitter.com/AnTOmwW9Wa

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

The tweet referenced an April 9, 2021, email from Flaherty to an official at Facebook, writing in part:

“Will say I’m really mostly interested in what effects the interventions and products you’ve tested have had on increasing vaccine interest within hesitant communities, and which ones have shown promise.

“Really couldn’t care less about products unless they’re having measurable impact. And while the product safari has been interesting, at the end of the day, I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure sure [sic] you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.

“I definitely have what I believe to be a non-comprehensive list of products you’re building but I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters in the now-folded ‘lockdown.’”

Bailey also tweeted “evidence that this scheme starts ‘at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH [White House].’”

An April 22, 2021, email from Flaherty to seven Google officials, on which Humphrey and former White House COVID-19 adviser Andrew Slavitt were copied, was attached, where Flaherty wrote:

“All — Thanks again for the conversation today.

“To recap: As we move away from a supply problem toward a demand problem [apparently referencing the COVID-19 vaccines], we remain concerned that Youtube is ‘funneling’ people into hesitance and intensifying people’s hesitancy.

“We certainly recognize that removing content that is unfavorable to the cause of increasing vaccine adoption is not a realistic — or even good — solution. But we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better.

“This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH, so we’d like to continue a good-faith dialogue about what is going on under the hood here.”

Bailey concluded his Twitter thread with this:

The truth no longer matters to the White House. They “Really couldn’t care less about products unless they’ve having measurable impact” on suppressing speech. (7/9) pic.twitter.com/AnTOmwW9Wa

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 7, 2023

Meta promised to use ‘a spectrum of levers’ to limit distribution and reach of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ content

In another Jan. 6 tweet, Bailey said, “Here’s more collusion,” and showed a screenshot of a “confidential” document from Meta — the parent company of Facebook — that was apparently directed at the White House.

In this document, Meta provided a screenshot of a link posted on Facebook to a Feb. 11, 2021, article critical of COVID-19 vaccines that appeared in The Defender.

Highlighting this as a “vaccine hesitancy example,” Meta’s memo stated, in part:

“The following examples of content are those that do not violate our Misinformation and Harm policy, but may contribute to vaccine hesitancy or present a barrier to vaccination.

“We utilize a spectrum of levers for this kind of content that is both proportionate and also helps our users make informed decisions. Actions may include reducing the posts’ distribution, not suggesting the posts to users, limiting their discoverability in Search, and applying Inform Labels and/or reshare friction to the posts.”

In other words, Meta appeared to tell the White House that while it could not identify a pretext to delete this particular content, it could nevertheless employ “a spectrum of levers” to limit its distribution and reach.

This was further confirmed by Landry in a Jan. 7 retweet of the Meta memo:

Facebook also told the White House how they could censor @RobertKennedyJR pic.twitter.com/aMDwN7c9KW

— Jeff Landry (@JeffLandry) January 7, 2023

More legal action coming as pressure on Twitter grows

Charlene Bollinger, co-founder of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer, remarked on these revelations, telling The Defender that if content questioning official narratives regarding the COVID-19 vaccines were not censored, “millions of people would still be alive today.”

Bollinger, who told The Defender that four Twitter accounts she was affiliated with, including the accounts for The Truth About Vaccines, The Truth About Cancer and the United Medical Freedom SuperPAC (political action committee) were taken down by Twitter, describing such actions as “a crime against humanity” which “has got to stop.”

“I am grateful for the attorney generals and the Twitter files coming out [with such content], which proves we were right,” she added.

Bollinger, along with Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola and others were identified by the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH) as being part of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.” Bollinger has called upon Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk to reinstate her accounts and others belonging to the “Disinformation Dozen.”

Described by Mercola as “a progressive cancel-culture leader,” CCDH has “extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has labeled questioning the COVID-19 injection as ‘threats to national security.’”

Officials including Fauci, former White House “disinformation” head Nina Jankowicz, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have been subpoenaed in the ongoing Louisiana and Missouri lawsuit.

Fauci, as well as FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan — who is also heavily implicated in the “Twitter files” — and other Biden administration officials, have already been deposed, while the scheduled deposition of former White House press secretary Jen Psaki was blocked last week by the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Recently released “Twitter files” have provided further evidence of collusion between the Biden administration, federal entities including intelligence agencies and Twitter. Further releases of “Twitter files” are widely expected in the coming days, including the release of the so-called “Fauci files.”

The Epoch Times reports that House Republicans, who now hold a majority in the chamber, have pledged to investigate collusion between the federal government and private companies, including social media platforms, and the establishment of a subcommittee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government.

This committee will reportedly be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Kennedy referenced other ongoing and forthcoming legal cases on related matters, on his part and from CHD, telling The Defender:

“We are already involved in a number of First Amendment cases. We’re involved in the litigation against Facebook on behalf of CHD. I personally am suing Elizabeth Warren. We’re about to file an antitrust suit against the Trusted News Initiative, which includes all of the social media sites.

“And [these new revelations] open up new claims, new opportunities. This is the government and the White House directly. We’re reviewing that right now, as public officials are not allowed to censor.”

*

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

Featured image is from CHD

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Kosovo and Metochia (KosMet) is a southwestern province of the Republic of Serbia – a central region of the political, national, economic, cultural, and religious life of Serbia in the Middle Ages. The region was occupied by the Ottoman authorities in 1455 and subsequently was under the Islamic-Ottoman yoke until the beginning of the 20^th century. The consequences of the Ottoman administration on the further development of the region were quite tragic in several points:

1. The Christian medieval feature of KosMet was to the great extent replaced by Islamic characteristics.
2. The ethnic breakdown of the region was drastically changed at the expense of the Christian Serbs and in the favor of Muslim Albanians who occupied KosMet as migrants from neighboring North Albania.
3. The European culture of the region was significantly changed in the favor of the Asiatic-Oriental cultural feature.
4. KosMet became one of the fundamental sources of Balkan Islamic radicalism till today.
5. The region is during the last hundred years one of the principal points of the Balkan Powder Keg creating as such internationally recognized problematic Kosovo Question.

Nevertheless, after the Balkan Wars of 1912−1913, a larger (eastern) part of KosMet became reincluded into the Kingdom of Serbia, after the Ottoman Empire was pushed out from the biggest part of the Balkans by the Balkan Alliance composed of Serbian, Greek, Bulgarian and Montenegrin forces (the First and Second Balkan Wars 1912−1913).[i]

A minor (western) part of KosMet became at the same time for the first time in history included into the state of Montenegro due to Serbia’s generosity toward the Montenegrin “brothers”. In November 1918 Vojvodina, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, joined Serbia, which in her turn joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed in 1929 as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), the new state of all South Slavs except Bulgarians.[ii] However, by the creation of the first South Slavic state on December 1^st, 1918 KosMet brought into this political entity a sizeable trouble-making Muslim Albanian population (the Shqiptars in the following how they are calling themselves), whereas in Vojvodina lived an approximately equal number of peaceful ethnic Hungarians followed by the German Folksdeutschers. However, from the political viewpoint, the difference between KosMet’s Shqiptars on one hand and Vojvodina’s Hungarians and Germans on another was quite immense as the latter never caused any serious troubles in the new state for the next twenty years of its existence while the Shqiptars, in contrast, became from the very beginning of the Yugoslav unification in 1918 an extremely disturbing and disloyal element within both Serbia and Yugoslavia.

Furthermore, for the last almost three decades, since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, KosMet has become a hot spot on the globe attracting huge international attention primarily due to the Albanian policy of secessionism and Islamic holy war (jihad) against the local Christian Serb population.

On this place, one can ask a fundamental question: What makes a region of the size of Corsica and a population of something 1.5 million so special that it forced first Serbia, and then half the globe, to engage in extinguishing the fire which threatens in 1999 to endanger the entire world order and global security?

Nevertheless, the quasi-independent Republic of Kosovo is today a classical mafia state under the protection of the Western “democracies”.[iii] Why?

KosMet region, the southwestern part of Serbia, is considered by many Western authors as a “disputed land” for the last two centuries. A traditional Western image of the issue of the Kosovo Question is that two competing nations, the Serbs and the Albanians (Shqiptars) are fighting for the dominance over the region.[iv]

Nevertheless, it is finally created a wrong impression about the present-day political situation in concern to the Kosovo Question that it is that two sides are claiming their rights taking into consideration two different arguments:

the Serbs are referring to their “historical rights” while the Shqiptars are relying on their actual numerical preponderance which is, in fact, a product of 300 years of ethnic cleansing of and terror against KosMet Serbs. However, for all real and non-partisan experts on the Kosovo Question it is clear that, in essence, there is not the issue of “disputed land” between Serbs and Shqiptars but rather the issue of a robbery of the province by the latter.[v] In other words, the whole issue of the Kosovo Question is set up upside down by the Western corporate media, politicians, warmongers, and academics based on misconceptions, fake news, and even notorious lies about KosMet history and politics (one of the best examples is a British historian and “expert on Yugoslav history”, Noel Malcolm). Those misconceptions, fake news, and lies are developed and maintained for a longer period of time up to the present, and, therefore, they have to be publicly presented and decisively refuted before any serious discourse on this matter is going to be carried out.[vi] Basically, it has to be exposed as real and based on the relevant sources of the historical, political, demographic, ethical, and religious background of the Kosovo Question. It has to be noticed in this respect that there are authors who argue that the Kosovo Question is predominantly of an anthropological nature, rather than a political one. Anyway, in principle, it has to be examined a number of possible solutions to the “dispute”, from an ideal one to the realistic one, putting the whole issue in the broader historical and actual worldwide political perspective as otherwise, the issue of the Kosovo Question is going to be blatantly taken out from its real context (what a majority of Western “experts” are exactly doing).

A leading research direction of the issue can be, for instance, to take into serious consideration the case of Kosovo Shqiptars’ natural birth-rate phenomena. Here it is going to be presented only one illustrative case of this politically motivated phenomenon. A French magazine published a couple of photos from the Lion airport on April 18^th, 1999, during the airborne aggression by NATO on Serbia (and partly on Montenegro), in the course of their “preventing a humanitarian catastrophe” at KosMet. However, one picture showed the French weaponry ready to be transported to KosMet, and the other presented an ethnic-Albanian family from KosMet, “refugees” just arrived in France. The latter photo deserves well one’s attention, for it speaks very much about the core of the Kosovo Question indeed as it exposes vividly the very crux of the matter. Let us analyze this picture, presenting the “unfortunate” family of Kosovars (as the Western “experts” call KosMet Shqiptars). First of all, it was a single family, consisting of three generations. On the left, we see the grandmother (with scarf), and on the right father and mother of the children posing around. Evidently, it is the peasant family. Though the children appear well dressed (probably by a humanitarian agency), the adults reveal their modest well-being. One can notice the first three daughters, the eldest and two twin girls next to her followed by two daughters in the front and two boys beside as well. The central figure appears as the young girl, of about 8, who shows the V sign in a Churchill-like gesture. What is she trying to tell us? The family is hardly in a “victorious position”. Who is going to defeat whom? Who instructed her to pose before the cameras in that manner? These are the basic questions that come to mind when looking at this scene at the Lion airport.

Toponyms

The authentic and original toponyms of some regions probably tell the best about the genuine ownership of it from the ethnonational point of view. It is, however, the most problematic and hidden aspect of the Kosovo Question by the Western “experts” who never wanted to deal with this issue as it is clearly refuting their arguments about allegedly Albanian features of this region of South-West Serbia, called Kosovo and Metohia (but not only Kosovo), which is an autonomous province of Serbia since 1945 but enjoyed till 1989 a significant political sovereignty especially from 1974 (according to the last Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).

To start from the very beginning, the very name Kosovo is a short-term Kosovo Polje, meaning in the Serbian language Field of Blackbirds (kos – blackbird in the Serbian language).[vii] In order to avoid confusion, it has to be adopted the standard rule for the terms used in, at least, scientific literature. Therefore, ethnic Albanians who are citizens of Serbia have to be designated by Shqiptars (Shqiptare, “sons of eagles”),[viii] as they call themselves and were usually called in Yugoslavia until the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, another interpretation of the term is stemming from shqipoj, “one who understands”. This interpretation appears in accordance with the similar case of Slav – “one who speaks (slovi)”, as different from Nemac (German), “one who is mute (nem)”. However, it is a fact that most of Serbia’s Shqiptars consider now the term pejorative but only if it is used by the Serbs, for several historical reasons.[ix] The principal reason is that many designations of the present-day Shqiptars/Albanians throughout history were, to many Balkan people eponymous to wild people, including the Ottoman administration. In particular, the name Arnaut, widely used during the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, was synonymous with the robber, highwayman, belligerent savage, etc.[x] The name Shqiptar was in many respects similarly used by the Slavic population. A modern equivalent to Shqiptar in Western usage as the term for KosMet ethnic Albanians/Shiptars is an artificial ethnonym Kosovars which is used mainly for purely political and propaganda purposes in order to show that a separate quasi-ethnic nation exists. Nevertheless, the term appears misleading for the very reason as it implies “inhabitants of Kosovo”, which includes all ethnicities of the province of KosMet. Shqipëria is the internal official name of present-day Albania and the Albanians (Shqiptars) themselves are calling their own national state in which they are living. The spoken and national language of all Shqiptars no matter which country they inhabitants is called by themselves Shqip. According to Albanian historiography, it is most probable that the ethnic name of Shqiptars is derived from the term shqipon (clearly to say).[xi]

The official term for Serbia’s southern province of KosMet is Kosovo and Metochia but for the very political reasons, the Shiptars are all the time omitting its second part (Metochia) using only the first one (as Kosova or Kosovë). The toponym Kosovo/Kosova/Kosovë with its root Kos simply means nothing in the Ship (Albanian) language as it is borrowed from Slavic/Serbian. Subsequently, the Shqiptars even do not have their name for the land they claim to be allegedly their own even from an immemorial time (by propagating false claims to be the oldest Balkan and even European people as the descendants of ancient Balkan Illyrians)![xii] The question is why they are purposely omitting to use of the toponym Metochia? For the very political reason as the toponym shows that the Shiptars have historically nothing to do with this province. To remind ourselves, Metochia is corrupt of Greek μετóχι, which designates a dependency of a monastery, usually allotted by the local ruler or the king. The name refers to the monasteries complex of the western part of the province, bordering both Montenegro and Albania. The essence is that Metochia is crowded by medieval Serbian monasteries but not Albanian. The Serbian Orthodox Church in this matter even claims that around 70% of KosMet land legally belongs to it. However, the same region of Metochia is called by Shiptars as Dukagjin – the land of a duke.[xiii] It has to be mentioned here that it designates generally a border region, which used to be under the military rule of a duke (like Frankish marka). Northern Serbia’s region, which is an autonomous province as KosMet, is called Vojvodina (the land of a duke), for the same reason, since it was situated on the border of the Habsburg/Austrian Monarchy (renamed Austria-Hungary from 1867) with the Ottoman Empire after the Great Vienna War in 1683−1699 and a big part of it was under the military rule as such. Here it has to be emphasized that kos is a purely Slavic/Serb name, as duka is a corrupted Italian one.

However, these facts are not merely of linguistic nature but bear a heavyweight when dealing with the essence of the Kosovo Question for the very reason that the authentic toponyms, in general, appear to be the most reliable identification of a region and at the same time crucial evidence of the fact as to whom the region, in fact, historically belongs. Therefore, the basic clarifications of the KosMet toponym issue are necessary to be pointed out in the next paragraphs.

Kosovo is a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic name of the kind of bird, which has about 300 subspecies, from the family Turdidae, derived from the Greek kopsihos. The Kosovo Field, where historically a number of important battles were fought, is situated northwest of the regional capital Priština.[xiv]

Metochia is derived from a Greek metohi as mentioned above, from meteho – to take part. It denotes a monastery estate (of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the KosMet case).

Priština, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic term, derived from prysk, derived in its turn from the Indo-European (s)per, to become the verb prisnoti, meaning “to spurt”, “to gush”. In the modern Serbian language, the term prisht designates decease, boil (anthrax).

The town of Priština was an important trade and mine medieval center, with an important Dubrovnik colony. A Serbian King Stefan Dečanski (1321−1331)[xv] used to stay at Priština, while Serbian Emperor Stephan Dušan (1331−1355) had his court here for some time.[xvi]

After Stephan Dušan, Priština became the capital of Vuk Branković’s feud and retained that position even after the Kosovo Battle in 1389.

His wife Mara lived there with her sons, Grgur (Gregorie) and Đurađ (Georgie), as well as Prince Lazar’s widow Eugenia (known in the folk songs as Empress Milica). The Ottomans took Priština in 1439, but the Dubrovnik colony remains there as Dubrovnik had all the time very good political relations with the Ottoman authorities.[xvii] In 1660 a Roman-Catholic missionary mentions Priština as an important post between Novi Pazar and Istanbul (Constantinople). During the Austrian-Ottoman war in 1683−1699 (the Great Vienna War) the former had a small garrison there in 1689.[xviii] However, according to the Austrian records, there were about 360 villages around, some of which were set to fire by Muslim Turks and Tatars and (Serb Christian) inhabitants slaughtered. At the beginning of the 19^th century, Priština appears to be an important trade town, with a famous fair, with some 12.000 inhabitants. France established her consulate there in 1812. According to some reports, Priština had at the time about 7.000−9.000 inhabitants, mainly Christian Orthodox Serbs, but some Muslim Arnauts and semi-Islamized Serbs too. However, in 1852 the reports count 12.000−15.000 inhabitants, one-third Serbs and Tsintsars (the Christian Orthodox Vlachs), the rest Muslim Arnauts.[xix] After two big fires in 1859 and 1863, Priština suffered a considerable decline.

Prizren, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic name, from zreti, to see. Derived from the Indo-European gher, to flash, participle perfect zren. A prefix pri is the common pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic. Prizren (a main urban settlement in Metochia) was mentioned as the episcopate in 1019 as subordinated to the Byzantine Ohrid archiepiscopate. The first Serbian archiepiscop (archbishop) St. Sava (1219−1236) subordinated it to his new Serbian archiepiscopate.[xx] Prizren was developed as a trade town in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, especially during Serbian King Milutin (1282−1321) and Serbian Emperors Stephan Dušan and Stephan Uroš (1355−1371), who had their courts there. Stephan Dušan built a monastery with a memorial church devoted to St. Archangels (Michael and Gavril). After falling into the Ottoman hands, the monastery was demolished and no trace of the grave of Emperor Dušan has remained. It was an important colony of Dubrovnik in Prizren, with two Roman-Catholic churches. The Ottomans took Prizren in 1455 and after that, the town was becoming more and more Islamic but even in 1878 2/3 of its population have been Christian Orthodox Serbs (today only several Serbs are left in the city). Nevertheless, during the Ottoman occupation, Prizren lost most of its trade role but there were some rich merchants like Turk Mehmed Hajredin Kukli-beg with his 117 shops, 6 watermills, and caravanserai (hotel). The Shqiptars appear there late, in the second half of the 17^th century only. In the 17^th century, trade receives a new impetus at Prizren, with some 8.600 (1610) and 12.000 (1655) homes. The town was renowned for its fountains, watermills (600), nice houses, and pleasant gardens. Craftsmanship was very developed, especially guns and sabers productions. Prizren was the largest Serb town in the region, second only to Skopje. Still, the overwhelming majority of the population was Christian Orthodox Serbs. Though there was a Roman-Catholic episcope chair, there were 30−40 Roman-Catholic homes only. However, in both the 16^th and 17^th centuries Prizren was a victim of ethnic-Shqiptar highlanders, mainly of the Mirdites tribe from North Albania. At the end of the 18^th century, many towns were devastated by the Shqiptars, including Prizren, mainly by highwaymen. For instance, father Sava reports how in 1795 Mahmud-pasha Bushatli and his Shqiptars devastated Prizren and only 7.000−8.000 homes remained, much lesser than there were in the 17^th century.

According to one record in 1805, Prizren experienced a revival. Its inhabitants were partly Muslims and partly Christian Orthodox, but both the Serbs, as their (Slavic) language revealed. The 19^th century witnessed the further development of Prizren. According to J. Miller (1844), the following statistics were offered; 6.000 homes, with 18.600 Orthodox citizens, 2.150 Roman Catholics, 4.000 Muslims (4/5 Serbs), and 600 Tsigans (Roma/Gypsies). Trade was mainly in the hands of the Serbs. The town had many mosques (12 big, 42 altogether), many clock towers, and one Christian Orthodox and one Roman-Catholic church. Trade was done mainly with Thessaloniki since the trade road to Skadar (Scodra/Scutari) was insecure due to the Shqiptar highwaymen.    

Mitrovica, after the Greek St. Demetrios, Serb Dimitrije. Demetrios itself means son of Demetre, goddess of fertility and agriculture.[xxi] When Serbian King Milutin donated in the 14^th century to the St. Stephan monastery at Banjska the church “St. Dimitrije under Zvečan”, the new town founded in the vicinity obtained the name D(i)mitrovica, or Mitrovica. Renowned Turkish traveler Evlia Čelebija mentions Mitrovica as “on the border of Bosnian vilayet”, with the castle (probably Zvečan) abandoned but the town flourishing. Father Jukić mentions (1852) 300 Muslim and 50 Orthodox houses. Unimpressive until 1871 Mitrovica experienced a fast development with a railway. 

Zvečan was a Serbian castle built in the 11^th century during Serbia’s fight against the Byzantine Empire. The castle served as a prison (something like London Tower), where many noblemen finished their lives, including King Stephan Dečanski’s brother, Constantine, and the King himself. Ottoman rule was imposed already at the end of the 14^th century after the Kosovo Battle. Zvečan used to be left empty for many periods. It suffered the most in 1884 when the wall material of the castle was used by the Ottoman authorities for building the bridge across the River Ibar in Mitrovica and some other objects.

As mentioned before, nearby Banjska was a village, which had a beautiful monastery, but was ruined after the Kosovo Battle.[xxii] Nevertheless, the place won its celebrity after the beautiful folk poem Strahinjić Bane, an epic Serb hero from Banjska. The Ottomans founded a small town over the ruins of Banjska, with a mosque and sahat-kula (clock tower). At the hill foot, there was a bath,[xxiii] in use a long time afterward. At the beginning of the 20^th century, one could still see a remnant of the minaret on the ruins of the old Serbian Christian Orthodox church, converted into the mosque in the 15^th century. 

Đakovica, from the Greek diakonos, servant, pupil. The earliest record about the place came from the 17^th century but the town probably existed before. The Albanian used toponym Gjakova was given by the Ottomans and the Shqiptars while the Serbs are calling the town Đakovica.[xxiv] This is the only area in KosMet (very close to Albania) in which, according to the first Ottoman population census (defter) in KosMet done in 1455, the Shqiptars lived in some big numbers.[xxv] It was a small town, which started to be massively populated by Shqiptars from neighboring North Albania after the First Great Serbian Migration from KosMet to the Habsburg Monarchy (i.e, to South Hungary) in 1689−1690.[xxvi] It was probably on that account that the Serbs used to call it Arnaut-Pazar. According to some sources, in 1844 there were 1.900 houses, 11 mosques, and 640−650 shops. In the same year, there were 18.000 Muslims, 2.600 Orthodox, and 450 Roman-Catholic inhabitants in Đakovica. As for the ethnic partition, the same records provide 17.000 Arnauts, 3.800 Slavs (Serbs), 180 Turks, and finally some Tsintsars and Gypsies (Tsigans). However, statistics greatly differ from author to author and may be taken as a rough estimate only. The Christians were engaged mainly in craftsmanship, with the Roman Catholics as goldsmiths and the Orthodox as saddle-makers and painters.

Peć, a pan-Slavic, and pra-Slavic from pekti, to roast. Pekt/peć means furnace. It is a cult place of the Serbian people, the former seat of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć in the nearby church (est. 1346), established by the Serbian King Milutin (1282−1321). However, besides its spiritual importance, Peć was a town with a lively trade, especially by the Dubrovnik colony in the town. The Ottomans abolished the Patriarchate of Peć after 1459, to be re-established in 1557 and ultimately to be abolished in 1766 and subordinated to the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople.[xxvii] In the 19^th century, there were 2.000 houses with some 7.000−8.000 inhabitants, mainly the Christian Orthodox Serbs. The town had 900 shops. A principal occupation was silk production and agriculture (fruit and tobacco). Despite its size, Peć (in Turkish Ipek) was not able to develop trade,  due to, according to the source, insecurity ”from (the local) Arnauts”, who were “public highwaymen”. 

Uroševac, a pra-Church-Slavonic from Uroš, derived from ur, master, from Hungarian ursu for a lord. In Turkish Ferizović, in Shqip Ferizaj. It was a small Gypsy village. The railway made it a town and a trade center of the region. 

Lipljan, an old Serbian, probably from the Roman name for the nearby Roman-Byzantine castrum Ulpiana.

Orahovac, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic name oreh for nut (orah in the contemporary Serb), derived from Indo-European ar and reks (to smash), something one eats skinned.

Drenica, derived from a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic dren, dogwood, from the Indo-European root dher(e)ghno. 

Vučitrn, derived from Serb vuk, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic vlk, for wolf, the Indo-European ulkuos[xxviii] and trn, the Teutonic-pra-Slavic term for thorn (the Indo-European (s)ter, for thorny plants). The town is built probably over the ancient Vicianum. It is mentioned for the first time in the 14^th century as a place belonging to the Serbian feudal lord Vuk Branković, who had his palace there too. The town was renowned for its trade activities, especially for its Dubrovnik colony. A Serbian despot Đurađ Branković (1427−1456) used it as his seat too. In the vicinity, there was a well-known trade and mine town Trepča. Vučitrn fell to the Ottomans in 1439 (or 1440) for the first time, then definitely in 1455 when all KosMet became finally occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Some travelers mention it as an important trade center. The Ottoman historian Turk Evlija Čelebija counts 2.000 houses, then tekija,[xxix] schools, a Christian Orthodox school, a hammam (bath), vineyards, and orchards. In the 18^th century, Vučitrn appears as an insignificant place but becomes the seat of a sanjak.[xxx] In 1894 one counted about 7.000−8.000 inhabitants. The main occupation was blacksmith and leather craftsmanship. 

Glogovac, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic name from glog for hawthorn (from Greek glohiis – top of a blade). 

Istok, from tok, a pra-Slavic noun for flow (from the Indo-European teq – to run (away), and iz as the perfective prefix for the verb teći – to flow, from the Indo-European eghs. 

Gračanica, a pan-Slavic and pra-Slavic diminutive of gord, initially any fenced settlement, later town, and castle, from the Indo-European gherdh, to fence.[xxxi] 

Kačanik, a Turkish name, from kaçak–highwayman. Kačanik (situated on the very border to the present-day Republic of North Macedonia) was notorious for its highwayman activities from the beginning of its history, which dates from the 16th century. Situated at the entrance of the gorge Kačanik, made by the river Lepenac, it controlled the passage through the gorge, the only possible between Macedonia and KosMet. A report from 1573 warns people to guard themselves well in passing the gorge, for the danger from the local Shqiptars.

It was for this danger that Sinan-pasha built the small fortress at the gorge entrance, which was intended to protect travelers, mainly tradesmen, from robbery and slaughter. The Austrian soldiers during the Great Vienna War under General Piccolomini took the fortress in 1689, but after their retreat in 1690, the Ottomans captured the fortress and slaughtered the Austrian garrison. It was not until 1807 when Reshid-pasha cleared Kačanik from highwaymen that the traffic through the gorge was resumed. Around the middle of the 19th century, the town consisted of, according to the source, about a „hundred miserable Arnaut (Shqiptar) houses“, situated beside the ruined fortress. Before the Balkan Wars (1912−1913) town was renamed by the Ottomans as Orhanije and at that time had about 250 houses.

Names of the rivers, mountains, and other geographical entities are likewise Slavic in the entire KosMet. They are easily recognized by suffixes, like –va for the river, -ica for rivers or settlements. We mention the Rivers Sitnica, Studenica, etc. The suffix -or for mountains is considered to be of Celtic origin, but mountains with this ending are scattered all around the West Balkans. Some toponyms bear Turkish names, as expected after centuries of Ottoman rule in this part of the Balkans.[xxxii] We emphasize here that since KosMet used to be separated from modern Serbia for two centuries, its development was considerably retarded concerning the language and folklore generally. It appears today as a sort of reservation in this respect, as a remnant of ancient times, from the medieval Serbian state and the Serbian nation in general. This is also the case with other mountainous regions of the Balkans, in particular, North Albania, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, which were on the margin of European civilization and culture for centuries.[xxxiii]

As for the toponyms in Albania, many appear corrupted from the original Greek or Roman, whereas some bear purely Slavic names. This applies particularly to the plain regions, which were settled by ethnic-Shqiptar (Albanian) highlanders only relatively recently.

As was already pointed out above, these linguistic details are not merely of a linguistic nature but reveal the essence of the issue of who is the genuine owner of the “disputed” land. It concerns the question of “negative designation” as well. The ancient Greeks (and Romans as well) used to call other nations “barbarians”, meaning “non-Greeks” or “neither Romans nor Greeks”. It had somewhat pejorative overtones, which one could appreciate regarding their superiority over the surrounding nations, in particular, those much less civilized, like Skits.[xxxiv]  The same point appears with the Israelites, who designate non-Jews as goyim, meaning (other, non-Jewish) nations.[xxxv] Though no Jew would admit it, it has a pejorative meaning whatsoever, and this overtone cannot be ignored.

The Shqiptar Question, in fact, involves all nationalities with whom the ethnic Shqiptars are in close contact at the Balkan Peninsula. Subsequently, one faces the conflict of the Shqiptars versus non-Shqiptars, which places inevitably the ethnic Shqiptars in a privileged position. This will sound cynical when we compare the civilization levels of both sides in the conflict over KosMet. Unfortunately, the term “non-Albanian” has been widely accepted by the international community, and even an eventual neologism that would substitute the unfortunate term “non-Albanian” would not do. In a sense, this terminology would correspond to a “non-sick” man (as compared to a sick one), meaning “healthy man”. “Non-Albanian” implies inevitably the feeling of “something wrong” with those singled out so.

Unfortunately, the story does not end here. Serbia used to have, during her recent history (since 1945), two regions, which had privileged positions relative to the rest of the state. One was the autonomous province of Vojvodina, the other the autonomous region (later to become a province, too) of . (KosMet). The problem is the “rest of Serbia”. Some call it “Serbia proper”, some “Central Serbia”. The first designation appears particularly unsuitable, for it implies that KosMet is not ”proper Serbia”, thus concealing in the very name a political message.

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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] After both the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912−1913 the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Montenegro agreed to divide the territory of Kosovo (i.e., western portion of this province known as Metohia and eastern portion known as Kosovo) at such a way that largest portion of Metohia became incorporated into Montenegro, while whole portion of Kosovo (with Priština and Kosovo Field where the Kosovo Battle occurred on June 28^th, 1389 between the Serbs and the Ottomans) and smaller part of Metohia have been annexed by Serbia (Никола Ђоновић, Црна Гора пре и после уједињења, Београд: Политика А.Д., 1939, 76; Борислав Ратковић, Митар Ђуришић, Саво Скоко, Србија и Црна Гора у Балканским ратовима 1912−1913, Београд: БИГЗ, 1972, 323). 

[ii]  About the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes see: Branko Petranović, Istorija Jugoslavije, knjiga I, Beograd: NOLIT, 1988; Алекс Н. Драгнић, Србија, Никола Пашић и Југославија, Београд: Народна радикална странка, 1994; Vladislav B. Sotirović, Creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 1914−1918, Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2007.

[iii] Pierre Pean, Sébastien Fontenelle, Kosovo une guerre “juste” pour créer un etat mafieux, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2013.

[iv] See, for instance: Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, New York: New York University Press, 1998.

[v] About Serbian-Shqiptars relations in KosMet, see: Душан Т. Батаковић, Косово и Метохија у српско-арбанашким односима, Београд: Чигоја штампа, 2006.

[vi] For instance, it was clearly done in my article: “Kosovo: What Everyone (Really) Needs to Know” (http://global-politics.eu/kosovo-really/).

[vii] In the German language, it is Amselfeld after Amsel for the blackbird and feld for the field.

[viii] The term is derived from shqipojnë, which designates the eagle, possibly totem of a tribe.

[ix] Nevertheless, as a matter of historical fact, Yugoslavia’s Shqiptar political leaders at the federal level used to use this term absolutely freely, during Josip Broz Tito’s era (1945−1980).

[x] By contemporary Balkan population Arnauts used to be experienced in a similar sense as North-American Indians by European population in the 19-th century. However, the Arnauts are the Albanized KosMet Serbs while usual Ottoman term for ethnic Albanians was Arbanesh. It is estimated that today there are approximately 1/3 of the KosMet Shqiptar population to be of the ethnic Serb origin (the Arnauts). About this problem, see: Душан Т. Батаковић, Косово и Метохија: Историја и идеологија, Београд: Чигоја штампа, 2007, 38−46.     

[xi] Peter Bartl, Albanien: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1995, 20.

[xii] About the Illyrians, see: Aleksandar Stipčević, Iliri: Povijest, život, kultura, II dopunjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1989. In the book by Albanian historian Peter Bartl about Albania and Albanians KosMet as Albanian (Shqiptar) land is very rarely mentioned (Peter Bartl, Albanien: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1995). Oppositely to the Albanian case, KosMet is very well presented in the national folk songs of the Serbs. About the Slavic and Indo-European roots of the Serbian epic including and KosMet case, see: Александар Лома, Пракосово: Словенски и индоевропски корени српске епике, Београд: САНУ, Балканолошки институт, 2002. 

[xiii] There is a false Shiptar interpretation of this toponym as that it was a land of the medieval family Dukagjini of the Shiptar origin.

[xiv] Undoubtedly, the most important battle occurred in KosMet was that of 1389 (June 15/28th) between Serbian army led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and Ottoman army led by Sultan Murad I. Both military leaders died during the battle. On the battle, see: Ратко Пековић (избор текстова), Косовска битка: Мит, легенда и стварност, Београд: Литера, 1987. About Prince Lazar, see: Раде Михаљчић, Лазар Хребељановић: Историја, култ, предање, Београд: БИГЗ, 1989.

[xv] About Stephan Dečanski, see: Станоје Станојевић, Сви српски владари: Биографије српских (са црногорским и босанским) и преглед хрватских владара, Београд: Отворена књига, 2015, 49−50.

[xvi] About the Empire of Stephan Dušan, see: Миладин Стевановић, Душаново Царство, Београд: Књига-Комерц, 2001.

[xvii] On the golden age of the history of Dubrovnik, see: Radovan Samardžić, Zlatni vek Dubrovnika, Beograd: Prosveta, 1962.

[xviii]  About this war and KosMet, see: Радован Самарџић и други, Косово и Метохија у српској историји, Београд: Српска књижевна задруга, 1989, 127−141.

[xix] The Ottoman census system for the very taxation purposes did not count ethnic nations but rather only the confessional groups (millets).

[xx]  About St. Sava, see: Драган Антић, Љиљана Цвекић, Венац Светога Саве, Шабац: Глас цркве, 1988.

[xxi] According to Robert Graves, Demetre means mother of barley.

[xxii] Slobodan Milošević’s family claims to have the origin from Banjska.

[xxiii] Banja in the Serbian language means bath or spa.

[xxiv] There are indications that the original town-name was Jakova or Giacovo.

[xxv] Translated text of the original defter from 1455 to the Serbo-Croat language is published in 1972 by the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo: https://www.scribd.com/doc/98035320/Oblast-Brankovica-Opsirni-Katastarski-Popis-Iz-1455-Godine.

[xxvi] About the First Great Serbian Migration, see: Стефан Чакић, Велика сеоба Срба 1689/90 и патријарх Арсеније III Црнојевић, Нови Сад: Добра вест, 1990.

[xxvii] About a historical role of the Patriarchate of Peć in the preservation of the Serbian national and cultural identity, see: Vladislav B. Sotirović, “The Historical Role of the Patriarchate of Peć in Preservation of Serbian National and Cultural Identity”, Актуальнье проблемы науки в контексте православных традиций, Сборник материалов международной научно-практической конференции, 28−29 февраля 2008 года, Армавир, Россия, 2008, 22−25.  

[xxviii] Ulk has been preserved in contemporary Albanian, as a common name, with the same meaning – wolf. In modern Serb Vuk appears a common name, too, in particular among the people coming from poor regions (usually high mountains).

[xxix] Dervish house, after Turkish tekke (Arab täkyä).

[xxx] Sanjak was the Ottoman smaller administrative-territorial unit as a part of a bigger pashalik.

[xxxi] Some toponyms Shiptars still call by Albanian names, like Ferizaj for Uroševac.

[xxxii] About the Ottoman rule in the region, see: Peter F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354−1804, Seattle−London: University of Washington Press, 1977.

[xxxiii] See the book by Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans, New York−Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

[xxxiv] The anecdote on the dispute between a bully Greek and philosopher Abaris, of the Scythian origin, who exclaimed “My homeland is a shame for me, but you are the shame of your homeland!”  illustrates well the issue.

[xxxv] In modern parlance it renders gentiles.

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Square, the payment processing company also known as Block, Inc., has deactivated the account of former Freedom Convoy organizer Chris Barber for “security reasons,” reports news outlet True North.

“We recently reviewed your account, and found activity that our platform is unable to support. Because of this, we are sorry to inform you that your Square account is now deactivated,” the company told Barber in a notice, according to True North journalist Andrew Lawton.

“Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the reason for your account deactivation due to security reasons,” it added.

The cancellation of Barber’s payment processing platform reportedly came in late December 2022, which caused his hoodie and T-shirt brand Big Red Merch to put orders on hold.

“The store will be down as we deal with some unpredicted issues,” reads a notice on its website. “The store will be operational again by the end of next week.”

Square also told Barber that it did not take the decision to close his account lightly.

“We understand that this decision may cause changes in how you run your business and do not make it lightly,” the notice said, adding, “Although we can no longer process your payments, we encourage you to reach out to alternative payment processors.”

Lawton reported that Square gave no explanation for the account deactivation other than alleging that Barber’s account violated the platform’s service terms.

“When sellers sign up with Square they agree to our Terms of Service. If a seller violates those Terms, we notify them that we will have to close their account,” said a spokesperson.

Lawsuits

Barber and other prominent Convoy organizers like Tamara Lich and Benjamin Dichter are among defendants named in a lawsuit filed by Ottawa lawyer Paul Champ on behalf of public servant Zexi Li and other Ottawa residents and business owners, who are seeking $306 million in damages.

Two of the defendants, Chris Garrah and Dichter, recently had their request rejected to have $200,000 in frozen funds released by the court. Garrah and Dichter were requesting access to the funds—part of the roughly $5 million raised for truckers now held in escrow—to pay for legal fees related to the lawsuit.

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Sasha Latypova, former owner and executive of multiple contract research organizations and former pharmaceutical executive, presented evidence on the DoD involvement with COVID countermeasures worldwide.

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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)

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‘Propaganda’ is a word familiar to us all although, ironically enough, however fully we may understand its definition, we are still unlikely – if the propaganda is effective – to detect its operation upon us.

Etymologically it shares roots with the word ‘propagate’, and it implies a spreading forth, a dissemination of information with a view towards promoting a particular agenda, cause or viewpoint.

At its essence there is a forcible aspect to propaganda, and in conjunction with the intent to ‘go forth and multiply’, an avowedly sexual facet, so that one may in fact characterize propaganda as a kind of rapine activity. It seeks to move, to persuade, to control and to coerce, and it thus represents the very antithesis of what we have come to regard as free will and free expression and the exercise of autonomous ratiocination.

Propaganda is everywhere and its methods are legion. There are endless ways to propagandize, and the so-called art of propaganda may be practiced by individuals as well as groups. In the case of Big State propaganda – the kind of propaganda designed to capture millions – we can be sure that every means, every nuance, every little bit of useful human psychological knowledge are employed – soft, hard and, if the propaganda is especially perfect, invisibly.

In musing further upon its nature in the context of the Covidian Dystopia we have suffered these past three years, yet another element emerges to characterize its essence: it is an act of masquerade.

Consider the following. A sign erected along a roadway telling passersby of a restaurant in the vicinity is not propaganda. A sign depicting a well-lit and superb eatery when in fact the eatery is a dark and slovenly affair becomes, by its deception, an act of propaganda.

When we were inundated in early 2020 with images of soldiers disinfecting Chinese streets and Chinese authorities imprisoning people in their own apartments, we were being deliberately propagandized. The message to us was: ‘Covid is highly lethal and the strictest measures are necessary to protect us, measures that have priority over inalienable human rights’. We know now – and the perpetrators of this bit of propaganda knew back then – that this was untrue.

The propagandist’s mask depicts one thing while behind the mask is another. The smiling urgent face of Dr. Anthony Fauci informing us that the Covid inoculations are safe and effective and necessary to prevent death is the hypocritical mask of the propagandist: the real Anthony Fauci knew differently, just as the real Fauci well understood that there was no actual science behind the mandates for masks, distancing, lockdowns and mass inoculation.

This mask-like nature of propaganda appears also in the use of words. The neutral and clean-sounding ‘depopulation’ really means genocide. The technical term ‘gain of function’, as it pertains to research on viruses, conceals the deliberate engineering of these pathogenic agents to become dangerous weapons of greater ability to sicken and kill. ‘Excess mortality’ signifies murder, pure and simple.

Coincidentally – or not so coincidentally – enough, the most significant tool of the Covidian propagandists has been the mask itself. It is as if we are being further acculturated to accept and condone duplicity and deception at every turn. When I see people around me who continue to participate in the charade by wearing their useless and de-identifying facial coverings, people who are happy to hide themselves and conceal their most expressive feature, these unwitting missionaries, like good little unquestioning soldiers, become concrete examples of the effectiveness – and fundamental nature – of propaganda in general.

I suppose it is possible for a propagandist, in the realm of public relations, to conceal the truth in order to serve a greater good.

But what greater good, may I ask, has come out of the Covidian campaign of fear, deceit and control?

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SHTFplan.com

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South Korea wants to overtake the UK and Israel to become the world’s fourth biggest arms exporter.

With big arms contracts to both Poland and Saudi Arabia, South Korea is well underway expanding. See this.

Poland is right now making mega-purchases of tanks and other heavy stuff to become the US bulwark against Russia when Ukraine falls. South Korea is the main supplier. There is even talk about South Korea building up arms production in Poland to make Poland a new top-quality European arms exporter using South Korean technology to compete with Germany in heavy arms.

Saudi Arabia is the World’s biggest arms importer and Saudi Arabia is tired of being in the pocket of the USA. Both South Korea and China are taking shares from the US in that huge market.

UAE is also high on the list as arms market – South Korea already supplied their nuclear power plant.

Germany continues its self-destruction by buying F-35 aircraft, air defenses, and other key equipment from the US – instead of developing it with partners in Europe. France is losing export shares because the US keeps stealing it contracts for submarines etc. The UK bets on gathering the crumbs from US deals – but as the Australian submarine deal shows, the UK is being held out promises but deceived by the US.

India, another ambitious arms exporter, takes due notice.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Even though one has become accustomed to seeing the United States government behaving irrationally on an epic scale with no concern for what happens to the average citizen who is not a member of one of the freak show constituencies of the Democratic Party, it is still possible to be surprised or even shocked. Shortly before year’s end 2022 an article appeared in the mainstream media and was quite widely circulated. The headline that it was featured under in the original Business Insider version read “A nuclear attack would most likely target one of these 6 US cities — but an expert says none of them are prepared.” The cities were New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco.

The article seeks to provide information and tips that would allow one to survive a nuclear attack, repeating commentary from several “experts” in emergency management and “public health” suggesting that a nuclear war would be catastrophic but not necessarily the end of the world. One should be prepared. It observes that “those cities would struggle to provide emergency services to the wounded. The cities also no longer have designated fallout shelters to protect people from radiation.” It is full of sage advice and off-the-cuff observations, including “Can you imagine a public official keeping buildings intact for fallout shelters when the real-estate market is so tight?” Or even better the advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s “nuclear detonation planning guide” that for everyday citizens in a city that has been nuked: “Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.” Dr. Ron Paul asks “Are they insane? They act as if a nuclear attack on the United States is just another inconvenience to plan for, like an ice storm or a hurricane.”

The article argues that the six cities would be prime targets as they are centers for vital infrastructure. The bomb blasts would kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans with many more deaths to follow from radiation poisoning, but the article makes no attempt to explain why Russia, with a relatively sane leadership, would want to start a nuclear war that would potentially destroy the planet. Also, the targeting list of the cities provided by the “experts” is itself a bit odd. Surely Russia would attack military and government targets as a first priority to limit the possible retaliation while also crippling the ability of the White House and Pentagon to command and control the situation. Such targets would include both San Diego and Norfolk where the US Atlantic and Pacific fleets are based as well as the various Strategic Air Command bases and the underground federal government evacuation site in Mount Weather Virginia.

Reading the article, one is reminded of the early years of the Cold War that sought to reassure the public that nuclear war was somehow manageable. It was a time when we elementary school children were drilled in hiding under our desks when the air raid alarm went off. Herman Kahn was, at that time, the most famous advocate of the school of thought that the United States could survive the “unthinkable,” i.e. a nuclear war. An American physicist by training, Kahn became a founding member of the beyond neocon nationalist Hudson Institute, which is still unfortunately around. Kahn, who served in the US Army during the Second World War as a non-combat telephone lineman, started has career as a military strategist at the RAND Corporation. Kahn endorsed a policy of deterrence and argued that if the Soviet Union believed that the United States had a devastating second-strike capability then Moscow would not initiate hostilities, which he explained in his paper titled “The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence”. The Russians had to believe that even a perfectly coordinated massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well. Kahn also posited his idea of a “winnable” nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he is often cited as one of the inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove.

The appearance of the Business Insider article dealing with a cool discussion of the survivability from a nuclear war suggests that the nutcases are again escaping from the psychiatric hospital here in the US and are obtaining top jobs in government and the media. While one continues to hope that somehow someone will wake up in the White House and realize that the deep dark hole that we the American people find ourselves in mandates a change of course and a genuine reset, there is little daylight visible in the darkness.

My particular concern relates to the entangling relationships that have kept our country permanently at war in spite of the fact that since the Cold War ended in 1991 no potential adversary has actually threatened the United States. Now, the federal government appears to be in the business of cultivating dangerous relationships to justify defense spending and placing the nation on the brink of what might prove to be catastrophic. The current US mission to “weaken Russia” and eventually also China in order to maintain its own “rules based international order” includes such hypocritical and utterly illegal under international law anomalies as the continued military occupation of part of Syria to deny that country’s leaders’ access to their oil fields and best agricultural land. A recent UN humanitarian agency investigation determined that the Syrian people are suffering and even starving as a result of that and US imposed sanctions that the Biden Administration maintains against all reason and humanity.

At the present time, however, the most entangling of all relationships, even more than with Israel, has to be the engagement of the US in the proxy war being fought against Russia on behalf of Ukraine, which is exactly what threatens to turn nuclear if someone blinks at the wrong time. Billions of dollars in direct aid as well as billions more in the form of weapons stripped from arsenals in Europe and the US have been given to the corrupt regime of President Volodymyr Zelensky while Zelensky continues to work assiduously to milk the situation and draw Washington into a deeper war directly confronting Moscow.

In fact, by some reckonings the war has already begun, with the US and its allies clearly dedicated to crippling the Russian economy while also getting rid of President Vladimir Putin. The 101^st Airborne is now in place in Romania next to Ukraine to “warn” the Kremlin while the Pentagon has recently admitted that some American military personnel are already in Ukraine, contrary to the denials by White House spokesmen. The British have also revealed that some of their elite Special Ops personnel are on the ground. And there are reports that more American soldiers will soon be on the way, ostensibly to “track the weapons” being provided to Zelensky, which will include US-made, Patriot Missile batteries some of which might even be placed in NATO member Poland to provide air cover over Western Ukraine, a definite act of war as seen by Russia, which has warned that such a move would mean that the US and its allies had “effectively become a party” to the war in Ukraine and there will be “consequences.” “Consequences” means escalation.

The soldier-“trackers” mission may be in response to reports that weapons provided by NATO have been corruptly sold or given to third countries by the Ukrainians. The several US initiatives taken together could produce a rapid escalation of the conflict complete with dead Americans coming home in body bags and an inevitable direct US involvement in combat roles that could lead anywhere, but at this point it is the Russians who are acting with restraint by not targeting the NATO and US “advisers” who are already active in Ukraine.

Suspicion is also growing that the United States “green-lighted” in advance recent cruise missile attacks carried out by Ukraine against military targets deep inside Russia. Since the attacks, the White House has declared that Ukraine has “permission” to attack Russia and has basically conceded to the unbalanced Zelensky the right to make all the decisions and run the war that the US is largely funding, which is a formula for disaster. It is already known that Ukraine is receiving top level intelligence provided both by the US and also other NATO states. The precision attacks on Russia suggest that the Ukrainian army was given the coordinates of possible active targets, something that the US would be capable of providing but which would have been beyond the abilities of Ukraine, which possesses no satellite surveillance capability. If it is true that the White House was involved in escalating the conflict it would be a very dangerous move, inviting retaliation by Moscow.

To be sure, some idiots in Washington, mostly of the neocon variety, continue to see war against Russia as something like a crusade for world freedom. Rick Newman, Yahoo’s top Finance Columnist, observes how “Budget hawks in Congress are worried about granting President Biden’s request for an additional $38 billion in aid for Ukraine to help defeat the invading Russians.” He concludes “They’re right. Thirty-eight billion isn’t enough. Make it $50 billion. Or even $100 billion. The more, the better, until the job is done.”

Apparently, the bellicose Rick does not quite get that Russia has made clear that if it is about to be defeated by force majeure it will go nuclear. And Congress and the White House don’t seem to get it either, with both the Republican and Democratic parties oblivious to the real danger that confronts the American people. Nuclear war? Sure! Just hide in your basement, if you have one, and tune in.

*

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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.

Featured image is from TUR

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

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***

On December 16, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced a new defense strategy that doubled Japan’s military spending by 2027. Japan further agreed to acquire offensive weapons and reshape its military command structure for its expanded armed forces.

On December 23, the draft budget was approved by Kishida’s cabinet.

Japan’s dangerous military expansion should set off international alarm bells. This major escalation is taking place based on intense U.S. imperialist pressure. It is the next step in the “Pivot to Asia,” aimed at threatening and surrounding China and attempting to reassert U.S. dominance in the Asia Pacific.

Source: indrastra.com

The movements opposing endless U.S. wars must begin to prepare material and draw mass attention to this ominous threat.

The plan to double military spending will add $315 billion to Japan’s defense budget over the next five years and make Japan’s military the world’s third largest, after the U.S. and China. Defense spending will escalate to 2% of gross domestic product, equal to the goal the U.S. sets for its NATO allies. Japan’s economy is the world’s third largest.

The Japanese government plans to buy up to 500 Lockheed Martin Tomahawk missiles and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM), procure more naval vessels and fighter aircraft, increase cyber-warfare capabilities, manufacture its own hypersonic guided missiles and produce its own advanced fighter jets, along with other weapons. The plan shifts from relying solely on missile defense to also embracing “counter strike” capabilities.

This Japanese-language graphic shows the country’s two planned hypersonic weapons: (1) the Hypersonic Cruise Missile and (2) the Hyper Velocity Gliding Projectile. [Source: defensenews.com]

In a stinging editorial, the left-leaning Asahi, one of Japan’s largest dailies called Kishida’s plan a “radical and dangerous departure from the past,” accusing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of “rushing headlong into beefing up the nation’s military muscle without developing plans or taking actions to improve the environment for building peace.” The editorial also took issue with the new counter strike capabilities, saying they would “eviscerate the nation’s long established principle of sticking to a strictly defensive security policy.”

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)’s foreign ministry, now led by veteran negotiator Choe Sun-hui meanwhile declared that Japan had effectively formalised “the capability for preemptive attack,” while criticizing the U.S government for “conniving and instigating Japan’s rearmament and reinvasion scheme.”

Article 9 – A Class Struggle Against Military Rearmament

Three key security documents—the National Security Strategy (NSS), as well as the National Defense Strategy (NDS) and the Defense Buildup Program (DBP)—shed some of the post-war constraints on the Japanese military.

Although the U.S. occupation force, after defeating Japan’s military in World War II, imposed a “pacifist” constitution on Japan, for decades U.S. strategists have pressured Japan’s government to aggressively rearm, to buy U.S.-made weapons, and to act as a junior partner to U.S. efforts to dominate the Asia-Pacific region.

Article 9 of the imposed Japanese constitution prohibits Japan from maintaining an army, navy and air force. To get around this, the “Japanese Self-Defense Forces” (JSDF) have since 1952 been treated as a legal extension of the police and prison system. The U.S. occupiers considered the JSDF an essential repressive tool defending capitalist property relations against the workers’ movement.

The decision for aggressive military expansion is in open violation of Japan’s supposedly pacifist constitution.

Japanese Self-Defense Force, 6^th Division. [Source: asian-defence-news.blogspot.com]

The effort to “reinterpret” Article 9 has been a continuing political struggle inside Japan. Mass rallies of hundreds of thousands have mobilized many times in defense of Article 9, which offers a clear prohibition of Japan’s maintaining a military force. The widespread opposition to the Japanese military and to constitutional change comes from working people, mobilized by the unions and the communist and socialist movements.

This movement pointed out to everyone how the wartime militarist regime of the 1930s and 1940s carried out brutal repression and led Japan into World War II. The people know from bitter experience that these ultra-rightist forces, whose roots are in historic Japanese colonialism, are the real threat to their rights and the social gains they have made.

The present doubling of the defense budget will be funded by raising taxes. A huge military budget will inevitably mean severe cuts to the country’s limited social spending.

The LDP, which has held power almost continually since the 1950s, is right-wing, pro-military and allied to U.S. imperialism, especially against China and the DPRK. They have been pushing for an end to the constitutional and legal restrictions on the country’s military.

The assassination of retired President Shinzo Abe on July 8, 2022, just two days before Japan’s election, brought additional votes to the LDP. It was able to win the two-thirds super-majority in the National Diet (Japanese Parliament) needed to move forward aggressively with its military plans.

Targeting China

Japan’s military expansion fits in with Washington’s aggression aimed at China, the DPRK and Russia. U.S. strategists’ goal is to use the U.S. alliance with Japan, South Korea and Australia, just as it uses the U.S.-led NATO alliance in Europe.

The doubling of NATO’s membership and NATO’s targeting of Russia have led to war in Ukraine, when the U.S. government imposed thousands of new sanctions against Russia, and the U.S. has ruptured the European Union’s mutually beneficial trade with Russia.

China is Japan’s largest trading partner in both imports and exports. Previous National Strategy Documents said Japan was seeking a “mutually beneficial strategic partnership” with China. Suddenly Japanese strategists started labeling China “the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan.” (U.S. Institute of Peace, December 19)

Japan had expanded trade with Russia in gas, oil, autos and machinery. Previously Japan’s December 17, 2013, National Security Strategy document called for “enhanced ties and cooperation with Russia.” Now Japan considers Russia a “strong security concern.” (USIP, December 19)

A U.S.-Japan alliance is now defined as a “cornerstone” of Japan’s security policy. (Japan Times, December 17)

U.S. Praise of Japan’s Rising Militarism

The U.S. media praised Japan’s new security strategy document as a “bold and historic step.” U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan praised the defense spending hike, which “will strengthen and modernize the U.S.-Japan alliance.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Japan an “indispensable partner” and cheered that the changed security documents reshape the ability to “protect the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.” (quotes, whitehouse.gov, December 16)

U.S. corporate power is the immediate beneficiary of this sharp turn in policy, built on military threats and economic sanctions.

Foreign Affairs magazine calls the announcement “a profound transformation,” stating that “the new national security strategy, however, represents a stunning change….[T]he government is enacting policies that have been debated for decades but were always blocked. Until now . . . Japan’s new national security strategy should be applauded.” (Foreign Affairs, December 23)

U.S. needs collaborators

U.S. policy toward the defeated capitalist class in Germany, Italy and Japan was remarkably similar. At the end of World War II, many of the industrial leaders who had backed these fascist regimes were quietly protected and rehabilitated in Japan, Germany and Italy, along with the fascist collaborators who fled from workers’ control in Eastern Europe.

The U.S. and later NATO used the rehabilitated fascists against a rising workers movement in Western Europe and against socialist construction in Eastern Europe. U.S. corporations, which had aggressively moved into the defeated Axis countries, needed insurance that their investments would be protected from the strike waves.

By 1950 the U.S. was at war on the Korean peninsula and, while using U.S. troops in Korea, needed a military force for “peacekeeping and self-defense” of capitalist property relations in Japan. Germany, Italy and Japan began to rearm during that period.

The impact on Okinawa

A chain of 150 islands called the Ryukyu Archipelago, of which the largest island is Okinawa, 400 miles from the Japanese mainland, is in reality a colony of Japan. Its population of 1.74 million people suffers from Tokyo’s rule and from the occupation by U.S. military bases. Okinawa is geographically closer to Taiwan than it is to the main islands of Japan.

Upgrading and strengthening Japanese ground units on Okinawa is part of the new National Security Strategy (NSS). Other islands, which are part of the chain southwest of Japan, will be further militarized.

Upgrading of Japan’s 15th Brigade on these islands for future electronic warfare, cyber warfare and joint operations of the ground, maritime and air forces are clearly a sign of plans to intervene in the Taiwan Strait.

In recent years, Japan has deployed anti-ship and air-defense missiles on its southwest islands of Amami Oshima, Okinawa Main Island, Miyako Island and a missile base on Ishigaki Island, the island closest to Taiwan.

Source: thailanddaily.com

More than 50,000 U.S. troops remain as an occupying force in Japan, at present the largest U.S. occupation force in any country. More than half of U.S. troops are based on Okinawa.

Okinawa residents, the Indigenous Ryukyu people, have spent decades protesting the constant presence of the U.S. military in their daily lives. There are now 31 U.S. military installations on the island prefecture of Okinawa, which accounts for 74% of the area of all U.S. military bases in Japan, although Okinawa only constitutes 0.6% of Japanese territory.

The U.S. maintains 73 military bases and 28,500 troops in South Korea. Both South Korea and Japan are forced to pay for “hosting” these troops of occupation.

“Using North Korea threat as cover”

Japan has previously justified its remilitarization by claiming North Korea is a threat. However, retired Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) Admiral Tomohisa Takei told the media that China has been the main target for which Japan has been preparing, “by using North Korea’s threat as cover.” (AP, December 17)

Both Japan and South Korea engage on a regular basis in coordinated military drills under U.S. command threatening Korea DPRK. Massive demonstrations in South Korea and missiles fired from targeted North Korea respond to these military provocations.

This cynical admission of the planning and preparation for war, while claiming self-defense, is similar to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s December 8 admission that the signing of the 2014 Minsk Agreement was not a peace treaty with Russia. Merkel confirmed that NATO wanted war from the start but needed time to prepare Ukraine militarily. (Interview in Die Zeit, December 7)

Having goaded Russia into an invasion of Ukraine in a bid to weaken and fragment Russia, the U.S. is next seeking to turn Taiwan into a military quagmire for China. The Biden administration is facilitating Taiwan’s purchase of advanced weaponry from the U.S. and greater diplomatic ties with the island.

Part of an effort to focus political attention through fact sheets, talking points, videos and webinars on the growing threat of U.S. pressure for Japan’s rearming is the short video, posted on the International Action Center website titled: “Japan’s constitutional amendment: a dangerous signal.” (tinyurl.com/mwjdt8rm)

*

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Sara Flounders is an American political writer active in progressive and anti-war organizing since the 1960s. She is a Contributing Editor of the Marxist Workers World newspaper as well as a principal leader of the International Action Center. Sara also works actively with the SanctionsKill Campaign and United National Antiwar Coalition. Sara can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Japan is moving to remilitarize despite its pacifist constitution. Image: Shutterstock via The Conversation

Video: Bombshell Docs Reveal COVID-19 Cover-Up Goes Straight to the Top. Redacted with Clayton Morris

By Clayton Morris, January 09, 2023

A BOMBSHELL new report claims shows that the Department of Defense – meaning the Pentagon – controlled the COVID-19 Program from the very beginning. If true, it means that everything we were told was political theater, right down to the FDA vaccine approval process.

Honoring MLK Six Decades After the Mass Struggles of 1963

By Abayomi Azikiwe, January 10, 2023

On January 16 in the United States, the 94th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will be commemorated as a federal holiday. Since 1986, the third Monday of January has been designated in tribute to the martyred Civil Rights and Antiwar leader who was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Usual Suspects in the Attempted Coup Against Lula in Brazil

By Kurt Nimmo, January 10, 2023

There is an important element omitted from the emerging narrative on Brazil and the attack on the elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

New Analysis Shows Studies of COVID Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis Hid Critical Safety Signal

By Dr. Suzanne Burdick, January 09, 2023

A new peer-reviewed analysis of studies on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis in young males shows many studies hid an important safety signal by not providing “adequate stratification.”

California Democrats Have Legislated Control Over Medical Practice Out of the Hands of Doctors

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, January 09, 2023

If you are so unfortunate to live in California, get out quickly.  The state government is insane.  Indeed, you could say criminally insane. Aside from water, electricity, earthquake and wildfire problems, the state has legislated away doctors’ judgments about how to best treat their patients, and the Woke governor’s state task force on reparations for blacks wants to rob California residents of $2,225,000,000,000 in order to give the  2,225,000 blacks who reside in California $1,000,000 each. 

WHO: Anti-Vaccine Activism Is Deadlier Than Global Terrorism

By Paul Joseph Watson, January 09, 2023

The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”

The Top 100 Reasons to #StopThePandemicTreaty, #StopTheAmendments, and #ExitTheWHO

By James Roguski, January 09, 2023

The World Health Organization is attempting a GLOBAL POWER GRAB by seeking to have the 194 member nations of the World Health Assembly adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as adopt a completely new international agreement commonly referred to as the proposed “Pandemic Treaty.”

The Plan to Carve Up Russia

By Mike Whitney, January 09, 2023

Here’s your geopolitical quiz for the day: What did Angela Merkel mean when she said “that the Cold War never really ended, because ultimately Russia was never pacified”?

Video: Japan Orders Investigation Into COVID Vaccine Deaths as MSM Admit “The Jabs Are Killing Us”

By Vigilent Citizen, January 09, 2023

In another case of yesterday’s conspiracy theory becoming today’s fact, mainstream media is finally reporting what we have known all along. Biden, Fauci and Gates have been sharing these information with us, there was no winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated; in reality, this is a pandemic of the vaccinated.

Is a Happy New Year Possible? Sisyphus and the Feeling of the Absurd Are Entwined

By Edward Curtin, January 09, 2023

If one carefully reads Camus’ oeuvre, it becomes apparent that his sense of the sacred was profound even while saying that he didn’t believe in God; so too was his commitment to resist evil and to see the sense of the absurd as a starting point and not a destination.

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***

On January 16 in the United States, the 94th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will be commemorated as a federal holiday.

Since 1986, the third Monday of January has been designated in tribute to the martyred Civil Rights and Antiwar leader who was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee during the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) intervention in support of the sanitation workers’ strike for recognition from the racist city government of Henry Loeb. African American sanitation workers were subjected to near slave-like conditions despite the passage of legislation such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-1965.

The mass Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. had gained momentum in the aftermath of the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in August 1955. Mamie Till Bradley Mobley, the mother of Emmett, militantly condemned the racist lynching of her son prompting mass rallies in several cities such as Detroit.

Later on December 1 in Montgomery, Ms. Rosa Parks, a longtime labor and civil rights activist, was arrested for violating the segregation laws of the State of Alabama. Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Several days later the African American community embarked upon a year-long boycott of the city buses. They defied the threats and intimidations by the racist city administration. Dr. King and other leaders were subjected to unjustified arrests and the bombings of their homes.

The case against segregation in Alabama was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court resulting in a victory in November 1956. After the highest court confirmed the unconstitutionality of the segregated bus system, the boycott was called off by the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).

According to a source on the historic ruling by the Supreme Court:

“Aurelia S. Browder v. William A. Gayle challenged the Alabama state statutes and Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinances requiring segregation on Montgomery buses. Filed by Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford on behalf of four African American women who had been mistreated on city buses, the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld a district court ruling that the statute was unconstitutional. Gray and Langford filed the federal district court petition that became Browder v. Gayle on 1 February 1956, two days after segregationists bombed King’s house. The original plaintiffs in the case were Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, and Jeanatta Reese, but outside pressure convinced Reese to withdraw from the case in February. Gray made the decision not to include Rosa Parks in the case to avoid the perception that they were seeking to circumvent her prosecution on other charges.”

After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement accelerated. In 1960, African American college and university students began the mass sit-in struggles throughout the South including Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee. In April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed while the following year, the freedom rides commenced resulting in additional legal victories outlawing segregation in interstate travel.

Mass Demonstrations Erupt in 1963

Despite these victories beginning with the Brown v. Topeka case of May 1954, where segregated K-12 public schools were deemed unconstitutional, to the Montgomery campaign, the sit-ins and freedom rides, the overall objective for the total elimination of Jim Crow was stalled by 1963. Then President John F. Kennedy had an image of being sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, yet his administration had not initiated a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill to nullify the draconian state and municipal laws enacted after the failure of Reconstruction in the late 19th century.

In Birmingham, the SCLC opened up a campaign to force the desegregation of the most industrialized city in the South. The Birmingham movement resulted in the arrest of several thousand youth who refused to halt their demonstrations in the city. Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor became the public face of the intolerant institutional racists who refused to integrate public facilities, businesses and schools.

A split between the outgoing and incoming segregationist municipal administrations in Birmingham led to a political vacuum where Connor was able to take administrative control of the efforts to halt the demonstrations during April and May 1963. These dynamics proved the opening for the business leaders in Birmingham to speak directly with the SCLC and other organizations where they reached a settlement to end the protests. Thousands were released from detention along with the reinstatement of African American students expelled from schools due to their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

During this same period, demonstrations erupted in numerous cities across the U.S. In Cambridge, Maryland, the struggle to desegregate the city led to mass militant protests and a rebellion. National Guard troops were ordered into Cambridge where they remained for over a year, representing the longest military occupation of a city since the Civil War.

Detroit march 125,000 during 1963 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Other municipalities impacted included Somerville, Tennessee; Danville, Virginia; Greensboro, North Carolina; and northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit where youth and workers took to the streets to protest the monumental injustices related to housing, police brutality and substandard education. In 1963, there were at least two cities where the demonstrations turned violent, providing a preview of the urban rebellions that became the focus of the Black struggle after 1964. In Cambridge, arson attacks and other forms of property damage occurred after many people became frustrated with the repressive tactics of the police. In Birmingham, there were occasions where youth and workers utilized unconventional methods to resist the brutality of Bull Connor’s law-enforcement agents.

On June 11, there was the historic admission of two African American students to the segregated University of Alabama, where then Governor George Wallace symbolically stood at the administration building to block the entrance. The admission of the two students had been authorized through a federal court decision which was supported by the Kennedy administration. These events and a speech by Kennedy suggesting he would introduce a Civil Rights Bill for deliberations in Congress, outraged segregationists in the South.

The following evening on June 12, Medgar Evers, a longtime Field Secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home in the capital of Jackson. The murder of Evers by a well-known racist businessman who boasted about committing the execution, infuriated people across the country.

In Detroit, a mass demonstration took place just two weeks later on June 23, representing a major departure for the overall movement for racial justice. This march known as the “Walk to Freedom” attracted hundreds of thousands of people within the city. The manifestation was led by Dr. King and the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a nationally-renowned minister based in Detroit and the father of the later designated “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin. This demonstration culminated at Cobo Arena where Dr. King delivered an early iteration of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, over two months prior to the March on Washington. The speech was captured by Motown Records and released as a recording, the first of LPs featuring Dr. King.

Image: Cynthia Scott, 24, killed by Detroit police on July 5, 1963 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Although the Detroit Walk to Freedom was an overwhelming success attracting the participation of then UAW President Walter Reuther and liberal Democratic Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, less than two weeks later, a 24-year-old African American woman, Cynthia Scott, was gunned down by two police bullets in her back during the early morning hours of July 5. Scott was walking on the street in the lower eastside when she was accosted by two white police officers. They demanded that she get into a police cruiser and when she refused, one of the officers shot her in the back while Scott walked away.

This incident mobilized the African American community in Detroit. The Wayne County Prosecutor and the Recorder’s Court refused to indict the officer who killed Scott. Thousands of people marched to police headquarters to protest the killing. Later a civil suit filed by Attorney Milton Henry was dismissed by the courts. A public rally was held at the Central Congregational Church attracted 700 people demanding justice for Cynthia Scott.

The corporate press during this period in Detroit attempted to criminalize Scott after her murder, citing previous arrests. The police claimed Scott had attacked them with a knife. Nonetheless, eyewitnesses to the killing gave statements to the police and the press saying that the shooting of Scott was completely unprovoked. (See this).

It would take another four years for the African American community to erupt in Detroit on July 23, 1967, with the largest urban rebellion in U.S. history. These events led to the election of the first African American mayor, Coleman A. Young, a decade after the Walk to Freedom and the police murder of Cynthia Scott, in 1973.

Lessons from the Mass Struggles of 1963

Today in 2023, there are no local or national elections for this year, therefore leaving the African American people largely abandoned by politicians who are not compelled to seek their votes. As in 1963, some six decades earlier, a Democratic administration will be in office which could not have been elected three years before without the electoral support of African Americans.

Similarly, as in 1963, the reformist program adopted by the Democratic National Convention in 2020 has not been fulfilled. African Americans are still suffering from police misconduct, impoverishment, unequal educational opportunities and increasing environmental degradation.

MLK at 1963 Detroit march with CL Franklin (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

The Pentagon war budget and the subsidization of the ruling class by the U.S. government continues to hamper the capacity of the state to meet the immediate needs of the masses of people. Dr. King in early 1967 began to speak out forcefully against the U.S. intervention in Vietnam demanding that the troops be withdrawn from Southeast Asia. He viewed the imperialist war machine as an enemy of the poor and oppressed.

Dr. King linked the struggles against poverty, racism and war into a program of action which the U.S. government feared. In 2023, we must study these developments which took place during previous decades to gain guidance and inspiration for the impending mass struggles ahead aimed at ending all forms of racism, national oppression, economic exploitation and imperialist war.

*

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. 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.

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***

There is an important element omitted from the emerging narrative on Brazil and the attack on the elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

First, though, let’s take a look at the current situation in Brazil. According to the establishment “newspaper of record,” The New York Times,

Thousands of supporters of Brazil’s ousted former president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Sunday to protest what they falsely believe was a stolen election, the violent culmination of years of conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies.

Jair Bolsonaro is characterized as the “Trump of the Tropics,” possibly an unfair comparison as Bolsonaro’s politics were far more radical and destructive than anything Trump could get past Congress or, for that matter, his own inner circle.

If we assume the election was fair, then it can be said the people of Brazil re-elected Lula, and the attack on Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential offices represent a coup attempt. Maybe Bolsonaro supporters organized the sacking on their own, and maybe they had help.

First and foremost, the USG is adamantly opposed to Lula holding office.

In 2021, the CIA was involved in removing Lula from Brazil’s political landscape. Brasilwire reported on June 3, 2021,

In a White House ‘Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on the Fight Against Corruption’, a Biden administration official admitted that the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus were involved in assisting the “War on Corruption” which jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and elected Jair Bolsonaro.

Reading through an official White House transcript, we learn the State Department and USAID were involved in, as Antony Blinken put it, “anti-corruption work in all of our bilateral context, as well as in multilateral fora,” in other words, in plain speak, making sure political enemies, designated as corrupt, are removed from the political landscape.

USAID, as former director John Gilligan admitted, functions as “a graduate school for CIA agents,” and at any given time “many AID offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people… It was pretty obvious what they were up to… The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

Jair Bolsonaro is on excellent terms with the CIA. He is, after all, the first Brazilian leader to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “He was accompanied by his Justice Minister Sergio Moro who had jailed main opponent Lula da Silva before the 2018 election, on now annulled charges,” Brasilwire reported. “In contrast, Bolsonaro has never visited ABIN, Brazil’s moribund equivalent of the CIA.”

Moreover, the Atlantic Council supported collaboration with Brazilian prosecutors in the attempt to get rid of Lula, according to a Brasilwire report. The Atlantic Council is an influential think tank “staffed with military, CIA, and their attendant politicians; and CEOs from strategic industries, like oil and media. It has strong connections to NATO, and is a central part of the modern military-industrial congressional complex,” according to WikiSpooks.

All of this is either ignored or underplayed by the corporate propaganda media. For instance, it would be rare indeed for USG involvement in Operation Lava Jato, the ostensible “anti-corruption” project in Brazil, to be mentioned, let alone investigated by the likes of The New York Times or The Washington Post, both hardly strangers to CIA misinformation campaigns.

A petition filed with the Federal Supreme Court (STF) by the defence of ex-president Lula presents such new evidence that ex-judge Sergio Moro colluded with foreign authorities in conducting the process which led to the arrest of the Workers Party leader, and his subsequent barring from a run for the presidency in 2018.

So, now we have “right-wing protesters” storming government offices, violently agitating for the overthrow of Lula. Considering the above, it is fair to say the USG and USAID (now doing much of the CIA’s dirty work) are involved behind the scenes in the storming of government offices.

I don’t know this for a fact. It is speculation based on history.

More to the point, the 1964 coup in Brazil was organized by JFK and the CIA. For all the lionization of Kennedy, it should be remembered he was an ardent anti-communist. Kennedy believed Brazilian President Goulart was too chummy with anti-colonial and anti-American activists in Latin America, many of them undoubtedly communists, such as Che Guevara, killed in Bolivia with CIA assistance in 1967.

In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine declared South and Latin America, indeed the entire western hemisphere, as USG property not to be claimed or occupied by other nations and empires. It later became the exclusive domain of US agricultural corporations and that domain was protected by USG Marines, as Major General Smedley Butler described in his short book, “War is a Racket.”

Considering the history of the USG, in collision with US corporations, and the “racket,” as Butler described it, we can assume this latest outbreak of violence in Brazil is designed to once again get rid of a politician not following neoliberal orders.

Lula’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) was formerly described as a straight-up socialist party but is now viewed as middle-of-road social democratic by many observers. In 1998, Lula cut all mention of socialist proposals from his political rhetoric. Despite his professed distance from socialism and the ideology of the Workers Party, it was decided by the financial elite in New York and London that Lula had to go.

This is Bolsonaro’s last hurrah, even if he said previously that he accepted the result of the election, and even though he may not be involved in the current effort to shock and awe the Lula government. Like so many other autocrats and psychopathic leaders and dictators before him, Bolsonaro and his supporters are being manipulated by the USAID, CIA, and the Biden State Department.

I seriously doubt this latest act of violence was cooked up entirely by outraged Bolsonaro supporters.

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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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***

A new peer-reviewed analysis of studies on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis in young males shows many studies hid an important safety signal by not providing “adequate stratification.”

“Many studies lump everyone together to hide a legitimate safety signal,” said Vinay Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., co-author of the analysis published last month in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Stratification means isolating the people in a study into groups based on pertinent factors, such as age and sex, according to Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

By lumping all ages, sexes, dosages and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers together, researchers “have been hiding and obscuring very necessary dialogue — which is that our vaccine policies don’t have to be the same for a 16-year-old man and an 87-year-old woman,” Prasad said.

Stratification is a basic skill for developing meaningful medical statistics, Prasad said. But the systematic review he conducted found that only a quarter of the studies used the four “elementary stratifying variables” (i.e. sex, age, dose number and manufacturer) when reporting the highest risk of myocarditis.

Prasad wrote this week that the net benefit of vaccination for a woman in her eighties was different from the net benefit of vaccination for a man in his late teens.

“As early as July 2021, with colleagues from mathematics, cardiology, and pediatrics, we worried that dose 2 [of the COVID-19 vaccine] was unfavorable in adolescent boys,” Prasad said. “With emerging data from the UK it was clear that for some products and some doses, myocarditis post vax exceeded myocarditis post illness.”

It turns out that when you look at myocarditis just in the highest-risk demographics — young men who get a second Moderna shot — the risk is substantially higher than when you lump “16-year-old boys with their great grandma.”

“This should be obvious,” Prasad added.

Why the one-size-fits-all COVID vaccine policy?

In a video discussion of his analysis, Prasad told viewers he sometimes feels pessimistic when he thinks about how “the only reason smart people would have a one-size-fits-all policy is it benefits the manufacturer because they can sell more dose of their product.”

“But that would be such a silly reason,” he added, “because credibility in public health is much more important than the meager short-term market share of a company like Pfizer. I can’t understand it.”

Prasad said he wonders if officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and members of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) could be “so bad at their job that they can’t understand that boosters and young people might have a different risk-benefit calculation than in older people” — even after “they literally had it told to them” by Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, two senior U.S. Food and Drug Administration vaccine leaders, who resigned over the issue.

“So they [CDC officials and ACIP members] are so dense that even when the people who’ve done it for decades are telling you, ‘I will resign over this issue,’ they still don’t understand,” Prasad said.

Prasad said he believes COVID-19 vaccine mandates were “always unjustified” and that he strongly supports the repeal of any such law — especially college vaccine mandates that were created by “some mid-level bureaucrat” who had no scientific expertise.

College students who were required for attendance to get the COVID-19 vaccine and now have myocarditis or pericarditis should be able to sue that college, he said.

Prasad added:

“Colleges need to be litigated. They need to lose the litigation so they learn some humility — which is that if you’re running random garbage liberal arts school you’re not qualified to be creating mandates.”

Watch the video here:

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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***

The U.S. government has still not formally admitted to any deaths directly attributable to the fast-tracked, emergency-authorized mRNA Covid shots, which comprise the vast majority of all doses administered, rolled out more than two years ago. Nevertheless, a new Rasmussen poll finds more than a quarter of adults think they “personally know someone whose death may have been caused by side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines.”

Rasmussen’s results are stunning, but the fact that Rasmussen decided to conduct this poll in the first place is perhaps more politically and culturally significant. It indicates a sea change in attitudes toward the jabs.

At the onset of mass vaccination, major platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter put in place strict speech codes that proscribe framing the Covid shots as “dangerous.” News outlets and pundits have often accused those who question the safety of the shots of spreading “dangerous misinformation” and promoting “vaccine hesitancy.” Even right-leaning outlets such as Fox News largely refused to give credence to those warning that the shots may be far less safe than advertised. Yet now, in 2023, a major polling firm is reporting that a substantial minority (28 percent) of Americans suspect someone they know died from adverse events caused by Covid vaccination.

Suspicion, of course, is a far cry from proof. But the sheer prevalence of such suspicion should prompt serious inquiry from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public debate that isn’t quashed or watered down by censors.

Other Polling Patterns

The poll also found younger people were more likely than older people to say someone they know may have died due to side effects from the shot: 35 percent of adults under 40, compared to 28 percent of those aged 40 to 64, and only 14 percent of those over 65.

Most interestingly, more Democrats than Republicans think someone they know may have died from jab side effects (33 percent to 26 percent). Democrats are more likely to have been vaccinated themselves, and thus more likely to associate with people who are also vaccinated. The more people one knows who have been vaccinated, the higher the likelihood of reporting a suspicion of vaccine-related death.

Additionally, as Covid-response skeptic Igor Chudov has pointed out, more married people than unmarried report knowing someone who may have died from an adverse event (33 percent to 23 percent). Not only do the social circles of married people tend to be larger, but Rasmussen reports that married people were more likely to be vaccinated.

Pollsters also found concerns about the shots’ safety are higher among the unvaccinated. A full three-quarters of the un-jabbed think it’s “at least somewhat likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.” Many unvaccinated didn’t take the jab due to concerns the shots weren’t sufficiently proven to be safe, so this stands to reason. On the other hand, those who’ve taken the vaccine have far more incentive to believe the drug they willingly took is safe. (Some may have taken it due to employer mandates or other requirements, however.) People are not inclined to believe they risked their health unnecessarily. Even so, 38 percent of those who’ve taken the jab also believed the shot was “at least somewhat likely” to have caused “a significant number of unexplained deaths.” That is a substantial minority.

Can a drug be considered “safe” if it’s “somewhat likely” to have caused a “significant number” of deaths? Is it reasonable to conclude from these results that a substantial minority of people who’ve taken the drug themselves do not believe the shots to be safe? A belief they’ve possibly caused a “significant number of unexplained deaths” would certainly put the Covid shots well below the level of perceived safety that most childhood vaccines are widely considered to have.

Maybe booster uptake has been so low not due to doubts about adequate testing or efficacy, but because more people are wary of it than before. A Rasmussen report from Dec. 7 found 57 percent of respondents were concerned about “major side effects,” including 43 percent of Democrats who were “at least somewhat concerned.” Seven percent of respondents reported “major side effects” from the shot.

Chudov discusses paywalled portions of the new poll here, including a curious finding that those “other” than whites or blacks were significantly more likely to say they know someone who may have died from an adverse event.

More Investigation Needed

The findings of the new poll on beliefs about deaths post-vaccination come a full two years after the initial rollout of the shots, which were marketed at the time as being more than 90 percent effective at preventing infection and almost 100 percent effective at preventing death from illness caused by infection with the SARS-COV-2 virus. Rasmussen conducted a poll on concerns over vaccine side effects in November 2021, but if the firm had polled about suspicion of deaths caused by the shot multiple times since vaccine rollout, we would have a better idea of how beliefs about the safety of the Covid shots have shifted. As more and more medical professionals and experts speak out, it is becoming more acceptable to ask questions that may yield frightening answers.

Our public health establishment has fallen prey to the sunk-cost fallacy. It is too terrible for them to imagine that the shots they pushed so aggressively could turn out to be unsafe, or at least a very poor risk-benefit tradeoff for many people. Because of this, honest, rigorous, and continuous investigation from both inside and outside public health agencies is all the more critical.

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Georgi is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist and host of The 180 Cast, where she interviews people who have changed their minds on important political and social issues. She is a regular guest on Kevin McCullough Radio and other talk radio programs, and her editorial writing brings Christian and conservative principles to the foreground. She is also the co-author of “Clocking Out Early: The Ultimate Guide to Early Retirement,” and enjoys a comfortably frugal life in central Washington with her family.

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***

 

 

 

 

From fiery leftist rhetoric, to steadfast solidarity with Palestine, to a constant and unrelenting departure from cinematic conventions – including his own – film director Jean-Luc Godard was not known for compromise.

It may thus come as a surprise that this was not always the case. Godard, who died last September, began his cinematic project by experimenting with techniques – and through this process, he developed an affinity for socialism, anti-imperialism, the working classes and Palestine.

One of Godard’s earliest films, The Little Soldier, is a beautiful pastiche of the gangster and spy genres, with an unmistakable Italian neorealism influence and a raw documentary feel. The 1963 film focuses on the Algerian war of liberation from France, but skilful cinematography aside, it is replete with racist depictions. The French are denounced only inasmuch as they succumb to the savagery of the Algerians, who kidnap and torture the protagonist but fail to understand his human dignity. Godard has contended that he sought to present not the realities of the war, but his own moral and political questions.

It is telling that he chose to present these questions through a right-wing assassin with second thoughts (and a golden heart) who loves France not out of nationalism, but for its poets; who loves the US because he loves American cars; and who hates Arabs because he hates the desert.

Towards the end of the film, the (supposedly shocking) plot twist is that the French, like the Arabs, torture their victims, as the protagonist’s love interest, Veronica, turns out to be a spy who is captured and tortured to death by the French. Yet, compared with the meticulous depiction of the protagonist’s torture by the Arabs, the torture and death of Veronica is relayed through a few narrative lines and no visual representation whatsoever. The referent for wartime savagery thus remains Arab, even if the French partake in it.

Ideology and the image

Buried deep in the film, however, are the seeds of a more militant attitude, embodied by Veronica, who works for Algeria’s National Liberation Front and declares that unlike the French, the Algerians have ideals. Yet, this notion is suffocated by the verbal vomit of the protagonist, who imposes his reactionary views on Veronica and the audience via lengthy monologues.

Godard’s films are largely self-deconstructive, as seen through depictions of the relationship between the camera and its object. The symbolism of the assassin being a photographer is not to be missed. He subjects Veronica to the preying gaze of the camera, along with intrusive questions and demands that she mostly turns down.

Godard’s Les Carabiniers employs similar symbolism, with imperial pillage replaced by a collection of postcards. At the beginning of her study On Photography, cultural critic Susan Sontag cites this scene and notes: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.”

Godard was among the pioneers who exposed how the inherent racism of the image is deeply engrained within the very chemistry of film while working in Mozambique on a project that exhibited both Godard’s revolutionary solidarity with the African people and his white missionary attitude that presumed to give a self-image to a people lacking it.

Little by little, militant political rhetoric came to populate, and eventually dominate, Godard’s films. Yet, for all his Marxist-Leninist and Maoist “working class” slogans, the working classes remained curiously absent from his films up until his work with the Dziga Vertov Group, which he founded with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin and others in the late 1960s.

In his early movies, we see a fascination with criminals, delinquents, adventurers, prostitutes and dropouts from the bourgeoisie class – in other words, what is known in Marxist literature as the “lumpen proletariat”, but never the working class. This is most obvious in his early representations of working women – always models, actresses or prostitutes. Even in Une Femme Mariee, wherein he artfully critiques the ways in which modern consumer culture controls and contours the bodies of women, he does so in a manner that caters to the male gaze and privileges bourgeois women.

‘A long march’

All of this changed in the aftermath of the wave of protests in France in 1968. At the height of the uprising, Godard himself took to the streets and famously denounced French filmmakers, himself included, for failing to engage with the concerns of the masses.

This set him on a path to creating militant cinema and, through the films he shot with the Dziga Vertov collective, he was able to turn his camera towards, and thus discover, the working classes. This culminated in one of his most beautiful films, Tout Va Bien, co-directed with Gorin and released in 1972.

It was also through the collective that Godard came in close contact with the Palestinian cause. In 1970, Godard and Gorin visited Palestinian training camps to shoot a documentary about the resistance; as Europeans, they felt directly implicated in the colonial situation in the Middle East. This was part of a larger post-1968 turn towards Palestine.

The documentary was never finished, and instead, several years later, the footage became part of the film Here and Elsewhere, which juxtaposed images of the Palestinian resistance with images from French media to demonstrate how, unlike the clarity with which Palestinians approached their struggle, the French were constantly diverted from the cause of revolution by consumer capitalism and media.

Did this end up appropriating the footage of the Palestinians, initially intended to serve as inter-revolutionary propaganda for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles, as lessons for the French? Perhaps, but it remains laudable that the filmmakers dared to seek inspiration from real anti-colonial struggles outside of the cultural and geographic parameters of the West.

The constant experimentation and persistent impetus to transgress, which lasted until Godard’s final movie, meant that all of this was a process of exploration and learning – for the audiences, but especially for the filmmaker. In his landmark film La Chinoise, one of the protagonists, a French Maoist student in search of a militant cause, delivers a potent and moving epilogue applicable to Godard’s entire career and his growing self-awareness of his role in the struggle: “I thought I’d made a great leap forward, only to realise that I had made a first timid step in a long march.”

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Ahmed D Dardir is the co-founder of the Institute for De-Colonising Theory (IDCtheory). He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University. He is a regular contributor to a number of media outlets. His personal blog can be found at https://textualtrimmings.blogspot.com.

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***

If you are so unfortunate to live in California, get out quickly.  The state government is insane.  Indeed, you could say criminally insane. Aside from water, electricity, earthquake and wildfire problems, the state has legislated away doctors’ judgments about how to best treat their patients, and the Woke governor’s state task force on reparations for blacks wants to rob California residents of $2,225,000,000,000 in order to give the  2,225,000 blacks who reside in California $1,000,000 each.  As soon as blacks hear about this, practically the entire black population of the US will move to California. See this.

In 2020 the US black population was 41.1 million, raising the cost to California taxpayers to $41,100,000,000,000 if blacks all decide to become millionaires by moving to California. This reparations sum is 11.4 times larger than California’s GDP in 2022.  Only a dumbshit like California’s governor Gavin Newsom could come up with a task force this  stupid.  Of course, it was the dumbshit voters in California who elected him and refused the effort to recall him. So one could easily conclude that the  voters deserve to pay the reparations.  It serves their stupidity right.

Blacks comprise 5.7% of California’s population.  Latinos are the largest percentage of the population at 39%, followed by 35% white and 15% Asian.  Will the reparation bill be levied against Latinos and Asians or just whites?  

According to Kamilah Moore who heads California’s Reparations Task Force, black homelessness is another “atrocity” California has committed against blacks. It turns out that 34 to 40 percent of the state’s homeless are black. What accounts for the homelessness of the remaining 60-66%?  If there is an atrocity, it is against all races of the homeless.

The mindlessness of the California state government boggles the mind.  But it gets worse.

On January 1, California’s new law that criminalizes the Hippocratic Oath went into effect. This law, passed by California’s Big Pharma-owned Democrat government, makes it a punishable offense for doctors to take exception to or disagree with Big Pharma’s diktats enforced by Big Pharma controlled medical boards.  Debate and clinical evidence is now impermissible.  Doctors who on the basis of evidence think the mRNA injections are unsafe, and  doctors who treat Covid with known cures such as Ivermectin and HCQ, are guilty under the new California law of committing the crime of “misinformation” and can have their medical licenses revoked

Under the new California law, only Big Pharma and its “regulators” and bought and paid for medical boards can determine acceptable medical practice.

In California the corporate takeover of medicine is now complete.  Nothing counts but Big Pharma’s profits, which it shares with medical boards whose members are hired as consultants at pay levels above what they can make practicing medicine.  

For years Big Pharma’s lobbyists have succeeded in getting laws passed that squeeze medical doctors out of private practice. One of Big Pharma’s greatest successes was ObamaCare.  Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) receive higher payments from Medicare and private insurance than do doctors in independent practice for the same procedures. This has forced many doctors in private practice to sell their practices to the favored providers of health care and to become employees who have to follow medical protocols directed from above or be fired.  

The lack of independence is why doctors and nurses had to stand by helplessly while Big Pharma, Fauci, and the FDA murdered people with a deadly injection while withholding treatment with the known cures of Ivermectin and HCQ. 

Money over life is the American way.  There is no accountability.  In California as of January 1, 2023, doctors cannot dare mention the rise of medical tyranny as a weapon against the people.

The dumbshit insouciant California population has voted itself into tyranny.  

Expect legislation muzzling doctors to spread in blue states.

See this.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article  was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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***

I have said on national TV throughout the COVID-19 vaccine campaign that no young person should receive a shot because the risks far outweigh the benefits. Chiu et al published a report where both cardiac symptoms and ECG changes were recorded after the first and second injections. The results are alarming. After the second injection of mRNA 17.1% of students reported cardiovascular symptoms.

Chiu SN, Chen YS, Hsu CC, Hua YC, Tseng WC, Lu CW, Lin MT, Chen CA, Wu MH, Chen YT, Chien TH, Tseng CL, Wang JK. Changes of ECG parameters after BNT162b2 vaccine in the senior high school students. Eur J Pediatr. 2023 Jan 5:1–8. doi: 10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36602621; PMCID: PMC9813456.

The difficulty for parents is to sort out symptoms indicative of the FDA acknowledged side effects of myopericarditis and pulmonary embolism. Because of the very high rate of symptomatic side effects, even ECG screening will not be enough. Fortunately, there were no serious adverse events in this study. However, when a cardiotoxic vaccine is administered to millions of adolescents, there are hundreds of thousands of symptomatic cases and the interpretation by parents and healthcare providers is quickly becoming a nightmare. Of great concern, are cases where the symptoms are interpreted as benign yet the child is suffering significant heart damage and later on is set up for sudden cardiac death during sleep or athletic events.

In summary the best way to protect both children and parents from this unnecessary nightmare is to decline COVID-19 vaccination and thereby eliminate the risk of iatrogenic heart disease.

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Source

Chiu SN, Chen YS, Hsu CC, Hua YC, Tseng WC, Lu CW, Lin MT, Chen CA, Wu MH, Chen YT, Chien TH, Tseng CL, Wang JK. Changes of ECG parameters after BNT162b2 vaccine in the senior high school students. Eur J Pediatr. 2023 Jan 5:1–8. doi: 10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36602621; PMCID: PMC9813456.

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For decades, many geopolitical experts have been claiming the United States is in constant need of geopolitical adversaries. The view was challenged by those claiming that all the US wants is the spread of “peace, prosperity, democracy, freedom, human rights,” etc. And yet, the belligerent thalassocracy is consistent in its rejection of mutually beneficial relations with other global powers.

USSR/Russia essentially dismantled its own superpower status in an attempt to establish normal ties with the political West and focus almost exclusively on economic cooperation and integration. The political West responded with an unrelenting eastward expansion and effective destabilization and encirclement of Russia’s core regions in the west of the country. Despite Moscow’s patience, the results of this are now seen in Ukraine, where the Eurasian giant is forced to fight the same ultra-radicals it had to fight eight decades ago.

A somewhat similar scenario seems to be playing out in the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific geopolitical theater, where the US and (most of) its regional vassals are taking aim at China. Despite Beijing’s attempts at rapprochement with Washington DC and its numerous satellites, this seems to be futile. The belligerent thalassocracy keeps insisting on not just meddling in China’s internal affairs, but is also engaging in repeated violations of Beijing’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is especially true concerning the South China Sea, as well as the Asian giant’s breakaway island province of Taiwan, which is being pushed ever closer to an armed conflict with (mainland) China. Beijing is certainly capable of winning if the ongoing dispute ever turns hot, but it’s still trying to avoid such a scenario.

In line with its attempts at detente with the US, the last major (geo)political move China made at the end of 2022 was the appointment of a new foreign minister. On December 30, its ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, was appointed as the Foreign Minister of China, taking the diplomatic helm from Wang Yi. Major Western media outlets noted that the move could indicate Beijing’s “softening” stance toward America. Indeed, this could be considered one of the biggest recent developments out of Beijing and it could have impacted the future of US-China relations, as Qin Gang tried his best to keep ties between the two superpowers as friendly as possible during his relatively short, seventeen months-long tenure in Washington DC.

In the first days of January, the new Chinese FM grabbed the headlines of Western media by posting tweets that he’s “deeply impressed” by the American people, while pledging to push US-China ties towards a more positive relationship. “I want to pay sincere thanks to the people of the United States for the strong support and assistance given to me and the Chinese Embassy during this period,” Qin tweeted on January 2, adding: “I have been deeply impressed by so many hard-working, friendly and talented American people that I met,” further saying he had “made many friends across the US.” He promised to “support the growth of China-US relations” in his capacity as the new Chinese FM.

And yet, China’s overtures have been shunned by the US. On January 4, barely two days after Gang’s words, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced it will be sending a delegation to Taipei this week for additional trade talks with the government of the breakaway island province. Washington DC and Taipei held formal trade talks last year and agreed to have more such meetings after the first round was held in New York in November. Although there are no official relations between the US and Taiwan, as even Washington DC officially considers the island as part of China, the American delegation is led by Terry McCartin, the assistant US trade representative for China affairs.

This means the move is carried out by President Biden’s Executive Office, giving the effort a formal diplomatic status, usually reserved for state-level contacts, which is highly unlikely to be appreciated in Beijing. In addition, the USTR stated that the meetings would be attended by officials from several other US government agencies. According to The South China Morning Post, Yang Jen-ni, Taipei’s deputy trade representative, will lead the Taiwanese delegations, which will also include officials from other departments. This clearly implies that the meeting will include more than just trade talks, further antagonizing China and its attempts at rapprochement.

Beijing views high-level contacts between Washington DC and Taipei as a direct violation of the One-China policy, to which, as previously mentioned, the US still officially adheres. This also includes trade talks, which have been almost exclusively aimed against China in recent years. Beijing views the trade talks as another US attempt to hurt China’s standing in the Asia-Pacific region. The USTR has dubbed the trade talks the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade and said that “they are intended to develop concrete ways to deepen the economic and trade relationship.”

A major point of the talks is Taiwan’s position as the world’s largest producer of advanced semiconductors. The US is aiming to push Taiwan-based companies to move facilities to America, while sanctioning China’s microchip industry, marking a hostile shift in US trade policy toward the Asian giant. Additionally, speaking of hostility, on January 5, only a day after the controversial trade talks were announced, Washington DC further insulted Beijing by ordering the US Navy 7th Fleet’s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon to pass through the Taiwan Strait as part of “its commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.” This was the latest sign that the US is clearly rejecting China’s peace initiatives.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) secretively seconded a military officer to Yemen in 2019, it can be revealed. The officer was attached to the office of the then UN special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths.  

Declassified has shown that Griffiths’ is a founder of, and adviser to, a private conflict resolution company, Inter Mediate, that works with the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

The MOD has told Declassified the military officer “works directly with and provides advice to the UN Special Envoy for Yemen regarding security and military issues relevant to the conflict in Yemen.”

The MOD added: “The military officer is not based in Yemen but has visited with the UN Special Envoy.”

The officer visited the Yemeni capital Sana’a on nine occasions, Declassified was told. But the UK government did not publicly announce the secondment, and there is no mention of it on the government website. Sana’a is currently under the control of Iran-backed Houthi rebel forces.

Griffiths, a British expert in conflict mediation, was appointed as UN special envoy in 2018 after a campaign by the UK government. He held the position until August 2021 when he became the UN’s Under-secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.

The secondment of the military officer raises further questions about the undermining of the appearance of impartiality crucial to the role of the UN special envoy. UK special forces are believed to have played a role in the war while the British military is maintaining the Saudi warplanes which have long operated over Yemen.

‘UN request’

The information was obtained by Declassified following a freedom of information request. It is not known if the military officer had a relationship with British special forces in Yemen or UK military personnel based in Saudi Arabia.

The defence section at the British embassy in Sana’a was evacuated to its embassy in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, in March 2015 as the Saudi air campaign—which has been paused for several months in 2022 due to a truce—began.

An MOD spokesperson told Declassified: “The UN requested a military adviser in order to support the planning and negotiation of a ceasefire in Yemen. The UK filled this role as part of our efforts to support the peace process.”

The MOD added that since 2015 the only other UK military personnel who had been in Yemen was the Defence Attaché, who accompanied the then foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt on a visit to the southern city of Aden in March 2019.

However, the MOD refused Declassified’s request for a list of the locations of Defence Intelligence personnel around the world, and special forces are not covered under freedom of information laws.

In July 2021, Declassified revealed that Britain has a secret detachment of up to 30 troops at Al-Ghaydah airport in Mahra province of eastern Yemen, where they are training Saudi forces.

Maritime Security Adviser

Declassified has also found that the UK military created a “Maritime Security Advisor” position in Yemen in 2015. Costing between £80,000 and £90,000 per year, some of which comes from the aid budget, the postholder was based temporarilywith the UK Yemen Office Network at the British embassy in Riyadh.

The government states that this role focused on “improving Maritime Security to sustain humanitarian access and legitimate trade into key ports, as well as service delivery and improved governance”.

The position raises questions in light of Saudi Arabia’s naval embargo on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, which UN experts have described as violating international humanitarian law. Human Rights Watch says the blockade has “severely restricted the flow of food, fuel, and medicine to civilians” during the war.

The UK is a strong supporter of the Saudi navy and has provided training on naval tactics that could be used for blockading Yemen, Declassified previously revealed.

The first Maritime Security Advisor was Kevin Stockton, who served from October 2015 to May 2016 in “Defence Section Yemen”, based in Riyadh. Stockton took up the position directly from being an advisor to the Saudis, as the Royal Navy’s Liaison Officer to the Saudi Naval Forces headquarters.

The government stated that “the maritime position in particular has been an excellent value add for the UK Government”. It added, “There should be strong consideration by MOD to transition this from a six month deployment to 12 months to build on access and influencing opportunities.”

The Royal Navy’s current Maritime Security Advisor to Yemen is Commander James Edwards, who is also based in Riyadh. He describes his role as involving “Delivery of timely maritime security advice, guidance and analysis to the FCDO and MoD on the maritime security of the southern Red Sea, Bab al Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden”.

An MOD spokesperson told Declassified: “A Maritime Security advisor provides the UK government with analysis and advice on threats to maritime security in the Gulf, helping promote regional security and the protection of UK shipping in one of the busiest commercial shipping lanes in the world.”

UK special forces in Yemen

The UK government maintains it is not a party to the war in Yemen but the British military and arms corporation BAE Systems, which works under contract to the MOD, maintains Saudi aircraft that have conducted thousands of airstrikes against Houthi forces.

The Yemen Data Project documents that these air raids have contributed to nearly 9,000 civilian deaths.

Britain is also training Saudi pilots on Typhoon fighter jets and UK military personnel are based in the Saudi Air Operations Centre.

In 2019, it was reported that “at least five British special forces commandos had been wounded in gun battles as part of a top-secret UK military campaign in Yemen”. The men were from the Royal Navy’s special forces, the Special Boat Service (SBS), and received the injuries following battles in the Sa’dah area of northern Yemen, where “up to 30 crack British troops are based”, it was claimed.

The SAS has also operated inside Yemen. In January 2019, a 12-man US/UK special forces task force, comprising the SAS and the US Green Berets, was reportedly flown into Yemen from Djibouti, ostensibly on an “humanitarian mission”.

Martin Griffiths did not respond to Declassified’s request for comment.

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A video promoting a fictional EctoLife facility recently went viral.  It featured pods in which babies could be grown from conception to birth.  Most people, having watched The Matrix, find it profoundly creepy.

Some reproductive experts were quick to point out that, of course, this is just science fiction and that anyone worrying about this is getting ahead of themselves.  Other experts, however, say that it really isn’t far off.  Our reproductive technology is getting better all the time, and moral qualms about tampering with the conception and birth process have mostly disappeared.

The dystopian novels and movies weren’t that far off.

Technology does move quickly.  When I was a kid, I thought the future would look like The Jetsons.  Sure, they predicted cell phones and video chatting.  But facial recognition tech?  The elimination of cash?  Changing birth from an organic process to a mechanical one?

Well, these things have been predicted too.  In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the first indicator society is about to turn upside down is when the main character’s credit card won’t work, and she finds she has to depend on her husband for all financial transactions.  We saw the human pods in The Matrix, but nearly 100 years ago Aldous Huxley described a similar baby-growth facility in Brave New World.

The Jetsons was a silly kids’ show; The Handmaid’s Tale and Brave New World were dystopian novels meant to provoke reflection about the direction in which our society has been moving.  Growing babies in pods is something most of us find instinctively disgusting; yet wealthy and influential people are attempting to sell us on the safety, convenience, and how it really isn’t so bad after all.  Why?

Fertility levels are low and still dropping.

The EctoLife video begins advertising as a way to help infertile couples conceive, and there is a need for this.  In November, Israeli scientists reported a worldwide sperm count decrease of 62% since 1973.  The same scientists had released a study in 2017, reporting that sperm counts from America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand had dropped by 50% since 1973 https://www.timesofisrael.com/sperm-counts-worldwide-fell-by-62-in-under-50-years-israeli-led-study-finds/  These world-class researchers have been monitoring these data for some time now and are finding that not only is sperm count decreasing, but it’s decreasing at an accelerated rate.

Fertility is low worldwide, for a variety of reasons.  Increased educational opportunities for women and the ability to plan families is a good thing; however, true infertility is tragic, and it’s becoming more common.

But why would we immediately jump to expensive, high-tech solutions?

Fertility may be dropping worldwide, but not at the same rate.  The EU’s birth rate was 1.5 as of 2020, far below the replacement level, while the birth rate for sub-Saharan Africa was 4.7. (See this) One can argue whether or not this is a good thing.  I’m not passing judgment; just stating that some populations are still, on average, having larger families.

It is similar to what’s going on with Covid.  While developed nations have been experiencing wave after wave of Covid, it is largely gone from Africa.  While Africans deal with a host of other health issues, as Dr. John Campbell points out in this video featuring an African doctor practicing in Africa, Covid is not one of them.

Africans are clearly able to still have babies as nature intended and are not getting sick from a disease making citizens of developed nations severely ill.  Isn’t this at least worth looking at?  Before looking for ever more expensive and technically complicated solutions to our First World problems, can we at least look at the Third World and ask some honest questions about what they do differently?  Is it not possible that they’re doing something better?  Technological innovation is a sign of progress; it’s also entirely possible to progress in the wrong direction.

And what about genetically engineered infants?

While wanting to help infertile couples is a noble cause, the rest of the video devolves into building your perfect baby, like infants are some kind of toy set.

EctoLife pods will be designed to replicate the exact conditions of the mother’s uterus, though they also claim to offer “germ-free” environments.  Uteruses aren’t germ-free so there’s an inherent contradiction.  Another selling point is the EctoLife app so that you can monitor your baby’s development from your phone.  Parents would be able to watch the baby’s development and pick out songs for the baby to listen to, all from their phones.  Parents could also sing into the baby’s pod, if they so choose.

Genetic engineering will be a possible feature.  They plan to use CRISPR technology to edit genes.  This will let parents not only weed out genetic defects, but also customize hair color and skin tone.  It’s important to note that nearly 80 years ago, Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis warned of genetically modified babies. Mothers will no longer have to confront the pain of childbirth; the process will occur with a push of a button.  And at the end, EctoLife will offer a free paternity test so you know the baby you take home is yours.

Many technical issues are not addressed.

The “germ-free” environment statement is significant, not only because it’s inherently false, but because it would be damaging.  All of us need regular exposure to a variety of substances for our immune systems to develop; any high school or college level biology textbook will tell you that.

And think about the last time you got an X-ray.  If you’re of reproductive age, they probably made you wear a lead apron.  Many medical imaging techniques will, after repeated exposures, have some effect and fetuses are particularly sensitive.  And yet EctoLife will let you look at your baby at any time?  This doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason people don’t get ultrasounds every single day.  But no thought seems to have been given to potential effects of imaging equipment.

Nowhere is there a discussion of how the mother’s body will be hormonally prepared to nurture a baby.  Motherhood isn’t a switch you just turn on. It’s a process, and shortly after giving birth most women will experience let-down, when milk starts flowing and the mother’s body is ready to feed the baby.  Maybe EctoLife assumes all babies will use formula?

Some of the claims are just silly to anyone that has actually given birth.  There’s no comparison between a lab setting with earbuds and the life of a pregnant woman. Most women are either working or taking care of other children while pregnant, which means the baby in utero is getting talked to and patted by Mom, her coworkers, and/or family for many hours a day.  Nothing can make up for the physical interactions with dozens of other people.

Our incubator technology has gotten good, and EctoLife sees itself as an extension of that.  Incubators are a blessing, for parents and babies that truly need them.  I’ve had a few close friends that have relied on incubators, though every parent I’ve known sees incubators as an emergency device, not something preferable.  A mother who wants to hold her baby will not be sold on convenience.  She won’t be sold on anything, other than the immediate need of the baby.

What about the philosophical issues of this?

And this touches on some extreme philosophical issues.  The minds putting effort into EctoLife differ profoundly from many actual parents.   They state, “Our goal is to provide you with an intelligent offspring that truly reflects your smart choices.”

I have a household full of intelligent offspring, and I have a very happy home.  But my first child was conceived in a vehicle when I was in my early 20s, and no, I’m not married to the father anymore.  My offspring most certainly do not reflect any “smart choices” on my part.  They reflect the impulsivity typical of young adults.

However, despite some rocky years, painful drama, and financial struggles, we found ways to meet our children’s needs.  By owning our mistakes and focusing on the needs of the kids, the stupid decisions of our young adulthood have led to incomparable emotional rewards of our more mature adulthood.

And that’s life.

Real life, not fake, ultra-planned artificial laboratory life.  We grow through struggle, and the struggles of pregnancy prepare you for parenthood.  The lack of control over your own body, the physical discomfort, the weird cravings, the inability to sleep all prepare you for parenting.

You don’t parent via app. Why pretend, in pregnancy?  None of this seems desirable to most parents, which leads us back to why?  Why put so much thought into these creepy baby pods?

Money’s the first, most obvious answer.  There are people in the world who want to commodify absolutely everything.  People in the most poverty-stricken parts of the world can and do have children.  All it takes is two reasonably healthy parents.

But there are an increasing number of potential parents who want everything to be absolutely perfect, and are willing to pay if they think that’ll happen.  And for anything someone is willing to pay for, there will be other people trying to provide it.

For a long time, couples conceived, gave birth, and nursed babies on their own.  Humans survived a long time without incubators and formula.  Again, incubators and formula are great when they’re truly needed, but EctoLife would take emergency equipment and make it standard.  Parents are happy when an incubator lets their preemie live, but I’m pretty sure they’d all just prefer healthy babies.  Same with formula.  It’s great for those who need it, but especially with all the formula shortages, I can’t imagine most people prefer it.

However, it isn’t the life that the powerful have reimagined.

I think this leads us to another, darker reason behind this effort to make something instinctively repulsive seem like the choice for smart people.  The past three years have seen enormous efforts on the part of worldwide governments and supra-national organizations to push everyone onto digital platforms, where they can be endlessly monitored.  It’s no secret that some very wealthy, powerful people want to completely reimagine society. This kind of technology would certainly influence who was able to “have” babies sheerly due to the price.

But of course, many of us plebes liked life before lockdowns.  We liked eating meat and conceiving children the old-fashioned way.  So these technocrats have taken it upon themselves to change our minds.  Since the publication of the book Nudge in 2008, there have been increasing efforts to nudge people’s behaviors, without them realizing it.  The Mercury Project has over $25 million in grant available to people researching how to increase vaccine uptake.  Changing behavior patterns is big business.

There are a lot of rich, powerful people out there who want us to overcome our disgust mechanisms and simply do what we’re told.  Overcoming our disgust toward baby pods, like our disgust toward eating insects, is just another part of that.

Our alarm bells should go off when we see ourselves being sold on something we would normally find disgusting.  Listen to your gut.  We’re being constantly bombarded with messaging, most of which is not good for us, and we need to be conscious of who is trying to sell us on what.

And maybe this should be a wake-up call, too, about our own health.  I’ve already had children; I want grandchildren, and hopefully, the healthy food and lifestyle I’ve tried to impart to my kids will make that possible.  A mentally, physically, and spiritually healthy population wouldn’t want or need baby pods.

What do you think of all this?

What are your thoughts on this technology? Is this just a creepy sci-fi video, or is it a glimpse of what the future might hold? Share your thoughts about it all in the comments.

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A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

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It is noted that the decree has not been officially published as it contains personal information. But according to the publication’s sources, Zelensky suspended the citizenship of 13 clerics of the UOC (MP).

In particular, it is about Metropolitan Ionafan of Tulchyn and Bratslav, who has been charged with treason.  According to available information, he also holds a Russian passport.  Also on the list is the vicar of the Tulchyn diocese, Bishop Serhiy of Ladyzhyn, who is Ionafan’s close contact, LB.ua wrote, promising to publish the full list of 13 persons as soon as it is verified.

It is also noted that the State Migration Service received a corresponding notification about the loss of citizenship by the said persons.  According to the current regulations, they may be deported.

As reported by Ukrinform, the SBU raided a number of UOC (MP) dioceses in various regions of Ukraine.  Many clergymen were found to hold Russian citizenship, store pro-Russian propaganda literature and millions in cash.

In Ukraine, 74% of the population supports the President’s decision to impose sanctions on the higher clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate), a recent poll says.

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The Taliban administration in Afghanistan has criticised Prince Harry after the British royal said in his memoir that he had killed 25 Afghans when serving as a military helicopter pilot, describing them as “chess pieces removed from the board”.

“The western occupation of Afghanistan is truly an odious moment in human history and comments by Prince Harry is a microcosm of the trauma experienced by Afghans at the hands of occupation forces who murdered innocents without any accountability,” Abdul Qahar Balkhi, spokesperson for the Taliban-led Afghan foreign affairs ministry, said.

Harry’s highly personal book Spare went on sale in Spain days before its global launch on 10 January. In one section of the memoir, the 38-year-old recounts his two tours in Afghanistan, first as a forward air controller in 2007/08 and again in 2012, when he was an Apache helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps deployed to Camp Bastion in the south of the country.

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On the anniversary of the “assessment” blaming Russia for interfering in the 2016 election there is still no evidence other than showing the media “colluded” with the spooks, Ray McGovern wrote on Jan. 7, 2019.

The banner headline atop page one of The New York Times print edition [now six] years ago today, on Jan. 7, 2017, set the tone for two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.”

Under a media drumbeat of anti-Russian hysteria, credulous Americans were led to believe that Donald Trump owed his election victory to the president of Russia, whose “influence campaign” according to the Times quoting the intelligence report, helped “President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

Hard evidence supporting the media and political rhetoric has been as elusive as proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002-2003. This time, though, an alarming increase in the possibility of war with nuclear-armed Russia has ensued — whether by design, hubris, or rank stupidity. The possible consequences for the world are even more dire than 16 years of war and destruction in the Middle East.

If It Walks Like a Canard…

The C.I.A.-friendly New York Times in 2017 led the media quacking in a campaign that wobbled like a duck, canard in French.

A glance at the title of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which was not endorsed by the whole community) — “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” — would suffice to show that the widely respected and independently-minded State Department intelligence bureau should have been included. State intelligence had demurred on several points made in the Oct. 2002 Estimate on Iraq, and even insisted on including a footnote of dissent.

James Clapper, then director of national intelligence who put together the ICA, knew that all too well. So he evidently thought it would be better not to involve troublesome dissenters, or even inform them what was afoot.

Similarly, the Defense Intelligence Agency should have been included, particularly since it has considerable expertise on the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been blamed for Russian hacking of the DNC emails.

But DIA, too, has an independent streak and, in fact, is capable of reaching judgments Clapper would reject as anathema. Just one year before Clapper decided to do the rump “Intelligence Community Assessment,” DIA had formally blessed the following heterodox idea in its “December 2015 National Security Strategy”:

“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”

Any further questions as to why the Defense Intelligence Agency was kept away from the ICA drafting table?

Handpicked Analysts

With help from the Times and other mainstream media, Clapper, mostly by his silence, was able to foster the charade that the ICA was actually a bonafide product of the entire intelligence community for as long as he could get away with it. After four months it came time to fess up that the ICA had not been prepared, as Secretary Clinton and the media kept claiming, by “all 17 intelligence agencies.”

In fact, Clapper went one better, proudly asserting — with striking naiveté — that the ICA writers were “handpicked analysts” from only the F.B.I., C.I.A., and NSA. He may have thought that this would enhance the ICA’s credibility. It is a no-brainer, however, that when you want handpicked answers, you better handpick the analysts. And so he did.

Why is no one interested in the identities of the handpicked analysts and the hand-pickers? After all, we have the names of the chief analysts/managers responsible for the fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 that greased the skids for the war on Iraq. Listed in the NIE itself are the principal analyst Robert D. Walpole and his chief assistants Paul Pillar, Lawrence K. Gershwin and Maj. Gen. John R. Landry.

The Overlooked Disclaimer

Buried in an inside page of the Times on Jan. 7, 2017 was a cautionary paragraph in an analysis by reporter Scott Shane. It seems he had read the ICA all the way through, and had taken due note of the derriere-protecting caveats included in the strangely cobbled together report. Shane had to wade through nine pages of drivel about “Russia’s Propaganda Efforts” to reach Annex B with its curious disclaimer:

“Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents. … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”

Small wonder, then, that Shane noted: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission…”

Since then, Shane has evidently realized what side his bread is buttered on and has joined the ranks of Russiagate aficionados. Decades ago, he did some good reporting on such issues, so it was sad to see him decide to blend in with the likes of David Sanger and promote the NYT official Russia-gate narrative. An embarrassing feature, “The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far,” that Shane wrote with NYT colleague Mark Mazzetti in September, is full of gaping holes, picked apart in two pieces by Consortium News.

Shades of WMD

Sanger is one of the intelligence community’s favorite go-to journalists. He was second only to the disgraced Judith Miller in promoting the canard of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. For example, in a July 29, 2002 article, “U.S. Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option,” co-written by Sanger and Thom Shanker, the existence of WMD in Iraq was stated as flat fact no fewer than seven times.

The Sanger/Shanker article appeared just a week after then-CIA Director George Tenet confided to his British counterpart that President George W. Bush had decided “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” At that critical juncture, Clapper was in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery and hid the fact that the number of confirmed WMD sites in Iraq was zero.

Despite that fact and that his “assessment” has never been proven, Clapper continues to receive praise.

During a “briefing” I attended at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington several weeks ago [in 2018], Clapper displayed master circular reasoning, saying in effect, that the assessment had to be correct because that’s what he and other intelligence directors told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump.

Image: McGovern questions Clapper at Carnegie Endowment in Washington. (Alli McCracken)

I got a chance to question him at the event. His disingenuous answers brought a painful flashback to one of the most shameful episodes in the annals of U.S. intelligence analysis.

Ray McGovern: My name is Ray McGovern. Thanks for this book; it’s very interesting [Ray holds up his copy of Clapper’s memoir]. I’m part of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  I’d like to refer to the Russia problem, but first there’s an analogy that I see here.  You were in charge of imagery analysis before Iraq.

James Clapper: Yes.

RM: You confess [in the book] to having been shocked that no weapons of mass destruction were found.  And then, to your credit, you admit, as you say here [quotes from the book], “the blame is due to intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help [the administration make war on Iraq] that we found what wasn’t really there.”

Now fast forward to two years ago.  Your superiors were hell bent on finding ways to blame Trump’s victory on the Russians.  Do you think that your efforts were guilty of the same sin here?  Do you think that you found a lot of things that weren’t really there?  Because that’s what our conclusion is, especially from the technical end.  There was no hacking of the DNC; it was leaked, and you know that because you talked to NSA.

JC: Well, I have talked with NSA a lot, and I also know what we briefed to then-President Elect Trump on the 6th of January.  And in my mind, uh, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT [signals intelligence] business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done.  There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever.  The Intelligence Community Assessment that we rendered that day, that was asked, tasked to us by President Obama — and uh — in early December, made no call whatsoever on whether, to what extent the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. Uh, the administration, uh, the team then, the President-Elect’s team, wanted to say that — that we said that the Russian interference had no impact whatsoever on the election.  And I attempted, we all did, to try to correct that misapprehension as they were writing a press release before we left the room.

However, as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.

RM: That’s what The New York Times says.  But let me say this: we have two former Technical Directors from NSA in our movement here, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; we also have forensics, okay?

Now the President himself, your President, President Obama said two days before he left town: The conclusions of the intelligence community — this is ten days after you briefed him — with respect to how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails are “inconclusive” end quote.  Now why would he say that if you had said it was conclusive?

JC: I can’t explain what he said or why.  But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.  I’m not going to go into the technical details about why we believe that.

RM: We are too [pretty sure we know]; and it was a leak onto a thumb drive — gotten to Julian Assange — really simple.  If you knew it, and the NSA has that information, you have a duty, you have a duty to confess to that, as well as to [Iraq].

JC: Confess to what?

RM: Confess to the fact that you’ve been distorting the evidence.

JC: I don’t confess to that.

RM: The Intelligence Community Assessment was without evidence.

JC: I do not confess to that. I simply do not agree with your conclusions.

William J. Burns (Carnegie President): Hey, Ray, I appreciate your question.  I didn’t want this to look like Jim Acosta in the White House grabbing microphones away.  Thank you for the questioning though.  Yes ma’am [Burns recognizes the next questioner].

The above exchange can be seen starting at 28:45 in this video or watch below.

Not Worth His Salt

Having supervised intelligence analysis, including chairing National Intelligence Estimates, for three-quarters of my 27-year career at C.I.A., my antennae are fine-tuned for canards. And so, at Carnegie, when Clapper focused on the rump analysis masquerading as an “Intelligence Community Assessment,” the scent of the duck came back strongly.

Intelligence analysts worth their salt give very close scrutiny to sources, their possible agendas, and their records for truthfulness. Clapper flunks on his own record, including his performance before the Iraq war — not to mention his giving sworn testimony to Congress that he had to admit was “clearly erroneous,” when documents released by Edward Snowden proved him a perjurer. At Carnegie, the questioner who followed me brought that up and asked, “How on earth did you keep your job, Sir?”

The next questioner, a former manager of State Department intelligence, posed another salient question: Why, he asked, was State Department intelligence excluded from the “Intelligence Community Assessment”?

Among the dubious reasons Clapper gave was the claim, “We only had a month, and so it wasn’t treated as a full-up National Intelligence Estimate where all 16 members of the intelligence community would pass judgment on it.” Clapper then tried to spread the blame around (“That was a deliberate decision that we made and that I agreed with”), but as director of national intelligence the decision was his.

U.S. Marine patrols the streets of Al Faw, Iraq, 2003. (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Ted Banks.)

Given the questioner’s experience in the State Department’s intelligence, he was painfully aware of how quickly a “full-up NIE” can be prepared. He knew all too well that the October 2002 NIE, “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” was ginned up in less than a month, when Cheney and Bush wanted to get Congress to vote for war on Iraq. (As head of imagery analysis, Clapper signed off on that meretricious estimate, even though he knew no WMD sites had been confirmed in Iraq.)

It’s in the Russians’ DNA

The criteria Clapper used to handpick his own assistants are not hard to divine. An Air Force general in the mold of Curtis LeMay, Clapper knows all about “the Russians.” And he does not like them, not one bit. During an interview with NBC on May 28, 2017, Clapper referred to “the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.” And just before I questioned him at Carnegie, he muttered, “It’s in their DNA.”

Even those who may accept Clapper’s bizarre views about Russian genetics still lack credible proof that (as the ICA concludes “with high confidence”) Russia’s main military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., created a “persona” called Guccifer 2.0 to release the emails of the Democratic National Committee. When those disclosures received what was seen as insufficient attention, the G.R.U. “relayed material it acquired from the D.N.C. and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks,” the assessment said.

At Carnegie, Clapper cited “forensics.” But forensics from where? To his embarrassment, then-FBI Director James Comey, for reasons best known to him, chose not to do forensics on the “Russian hack” of the DNC computers, preferring to rely on a computer outfit of tawdry reputation hired by the DNC. Moreover, there is zero indication that the drafters of the ICA had any reliable forensics to work with.

In contrast, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, working with independent forensic investigators, examined metadata from a July 5, 2016 DNC intrusion that was alleged to be a “hack.” However, the metadata showed a transfer speed far exceeding the capacity of the Internet at the time. Actually, all the speed turned out to be precisely what a thumb drive could accommodate, indicating that what was involved was a copy onto an external storage device and not a hack — by Russia or anyone else.

WikiLeaks had obtained the DNC emails earlier. On June 12, 2016 Julian Assange announced he had “emails relating to Hillary Clinton.” NSA appears to lack any evidence that those emails — the embarrassing ones showing that the DNC cards were stacked against Bernie Sanders — were hacked.

Since NSA’s dragnet coverage scoops up everything on the Internet, NSA or its partners can, and do trace all hacks. In the absence of evidence that the DNC was hacked, all available factual evidence indicates that earlier in the spring of 2016, an external storage device like a thumb drive was used in copying the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks.

Additional investigation has proved Guccifer 2.0 to be an out-and-out fabrication — and a faulty basis for indictments.

A Gaping Gap

Clapper and the directors of the C.I.A., F.B.I., and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they briefed President-elect Trump. At Carnegie, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts.  On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language to cover his own derriere, saying: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

So we end up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point. In other words, U.S. intelligence does not know how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. In the absence of any evidence from NSA (or from its foreign partners) of an Internet hack of the DNC emails the claim that “the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks” rests on thin gruel. After all, these agencies collect everything that goes over the Internet.

Clapper answered: “I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.”

Really?

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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).

Featured image: Clapper: Showing handpicked evidence? (White House Photo)

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President Biden’s recent decision to permit the CIA to continue keeping its 59-year-old records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret from the American people has brought about a public backlash that has not been seen since the enactment of the JFK Records Act in 1992. This major shift is a tremendously positive development in the JFK assassination. 

You will recall that a couple of years ago, Biden used the Covid crisis as an excuse to give the CIA another extension of time for secrecy. Biden has now returned to the tried-and-true “national-security” excuse for, once again, letting the CIA get away with another secrecy extension. Apparently the idea is that if the CIA’s 59-year-old secret assassination-related records are released to the public, the United States will fall into the ocean or be taken over by the Reds.

The backlash to Biden’s decision has been substantial.

There is Tucker Carlson’s monologue on Fox News in which he expressly stated his belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Given that Carlson is the most popular commentator on Fox News, that monologue is obviously a huge breakthrough.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., is the son of Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, who himself was assassinated. Kennedy, Jr., sent out a tweet that included a link to Carlson’s monologue. Kennedy’s tweet stated,

“The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.@Tucker Carlson.”

In his online show System Update, the noted political commentator Glenn Greenwald has also now weighed in on the JFK assassination. You can see his presentation here (go to 43:00). Greenwald doesn’t specifically state his conviction that the CIA helped carry out the JFK assassination but there is no doubt in my mind that, based on his presentation, that is what he believes. In his presentation, he features Carlson’s monologue and Robert Kennedy’s tweet. He also recommends David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard. For a written summary of Greenwald’s presentation, see here.

The libertarian Reason magazine published an article which, while refraining from taking a position on whether the assassination was, in fact, a national-security-state regime-change operation, called for the release of the CIA’s long-secret assassination-related records.

Even though he is skeptical of claims that November 22, 1963, was a regime-change operation, federal judge John Tunheim is exhorting President Biden and Congress to order the release of the CIA’s long-secret assassination-related records. Tunheim served as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. The ARRB was the agency whose job it was to enforce the JFK Records Collection Act. You can see his presentation here at a press conference at the National Press Club.

Biden’s decision to extend the time for secrecy also generated a large number of articles in the mainstream press criticizing his decision. A fascinating aspect of these articles is that some of them did not limit their criticism to the continued secrecy of the records. Like Carlson and Kennedy, Jr., they went one important step further and actually stated their conviction that Kennedy was felled by his enemies within the government. See this article by Jefferson Morley that recaps many of the articles in the mainstream press regarding the controversy.

In fact, Morley, who is a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post, deserves the credit for having brought much of the recent publicity to the CIA’s continued cover-up. Longtime supporters of FFF will recognize Morley as the author of FFF’s book CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. He was also a speaker at our 2021 conference “The National Security State and the JFK assassination,” which was, in my opinion, the best conference ever on this topic. In fact, if you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend doing so.

In fact, another fantastic conference we held was in 2017, which featured Oliver Stone and many other great speakers. It was entitled “The National Security State and JFK.”

There is also a federal lawsuit that has recently been brought by the Mary Farrell Foundation against the National Archives to force compliance with the JFK Records Act. Read about that lawsuit here.

The genesis of the JFK Records Act is a testament to the power of public opinion. For 30 years, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies were steadfastly keeping their assassination-related records secret. “National security,” they said! Needless to say, that was a weird claim, given their official narrative that a lone nut with no ties to U.S. intelligence had killed the president. 

In 1991, Oliver Stone came out with his movie JFK, which posited that the assassination was a U.S. national-security state regime-change operation, no different from regime-change operations that were carried out against other regimes, such as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1960-present), and Chile (1970-73). At the end of the movie, Stone included a blurb informing people that federal officials were still keeping their assassination-related records secret. 

Stone’s blurb produced a public outcry that forced Congress to enact the JFK Records Act. That can happen again. Biden extended the CIA’s secrecy deadline to June 2023, which I think was a dumb move because there is a good chance that there will be more publicity surrounding that upcoming deadline. From the CIA’s standpoint, Biden would have been much better off extending the deadline for 25 years or forever.

There is no doubt that the records that the CIA continues to steadfastly keep secret have nothing to do with “national security,” no matter what definition one puts on that nebulous, meaningless term. But in the final analysis, the real issue is not what’s in those secret records, but rather that the CIA and the Pentagon did, in fact, orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. president, just as they orchestrated the assassination of foreign leaders who they felt posed a grave threat to “national security.” 

As far as I’m concerned, the CIA should never have come into existence. As I state in my most recent book on the JFK assassination, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, which I consider the best work I’ve done in the 33-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation, once the CIA’s evil program known as MKULTRA came to light, the CIA should have been abolished at that point. But I am more convinced than ever that the day of reckoning is getting closer for the CIA, the day that a critical mass of Americans finally reach the conclusion that John F. Kennedy was, in fact, assassinated by the U.S. national-security establishment for his decision to move America in a direction different from that of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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A group of University of Florida medical-school faculty members challenged controversial guidance by state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on COVID-19 vaccinations, but a university official said Wednesday the guidance is outside the scope of Ladapo’s work with the school.

Ladapo, who holds a faculty position in the UF College of Medicine, was tapped in September 2021 by Gov. Ron DeSantis to serve as surgeon general and secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Ladapo has become a controversial national figure because of his positions on issues such as COVID-19 vaccines and mask requirements.

In October, Ladapo issued guidance advising males ages 18 through 39 to avoid getting shots with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The Department of Health published an analysis that showed an increase “in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death” among males in that age group roughly a month after receiving the shots.

The report by the UF College of Medicine’s Faculty Council Committee, first reported by The Washington Post, was shared with medical-school faculty Tuesday. It outlined seven “major critiques” of Ladapo’s vaccine guidance.

Among the critiques was an assertion that Ladapo’s analysis committed “reporting bias by cherry-picking results; focusing only on evidence that supports his stance, ignoring contradicting evidence, and failing to appropriately acknowledge the limitations of his own data set.”

The committee said it has “concerns” that Ladapo violated UF’s research integrity policy and that the issue had been referred to the school’s research integrity officer. But David Norton, vice president for research at the university, said in a statement Wednesday that UF’s research integrity office has “no standing” to look into the committee’s accusations.

“As this work was done by the Dr. Joseph Ladapo in his role as the state of Florida Surgeon General and not in his role as a UF faculty member, the UF Office of Research Integrity, Security and Compliance has no standing to consider the allegations or concerns regarding research integrity set forth in the Faculty Council task force report,” Norton said.

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The open white supremacy and fascism exhibited in Ukraine are conveniently swept under the rug. Nazis are bad, unless they serve the interests of the U.S. state.

The accuracy of this commentary’s title is borne out by statements made and actions taken by the Ukrainians themselves. In 2020 millions of people around the world protested against racism in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Ukrainians made it clear that they were not to be included amongst that mass of humanity and in fact expressed their support for white supremacy.

In June 2020, a group of football fans at a match in Ukraine unfurled a banner reading, “Free Derek Chauvin .” Chauvin is the man who murdered George Floyd. Not to be outdone, members of the neo-Nazi group Nazionalny Sprotyv, National Resistance, marched on October 14, 2020 with a banner that made the point very clear. The words “White Lives Matter ” were written in English and in much larger type than the name of the organization which appeared in small type below. October 14 is celebrated as the Day of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Nazi Germany after it invaded Ukraine during World War II. The words in the pink graphic on the video read, “On the march of UPA Nazis carefully burned the poster of BLM.” Nazionalny Sprotyv is known for its racist, anti-Russian, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Communist beliefs.

The war propaganda disseminated by the Biden administration and its friends in corporate media tells us to ignore the swastikas, Hitler salutes, and other clear indicators of Nazi sympathies when they appear in Ukraine. Suddenly symbolism which we were told to abhor as indisputable signs of hate speech are now to be accepted or explained away as figments of our collective imagination.

Nazi regalia and symbolism should make assistance to the Ukrainian government an automatic deal breaker. But the U.S. has always been rather flexible in its approach to Nazism. After World War II an intelligence program known as Operation Paperclip brought more than 1,600 German scientists to the U.S. to fight in the new cold war against the Soviet Union. Their links to the Nazi party were covered up so that they might be of assistance to the U.S. Werner von Braun and other Nazi linked scientists were instrumental in creating the U.S. space program.

Ukraine was a divided nation from its very beginnings after World War I, with half of the country hating the Soviet Union so much that they sided with and fought alongside the Germans. January 1 is officially celebrated not just as the first day of the year but as the birthday of Ukraine’s chief Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. The 2023 celebration was no exception but not without embarrassment. The Ukrainian parliament was forced to delete a Twitter post featuring a photo of army commander General Valerii Zaluzhny juxtaposed with an image of Bandera. Bandera massacred thousands of Poles during the war and the Ukrainians had to be reminded through diplomatic channels that everyone isn’t as forgiving as clueless Americans. Just as Operation Paperclip is an inconvenient and rarely discussed truth, Ukraine’s continuing Nazi and white supremacist connections are now hushed up by the U.S. state and its media partners.

It is indeed awkward for Joe Biden to greet president Zelensky at the white house and for him to speak in congress if these facts are openly discussed. Of course Zelensky is president because the Obama administration helped to engineer a coup against an elected Ukrainian president in 2014. Members of congress like senator Chris Murphy and the late John McCain are among those who traveled to Kiev and addressed rallies sponsored by the right wing Svoboda and Right Sector parties and aided in the coup effort.

The Biden administration invitation to Zelensky was an effort to ensure that an additional $45 billion was allocated to Ukraine before the congressional session ended. The standing ovations and blue and yellow flags and cries of “Slava Ukraini!” were orchestrated to get more buy-in at a time when many Americans are asking why their needs go unmet and why Ukraine can’t resume the negotiations it was holding months ago with Russia. It has been reported that the U.S. sent the then prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, to tell Zelensky that any talk of peace had to end. Russia was ready to withdraw in exchange for security guarantees and an end to Ukraine’s efforts to secure NATO membership. But Ukraine is the latest U.S. forever war and its people have to suffer and die because of its dictates.

Perhaps the saddest sight of the night of Zelensky’s congressional speech was the adulation he received from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). CBC members Sheila Jackson-Lee and Barbara Lee eagerly sought to shake his hand. Perhaps they are unaware of Ukraine’s white supremacist leanings. But that can’t be true. After all, in 2015 their CBC colleague, the late John Conyers, co-sponsored an amendment that would have barred U.S. funding to the Azov battalion and other Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups. The amendment was ultimately removed from the final spending bill.

CBC member Gregory Meeks is Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee and said, “This war is about Russian aggression against Ukraine and the security of Europe, and it is also about democracy over tyranny, and freedom over oppression.” Ukraine has banned left wing parties and collective bargaining rights. Its people are openly racist. Barbara Lee, now elbowing her colleagues to get a little Zelensky facetime, was the only member of congress to have voted against the authorization to invade Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Now she brags about her role in securing more funding for a white supremacist state.

White lives matter just as much in the U.S. as they do in Ukraine. Even Black politicians go along with supremacist ideology. As the war grinds on, and casualties and public spending go ever upward, it is wise to remember that there are very few anti-racists in positions of authority anywhere in the world. Apparently the war propagandists are right. The U.S. and Ukraine are united in every way.

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Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on Twitter and on Telegram. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.

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***

 

Churches in East Jerusalem are constantly concerned about the rise in Israeli extremist attacks on Christian property in the city.

Current and former church officials told Anadolu Agency that the frequent attacks on Christian property ended in most cases without punishing the perpetrators.

On Sunday, Israeli extremists destroyed and toppled 30 graves with crosses at a Christian cemetery belonging to the Evangelical Episcopal Church in East Jerusalem.

“The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemns the act of vandalism at the Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery in Jerusalem,” the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a tweet on Wednesday.

History of assault

On 27 December, 2022, dozens of settlers stormed the 5,000-square-meter (53,820-square-feet) plot of land in Silwan, south of Jerusalem’s Old City, under Israeli police protection.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate decried the settler raid as a “clear encroachment” on its properties in Jerusalem.

“This radical group has no right or judicial backing in their favour to allow them to enter or occupy the land,” it said in a statement.

The Patriarchate referred to the fact that, two years ago, a settlement association tried seizing the Imperial and Little Petra hotels located in Omar Ibn Al Khattab Square in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Conviction awaiting punishment

The former Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Holy Land, Munib Younan, said: “The attack on a cemetery that tells the history of Lutherans since the 19th century is evidence of the hatred of the attackers.”

During his interview with Anadolu Agency, Younan said the attack on the cemetery “is unacceptable and should not only be condemned but the perpetrators must also be punished.”

He stressed that the aggressors “aimed to seize the Hebron Gate by seizing the Imperial and Petra Hotels, which would lead to control of the local and international Christian pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City.”

Intentional narrowing

The recent attacks were not limited to the property of the Lutheran Church, but also included the property of other Christian denominations, including those owned by the Greek Orthodox Church.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s spokesman, Father Issa Musleh, said, “Extremists attack churches and monasteries, just as they attack the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

“Our Muslim brothers are exposed to the same attacks we are exposed to, our cause is the same,” he added.

He attributed the increasing decline in the numbers of Christians in the Holy Land in part to Christians feeling targeted by extremists.

Father Musleh called on Christians to return to their lands to confront the “targeting of settlers”, noting that “they are harassing us to displace us, but we will remain until the Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital is established.”

Musleh said “the presence of an extremist right-wing government in Israel does not scare only us but the whole world.”

Against unknown

Over the years, Wadih Abu Nassar, spokesman for the Council of Heads of Catholic Churches in Jerusalem, along with Israeli authorities, followed up on many attacks.

“We are not talking about singular attacks but rather dozens of attacks over the past few years, most of which were recorded against unknown persons,” he noted.

“This matter cannot be accepted,” Abu Nassar added. “Advanced security services must be used to stop hate crimes and bring perpetrators to justice.”

He warned against the development of attacks in the future and their transgression of cemeteries.

“The continuation of the attacks will lead their perpetrators to believe that they are untouchable, their attacks will not end with graveyards,” Abu Nassar noted.

He also pointed out that “hate crimes stem from an educational problem,” adding: “A radical solution is needed.”

Aggravating attacks

Abu Nassar narrated examples of how the Israeli authorities deal lightly with hate crimes.

“In the case of the attack on the Church of the Grotto of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, the assailant was arrested, then declared abnormal,” he stressed, explaining: “The Israeli authorities behave strangely with such mentally abnormal crimes. If the assault is documented through cameras, authorities say the faces are blurred, and when aggressors are arrested, they are always mentally ill.”

“I do not rule out that the Christian presence is targeted, according to some Jewish fundamentalists, the Christian is an enemy. There are ideological dimensions, not just political ones, just as I do not rule out hatred among some,” he added.

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Featured image: This is a photo of a place that is recognized as a heritage site by the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The Iraqi supreme court has issued an arrest warrant for former U.S. President Donald Trump for the assassination on Iraqi soil of Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani, IraqiNews reports, citing a Baghdad news agency. 

The warrant was issued on Thursday in connection both with the killing of Soleimani and of another Iraqi militia leader, chief of staff of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq–both of whom were killed in a drone strike in January 2020 near the Baghdad airport.

That assassination operation led to Iranian strikes on the Aia Al-Assad U.S. base in Iraq.

The arrest warrant charges Trump with premeditated murder. While the warrant is clearly symbolic, a conviction of this nature carries the death penalty.

The court said the investigation into the killings was still ongoing, AP reported.

Citing Baghdad Today news agency, IraqiNews quoted Supreme Judicial Council head Faiq Zaidban as calling on Baghdad to hold Trump “accountable for this heinous crime”.

At the same time, in November, Iraq’s parliamentary speaker confirmed that hundreds–and possibly thousands–of people had been kidnapped and killed by Iran-backed militias from 2014 to 2016.

Iraq, the second-largest oil producer in OPEC, is caught between rivals Iran and the United States, while Iran’s influence has grown exponentially since the toppling of Saddam Hussein following the 2003 U.S. invasion.

In October, ending a long-running stalemate, Iraq’s parliament named a new pro-Iranian prime minister and pro-Iranian parties now dominate, having sidelined Shi’ite rival Moqtada al Sadr, who had been paralyzing the government with anti-Iranian protests.

The PMF figure assassinated in a Trump-ordered military operation represented the head of an umbrella group that brought together pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, which enjoyed government support as a loosely defined element of the Iraqi armed forces.

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Charles is a writer for OilPrice.com.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

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American presidential candidate and international relations expert Emanuel Pastreich discusses the events of 2020 and how it was really an attempted totalitarian takeover of local and central governments around the world by billionaires and bloodline families working through IT companies, and private intelligence firms. We talk about the perversion and marxification of academia and how students are “mind raped” into a worship of authority by the very people that have been learning how to corrupt minds from earlier experiments at DARPA and Guantanamo Bay.   

Transcript

John Cooper: Welcome to another episode of Raising the Bar with myself, John Cooper. Today I’m joined by Emanuel Pastreich who serves as the president of the Asia Institute and is director general of the institute for Future Urban Environments. Emanuel declared his candidacy for president of the US as an independent in February of 2020. Emanuel welcome to the show.

Emanuel Pastreich: It’s an honor to be with you.

John Cooper: I presented a little bio there, but could you explain for the audience what brought you to where you are at this moment, about your candidacy for president, and also about being brave enough to speak the truths that you do?

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, first I’m an American And you could say that I was a card-carrying member of The establishment, in the sense that my father went to Yale and I went to Yale, I grew up in an upper middle class environment, became a professor at University of Illinois, and I was 22 years ago a prominent figure in Asian studies—and I thought I would end up with a very illustrious career. But then I was forced by 9/11 and the build up to 9/11 to face ugly aspects of American culture; it was a change, a negative mutation, in American culture and I watched people being cleared out of government, out of academics, and other places and I felt we’d crossed the Rubicon, and that therefore, as an intellectual, I had a responsibility to take a stand and to oppose this. It was not just me, but it was a small group in America of people who felt we had to take a stand back then in 2001–even before the 911 incident.

But the institutional decay and contradictions went back to Oklahoma, it went back to the Kennedy assassination in some respects it went back to the end of the second World War. At the end of the Second World War we had this very sad experience —and equally true in London as it is in Washington DC–which is that during the Second World War there was an effort in Washington DC or in London to move away from the imperialist financial system and to get back to something closer to a republic, something based upon representation of the interests and the needs of the average citizen, to move away from global finance.

But that effort, that effort to maintain healthy institutions, started to fall apart at the end of the Second World War. It took another 30 years to weave the spider’s web in which American and British corporations set up their Headquarters, in the Virgin Islands and other places, and thereby created a parallel alternate universe that is not subject to the rule of law, that is not overseen by anything; just trusts, corporations, offshore holdings.

And today that “spider’s web economy” has become the dominant paradigm. So we live in the terrarium economy—you, me, our friends– and then there’s this “Untouchable” Brahmin class of people who have accumulated billions and billions of dollars. They make up money, they control money, and they inhabit the the leftovers of the British Empire. They have become the dominant mode for economic interaction for both the United States and Great Britain, and other countries as well. We’ve signed, unbeknownst to Ourselves, a sort of death pact to have our societies torn apart, sold off at fire sale prices, to benefit this tiny handful the super-rich. Now it’s no longer just in London and New York, but also includes wealthy individuals from around the world—from Japan, from Germany, from China, from Russia, etc. It is a disturbing world and so I decided we had to take a stand against them, not just me of course. The result was that I ended up spending 14 years in Korea. This is my second time trying to come back to the United States I don’t know how it will end, and I’m not totally sure that it’s a viable campaign, but at least I will try.

I say let’s go back to real politics. Politics was not a bad word originally. We need a politics of truth, a politics of ethical commitment, and we need to say that those of us who had the benefit of receiving good educations have a responsibility to the common man, the common woman the working women and men of our country, of our Earth. Intellectuals must recognize that our interests do not lie with the billionaires, not with Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Perhaps this point seems obvious to some of you, but that this is not common sense in London and Washington. The vast majority of the privileged intellectuals, those who have had these opportunities for good educations in a supportive environment, find themselves siding with the billionaires, not the working people.

I mean the will of the billionaires as articulated through their cardboard Messiahs, their pay-to-play NGOs, their fake organizations that are supposedly trying to abolish poverty or address the environmental crisis—but they are in fact following their directives from private intelligence agencies that work for the for billionaires, for BlackRock, for Microsoft, for Cisco, and for other multinationals. These multinationals are a combination of financial, Technological, and intelligence Services that are engaged in the mass manipulation of public opinion and are creating a radical class society.

John Cooper: What do you mean by “radical class society”?

Emanuel Pastreich: So class is the issue that is critical for us to understand in order to take political action, and also must be understood for the sake of self-awareness so as to start real change. We must be aware that there are radical class gaps between this small group of billionaires, and their immediate associates, who live in their own precious world, winging around the world on private jets. They are people for whom there was no pandemic and there has been no economic crisis. They never wore masks or were forced to take vaccines. If anything, they’ve gotten richer and they’re insulated on every side. If you grow up in one of these families will you’re not be aware of of what is going on in the world, or what’s happening to those around you.

Unfortunately, the term “class” is associated with Marxist thought which has led some people to dismiss it. The argument advanced in the corporate-funded media is that anyone who’s talking about class is a leftist, a socialist, and they cannot be taken seriously. There are two problems with that assumption. First, Marxist analysis, although it has serious problems, it is accurate in many respects and deserves to be at least explored as one perspective on the world. The billionaires have paid off a lot of people to pursue the argument that if you’re a socialist, if you’re sympathetic to Marxist or Leninist analysis, then you are the enemy and so we can’t even listen to anything that you say. So most people have never even looked at what Marx actually wrote. The other part of the problem is that people like John Stewart Mills, who wrote on social and political issues in the 19th century, used the word class and they used the framework of class interests for understanding the world. The emergence of dominant classes who control the money, control the means of production, distribution, education, and ideology is not a Marxist concept.

Somehow, by branding discussion of class as socialist or Marxist, we take away from the common people the most valuable form of analysis for understanding the world: class interests.

John Cooper: Thank you for that explanation. I think that what’s happened is that we have moved from class as the source of socio-economic disparity to a state in which “class” is being transposed over categories like race, sexual identity, sexual orientation. We end up with neo-Marxism, or cultural Marxism. A lot of people have a problem with this analysis that because it feels like yet another divide and conquer strategy.

Emanuel Pastreich: That is exactly what it is. What we’re looking at (I don’t have access to the classified files of private intelligence firms like Booz Allen Hamilton) is how the billionaires paid off a group of people to push this neo-progressive neo-Marxist ideology of identity politics. This ideology does not come from working people but it’s being force fed to us by these same groups. The same people at BlackRock, or Cisco, or Facebook, or Google who are funding the corrupt parts of Black Lives Matter, ordering them to push this gender blending, race-based, fake ideological struggle, are the same people who are funding the Trump people and their MAGA (Make America Great Again) groups, those who are attacking immigrants as the threat to America without identifying the real problem of global finance. The Trump people are not any more right, or wrong, than those on the other side. They’re totally right to see how immigration is used to destroy the lives of ordinary Americans. Where they’re wrong, or where they miss the point, is that they don’t see how global financial institutions are investing in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina so as to destroy the local economies of those countries and to force people to move to the United States as part of this strategy to destroy the lives of workers in both places so that the billionaires can emerge all-powerful.

Both sides, the left and the right, have become part of a puppet show these days.

John Cooper: These big companies work through academia, they work through the education system so as to   capture the so-called intellectuals. It is a paradox that the people who have abdicated their critical thinking skills ARE the intellectuals themselves. Whereas the common working class people, your typical man on the street, seems to be able to acknowledge the evil when he sees it, and to identify government overreach. Why is it that these intellectuals were captured in the first place, and why is it that they can’t think for themselves?

Emanuel Pastreich: I came from that background and so I have an intimate knowledge of this process of seduction. To some degree it’s a standard strategy. You can read about mass manipulation and there are strategy books they’re being passed around at Boston Consulting, and other private consulting firms, about how do you take over a country and thereby seize control of the decision-making process. This high level manipulation goes back to the Phoenix Project of the 1960s that set down the groundwork for what we see being done here today. Originally the Phoenix Project was carried out in Vietnam by the US government, and the corporations hiding behind government, as a means to take over Vietnam. The files for the Phoenix Program are pretty explicit. They are a handbook for controlling society.

Doug Valentine writes about how the United States then imported this Phoenix Project system for seizing control of politics from the Vietnam back in to the United States. Seizing control of the intellectuals was a big part of the Phoenix Program. There was a carrot and a stick for the educated (then in Vietnam, now in DC). The carrot is how intellectuals are flattered, are made to feel like they’re part of the establishment.

Rich people take them out to dinner and feature them in the media as experts. The intellectuals who go along with the plan get to be famous in a way that they wouldn’t normally. It is a seduction.    Eventually it becomes a form of sort of sexual abuse, almost like rape, in which intellectuals are so compromised by these elicit relationships with global finance that they themselves can no longer face the reality and fall into a cycle of denial. The stick is punishment for those who wander off the reservation. That is to say that the professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, this class of the educated (more educated than billionaires who are their bosses) start to see their interests as being aligned with those of the wealthy. But, they also know that they can be cut off, they can lose their tenure, not get those opportunities to show up on CNN, to be invited to think tanks. That threat then leads them to self-censor. I should just add that this has been true for a while, but it’s gotten much worse.

I mean, the most clear example was Drew Faust, an American historian and professor at Harvard who wrote an excellent study of the Civil War. Faust became president of Harvard and then, when she retired, she was invited to become a member of the board of directors of Goldman Sachs. I think that 20 years ago it would have been inconceivable that the president of Harvard would have stepped down and joined the board of directors of Goldman Sachs.

But Harvard has changed fundamentally in its nature. It was never perfect, but whereas there was a clear wall, a policy that Harvard would take money from wealthy individuals that it had an enormous endowment of 30, now more than 40, billion dollars that there remained a brain-blood barrier that said, we will keep out these most corrupting parts of global finance so that Harvard will be able to be independent, relatively. But that this is gone now and that is why people say that Harvard today is “an investment fund with a little university attached on the side.” And so those 40 billion dollars is what’s important, not Harvard the university. And so, by extension, Harvard has become just a brand, like Adidas or Google.

which multinational corporations can use to brand their psych ops. We see this happening increasingly. The Harvard brand is used promiscuously to mask or to rebrand disturbing activities. Nor is that strategy limited to Harvard. We see that happening across the board.

John Cooper: Thank you for that. All universities seem to be captured to some degree and also the students that are coming out of them.   I don’t just mean the intellectuals, I mean every university graduate, they are the products of their professors who were probably activists at one point in the past. It’s a kind of a follow-on, a domino effect in which an ideology is passed down. I want to know why these students are like that. It seems that they are not taught how to think; they’re told what to think. They’re whipped up into sort of a frenzy. It’s all very kind of tribal within the universities.

They feel that they’re almost militarized at university, given their ideological training. Then, when they come out, they go out in the world, into media, into the HR Departments of companies. And that is how the ideology spreads. Is that a fair assessment, and how do we change that? If there is someone watching this broadcast, someone who at the university, taking one of these feminist or sociology courses, whatever it is, Then they are given these very militant ideas about everything. What could we say to encourage them to break out of that “ideological calcification?” You know what I’m trying to say, right?

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, it’s extremely difficult to break out and I think we’re going to have to be increasingly independent. We are going to have to say that some of these institutions are so corrupt that they are not about learning and they’re not about education. You get this degree, whether a high School degree, or college degree, or graduate degree, and that allows you to get a job. So it’s a qualification; it’s not about learning how to think. It’s not about understanding the world. It’s not even about science. It is just following a set of prescribed rituals that will give you a qualification that allows you to be employed. So that’s not education. I think the first step is just to be brave enough to say that this is not education to put your foot down and say these schools do not have the legitimacy to be called “education,” to serve as a real education. We must admit to ourselves this fact.

As I said before, the abuse of the citizen is like rape or incest, in that the individual, the victim, is so corrupted and compromised by this process that he or she is no longer able to identify the violence and the exploitation for what it is.   So we fall back these rituals, these rites, at the Universities, and continue them even as journalism, education, governance have become but corrupt means for the super wealthy to control us and the best way to control us.

As we know from the experiments at DARPA and at Guantanamo Bay abuse is used to permanently alter the capacity of individuals to respond to authority. They become so compromised by the system they can no longer oppose anything. I think that’s the ultimate goal here, to compromise us using education and media to form a relationship with the power elite like sexual abuse, so that we can no longer stand up and say, “this is wrong” to say that we have our own perspective. It does come back to self-awareness. That is why I appreciate your efforts, your focus on the individual and the self-confidence and awareness that is necessary. If we lack at the most basic level, the ability to say “this is who I am,” “these are my values,” “this is where I stand” then we’re going to be incapable of articulating our opposition to this outside multinational force.

John Cooper: Absolutely. That is why I believe we need to bring everything back to the individual, and to really take care of yourself, to nurture yourself and to curate your own life in a way that then cascades outwards reflecting your beliefs, your values, and your integrity. I

I read in one of your articles that this hasn’t always been the way. We were better critical thinkers 60 or 70 years ago. What’s changed? And how did we think back then?

What’s missing now? You often reference philosophers and stuff like that. Are there things that we can do that will help us with our critical and rational faculties?

Emanuel Pastreich: There have been many changes that took place. The promotion of this consumption culture, a sort of narcissism that takes control of our aesthetics is in our entertainment, in movies. Above all, we see the intentional confusion, pushed by multinational corporations and the rich, of science with technology. If we’re going to look for one major Factor, the origin of the current crisis, the cause for the collapse of medicine, the collapse of journalism, the collapse of academics, then this intentional confusion of science with technology is key. I would just start with what the philosopher and essayist of the 1960s Paul Goodman said famously,

“Whether or not it draws a new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy not of science.”

That is to say that technology should be ultimately concerned with the moral, the ethical, and that science is the process by which one investigates, one searches, for truth. These two realms are fundamentally different: science is a philosophical demand to discover the truth through the scientific method. That means that you observe things around you, you speculate as to possible explanations for what you observe using your imagination–so it’s a humanistic creative process–and then you compare the explanations that you imagine with what You observe over time. You start with five theories, you get them down to four, three, and eventually you’re able to come up with a thesis to explain what you observe, the reality based on truth. That process, that intellectual philosophical process, that science of understanding the truth might tell you to stay away from your smartphone, right? that you should not have AI cartoon characters talking to your kids when they’re developing–that would be science.

We need to erect a wall, to say that we only use technology when it’s helpful and we reject it when it’s not helpful to us. If it’s better to grow your own food because the food is organic, it gives jobs to people in your community, it puts you in charge of what you eat, making you self-sufficient and not subject to the whims of multinational corporations, and import-export logistics firms, then, yeah, that’s what you should be doing. Technology by contrast are processes for an effect. That can be good, but it can easily be used in a negative way to control people and technology can be used as a means to diminish and to undermine the capacity of the individual, or the community, to think independently. That is what has happened over the last 20 Years.

The smartphone, the internet, the search engine, social media all these things which could theoretically be used in a positive sense have been transformed into covert operations whose primary goal today is to diminish and undermine, to degrade the capacity of the individual to think for herself or himself, to compromise the individual’s role in the community through these relationships with so-called friends who are actually enemies of the ordinary citizen and through that process to create a economic, social, political environment in the United States, or for that matter in other countries, in which it is no longer possible to resist the authority from above and to be critical. These technologies end up compromising the individual so that the individual feels somehow that he or she is part of this process. That compromise leads us into things like the wearing of masks.

John Cooper: Absolutely. But before you go into masks, I just want to thank you for that explanation, and to say that it does seem that because we’re depending more and more on technology, and eventually it’s going to get to the stage where the technologies community guidelines will become the law. Because when everyone’s on these platforms they will have no choice but to comply with them—especially if technology connects you to the local supermarket and you won’t be able to get a loaf of bread, unless you comply.

I definitely see that’s what is happening and you’re right, they’re having conversations about how the general scientific line of inquiry is just investigating something, but then you’ll find out that the technology will character assassinate you, delete you, ban you, turn you against your friends online. That is what becomes so difficult, to know how to play the system, and to beat the system.

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, I had the experience last week of having 280 videos deleted from Vimeo. Suddenly they decided that I had gotten too popular I think and so they deleted me. They sent me a letter of explanation and I responded, saying that I want to talk to them and I have scientific proof for everything I wrote. “Let’s have a dialogue?” They sent me this response stating that these authority figures, whether it’s at Harvard, or in the American government, or in the media, they decide what is true. It is not based on a rigorous questioning through the scientific method. Rather these authority figures decide. This is the ideology that has been accurately described as science-ISM.

It’s not science but rather this ideology that holds that if you’re a Harvard professor, if you work at the Center for Disease Control, if you have this stamp of approval of graduating from a good high school or college, then you have the authority to dictate to the people what is true.

By contrast, if I’m unemployed or I’m just a blogger, or whatever, even if I base everything on a close scientific investigation of things, still I don’t have any authority because I don’t have that stamp of approval. That’s not science; that’s scienceism.

John Cooper: Yeah sciencism. I call it scientism. it’s a perversion of the actual truth because it’s just following orders; it’s being compliant. It’s the old “8 out of 10 cats prefer this cat food” or “97% of climate scientists have said this therefore trust the science.” Anytime you hear “trust the science” you know it’s not science.

Emanuel Pastreich: I read many articles on policy in the United States in which the first thing they state is that the public supports this according to our recent surveys. Eighty percent of Americans think that we should do this about health care. Now as an American who has never been called by any public opinion research polling company, all of which are run for profit and their shares are owned by multinational investment banks, I assume these statistics are fabricated.

I wouldn’t say that they have no basis in in reality. They follow the propaganda strategy: a 30 70 mix. You take 30% truth and you mix it with 70% lies, and then you plant it in different mouths, which have different ideological flavors to them. That gives the impression that, “Oh if this part of it’s true, then rest must be true. And it’s being repeated by people from the left or from the right (you know Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, those cardboard Messiahs) so somehow it must be true because it’s being recognized by people with all these different perspectives.”

John Cooper: We’ve something similar with the Twitter files. In the Twitter dump it was clear that  The White House was dictating to Big Tech, to Twitter execs.  They were just making sure that the company and the algorithms and the AI Bots were filtering out anything that contradicted the mainstream narrative of the World Health Organization, and they would de-platform and cancel anyone who had any opinions, any alternative views on anything. That is scientism, as you say, isn’t it? That’s the technological monopoly.

Emanuel Pastreich: Twitter is a perfect example.  The debate is controlled. The question is whether Elon Musk owning Twitter will somehow make it better, or whether letting Donald Trump, and a few of these perverse false Messiahs, get an account on Twitter will somehow improve things. But Twitter is basically a platform for controlling public opinion that is run for profit and is co-owned by a series of global funds, which they tend to hide behind multinational corporations, funds like BlackRock, or Goldman Sachs, or Vanguard. But behind that they are basically funds belonging to extremely wealthy individuals and families. The primary goal of Twitter is to control opinion.

What we really should have had was a debate in which we could say that we don’t  want Twitter at all, or that Twitter should be owned by its users, that all the people who use Twitter should be shareholders in Twitter and get a payment every week based upon their contribution to Twitter.  But the system is set up such that Twitter is controlled a hundred percent by these multinational Banks (behind them wealthy families) and it’s used to manipulate us.  We have no say. Nobody in this debate on Twitter, Trump or Musk, or whoever, nobody said that maybe the people who use Twitter should own Twitter or that maybe they should have the right to determine what its policies are. No one suggested that we should be able to propose policy to Twitter and to vote on what Twitter’s policy should be.

To my mind, the revolutionary change that we need is to hold that Facebook, Twitter, all social media can play a positive role, and that they’ll be positive when they’re owned by their users—who are the ones who contribute all the value to them. We write for Facebook and “Facebook Incorporated” uses that information and makes billions of dollars off of it. They pay you nothing. All they do is give you the special privilege of using it for free.

John Cooper: So you used the the term “cardboard messiah.” So is your opinion of Elon Musk that he is just he’s a false savior?

Emanuel Pastreich: I would not rule out the possibility that in the controlled environment in which Elon Musk lives that he may have more thoughtful views than some of his associates do. So I  I’m not ruling out the possibility that he as an individual may have some positive characteristics, and I have nothing personally against him. But within the larger system of things this man, who is pushing trans-humanism and who has been a central figure in the push for technology, the push for geo-fencing, and the control of the citizen. He has no legitimacy and I would say he should be in jail. I think that his role in the global takeover over the last four or five years has been central and he has tens of billions of dollars invested in this project.

This fact has been proven by the many anti-democratic, techno-fascist policies that he pushes through various holding companies. I’m not expert enough on Elon Musk to say exactly how he does it, but I’m quite familiar with how you set up sock puppets to push your agenda from the right and from the left. Elon Musk has been a card-carrying member of this elite group for a long time.

John Cooper: So how does he benefit from it? What exactly is his game; what’s his end goal?

Emanuel Pastreich: Well his main game is using public Funding to make billions and billions of dollars. He comes up with these schemes like “we’re all going to drive electric cars.” The he gets local and central governments around the world to give him tens of billions of dollars to develop his Tesla cars even though they don’t even exist yet. He gets all this funding. And then and he pushes AI.   It is all similar, he says we have to go to this next stage of our development and that we need all this funding to develop AI. That money comes from our tax dollars, or from the inflation resulting from overspending by government.

So he is basically funded by the government even though he’s a profit-seeking individual.  I think he’s worse than many people in that respect the degree to which he was willing to take this enormous amount of money from central governments and central banks to finance these pie in the sky projects like Tesla that do nothing.

Tesla is a scam. You see all these big signs for electric cars and these charging stations that nobody uses, and these Tesla cars parked in strategically visible locations to publicize how somehow we’re going to go to electric cars. But, in fact, almost nobody has them and they’re priced out of the range of normal people. And electric cars don’t help the environment in most cases—it’s just a transfer. You’re taking the pollution and putting it somewhere else and transferring it as electricity. But it’s not helping the environment. If anything you’d be better off going back to riding horses.

John Cooper: Absolutely! It seems to me that Elon musk’s role is to get us all on board with him as this renegade that’s going into something like Twitter and then cleaning out of all the “fascist liberals” – you know the ones who are kicking us all off Twitter. And then we all are supposed to get behind him and then we will all sympathize with his ideas about climate change and building these electric cars which are not helping the environment.

It all seems to me that he’s a well-packaged WWF character brought in as a pro-wrestling “baby-face” to make us buy into some of the things that we might not have if it wasn’t for him coming in.

Emanuel Pastreich: It’s created an enormously difficult situation because people now assume that any discussion of the destruction of the climate, of the environment, is a fraud because it’s become fraudulent.  I personally base my opinion on considerable amount of research on the environment. I don’t think it’s a fraud. It is just that the time scale is off. Destroying the environment is not going to lead to human extinction in 20 years. But within 500 years? Totally conceivable.

And it’s not just about carbon-dioxide. It is a whole range of destructive activities that are going on: the destruction of the oceans, micro-plastics, the spread of deserts, the destruction of fresh water, etc. It is a complex process.

But because so many people have degraded the debate and made it into a tool for banks to control you and limit your activities, now if I even just mentioned the words “environment” or “climate Change” people think I’m a sock puppet of the World Economic Forum.

This discourse has problematized, and maybe intentionally degraded, our ability to even discuss the environment.

John Cooper: Well it works both ways. You can’t have any view that goes outside of the central narrative. Otherwise,  you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist or their favourite is “a climate denialist” (pernicious term to associate you with a Holocaust “denier”). It seems to me that there’s certain things that you can’t talk about, which always me ask, why is that?

I find that it’s probably the other way around.  In my experience it is the people that you’re not allowed to question who are the ones that rule over you. It I think Voltaire who said that. It is things you can’t talk about, or the things that if you have an opinion about them that is contrary to the mainstream narrative, you’re immediately shot down, those make me think, well maybe there’s something in this.

Emanuel Pastreich: That’s why I think the analogy to incest is so valuable, especially when you talk about intellectuals. In the case of incest in a family things are different. If a parent gets in a fight with a child, then people recognize as a problem in the family. But in the case of incest there are times when these damaging relations go on for decades, everyone knowing that something is wrong but nobody being able to talk about it.

The reason is that the incestuous relationship is so compromising to everybody that it’s no longer possible to even discuss it. It is a taboo and that’s the process right from the Kennedy assassination, to 9/11, and then on to what we have now, this “health crisis” in which an enormous number of intellectuals, people who are knowledgeable, were so profoundly compromised by these incidents that they were no longer able to express any form of resistance, and they became pawns of the system.

John Cooper: I definitely see that, the agent Smiths I call them from the Matrix. Whereas the Neos were sort of bringing new ideas, a new way of thinking.

Quickly would you mind, just as a spoke from that hub, would you mind just saying what was Covid-19 all about?

Emanuel Pastreich: Covid-19 probably it goes back far in time. There were these efforts to find some way of creating mass control, and for using technology for global domination. We have parts of some DARPA and RAND studies from back in the 70s in which this plan is discussed. Some things are even declassified. But this discussion was going on for a while. The idea was to achieve a sort of ideological control whereby citizens would no longer be able to articulate an alternative position and would fall in with this corporate-dominated worldview.  The ultimate purpose was the creation of a new class.  The move towards action in the Covid-19 operation was aided by the massive concentration of wealth that took place over the preceding 10 to 15 years.

So, if you have the difference in wealth of 100 times, the average people making forty thousand and rich people making 4 million that is a different society than the one in which the ordinary people make sixty thousand and the rich own 100 billion. This new society is so different that you are left with a radical gap. You have these super-rich groups who are pursuing their interests, and then you have this terrarium economy in which you hold the people from working class, up to those who hold five to ten-million dollars in assets.  They are all in this little contained ball. And so this terrarium economy leads to a profound misunderstanding wherein people think, “Oh I have five million dollars so I’m rich.”

From the perspective of the billionaires, however, the difference between having five million dollars in assets and being homeless is the difference between being an ant and a cockroach. I mean it’s it’s nothing to them. And so a system came into being in which at the highest levels the Brahmin class, beyond your reach, they come up with policies that they enact in manner that transcends not only local government, but also national governments, and even supra-national, global organizations. As a result, all these governments are essentially run by their pets.

That is why it’s so hard to conceive of how this small group of people would engage in policies which are meant to degrade your ability to think. Basically everybody, 95% of the population 95,  or more, is their target. They destroy your bodies, your ability to reproduce. They introduce chemicals into your body that’ll cause cancer and other diseases and that will over time kill you off in the what they call “the slow kill.”

Most people could not conceive of something like that, partially because it’s just so evil. People can’t conceive of evil. So that is one barrier. More importantly, we’re thinking that things are being done by the president, or the senator, or the head of our local Lions Club, or our mayor, or the rich guy in our neighborhood who’s a real estate agent.   Somehow we thought that these guys are the authority figures. And now we see that they are like us, basically in the same position, and so we think “Oh well, they must know what’s going on. It’s not on their interest to promote a fraud that damages them. Obviously they’re not going to do it.”

We’re unable to conceive of the fact that all of these people, all the way up to Joe Biden or Donald Trump, all of them are basically in the same lobster pot in which we are being slowly cooked, and that there is another class of people above them who are willing to kill all of us, or turn us into slaves according to whatever proportion fits their latest algorithm. They don’t care if we live or die.  The people we see on TV for the most part are not the people making the real decisions.

John Cooper: So this class that you talk, that top 0.0001%, how many are in that class? What kind of people are we talking about? The billionaire philanthropist types?

Emanuel Pastreich: There’s a lot of debate about this topic and I have gotten into arguments with fellow travelers about where we cut it off. There is a book by Peter Phillips entitled Giants: The Global Elite that gives a useful analysis of who the major players are in investment Banks, and other places, who has large amounts of wealth. I think the analysis is quite good. But there are theories out there. And that is where we get into trouble.  Certain groups will say it’s the Zionists, or it’s the Rothschilds, or it’s the Freemasons, or it’s the Vatican.  These accusations are not untrue, but that lack scientific clarity, and they tend to spill over into emotional and cultural baggage that clouds the mind. I sometimes get into disputes with fellow Travelers who embrace what I think are oversimplified visions of who’s actually making the decisions.

What I see as the most likely scenario is you have maybe a couple thousand people in  these very wealthy families who  got these intelligence reports telling them how much of a crisis we’re going to be facing economically and environmentally and they embraced this plan to create a class society made up  of slaves and the super-rich (with a lot of people marked to disappear over the next 20 years).   But the actual planning is not done by the super-rich, but rather by this class of advisors, often ex-military and intelligence—not just the U.S but from other countries as well. These guys advised them on how to carry out this agenda and they wrote up classified plans.

Someone forwarded me an email a couple of months ago which was from the CIA, a call for  Asia experts. The advertisement said that basically all the positions had been outsourced to Facebook, Cisco, Microsoft, and Google. Basically these government organizations are no longer government organizations at all. There no is government in the sense that in an engine you have a governor. There’s only the parts of government, whether in the UK or the United States, or in Japan Germany, China, or Russia, that have been outsourced to for-profit organizations pursuing their own narrow short-term interests.  That is why we’ve been rendered blind.  The government cannot govern. The university cannot educate. The newspaper cannot practice journalism. In the land blind, the one-eyed man is King. But it’s worse than that. It’s a one-eyed psychopath who is King.

John Cooper: It is terrifying when you put it like that. It is a reality check. It’s sobering to hear you say That, but it makes sense that the people in power, those that we think are in power, are merely the puppets. They’re just follow the teleprompters. They are there to give the impression that they’re looking after their people. In reality they’re just relaying a message given to them directly from those core companies, or intelligence agencies, that are running the show.

Emanuel Pastreich: Donald Trump is the best example of that role. People have this impression that Donald Trump is one of the members of that elite. That is not true. Having a couple billion dollars (and even more in debt) not nearly enough. He does not count as one of those the super elite. The concentration of wealth has created a radical divergence. Our minds have not been able to keep up with the radical shifts in our society over the last 15 years.  The COVID-19 crisis is not the cause, but rather the consequence, of that concentration of wealth.

We reached the point at which the concentration of wealth was so extreme, the control of technology, of information, so profound, that it became possible for the first time in history to take over everything.

That is what the super elites thought to themselves, in any case: “We can just take over everything and  destroy humanity.”  If the gap hadn’t been so great, I don’t think that plan would have been adopted.  Of course this plan for a total takeover existed before.   Back before 2019, if Bill Gates and his friends were shooting the breeze at the club, they would have said to Bill, “Nice idea, but you couldn’t possibly pull it Off.”  The question is, why was it that in 2019 that suddenly they thought that “Yeah, we can pull it off. We’re gonna go for it!”  The operation is extremely risky.  Obviously they’re taking a lot of risk too. We’re at risk, but they’re at least as much risk. Bill Gates and friends may not survive this –the risks is that high.  But somehow we got to such a place in terms of the collapse of values, the decay of ideology and culture, and the concentration of wealth that these people really thought that could pull it off, could destroy most of humanity.

They are following, basically, the model for the colonization of the new world which was to destroy all the native populations of North and South America. Same strategy for the project of 1940s to destroy millions in Europe. Most people describe it as “destroying the Jews” which I think is not entirely accurate. Most of the people who were killed off systematically in death camps were Russian POWs. The basic plan was to kill off a large number of people in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and throughout Europe to create this “living space” which would then be settled by Germans following the American model: destroy the native peoples and take the land.

Now we find ourselves in the position where we (establishment upper middle-class Americans) are the ones, we who thought WE were the elites, who are being treated like the Navajos or the Iroquois: slated for extermination.

John Cooper: It’s not over yet; That’s the thing. This part is the first wave of something, and there is a swell. And then another wave will come crashing in. Classic “Art of War” stuff.

I think that they stood back and thought “I can’t believe how much the people bought into that.”  They’re probably having a whale of a time thinking, “God they did all that, the social distancing, wearing the masks, they even took the anal swabs. We could tell them anything and they would do it because they’re in a state of hysteria and fear.” They cannot believe how compliant everyone was.

Emanuel Pastreich: Maybe I could say a word about masks. so Masks are an extremely important part of this operation. Not because they block viruses—which they don’t—but because masks have been usedin torture and re-education for centuries. It’s not a new technology.

So, by creating an environment in which the individual is forced by circumstances, by social pressure, to put on the mask VOLUNTARILY the individual is forced into this unnatural violation of her or his conscience, her or his sense of what’s right. After being forced to do repeat that ritual (wearing the mask) over and over again the individual loses the capacity to resist.

That is how profoundly they are compromised by this act of participation in the destruction of their free will.

Most of the people wearing these masks, at some level, know that these masks are not scientifically meaningful. But they do it anyway. They participate in their own mental violation. It is form of mental rape, what Joost A.M. Meerloo calls “The Rape of the Mind.”

They just repeat this ritual until the individual, the community, is no longer capable of organized intellectual resistance.

John Cooper: It inculcates a state of fear that lingers on in the minds of people, even if they’re just seeing other people wearing masks. This pandemic is still going on. It is a visual performance, a kind of trickery of the mind that keeps people locked into a certain mental state.

I definitely can see that rape of the mind—I agree 100% with that.

So when did the pandemic end? Why are people suddenly, now, taking off their Masks?

I think that it’s because they took the funding out of certain channels, like the funding for the mainstream media. The designated propaganda money ran out. Now the people on TV aren’t talking about it as much. So the pandemic went away in the eyes of people. It is a perception thing.

Emanuel Pastreich: At this moment we see an interference pattern: on the one hand there are those at the top who are following their own strategy, who are saying to themselves, “Well, we got all our money out of the pandemic, so now let’s push forward with a risk of nuclear war, or food shortages, or destroy banks and

money etc. They want to start plan B, C and D.

So that’s part of it. But there is another part. Some people really were organized and we saw the beginning of real resistance. That also played into it. We are seeing a combination of the two

I want to conclude NOT by saying “Oh it’s all planned out,” but rather to stress that our conversation, and of course I include those listening to us, means that we’re starting to organize a real resistance, not follow a bogus “cardboard messiah” Donald Trump or

Bernie Sanders type. We are making an effort to actually launch a real flesh and bones opposition in which we the people start to engage in our own governance.

This conversation, our meeting today, that it to say John and Emanuel speaking the truth. What do we have? We have the Constitution. We have morals. What we have is justice and we have legitimacy. We are creating our own form of governance so that we can stand up and say,to those who are supposedly in power, that “we are legitimate and you are not legitimate.” Although we start with nothing, if we look at history we see that in the past there have been numerous times in history when it was possible, starting with a tiny minority who are willing to stick to principles and take risks, to flip things so that the whole equation was reversed.

John Cooper: A message of hope is possible, that is not top-down.

We don’t need a great reset; we need a grassroots reset, a grassroots change. We the people to stand up, based on their individual morality and integrity, and to hold the governments accountable. That’s what we need isn’t it?

Emanuel. Do you have a few closing words?

Emanuel Pastreich: I really appreciate everybody joining us today. I think that our own self-awareness, mindfulness, and practice is where we should start because if we can’t identify who we are, and we cannot separate ourselves from the poisonous toxic environment around us, then we can’t start this process in a constructive way.  I would be happy to engage and to help all of you. We have to assume that the entire system out there for governance, for corporations, for economic interaction, is so corrupt that we must create real alternatives. That has to start with a debate, a discussion, about how we’ll do so.

We have a research institute, the Asia Institute, for which the website is not working now, but you can email me directly at [email protected].

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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***

One of the fascinating aspects of the war in Ukraine has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters to acknowledge, much less condemn, the Pentagon for its role in bringing about this war. After all, the two concepts — the Pentagon’s bringing about the crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — are not mutually exclusive. You can have both things happening — the Pentagon gins up the crisis with the aim of “degrading” Russia and then Russia falls into the trap by getting mired down in a deadly and destructive war against Ukraine.

But when one raises the first part of this equation — that is, the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the crisis — the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters go ballistic. For them, it’s heresy to point out what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are innocent, virtuous babes in the woods that would never do such a thing. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are nothing but a “force for good” in the world. 

But we know that the Pentagon and the CIA do engage in these types of evil machinations. In fact, they did the same thing to Russia in 1979. They lured the Russians into invading Afghanistan, with the same goal they had with their Ukraine machinations — to give the Russians their own “Vietnam,” which meant “degrading” Russia through the killing of massive numbers of Russian soldiers. 

“Conspiracy theory”? Well, not exactly. That’s because National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a remarkable degree of candor, admitted that they had knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally done it. He was proud of it. He was bragging about how they had gotten the Russians to fall into their trap. The entire national-security establishment loved the fact that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were being killed in the process. The more soldiers being killed, the more Russia was being “degraded.”

That’s why they are so ecstatic every time more Russian soldiers are killed in Ukraine. With each dead soldier, Russia is “degraded” a bit more. The more soldiers killed, the more Russia is“degraded.”

Ginning up a new Cold War with Russia was the whole idea behind keeping NATO in existence after the ostensible end of the original Cold War. The Cold War had been a great big cash cow for the U.S. national-security establishment. They weren’t about to let go of it that easily. So, they used NATO, which by this time was just an old Cold War dinosaur, to begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact. That would enable the Pentagon and the CIA to install their military bases and nuclear missiles ever closer to Russia’s border. 

Throughout this process, Russia was objecting, and Pentagon and CIA officials knew it. Moreover, Russia consistently made it clear that absorbing Ukraine into NATO was a “red line” for Russia, one that would cause Russia to invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. 

Once Russia made that declaration, the Pentagon and the CIA had Russia right where it wanted it. The Pentagon then sprung the trap by simply announcing that NATO intended to absorb Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Russia ended up invading Ukraine, which has given Russia another “Vietnam,” just like what happened back in 1979 with Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

There is nothing new about this type of thing. Back in 1964, the Pentagon knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately ginned up a fake and fraudulent crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin near North Vietnam. The goal? To embroil the United States in the Vietnam War. The strategy worked. President Lyndon Johnson used the fake and fraudulent Pentagon-induced crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin to secure a congressional resolution that authorized him to embroil the United States in a war that ultimately took the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and more than a million Vietnamese. 

Why do Pentagon-CIA supporters get so bent out of shape when one points to these types of Pentagon-CIA machinations? Because the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are a triune god to these people. And they don’t like it when someone exposes the evil actions of their triune god. After all, look at how much they love what U.S. officials have done to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for disclosing the evil actions of their triune god.

There is something important to keep in mind about this strategy of “degrading” Russia. Every one of those Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who have been killed in this war had families or friends, just like American soldiers do.Those families and friends are grieving the loss of those soldiers, just like families of American soldiers grieve over the loss of their loved ones. 

That is what makes the Pentagon and the CIA’s machinations so evil. When a regime is celebrating the deaths of massive numbers of people who are dying as a result of a strategy that is designed to “degrade” a foreign regime, that is an excellent sign that there is something fundamentally wrong, from a moral standpoint, with that regime.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

Featured image: Russian president Vladimir Putin (Illustration by TPYXA_ILLUSTRATION/Shutterstock)

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***

The World Health Organization shared a video on Twitter promoting the claim that anti-vaccine activism is deadlier than global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and gun violence.

Yes, really.

The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”

Hotez went on to assert that 200,000 Americans died from COVID because they refused to get the vaccine, a claim that isn’t backed up by any source.

“And now the anti-vaccine activism is expanding across the world, even into low and middle income countries,” added Hotez.

“Anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally."
– @PeterHotez, Professor and Dean @BCM_TropMed, on the devastating impact of #misinformation and disinformation. pic.twitter.com/ZluiMGJ2gX

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) December 14, 2022

Once again with providing any source for his dubious claims, Hotez asserted that “anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation or cyber attacks.”

The doctor went on to complain about how anti-vaccine skepticism had now become a “political movement” linked to “far-right extremism” in both the United States and Germany.

Hotez ominously called for “political solutions to address this.”

Unsurprisingly, respondents to the tweet completely savaged the WHO for sharing the video, with one pointing to stats that suggest, “Doctors and “medicine” kill more people than car accidents and guns.”

Doctors and “medicine” kill more people than car accidents and guns. YOU are killing people with “science” and dangerous untested drugs and vaccines. pic.twitter.com/sSGnxXNr8A

— Henrik Palmgren 🇸🇪 ᛟ (@Henrik_Palmgren) December 23, 2022

“The biggest anti-science dissemination has come from the @who when you tried to shut the world down over a mild virus with a 99.97% survival rate and for which even the most dire mortality rate was fraudulently reported (ie ‘positive test’). You only have yourselves to blame,” remarked another.

The biggest anti-science dissemination has come from the @who when you tried to shut the world down over a mild virus with a 99.97% survival rate and for which even the most dire mortality rate was fraudulently reported (ie ‘positive test’). You only have yourselves to blame.

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) December 18, 2022

“You are an absolute menace to society, Peter. Not just wrong in medicine. A menace to civilized society,” commented lawyer Viva Frei, posting screenshots of how Hotez has continually called for the masking and vaccination of children.

You are an absolute menace to society, Peter. Not just wrong in medicine. A menace to civilized society. pic.twitter.com/n99LlCwVrc

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) December 23, 2022

Despite his vehement enthusiasm for face coverings and vaccines, which he claimed stopped transmission of COVID, Hotez himself caught COVID in May last year and, of course, responded by thanking the vaccine.

Looks like I've tested positive for COVID, moderate symptoms of fatigue, headache, sore throat, isolating at home doing zoom meetings. I'm grateful to have been vaccinated/boosted, which certainly prevented more severe illness. Just started Paxlovid. Transmission up, be careful.

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) May 9, 2022

Meanwhile, as we document in the video below, diehard advocates for the vaccine are now going full Jonestown with their rhetoric.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

 

 

 

 

 

What to make of it?  History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind.  Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it.  The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list.   In what can only be described as one of his “Nazi uniform” moments, Prince Harry has revealed in his memoir Spare that he killed a number of Taliban fighters. (In the same memoir, the weak-willed royal blames his brother for the uniform idea, though not for organising the Afghan shooting party.)

The prince, wishing to show that he was no toy soldier or ceremonial ornament of the British Army, puts the number of deaths at 25.  “It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it make me ashamed.”  He recalls being “plunged into the heat and confusion of battle”, and how he “didn’t think about those 25 people.  You can’t kill people if you see them as people.”  Doing so from the security of a murderous Apache helicopter certainly helps.

The prince continues to show that he is nothing if not unworldly.  “In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people.  They were chess pieces off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys.”  Then comes a bit of cod social theory.  “They trained me to ‘other’ them and they trained me well.”  A dash of Meghan; a smidgen of postcolonial theory.

There it is: the killer aware about his Instagram moment, the social media miasma, the influence of cheap Hollywood tat via Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.  He killed but was merely performing his duty as conditioned by the Establishment or, to put it another way, the army of his late grandmother.

The response from the Establishment was not one of praise.  Adam Holloway MP, writing in The Spectator, did not find the statistic distasteful or troubling, but the fact that Prince Harry had mentioned it at all.  Good soldiers did not publicise kills.  “It’s not about macho codes.  It’s about decency and respect for the lives you have taken.”

Retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins also seethed.  “This is not how we behave in the Army,” he tut-tutted to Forces News, “it’s not how we think.”  That’s Prince Harry’s point: more a doer than a thinker.

That doing involved, as Collins put it, “a tragic money-making scam to fund the lifestyle he can’t afford and someone else has chosen.”  Harry had “badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt.  We never did.”

Collins became something of a poster boy for revived wars of adventurism in the Middle East with his speech to the 1^stBattalion The Royal Irish Regiment (1 R IRISH) battle group in March 2003.  It was the eve of an international crime: the invasion of a sovereign country by colonial powers old and new.  As with any such crimes, notably of vast scale, it was justified in the name of principle and duty, otherwise known as the civilisational imperative.  “We go to liberate,” declared Collins with evangelical purpose, “not to conquer.  We will not fly our flags in their country.  We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own.”

In the Middle East, and elsewhere, such gifts of imposed freedom by armed missionaries tend to go off.  In July last year, the BBC news program Panorama reported that, “SAS operatives in Afghanistan repeatedly killed detainees and unarmed men.”  The report disturbed the amnesiac effect of two investigations by military police that saw no reason to pursue prosecutions.  But the allegations were sufficiently publicised to prompt the launching of an independent statutory inquiry by the Ministry of Defence last December.  “This will take into account the progress that has already been made across defence in holding our Armed Forces personnel to account for their actions, and the handling of allegations that were later found to have insufficient evidence for any prosecutions.”

Collins must also be aware that commencing a prosecution against British army personnel operating overseas for war crimes, let alone succeeding in one, is nigh impossible.  It’s all marvellous to claim that the armed forces play by the book and operate to the sweet chords of justice, but it is rather easier to do so behind sheets of protective glass and exemptions.

Australia, as one of Britain’s partners in military adventurism, has also done its bit to bloat the war crimes files in its tours of Afghanistan.  The four-year long investigation culminating in the Brereton Report identified at least 39 alleged murders of captured Afghan troops and civilians, and cruel mistreatment of two more locals by SAS personnel.  To date, however, the Office of the Special Investigator has made no referrals to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, a tardiness that is likely to be repeated by British counterparts.

The war criminality theme was bound to be picked up by Afghanistan’s Taliban officials.  Anas Haqqani, a senior Taliban figure, suggested to the prince via Twitter that those he had slain “were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return.”  But astute enough to sense a public relations moment for his government, Haqqani heaped mock praise. “Among the killers of Afghans, not many have your decency to reveal their conscience and confess to their war crimes.”

In this whole affair, Prince Harry did perform one useful function.  He removed the façade of decent soldiery, the mask of the supposedly noble liberator.  On this occasion, it took a prince to tell the emperor he had no clothes.  “The truth is what you’ve said,” continued Haqqani, “[o]ur innocent people were chess pieces to your soldiers, military and political leaders.  Still, you were defeated in that ‘game’ of white & black ‘square’.”

We can certainly agree with Haqqani on one point: no tribunal will be chasing up the royal.  “I don’t expect that the ICC [International Criminal Court] will summon you or the human rights activists will condemn you, because they are deaf and blind for you.”  Some of that deafness and blindness might have been ameliorated.

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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: Harry in New South Wales, May 2015 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

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***

The super-secret International Health Regulations Review Committee (IHRRC) is scheduled to meet January 9-13, 2023. They plan to submit the amendments on January 15, 2023. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.

For five (5) days, from Monday January 9, 2023 to Friday January 13, 2023, the super-secret International Health Regulations Review Committee (IHRRC) will be conducting face-to-face meetings in Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of these meetings will be to finalize their report regarding the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.

The work done by the IHRRC is “confidential” and they answer directly to the Director General ONLY. Their work is likely to involve editing the 46 page proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations to eliminate the many typographical errors and redundancies that can be found in the current version.

Download the proposed amendments here.

These meetings will NOT be live streamed. The proceedings will not be available to the public. NO public comment period is scheduled. YOUR opinion regarding these amendments is NOT going to be considered. These rules are being negotiated by the members of the International Health Regulations Review Committee, who were chosen, not elected.

January 15, 2023

The self-imposed deadline for the IHRRC to submit its report to the Director General is January 15, 2023. The Director General is then expected to communicate it without delay to the Working Group for amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) and also to the 194 member nations. By submitting the secretly negotiated document by January 15, 2023, the IHRRC will provide the Director General with at least 6 days to forward the submitted documents to the 194 member nations by the deadline of at least 4 months in advance to the 76th World Health Assembly.

International Health Regulations Review Committee (IHRRC) Schedule

Pandemic Treaty Negotiation Schedule

May 21-30, 2023

The “official” statements of the World Health Organization have consistently stated that they do NOT plan to adopt the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations until the 77th World Health Assembly in 2024. See this.

However, if the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations are submitted to the WHO by January 15, 2023, then they COULD be adopted by the 76th World Health Assembly as early as May 2023.

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***

Yawn. Another warmongering statist is elected to head up the “right” side of the corporatist uniparty in the House of Representatives. The other side of the uniparty—the “woke” contingent, segregated on the “left” side of the aisle—condemned his appointment as a victory for Trump.

The Kevin McCarthy Mess Is Peak Trumpism https://t.co/kwaulwe3Dx via @VanityFair

— Musa موسى‎‎ (@MusaKutiMalik) January 7, 2023

Well, maybe. Let me tell you what it really is.

More of the same. More war, more debt, more suffering for the American people and, above all, more death and destruction in faraway lands, thanks to the likes of Kevin McCarthy and most members of Congress.

It was mildly amusing to watch careerist politicians tussle. Mike Rogers, would-be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had to be restrained. He was prevented from attacking Matt Gaetz by Richard Hudson while assorted millionaires and K Street water carriers looked on.

I expected a repeat of the caning of Senator Charles Sumner during the late 1850s in the contentious lead-up to the War Between the States. No such luck. Gaetz didn’t have a cane.

It was an irrelevant, grandstanding three-ring circus of Brioni Vanquish clad warmongers. In regard to foreign policy, nothing will change, although the Republican faction of the uniparty has promised to “audit” the transfer of freebies to Ukraine.

It will not end the transfer, mind you. Congress will not close down this aspect of the pernicious neoliberal project. Moreover, it will refuse to bring the troops home. It will not close down more than 750 USG military bases in 80 nations.

Russia has three dozen foreign bases. China, five.

Sadly, there is less than a handful of folks in Congress opposed to funding the ultranats of Ukraine, assisting Saudis in the serial murder of helpless Yemenis, celebrating (and paying for) the slaughter of Palestinian children, journalists, and activists, and illegally occupying eastern Syria and stealing its oil, to name but three of its crimes.

Since the end of WWII, the USG and its enforcer military have intervened in dozens of nations, including but not limited to Greece, Italy (subverting elections), China (intervention in its civil war, establishing Taiwan), Syria (the first CIA coup), the Korean War (one of the most costly wars in terms of death and destruction on a per-capita basis), Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, the Vietnam War (more than 2 million Vietnamese killed, a million in Laos and Cambodia), two Iraq invasions (well over a million killed), Somalia, Haiti, Panama, Afghanistan, Syria again, Libya—on and on.

A thin slice of the uniparty voted against sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, most on the Republican side of the forever war uniparty.

This is little more than partisan politics. Recall McCarthy parading around the floor with a giant yellow and blue badge on his lapel. He supports killing Russians while “auditing” the irresponsible free flow of cash—not ending it, mind you, but going through the numbers because Republicans claim they want to reduce the debt. If you believe this, you may also be interested in a water slide park for sale in the Kalahari.

Sarcasm aside, there is little to no chance the USG will abandon the effort to kill Russian soldiers and, as the psychopath Lindsey Graham demands, assassinate Russia’s elected leader, Vladimir Putin.

No, this debt-fueled monstrosity will eventually run out of steam, Russia will conclude its SMO, and the USG will pull an Afghanistan cut and run, abandoning the overt war effort in Ukraine (while intensifying a clandestine guerrilla terror war, an amplification of a low-intensity war waged since the fall of the Soviet Union).

The other alternative is WWIII—a full-blown war, conscription, a demand by the state for submission and sacrifice (no opposition permitted, same as in any other autocratic state), and the eventuality of nuclear war threatening the very existence of all life on the planet.

Kevin McCarthy will not stop this. He is a dedicated follower of the malignant narcissist Donald Trump—the president who, like presidents before him, had no problem with war and organized mass murder. Trump violated the precepts of international law by killing people in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. He made a mockery of this by claiming he was against war.

Trump was undermined not for his wishy-washy supposed opposition to war, but because he was not selected by the ruling elite to carry out their control-freak agenda of global domination. He wasn’t invited to the party (or uniparty), so he, and the majority of Americans that voted for him (“deplorables”), must be punished evermore.

McCarthy as House Speaker is meaningless. The brawl on the House floor was partisan political theater, nothing more. The wars will continue, the neoliberal project will inch forward, and the state—its FBI, CIA, DOJ, DHS, and Pentagon, in collusion with Silicon Valley—will continue to demonize, de-platform, and otherwise “neutralize” (as J. Edgar Hoover characterized it) all voices in opposition to what may be an irreversible slide into a nuclear conflagration.

*

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***

Earlier today, I watched Col. Douglas Macgregor on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. Macgregor mentioned the child soldiers of Ukraine. The interview was posted on December 29.

Douglas Macgregor – Ukraine recruits child soldiers

Ukraine admitts 35000+ missing and more then 100000+ killed now forcing teenage boys in masses into the meatgrinder. pic.twitter.com/JJ7rCVEWuP

— Hawkeye1745 (@Hawkeye1745) December 29, 2022

As usual, it is difficult to find mention of this in the corporate war propaganda media. I was able to track down a single mention of child soldiers in Ukraine posted by the corporate media—remarkably, by none other than CNN. However, the information is seriously counter-narrative, so a “fact checker” was thrown into the mix to dispute the CNN tweet.

Not that it matters. For those interested in discovering the truth, there are plenty of videos showing the child soldiers of Ukraine (more directly, the child soldiers of the Azov Battalion, as I explain below).

Child soldiers in #Ukraine #UkraineRussianWar

Nothing to say @UNICEF ?@SavetheChildren ? pic.twitter.com/yPEnHjUk9Y

— colombinilaura (@Lauara_It) January 4, 2023

🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦The first confirmation of the liquidation of teenagers recruited into the Armed Forces of Ukraine

The first "rumors" about the creation of groups of Ukrainian militants, consisting of children, began to appear in the summer. pic.twitter.com/L4zFqz2VLd

— Тоби айоделе -Tboy🇷🇺 🇳🇬 (@TobiAyodele) December 27, 2022

For the civilized, the idea that children as young as 13 or 14 should be used as Russian bullet stoppers (and this is precisely what they are) is barbaric and inhumane, something usually found among the warring tribes of sub-Saharan Africa.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict states that warring parties “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that members of their armed forces who have not attained the age of 18 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.”

As noted above, most child soldiers are conscripted in Africa (Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Sierra Leone), although they are also exploited in Sir Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), and Colombia.

In Ukraine, children are indoctrinated (to hate Russians, Jews, Roma, and Poles) and taught military skills at an Azov Battalion “summer camp.”

Of course, there is virtually nothing about this in the tightly controlled and endlessly spun corporate war propaganda media. However, as they say, pictures are often worth a thousand words. The following photo was taken by a Romanian journalist.

In August 2015, a year after the USG-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, Prof Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research posted an article exposing “a Summer Camp military training project for young children as part of its broader training and indoctrination program.”

It was reported by the Kyiv Post that children as young as six years old participated in the program held at a location in the Vodytsya district outside Kyiv. The Post attempted to spin the story.

… this particular camp is run by the Azov Battalion founded by lawmaker Andriy Biletsky, its former commander. Located in the wooded area of Kyiv’s Pushcha Vodytsya district, kids at this summer camp aren’t just playing soldiers—they’re getting actual military training from soldiers who have fought on the front line in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Named Azovets, the camp has been the subject of negative coverage in the Russian media, pro-Russia websites and even U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail.

“Neo-Nazi summer camp: Ukrainian kids taught to shoot AKs by Azov battalion members (PHOTOS),” reads Kremlin-controlled RT’s headline for its story about the camp.

“Shocking pictures from inside neo-Nazi military camp reveal recruits as young as SIX are being taught how to fire weapons (even though there’s a ceasefire),” reads the headline in the Daily Mail’s sensationalized and inaccurate article. (Kyiv Post, August 29, 2015) (Emphasis added.)

Needless to say, the Daily Mail would not run this story today. The original post was scrubbed from the Kyiv Post website, lest the world understands the true character of the UAF and its embedded “national guard” neo-Nazi killers and child slavers.

When the Kyiv Post visited the Azovets camp on Aug. 19 the kids were busy with a range of activities, including stripping down and assembling AK-47 assault rifles, target practice (with air guns), tackling assault courses, and practicing combat poses and patrolling. They also take part in various sports and games, do rappelling and climbing, and practice other more traditional scouting and woodcraft skills like tying knots.

In addition to training in the use and handling of weapons, Ukronazi overseers indoctrinate impressionable minds in hate. “A boy who sits on a log softly whispers: ‘I want that this war will end and we will kill all the Russians.’”

Again, the article by Faina Nakonechnaya was posted well before the Russian SMO, thus demonstrating how neo-Nazi ultranats have brainwashed the next generation and are now feeding them into the Russian meat grinder on the Donbas front.

The takeaway on this is obvious—Ukraine is losing so many men, either at the front or through emigration, that it now believes it must sacrifice its children on the bloody altar of Stepan Bandera, Symon Petliura, Yevhen Konovalets, Andriy Melnyk, Mykola Lebed, and other vicious ultranats of yore.

It will require an extraordinary effort to deprogram these children. Unfortunately, like many of their fathers and grandfathers, thousands of them will no doubt end up in mass graves or left to rot in the field like so many Ukrainian (and foreign mercenary) adults, many forced at gunpoint into the slavery of conscription and rushed by the truckload to the front to in droves where they perish in the non-stop meat grinder of Russian artillery.

---

Supplemental reading:

Ukraine’s “Neo-Nazi Summer Camp”. Military Training for Young Children

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 30, 2022

---

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

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***

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, prime minister, and now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, posted the following statement to Telegram on January 6.

Dmitry #Medvedev threatens to aim #Russia's #Zircon hypersonic missiles at Washington by placing the ship carrying them 100 miles from the #Potomac River #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/HiZXHzImCJ

— Diplomacy140 (@Diplomacy140) January 6, 2023

On Wednesday, Vladimir Putin deployed the frigate Admiral Gorshkov. It is armed with Zircon hypersonic missiles (3M22 Tsirkon). Admiral Gorshkov will travel “on a transoceanic cruise in a show of force as tensions with the West escalate over the war in Ukraine,” according to the LA Times.

Norwegian Navy's P-3 Orion reconnaissance plane took this photo of the Russian "Admiral Gorshkov" frigate carrying Russia's newest "Zircon" hypersonic nuclear-capable cruise missiles. January 6, 2023 pic.twitter.com/9FAakXwffC

— Venik (@venik44) January 7, 2023

The latest version of the Zircon missile is capable of screaming toward a target at Mach 8, around 7,000 miles per hour, and is reportedly unstoppable.

Russia: The warship Admiral Gorshkov, for the first time armed with hypersonic ballistic missiles of the "Zircon" type, has been put into operational mode. The ship successfully launched the missile at a target 1,000 km away in the northern Barents Sea. pic.twitter.com/hGmLI1xUm0

— Andrejs Eglitis (@falconnestorg) January 4, 2023

Parking hypersonic missiles 100 miles off the Potomac, which flows through DC, is an obvious warning that Russia has the ability to strike the neoliberal order where it hurts.

Medvedev doesn’t pull punches. He tells us, in language avoided by Putin, what he thinks of the USG and its continued exercise of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that is to say, the belief all competitors must be confronted and destroyed if demonstrating intransigence or resistance. Competitors will be eliminated, similar to the way Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, and Moammar Gadaffi were eliminated.

From Medvedev’s Telegraph account:

The United States is spending tens of billions on the war in Ukraine, supplying its weapons on a gigantic scale, and exterminating thousands of people with other people’s hands. This is outrageous cynicism in the best traditions of the Nazis. Yes, in fact, the sons of bitches, who are such nonsense, are the true heirs of Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.Only this stillborn nonsense has no effect on anyone. And the answer to it you will not get in official silence.

Indeed, the entire USG propaganda campaign takes cues from Goebbels, and the Big Lie formulated by Hitler in his memoir “Mein Kampf,” written while in prison after a failed coup, a putsch. Hitler knew that when a Big Lie is repeated over and over, day after day, week after week, the public eventually accepts it as reality.

The USG Big Lie portrays Russia as losing in Ukraine. However, according to journalists on the ground in eastern Ukraine (not corporate journalists ensconced in Kyiv hotels), it is Ukraine that is suffering slow-motion defeat, tens of thousands of its soldiers chewed up by constant Russian shelling. Russia’s strategic retreat from Kherson and Lyman is portrayed as an epic defeat, a turn in the war that will eventually tear apart the Russian Federation.

The goal of the ruling global elite is to prevent the emergence of all competitors, as stated in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, officially titled “Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–99 fiscal years,” formulated in 1992 under the direction of Dick Cheney. It eventually became known as the Bush Doctrine. The tenets of this doctrine are now being used to “weaken” Russia, considered a major competitor along with China.

Medvedev knows this. Putin knows this. Most Americans, thanks to endless propaganda, don’t know anything about this. The Big Lie corporate media feeds them fantasies, warning Russia is determined to reestablish the Soviet empire.

This rubbish is pushed by the former ambassador to Russia, and Deputy Secretary General of NATO, Alexander Vershbow, who said, “Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire as his legacy… We have to figure out whether he can be stopped.”

This made-up excuse is nothing if not a raison d’être for the continued existence of NATO. Minus a manufactured or actual threat, NATO does not have an excuse for maintaining its existence. NATO is a tool for the destruction of targeted states—Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Libya. It has nothing to do with European security—and it certainly does not have a role in the security of America.

The unlikely prospect of unstoppable Zircon missiles striking DC will be exploited by the USG to further its propaganda campaign and instill fear in a malleable public. The fact the USG has sent the nuclear submarine USS New Mexico—armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles—into Russian territorial waters is left unmentioned.

“Currently, the nuclear submarine USS New Mexico is located about 500 km from the Russian territorial border and will quickly shorten this distance,” DefenceNewsreported a month before the Russian SMO.

Block V Virginia-class submarines can carry 40 cruise missiles, allowing the US to withdraw converted Ohio-class nuclear submarines, making up for the shortfall in long-range missile firepower in the “superpower competition” with Russia and China.

In addition, the ship is also equipped with 4 533 mm torpedo tubes, compatible with Mk 48 heavy torpedoes or AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles…

The Wolfowitz Doctrine, and the hegemonic designs of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, make it more than obvious—the USG will not tolerate competition for influence and resources, and it will go to war to retain the ability to kill people living in countries that reject the neoliberal looting and pillage agenda.

Increasingly, it appears that effort will result in WWIII, the final war terminating in nuclear winter, and the extinction of all living creatures.

*

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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

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***

Please watch the video and follow along with the transcript below.

The World Health Organization is attempting a GLOBAL POWER GRAB by seeking to have the 194 member nations of the World Health Assembly adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as adopt a completely new international agreement commonly referred to as the proposed “Pandemic Treaty.”.

The proposed amendments would make the WHO’s proclamations legally-binding rather than just advisory recommendations. The changes would institute global digital health certificates, dramatically increase the billions of dollars available to the WHO and enable nations to implement the regulations WITHOUT respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.

Agreement by a simple majority of the 194 member nations is all that is needed to adopt the amendments because, as amendments to an existing agreement, neither the advice and consent of the United States Senate, nor the signature of the President would be required.

These amendments are being negotiated in secret without any opportunity for comment by people from around the world.

Transcript

I encourage absolutely everyone to copy this recording (and article) and re-upload it on the platform of your choice. Spread it far and wide so that everyone you know has the opportunity to become aware of what the WHO is attempting to do.

If you have the ability to translate this into other languages, or to subtitle it, that effort would be very much appreciated.

What follows are 100 of the many reasons why we must stop the proposed “Pandemic Treaty”, we must stop the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations every nation on earth must #ExitTheWHO.

EVERYONE ON EARTH must be made aware that the World Health Organization is attempting a global coup. PLEASE share this article with everyone you know and feel free to contact me directly at any time if you have any questions or would like to help in a more substantial way. My name is James Roguski and you can reach me at 310-619-3055 via phone, text, Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram.

The WHO is currently overseeing negotiations that are designed to convince its 194 member nations to adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as to adopt a legally-binding “Pandemic Treaty.”

The people behind these negotiations are hell-bent on creating a totalitarian dictatorship designed to enslave every human being within a digital prison that is lined with health certificates and continuous surveillance.

These agreements, if adopted, would surrender health related sovereignty over to the WHO, who would then, in their own words, be able to implement the regulations WITHOUT respect for human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms.

You all better wake up, and you better wake up right now. We need to work together to

#StopTheTreaty

#StopTheAmendments

#ExitTheWHO

I am going to break these 100 reasons down into seven categories:

PART I: Ten things that everyone needs to know about the World Health Organization’s proposed “Pandemic Treaty.” (1-10)

PART II: The proposed amendments would seek to remove 3 very important aspects of the existing regulations. (11-13)

PART III: The proposed amendments a would implement a great number of changes that everyone should absolutely disagree with. (14-50)

PART IV: There are glaring contradictions and flaws in the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations. (51-60)

PART V: The proposed amendments are absolutely ignoring many of the things that really do need to be addressed. (61-80)

PART VI: The proposed amendments would trample our rights and restrict our freedoms. (81-90)

PART VII: The Ten Main Reasons why every nation on earth should #ExitTheWHO (91-100)

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The first and most important point that I would like to make is that I am about to discuss two very different things. First, I will talk briefly about the proposed “Pandemic Treaty.” More people seem to be aware of the so-called “Pandemic Treaty,” but, while I see it as being an important issue, I believe that it is also functioning as a decoy that is designed to distract people from the much larger and more immediate threat to our rights and freedoms, which are the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.

*

#StopTheTreaty

PART I: Ten things everyone needs to know about the World Health Organization’s proposed “Pandemic Treaty.”

1. Dramatically Expand the Role of the WHO

The proposed “Pandemic Treaty” is the World Health Organization’s attempt to convince the 194 member nations to agree to hand over their national sovereignty to the WHO via a legally binding framework convention that would hand over enormous additional, legally-binding authority to the WHO.

The WHO has published a 32 page document that they refer to as the “Conceptual Zero Draft” and on pages 10, 13 and 22 the WHO makes it very clear that the purpose of the document is to recognize the central role of the WHO in the prevention, preparedness, response and recovery from future pandemics. They want to be the directing and coordinating authority on global health and global governance over all health systems.

Clearly, the actions of the WHO point to the fact that they are not focused upon the health of people. Instead, they are focused on funneling billions of dollars into building health systems. Their true purpose is to help finance and build the Pharmaceutical, Hospital, Emergency Industrial Complex (PHEIC) by redirecting funds via crony capitalism to corporations that profit from the declarations of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern and the fear-mongering that naturally follows such emergency declarations.

2. Creating an Entirely New Bureaucracy (COP) 

In order to facilitate the growth of the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex (PHEIC), the WHO would create an entirely new bureaucracy as defined in Article 19 of the Conceptual Zero Draft of the proposed “Pandemic Treaty.” It would create a governing body that is made up of a Conference of the Parties (COP), much like the system that has governed the discussion over climate change. Only nations that sign and adopt the treaty would become members of the Conference of the Parties. They would be directed by the Officers of the Parties which would include two presidents and four vice-presidents. There would also be an Enlarged Conference of the Parties (E-COP) that would include “relevant stakeholders” such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations and others, so long as they were approved by a 2/3 majority of the Conference of the Parties.

3. The WHO Is Seeking Tens of Billions of Dollars

This already enormous bureaucracy seeks to have a yearly budget that is many times as big as the current entire budget of the WHO. While the Conference of the Parties associated with the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” would be connected to the WHO, it would also act independently from it.

Article 18 of the Conceptual Zero Draft of the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” discusses the desire for sustainable and predictable financing. They seek collaboration between the health, finance and private sectors and they also want to establish new international mechanisms in order to ensure a stable source of financing on global, regional and national levels.

One of the things that is absolutely lacking in the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” is any discussion whatsoever of the means by which decisions would be made regarding how all of these billions of dollars would be spent. It would essentially set up an enormous candy store through which the bureaucrats of the WHO would control the means of production in the Pharmaceutical, Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex.

4. Expanding Censorship

Article 16 of the Conceptual Zero Draft would essentially set up a Ministry of Truth that would give the WHO the power to study the behavioural barriers and drivers of adherence to public health measures. The WHO would be empowered to analyze social media to identify misinformation and disinformation in order to counter it with their own propaganda. They want billions of dollars to enable them to clamp down on free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of expression because they know that their recommendations and guidelines cannot stand the true test of scientific inquiry and they do not want any of their dictates to be criticized by public comment.

5. Speeding Up the Approval for Drugs and Injections

In Article 7(2)(b) it is very clear that they want regulatory bodies in nations around the world to accelerate the speed at which new drugs and injectables are authorized and approved. As if the disaster caused by the rapid authorization of the COVID-19 injections was not bad enough, they seek to dramatically speed up the process by which products are authorized and brought to the market.

6. Support for Gain-Of-Function Research

Rather than outlaw what may very well be the greatest threat to the survival of mankind on planet Earth, Article 8 of the Conceptual Zero Draft actually seeks to ensure that none of the measures put forth would create any unnecessary administrative hurdles for gain-of-function research. We need to completely and totally ban gain-of-function research immediately, not protect it from “unnecessary administrative hurdles.”

7. More and More Tabletop Exercises (Simulations)

Article 12 of the Conceptual Zero Draft calls for an increase in funding for what are known as tabletop exercises or simulations, much like Agenda 201 or the more recent simulation that can be found on CatastrophicContagion.com. The WHO wants nations around the world to spend billions of dollars on biological war games rather than spend that money in ways that would actually improve the health of the general population.

8. Seeking to Implement the Concept of One-Health

Article 17 of the Conceptual Zero Draft would implement a complex system known as One-Health in which control over human health, pet health, domesticated animal, farm animal and wild animal health and agricultural plant health and the overall health of the natural environment would be strictly controlled. In short, they want to have control over every aspect of everyone’s life.

9. Whole-Of-Government, Whole-Of-Society Approach

The whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach would give authority to every agency of government and every non-governmental organization to be involved in the control of every single aspect of everyone’s life. Their long term goal is complete totalitarian dictatorial control over every aspect of life on the planet.

10. Global Review System to Oversee Health Systems

In Article 12 and in Article 20 of the Conceptual Zero Draft of the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” they call for a Global Review Mechanism whereby the WHO would actively stick its nose into the manner in which individual sovereign nations support and structure their public health care systems. The oversight mechanisms in Article 20 fail to clearly define the metrics and other criteria by which any compliance review would be based. These details would be left to be decided at the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties which would occur long after the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” had already been adopted, ratified and entered into force. This would include the ability to monitor the nation’s progress in complying with the treaty and would require the submission of periodic reports and reviews to suggest remedies and actions as well as advice and assistance. While it does not specifically mention economic sanctions, it also does not rule them out.

*

The above are just ten reasons why We, the People of the World, must #StopTheTreaty.

Now I will discuss the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations. Although the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” is very concerning and very important to pay attention to, I honestly feel that the amendments to the International Health Regulations are a much more immediate and direct threat to the sovereignty of every nation and the rights and freedoms of every person on earth.

*

#StopTheAmendments

PART II: The proposed amendments would seek to remove some very important aspects of the existing regulations.

11. Removing respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms. 

The most egregious, blatant and disgusting proposed amendment is to the first paragraph of Article 3 in the existing Regulations which describes the core principles of the International Health Regulations. The current version of the IHR does defend the unalienable rights of We the People. It currently states that the regulations must be implemented [with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people], but the proposed amendment would cross out those 13 vitally important words. The proposal submitted by the delegation from India would replace those words with a focus on the transfer of wealth and would replace individual rights with inclusivity. This is a direct assault the rights and freedoms of every human being. This is a direct assault on humanity itself. (Page 3)

12. From “non-binding” to “legally binding.”

The proposed amendments would seek to remove the words “non-binding” from the definitions of temporary and standing recommendations that are made by the World Health Organization. When coupled with Article 42, (the Implementation of Health Measures) which says: “Health measures, including the recommendations made under Articles 15 and 16 shall be initiated and completed without delay by all States Parties.” That turns the WHO’s advisory role into a totalitarian dictatorship. The statements made by the WHO are currently recommendations, they are NOT commands upon the people of the earth. (Page 2)

13. Nations Shall, Must, Are Obligated and Have a Duty to Collaborate With and Assist other Nations

In a direct assault on national sovereignty, the proposed amendments to Article 43 state that “Recommendations made pursuant to… this Article shall be implemented… within two weeks from the date of [the] recommendation… and the decision made [by the Emergency Committee] on the request for [any] reconsideration shall be final.

Essentially, the WHO’s Emergency Committee would be given the power to overrule actions taken by sovereign nations. (Pages 21-22)

While the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations seek to remove some very important rights and freedoms, the vast majority of the document seeks to add in new language, giving new authority to the WHO.

*

PART III: The proposed amendments a would implement a great number of changes that everyone should absolutely disagree with.

So now, let’s turn to the many, many things that these proposed amendments would add to the International Health Regulations.

14. Drugs and Jabs = Health

In Article 1, the definition of “health products” fails to include the very things that were shown to be effective in double blind, placebo controlled, clinical studies that have been ignored by the world.

The definitions do not include vitamins, minerals, herbs and other beneficial nutrients that proved themselves to be supremely beneficial and truly safe. In lieu of using products that are truly safe and effective, the WHO seeks to redirect billions of dollars toward the Pharmaceutical Hospital, Emergency Industrial Complex for drugs and injections that are not proven to be safe and are only effective in increasing the risk of being diagnosed with the very dis-eases that these products are purported to protect people against. (Page 2)

15. Expanded Scope

The proposed amendments to Article 2 would dramatically expand the scope of the International Health Regulations from dealing with actual risks to dealing with anything that had the potential to be a risk to public health. This amendment would open up the doors wide to massive abuse beyond anything we have seen over the past 3 years. (Page 3)

16. Protecting Health Care Systems Instead of People

In the proposed amendment to the new second paragraph (bis) of Article 3, the focus of the WHO is subtly shifted away from the health of real people and would be guided to place primary preference upon the resilience of health care systems. We don’t need to focus upon the health of our health care systems so much as we need to focus upon the health of PEOPLE. Our health care facilities are no longer a place where people who are suffering from dis-ease go in order to regain their health. Our health care facilities have become killing fields to be feared. (Page 3)

17. Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities

In the proposed amendments to Parts 1 and 2 of Article 3, the repeated use of the phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” is used to mask what is inherently discriminatory, racist, sexist and unequal treatment of people around the world under the guise of “equity and inclusivity.” Please note that the phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” is NOT defined in Article 1. (Page 3)

18. All Powerful National Competent Authority

The proposed amendments to Article 4, would seek to establish a National Competent Authority who would be given great power to implement the obligations under these regulations, while having absolutely no accountability for any of the harm caused by any of their official actions. This without precedent. (Pages 4-5)

19. Developed Nations’ Obligation to Provide Assistance to Developing Nations

While the existing document fails to clarify which countries are considered to be on which list, in both Article 5 and in Annex 1, the proposed amendments would clearly obligate “developed nations” to assist “developing nations” to build their ability to detect, assess and notify the WHO regarding pathogenic, infectious outbreaks. (Pages 4 and 31)

20. Loss of Sovereignty

IF the proposed amendments to Articles 9, 10 and 12 were to be adopted, the WHO will no longer need to consult any sovereign nation in which an event may, or may not be occurring within that nation before declaring that there is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) within the borders of that nation. (Pages 6-10)

21. Intermediate Public Health Alert

The proposed amendments to Article 12 would also enable the Director General of the WHO to declare a Intermediate Public Health Alert. (Pages 8-10)

22. World Alert and Response Notice

The proposed amendments to Article 12 would also enable the Director General of the WHO to declare a World Alert and Response Notice. (Page 10)

23. Public Health Emergency of Regional Concern (PHERC)

Also, the proposed amendments to Article 12 would also enable the Regional Directors of the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of Regional Concern (PHERC). (Pages 8-10)

24. The WHO Would Be Placed in a Position of Global Authority

The proposed amendments seek to create a new Article 13A which would have the world community recognize the World Health Organization as the guidance and coordinating authority during international emergencies. (Pages 12-14)

25. WHO Allocation Plan

The proposed new Article 13A would also empower the WHO to craft an “Allocation Plan” to mandate the manufacturing, donation and distribution of various pandemic response products. If these amendments were to be adopted, the WHO would effectively be placed in control of the means of production of any and all nations of the world. Upon the dictate of the WHO, formerly sovereign nations would be obligated to ensure that the manufacturers within their borders gear up production and donate their products as directed by the WHO. (Pages 12-15 and page 21)

26. Events That Are Only Potentially Dangerous Can Be Declared Emergencies

The proposed amendments to Article 15 would empower the WHO to declare emergencies and make legally-binding recommendations or commands based on situations that merely had the potential to cause Public Health Emergencies of International Concern. (Page 14)

27. The WHO Could be Empowered to Mandate Policy During Emergencies

The existing Article 18 lists a number of “recommendations” that the WHO could make but, if the proposed amendments are adopted, these non-binding recommendations would no longer merely be suggestions, but would be legally-binding upon the member nations. (Page 16)

1. Review travel history in affected areas;
2. Review proof of medical examination and any laboratory analysis;
3. Require medical examinations;
4. Review proof of vaccination or other prophylaxis;
5. Require vaccination or other prophylaxis;
6. Place suspect persons under public health observation;
7. Implement quarantine or other health measures for suspect persons;
8. Implement isolation and treatment where necessary of affected persons;
9. Implement tracing of contacts of suspect or affected persons;
10. Refuse entry of suspect and affected persons;
11. Refuse entry of unaffected persons to affected areas; and
12. Implement exit screening and/or restrictions on persons from affected areas.
13. Review manifest and routing;
14. Implement inspections;
15. Review proof of measures taken on departure or in transit to eliminate infection or contamination;
16. Implement treatment of the baggage, cargo, containers, conveyances, goods, postal parcels or human remains to remove infection or contamination, including vectors and reservoirs;
17. The use of specific health measures to ensure the safe handling and transport of human remains;
18. Implement isolation or quarantine;
19. Seizure and destruction of infected or contaminated or suspect baggage, cargo, containers, conveyances, goods or postal parcels under controlled conditions if no available treatment or process will otherwise be successful; and
20. Refuse departure or entry.

28. Traveler’s Health Declaration 

The proposed amendments to Article 18 also seek to create mechanisms to develop and apply a “Traveler’s Health Declaration” that would require personal information about one’s travel itinerary, possible symptoms and any prevention measures that had been complied with in order to facilitate contact tracing. (Page 16)

29. Foreign “Health Care Workers” 

The proposed amendments to Article 18 also appear to make it mandatory for nations to allow foreign “health care workers” to enter their country. (Pages 16-17)

30. Digital Global Health Certificates

The proposed amendments to Articles 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36 and 44 as well as proposed amendments to Annexes 6, 7 and 8 would institute a global digital health certificate with a paper backup which would require people to show a QR code in order to continue to live their life as a human being on planet Earth, to travel, to shop, to do whatever it is that this may be used to prevent. It would set up an interoperable, world-wide digital health database system that would potentially enable bureaucrats from around the world to set requirements for prophylaxis, medications, treatment, injections and God only knows what else. This could potentially require people to undergo health treatments that are against their free will, in violation of their deeply held religious beliefs and their right of informed dissent just to enable them to participate in society. (Multiple pages)

31. Passenger Locator Form

The proposed amendments to Article 23 would set up a Passenger Locator Form that would require people to provide their travel itinerary and planned locations in order to facilitate contact tracing. (Page 18)

32. Competent Authorities Given Command Over Ships and Aircraft

The proposed amendments to Articles 27 and 28 would enable so-called “competent authorities” to actually command the captains of ships and aircraft to follow their orders. (Pages 18-19)

33. Multiple Health Documents

The proposed amendments to Articles 35 and 36 would dramatically expand the required health documents to require testing certificates, vaccine certificates, prophylaxis certificates and recovery certificates. (Page 20)

34. Legally Binding “Recommendations”

The proposed amendments to Article 42, as mentioned earlier, would require nations to implement the “recommendations” of the Dictator General of the World Hypocrisy Organization as though they were legally-binding orders, not just recommendations. (Page 20)

35. Attain The Highest Achievable Level of Health Protection

The proposed amendments to Article 43 seem to allow and encourage nations to go to the absolute extreme in responding to any so-called “emergency by striving to “attain the “highest achievable level of health protection.” This appears to encourage and give support to actions that were implemented by some nations which employed extremely severe lockdowns, travel restrictions and ZERO COVID policies. (Page 21)

36. The Finality of Decisions Made by the Emergency Committee Would Be a Direct Attack on National Sovereignty

The proposed amendments to Article 43 would make the decisions of the Emergency Committee legally-binding and final. They would seek to negate decisions made by sovereign member nations and limit the freedom of sovereign nations to enact legislation or regulations as they determine to be appropriate, as stated in Article 3, Section 4. (Pages 21-22)

37. Loss of Privacy Regarding Health Records

The proposed amendments to Article 44 would facilitate digital access to everyone’s private health records. The loss of one’s unalienable right to privacy regarding their health records is something that every human being on the planet must oppose. (Pages 22-24)

38. Censorship

The proposed amendments to Article 44 would also facilitate the censorship of any differing opinions under the guise of mis-information or dis-information. (Page 23)

39. WHO Interference in the Crafting of Legislation

The proposed amendments to Article 44 would also involve the World Health Organization in actually writing the laws that would be enacted in various nations in order to implement these regulations. (Page 23)

40. Unlimited Money for the PHEIC

The proposed amendments to Article 44A would organize massive financing on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex with absolutely no estimate or limit on the proposed costs. (Page 25)

41. Financing Rules to Remain Undetermined for 24 Months

The proposed amendments to Article 44A also state that the details of the financing mechanism would NOT be decided upon until 24 months after the adoption of the amendments to the International Health Regulations. (Page 25)

42. Loss of Privacy of Personal Health Data

The proposed amendments to Article 45 would make it acceptable for private, personal health data to be shared. Again, this violation of our unalienable right to privacy in our personal health records must not be allowed to occur. (Page 25)

43. Lack of Transparency with the General Public

The proposed amendments to Article 49 fail to stipulate that the reports of the Emergency Committee must be revealed to the general public. The reports of the Emergency Committee must be made publicly available, especially the dissenting voices that may disagree with the recommendations. The proposed amendment to Article 49 only requires the information to be shared with the member nations, who could then keep it secret from the general public. Personal experience has proven that the members of the delegations to the WHO are inaccessible and refuse to reveal such communications, even after numerous Freedom of Information Act Requests. (Pages 26-27)

44. Implementation Committee and More Bureaucracy

The proposed amendments to Articles 53A and 54 bis would redundantly establish an Implementation Committee or place implementation of the proposed amendments into the hands of the World Health Assembly. This Implementation Committee would just add to the bureaucracy along with the Compliance Committee, the Emergency Committee, the Review Committee, the Special Committee and the Standing Committee on Health and Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, and Response. Spending money on bureaucracy does not improve the health of the general public. (Pages 26-27)

45. Compliance Committee

The proposed amendments to Article 53 bis-quater would create yet another bureaucracy in the form of a Compliance Committee. This committee would consist of at least 36 people (6 bureaucrats from each of the 6 WHO regions). The Compliance Committee would be empowered to make recommendations to nations regarding how they may improve compliance with the core capacities required by the amendments to the International Health Regulations. This is yet another attack on the sovereignty of nations and the freedoms of people. (Pages 28-29)

46. Core Capacities

The proposed amendments to Annex 1 are absolutely massive. They include seven (7) full pages of requirements that each and every member nation would be required to implement as changes to the “core capacities” of their nation’s public health system. These changes also seek to impose requirements on a local or community level, at an intermediate public health response level, at the national health governance level as well as at the global level. (Pages 31-37)

47. Treatment Guidelines

The proposed amendments to Annex 1 would seek to enforce clinical guidance and treatment guidelines. The doctor-patient relationship would be absolutely destroyed. (Page 32)

48. Propaganda

The proposed amendments to Annex 1 would also require the core capacity for “information dissemination” via “appropriate messages” and “communication management.” By any other name, this is propaganda that would be funded by billions of dollars allocated to the WHO. (Page 32)

49. Surveillance Networks

The proposed amendments to Annex 1 would set up surveillance networks within the territories of the member nations to “quickly detect public health events.” The definition of a “public health event” can be almost anything that they want it to be. (Page 32)

50. Obligations of Duty to Cooperate

The proposed amendments seek to create an entirely new Annex 10 which would create “Obligations of Duty to Cooperate” that would require nations to assist when asked to build infrastructure around the world. And most concerning, on the very last page of the proposed amendments is the requirement of “Developed States Parties” of which there is not yet a list of nations clarifying which nations are considered to be developed, to assist in the building and maintaining of facilities at points of entry and for the operations associated with the implementation of the International Health Regulations. (Page 46)

What in the world could such facilities be planned to be used for?

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PART IV: There are glaring contradictions and flaws in the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.

In addition to a number of blatant contradictions, many issues are missing, forgotten, overlooked or purposefully left out from the proposed amendments as well as missing from the entire process.

Neither the Working Group to consider amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) nor the International Health Regulations Review Committee (IHRRC) seem to have the foggiest clue about the many things that We the People of the World are actually very concerned about.

51. Lack of Input From The General Public

The vast majority of the people of the world have no idea whatsoever that any of these negotiations are happening. They have been given no opportunity whatsoever to have any say or any input into these secret negotiations. All of these negotiations are being done without any form of democratic process or public comment. Those of us who have reached out in an attempt to have our voices heard realize that the WHO does NOT reply, they do NOT respond to members of the general public at all. They are only interested in the inputs from what are considered to be “relevant stakeholders” which are big-money organizations and foundations, many of which donate to the WHO and actually fund and thus control their activities. That is what gives them a seat at the negotiating table and a voice in these negotiations. The average person is completely shut out and is considered to have and offer no value to the people who are negotiating, supposedly on behalf of the people of their nations.

52. Unknown and Unaccountable Delegates

Most people do not have any idea of who their delegates to the WHO are. They have no idea regarding who may be pretending to represent them before the WHO. Most people in the world do not know that the World Health Assembly even exists and that the 76th meeting will be occurring at the end of May, 2023.

53. The Negotiating Process has been Hijacked by the IHRRC

At the 75th meeting in May of 2022, the World Health Assembly agreed to create a Working Group to consider amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR). They scheduled an initial meeting of the WGIHR for mid-November 2022, but the negotiating process was hijacked by the WHO at the beginning of October. The WHO created an International Health Regulations Review Committee (IHRRC) that took over the job that should be directly under the control of the Secretariat of the WGIHR. The IHRRC is sworn to secrecy and confidentiality and answers only to the Director General. The IHRRC was put together in early October and has met several times for weeklong secret meetings to negotiate and craft the document that they plan to submit to the WHO for consideration at the 76th World Health Assembly in May of 2023.

These are oligarchs and technocrats who are making rules to give more power, authority and money to oligarchs and technocrats.

The WGIHR’s authority over this process appears to have been usurped by the IHRRC. As of the end of 2022 the WGIHR has failed to provide any insight into their upcoming schedule and they have not planned any means by which the public would be able to comment on these negotiations to amend the International Health Regulations. It appears that the entire negotiating process has been hijacked by a group of 18 “experts” who have been hand-picked to do the bidding of the Dictator General of the World Hypocrisy Organization.

The entire process violates one of the fundamental principles in the Preamble of the WHO Constitution which states:

“Informed opinion and active co-operation on the part of the public are of the utmost importance in the improvement of the health of the people.”

54. Undefined Terminology

In regards to the proposed amendments themselves, the WGIHR and the IHRRC have created a jargon of their own that they refuse to legally define. Dozens of undefined words and phrases are used throughout the proposed amendments and, since they are not defined, they can purposefully be misrepresented and skillfully re-interpreted at will.

Undefined terms:

1. Assessment and Risk Criteria
2. Assistive Products
3. Benefit Sharing Mechanism
4. Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities
5. Conflict and Violence Elements
6. Developed States Parties
7. Developing States Parties
8. Equity
9. Event Information [Web]Site
10. Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits
11. Genetic Sequence Data
12. Genome Sequence Data
13. Guidance
14. Inclusiveness
15. Joint External Evaluation
16. National IHR Competent Authority
17. National IHR Focal Point
18. Non-State Actors (an official list is needed)
19. Pandemic
20. Potential to Become a PHEIC
21. Preparedness
22. Prevention
23. Public Health Interventions
24. Recovery
25. Response
26. Risks With a Potential to Impact Public Health
27. Solidarity
28. Universal Health Periodic Review
29. Vaccine

Without proper legal definitions, these words can be interpreted and re-interpreted at will to mean whatever they want them to mean.

55. Hypocrisy

After rejecting numerous natural and inexpensive therapeutic agents due to false claims of a lack of peer-reviewed studies, the WGIHR and the IHRRC continue to fail to appreciate the irony that they are negotiating proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, purportedly to improve pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery, and they have failed to provide a single peer-reviewed, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to back up any of their many recommendations. They are clearly NOT meeting their own supposed “gold standard.”

56. Fatal Flaw #1 – There are NO Valid Criteria by Which to Measure Preparedness

I will comment on just one of the several dozen undefined terms, which is the phrase “assessment and risk criteria.” During the first Informal Focused Conference, the WHO moderator asked several experts to explain which metrics could be used to determine a nation’s preparedness and thus, give them the ability to prevent and/or respond to a PHEIC. The experts clearly stated that no metrics, or assessment or risk criteria had been shown to accurately determine whether or not a nation could be confident that they were adequately prepared for the next pandemic.

Ignoring the fact that the word pandemic itself is not legally defined, the point is this: The entire process of crafting amendments to the International Health Regulations in order to “be better prepared to prevent and respond to the next pandemic” is a useless exercise because NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO MEASURE PREPAREDNESS! The WHO’s own experts expressed it in the following words, and I quote:

“We owe it to ourselves to not continue to rely on them in a dogmatic way until allowing scientific analyses to generate a new set of measurements. It’s a topic that I think has been marginalized, but is very important.”

The WHO is purporting to negotiate legally-binding amendments to the International Health Regulations to improve the ability to prevent and prepare for the next pandemic, and they have NO IDEA how to measure the goals that they say they are trying to achieve.

57. Fatal Flaw #2: National Sovereignty of Every Nation Directly Conflicts With the WHO’s Attempted Power Grab

Many of the proposed amendments should be seen as null-and-void because they directly conflict with principle number 4 in Article 3, which clearly states the following:

“States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to legislate and to implement legislation in pursuance of their health policies.”

Sovereign states cannot be commanded by recommendations that have attempted to be converted into commands or orders by the Compliance Committee, by the Rulings of the Emergency Committee or by the proclamations found in Article 44, Annex 1, or Annex 10 or by a change in terminology in Article 1 that seeks to change non-binding recommendations into legally-binding “Obligations of Duty to Cooperate.”

This makes the International Health Regulations self-contradictory and would make them null and void. The WHO seeks to have the member nations surrender their right to sovereign control over their own public health systems to the WHO. This is reason enough to #StopTheAmendments and #ExitTheWHO.

58. No Way to Cancel or End a Declared Emergency

In much the same way that the Director General is free to declare an emergency even against the advice of his own expert Emergency Committee with essentially no valid data whatsoever, the opposite problem of being unable to bring an already declared emergency to an end is also under the sole control of the Dictator General. There is currently no way for We the People to insist that an emergency be brought to an end.

59. The Proposed Funding Mechanism is Redundant With the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund

Although the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund is as deeply flawed as the ill-defined funding mechanisms proposed by both the proposed Pandemic Treaty and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund is currently in place and will begin serving as a mechanism that can be studied to see if the hoped for benefits may arise from the many billions of dollars that they plan to spend. To even consider wasting untold tens of billions of dollars before the pilot project being conducted by the World Bank has had a chance to succeed or fail, is ridiculous. The World Bank Pandemic Fund has had great difficulty raising the money that they had hoped for. To believe that the funds associated with the proposed treaty and amendments will be greeted any more favorably is sheer folly.

60. Spending tens of billions of dollars diverts that money away from things that people are actually suffering from

Spending billions of dollars on the items and personnel that are currently undefined by the proposed amendments could and should absolutely be spent on health related issues that could truly have an impact upon people who are suffering from a wide range of dis-eases. Spending money to attempt to prevent or prepare for an event that may never come, and even if it does, is likely to be far different than what may have been planned for is simply bureaucratic malfeasance.

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PART V: The proposed amendments are absolutely ignoring many of the things that really should be and need to be addressed.

61. The Importance of Individual Health Over Public Health Systems

Supporting Public Health Systems associated with the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex is not even remotely the same as supporting the health of individual people. The WHO seems to have forgotten that the good of any people is the sum total of the benefits enjoyed by each and every individual. The unalienable human rights of each individual, their personal sovereignty and their bodily autonomy, supersede the privileges of any and all international organizations, nations, states, provinces, cities or other groups that derive their existence from We, The Individual People Of The World.

62. Failure to explain the magical disappearance of Influenza

The WHO seems to be at a complete loss to explain how an why influenza magically disappeared from the health statistics over the past few years.

63. Failure to Isolate the virus

The WHO continues to be in absolute denial of the fact that no one has ever provided actual evidence of the existence of the supposed virus that has been given the name SARS-CoV-2 and its many supposed variants. Even though hundreds of Freedom of Information Requests for such evidence from around the world have been submitted, no one appears to have ever been able to properly isolate it and provide evidence of having done so.

64. Failure to prove causality via Koch’s Postulates

The WHO also continues to ignore the fundamental fact that SARS-CoV-2 has never been submitted to the scrutiny required according to Koch’s Postulates to determine whether or not it is actually the causal factor in the collection of EXTREMELY common symptoms that have come to be known as COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 has not been properly shown to be the sole cause of the symptoms associated with COVID-19 which has resulted in widespread mis-diagnosis, with massive numbers of false positive RT-PCR results.

65. Two Weeks to Flatten The Curve Was An Absolute Failure

The WHO is in complete denial that the concept of “two weeks to flatten the curve was a lie and that the lockdowns that resulted from that lie failed to stop the spread of whatever is causing the dis-ease that is known as COVID-19.

66. Lockdowns, Curfews, Travel Restrictions

The WHO is still failing to admit that lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, travel restrictions, social distancing and the wearing of masks only served to trigger severe economic devastation and caused an enormous mental health catastrophe. They still refuse to acknowledge that countless studies have shown that those actions failed miserably and have never been shown to reduce the spread of a respiratory pathogen.

67. Using RT-PCR to Diagnose Disease is Fraudulent

The WHO is still promoting the lie and pretending to determine cases of a disease via RT-PCR that is NOT of any benefit whatsoever to improving people’s health. Using RT-PCR is clearly NOT a valid way of diagnosing disease. All it does is generate a huge percentage of false positives that simply wastes resources on asymptomatic people who are actually more properly described as being healthy. Generating massive numbers of improperly diagnosed fake “cases” only serves to assist the fear-mongering that leads to feeding the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex. Using RT-PCR must be admitted to be the fraud that it has always been since the very beginning.

68. Early Treatment

The WHO still seems to believe that the early, inaccurate detection of disease via RT-PCR followed by lockdowns, quarantines and mask wearing is somehow a better strategy to prevent outbreaks from spreading into pandemics than early effective treatment with decades old essential medications that have exhibited a long history of safety and effectiveness in combination with vitamins, minerals, herbs and good nutrition.

The WHO continues to fail to acknowledge that the blame for the death of millions of people must be placed directly upon the numerous health officials around the world who insisted that frontline clinicians follow pathetic treatment protocols which prevented the use of early, effective treatments. Millions of people died because their doctors were directed to tell them that “nothing could be done” and sadly, this situation still exists.

The WHO appears to be completely ignore-ant of the fact that the intelligent early treatment with essential medications and natural substances that were provided by wise and experienced health professionals all around the world were far more successful in preventing hospitalizations and preventing deaths than the pathetic official protocol of do nothing, take a Tylenol and go to the emergency room if it gets really bad so we can put you in a drug induced coma in order to mechanically control your breathing with a ventilator and give you Medazolam so that you can have a “good death.”

69. Nutrition

The WHO continues to fail to recognize the benefits of treatment with vitamins and minerals such as vitamins C and D and the mineral zinc. There is no profit to be had by the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex in utilizing these proven, natural ingredients, and THAT is what clearly explains why they have not been used.

70. Essential Medications

The WHO continues to fail to recognize the benefits of repurposed essential medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Every person who contributed to restricting the use of these life-saving essential medications is a criminal and should be charged with mass murder.

71. Dangerous Authorized and Approved Medications

The WHO continues to fail to address the deadly side effects of approved and authorized drugs such as remdesivir and medazolam that have contributed to kidney failure and death in thousands of individuals. The ongoing use of these drugs must be investigated to determine their true risk/benefit ratio.

72. Ventilators are Deadly

The WHO continues to deny that ventilators and the drugs that are administered as part of the ventilator protocol have actually caused the deaths of thousands of innocent victims of medical murder.

73. In Silico Genetic Sequence Used for mRNA Injections

The WHO still chooses to ignore the undeniable fact that the genetic sequence that was supposedly used to create the mRNA injections was clearly created in silico (in a computer) and is not a naturally occurring sequence. If a spike protein is produced in the human body due to the mRNA found in the injections, then it is clearly a non-natural, man-made biological weapon.

74. Quality Assurance Failure

The WHO has failed miserably to ensure that quality assurance testing was done to ensure the purity of the ingredients in the jabs that have been injected into billions of people. In the past, if any other product was found to have the levels of contamination reported by many researchers or exhibited the complete lack of the purported active ingredient, such mislabeled products could, should and would have been recalled from the market immediately.

75. Vaccine Equity

The WHO still seems to believe that equity in producing and distributing poisonous drugs and deadly injections is more important than focusing on treatment protocols that actually save lives. Clearly, they believe that equity is about wealth, not about health.

76. The So-called “Vaccines” are simply NOT effective.

The WHO still fails to acknowledge that the COVID-19 gene-therapy biological weapons have failed miserably in their stated goals. Several billion people have had multiple injections and yet COVID-19 is rampant across the world, especially in those people who have received the most jabs. The WHO refuses to admit that the so-called COVID-19 “vaccines” were rushed into use and were never shown to be effective. They were never studied nor shown to reduce transmission of any virus. Statistics from all across the world have shown that those who have been jabbed are absolutely NOT protected from being diagnosed with COVID-19. How massive of a failure does this need to become before the WHO will recognize and admit that it has committed a gargantuan mistake?

77. The So-Called “Vaccines” Are Absolutely NOT safe

What will it take for the WHO to realize and admit that the jabs are damaging people’s immune systems and actually making the situation far worse than it was. The WHO refuses to admit that the so-called COVID-19 “vaccines” were rushed into use and were never shown to be safe. Lack of safety testing in pregnant women is an extremely egregious violation of the most basic ethical standards of health care.

Anyone who states that these injections are “safe” is committing a crime against humanity and should be charged as an accessory to mass murder.

78. Death, Disability and Dis-ease

The WHO is in complete denial of the many thousands of people who have been killed by these injections, or who have suffered severe disability, heart attacks, strokes, myocarditis, pericarditis, turbocharged cancers, Bell’s Palsy and countless other adverse reactions to the injections. The WHO is ignore-ant of the tens of thousands of people who have suffered damaged immune systems, cardiovascular problems, liver, kidney and nervous system and other systemic damage due to the toxic effects of the poorly tested injections. Their injuries suffered by these people around the world are real, not rare.

79. Fraudulent Causes of Death Listed on Death Certificates

The WHO seems to be in complete denial that the ongoing practice of claiming that people who died with a positive RT-PCR test, but whose deaths were actually due to a wide variety of other causes should still be counted as COVID-19 deaths is actually a form of fraud of which many people are aware. The WHO refuses to even examine the fact that, while many people have died, the reasons behind the causes of their deaths are exceedingly unclear and multi-faceted and cannot reliably be attributed to COVID-19

80. The Cover-up the Facts and the Propensity to Attack the Messengers

The WHO seems to be very much in favor of censoring those who seek to expose the truth in order to avoid holding themselves and other officials accountable for the financial devastation, mental anguish, physical harm and untold death that they have caused by their overreach, their ineptitude and their craven desire for power and control. Censorship is NOT a solution to the catastrophic failure that we have all witnessed over the past 3 years.

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PART VI: The proposed amendments would trample our rights and restrict our freedoms.

All people have an absolute, unalienable right to privacy in their personal information, including health related data. Every individual human being has the unalienable right to be free from any requirement to have or present any “vaccine passport,” “digital-ID,” or “health certificate” of any kind, whether in printed, digital or any other form.

82. The Unalienable Right To Express One’s Opinions

Every individual human being must always be free to fully express their own personal opinion free from any threat of retribution. Only the free debate of different and competing opinions can provide an environment of informed decision-making by each country, state, county, community, family and individual.  Each individual has the right to publicly express their own opinion regarding the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of any health related policy or treatment in spoken and/or written form. Every person’s experience is a valuable scientific observation and must NOT be censored.

As more free debate and free expression of ideas, facts and data are allowed to occur, each level of society will be better able to decide for itself what the best interventions to recommend are for the control and management of any disease. Any form of suppression of free public debate is strictly forbidden. Promotion of the public debate of competing points of view and access by the population to that debate, plus the personal dialogue between patients and doctors, will ensure each individual and family can be sufficiently informed to make their own choices and decisions regarding their health, under the principle of informed dissent. No uniform behavior of all of society can be required and the autonomy and free will of each individual must be protected.

83. The Unalienable Right To Provide Information on Prevention and Healing

Every individual human being has the unalienable right to provide information that is directed by their experience and wisdom, free from executive mandate, bureaucratic dictate, pressure or coercion. All people have an unalienable right to choose to ignore or to take action upon the information that they receive, free from any form of censorship or coercion.

84. The Unalienable Right To Choose Treatment

Every individual human being must always be free to use any preventive and/or therapeutic treatment interventions that they consider to be the best choice for them. This may include strategies such as lifestyle changes, food as medicine, vitamins, minerals, natural supplements and repurposed essential medications that were previously approved for other diseases and have a long safety record. Withholding any of those optional strategies is a violation of an individual’s unalienable right to choose. Health care decisions must ultimately be made based on the individual’s choice, not by bureaucratic dictate by government, academics, hospitals, clinics, medical practitioners or “public health experts.”

85. The Unalienable Right To Refuse Treatment

Every individual human being must always retain the unalienable right to refuse any intervention recommended by any institution, the World Health Organization, governments at all levels, medical associations, hospitals or health care providers. Each individual must be in control of the ultimate decision to utilize any and all health-related treatments, medications, and nutrition, as they themselves deem necessary to improve and/or maintain their health. The right of informed dissent by patients will always be placed above any political interests or centralized decision-making by any government or health agency.

86. The Unalienable Right To Travel Freely Upon The Planet

Every individual human being has the unalienable right to move about the planet and this right may NOT be made dependent upon health, testing, or treatment based requirements. Each individual has the right to travel, free from any lockdowns, quarantines, vaccine requirements, vaccine passports, digital-IDs, mask mandates, social distancing or any other attempt to impede their freedom of assembly or movement.

87. The Unalienable Rights Of Parents To Protect The Unalienable Rights Of Their Children

Every parent has the unalienable right and the solemn obligation to ensure that all the unalienable rights of their children are defended. No government or any other organization has the right to prevent any parent from defending the unalienable rights of their children.

88. The Unalienable Right To Be With Family and Friends

Every individual human being has the right to visit with family and friends, who may be suffering through an illness, in order to provide them with love and emotional support that they need, in any setting including, but not limited to, home, clinics or hospitals. The Freedom of Assembly shall NOT be denied.

89. The Unalienable Right To Freedom From Discrimination

Each individual human being has the right to be free from discrimination based upon any demand upon anyone to undergo any form of medical procedure, including testing. Discrimination based on personal health choices is absolutely unacceptable in employment or education matters, when accessing public and private institutions, organizations, private businesses or in other locations or in regards to any other issue. Discrimination based on medical status is wrong and must NOT be permitted in any form whatsoever.

90. There May be NO Derogation of Rights During a Declared Emergency

Every government, every corporation, every organization and every individual human being must respect and honor everyone’s unalienable rights despite any declaration of a “state of emergency” by anyone. Governments do NOT have the authority to suspend human rights because of so-called “emergencies.” The declaration of an “emergency” does not give anyone the right to infringe upon anyone else’s unalienable human rights. Every individual human being has the right to withhold their consent and refuse treatment or intervention of any kind, at any time, regardless of whether there is a declared “emergency” or not. Regardless of the scope and/or severity of any disease outbreak or real pandemic, human rights remain unalienable and may not be abridged.

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#ExitTheWHO

PART VII: The Ten Main Reasons why every nation on earth should #ExitTheWHO

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91. The WHO is Clearly Attempting a Power Grab 

The WHO is blatantly seeking to increase its power by pursuing a legally-binding “Pandemic Treaty” and proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations. The WHO seeks to turn its recommendations into legally-binding orders and control. The WHO seeks to have the 194 member nations surrender their sovereignty to the WHO. This must NOT be allowed to happen.

92. Conflicts of Interest and Corruption Have Plagued the WHO for Decades

The WHO is infiltrated by Big Pharma, Big Money, and Big Foundations and has been corrupted by financial donations from corporations and non-governmental organizations which have undue influence over WHO policies in ways that benefit the corporations and the organizations through a money-laundering and influence-peddling scheme of massive proportions. The WHO follows the dictates of it’s so-called “relevant stakeholders” while ignoring the needs and desires of “We the People.” The global health architecture proposed by the WHO is much closer to an organized crime syndicate than it is to anything resembling public health

93. The WHO is Plagued With Vaccine Madness

The WHO is influenced by vaccine manufacturers and vaccine pushers such as GAVI and Bill Gates. The WHO has clearly lost sight of its core purpose of promoting health and has overemphasized the use of “vaccines” which have recently been switched and converted into gene-therapy treatments which have not improved health, but have actually degraded the overall health of billions of people around the world. Best practices designed to improve health are now being ignored in favor of actions that are ultimately designed to profit the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex.

94. Stop the Expansion of Bureaucracy and Waste

The WHO is dominated by bureaucrats and technocrats that are beholden to Big Pharma and are not knowledgeable health professionals that are dedicated to caring for patients and actually helping them to maintain and improve their health. The WHO wastes enormous amounts of money on salaries for their bloated staff and have allowed travel expenses to increase to such a degree that actual health related programs are chronically underfunded.

95. The WHO Has Continuously Engaged in Fear-Mongering

The WHO has sounded the alarm and wasted time, effort and money by declaring fake Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICs) and are now seeking to be able to increase that activity by being able to declare Public Health Emergencies of Regional Concern (PHERC) and Intermediate Health Alerts. The fear-mongering has got to stop, and the only way to ensure that happens is for each and every nation to #ExitTheWHO and to ignore their recommendations.

96. The WHO’s Recommendations Have Been Horrible

The WHO has made horrible and corrupt recommendations in support of the expanded use of pharmaceutical drugs such as opiates and they have actually been responsible for the untold millions of unnecessary deaths. Turning their recommendations into legally-binding obligations would be a mistake of epic proportion.

97. The WHO Follows a False Model of Health

The WHO is overly dependent upon the petro-chemical based practice of allopathic medicine that is designed to alter and mask symptoms with chemicals, rather than to actually improve health. The WHO does not offer a forum for clinical and scientific discussion or debate and clearly marginalizes natural healing modalities.

98. Unwillingness to Learn From Mistakes Of the Past

The WHO has repeatedly demonstrated that it is absolutely unwilling and incapable of learning from its mistakes and is destined to continue wasting money while providing horrible advice based on the corruptive influence of Big Pharma.

99. WHO Delegates are Unaccountable, Out-Of-Touch, They Operate in Secret and They Lack Transparency

The delegates to the World Health Assembly are unelected, unaccountable, unknown to the people they purport to represent and they are completely out of touch with the needs and desires of the people of their respective nations. Far too much of what is done by the WHO remains hidden. What we know is horrible. What we don’t know may be monstrous.

100. The WHO has NO Authority Whatsoever Over We The People

For the most part, the World Health Organization has been an advisory organization. Their attempt to expand the scope of their authority should be seen for what it is: a worldwide POWER GRAB designed to set up a one-world governing body that is unelected and unaccountable to the people.

We the People must never allow authority to be handed over to any organization without demanding accountability.

We must never allow organizations to spend billions of dollars without complete transparency.

We must insist that each and every nation on earth #ExitTheWHO in order to chart their own course.

We the People of the world must stand together and defend our rights, our freedoms and our dignity. We must…

#StopTheTreaty

#StopTheAmendments

and

#ExitTheWHO

*

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From the birth of our nation, bankers sought by every available means to establish a central bank and thereby gain control over America’s finances. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, bankers pursued this ambition with uncommon zeal, and in 1913 they finally succeeded.

Although few were aware of it at the time, passage of the Federal Reserve Act was a quiet coup against the American people. Because when president Woodrow Wilson signed the bill into law just after Christmas he unwittingly ceded power of the purse to a private banking cabal that had no allegiance to the country, nor to the US Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, founding father and our third president, had warned that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies. His words were prescient, because in less than a year from the stroke of Wilson’s pen the world was at war.

Some historians who observed this concluded correctly that World War I was a bankers’ war. But what few understood is that the brand new Federal Reserve central bank did not merely facilitate US management of the war effort. The consequences were much greater than that, because creation of the Fed virtually guaranteed US entry into the war. Or, put another way: but for passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 the US would never have entered the war in the first place.

Indeed, without the Federal Reserve there might have been no world war at all. In 1914, Britain was bankrupt and could not have prosecuted a major war against the combined powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire without first securing an almost unlimited line of credit from somebody. And the only available creditor nation was America. Britain was bankrupt because during the previous half-century the Crown’s finances had been handled by the Bank of England (i.e., the City of London, included the Rothschilds). London bankers ran up a mountain of debt financing British military adventures around the globe, a pattern the US has repeated. Nor is this merely a coincidence.

By the early 1900s, war in Europe was on the horizon. Did the London bankers decide in those years to do to America what they already had done to Britain? Certainly they knew it was in their interest to install a US version of the “City of London,” acting through their American associates.

We know a detailed plan for the Federal Reserve was drafted in 1910 during a hush-hush ten-day meeting of prominent US bankers. The site of the secret talks was a resort hideaway on remote Jekyll Island, Georgia. We also know who attended and what generally transpired there, if not all of the details. At least two of the bankers present had close ties to the City of London.

The Rothschilds had a deserved reputation for war profiteering, and their involvements were non ideological. The English house of Rothschild profited from World War I, but so did the German and French sides of the Rothschild family. What are a nation’s policies, after all, not to mention moral principles, when there is money to be made?

Historians attribute US entry into World War I to Germany’s unrestricted u-boat attacks on American shipping that started in February 1917. Germany’s leaders understood full well that sinking US merchant ships in order to starve Britain would likely cause America to enter the war. They discounted this, however, because they were confident they could bring England to her knees within six months and win the war, long before the US would be able to mobilize and transport an army to the front in northern France. They were wrong.

The initial loss of life and tonnage from the German sub attacks was frightful, and explains the US declaration of war in April 1917. Very soon, however, the Brits introduced counter-measures, including convoys, escort ships and sub-chasers. The Royal navy also laid down mine barrages in the English channel and in the North Sea, and these sharply limited the movement of the German subs. The counter measures became increasingly effective and within a few months the losses of allied shipping sharply decreased. By September 1917, the tide had turned against Germany’s submarine campaign.

Although the Brits were successful at sea dealing with the u-boats, the ground war in France was not going as well. The conflict had become a war of attrition, a grinding succession of costly yet inconclusive attacks and counter-attacks, often fought over the same piece of ground. The losses on both sides were horrific. As the fighting dragged on, neither army could gain a decisive advantage. The stalled war produced deep gloom in Whitehall as British imperialists desperately cast about for some means to tip the balance in their favor.

This was the context for the fateful new policy announced in November 1917, the so called Balfour Declaration. It was only a brief letter, one page long, yet it was to have immeasurable consequences for our world. The letter was addressed to Lord Rothschild, leader of the Zionist movement. In it the British government announced its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Notwithstanding the obvious fact that Palestine was not Britain’s to give, Zionists quickly embraced the offer. Ever since, the western media has treated the document with reverence, almost as though it were a sacred text.

Of course, the “gift” of Palestine to the Zionists was not a freebie. There were strings attached. The letter does not enumerate these, but there is no need to guess. Subsequent events inform us that British Zionists agreed to use their considerable influence against Germany. And this also meant bringing America into the war at the earliest possible date. The full story of the behind-the-scenes negotiations that produced the Balfour Declaration has never been told. But given the subsequent calamitous course of world history, I would argue with hindsight that US entry into World War I was a huge mistake.

The arrival in France of hundreds of thousands of fresh and high-spirited American Doughboys eager to fight tipped the scales against Germany. But the allied victory gave no hint of what was to follow. During the Versailles peace councils, the Brits and French imposed crushing reparations on Germany, even as they stripped Germany of the means to pay. In 1922, a German official, Walther Rathenau, sought a way out of this difficult situation by securing a bilateral agreement with Bolshevik Russia. The Soviets agreed to forgive their portion of the reparations owed by Germany in return for badly needed German manufactured goods. If the plan had gone forward the renewed commerce might have enabled Germany to meet its obligations and save itself. However, soon after the agreement was announced, Rathenau was assassinated, which mooted his initiative. Rathenau’s convenient death smacks of likely British involvement.

Need I mention the obvious parallel with the recent bombing of the Nordstream II pipeline by US/Britain? We are told the Russians blew up their own pipeline but this is nonsense. For many years, Germany’s remarkable prosperity was dependent on access to cheap and abundant Russian energy. The denial of this vital energy source has already caused the shut down of aluminum, chemical and other key industries, dooming the German economy. History has a strange way of repeating, never exactly but through a perverse logic that is unique to history itself.

After Rathenau’s murder, Germany suffered a currency collapse. To make matters worse, French troops occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, which brought the German economy to a standstill. After that, the country descended into a nightmare of social upheaval and political chaos that was exploited by the Nazis…

We all know the rest of the story.

But none of this was inevitable. For a moment, let us try and think outside the box. Imagine what might have happened if America had changed its mind and stayed out of that war. At the time, public opinion was arguably against intervention. The majority of Americans believed that what happens “over there” is none of our damned business. Stay out of it! The people were right.

The deep gloom of British officials at this stage of the war mirrored the gloom at the German high command. The British embargo on sea transport of goods to Germany had begun to bite. The people of Germany were already on short rations and were fast approaching a state of deprivation and near famine. All of Europe was war weary, including the troops. Both armies were exhausted. A number of French units had already mutinied in the trenches.

The crucible of war had produced a military stalemate. Absolute victory appeared beyond the reach of either side. The deep suffering and exhaustion brought about by years of war had demonstrated the need for a fundamental shift in international relations. All sides had arrived at this critical juncture together. What I am suggesting is: conditions were ripe for something entirely new, a breakthrough.

Germany had already proposed a truce. Why not simply call it a draw, agree to disagree, and get on with the business of living? Why not attempt to co-exist? There was a chance for something like this to happen. The obstacle, of course (then as now), is the way men think, our deeply felt but limiting beliefs, especially our assumption that international affairs is a zero sum game where only one side can prevail; and the other must lose. What about win-win?

Many will scoff and call this fantasy. (What have you been smoking, Mark?) But the reality is, our predicament today vis a vis Russia and China is no different in essence from the predicament of our forebears in 1917. Historians have pointed out that World War II was merely a continuation of World War I. Yes, but I would go further and argue that since the first shot was fired in August 1914 our world has been at war continuously, but for brief interludes of peace. It has been the same war.

Psychopath bankers and their militarist allies have done this to us.

Human nature has not changed. What has changed are the stakes because sabers, rifles and cavalry have morphed into weapons of inconceivable power. The vast majority of people today do not grasp what this means.

For more than a century, our so called leaders have been kicking the can down the road. The fact that the US refused, last December, even to discuss the new security framework for Europe proposed by Russia means we have finally run out of highway. Our leaders have failed us. We will have to save ourselves.

Pray for peace!

*

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Mark H. Gaffney is the author of Dimona: The Third Temple (1989), Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes (2004), The 9/11 Mystery Plane (2008), Black 9/11 (2016), and his latest, Deep History and the Ages of Man (2022). Mark can be reached for comment at [email protected]

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***

The new myth making the globalist rounds is that GMOs – and glyphosate in particular – are saving the planet. The industrial behemoths who produce the chemicals upon which GMOs depend now pontificate that the world will be rescued by their salvific chemical concoctions. This laughable sales pitch is touted by the Klaus Shwab and Bill Gates crew, to justify wiping out cows, meat, and Dutch farmers. Let us not be fooled.

The proclamation that GMHT (Genetically Modified Herbicide-Tolerant) crops are environmentally beneficial because they will sequester carbon and reduce tillage accompanies the longstanding misinformation that “only industrial agriculture can feed the world.” The opposite is the case.

Increasingly, Big Ag proponents are claiming that GMO crops create more environmental benefits than organic or conventional cropping. Their chief argument is that GMO genetics reduce applications of insecticides and other chemicals, and that because they are more productive (itself a controversial claim) will use less land area and reduce carbon emissions. A typical claim is that “Genetically modified crops support climate change mitigation”:

“As global demand for food production continues to grow, crop yield increases can reduce the need to add new land into production, thus preventing additional CO2 emissions from land-use change.”

The chief complaint against GMOs is that they are most often designed to require applications of chemicals such as glyphosate (Round-up) in order to generate the promised yields. Glyphosate in turn is controversial not merely due to claims that it may be hazardous to humans and other animal life (especially when combined with other chemicals), but that it may pose threats to important soil organisms.

The EPA, CDC and FDA support glyphosate use, but the claim that glyphosate-dependent crops are “environmentally beneficial” resonates like a corporate Pinocchio. GMO proponents assert that fewer chemical applications are required for GMO crops, higher yields are achieved, and increased productivity reduces the use of fossil fuels:

“The technology has also facilitated important cuts in fuel use and tillage changes, resulting in a significant reduction in the release of greenhouse gas emissions from the GM cropping area. In 2018, this was equivalent to removing 15.27 million cars from the roads.

Such analyses distract from underlying concerns about human health – the same article touts new GMOs tolerant to 2,4-D, another herbicide flagged as a potential human carcinogen by international bodies including the WHO (but not by the EPA). It is revealing that the corporate proponents of chemicals as harmless ignore international alarms about health while invoking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to support climate change assumptions – they “have their CO2 cake and their chemicals too.”

The bold claim is that these chemicals reduce CO2 and will save the planet more than conventional or organic cropping:

“This evidence confirms the correlation between genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops and glyphosate use is a driver of the increased soil carbon sequestration. The removal of tillage and adoption of minimal soil disturbances has reduced the amount of carbon released from tillage and increased the sequestration of carbon through continuous crop production. Countries that ban genetically modified crops and are enacting legislation restricting glyphosate use are implementing policies that Canadian farm evidence indicates will not contribute to increasing agricultural sustainability.”

The environmental dilemma between pollution by chemicals versus CO2 is here laid bare. The universal acceptance of the environmental harms caused by manmade chemicals engendered the EPA under President Richard Nixon: Al Gore then pivoted the world into a divisive debate over the impact of CO2. Now we are full circle, with corporate chemical companies like DuPont and Monsanto (now hiding under the once-benign trade name of Bayer) asserting that their highly-profitable and increasingly ubiquitous chemicals must be applied to soil and food to protect us from non-toxic CO2.

But does glyphosate enrich soil health? The evidence suggests that, especially over time, GM-dependent glyphosate reduces soil microbiome health, lowering yields, increasing soil erosion, and adding to water pollution – CO2 doesn’t much toxify water supplies. There are numerous concerns yet unanswered:

“Whilst the effects of glyphosate on human health are coming under scrutiny, scientists are now concerned about our insufficient knowledge of the ecological safety of glyphosate, the way it behaves in the natural environment, how it interacts with living organisms, and the pathways through which it is degraded. ….The Soil Association has reviewed the science on the impact of glyphosate on soils and soil life. For the world’s most widely sold weed-killer, we found surprisingly little research has been done. What research there is shows contrasting results, significant uncertainty and some evidence that glyphosate causes harm. More research is urgently needed.”

The exact degree of carbon dioxide destructiveness to the climate is similarly unknown, yet many rush in to promote these chemicals in food for which a long list of potential risk factors remain. Glyphosate residues persist in soil and water longer than previously thought; adversely affect aquatic invertebrates, amphibians, and earthworms; incorporate toxic adjuvants; threaten rhizosphere, Acidobacteria, Pseudomonas, and other vital soil microorganisms; compromise Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF); encourage crop disease reemergence and Superweeds; accumulate in humans; increase soil erosion; inequitably expose black farmers; and release toxic DDT and chlordecone from soil into water supplies.

Like mRNA vaccines and synthetic opioids, agricultural pesticides and herbicides guarantee short-term profits while long-term impacts present many unknown risks.

While globalist-minded industrial agriculture proponents tout their chemical technologies for profit, the science increasingly suggests there are potentially life-killing consequences to this mad rush to spray more chemicals on the landscape in the name of “environmental benefits”:

“In human urine samples, 90 percent of farmworkers, 60 to 95 percent of the general U.S. population, and 30 percent of newborns have high concentrations of glyphosate. ….50 years of extensive glyphosate use also increased human/animal pathogenic bacteria to break down the chemical compound. ….Considering pathogenic microbes are less sensitive or insensitive to glyphosate, these disease-causing microbes can accumulate to worsen adverse health effects. Furthermore, the authors note a connection between gut health and neurological diseases as individuals exposed to glyphosate also experience a higher incidence of ADD/ADHD, autism, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s.”

In the world of COVID, the arguments supporting glyphosate as world-saving ignore that the potential risk factors of glyphosate extend beyond carcinogenic properties. They include compromised human immune function.

“….glyphosate kills bacterial species beneficial to humans and incorporated in probiotics yet allows harmful bacteria to persist, leading to resistance. ….Antibiotic resistance can trigger longer-lasting infections, higher medical expenses, the need for more expensive or hazardous medications, and the inability to treat life-threatening illnesses.”

Federal regulatory agencies have not undertaken the research to assess the plethora of health and environmental risks of glyphosate. The Fauci-like EPA seems unconcerned:

“Residues of glyphosate on any food or feed item are safe for consumers up to the established tolerances. Before allowing the use of a pesticide on food crops, EPA sets a tolerance or limit on how much pesticide residue can legally remain on food and feed products, or commodities.”

How can the EPA determine what are safe levels for a substance it claims is non-carcinogenic and for which it has not undertaken rigorous study? The very assurance that there are “safe” levels of residue indicates that there are unsafe levels.

The clarion for GMOs has been tooted loudest by the chemical and food companies who stand to gain the most in profits by their increasing domination of public and private food production resources. Much like vaccine manufacturers touting COVID shots, and pharmaceutical companies pushing OxyContin, these manufacturers collaborate with government agencies charged with protection of human health to promote their products as beneficial despite their obvious harms. Like addictive pharmaceuticals and ineffective vaccines, the domination of food production by chemical-dependent crops will simply create more ill health and yet greater corporate dependency.

The Orwellian assertion that glyphosate will save the planet by decreasing CO2 levels is more than just insincere – it is patently propagandistic, on behalf of overly powerful corporate and private interests who do not properly care for either the ecosystem or humanity. The laundry list of potential environmental harms to human and animal life is inadequately researched. Chemical-peddling companies are investing instead in research of glyphosate-enabled CO2 sequestration, and how many cars won’t be driven on roadways when more Round-up is sprayed on the dying landscape.

Who cares whether glyphosate use sequesters carbon dioxide, when it poses so very many non-CO2 pollution threats? Humanity must resist this glyphosate-laced publicity Kool-Aid.

*

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John Klar is an attorney, author, grass-fed beef and lamb farmer, and grandfather. John advocates for greater conservative leadership in conservationism and environmental policy through policy supports for regenerative, local agriculture. He is a regular contributor to American Thinker, and pens a column for Vermont’s conservative True North Reports.

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***

 

 

 

 

“For decades, the idea of dismantling the Soviet Union and Russia has been constantly cultivated in Western countries. Unfortunately, at some point, the idea of using Ukraine to achieve this goal was conceived. In fact, to prevent such a development, we launched the special military operation (SMO). This is precisely what some western countries –led by the United States– strive for; to create an anti-Russian enclave and then threaten us from this direction. Preventing this from happening is our primary goal.” — Vladimir Putin

Here’s your geopolitical quiz for the day: What did Angela Merkel mean when she said “that the Cold War never really ended, because ultimately Russia was never pacified”?

1. Merkel was referring to the fact that Russia has never accepted its subordinate role in the “Rules-based Order.”
2. Merkel was referring to the fact that Russia’s economic collapse did not produce the ‘compliant state’ western elites had hoped for.
3. Merkel is suggesting that the Cold War was never really a struggle between democracy and communism, but a 45 year-long effort to “pacify” Russia.
4. What Merkel meant was that the western states –particularly the United States– do not want a strong, prosperous and independent Russia but a servile lackey that does as it is told.
5. All of the above.

If you chose (5), then pat yourself on the back. That is the right answer.

Last week, Angela Merkel confirmed what many analysts have been saying for years, that Washington’s hostile relations with Russia –which date back more than a century– have nothing to do with ideology, ‘bad behavior’ or alleged “unprovoked aggression”. Russia’s primary offense is that it occupies a strategic area of the world that contains vast natural resources and which is critical to Washington’s “pivot to Asia” plan. Russia’s real crime is that its mere existence poses a threat to the globalist project to spread US military bases across Central Asia, encircle China, and become the regional hegemon in the world’s most prosperous and populous region.

So much attention has been focused on what Merkel said regarding the Minsk Treaty, that her more alarming remarks have been entirely ignored. Here is a short excerpt from a recent interview Merkel gave to an Italian magazine:

The 2014 Minsk Accords were an attempt to give Ukraine time. Ukraine used this period to become stronger, as seen today. The country of 2014/15 is not the country of today….

We all knew that it was a frozen conflict, that the problem was not solved, but this was precisely what gave Ukraine precious time.” (“Angela Merkel: Kohl took advantage of his voice and build”, Corrier Della Sera)

Merkel candidly admits that she participated in a 7 year-long fraud that was aimed at deceiving the Russian leadership into thinking that she genuinely wanted peace, but that proved not to be the case. In truth, the western powers deliberately sabotaged the treaty in order to buy-time to arm and train a Ukrainian army that would be used in a war against Russia.

But this is old news. What we find more interesting is what Merkel said following her comments on Minsk. Here’s the money-quote:

I want to talk to you about an aspect that makes me think. It’s the fact that the Cold War never really ended, because ultimately Russia was never pacified. When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, he was excluded from the G8. In addition, NATO has deployed troops in the Baltic region, to demonstrate its readiness to intervene. And we too have decided to allocate 2% of GDP to military expenditure for defence. CDU and CSU were the only ones to have kept it in the government programme. But we too should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness. (“Angela Merkel: Kohl took advantage of his voice and build”, Corrier Della Sera)

Source: Global Affairs.org

This is an astonishing admission. What Merkel is saying is that ” the Cold War never ended” because the primary goal of weakening (“pacifying”) Russia –to the point that it could not defend its own vital interests or project power beyond its borders– was not achieved. Merkel is implying that the main objective of the Cold War was not to defeat communism (as we were told) but to create a compliant Russian colony that would allow the globalist project to go forward unimpeded. As we can see in Ukraine, that objective has not been achieved; and the reason it hasn’t been achieved is because Russia is powerful enough to block NATO’s eastward expansion. In short, Russia has become the greatest-single obstacle to the globalist strategy for world domination.

It’s worth noting, that Merkel never mentions Russia’s alleged “unprovoked aggression” in Ukraine as the main problem. In fact, she makes no attempt to defend that spurious claim. The real problem according to Merkel is that Russia has not been ‘pacified’. Think about that. This suggests that the justification for the war is different than the one that is promoted by the media. What it implies is that the conflict is driven by geopolitical objectives that have been concealed behind the “invasion” smokescreen. Merkel’s comments clear the air in that regard, by identifying the real goal; pacification.

In a minute we will show that the war was triggered by “geopolitical objectives” and not Russia’s alleged “aggression”, but first we need to review the ideas that are fueling the drive to war. The main body of principles upon which America’s foreign policy rests, is the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the first draft of which was presented in the Defense Planning Guidance in 1992. Here’s a short excerpt:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

There it is in black and white: The top priority of US foreign policy “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” This shows the importance that Washington and its allies place on the territory occupied by the Russian Federation. It also shows the determination of western leaders to prevent any sovereign state from controlling the area the US needs to implement its grand strategy.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Russia’s transformation into a strong and independent state has not only put it squarely in Washington’s crosshairs, but also greatly increased the chances of a direct confrontation. Simply put, Russia’s return to the ranks of the great powers has placed it on Washington’s ‘enemies list’ and a logical target for US aggression.

So, what does this have to do with Merkel?

Implicit in Merkel’s comments is the fact that the dissolution of the communist state and the collapse of the Russian economy was not sufficient to leave Russia “pacified”. She is, in fact, voicing her support for more extreme measures. And she knows what those measures will be; regime change followed by a violent splintering of the country.

Putin is well-aware of this malignant plan and has discussed it openly on many occasions. Take a look at this 2-minute video of a meeting Putin headed just weeks ago:

“The goal of our enemies is to weaken and break up our country. This has been the case for centuries.. They believe our country is too big and poses a threat (to them), which is why it must be weakened and divided. For our part, we always pursued a different approach; we always wanted to be a part of the so-called ‘civilized (western) world.’ And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we thought we would finally become a part of that ‘world’. But, as it turned out, we weren’t welcome despite all our efforts. Our attempts to become a part of that world were rejected. Instead, they did everything they could– including assisting terrorists in the Caucasus– to finish off Russia and break-up the Russian Federation.” Vladimir Putin

The point we’re making is that Merkel’s views align seamlessly with those of the neocons. They also align with the those of the entire western political establishment that has unanimously thrown its support behind a confrontation with Russia. Additionally, the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Congressional Research Service’s latest report, have all shifted their focus from the war against international terrorism to a “great power competition” with Russia and China. Not surprisingly, the documents have little to do with ‘competition’, rather, they provide an ideological justification for hostilities with Russia. In other words, the United States has laid the groundwork for a direct confrontation with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower.

Check out this brief clip from the Congressional Research Service Report titled Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress:

The U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia... is a policy choice reflecting two judgments: (1) that given the amount of people, resources, and economic activity in Eurasia, a regional hegemon in Eurasia would represent a concentration of power large enough to be able to threaten vital U.S. interests; and (2) that Eurasia is not dependably self-regulating in terms of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons, meaning that the countries of Eurasia cannot be counted on to be able to prevent, though their own actions, the emergence of regional hegemons, and may need assistance from one or more countries outside Eurasia to be able to do this dependably.”….

From a U.S. perspective on grand strategy and geopolitics, it can be noted that most of the world’s people, resources, and
economic activity are located not in the Western Hemisphere, but in the other hemisphere, particularly Eurasia. In response to this basic feature of world geography, U.S. policymakers for the last several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia. Although U.S. policymakers do not often state explicitly in public the goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia, U.S. military operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—appear to have been carried out in no small part in support of this goal.” (“Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress”, US Congress)

It sounds alot like the Wolfowitz Doctrine, doesn’t it? (Which suggests that Congress has moved into the neocon camp.)

There are a few things worth considering in this short excerpt:

1. That “the U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia” has nothing to do with national defense. It is a straightforward declaration of war on any nation that successfully uses the free market to grow its economy. It is particularly unsettling that China on Washington’s target-list when US corporate outsourcing and offshoring have factored so large in China’s success. US industries moved their businesses to China to avoid paying anything above a slave wage. Is China to be blamed for that?
2. The fact that Eurasia has more “people, resources, and economic activity” than America, does not constitute a “threat” to US national security. It only represents a threat to the ambitions of western elites who want to use the US Military to pursue their own geopolitical agenda.
3. Finally: Notice how the author acknowledges that the government deliberately misleads the public about its real objectives in Central Asia. He says: “U.S. policymakers do not often state explicitly in public the goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia, U.S. military operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—appear to have been carried out in no small part in support of this goal.” In other words, all the claptrap about “freedom and democracy” is just pablum for the masses. The real goals are “resources, economic activity” and power.

The National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy are equally explicit in identifying Russia as a de facto enemy of the United States. This is from the NSS:

Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and it is a source of disruption and instability globally…

Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability….

Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order … This decade will be decisive, in setting the terms of …managing the acute threat posed by Russia.. (“The 2022 National Security Strategy”, White House)

And lastly, The 2022 National Defense Strategy reiterates the same themes as the others; Russia and China pose an unprecedented threat to the “rules-based order”. Here’s short summary from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

The 2022 National Defense Strategy… makes clear that the United States …. sees the subjugation of Russia as a critical stepping stone toward the conflict with China.… The eruption of American imperialism… is more and more directly targeting Russia and China, which the United States sees as the principal obstacles to the untrammeled domination of the world. US strategists have long regarded the domination of the Eurasian landmass, with its vast natural resources, as the key to global domination.” (“Pentagon national strategy document targets China”, Andres Damon, World Socialist Web Site)

What these three strategic documents show is that the Washington BrainTrust had been preparing the ideological foundation for a war with Russia long before the first shot was ever fired in Ukraine. That war is now underway although the outcome is far from certain.

The strategy going forward appears to be a version of the Cheney Plan which recommended a break up of Russia itself, “so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.” Here’s more from an article by Ben Norton:

“Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a lead architect of the Iraq War, not only wanted to dismantle the Soviet Union; he also wanted to break up Russia itself, to prevent it from rising again as a significant political power…The fact that a figure at the helm of the US government not-so-secretly sought the permanent dissolution of Russia as a country, and straightforwardly communicated this to colleagues like Robert Gates, partially explains the aggressive posturing Washington has taken toward the Russian Federation since the overthrow of the USSR.

The reality is that the US empire will simply never allow Russia to challenge its unilateral domination of Eurasia, despite the fact that the government in Moscow restored capitalism. This is why it is not surprising that Washington has utterly ignored Russia’s security concerns, breaking its promise not to expand NATO “once inch eastward” after German reunification, surrounding Moscow with militarized adversaries hell bent on destabilizing it.” (“Ex VP Dick Cheney confirmed US goal is to break up Russia, not just USSR”, Ben Norton, Multipolarista)

The carving up of Russia into several smaller statelets, has long been the dream of the neoconservatives. The difference now, is that that same dream is shared by political leaders across the West. Recent comments by Angela Merkel underscore the fact that western leaders are now committed to achieving the unrealized goals of the Cold War. They intend to use military confrontation to affect the political outcome they seek which is a significantly weakened Russia incapable of blocking Washington’s projection of power across Central Asia. A more dangerous strategy would be hard to imagine.

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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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Hrvoje Morić 0:00 Joining me once again for his second outing is Mark Taliano, a former high school teacher like myself. He currently is a Research Associate with Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research. That’s globalresearch.ca.

He’s the author of Voices from Syria as well as the second revised edition of Voices from Syria. The second edition is co- authored by Basma Qaddour. His website is marktaliano.net. We talked last time about Syria, so you can go back to the archive and and dig into that where we’ll be talking about COVID This time, welcome back to TNT Radio Mark.

Mark Taliano 0:33 Hi, nice to meet you again. I was listening to the earlier part of the conversation as well.

Hrvoje Morić 0:42 Yeah, did we put you to sleep? Or was it all right?

Mark Taliano 0:45 No, I was very happy to hear that we’re on the same page. Yes, very comforting to know. And someone mentioned segregation. And it’s not only by skin color. And I agree with him, too, because we’ve been segregated in Canada. You’re in the States, right?

Hrvoje Morić 1:04 I’m in Mexico. So yeah, oh, Mexico, sorry.

Mark Taliano 1:07 Well, in Canada and throughout the world, actually. I mean, we were living in basically an apartheid state, where people such as myself, who believe in and have the time to do research, didn’t go along with the agenda. And we were discriminated upon terribly, and it affects relationships with family with everybody. And part of that is a function of the military grade psychological warfare being waged against us. So really, it’s in many respects, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s horrible on many levels.

Hrvoje Morić 1:47 Yeah. You Yeah, I wanted to get your take on it. You know, I just saw that the Biden administration renewed until at least, I mean, I was predicting predicting this in December until at least April now, unvaccinated foreigners cannot enter the US. And as you said, I’ve mentioned that I went to the US recently, everyone that my family except my wife is a US citizen. And so yeah, first time, took my kid to visit family in the US. And you know, she she got sad, because after she was without her mom for a while, and I think that caused her to get a flu or whatever, just common illness and then yeah, all of this because of these insane policies. These you know, tyrannical military. Great, as you said, and I’ve had over the past year guests, Canadian guests, Daniel Bulford, was on with me the former Army Oh, yeah. Who’s his job was to protect Trudeau. Yeah, I’ve had Henry Hill the breath. Yeah, he quit because of the mandate. And then I’ve talked to Henry Hildebrand, sarjapur, Loski, and many others. So basically, you know, I had a guest on at the start of this week, talking about COVID. And he posited that the big picture here is that Western elites after World War Two, could no longer keep up the charade of democracy, and so had to resort to the sort of strategy of tension or false flag tactics to keep us plebs in line. Everything from NATO Gladio to 911 to 911, part deux COVID 911. So what’s sort of, what’s your assessment of what went down starting 2020 And it’s, it hasn’t stopped?

Mark Taliano 3:24 Well, it to me, it’s a horrible nightmare. And you know, I was wondering before this, I can … Okay, so I saw the signs. I’m not saying I’m more intelligent than anyone else, but I saw all the signs. And just like your previous speaker there, who’s in marketing, he saw all the signs that this whole thing was contrived. Okay, I remember I was walking my dog from the lake and then all the lights were off (and I thought) Oh, my god, we’re in trouble now. And we were in trouble. And I also recall wondering, Are they going to get away with this? Can they actually kill and injure millions of people globally and get away with it? And I think they can. And if I think too hard about that I’ll get really depressed but I mean, even according to the CDC figures like over 2 million  jab injuries and I suppose that’s only 1% and and and they’re they’re taking the they’re removing the record, apparently to try to cover themselves, but according to the CDC VAERS itself like over 30,000 dead and that’s a huge underestimate and people can look that up openVAERS CDC and there’s EudraVigilance  and there’s Yellow Card (UK). If you bring all these together, the death toll is just horrible and even more accurate probably is excess mortality. Edward Dowd has done a lot of work with that, and the excess mortality is, is, is very, very high. And he’s an insurance guy, a numbers guy. And that may be the best way because all of the increased excess mortality is  synchronous with the rollout of the COVID jabs, which are bioweapons. So I mean, we can get depressed over this. And I think that’s probably is a normal thing to do. Because it’s such a tragedy, catastrophic tragedy. Now I am, I am involved with …. many people who are on the same page as me. Okay, so that’s my social network. And that’s the survival. And that’s my sports network. So that’s kind of how I survive. But on the other hand, people have closed the door on me because they think I’m infectious. They think I’ve got the plague. And this is happening to all of us to one degree or another. And so I it’s very, very important topic. And I made some notes because I think the more we amplify it, the better. So I have some information for you, which I’m sure you’re familiar with as well.

Hrvoje Morić 6:13 We’ll have to jump to our break again, Mark our guest fortunately, like you, I’ve heard other people have these experiences. I haven’t really had that shunning from people who were Vax, maybe because people are, I’m sure like in Canada or us maybe because people in Mexico are generally a little bit more respectful and chill. So I haven’t had that experience. No, you have some notes, but I thought maybe just get your get your thoughts. You know, when all of this was happening for me, one of the biggest key things to focus on, you know, right out of the Gates in 2020 was the pandemic pandemic simulations. And because you mentioned this is what we’re going what’s what’s going on is it’s a military operation, a global military operation, and yet everything from you know, Dark Winter in 2001 and there’s just so many I can even keep track keep track of these pandemics, simulations, clade X, sparse Crimson Contagion, urban outbreak. Yeah, most people never mentioned that in September of 2019. The Chinese ran Coronavirus simulation at the Wuhan airport. And of course, everyone knows in October 2019, event two one and so right before 2020 There were three Coronavirus pandemic simulations. And then we recently had in Brussels a couple of months back, I think Catastrophic Contagion. And so, you know, I recall when I was researching 911, you know, Webster Tarpley, he had put together, I’ve got the file somewhere, a PDF, like how many simulations had been running right up to 911. And he had counted like, close to 40, or 50. Simulations, many of which were emulating what actually happened. On on 911. So just your thoughts on on these simulations or other worlds you think are important?

Mark Taliano 8:04 Yeah, it’s very important. First of all, who’s doing (it)? Rockefeller foundation, the same players, the same villains really? Rockefeller, the intelligence agencies, you mentioned, the military part, DARPA is involved. Why can we not get the ingredients for these bio weapons because it’s a military secret. So if we don’t know what’s in them, which we don’t, except for some people on the side are investigating on their own, but there’s, there’s a lot of variance in the batches. There is an Italian judge who tried to get ahold of it. And she was told it’s a military secret. So how can you possibly have informed consent? No, you cannot because nobody knows what’s in it. We know … some of the catastrophic results of taking these things, but we don’t know what’s in it. So therefore, it’s a violation of Nuremberg Code on many, many levels. And yes, it was, it was pre-planned and also, who, who is a major donator to the World Health Organization? Gates, he’s just behind Germany as far as that. Okay, so a lot of these oligarchs including Gates, they knew roughly when it would happen and what happened shortly after the initial Public Health Emergency of International Concern, which wasn’t a public health emergency, but it was announced as such, because there were maybe 1000 or whatever cases outside of China, very negligible. And those are cases in quotation marks, with fore-knowledge of the stock market crash, when the stock market crashes and you have foreknowledge, you can make a lot of money. And Chossudovsky and myself, we I agree that I mean, there must have been an intense amount of insider trading, which is criminal, based upon foreknowledge of when this thing would  happen. So people can hedge their bets. So Chossudovsky says on that same day outside China, there are like 1073 so- called cases that was 620. were 21 were passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess. Okay. Well, shortly thereafter, there’s a financial collapse. Some people, not you or me, but a lot of people made a lot of money off of that. So it was pre- planned. Yes,  the evidence is there, and we even know the players involved. But really the tragedy … Okay, so I’ll let you ask another question if you like, or I could go on, but so I agree with you. Yeah, it was pre planned. It’s right there. I mean, they’re not even hiding it. They weren’t hide. Yeah,

Hrvoje Morić 10:38 As you mentioned. Yeah. And right. Before, I mean, so many parallels to 911. This way, I like to call it some very mad with 911. Because you had the insider trading right before 911. And as you know, same thing, same thing with COVID. You had people recall in late 20, late 2019, early 2020. So many CEOs were just stepping down from their positions. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a military operation. But you know, before getting to the vaccines, you know, I kind of separate things. You’ve got like, the biosecurity protocols, right. Apart from Yeah, seems you’ve got the mat, the masking and the gel and the temperature checks and distancing. Yeah. Sounds and it really seems like a military regimen. And it was it in every single country, country. It’s absolutely insane. And I think that was more just the regiment, people like, you know, soldiers would in the military. So they were trying to regiment us in these military style biosecurity protocols. I mean, and then there’s a lot of stuff, you know, masks are bad for you, obviously. hand gel, I remember reading over the past two years, people actually died from taking too much of his handle on their hands, because it was some brands were toxic. So just your thoughts on some of these protocols? Well, they’re

Mark Taliano 11:57 They are toxic. I remember seeing someone who was using so much hand gel, and his hands were bloody. And I said, Well, it’s kind of counterproductive, isn’t it? But he didn’t really clue in. And that’s another thing. It’s hard really to get through to people. And there’s some theories on that too, it’s part of the psychological warfare, but maybe there’s something else. But I mean, I’ve always thought the best way to defeat this. And I still think this is just to say No. And I went to and I went to visit a relative who’s in Long Term Care, and I just didn’t abide by the rules. And next time I tried to get in, I could not get in. So this is how they’re doing it. And they’re trying to get people to jab and test and all this and I just don’t play that game. Well, I haven’t been here. So this is segregation and apartheid, but also part of their protocols. It means that they’re destroying the medical profession, they’re turning doctors into clinicians. Now, a lot of good doctors believe all good doctors should, I would assume believe in early therapeutics, but they’ve been denied early therapeutics like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and that has created so many deaths, I would have to look up how many, but the fact that people have not been treated correctly, is part of the criminality of all this. Because early treatment has proven to be successful against this virus, which if we look at this virus, the WHO has admitted it’s in line  with the flu, okay, …. and says it’s .1 to  .3% Infection Fatality Rate. So everything, they threw out the tried and true pandemic protocols, and brought in these ridiculous militarized protocols to turn us into robots or sheep, or turn us into the dark ages, where we’re not thinking and sorry, but Shame on those doctors who, who are following along because a lot of deaths…. Yeah, go ahead.

Hrvoje Morić 14:00 I was just gonna ask him your thoughts as to the nature of because I think the real danger here is the injection, right? I’ve said from the beginning, I’ve never believed it. We’ve never been in a pandemic. And that if it was, you know, a gain of function virus, that again, it was like the flu, it was nothing to freak out about. But the real, you know, the real problem was the purported solution, because I mean, there are people saying that they don’t believe in infectious infectious disease or virus now. And I just think that that’s, you know, it’s a moot point. It’s the injections and all of these locked down dystopian protocols that have no place anywhere ever. You know, there’s no exception for them. Just nature.

Mark Taliano 14:47 Sorry, what were you saying? What what do I think about?

Hrvoje Morić 14:49 You think it was a bio weapon that was intentionally released or was that

Mark Taliano 14:56 I agree with you that hardly matters it’s basically a red herring, I think people are … up. It’s part it’s part of the mechanism of getting people fearful as part of the mechanism of getting people injected with these bio weapons, which is the end goal, Problem, Reaction Solution. So, I mean, okay, there’s probably something out there, but there always is something out there. That’s the thing. But But the real problem is the injections like Dr. Yeadon. I know you know him, former VP, Pfizer and Chief of Science at Pfizer, he’s, he’s saying that just read a bit here, he elaborates after the boosters three to four shots, the immune system has lost up to 80% of its defenses, thus, people are more vulnerable to catching any kind of disease. So this is horrifying. Now I just know anecdotally, some people that I know who believe in the jabs, the injections, experimental mRNA injections, they are a lot of them get colds, they seem to be more prone. Now, that’s just anecdotal. But doctors who do speak out are saying they’re seeing turbo cancers as well. They’re seeing they’re seeing and people that had protests that I’ve been to, like, nurses or former nurses who stood up and refused the jab. They’re saying, Well, all the people in hospital have taken these jabs. Okay, so I mean, and then we can get into these testing then, which is also part of the military operation, but I’ll let you ask the question. So anyway, I agree with you there is there may be a virus, okay, maybe there is, but it doesn’t satisfy Koch’s Postulates. And the tests are totally fraudulent. But okay, so if there is Dr. Ionniditis,  said it was Low Infection Fatality Rate. So their reaction to it has been insanely criminal.

Hrvoje Morić 16:58 rewarding. Regarding the tests, my view has always been, again, there’s they don’t make any sense. But for me, you know, maybe we can talk about this later. I mean, the, the big picture for me is that they were using this military biosecurity operation to basically the key here is the digitalization, they want to create this credit system, and, you know, cashless society, digital passports. And the testing, I think was, you know, for the social credit system, they need to have all your data, your surfing data, but also your, you know, biometrics your eyes, scan your fingerprints, but also your DNA or blood. And I recall photos lately. Yeah. And during the pandemic, I found a mainstream article out of China talking about how the Chinese and again, I’m not saying like, it’s, as you mentioned, I think it’s, most governments are involved. It’s DARPA, it’s every country to different degree is running involved in this, but China has scared its citizens. They invented some health scare to get people to give their blood tests and then later they recognize it was, oh, would they really have done it just to get the DNA for the DNA database? And then the CDC actually tweeted, like a year or two ago, Oh, guess what, 10% At least 10% randomly taken of the PCR test results of people are sent to DNA labs. So I think the goal there is Yeah, so I mean, just so your thoughts on the tests or anything else?

Mark Taliano 18:45 Okay, so getting a lot of people okay, so China, I guess is more advanced and more advanced in this in this matter. Anyway, they’re following these protocols. Reiner Fuellmich figures the Lion’s Den is in the US. But also possible that we the best chance of getting criminal convictions might also be in the US Okay. A digital ID okay. I was part of the I spent four nights and four days at the freedom rallies in Ottawa. It’s just that one of the best experiences of my life is totally peaceful, free food free. There’s everyone was celebrating and the truth was right out there. It was right out and old, which is in modern society isn’t. But how what did they do? The government, the the Trudeau Government, and Fuellmich figures, the government’s aren’t ours anymore. And I agree with that, because he he’s (Trudeau) one of these young global leaders (and Freeland too). So as , so they a lot of people were contributing to the Freedom Convoy, that’s digital, and what did the government do? They (froze the funds) it. So this is just one tip of the iceberg of what can happen if we have digital completely digital money they will have total control over us over how what we how we spend our money, where we spend our money if we spend our money and so it just we’re just relinquishing our freedom, all of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and (rights), and this was what we were protesting at the Freedom Convoy, which was a magnificent protest. But this is also they want to turn us into a world dictatorship basically. And a digital currency is one way of doing because they can stop it. They can turn it off just like that. And they can know everything. If it’s digital, they can know where we spend our money, how we spend our money.

Hrvoje Morić 20:44 Yeah, we’re seeing this happen now everywhere now in Canada I’ve seen in Brazil now people protested Bolsonaro last Brazilians had their bank accounts frozen in the US people haven’t been as frozen. There’s that Russian journalist Alina Lipp had her and her whole family’s bank accounts frozen. So Europe is happening. Yeah. And so we’re gonna have to jump to our break Mark. Again, the website is marktaliano.net. You can check out his book Voices from Syria and we’ll be right back on TNT radio.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. He writes on his website where this interview was originally published.

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