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One of my surveys had a strong signal. So I had a third party polling firm run it against a neutral audience. The results are devastating. It shows we were lied to. Big time. No other way to spin it.

I now have a survey question that, when tested against a neutral audience, gives a very strong signal. Turns out that most people think that the COVID vaccines have killed more people in just 1.5 years than all 70+ vaccines combined over the past 32 years. The more unvaccinated you are, the more likely you are to notice this. If you’ve had four doses, it was nearly tied.

Here is the pivot table of the Pollfish results so you can see the votes vs. vaccine status:

Here is the underlying data so you can verify the result. And here’s the summary PDFthey provided.

What this means is we’ve won. There is no way to defend this.

Unless I missed something, they are totally screwed. There is simply no way to “spin this” in your favor. This survey is simple to replicate and it completely destroys the “safe and effective” narrative because there is no way to “spin” the results in your favor. It’s devastating.

The CDC would argue, “You are asking the public to make a non-professional judgment on causality. We at the CDC have determined no causal link. All these deaths are simply coincidences!”

The fact checkers will then agree with them!

OK, fine.

Simply explain why there are more 1.7X as many “coincidences” happening with the COVID vaccines than all 70+ vaccines over the past 32 years? Make my day. Back it up with actual data proving your point, not a hand-waving argument.

Or, show me your survey. And explain why, in the 18 months the vaccine has been on the market, you never reached out to find the incidence rate of adverse events and deaths in a pro-active survey rather than sitting back with a passive surveillance system. And explain to us why you never revealed to anyone the Medicare mortality data? What was the reason for keeping that a secret? Explain that one for us.

Sadly, the press will simply accept any hand-waving argument from the CDC no matter how idiotic it is. That’s how they will defend it. They will never ask the questions in my previous paragraph.

So it’s not over yet, but we are getting close.

Confirmation of the poll in the VAERS system

This isn’t a fluke.

The VAERS system essentially is throwing the same safety signal with a ratio that is pretty close to what our survey found.

It turns out that 69% of all deaths in VAERS (limiting ourselves to US only deaths) are from the COVID vaccines.

So this means that the COVID vaccines have killed 2.3X as many people as all the 70+ other vaccines over the past 32 years.

How do you explain that? It can’t be over-reporting of background deaths because the adverse event profile of the COVID deaths doesn’t match “natural causes.” So these stupid hand-waving arguments don’t fly.

Here are the queries I used and the results.

Deaths from the COVID vaccines only, limited to US States. There are more than 2.3X as many deaths from the COVID vaccines than for all the other vaccines put together since the start of the VAERS system 32 years ago. That’s an impressive kill rate.

Deaths from ALL vaccines over 32 years in US States only

Other troubling surveys for the mainstream narrative

The survey above is just the beginning.

Neutral audience validation of the following polls coming shortly as well.

Injuries

The vaccines are harming more people than COVID is. Hospital treatment protocols are #2. Why can’t we let doctors be doctors?

The COVID vaccine is the biggest source of injuries, followed by hospital COVID protocols, followed by the virus itself in last place. The government dictated “cures” are far more likely to injure you than the virus itself.

Deaths

The big killer: the vaccine. Hospital treatment protocols are #2. Why can’t we let doctors be doctors?

The COVID vaccine is the biggest killer, followed by hospital COVID protocols, followed by the virus itself in last place. The government dictated “cures” are far more likely to kill you than the virus itself.

Myocarditis rates

Doctors say that myocarditis from COVID is greater than from the vaccine. Funny thing though…. I couldn’t find any cardiologists who have seen more myocarditis rates before the vaccines rolled out. Looks like I’m not alone.

“The Elephant in the Room” presentation has more examples

Want more evidence that you’ve been misled? Check out my Elephant in the Roomslide deck and you’ll very quickly discover why nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room: that the CDC, medical community, Congress, state and local health officials, mainstream media, and mainstream social media companies are responsible for killing over 500,000 Americans by enticing them to take a vaccine that was far more likely to kill them than save them.

None of the interventions was needed. We had an effective early treatment protocol in March of 2020, but the NIH and CDC ignored it and still do to this day. There are no deaths or long-haul COVID if people are given that protocol. Over 10,000 people were treated without a death or hospitalization if the patient starts treatment promptly after first symptoms. The reason it is ignored is simple: Tony Fauci says that such protocols don’t work, even though they do. It’s not like they looked at the protocol and rejected it. It’s like they never even looked at the protocol.

You’ll also understand why nobody wants to debate me.

Summary

This survey is devastating because it is confirmed with a neutral audience. The survey and several more will now be repeated by an internationally famous polling firm.

So you now know who is going to win the game: the truth.

And it’s now just a matter of time. It will be fun to see people try to attack me in the meantime.

My advice to them is simple: if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Next step: wait for the new famous pollster to release this poll plus several others. They are highly respected.

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An Appalling Slur on the Civilisation State That Is India

June 8th, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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‘Global Nato’. Help Taiwan ‘defend itself’. Recover the ‘whole’ of Ukraine. Promote ‘the free world’ – UK foreign policy under Liz Truss has become a series of empty slogans from a declining power desperate to remain a major one.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign secretary Liz Truss has given at least three speeches saying the UK must enable Taiwan to “defend itself” against possible Chinese aggression.

Clearly, China and the island of 24 million Taiwanese lying 100 miles off its shore, is very much on the minds of British officials as they aid Ukraine’s military efforts against Moscow.

Maybe it’s China, the world’s coming superpower, they’re really wanting to deter in their determination to be seen to stop Russia.

Last November, in his first ever public speech, MI6 chief Richard Moore said: “Beijing’s growing military strength and the [Communist] Party’s desire to resolve the Taiwan issue, by force if necessary … pose a serious challenge to global stability and peace”.

But how far would or could the UK really go to “defend” Taiwan? The UK’s Attorney General, Suella Braverman, implies the UK will help it counter “hostile cyber activity” by China.

But a military threat is of a different order. The UK doesn’t recognise Taiwan as a state. Just 13 countries recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country for fear of upsetting relations with Beijing and its “One China” policy.

Like most countries, Whitehall has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and has no plans to recognise it. The Foreign Office says it has an “unofficial relationship, based on dynamic commercial, educational and cultural ties”.

The UK also has no formal defence ties with Taiwan. When asked over the years if the UK would consider lending military support to it, UK governments have repeated the position that UK policy backs a peaceful resolution between China and Taiwan.

‘Global Nato’

Truss’s bullish statements about defending Taiwan are as vacuous as those coming from Washington.

US President Biden warned in Tokyo last month that if China invaded Taiwan, the US would intervene militarily. This was an apparent departure from Washington’s traditional policy of “strategic ambiguity” and implicit recognition of Beijing’s policy towards the island.

His intervention was welcomed in Taiwan until the State Department quickly insisted that Biden’s unscripted comment in answer to a journalist’s question did not signify any change in US policy.

But when Liz Truss spoke in April about Taiwan being able to “defend itself” she invoked a new concept – a “Global Nato”.

“By that”, Truss said, “I don’t mean extending the membership to those from other regions. I mean that Nato must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats”. She could only have meant China.

The UK has been keen to display its military power to the Chinese. Last September, the UK sent a warship that was part of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier strike group, HMS Richmond, through the Taiwan strait for the first time since 2008.

In response, China accused Britain of having “evil intentions”.

The British government had already seized the opportunity presented by increased Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea to justify the £7.6 billion spent on building two aircraft carriers – the largest ships ever commissioned by the Royal Navy.

It sent one of them, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the Pacific. Yet the UK’s aircraft carrier, like all large warships, is extremely vulnerable to attack, especially from Chinese missiles.

A provocative naval show of force in the Pacific may make UK officials feel important. It may also make Beijing think again about the timing and nature of any attack on Taiwan, but in the end would surely make no difference to China’s commitment to achieve its objectives.

Ukraine

It’s not only on Taiwan but also on Ukraine that comments by Truss and other British ministers are empty rhetoric, counter-productive, and also dangerous.

To ingratiate themselves with Washington, take a sideswipe at the EU, and as a diversion from domestic crises, Boris Johnson and his foreign and defence secretaries are keen to be at the forefront of giving military support to Ukraine. They’ve been plying Ukraine with missiles and organising international arms shipments to Kyiv.

But while Ukraine needs arms to defend itself, it also needs progress towards implementing a peace agreement. Britain’s demand that Russia must withdraw from the whole of Ukraine – which by implication includes Crimea – slams the door on any peace settlement.

Even some former British military chiefs recognise Putin is never going to allow Ukraine to regain Crimea, which historically was part of Russia until a Soviet president gifted it to Ukraine in 1954.

An obvious outcome might be that the Donbas region remain in Ukraine but its people enjoy a wide degree of devolved power – something that might have been attainable before the invasion.

Then there are Truss’s seemingly endless comments about her foreign policy promoting the “free world”, “freedom and democracy” and “network of liberty”.

The claims are ludicrous as the UK deepens relations with the tyrannical Gulf states and, as Declassified has shown, backs most of the world’s repressive regimes.

Arms market

Taiwan has the advantage for Whitehall of being a burgeoning market for UK arms exports. These have taken off in the last five years: since 2017, Britain has sold £338m worth of military equipment to the island.

Perhaps the UK’s military-industrial complex, backed by officials, is more hopeful than fearful of increasing Chinese belligerency.

The US is also increasing its supplies of arms to Taiwan, albeit not on the scale it has to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. Yet western arms are unlikely to deter President Xi if he decided to attack Taiwan.

Taiwan’s military chiefs are following the war in Ukraine extremely closely, learning lessons. So, too, is Beijing.

The Taiwanese have seen how ambushes by small groups of militia and drones can destroy large military formations. Beijing has seen how vulnerable a ground invasion can be, with clear implications for amphibious operations.

The message is that an attack on Taiwan would require coordinated airborne and amphibious forces, accompanied by precise bombing.

Nato members, including the US, have so far shown they are unwilling to provoke Moscow into an even wider military conflict, and the US is likely not willing to intervene directly in a conflict with a nuclear power.

In any war over Taiwan, western warships would have to engage directly with the Chinese navy to prevent the island from being cut off and blockaded by China.

Sanctions

Europe is suffering an energy crisis partly because of sanctions imposed on Russian oil and gas and there are already cracks in the EU’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions take a long time and need to be well targeted to be effective.

Sanctions against China would have a much greater impact on the west’s economy given the importance of China in the market for rare earth products, electronics and consumer goods and more generally, global finance and investments.

A conflict involving Taiwan could have a devastating impact on the world’s supply of microchips.

Rather than bellicose belligerency, the UK Foreign Office should begin to understand what it can really achieve on the international stage, and who and what it can deter. It should give up its grandstanding claims and match policy to its rhetoric.

It should stop telling others to promote peace when it’s plainly more interested in war, and stop pretending it’s supporting human rights when it’s backing those repressing them.

What the public needs is for the West and the East to cooperate and confront such impending crises as climate change. What it doesn’t need is for pretentious great powers to strut the world stage bereft of real policies.

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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.

Richard is a British editor, journalist and playwright, and the doyen of British national security reporting. He wrote for the Guardian on defence and security matters and was the newspaper’s security editor for three decades.

Featured image: HMS Richmond fires a missile on exercise in the Atlantic. (Photo: US Navy)

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***

As the US government’s Summit of the Americas opens in Los Angeles, California, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala have refused to attend, protesting the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

The US government’s Summit of the Americas started on June 6 in Los Angeles, California. And the event proved to be a major diplomatic failure for the Joe Biden administration.

Washington refused to invite the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

So to protest this exclusion, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras boycotted the summit. Guatemala’s president also chose to skip the conference.

This means heads of state representing Latin American countries with a total population of more than 200 million people – a significant percentage of the Americas – refused to attend Washington’s Summit of the Americas.

Mexico’s President AMLO boycotts the summit

The most significant absence was Mexico’s left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly by the acronym AMLO.

“I am not going to the summit because not all of the countries of the Americas were invited,” AMLO explained in his morning press conference on June 6.

“I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries, the exclusion, the desire to dominate, the lack of respect for the sovereignty of the countries and the independence of every country,” the Mexican president explained.

“There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all of the countries of the American continent do not participate,” López Obrador continued. “We consider that to be the old policy of interventionism, of a lack of respect for nations and their peoples.”

AMLO criticized the US Republican Party for its “extremist” positions against Cuba and racist policies against immigrants. But he also pointed out that some prominent figures in the Democratic Party, such as New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, have also contributed to “hate” against Cuba and hawkish meddling in Latin America’s sovereign affairs.

“I don’t accept hegemonies,” AMLO added. “Not of China, not of Russia, not of the United States. All countries, no matter how small they are, are free and are independent.”

López Obrador said that Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, would instead attend the Summit of the Americas.

AMLO’s absence is especially significant given that, in addition to being neighbors with a 3,000-kilometer border, the United States and Mexico’s are each other’s top trading partners.

Mexico is the second-largest country in Latin America, in terms of population. It also has the second-biggest economy in the region.

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce boycotts the summit

Joining AMLO in condemning the US government’s policy of exclusion was Bolivia’s socialist President Luis Arce.

Bolivia’s foreign ministry confirmed on June 6 that Arce is not joining the summit either. Instead, the country’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Héctor Arce, is attending.

In a Twitter thread the week before, Arce insisted that

“it is time for the government of the United States to put an end to the senseless and criminal economic, commercial, and financial blockade that weighs on Cuba, as well as the more than 500 unilateral coercive sanctions imposed on Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

The Bolivian leader added,

“With blockades and sanctions, a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future will never be able to be built in the hemisphere, as the next Summit of the Americas is proposing.”

Honduras’ President Xiomara Castro boycotts the summit

Honduras’ new left-wing President Xiomara Castro is boycotting the Summit of the Americas as well.

On May 28, Castro tweeted,

“I will only attend the summit if all of the countries of America are invited without exception.”

On June 6, the Honduran president made good on her promise, and her government confirmed that Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina would attend instead.

Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei boycotts the summit

While the majority of the leaders not attending the Summit of the Americas are left-wing, even Guatemala’s right-wing president, Alejandro Giammattei, announced that he will not be present.

Several officials from Giammattei’s government have been sanctioned by the United States, and he is protesting the Biden administration’s policies with his absence.

Protests planned against summit

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM), which represents 15 states, similarly threatened to boycott the summit if Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were excluded.

Several countries in the Caribbean did confirm they are attending, however. It is not clear how many are boycotting.

Brazil’s far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro, had initially threatened not to attend the summit. Washington responded by promising Bolsonaro that it would welcome him to the White House and give him one-on-one meetings with Biden.

The far-right Brazilian autocrat thus changed his mind and decided to attend.

Bolsonaro is joined by the right-wing leaders of Colombia and Ecuador, as well as the centrist leaders of Chile and Argentina. (The conservative president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, had planned to join, but was ultimately unable to do so because he got Covid-19.)

The Summit of the Americas was first convened by the United States in 1994, after the end of the first cold war, as a way for Washington to expand its hegemony in Latin America and the Caribbean.

That same year, the US government signed the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a neoliberal deal with Mexico and Canada, which devastated Mexico’s local economy and fueled a wave of mass migration.

Numerous grassroots organizations, left-wing social movements, and labor unions have organized an alternative People’s Summit for Democracy to protest the US government’s Summit of the Americas.

The People’s Summit is hosting a series of demonstrations, panels, concerts, and cultural activities in California from June 8 to 10.

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WHO and WEF Globalists Coordinate Their Global ‘Reset’

June 8th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Each year, the self-proclaimed ruling class spend a week in Davos, Switzerland, discussing their visions of the future and how to impose their ambitions on the rest of the world

They believe the future is theirs to create. They believe they, the attendees in that room, have all the power. And. by extension, they think that the rest of the world, those unfit to wear a Davos Forum badge, have no say in the matter

Among their plans is to track your carbon footprint. They want to track where you travel, how you travel, what you eat and any other resources you might use in your day-to-day life

To start, individual carbon footprint tracking will be sold to you as a way for you to be a responsible citizen and track your own carbon footprint. In time, your carbon footprint will be part and parcel of your social credit score, and used to place restrictions on your way of life

They also openly admit that their plans will cause pain for the populace. We have to expect shortages of food and energy, for example, because they’ve decided societal changes need to occur faster than what the “green” technology sector can keep up with

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Each year, the world’s elite hop into their private jets and descend upon Davos, Switzerland, the location of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual Davos Forum. Here, the self-proclaimed ruling class spend the week discussing their visions of the future and how to impose their ambitions on the rest of the world.1

As explained by Fox News anchor Jesse Watters, participants are divided into clear classes even there. Not only must you receive a personal invitation to attend, but once you’re there, your name badge will clearly illustrate which “elite class” or “subclass” you belong to.

If you’re a sufficiently wealthy VIP, you get a white badge with a blue line. If you’re married to a VIP, you get a plain white badge. If you’re just part of someone’s entourage, you get a green badge (wouldn’t want the true elite braintrust WEF’s planners and strategists — to accidentally mingle with and swap ideas with the servants).

The Future Is To Be Built by Them, Not Us

If you have any doubt that these individuals believe they have the right to own the world and make decisions for all mankind, just listen to WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s opening remarks:

“The future is not just happening. The future is BUILT, by US. By a powerful community, as you here, in this room.”

These three short sentences tell us a lot. They believe the future is theirs to create. They believe they, the attendees in that room, have all the power. And, by extension, they think that the rest of the world, those unfit to wear a Davos Forum badge, have no say in the matter.

We’re not powerful enough, or smart enough, or wealthy enough to be part of the planning. The people in that room, they are the ones responsible for making the decisions for everyone else.

They Want to Track Your Carbon Footprint

As noted by Watters, “They’re openly scheming up some of the craziest plans you’ll ever hear of, like tracking your carbon footprint.” In other words, they want to track where you travel, how you travel, what you eat and any other resources you might use in your day-to-day life.

This technology isn’t commercially available yet, but we’re told it’s coming. To start, it’ll be sold to you as a way for you to be a responsible citizen and track your own carbon footprint. Eventually, your carbon footprint will be part and parcel of your social credit score, and used against you in every conceivable and inconceivable way.

Make no mistake, the so-called “manmade climate change crisis” is a ploy to entice the world population into giving up the lifestyle we’ve become used to, no matter how modest.

You’re supposed to track and limit your carbon footprint, while these self-proclaimed elitists have no qualms about hopping on their private jets. At bare minimum, you’d think they’d humble themselves enough to fly commercially, but no. They’re too important for that. They’re the builders of the future, after all.

Failed Planners Continue Planning

Of course, the meeting also included discussion about pandemic response. Despite having utterly failed to prevent any of their previously predicted pandemics — and there have been several — they still believe they’re the only ones who can get it done.

They also openly admit that their plans will cause pain for the populace. We have to expect shortages of food and energy, for example. And why? Because they’ve decided societal changes need to occur faster than what technological advancement can keep up with.

As just one example, we currently don’t have viable alternatives to diesel-driven machinery used in construction and farming, but they’re not going to let that stop them from implementing their “green” agenda.

Do you want to know what their solution is? They continue their lifestyle, while demanding that you give up creature comforts like air conditioning and heating, or like driving your car and flying overseas, until the green energy sector catches up. Never mind the fact that by the time that happens, many millions will have died from starvation and society as we know it will have crumbled.

They also stressed that “inflationary pressures” are “worth it.” Worth it for whom? Themselves, of course, because the average person who can’t afford to drive to work and whose children cry from hunger is hardly going to agree that premature implementation of the green agenda is worth that kind of suffering. It’s tone-deaf in the extreme, really.

Watters asks Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for comment on what’s happening in Davos, and as noted by Paul, one of the greatest dangers of a One World Government is that it will be unelected.

Just look at how bad government performs when you’re allowed to vote for the representatives you actually want, he says. This Davos crowd, which wants and fully intends to form their own global government, doesn’t represent anyone but themselves. You can’t vote them in. You can’t vote them out. And they’re accountable to no one.

Elitists Clueless About Basic Economy

Living in an insulated bubble is also, apparently, hazardous to your intellect. As noted by Paul, these elitists actually blame inflation on greed, which is dangerously ignorant, and proves they’re really not qualified to manage anything, let alone a global economy.

“If you were in a third-grade class, I’d give you a failing grade if you told me inflation was caused by greed,” Paul says. “That is the dumbest explanation, the most implausible, lacking all facts, that someone could put forward.

Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply … The Federal Reserve prints it up to borrow it; it floods the economy and drives prices up. If you don’t understand that, it’ll never get any better. My prediction is it’ll get a lot worse before November.”

World Health Organization Vies for Global Health Monopoly

Of course, global economies are not the only thing being destroyed by these billionaire parasites. They also want to be in charge of global health care, and to that end, the World Health Organization is now trying to get member states to agree to a Pandemic Treaty that will give the WHO complete authority over pandemic planning and response, even if its decisions violate national laws and civil rights.

It’s fitting then, that China was recently elected to the WHO’s executive board.2 Not a single member nation objected to the appointment. As noted by Spectator columnist Ross Clark,3 the election of China is further evidence WHO has “lost all credibility.” What’s more, Clark points out that the only European country on the WHO’s executive board is Slovakia, which also had one of the highest COVID-19 death rates.

‘Sustainable Financing’ of the WHO May Be Pure Fiction

Directing and coordinating international health is expensive, as you might imagine, so the World Health Assembly, the governing body for the WHO, has approved a draft decision, A75/9, which lays out the plan for “sustainable financing” of the WHO.

According to a supporting document titled “A Healthy Return — Investment Case for a Sustainably Financed WHO,”4 investing in the WHO “provides a return of at least U.S. $35 for every U.S. $1 invested.”

As noted by a Twitter user called Critical Sway,5 this return on investment claim is based on “complex economic calculations” involving “enormous sums of money, projects running worldwide over the next decade,” and factors in “an incalculable number of unknown and unknowable variables.” The models for these calculations were done by staff at the Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, and were funded by the WHO itself.

In other words, the return on investment claim could be completely fictitious, especially when you consider that “This lot couldn’t accurately model one virus over the course of two years.”6 But they’ll use these fantasy calculations to milk governments for more money, and government can then tell the people that their money (because all government money comes from your tax dollars) is being “securely invested” and “well spent.”

Update on International Health Regulation Amendments

In addition to the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the World Health Assembly recently voted on a set of amendments7 to the International Health Regulations proposed by the Biden administration. These amendments would have stripped member nations of their sovereignty and given the WHO unprecedented power to restrict your medical freedoms and civil liberties in the name of biosecurity.8

The WHO, however, temporarily withdrew 12 of the 13 proposed amendments, May 25, 2022. That doesn’t mean they’re off the table, though. Another hearing on these amendments has been scheduled for June 16 and 17, 2022. According to the Liberty Counsel,9 a number of African nations, Iran, Malaysia and Brazil objected to the amendments, for a variety of reasons.

The African nations reportedly want the proposed IHR amendments to be consolidated into the Pandemic Treaty rather than being done piecemeal separately.

So, we’re not out of the woods yet. We must continue to pressure the U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly to oppose these amendments. Some nations have expressed support for giving the WHO the power to mandate global universal health care as well, and this is yet another reason to push for national sovereignty and oppose the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty.

Take Action Today to Preserve Freedom for Tomorrow!

As reported by the Organic Consumers Association:10

“Lockdowns and mandates are bad enough when they’re imposed by local officials. At least, they can’t hide from our protests. We can show up where they work and live, and we can vote them out in the next election.

Things would be much worse if lockdowns and mandates were imposed from Geneva, Switzerland, by an unelected, corporate-controlled bureaucracy … and that’s exactly what the pharmaceutical companies are working on now.

TAKE ACTION! Tell the U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly that you oppose their amendments to the International Health Regulations!

According to the World Council for Health, these amendments would give control over the declaration of a public health emergency in any member state to the WHO Director-General — even over the objection of the member state …

Under the amendments they’ve proposed, the U.S. would have just 48-hours to respond to a WHO risk assessment and accept or reject on-site assistance, forcing it to comply or face condemnation from the WHO and, potentially, sanctions from unfriendly nations.

Even worse than that, under the amendments, the WHO could declare their public health emergency based on secret information from anonymous sources …

Corruption at the WHO was already the ‘biggest threat to the world’s public health of our time’ according to a 2015 investigation.11 We don’t need U.S. amendments to the International Health Regulations making it any easier for the pharmaceutical companies to wield their influence.

‘Put simply, the proposed IHR amendments are directed towards establishing a globalist architecture of worldwide health surveillance, reporting, and management,’ says the World Council for Health.12 ‘Consistent with a top-down view of governance, the public will not have opportunities to provide input or criticism concerning the amendments. This, of course, is a direct violation of the basic tenets of democracy.’

The anti-corporate-globalization movement killed the World Trade Organization’s attempt to establish a global dictatorship where a bureaucracy run by the world’s largest corporations could override local democracy.

Now, like the regional trade agreements that replaced the WTO, the World Health Organization is trying to become a mini WTO just for the pharmaceutical industry to override national laws on the safety-testing and regulation of drugs and vaccines–via pandemic Emergency Use Authorizations. We must act now!”

The World Council for Health has facilitated this process by creating a form letter that you can easily modify if you want. You can find the form letter here. Once you’ve filled in the blanks and modified it to your liking, the letter will automatically be emailed to the U.S. Health and Human Services of Global Affairs with the push of a button.

How to Become Ungovernable

While the Schwabs and Gateses of the world may appear invincible and too powerful to knock down, we should not give in to such mental traps. Always remember that there are literally many millions of us for each and every one of them.

They can’t impose their ambitions on us unless we let them. They need our permission and cooperation to rule over us. So, part of the answer is to become ungovernable. I’m not talking about anarchy, violence or acting “out of control.” I mean forming parallel systems that operate completely outside of their control grid.

For example, a society that primarily relies on physical cash is ungovernable by technocrats because they can’t track everyone’s earning and spending. A society that refuses to carry geolocation trackers is ungovernable by technocrats because they don’t know where you are or what you’re doing.

They need all those data points in order to profile you, to create a digital identity of you. And without that digital identity, artificial intelligence cannot predict what you’re thinking or how you’ll respond to a given stimuli. The less data they have on us, the less governable we become.

Top-Down Rule Is a Failed Model of Governance

In a May 2, 2022, article, Michael Driver highlighted some of the global cabal’s apparent weaknesses, noting we actually have a lot to be optimistic about. Here’s a longer than usual excerpt from this worthwhile read:13

“I don’t worry about the World Economic Forum achieving their stated goals for 2030 … If history rhymes, it positively sings with the failure of such grandiose projects. The history books are littered with the corpses of centralized top-down ideas.

The reason why we are not talking enough about the impossibility of Klaus Schwab’s Great Leap Forward is because the opposition are guilty of the same failure of basic understanding. The opposition is making the flawed assumption that this project is doable.

In fact, the future is resistant to shaping. What we should all be preparing for is the failure of the WEF’s program. This should be a cause of profound optimism. Put simply the universe works against centralized top-down systemization.

‘They’ are swimming against the teleological tide of creation — an impenetrable future, the inevitability of the new, while we are surfing the wave of ontological emergence with decentralization as the key to developing solutions via free and open debate.

‘Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht’ — man plans and God laughs — is a Yiddish proverb. Well, she must be positively ROFL at the collection of billionaires and world leaders gathered in a fake village in Switzerland busily stitching together their own petards.

As David says in Psalm 59:8, ‘But you, O Lord, shall laugh at them: You shall have all the nations in derision.’ Derision and ridicule are the correct responses here, not abject panic. They are not going to succeed; Iron Mike got it right when he said ‘Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face’ …

Schwab and his collection of command and control technocrats have taken the ideas of Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot and whoever wrote WeWork’s business plan and dressed them in new clothes.

These threadbare robes are camouflaged with words such as ‘stewardship,’ which actually means the absence of democracy; ‘sustainability,’ roughly translated as ‘you eat bugs while we flambé the wagyu’; ‘inclusivity,’ which is a big club and you ain’t in it, and ‘equity’ which redistributes assets to billionaires and associated parasites …

Every plan falls apart when you pull on its assumptions. The Great Reset sits on the implicit assumption that everything in nature can be known, ordered and controlled via technology. Some twisted fantasy they call artificial intelligence. A general theory that they claim applies to everyone and everything everywhere.

Globalism from above is just another in a long line of narrative fantasies stretching all the way back through the failed ideologies of the last century — communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism and so on. Our vital objective should be to avoid the fate of the victims of these failures …

Get angry, then get with the repudiation. Get with the presentation and promotion of decentralized, ground up, emergent philosophies. Get with the optimism. We are on the right side of history; they are on the precipice.”

*

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Notes

1 WinterOak.org May 26, 2022

2 WND May 31, 2022

3 Spectator May 28, 2022

4 WHO, A Healthy Return May 17, 2022

5, 6 Twitter Critical Sway Thread

7 Health Policy Watch February 23, 2022

8 RW Malone Substack May 17, 2022

9 Liberty Counsel May 25, 2022

10 OCA Stop WHO’s Global Pharmagarchy

11 Journal of Integrative Medicine & Therapy January 2015; 2(1)

12 World Council for Health Comment Submission

13 Conservative Woman May 24, 2022

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Studies suggest a link between an incurable and fatal prion disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and COVID-19 vaccines.

Researchers believe the prion region from the original Wuhan COVID-19 variant’s spike protein was incorporated into mRNA vaccines and adenovirus vector vaccines — given to hundreds of millions of humans — and that it can cause a new type of rapidly progressing sporadic CJD.

According to Mayo Clinic, CJD is a degenerative brain disorder that leads to dementia and, ultimately, death.

Although the Omicron variant does not have a prion region on its spike protein, current COVID-19 vaccines still use the genetic material — including the prion region — of the parent Wuhan strain.

A French pre-print paper published in May on CJD and COVID-19 vaccination identified a new form of sporadic CJD that occurred within days of receiving a first or second dose of Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

Researchers analyzed 26 cases of CJD and found the first symptoms appeared on average 11.38 days after injection with a COVID-19 vaccine.

Of the 26 cases, 20 had died by the time the study was published and six were still alive.

“The 20 deaths occurred only 4.76 months after the injection. Among them, 8 of them lead to a sudden death (2.5 months),” researchers wrote.

“This confirms the radically different nature of this new form of CJD, whereas the classic form requires several decades,” wrote the researchers.

Dr. Jean-Claude Perez, lead author of the French study, on June 6 told The Epoch Times that all 26 cases resulted in death.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prion diseases are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.

Although prions occur naturally in the brain and are usually harmless, they can become diseased or misfolded, affecting nearby prions and causing them to become misshapen.

The abnormal folding of the prion proteins “leads to brain damage and the characteristic signs and symptoms of the disease,” the CDC’s website states.

Sporadic CJD occurs when a person becomes infected for no apparent reason. Once a single prion becomes infected, it will progress to other prions, and there is no treatment capable of stopping it.

Prion area of original Wuhan strain spike protein present in all COVID vaccines can interact with human cells

Although the Omicron variant does not have a prion region on its spike protein, French researchers said other COVID-19 variants, including the parent Wuhan strain used in currently administered vaccines, do.

“We are now studying the very first cases of patients with Omicron, in South Africa, Europe and the USA and Canada in particular,” the researchers wrote. “In ALL of these cases, the Prion region has disappeared.”

However, the Wuhan variant’s spike protein gene information — including its prion region — was integrated into the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vector vaccines.

“We have also demonstrated […] that the Spikes of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections also contain this same Prion region,” the researchers wrote. “The same is true of ALL the other SARS-CoV2 vaccines since ALL are made from the Spike sequence of SARS-CoV2 from Wuhan, which we have demonstrated contains the Prion region.”

With mRNA vaccines, once mRNA is incorporated into the cells, the cell turns mRNA instructions into a COVID-19 spike protein that tricks the cells into believing it has been infected so the body will create an immunological memory against a piece of the virus.

With adenovirus vector vaccines, the DNA of the spike protein is carried into the cell through an adenovirus vector and then into the nucleus where all human DNA is stored. Once there, DNA is transcribed into mRNA and made into the spike protein.

A U.S. study published in Microorganisms in January 2022 showed the prion area of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein incorporated into COVID-19 vaccines is able to interact with human cells.

Although the CDC says COVID-19 vaccines cannot “alter your DNA,” studies show mRNA can be changed into DNA and incorporated into the human genome.

A U.S. study speculated that a misfolded spike protein could create a misfolded prion region that may be able to interact with healthy prions to cause damage, leading to CJD disease.

A peer-reviewed case report published in Turkey and the French preprint identified sudden CJD cases appearing following vaccination with the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines, suggesting links between getting vaccinated and the disease.

A study published last year in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases found a potential link between Pfizer’s vaccine and prion disease in humans.

Despite the existence of new SARS-COV-2 variants, people are still receiving the original COVID-19 vaccines developed with the parent Wuhan variant’s spike protein.

Numerous cases of CJD reported in the U.S.

A U.S. case report in March highlighted 64-year-old Cheryl Cohen’s battle with CJD, which developed within days of her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

The report stated:

“Here, we highlight a case of a 64-year-old woman who presents with rapidly declining memory loss, behavior changes, headaches and gait disturbance approximately one week following administration of the second dose of the novel Pfizer-BioNTech messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine.

“After extensive investigation, conclusive evidence identified the fatal diagnosis of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.”

In an exclusive interview with The Defender in Aug. 2021, Cohen’s daughter, Gianni, said her mother’s regression was “mind-blowing, confusing and truly heartbreaking.”

She went from being able to work and do normal everyday activities to being unable to walk, speak or control her body’s movement, Gianni said. Cohen felt as if her head was “going to explode” and died within three months of receiving her second dose of Pfizer.

In a written statement to The Defender, her physician said:

“This case identifies potential adverse events that could occur with the administration of the novel COVID-19 vaccine. Moreover, clinicians need to consider neurodegenerative diseasessuch as prion disease (e.g. sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), autoimmune encephalitis, infection, non-epileptic seizure, toxic-metabolic disorders, etc. in their differential diagnoses when a patient presents with rapidly progressive dementia, particularly in the setting of recent vaccination.

“Although there is currently no cure for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), early diagnosis is crucial to avoid the unnecessary administration of empiric medications for suspected psychological or neurological disorders.

“Furthermore, tracking adverse events could potentially lead to further characterization and understanding of both the novel COVID-19 messenger ribonucleic nucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine as well as the etiology of sCJD.

“More importantly, recognizing adverse effects provides individuals with vital information to make a more educated decision regarding their health.”

In another exclusive interview with The Defender, Jeffrey Beauchine said his mother, Carol, knew her Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was related to the Moderna shot. Watching her death was like “something you see out of a movie,” he said.

Beauchine said his mother received her first dose of Moderna on Feb. 16, 2021, and didn’t report any complaints. After getting the second dose on March 17, Carol immediately said she “felt different.”

Carol’s symptoms began with numbness that spread from the arm in which she received her injection to the entire left side of her body.

She complained that something was wrong with her brain, couldn’t put thoughts together or make sense of things, developed double vision and blindness and began to experience hallucinations.

Doctors initially thought Carol had suffered a stroke or anxiety. Scans later showed there were abnormalities with her cerebellum.

Carol’s condition progressed rapidly and she was eventually diagnosed with CJD and given days to live. She died within months of receiving her second dose of Moderna.

Carol’s doctors filed a report with the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS I.D. 2180699).

To date, the CDC has not reached out to the family despite an autopsy confirming her death was caused by CJD — a condition she did not have prior to receiving her COVID-19 vaccine.

In another exclusive interview with The Defender, Richard Sprague said his wife, Jennifer, developed CJD after the Pfizer COVID-19 shot and died within five months of the second dose.

Jennifer received the first dose of Pfizer on Aug. 29, 2021, and her second dose on Sept. 21, 2021. Although her husband remained unvaccinated, Jennifer was required to get vaccinated as part of her employment.

Four days after the second dose, Jennifer experienced her first episode of a “sudden strange event she couldn’t explain.”

Jennifer started having more episodes and her left hand and side began to tremble. On Oct. 13, 2021, Jennifer went back to the doctor, who prescribed Xanax for anxiety.

Jennifer’s disease progressed rapidly until she was unable to sit up and walk independently. Scans confirmed Jennifer had significant changes on the right side of her brain. A new medical team performed a spinal tab and confirmed Jennifer had CJD. By this time, Jennifer was unable to get out of bed.

“Your brain is just disappearing. It’s crazy,” Sprague said. “You’re in this perfect healthy body and your brain just dies within the course of a few months.”

After Jennifer was diagnosed with CJD on Feb. 12, her insurance company said it would no longer pay for her care and Sprague was told his wife would not recover.

Jennifer died on Feb. 21 — five months after receiving her second dose of Pfizer.

According to the latest data from VAERS, 56 cases of rapid-onset CJD have been reported following COVID-19 vaccines since Dec. 14, 2021.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

*

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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

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Propaganda in Academia

June 8th, 2022 by Tim Hayward

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Introduction

What does propaganda have to do with academic research and teaching? Citizens can reasonably expect the academic community to generate scholarly understanding and public awareness of what propaganda is and how propaganda operates. Academics should certainly aim to ensure their own research and teaching are not influenced by it. But how well does the academic community actually deal with propaganda? Addressing this question means considering both how propaganda should be dealt with and how academics actually deal with it.

Given the distinctive social role of academics, there are five general responsibilities that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil in relation to propaganda. The most basic is to engage in research and teaching with methods of developing and communicating knowledge quite different from those that constitute propaganda. Whereas propaganda involves strategically communicating information selected on the basis of a prior agenda, the methods of science and scholarship involve collaborative deliberation and openness to new discoveries. A second general responsibility directly follows: academics should endeavour not to succumb to the influence of propaganda in their teaching and research. While seemingly a negligible risk in some fields of inquiry, something to be alert to regarding topics of public controversy is how an academic may, unaware, have passively absorbed assumptions and framings of propagandistic genesis. A third responsibility is to avoid reproducing propaganda, even inadvertently, in teaching and written works. A fourth, more imperative still, is the responsibility not to engage in the active (re)production of propaganda.

The four responsibilities just referred to do come with certain caveats: not all forms of propaganda are necessarily pernicious; perhaps not all instances of it will ever be fully identified; and academics are not necessarily less vulnerable to being deceived by propaganda than are their fellow citizens. But while there is scope for discussion of caveats, the important point is to be clear about the responsibilities themselves. While recognizing a place for reasoned critiques of particular studies of propaganda, in fact, we need also to be aware of one further general responsibility, namely, to ensure that the critical study of propaganda is not actively obstructed or attacked. This distinct fifth responsibility unfortunately needs mentioning because, as we will see, the active discouragement of critical study of certain cases of propaganda comes not only from representatives of vested interests outside academia but even sometimes from people who hold positions within.

The purpose of this article is to heighten awareness of why a conscious commitment to fulfilling those responsibilities is important for the academic community and the wider society it serves. Illustrations will generally be drawn from cases I happen to have some familiarity with, but the aim is to discern certain patterns of propaganda at work that others will be able to trace across a wider range of topics of public interest.

Propaganda as a subject matter of academic study

The first thing to be aware of is that effective propaganda exercises its influence largely unnoticed. Any of us, including those who happen to be academics, may not necessarily recognize it in practice, because it can be designed to work by eliciting psychological and emotional responses that bypass the more rational faculties involved in conscious deliberations such as are honed through academic study. Propaganda involves forms of communication that can be described as strategic because their purpose is to promote certain beliefs regardless of how well these are supported by evidence or dispassionate reasoning. Contemporary methods of strategic communications – often branded as ‘public relations’ – have been honed in the business world, but they are also deployed by governments and other state and non-state actors, including as a ‘soft’, or ‘non-kinetic’, aspect of military operations. They can involve complex and extensive organisation.

Strategic communication contrasts quite starkly with a model of communicative action describable as deliberative, which is what scholars and scientists aim to engage in. Academic methods and procedures, which are intended to make reliable knowledge and understanding possible, involve promoting the values of careful and thorough investigation of evidence combined with intellectual integrity in the application of reason and argument. Thus the deliberative communication of ideal academic inquiry stands opposed to the aims and methods of strategic communication.

Insofar as strategic communication is the antithesis of what academic inquiry ideally involves, there should in principle be no place for it in the practices of scholarship and science other than as an object of study. Study of it should also be suitably critical. For although there is much to be learned from the writings of practitioners – such as the seminal study, Propaganda, by Edward Bernays in 1928 or the more recent NATO Handbook of Strategic Communication – academic study of its use requires the application also of epistemological and ethical judgement in assessing the status of its truth claims and its wider socio-political impacts. The need for critical attention is accentuated by the fact – emphasised by practitioners themselves – that the most effective propaganda is not readily noticed as such. Yet, despite some notable contributions (from e.g. Bakir et al, Herman and Chomsky, Miller and Dinan), critical scholarship regarding propaganda remains a marginal activity within academia. As for the idea that propaganda could be a problem in academia, this is little discussed.

So having set out a clear contrast between the deliberative communication of academic work and the strategic communication of propaganda operations, it has to be acknowledged that how things ideally should be is not always how they are. In reality, the influence of strategic communications can affect academic research in a variety of ways.

Passive absorption of assumptions from propaganda

Although academics characteristically have epistemological capabilities that can help them resist propagandistic claims, some potential vulnerabilities to deception are attendant on those epistemological advantages.

For one thing, because academic research develops in depth as a result of specialisation, researchers can sometimes become ‘siloed’ in their narrow field, and some kinds of cross-disciplinary expertise needed for the identification of propaganda may simply not be well-developed by any particular grouping of academics.

A second disadvantage is attendant on the virtue of academic research in creating authoritative bodies of knowledge and procedures for validating them. For the academic requirement of duly acknowledging the accumulated knowledge on a given topic of inquiry, before presuming to innovate on it, can sometimes trap researchers in ways of thinking that are not well-suited to a discerning analysis of novel problems. They may find themselves at an epistemic disadvantage – i.e. liable to deception – in relation to strategic communications, particularly innovative forms of these, since, unlike academic communications, these are not constrained to observe principles of what we might call ‘epistemic due process’.

A third disadvantage attends academics’ professional freedom to pursue the ‘life of the mind’ in their highly focused endeavours, for this can mean being to some extent cloistered from the wider gamut of human affairs. Certain kinds of naivety can prevail. In the context of propaganda, an illustration would be a degree of reliance on the accuracy and good faith of reports published in the established press, with the media being considered ‘a properly constituted epistemic authority’ and, ‘in the main, trustworthy’. Of course, by no means all academics are naïve or cloistered, and not all cite non-academic publications in their work, at least uncritically, but it is not hard to find examples of academic writings influenced by assumptions generated through strategic communications that are relayed through mainstream or corporate media. In fact, this can even happen when a researcher’s actual aim is to diagnose the propaganda of a disinformation campaign, as the following case illustrates.

In a 2017 Guardian article, Olivia Solon presented what she called ‘a neat case study in the prevailing information wars’. She identified what she claimed was a Russia-backed disinformation campaign deploying a ‘network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls’ whose purpose was ‘to discredit the White Helmets rescue workers in Syria’. The article has since been cited in dozens of academic discussions. What many of these have not noted, however, is the fact that regardless of how reliable the information promoted by the White Helmets and supporters may be, it was conveyed as part of a demonstrable propaganda campaign: the White Helmets were founded under the auspices of a UK-funded strategic communications operation; they were funded by Western governments, including the UK which expressly acknowledged the value of their testimony in providing confidence to its statements made in condemnation of Russian. Furthermore, although Solon alleges that criticism of the White Helmets stems from a Russian disinformation campaign, the earliest sceptical publications actually came from independent journalists in Canada (Cory Morningstar) and the US (Rick Sterling). Solon ignores these and also dismisses the influential work of independent journalist Vanessa Beeley, on the advice of James Sadri, Director of the organisation responsible for the White Helmets’ public relations campaign in the West. All of the other sources that Solon cites in support of her argument also have traceable connections to NATO strategic communications operations. Neither she nor The Guardian would respond to questions about the article, which was closed to readers’ comments.

So an academic who has not independently researched the matter, but cites claims from Solon’s article as established findings, can be said to have passively absorbed propaganda. They may do this because the focus of their own work is on a different subject, and they mean simply to offer an indicative reference standing for a more generic phenomenon (e.g. Bunce 2019, Clay 2021). They may also appeal to the general defence that we all have to take some things on trust, for reasons Neil Levy has examined. Yet it is still objectively problematic, since even offhand references do help sediment propaganda claims in the academic literature.

Uncritical reproduction of propaganda claims

More problematic, nevertheless, is when a researcher does not merely cite a propaganda claim inadvertently when writing about something else but actively reproduces one by taking it as a substantive premise of their own work. With regard to the Solon article, for example, we find several academics have advanced their own research contributions on the premise of a disinformation campaign with the features and protagonists Solon claimed (e.g., Brandt 2021; Cosentino and Alikasifoglu 2019; Freeman 2019; Hernandez et al 2020; Horawalavithana et al 2020); Lester 2018; Levinger 2018; Martin and Shapiro 2019; Merlan 2019; O’Shaughnessy 2020; Pacheco et al 2020; Starbird et al 2019; Vilmer et al 2018; Wilson and Starbird 2020).

More problematically still, some academics have uncritically reproduced specific claims about important matters of fact – even serious crimes – that have been recorded in the literature on the basis of propaganda rather than as a result of good faith investigation.

An example concerns an event in Douma, Syria, in 2018, where 43 civilians were found dead. The Western media reproduced the claim that the deaths were a result of a chemical attack by the Syrian government – a claim cited as justification for US, UK, and France firing missiles into Syria a week later. Yet the evidence appealed to in the allegations was found by inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) not to support them. However, the OPCW’s management excluded the inconvenient evidence in their official report which was then seized upon by the Western powers as confirmation of their claimed justification for their missile attack. Whatever is the truth of the matter, any academic researcher would know, especially since the inspectors’ original report and documented misgivings came to light, to be cautious about accepting the official version and would certainly not uncritically reproduce it. Thus, several authors do treat the matter in an academically responsible fashion (e.g. Al-Kassimi 2021; Beal 2020; de Beer and Tladi 2019; de Lint 2021; Gray 2019; Kleczkowska 2020; Olsen 2019; Portela and Moret 2020; Tomić 2020; van der Pijl 2020; Yue and Zhu 2020), and some are quite thoroughly critical (see in particular publications by members and associates of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media). Yet we find a number of articles in academic publications that do insufficient epistemic diligence. This might be because the focus of discussion is elsewhere and reference to the event simply reproduces the assumption that the official Western version of it is authoritative (e.g. Ekzayez and Sabouni 2020; Orchard 2020 and Watkin 2020). Some authors are one-sided in selecting sources, but without necessarily making specific controversial claims (e.g. Notte 2020; Van Schaack 2020). Some do explicitly uncritically affirm the West’s version (e.g. Anthony 2020, Mitton 2019, Newlee 2020), or confusedly do so (Reynolds 2020). Some who follow these matters closely are aware of critical questions yet ignore them (e.g. Koblentz 2019). Some choose even to disparage the critical questions and those asking them, as is the case with authors from the Bellingcat organisation (Fiorella et al 2021).

A more general kind of problem is that whole research programmes can sometimes become skewed in favouring one view of the world over another. Indeed, ideologies are sometimes nurtured within academia that can have significant propaganda value. For instance, Inderjeet Parmar suggests that some social sciences, including the discipline of International Relations (IR), developed as ‘products of Anglo-American early twentieth-century hegemonic elite knowledge networks aimed at securing elite and imperial-state interests’. Relatedly, critics of the way Economics is taught in universities complain that the dominant neoclassical paradigm enjoys a virtual monopoly from which it promotes ‘free-market propaganda’. Indeed, Peter Söderbaum has lamented that universities’ economics departments have become ‘political propaganda centers not very different from the think tanks that we see these days in the USA and Europe.’

When the activities of a university are not clearly distinguishable from those of a think tank, there is a heightened risk of not only reproducing but actually producing propaganda.

Production of propaganda

Although the rigours of academic procedures provide reasonable safeguards against the production of propaganda within universities, more insidious opportunities for it arise in what we might call the ‘para-academic’ sphere. Here the reputation of universities is in one way or another leveraged to give credibility to communications that have not been subjected to the rigours of good faith peer review and would not necessarily have survived them. This sphere notably includes think tanks and NGOs with campaigning agendas and influential backers. When such organisations promote research dedicated to the pursuit of specific objectives, the publications they authorize will not necessarily disseminate the best available knowledge on a subject but may instead present claims that fit with their particular agenda. In this respect, their approach differs decisively from that of independent academic working groups, and the same is true of their preparedness to suppress knowledge found inconvenient for their purposes. (Strategic omission of information is itself an important part of propaganda.) Yet such organisations might employ academically qualified researchers – who may also hold or have held university positions – and thus lay claim to academic credibility in virtue of those credentials.

The blurring of boundaries between universities and think tanks can undermine the academic community’s fulfilment of responsibilities regarding propaganda in several ways. As well as leveraging the academic reputations of individual researchers to the purposes of special interests, para-academic activities can also involve leveraging the reputation of a university itself. For instance, individuals whose principal employment is in journalism, or at a think tank or NGO, may take visiting or honorary fellowships at universities and enjoy the reputational benefit of the association without necessarily making a commensurate academic contribution. Or they may publish working papers or blogs under a university’s banner whereby a veneer of credibility is lent to material that independent academic reviewers might have regarded as partisan polemics. It is also possible for businesses to leverage university connections so as to imply academic respectability for activities that might be regarded as propagandistic. An example is the teaming up of a business ‘based at’ Goldsmiths, University of London, with Bellingcat to produce a reconstruction of the Douma ‘chemical attack’ that supports OPCW management’s official version against that of the OPCW’s actual inspectors. This involved ‘modelling’ of a situation that failed to accord with the actual records and measurements gathered by inspectors on the ground, or even with visual evidence incidentally broadcast by the BBC (Hayward 2019a; Watson 2020a, 2020b). Yet the piece, published in the New York Times, has been approvingly cited in academic literature.

The use of modelling in place of real-world evidence is more generally a versatile tool for propaganda. This was illustrated by the UK’s response to Covid-19, which relied on modelling by Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor with a track record of over-estimating the threat to life posed by new pathogens. Simon Ruda, one of the government’s leading behavioural scientists involved in generating public fear on the basis of Ferguson’s projections, conceded in retrospect that there had been an overemphasis on modelling and data that was ‘propagandistic’. Ruda had come to regret how the ‘nudges’ instigated by the behavioural scientists ‘inadvertently sanctioned state propaganda’. This was ‘unethical and undemocratic’ according to a group of healthcare professionals led by Gary Sidley.

In general, a degree of intellectual humility would be an appropriate element of academic diligence on the part of the media-promoted experts. It would have been helpful, for instance, in the case of a high profile academic claiming on a BBC programme shown in UK schools that ‘Covid-19 vaccines are 100% safechildren should get the vaccine to protect their parents, and the benefits to children outweigh any risks.’ According to a complaint made on behalf of independent medics, ‘such a simplified and biased message’ was ‘deeply irresponsible’ and ‘amounts to propaganda’. Even assuming academics who promote one side of a debate do so in good faith, the point is that scholarship and science develop by means of debate and disagreement, which does not happen if only one side of an argument is heard.

This issue is all the more significant with matters attended unavoidably by a degree of secrecy, as when they concern national security or intelligence. Given this is the situation for some of the most momentous decisions that elected representatives must decide on – such as going to war – there is a need for scrupulous alertness to the possibility of being swayed by propaganda. This was made very clear in the wake of the 2003 Iraq war.

Nevertheless, some academics appear to have been drawn into propaganda operations that serve to heighten geopolitical tensions. For instance, we are aware, thanks to leaked documents, of the so-called Integrity Initiative, supported by the Institute for Statecraft, that has involved academics as well as journalists in clusters engaged in covert operations to present a one-sided view of relations with Russia (Hayward 2018, Klarenberg 2019, King and Miller 2020). Nor is the problem simply with covertly directed activities. There is a university research centre overtly funded by UK security and intelligence agencies whose publications ‘are subject to review by the Security and Intelligence Agencies’. This means their readers cannot be sure there are no ‘key omissions in data, analysis or argumentation’. Such concerns are intensified when researchers find themselves obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act. This, as Massoumi and colleagues observe, ‘opens up the possibility for secret or covert research’, which ‘cannot be properly tested by others since none of the data from the research is available.’

Another use of social science for potentially propagandised ends is in manipulating online discourse and activism to generate outcomes congenial to its sponsors. The tactics deployed by a formerly secret British propaganda unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) aimed to ‘“discredit”, promote “distrust,” “dissuade,” “deceive,” “disrupt,” “delay,” “deny,” “denigrate/degrade,” and “deter”’. Although criticised by other psychologists, a psychologist involved in this work defended it on the speculative grounds that the harm it would do might be outweighed by harms it could help avert. Such tactics have received academic support also from other quarters. The case for governments intervening in citizens’ conversations – through ‘cognitive infiltration’ – has not only been approved but even positively advocated by certain academics with government connections, notably the US legal scholar and government advisor Cass Sunstein.

Sunstein has specifically developed such an argument in response to what he claims is the danger of conspiracy theories. Critics of this view, such as Kurtis Hagen and myself, highlight how the use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ as a slur is used to discourage critical discussion of public malfeasance by implicitly branding critics as delusional. The effect of labelling certain concerns as ‘conspiracy theories’ is effectively to make discussion of them taboo, which is the antithesis of a scientific or scholarly approach and can allow propaganda a free pass. Arguably, a greater threat to democracy than conspiracy theories is the pre-emption of dissenting views and the suppression of free speech this involves.

Certainly, the logic of Sunstein’s approach tends to undermine the possibility of a critical study of propaganda. That is why, I argue, there is also a responsibility of academics to defend such study against its attackers, within and beyond academia.

Attacks on scholars of propaganda

Mutual criticism is at the heart of academic activity and crucial to its advancement. In the rigorous testing of ideas, new insights emerge and old illusions get laid to rest. Exchanges can be robust, but good faith criticisms of an idea are not the same as attempts to discredit those who advance it. Yet when one side of a controversy is actively promoted by the dominant media, those who articulate principled concerns about it may come under personal attack.

I learned this first hand doing epistemic diligence on media reports relating to the war in Syria. On one early occasion, academic members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), including myself, were subjected to an onslaught of smears in The Times newspaper, on both front and inner pages. The attacks did not mention anything we had published, but aimed simply to undermine our reputations. These attacks were lent a veneer of apparent academic support by citing opinions of certain individuals with academic credentials known for a willingness to engage in ad hominem abuse in defence of official narratives.

This propaganda tactic has been conspicuous in Covid-19 communications, where highly respected epidemiologists, doctors and other relevantly qualified scientists have been vilified for articulating views contrary to those being promoted in the mainstream media (Broudy and Hoop 2021; Cáceres 2022; Hughes 2021). One instance was the campaign against the concerned scientists who issued the Great Barrington Declaration. They had argued, ‘in view of a thousand-fold difference in COVID mortality risk between the old and the young’, for a policy of ‘focussed protection’. But the media were ‘working 24/7 to say that lockdowns were the only option, so anyone against them was a “Covid denier.” It was brutal.’ We now know from leaked emails that Dr Anthony Fauci, the US president’s Chief Medical Advisor, responded to a colleague’s call for ‘a quick and devastating published take down’ of the dissenters’ premises by pointing to an available example: an article by Gregg Gonsalves, an academic at Yale. This was not so much a reasoned critique as the manifestation of an approach the author summed up in a tweet: ‘This f*****g Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that won’t go away’.

Attacks on academics by academics generally take the form of op-eds, letters or tweets – forms of communication not subject to peer review. Smears can gain considerable public traction without peer scrutiny and without the targets having any meaningful right of reply. Academics subjected to smears can even find that their own universities are swayed by them. There have been disturbing cases of universities disciplining their own academics on the basis of externally-driven smear campaigns.

Campaigns can also target publishers who are pressured to retract items that go against official claims. For instance, when David Hughes published an article on the silence of the IR discipline about unresolved controversies concerning events of 9/11, this was the subject of extraordinary vitriol on the part of certain other academics. Fortunately, editor and publisher held firm in this case, but other publishers have yielded to pressures. A striking example came to light as I was writing this article. The publisher Edward Elgar announced it was removing a chapter by Piers Robinson from its recently published Research Handbook on Political Propaganda. Since the chapter in question documents campaigns to silence academics who present inconvenient truths, this occurrence is a clear case of Quod Erat Demonstrandum! [Happily, the text of Robinson’s chapter, together with notes on the story of its removal, is now freely available.]

A particularly sickening instrumentalization of universities in the service of propaganda involves the coaxing of students with journalistic ambitions to write attacks on academics – regardless of whether they have even had any dealings with the academic targeted. An egregious example of this resulted in David Miller’s recent sacking by Bristol University. That case involved a particularly sustained and coordinated campaign, but I am personally aware of other, lower level, attacks, including several on myself. One student at Sheffield collaborated with HuffPost senior editor Chris York – himself author of more than a dozen attacks on WGSPM – in attacking Piers Robinson, and then attempted to do the same to me. Fortunately, that attack was aborted when a student at my university, contacted for negative comment, instead alerted me.

Then another student journalist approached me at the instigation of producers working for the BBC on its Mayday podcast series – itself the subject of a rare rebuke from the BBC’s own complaints unit – but, investigating the story independently, opted to decline the producers’ suggestion. A less principled student, however, did publish an attack on me for the Murdoch publication The Tab – without contacting me or verifying its defamatory accusations. Notwithstanding this lack of journalistic ethics, her attack was praised and amplified on Twitter by Oliver Kamm of The Times, to whom she replied ‘Thank you so much Oliver! Always available for work experience at The Times! [“Wink” emoji]’. Kamm has since deleted his tweets, but the sort of example he sets to aspiring journalists has already been noted by others (Leiter 2005, Peterson and Herman 2010, Robinson 2022, Sayeed 2016).

Academics who are not as aware as they could be of how propaganda operates in practice may not appreciate the degree of epistemic diligence that ought to be applied to mainstream narratives. A telling illustration was provided by the student who chose to speak to me rather than the HuffPost. This Syrian student spoke of cognitive unease at ‘the overwhelming outlook of those around me in Scotland and at the university,’ feeling implicit pressure to conform to a view that conflicted with personal understanding of the situation in Syria. The student avoided writing essays on Syria. The fact that academics can contribute to demoralising experiences like that, for want of awareness of how their own assumptions can have origin in highly coordinated propaganda operations, should be a concern to anyone working in education. When the media single out for attack those of us making this very point it shows how their values and ethos are fundamentally at odds with the very vocation of academics.

Attacks on academics who challenge official orthodoxies are launched under the guise of combatting disinformation, and general concerns about disinformation are certainly now widespread. But before presuming to combat disinformation, one needs to reliably identify it, which means understanding the ways in which it can be purveyed and also having a robust epistemic account of what one takes to be reliable information. These are essential responsibilities of academics and need to be applied no less to orthodox views than to those that challenge them.

Conclusion

Academics have unique skills and an important social role to play in maintaining open and honest communications. This article has argued that there are significant responsibilities they should acknowledge and, collectively, work to fulfil. The wider public has reasonable expectations that universities are able to assure the integrity of knowledge available for public discussion – which, in practice, means also being ready, when necessary, to help cut through propaganda claims or hold officials to account.

Even if these expectations are not always fully met, they should still guide what academics aspire to. This article has acknowledged that to engage critically with the strategic communications of powerful actors can be difficult in itself and can even encounter active resistance. That engagement can require a certain resolve, particularly when, as Bertrand Russell many years ago observed, it means taking a stand against ‘the powerful organizations which control most of human activity’. But if academics cannot hold the line against the propagandising of information in public debate, it is not clear who else will be able to do it.

*

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Tim Hayward is a social and political philosopher whose books include Ecological Thought: an introduction (Polity, 1995), Constitutional Environmental Rights (OUP 2005) and Global Justice & Finance (OUP 2019). His current work examines the influence of strategic communications on the development of norms of international justice. As a founding member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, his studies of propaganda in action have led to academic publications on ‘conspiracy theory’, ‘disinformation’, and academic duties of due epistemic diligence. Tim maintains a personal blog and Twitter account. He is Professor of Environmental Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh.

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UK Medical Freedom Alliance (2021) ‘Open Letter to Professor Devi Sridhar Re BBC Newsround Episode on Children’s Vaccines’. Accessed 23 February 2022. https://www.ukmedfreedom.org/open-letters/open-letter-to-professor-devi-sridhar-re-bbc-newsround-episode-on-childrens-vaccines.

Van der Pijl, Kees (2020)‘The Coming Trial of the MH17 Suspects. A Piece of Political Theatre?’ Accessed 23 February 2022. https://www.academia.edu/41166182/The_Coming_Trial_of_the_MH17_Suspects_A_Piece_of_Political_Theatre.

Van Schaack, Beth (2020) ‘Innovations in ICL Documentation Methodologies and Institutions’. In Imagining Justice for Syria. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190055967.003.0009.

Vilmer, J.-B. Jeangène et al (2018) ‘Information Manipulation: A Challenge for Our Democracies’. Media Freedom Resource Centre OBCT. Accessed 23 February 2022. https://www.rcmediafreedom.eu/Publications/Reports/Information-Manipulation-A-Challenge-for-Our-Democracies.

Watkin Kenneth (2020) ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Where it Stands in 2020’, Southwestern Journal of International Law 26(2): 213-240. https://www.swlaw.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/Watkin_213-240_v26n2.pdf

Watson, Philip (2020a) ‘Two Buildings – Two Cylinders: Part 1’. Hiddensyria (blog), 5 January 2020. https://hiddensyria.com/2020/01/05/two-buildings-two-cylinders-part-1/.

Watson, Philip (2020b) ‘Douma Incident and Forensic Architecture – The Emails’. OffGuardian(blog), 7 March 2020. https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/07/douma-incident-and-forensic-architecture-the-emails/.

Wilson, Tom and Starbird, Kate (2020) ‘Cross-platform disinformation campaigns: lessons learned and next steps’. Misinformation Review, 14 January: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/cross-platform-disinformation-campaigns/

Yue Hanjing and Zhu Ying (2020) ‘Great Power Game around the Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria and the New Norm on Banning Chemical Weapons’, Scholars Journal of Economics, Business and Management, 7(9): 304-312. https://saspublishers.com/media/articles/SJEBM_79_304-312.pdf

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“The best way to resolve the opposition of both French and English groups [in Canada] is to swamp the French population under the steady stream of a methodically organized immigration, controlled initially, greeted on arrival and ensured of a privileged position in the colony.” Lord Durham (John Lambton), (1792-1840), in ‘Report on the Affairs of British North America’, Jan. 31, 1839, (mainly written by Charles Buller).”

“Economic thinking about immigration is generally quite superficial. It is a fact that in different [rich] countries, reproducible national capital is on the order of four times yearly national income. As a result, when an additional immigrant worker arrives, in order to build the necessary infrastructure (housing, hospitals, schools, universities, infrastructure of all kinds, industrial facilities, etc.), additional savings equal to four times the annual salary of this worker will be needed. If this worker arrives with a wife and three children, the additional savings required will represent, depending on the case, ten to twenty times the annual salary of this worker, which obviously represents a very heavy burden for the economy to bear.” Maurice Allais (1911-2010), 1988 Nobel Prize in economics, 2002.

“A people who is not master of its fate should limit its level of immigration to its capacity of integration. It is on this condition that cultural diversity can be positive. Otherwise, our roots and our identity are in danger.” Rosaire Morin (1923-1999), Quebec journalist, 1966.

During the last federal election campaign in Canada, the issue of mass immigration for decades to come received virtually no attention.

Let us recall that during this election, the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) obtained 32.6 percent of the vote. Moreover, since the voter turnout was only 62.9 percent, the direct popular support the LPC received from all Canadian voters was only 20,3 percent.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to arrive at the conclusion that the current Liberal minority government in Ottawa has received a clear and legitimate mandate from the people of Canada to substantially change the demographic composition of the country, for decades to come. This would surely be the result if a mass immigration policy is implemented over the long run.

The Proposal of the Toronto lobby ‘Century Initiative’

Few people know that an obscure political organization, founded in 2011 by a small lobby of businessmen and journalists from Toronto, and bearing the name ‘Century Initiative‘, has proposed to triple the Canadian population by the year 2100.

Indeed, the Toronto group ‘Century Initiative’ asserts that Canada—which counted 37  million inhabitants at the last census in 2021, and which normally, according to official projections, should have 53 million in the year 2100, (with a natural population growth rate and an average immigration policy)—should aim instead at having 100 million inhabitants by the year 2100, and not 53 million, and that the Canadian federal governments should, for this purpose, adopt a very aggressive immigration policy.

At this extreme migratory rate, already one of the highest in the world, if not the highest, Canada would no longer be recognizable, demographically speaking, in less than one generation or two. A major population replacement policy would have been implemented, almost on the sly, without public debate, without a general consultation and without in-depth studies on the probable consequences of such a project.

According to the plan designed by the Toronto lobby, within barely 78 years, Canada would have several mega urban agglomerations of more than ten million inhabitants, a bit like China today. Indeed, it is forecast that metropolitan Toronto would increase its population from 8.8 to 33.5 million inhabitants; that metropolitan Montreal would expand from 4.4 to 12.2 million inhabitants; that metropolitan Vancouver would grow from 3.3 to 11.9 million inhabitants, etc. Several Canadian megacities would each have about the same population as some medium-sized independent countries.

[N.B.: On October 23, 2016, one of the co-founders of the ‘Century Initiative’ lobby, Toronto businessman Dominic Barton (1962-), gave an interview to Global News in which he said: “It’s a big number [100 million]—for me it’s more than an ambitious number”… “It would obviously change the country considerably. It’s a different vision… But I don’t think it’s madness!”]. Is this a hoax?

Drawbacks and consequences of the ‘Century Initiative’ project

The implementation of the ‘Century Initiative’ project to triple the population of Canada in less than a century would result in numerous drawbacks and consequences, whether economic, political, social, cultural, linguistic, geographical or environmental.

Canada would suffer much more than a demographic shock. Indeed, besides profoundly upending the Canadian population, other impacts could be expected: more congestion more pollution, increased diseconomies of scale with the overload of public services in health, education and transportation facilities, more ghettoization, more language conflicts, more crime, more insecurity, etc.

Weaknesses in the main arguments of the ‘Century Initiative’ to triple the Canadian population

The two main arguments advanced by the lobby behind the ‘Century Initiative’ to triple the population of Canada in less than a century are:

1. Increase the political importance of Canada on the international scene, by ensuring that Canada is among the 45 most populous countries on the planet, by the year 2100;

2. Increase Canada’s economic growth rate. This would be attained mainly through bloating the number of domestic consumers and workers through a program of mass immigration.

A question begs to be asked: Is ‘bigness for bigness sake’ a relevant reason to transform the demographic picture of Canada? Indeed, such an argument essentially rests on the dubious idea that the level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its bulimic growth should be front and center in matters of public policy. What about the quality of life, living standards of the population and their happiness?

There are several countries with a large population in the world, but they are often relatively poor, and their demographic weight does not necessarily translate into an enviable position on the international scene.

Short of wishing to become a heavily militarized empire, Canada already plays a relatively large role internationally. However, over the years, this role has been somewhat diminished from what it was under the government of Lester B. Pearson (1897-1972), the winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. It is not because of Canada’s lack of demographic weight, but because the Canadian politicians who succeeded Pearson have not measured up.

With free trade, Canada does not need a very large population

Since January 1, 1989, Canada is in a position of free trade with the United States. Moreover, that agreement was enlarged to include Mexico in 1994.

In such a commercial environment, Canadian producers are by no means limited to the Canadian market to sell their products. They are able to reach high output levels, which generate economies of scale, by exporting part of their production to the American market. Similarly, Canadian consumers have access to imports from the United States, which increases the diversity of supplies and stabilizes prices.

Living standards in the world are not linked to the demographic size of countries

A country’s standard of living (GDP per capita) is hardly related to its demographic size. Rather, it would seem to be the opposite. This is clearly shown in the publications of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The UNDP publishes the Human Development Index (HDI), a global index ranking of countries according to the standard of living and quality of life of their inhabitants. This index shows the level of qualitative development (life expectancy, education, standard of living) of each country.

Barring exceptions, it is inevitably the small or medium-sized countries that occupy the first ranks, regarding the standard of living and the quality of life of the inhabitants, and not the most populated countries. In most cases, there is a negative relationship between the large demographic size of a country and their population’s standard of living.

In 2019, for example, the top three countries for standard of living and quality of life all had less than 10 million inhabitants: Norway (pop. 5.3 million), Ireland (pop. 5.0 million) and Switzerland (pop. 8.5 million).

Arguments related to the aging of the population and labor shortages

The ‘Century Initiative’ invokes two other arguments in favor of very high immigration levels. One is supposedly to compensate for the aging of the population (caused by a drop in the fertility rate and an increase in life expectancy). Another is to prevent a possible labor shortage cased partly by the retirement of the ‘baby-boomers’, that is, the population cohort born between 1945 and 1965 in Canada.

It is true that these two phenomena will require adjustments and complementary policies in the short and medium term, that is to say until around the year 2050, when the ‘baby-boomer’ cohort will have largely disappeared, but not necessarily in the very long term, stretched over a whole century.

For example, studies show that immigration as such does not substantially modify the age structure of a population, essentially because the majority of immigrants arrive in the country as adults and the family reunification program contributes by bringing in immigrants who are already elderly (spouses, parents, grand-parents, etc.).

On this topic, the demographic studies of Benoît Dubreuil and Guillaume Marois (‘Le remède imaginaire‘/The imaginary remedy) indicate that the contribution of immigration on a large scale is not necessarily a panacea for rejuvenating a population, and that it can sometimes accentuate its aging problem. Other studies come to the same conclusions, namely that it is impossible to reverse the aging of populations through a high level of immigration of foreign adults and elderly dependents.

Means of mitigating the economic impact of an aging population through the year 2050

Other industrialized countries are facing the same problem of a demographic shock, and they resort to different means than relying on mass international immigration to deal with it.

For example, Japan is a prosperous industrial nation with an even older population than Canada, but it does not rely on international immigration to address the phenomenon.

Indeed, a country can instead put forward policies aimed at raising the fertility rate and the birth rate. Other policies may delay the retirement age in view of the increase in life expectancy. The same applies to measures to facilitate and increase the role of women in the labor force.

A government can encourage training in basic trades (computer specialists, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, technicians, etc.). In addition, as several companies are already doing, there is an opportunity to make greater use of robotics to perform labor-intensive tasks and raise productivity levels. And, ultimately, a selective immigration policy, based on identified economic needs, can rely on temporary foreign workers.

Regarding labor shortages, it is important to situate the issue in its overall economic context.

In theory, if a particular industry has a need for skilled workers, it is possible to adopt a temporary program to attract such workers from abroad. However, if one is talking about a generalized shortage of labor in the whole economy, which cannot be corrected through higher wages and training programs, that is quite another matter. On the one hand, if the rate of population growth naturally slows, consumption will also slow. The same would apply to some industries, which must adapt to a fluctuating demand or face increased competition with imports.

Moreover, as we saw earlier with the family reunification program, Canada imports many more consumers than workers with its mass immigration program. There is a danger of solving the problem of a labor shortage in one industry in particular, but simultaneously creating labor shortages in other industries, particularly in education and health sectors, in housing, in transport facilities and in private and public services and infrastructures in general. The economy could then face an endless spiral of labor shortages, with permanent tight labor markets that are created artificially and are inflated by a population that is growing too quickly through immigration.

Political, linguistic and cultural impact on French-Canadians and on French Quebec

The ‘Century Initiative’ lobby seems unconcerned about the consequences of its extreme immigration project on French-Canadians in general, and on their status as a political majority in Quebec. If the Canadian government were to continue on the path of a “Canada of 100 million inhabitants” by resorting to an ultra-mass immigration policy, the place of French-Canadians in Canada could only decline dramatically over the coming decades.

It is a fact that during the 20th century, Canadian immigration policy has resulted in a continuous decline in the demographic and political weight of the French-speaking population. In 1941, the first language of 29.3 percent of the population was French. However, by 2016, it had fallen to 21 percent, a drop of more than eight percentage points in 75 years. If the ‘Century Initiative’ project is implemented, it is possible to foresee a fall at least as important during the next 75 years. The result would be a situation that would threaten the very viability and durability of the French language in Canada in the next century.

As far as Quebec is concerned (one of the four founding provinces of Canada in 1867), its demographic weight in Canada as a whole could fall to as low as 10 percent by the end of the century. And in Quebec itself, francophones could find themselves in a minority on the territory of their ancestors, for the first time in 500 years.

If the federal government under J. Trudeau continues to implicitly endorse the ‘Century Initiative’ project, such an extreme immigration policy is bound to de facto“marginalize” French-speaking Quebec and to weaken the place of French-Canadians in Canada.

[N.B.: Regarding the daily scandal of ‘Chemin Roxham‘ (Roxham Road), the illegal border crossing in Quebec for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and bogus refugees, with the help of professional smugglers—the only one of this nature in Canada—a solution must be found. In a democracy, if a government is unable to enforce the country’s borders, its primary responsibility is to resign.]

Conclusion

When all is taken into consideration, the Canadian federal government should publicly reject the project of ‘Century Initiative’. If, instead, it persists in finding inspiration for its immigration policy in the proposal of the Toronto group, the Canadian population will have to deal with a planned immigration tsunami in the future.

In a true democracy, the adoption of such a long-term public policy should be submitted to the people for approval. However, neither the proposal of Canada’s 100 million inhabitants by the ‘Century Initiative’ lobby, nor the extreme immigration policy inspired by it, have been the subject of public debates or have been submitted to the population, either in a referendum or in a general election. This is a major breach of democracy.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University. 

He is a Research Associate of  the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Featured image is from Toronto Star

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On May 21, Australians elected as their new prime minister Anthony Albanese of the Labor Party, who defeated conservative Scott Morrison. CNN reported that Australians had delivered a strong verdict on the need to act against climate change.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that Anthony Albanese’s government will be any different when it comes to foreign policy than Scott Morrison’s.

Albanese has said explicitly that he is committed to AUKUS, the Australia-United Kingdom-United States strategic partnership against China.

During the election campaign, Albanese attacked the Morrison government for what he called a “massive foreign policy failure” vis-à-vis the Solomons/China agreement—a bilateral security cooperation agreement granting China access to the Solomon Islands’ ports.

Albanese has further promised to create a training school in Australia to train the militaries from various Pacific nations.

During the election campaign, he and Morrison competed on who would be tougher toward China.

Colour photo of middle-aged man in suit sitting behind desk with UN symbol in background. - click to view larger image

The last time that an Australian Labor government offered a markedly different foreign policy was the 1972-75 government led by Gough Whitlam—which was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup.

Image on the right: Gough Whitlam in 1974. [Source: nma.gov.au]

Both Whitlam and Albanese had themselves sworn in as Prime Minister immediately after their respective election wins, but the contrast could not be starker.

Whereas Whitlam rejected alliances with imperialist powers, Albanese wanted to immediately scurry off to Tokyo to meet Joe Biden and reassure him of Australia’s continued loyalty as a good and obedient servant.

The Australian Labor Party has not questioned the American alliance since Whitlam. Its current policies fit a long tradition in the Australasia region of whipping up alarm about “outsiders” muscling into “its backyard.”

At the end of the Vietnam War, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Rob Muldoon (1975-1984) used to commandeer prime time on the country’s solitary TV network to issue dire warnings about the Soviet Union being able to move its Pacific Fleet thousands of kilometers south from Vladivostok to Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay and, hence, that much closer to “us.” Didn’t happen.

There were some beat-up stories about Soviet submarines in “our” Pacific. A few years later there was preposterous alarm about Gaddafi’s Libya getting a toe hold in the Pacific. Nothing came of that, either.

Indeed, the only Pacific military power to attack New Zealand in the second half of the 20th century was not Russia or China or Vietnam. No, it was France, which bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, killing one crew member, getting most of the killers out of the Pacific by submarine, and bullying NZ to release the two killers imprisoned here. That’s right, the only actual violence—an act of terrorism, if not war—came from “our side” in the Pacific, one which maintains a considerable military presence in the Pacific to this day. Oh dear, how embarrassing. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The bombed Rainbow Warrior is in Marsden Wharf in Auckland Harbour after the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship by French secret service agents.

Source: greenpeace.org

Solomons: Same Old Yellow Peril Script

Now it is happening again, except that the villain in the script has changed. China has started throwing its weight around in the South China Sea, bullying neighbors like the Philippines (which calls it the West Philippines Sea). In 2022 China has been portrayed as suddenly leapfrogging so much closer to home (stop me if this sounds familiar) by signing a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. This has sent Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. into a frenzy about China getting a military base in the Solomons (despite the assurances of that country’s prime minister that no such thing will happen).

Relations with China are a controversial subject within the Solomons, which established ties with China in 2019, leading to Taiwan severing diplomatic relations after decades. This did not go down well with one particular province, which wanted ties to continue with Taiwan and which has separatist yearnings. This all culminated in major riots in late 2021 in the Solomons’ capital, Honiara—riots featuring people from that province and aimed at the city’s Chinatown.

There was major property damage, the local cops couldn’t handle it, and Australia and New Zealand sent police and troops (aided by Papua New Guinea and Fiji). This was the most recent iteration of the 2003-17 Australian and NZ security presence in the Solomons to deal with long-term and serious internal unrest. The regional assumption had always been—if the natives get restless, send in the soldiers and cops from the white countries because it is, after all, “our backyard.”

But the 2022 China/Solomons security agreement puts a cat among those colonial pigeons. Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said that his government preferred that Chinese police take over that Australasian role of training the local cops and providing an on-the-ground security presence in the event of an emergency, including protecting Chinese citizens and assets (who were targeted in the 2021 riots). The white big boys were not taking this lying down—much spleen was vented by media, “experts” and politicians in Australia, NZ and the U.S. The U.S. warned of a “response” if China built a base in the Solomons; Australia sent its two top spy chiefs to lean on Sogavare.

AUKUS

That had the entirely predictable result of getting his back up. “We find it very insulting to be branded as unfit to manage our sovereign affairs, or (to) have other motives in pursuing our national interests” (ABC News, March 29, 2022). Sogavare had the bad manners to remind Australia of its own deception when, in 2021, it broke a contract to buy French submarines and, instead, signed up with the U.S. and UK to form the AUKUS Treaty, which will build eight nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines for Australia.

Sogavare said the ‘Western media’ had accused Solomon Islands and China of showing a lack of transparency about the agreement. But Sogavare said he had first ‘learned of the AUKUS Treaty in the media.’ “One would expect that as a member of the Pacific family, Solomon Islands and members of the Pacific should have been consulted to ensure that this AUKUS Treaty is transparent, since it will affect the Pacific family by allowing nuclear submarines in Pacific waters,” Sogavare said.

“Oh, but I realise … that Australia is a sovereign country, and that it can enter into any treaty that it wants to, transparently or not—which is exactly what they did with (the) AUKUS Treaty.” Sogavare added: “When Australia signed up to AUKUS we did not become theatrical and hysterical on the implications this would have for us. We respected Australia’s decision. And I’m glad to say that Australia, United States of America and Japan respected our sovereignty to enter into this security agreement with China as well, based on trust and mutual respect.”[1]

Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Australia is the last country to be lecturing anyone about honesty and honorable behavior. Prime Minister Scott Morrison went behind the backs of the French in order to instead do a deal with the U.S. and UK. It led to the most extraordinary diplomatic bust up between those countries—France recalled its ambassadors from both Australia and the U.S. (it is America’s oldest ally, dating back to the American Revolution); President Macron called Morrison a “liar.” When Morrison was voted out a few months later, France’s outgoing foreign minister said: “I can’t stop myself from saying that the defeat of Morrison suits me very well.”

Nuclear-free New Zealand was not invited to join AUKUS (nor was fellow Five Eyes member Canada) but the Jacinda Ardern government has had a FOMO (fear of missing out) reaction and said that New Zealand would like to get involved with other aspects of AUKUS, such as artificial intelligence. AUKUS is rapidly proving it is about much more than a few nuclear subs: In April 2022 it announced that its three members would work together to develop hypersonic missiles to counter Russia and China, which already have them.

In early June, Jacinda Ardern met Joe Biden in the White House to strengthen the U.S./New Zealand relationship and to accept membership of Biden’s new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. Whilst at the White House, Ardern also met Kamala Harris, where one of the key topics discussed was U.S./New Zealand space cooperation, which revolves around the now U.S.-owned, New Zealand-founded company Rocket Lab, which launches payloads for the U.S. military and spy agencies from launch sites in both New Zealand and the U.S.

Drop the “Our Backyard” Colonial Crap

In a biting column in New Zealand’s Stuff magazine, Josie Pagani, a former Labor Party candidate in Rangitikei wrote:

“We are ‘gravely concerned’ about the Solomon Islands’ security deal with China. How about we offer something better. We say we’re worried because the Pacific is our own ‘backyard.’

The phrase is meant to signal a shared Pacific identity but, to the Pacific, the expression sounds colonial. Russia calls Ukraine its ‘backyard.’ If you are opposed to Russia meddling in Ukraine, where Russia spuriously claims a ‘security concern’ about Ukraine joining NATO, then consistency demands you must also respect the Solomons’ right to make its own decisions. We’re not invading the country—but we are trying to boss it around.

We didn’t like it when the Five Eyes intelligence network demanded we sign its statement condemning China for human rights abuses. Since the network attacked our independence from China for refusing to sign, our diplomatic ties to the U.S. and Australia have weakened, not strengthened. Likewise, our public condemnation of the Solomons’ deal with China will push the Solomons further away, not bring it closer…We would be more effective if we asked why the Solomons would do a security deal with China in the first place.

If we listened, it would be clear that what’s important to Solomon Islands is security, not geopolitics. Recent riots in Honiara were about jobs. Too many unemployed young people with nothing to do, sick of watching imported Chinese workers get the jobs. The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force couldn’t cope, despite support from New Zealand and Australian police. So, the Government turned to China.

Security matters in the Pacific. Transnational crime, such as drug production and people trafficking, is serious in the region. Trafficking of methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine is on the rise. Why doesn’t New Zealand double its aid to the Solomons to grow new businesses, and more jobs in legitimate industries? Why not help the country negotiate better contracts with China that insist on local labour instead of shipping in Chinese workers? We need to out-compete China. Not just yell ‘Get Off My Lawn’ at them.”[2]

Foreign Bases and Wars: The U.S. Is the Undisputed Champ

The hypocrisy of Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. is quite breathtaking. I am not going to argue any case for China to have a base in the Solomons, or anywhere else in the Pacific for that matter. The Pacific should be true to its name and be pacific, with no foreign bases.

But let’s do some basic fact-checking—China has one foreign military base in the world (in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa). The U.S. has nearly 800 bases in 70 foreign countries and territories (including Djibouti).

The Pacific is full of U.S. bases, from South Korea and Japan to Australia, which, for example, hosts U.S. Marines in Darwin and the vital war-fighting spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. That is not counting the bases on U.S. Pacific soil like Hawaii, Guam, and California. It no longer has bases in the Philippines but has the run of the place.

U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific 2020. Map: basenation.us

Map of U.S. military bases. [Source: womenagainstmilitarymadness.org]

Australia is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade Papua New Guinea’s main Navy base on Manus Island, which will then be used by the Australian and U.S. navies.

Map Description automatically generated

Source: usni.org

On Anzac Day 2022 Australia’s then-Defense Minister, Peter Dutton, said, “The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war, and be strong as a country. Not to cower, not to be on bended knee and be weak. That’s the reality.”

Dutton, who has since replaced Scott Morrison as leader of the Liberal Party, continued: “The Chinese, through their actions, through their words, are on a very deliberate course at the moment, and we have to stand up with countries to stare down any act of aggression…to make sure we can keep peace in our region and for our country.”[3]

How’s that for Warmongering 101?

I haven’t mentioned actual wars, because it is such a blindingly obvious fact. The U.S. has been involved in wars continuously in the 21st century (Iraq and Afghanistan being only the most spectacular examples). That carries on an unbroken tradition dating back to World War II, when it succeeded Britain as the world’s pre-eminent white, Western empire.

And how many wars has China fought in the 21st century? I can only think of a few deadly fisticuffs on the contested border with India. In the 20th century, it fought wars in Korea and Vietnam and subjugated Tibet. The Chinese security apparatus is used for internal repression in places from Hong Kong to Xinjiang. The U.S. security apparatus is, likewise, used for internal repression across the whole country. Ask any young Black male motorist.

What’s Good for the Goose Is Good for the Gander

Let’s look at a comparative example much closer to home. In 2011 Christchurch was flattened by a killer earthquake, one of a sequence of 18,000 that shook the city for years. In the immediate aftermath of that killer quake, hundreds of Australian cops were flown to Christchurch and patrolled the streets (minus their usual guns) for weeks. It was the first deployment of Aussie cops to NZ in the history of the two countries.

It was a huge emergency and my stricken home town needed as much help as it could get (there was also a huge NZ military mobilization, with help from the militaries of other countries, such as Australia and Singapore). It was a disaster on a global scale and NZ exercised its sovereign right to ask its friends for help, for which we were truly grateful. It was all hands to the pump.

Now, imagine if China, or the Solomons for that matter, had objected to NZ inviting Australian cops to help in our emergency. They would have been told to mind their own bloody business. We could have justifiably called such a response “hysterical and hypocritical.” What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

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Notes

  1. Daniel Hurst, “Solomon Islands PM suggests Australia’s reaction to China security deal is hysterical and hypocritical,” The Guardian, April 29, 2022. 

  2. Josie Pagani, “Stop Telling Pacific Countries What to Do,” Stuff, January 4, 2022, https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/128224030/stop-telling-pacific-countries-what-to-do
  3. Angus Thompson, “Reality of Our Time: Dutton Warns Australians to Prepare for War,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 25, 2022, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/reality-of-our-time-dutton-warns-australians-to-prepare-for-war-20220425-p5afuy.html). 

Featured image: Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party celebrates election victory. [Source: scmp.com]

A Spanish Court Calls: Mike Pompeo, We Want You

June 8th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

On June 3, Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s national court, the Audienca Nacional, issued a summons for former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of private security firm UC Global and its founder, David Morales.

The security firm is said to have been hired by US intelligence operatives to monitor Julian Assange and his associates during his time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  In all likelihood, if we are to take the evidence of UC Global’s former head of operations, Michel Wallemacq, seriously, Ecuador’s intelligence services were also involved.

The allegations were given a very dramatic airing in the initial extradition trial of Assange at the Old Bailey in London, when two former UC Global employees were called to testify for the defence.  One of the two gave testimony on the rather seedy task of pilfering “a nappy of a baby which according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange”.

The witness also revealed that Assange’s seemingly interminable stay had, by December 2017, caused nerves to fray.  The “Americans … had even suggested that more extreme measures should be deployed against the ‘guest’ to put an end to the situation”.  This might involve staging an “accident” that “would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee”.

The move against Pompeo comes as part of a petition filed by Aitor Martínez, one of the lawyers representing Assange in the proceedings against UC Global.  In addition to summoning Pompeo, Judge Pedraz is also seeking to question William Evanina, a former US counterintelligence official who is said to have confessed to viewing security camera footage and audio recordings from inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Pompeo has had a rather fickle relationship with WikiLeaks, an addling mixture of opportunistic appreciation and loathing.  As House Representative from Kansas, he drew much upon the organisation’s published emails as evidence of the DNC’s rigging proclivities in selecting candidates for the 2016 election.  “Need further proof that the fix was from Pres. Obama on down?  BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks,” tweeted Pompeo in July 2016.

When questioned about the tweet during his confirmation hearings for the post of CIA Director, selective amnesia gripped.  Asked by Maine Senator Angus King whether he felt that WikiLeaks was “a reliable source of information”, Pompeo replied in the negative, adding that he had “never believed” the publishing entity to be “a credible source of information”.  He had a “deep understanding of WikiLeaks” (evidence of that knowledge was not forthcoming) and had never seen it as having credible information “for the United States or for anyone else.”

Instead of making an issue of this, Senator King felt less than combative, appreciating the “candour” shown by Pompeo, with a recommendation that he “speak truth to the highest level of power in this country”.  King merely hoped “that you will hold onto the commitment that you made today, because it’s not going to be easy.”

On becoming director, WikiLeaks became an object of mania for Pompeo, suggesting that his views on the outfit’s credibility had been rather short on candour.  Their publishing feats, in other words, were simply too credible.  The disruptive role played by the publishing organisation in the 2016 election through publishing leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign was filed away to gather dust.  “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is,” he told an audience at the Center for Strategic and international Studies (CSIS) on April 13, 2017, “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

This was aided, in no small part, by the release by WikiLeaks of the CIA’s own crown jewels – or at the very least a good smattering of them.  The publication of the Vault 7 files, detailing hacking tools developed by the intelligence organisation, unleashed a storm within the organisation.  “This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code,” WikiLeaks declared in a press release, “gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.”

According to the report from Yahoo!News last September, a former Trump national security official claimed that the administration saw “blood” in the aftermath of the release.  Ideas and plans were exchanged among various officials to abduct Assange, and even, given the chance, assassinate him.

Pompeo, again showing himself to be a man of brimming candour, refused to confirm the veracity of the details in the report.  “I can’t say much about this other than whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke to one of these [Yahoo News] reporters – they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Neither Pompeo nor Evanina are at risk of facing any charges in Spain, however richly deserved. Judge Pedraz has made it clear that the Spanish courts have no jurisdiction to try them.  At the very least, these summonses have caused a flutter, mocking the politicised process that has characterised the vengeful, Kafkaesque effort against Assange.

*

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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]

Bilderberg Meets in Washington: Bilderberg Does China. An Economic Hurricane is Coming

By Pepe Escobar, June 07, 2022

As Bilderberg follows Chatham House Rules, mere mortals won’t have a clue of what they actually “proposed” or approved, and none of the participants will be allowed to talk about it with anyone else. One of my top New York sources, with direct access to most of the Masters of the Universe, loves to quip that Davos and Bilderberg are just for the messenger boys: the guys who really run the show don’t even bother to show up, ensconced in their uber-private meetings in uber-private clubs, where the real decisions are made.

The Links Between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates Explained

By The Week, June 07, 2022

Discussing the role that his relationship with Epstein played in his divorce from Melinda Gates, the Microsoft billionaire told The Sunday Times that “at the time” he “didn’t realise that by having those meetings it would be seen as giving [Epstein] credibility”.

Day 100 of the Russia-Ukraine War

By William Walter Kay, June 07, 2022

Historians will agonize over when the Russia-Ukrainin War actually started; but as Russia’s February 24 breach of Ukraine’s borders has been deemed by our media as Day One, let’s run with that. This makes June 4, Day 100.

“US Imperialism is the Greatest Threat to Life on Our Planet”: Mapping US Imperialism

By Mapping Project, June 07, 2022

This article is a snapshot from the Mapping Project: a project created by activists and organizers in eastern Massachusetts, investigating local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine, for colonialism and dispossession here where we live, and for the economy of imperialism and war.

Credit Unions and Banking Groups Warn of “Devastating Consequences” of a US Central Bank Digital Currency

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens, June 07, 2022

Credit union and banking trade groups have released a joint letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, warning of “devastating consequences” if the Federal Reserve moves forward with a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Kiev’s Forces Attack Civilians in Donbass Using Long-range Artillery

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, June 07, 2022

In a statement on June 6 the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, reported that Western long-range weapons in Ukraine have been used in recent days to attack civilian targets in the Donbass.

Gina Haspel Watched the Waterboarding at CIA ‘Black Site’: Ray MCGovern

By Ray McGovern, June 07, 2022

It still makes me sick to my stomach — this time the sworn testimony of CIA contract psychologist/torturer James Mitchell that Gina Haspel was watching as he and psychologist/torturer colleague John Bruce Jessen waterboarded Saudi captive Ab al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand.

Biden Rocks the Middle East. Partitioning Syria May be on the Way

By Philip Giraldi, June 07, 2022

Last week the Pentagon announced that it had completed its investigation into an attack in Syria on March 18, 2019 that killed some presumed ISIS guerrillas as well as four civilians while wounding fifteen others. The Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the Defense Department had determined that that the airstrike “did not violate the laws of warfare or the rules of engagement.

US Wants to Surround China with Missiles – But Can’t Find Asian Country to Host Them

By Ben Norton, June 07, 2022

The United States plans to spend billions of dollars to surround China with missiles. But a US military-sponsored study concluded its Pacific allies South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia are unlikely to host the offensive weapons.

The Death of the Ministry of Truth — What Will They Do Next?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, June 07, 2022

The Biden administration’s “Ministry of Truth” has, for the time being, been put on hold, and its chief, Nina Jankowicz, has resigned.

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We bring to the attention of our readers this essay by  the late Professor André Gunder Frank, one of the World’s leading and most distinguished political economists. First published by Global Research in 2004.

From the very outset in 2001, André Gunder Frank was a firm supporter of the Global Research Project. He was a lifelong friend and mentor. He passed away in 2005. His legacy will live. 

Frank analyzed the broad relationship between militarisation and the crisis of the US dollar as a World currency, a key relationship which characterizes today’s global crisis.

Published 18 years ago, this  incisive essay provides a perspective on the evolving New World Order, its structural weaknesses and contradictions.

Prof André Gunder Frank

This essay consists of the following parts:

Coup d’ État in Washington

Paper Tiger – The United States and the World

Fiery Dragon: China in East Asia

Michel Chossudovsky, May 4,  2018, June 7, 2022

***

Political Background

Recent events in Iraq that require no further elucidation here make this essay now more timely than when it was written.

For this essay is a combination of two related articles:

First, my earlier paper focusing on the 2000 [Election] Coup d’Etat. This paper related to the illegitimacy of the Bush government and the long standing agenda of the Cheney group which has made another Coup within the Bush Coup.

Secondly, my paper on the paper tiger, concerning the underlying Achilles heels vulnerability of American power that rests only on the paper dollar and the military Pentagon.

Vice President Gore’s major speech damning the policy of the Bush administration and calling the President himself incompetent, as he surely is, nonetheless judiciously avoided any direct mention of the illegitimacy of the president and his administration.

Bush’s presidency was derived from a veritable coup d’ Etat, not in having lost the popular vote, but first in having also lost the vote in the key state of Florida and “won” it through fraud and violence.

And then they violated the fourteenth amendment of due process through the stacked vote in the Supreme Court and its refusal to let anybody abide by due process.

Moreover, not only did Dick Cheney manage the entire transition to and construction of the Bush administration, but as Vice President he has continued to run the President’s show from behind the scenes.

That is so much so that after their joint three hour testimony to the 9/11 commission about their Iraqi malfeasance, the New York Times was moved to editorialize that it made evident that the President is no more than a puppet managed by the Vice-President.

And as we know and the coup part of this essay further documents, the Vice-President himself was captured and molded to its own ends of long standing by a team of the PNAC – Program for the New American Century – maniacal adventurers, led by “Wolfowitz of Arabia.”

This illegitimacy of the President and his administration’s inauguration now takes further significance with the revelations that after having lied to the electorate, they have continued to lie and mislead the American public and the world regarding the State of the Nation and that of the world, as well as with regard to the devastating impacts of their foreign and domestic policies.

The documentation is overwhelming, but not even the tip of the iceberg is yet emerging that the Administration and President Bush himself have consistently lied and covered up about September 11, 2001.

They have lied about security and have deliberately weakened it and have themselves terrorized the American public, not to mention that they have torn the Bill of Rights to shreds and otherwise have violated the Constitution.

By sending the machine gun toting National Guard into every airport in the country, they are every day violating the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits military participation in domestic civilian affairs that has stood since 1878. They have also violated a more recent law prohibiting the CIA from doing so as well. All this only to scare the public and Congress into accepting their unconstitutional Patriot Acts and other measures from the agenda of a small right minority.

And of course they have perpetrated monstrous lies about their war against Afghanistan and now against Iraq.

Thus, an illegitimate president who promised “gentle conservatism” has instead taken the most radical departure of militarizing American society at home, privatizing the US Military abroad, and antagonizing the rest of the world by his unilateral militarism and anti-environmentalism, not to mention his administration’s befuddled ‘’justification.”

His and his government’s verbal denunciation combined with de facto generation and sponsorship of terrorism is wearing thin and has in a totally irresponsible fashion led them and us into a Catch 22 damned if you do, damned if you don’t debacle.

The one in Iraq demonstrates one of several underlying vulnerabilities of American reliance on the Pentagon.

The Paper Tiger Dollar

As this essay argues, this military Achilles heel also further weakens the other one, which is based on the paper tiger dollar. That has declined in value against the Euro and the Yen since I first wrote about this threat and how it in turn would weaken the Pentagon that must be financed by devalued dollars, especially in its increasing ventures abroad.

At the same time, while the revelations and soul searching about American torture in Iraq – and now we know long since also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo – the US occupation in Iraq is proceeding relentlessly with its major agenda there: OIL and the economy.

The Cheney sponsored oil pipeline through Afghanistan that the Taliban was supposed to implement but was unable to guarantee, thus converting it from friend to enemy, is now in the hands of the new American appointed government in Kabul.

In Iraq, it is yet difficult to tell WHAT the US occupation is doing – nobody even bothers to look beyond the torture any more – about the oil and the economy, other than that they are being privatized and sold off at bargain basement prices to big American companies, with Vice President Cheney’s Haliburton in the lead. He still derives income from it, although his super-hawk friend Richard Perle resigned his high Defense Dept position so that his conflict of interest would ‘’not hurt the President’s re-election chances.’’

Meanwhile President Bush himself defends giving a near monopoly of contracts for ‘’re-building Iraq’’ to US near monopolies on the grounds that ‘’WE’’ put our lives on the line and so are we legitimately entitled to the economic rewards there from.

But more important, with the region’s second largest oil deposits in Iraq , what is the US really doing there on the world oil market and its efforts to control or break OPEC?

One thing is sure, and the oil section of the paper tiger part of this essay speaks to this issue:

Iraqi oil is again being priced in US dollars and no longer in Euros as under Saddam Hussein.

In the meantime also, the dollar has indeed fallen significantly against the Euro and the Yen. This devaluation of the dollar would at least make US industrial and agricultural products more salable on the world market – if they were otherwise competitive. But the industrial ones are not and the agricultural ones thrive only thanks to the huge government subsidy, the same as in Western Europe and Japan.

On the other hand, a devalued dollar makes the US less attractive for the continued inflow of foreign capital from overseas savings on which the US economy and the American standard of living and way of life is so vitally dependent.

All presidential administrations have lied to the American public about the sources of their well being that are allegedly based on American efforts and skills promoted by healthy government domestic and foreign economic policies. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Clinton boom years of the 1990s – after the 1989-92 recession – were based entirely on the suction and flight of capital first from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who were forced into a depression far deeper than that of the 1930s and after the financial crisis of 1997 in Southeast Asia that was deliberately sponsored by Larry Summers, now President of Harvard but then at the World Bank and the US Treasury.

That resulted in declines of income by 40 and 50 percent and the deliberately managed misery and death of millions in East Asia – and the flight of their own and foreign speculative capital to the US safe haven of Treasury certificates (where it permitted a sudden but temporary balanced budget) and into Wall Street. There it fired the bull market that attracted Main Street to invest in Wall Street and made Mr. And Mrs. America feel rich and able to spend – also on $ 100 billion of excess imports of textiles and gadgets from China.

The Chinese in turn also sent the dollars they earned thereby back to Washington to buy Treasury certificates, so that the poor Chinese are by now the world’s largest creditors to the rich Americans.

More recently however, China has begun to import more itself, in particular from Southeast Asia and using it’s American earned US dollars to get at least something more that worthless Treasury certificates on which the US is bound to default, because it will be neither able nor willing to make good.

All depends on how long the rest of the world is still willing to put up with the US dollar as the world currency and what alternatives thereto there are. And this brings us back to the Pentagon as a shaky support for the dollar and the Iraq debacle as yet another chink in the rusty armor of confidence in the US in general and its money in particular.

And it leads us forward to examine the expanding role in the world of China, whose ten percent annual economic growth has been duplicating income every six years and making it a, and soon perhaps the, major player in the world economy.

What is the basis and security of the United States position and power in the world? The answer is the twin pillars of the Dollar and the Pentagon.

The dollar is a paper tiger – literally so, much more than when Mao applied this term to the US. The Pentagon’s strength and mobility is dependent on the dollar, which in turn is supported by US military might. But these two supporting towers of the US are also its two Achilles heels. Through them, like the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the entire US edifice can come crashing down in one morning – not by terrorism but through the operation of the world market economy and the foolish policies of the United States government itself.

With the end of the cold war in 1989 and the subsequent decline of Russia as a serious immediate contender, as well as the decline during the 1990s of the hype of JAPAN AS # 1 [Vogel 1979] two other regions, states and powers came into contention.

They are the United States whose fortunes and prospects seemed to have declined after 1970 but recovered in the 1990s; and yet it is a paper tiger.

The other is the rising Fiery Chinese Dragon In global terms, we could regard this as a process of continued shift of the world center of gravity west-ward around the globe, from East Asia/China to Western Europe, then across the Atlantic to the United States, and there then from the eastern to the western seaboard, and now onwards across the Pacific back to East Asia, as observed in my “Around the World in Eighty Years” [Frank 2000]. Let us inquire further into the so far last part of this historical process.

Coup d’Etat in Washington

Be wary of conspiracy theories, beware of real conspiracies, and be aware of a grab of power.

It has happened in Washington and its instigators are pursuing a policy of (several) faits accomplis that attracts ever more people to jump on the band wagon. The Busch administration has made a real Coup d’Etat and achieved its apparently unknowing acceptance by America and the World. Even Hitler and Mussolini came to power by electoral routes and Stalin and Latin American dictators had to resort to violence to make their coups d’etat. Bush and his small coterie required none of these to get to the seat of power.

“The Coup”: Bush’s Accession to the Presidency

To begin with, Bush’s accession to the Presidency was in violation to the Constitution. It is not that he received a minority of the popular vote, because the Constitution provides for the President’s election by the Electoral College. But Bush received the Electoral College vote by fraud, for he lost the decisive popular and thereby electoral vote in Florida. His brother Jeb as Governor of Florida with the help of Mrs Harris as Secretary of State first deprived hundreds of thousands of African American and presumably Democratic voters of the vote through incarceration, intimidation, and other means.

The Republican Cuban Mafia sent its goon squads physically to prevent a recount in Broward County. Mrs. Harris did all she could, which was plenty, to interfere with recounts in other counties in Florida. The alleged recounts that were made were a sham. They only recounted votes that were NOT counted in the first count by voters who had been unable to punch holes all the way through the voting cards without leaving the infamous hanging chads.

Yet much more importantly one either before the decision or afterwards when the newspapers did it again, NO one ever recounted the votes that HAD been for the Democrats but were discounted because voter mistakenly also punched a second hole on a confusing ballot. Yet even the third and most conservative candidate Pat Buchanon declared publicly that these duplicate votes in heavily Jewish and Democratic counties were surely not for him but for the Democratic Party candidate. These votes [or even half of them if they had been allotted also to other candidates] would have given a decisive majority of the popular vote and therefore of the Electoral College votes in Florida to the Democrats. Yet they were never counted or recounted for the Democrats.

In the end Bush was not elected, but was SElected in the Supreme Court by the decisive political swing vote of Justice Kennedy. The Supreme Court’s appeal to the 14th amendment, which guarantees due process of Law to all, was ironically biased. For it was selectively applied without due process to squash the popular vote in Florida, but the same due process procedures were not applied to challenged votes in any other State. That in itself was already a de facto coup d’ Etat.

Then, several members of the House of Representatives called for a challenge of the Electoral College under Constitutional provisions that permit the Congress to do so if the challenge has the support of at least one member of both houses. Yet they were not joined by even a single Senator, who would have made the challenge legally effective. In other words, the Congress simply acquiesced to this power grab by the Bush administration through a Coup d’eat with the help of the Supreme Court but in clear violation to the Constitution.

That was the beginning of the violation of the Constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances. Since then, the Bush administration has carried these violations farther than any previous one in the history of the United States. Not even President Lincoln in the Civil War, nor President Roosevelt in the Second World War nor his previous attempt to stack the Supreme Court, ever grabbed and concentrated as much power for the executive branch while marginalizing the Legislative branch and the Judiciary.

Beware of Conspiracy Theories. But be aware that it was really Vice-President elect Dick Cheney who then put together the Bush Administration, selecting whom to place in which positions of power, especially in defense affairs.

The PNAC

And beware of PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, which was already lobbying Washington with their plans for a “Pax Americana” in 1992, 1997, and 2000 among other notable dates.

PNAC issued a long report in September of 2000 entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.”

Its statement of principles calls for a massive increase in military power, U.S. military domination of Eurasia to prevent the rise of hostile powers; and pre-emptive [not just pre-ventive] military action against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction.

PNAC’s prescriptions have been converted into official US policy and praxis by the Bush Administration.

PNAC founding members and signatories of its statements include;

  • Cheney himself,
  • Lewis Libby, Cheney’s top national security assistant and now the Vice-President’s chief-of-staff
  • Donald Rumsfeld, also a founding member, now Secretary of Defense
  • Paul Wolfowitz [of Arabia], now Deputy Defense Secretary and arguably the groups ideologue
  • Eliot Abrams, pardoned by Bush Sr. in the Iran/Contra scandal and now member of the National Security Council
  • John Bolton, Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security
  • Richard Perle, the most outspoken hawk in the Reagan administration who advocates dumping the United Nations, then chairman of the powerful Defense Policy Board, who was forced to resign one of his positions over a conflict of interest scandal,
  • Randy Scheunemann, President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who was Trent Lott’s national security aide and who served as an advisor to Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2001
  • Bruce Jackson, now Chairman of PNAC and former vice president of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin who headed the Republican Party Platform subcommittee for National Security where he called for – as had Wolfowitz for some years – the removal of Saddam Hussein
  • William Kristol, noted conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, a magazine owned along with the most hawkish Fox News Network owned by Ruppert Murdoch
  • Norman Podhoretz, editor of the right wing New Republic
  • and others, like Norman Kaplan and Douglas Feith.

The core group of the PNAC now hold the highest positions of policy making power in the Pentagon and much of it in the White House.

They have also planted one of their group in the State Department to keep an eye and check on Colin Powell who is the only major foreign policy player who is not a member of this inner sanctum.

An interesting sidelight is that Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith also went to Israel to serve as advisors to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, for whom they drew up a battle plan against the Palestinians. Behind them lies the strange ideological bed-fellow political alliance of two of the most powerful lobbies in the United States: Organized Zionism and Christian Fundamentalism. For good measure, throw in the Cuban Mafia as well.

Another matter to consider are some of the connections of these same people with the private sector. Two examples should suffice to give a general idea. Cheney was chairman of Halliburton Inc., which in turn owns Brown & Root and other habitual contractors of the Defense Department for major construction and/or petroleum projects around the world.

One of these companies was awarded a 1 Billion dollar contract to re-build the Iraqi oil fields in case they should be damaged in the war. Another, of which the now “Prime Minister” of Afghanistan was a former employee, namely UNOCAL, is first in line to build the proposed oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. The Bush family and George W. Bush himself have long standing business relations with the Carlyle Group, which also represents the Bin Laden family (including Osama), with whom they have also maintained direct relations.

The White House and the Executive Branch generally has made full use of its new power to serve its economic and political allies.

Those who made the largest campaign contributions have been handsomely rewarded with government hand-outs and regulations, or rather de-regulation. The Bush administration has issued at least 200 separate executive orders to roll back regulations enacted by previous administrations, even Republican ones, to protect the environment and/or Public Health and Safety. Executive Order has received a whole new meaning: Special interests write an order that is passed to the President for his signature, whereby mostly without knowing what he is doing he converts it into an Executive Order.

The Pentagon has petitioned the White House to exempt it from existing environmental protection regulations that hamper their disposal of spent munitions and other hardware and thereby interfere with ‘’national security. ” The President deliberately appointed as Secretary of the Interior a person known for her ties to the timber and oil industries to whose exploitation she seeks to open thousands of acres of federally owned lands as well as the Alaska Wilderness for the construction of a new pipe-line – all in the interest of course of ‘’national security.”

The Bill Of Rights and the Constitution

More serious still, the Bush administration has shredded the Bill of Rights, abrogated the Constitution, and even violated the age – old common law of Habeus Corpus, which prohibits the detention and holding of anybody against his will without due process of law.

Elsewhere in the Executive Branch, President Bush appointed and lent full support to Attorney General John Ashcroft who was already known for his racist and authoritarian inclinations. Although many Senators had doubts about his appointment, the Senate ratified it anyway. Since then, Attorney General Ashcroft and his staff have converted several arms of the Department of Justice into those of a police state. The Executive has encouraged and permitted the Attorney General and the Department of Justice Judiciary Branch to violate the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on multiple counts. For instance, the US Government already claims the right to monitor all e-mail and to bug telephone conversations without specific judicial permission.

The Bush Administration brought Admiral Pointdexter back into government after his participation in the Iran-Contra Scandal and lyiung about it to Congress. His new mission is a project, called Total Information Awareness Project (TIAP): to develop computers to monitor “vast quantities of data generated by US civilians in their daily lives: Academic transcripts, ATM receipts, prescription drugs, telephone calls, driving licences, airline tickets, parking permits, mortgage payments, banking records, emails, website visits and credit card slips” [The Guardian November 23, 2002].

In critique of all this and the Patriot Act, only the lone voice in Congress of Representative and presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) has asked

“How can we justify in effect canceling

  • the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble?
  • the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure?
  • the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial?
  • the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial?
  • the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment?
  • And Justice for All?”

The Constitution makes all the rights it guarantees extensive to anybody in the US, but the Attorney General has declared that non- citizens are not worthy of protection by the Constitution.

We do not know yet how much of a loss that is because the Department of Justice and its Immigration and Naturalization Service[INS] have also taken it upon themselves also to divest naturalized and even native-born American Citizens of their citizenship, again in clear violation of the Constitution.

And even those who remain citizens are under constant threat to have their rights violated without due process under the fourteenth amendment, or to be detained in violation of Habeus Corpus.

They are denied representation by legal counsel and trial in civil courts, as provided for by the Constitution. In particular, hundreds of thousands of American residents and Citizens of Arab descent or even of features that appear to individual agents of the Department of Justice or the police’s racial profiling as perhaps being Arab, or Muslim, or who knows what else have been called in for questioning. When they appeared in Los Angles, they were detained without charge. They now live in constant fear of the infamous knock on the door at 3AM that was made infamous by Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s GPU. That is so if they are even favored by a knock on the door before a blast of gunfire of shooting first and asking questions later.

So far as we know of over 700 people who have remained in detention since September 2001; though there may be many more, since nobody knows or says where they are, or who they are, or what they are accused of. Indeed, only a dozen of these have ever been charged with anything. The others remain out of sight and out of mind except for their families who are not allowed even to secure legal representation for them. So do the innocent Afghani prisoners the US keeps in in Guantanamo and the countless ones still detained under horrible conditions in Afghanistan. How come there is no public outcry about any of these?

On the other hand, the same Executive Branch has divested the Judiciary of powers and the citizenry of judicial protection by illegally transferring powers of the Judiciary to itself. Perhaps only the most visible tip of the iceberg of this process is the Bush Administration and Pentagon declaration that it will bring normal civil suits before military tribunals that operate under rules of court marshal and other procedures of Military “Justice” that can order death sentences without appeal. Moreover, the accused do not know whereof, cannot chose legal counsel, and their conversation with whom can be overheard by the authorities. The prestigious very conservative publicist William Saffire refers to them as ‘’kangaroo courts” and observes that “no longer does the judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and the accused.

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush’s order calls this Soviet-style abomination “a full and fair trial.”

The Land of the Free?

John Ashcroft has also issued instructions to the Department of Justice to resist as far as possible the delivery of documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

And the Executive itself has severely restricted the kind and number of documents of its own that it is prepared to make public. In other words, transparency and therefore control or even critique of the ever widening powers and their use by the Executive Branch is itself being severely restricted.

On the other hand, the Executive Branch has multiplied its own access to information. During the congressional debate on John Ashcroft’s USA Patriot Act, an American Civil Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill’s assaults on the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the act “would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items.” That includes bookstores and public libraries being obliged to divulge who is reading what. This is now the law,

Alas, the Congress has been intimidated into passive acceptance of virtually everything and anything the Executive proposes and demands. It passed the Patriot Act that severely restricts civil liberties virtually without reading it.

The proposed Patriot Act # 2 has not even bee submitted to the Congress for study and yet the version leaked by the Press suggests that it proposes even more of a police state than the first one. When the Leader of the Democratic Majority in the Senate voiced only the mildest doubts about Bush’s military moves, he was immediately reprimanded by his Republican Majority Leader counterpart Lott, for ‘’how dare he criticize the President in time of war!” Both have been forced to resign since then, but for scandals unconnected to that one.

Moreover, the Executive has been more than secretive about the events and circumstances of September 11, 2001; and the Congress has not launched any serious inquiry of its own. Neither have the Media. There has not even been any public inquiry or disclosure into the failure of the Air Force or National Guard to scramble fighter aircraft to investigate the airliners that had clearly gone off course. That is every day routine standard operating procedure, but it was called off or at least not enacted during the 90 minutes that elapsed between the crash into the first World Trade Tower and the one into the Pentagon – that is IF the Pentagon was damaged by an aircraft which has been seriously questioned if only because no evidence has ever been made public for such an occurrence.

Nor has the government given any account of its receipt and disregard of multiple forewarnings from intelligence agencies among its allies in Pakistan, Russia, Germany, France, Israel. In other words, the very circumstances that allegedly require all these domestic and foreign responses by the Bush Administration are themselves wrapped in a shroud of self-imposed secrecy.

The violation of the Constitutional provisions for the separation of powers is particularly flagrant regarding the powers reserved to the Legislative Branch of the Congress and the Constitutional prohibition against military action in domestic civil affairs.

Bush also disregards the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war, and it violates the 1976 War Powers act that Congress passed to regulate that Constitutional provision after it had been grossly violated in the Vietnam War. The Bush administration has de facto-also abrogated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits military participation in the enforcement of civil law, and it violates the general Constitutional provision against the military action in domestic affairs.

A US tank convoy during the Vietnam War (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Instead, the Bush Administration has visibly mobilized the Armed Forces and National Guard around all US airports and elsewhere, and the Pentagon is drawing up plans for its intervention in endless domestic affairs. It stands to reason that the machine gun toting military presence in the passenger areas of airports has not added one iota to security but serves only to terrorize the public into blind and passive acceptance of the violation of their civil rights there and elsewhere.

Even the government has stated repeatedly that any other terrorist attack on the US is not likely to copy that of September 11, 2001 but to take totally different forms against which this military presence would offer no defense. Indeed, it would not have prevented that of September 11 either. The pretext that the country is at war is being used as cover for US government terror of its own at home and abroad; and the country is being militarized as never before, not even in war time.

The Pentagon is extending its actions in American Civil Affairs ever more, also by establishing a new office of Under Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security, which then created a northern command to coordinate military response to domestic threats. The Pentagon also has a new Under Secretary for Intelligence,

Stephen Cambone, who said the existing agencies will continue with their work but that his unit will ensure that they are meeting the intelligence needs and priorities laid out by the Pentagon, also at home. [Boston Globe June 8, 2003].

Pax Americana

The Pentagon is also expanding into previously unimagined places and roles overseas. There are now well over 100 US military bases around the world. and current US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, South Korea, the Philippines, and former Soviet states such as Georgia.

The latest details, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on June 10th 2003, include plans to increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea from Yemen, setting up semi-permanent “forward bases” in Algeria, Morocco, and possibly Tunisia, and smaller facilities in Senegal, Ghana, and Mali that could be used to intervene in oil-rich West African countries, particularly Nigeria.

Similar bases–or what some call lily pads–are now being sought or expanded in northern Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, even Vietnam, and Iraq. [Needless to say that the construction of these military bases constitute lucrative multimillion contracts for US corporations including Bechtel and Halliburton. (Edtor)]

The new republics in former Soviet Central Asia and the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe are a particularly strong magnets for U.S. military presence, and a glance at the map will show that the US is systematically encircling China. Moreover, the Pentagon military missions are marginalizing the State Department diplomatic ones, with the senior military officer having more resources and greater influence than the US ambassador [Boston Globe, June 8 2003].

Even so, the Associated Press reports on February 24 that

” senior U.S. officials have been quietly dispatched in recent days to the capitals of key Security Council countries where they are warning leaders to vote with the United States on Iraq or risk “paying a heavy price.”

Although this kind of blackmail has been SOP in all American administrations, the Bush Administration has carried the threat and practice to previously unheard of new heights. As President Bush declared in his State of the Union address “Those who are not with us, are against us” – and will pay a heavy price.

“We are in the process of taking a fundamental look at our military posture worldwide, including in the United States,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on a recent visit to Singapore, where he met with military chiefs and defense ministers from throughout East Asia about U.S. plans there. “We’re facing a very different threat than any one we’ve faced historically.” But recall that this is the same Wolfowitz of Arabia talking who drew up his and PNAC’s plans to face this different threat already in his memos of 1992, 1997 and 2000.

The Law of the West

The Bush administration has also set aside centuries of International law. It wages illegal war, prohibited by numerous international treaties and by the United Nations Charter. Indeed it makes war without even declaring it, which even Hitler took the trouble to do.

The US armed forces wantonly violate Geneva conventions of crimes against humanity, genocide, weapons of mass destruction such as depleted uranium, cluster bombs, massive ‘’Daisy Cutter” bombs, destruction of civilian facilities to provide as power, water, and sanitation, and even neutral international waterways as when it deliberately blocked shipping on the Danube.

The Bush Administration (though Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr. also already earlier) have completely emasculated the United Nations instruments and procedures set up by the US and its allies after World War II to preserve the peace. Bush even had the gall to go to the UN and charge it with dereliction of duty and of its reputation by failing to give its stamp of approval for his War against Iraq – when the clear duty of the UN and especially of its Security Council is not to make war but to keep the peace.

His government and his lackey press mislead the public into believing that a Security Council resolution could legalize his war. The fact is that even with a SC resolution, his father’s War against Iraq in 1991 was in clear violation of Articles 2, 27, 41, 42, 43 and 53 of the UN Charter, among others.

The NATO states and President Clinton failed even to consult the UN before going to War against Yugoslavia. Then the present President waged War against Afghanistan without the slightest provocation from its government, without UN approval. And then it made War on Iraq in clear violation of the expressed desires of the UN membership. What this illustrates is the total abandonment of the UN as an institution and instrument for peace.

The demise of the UN as an International Body

After the US bombs a country into shambles, it then goes to the UN to ask it to pick up the pieces, or in plain English allegedly to legitimize the US military occupation of the country it had just destroyed.

But not only that, the violation of international law also constitutes ipso facto a violation of national law, because Senate ratification of an international treaty converts it into US law as well. Moreover, domestic democracy has been sacrificed to waging international war as well, as when NATO did so against Yugoslavia without even a single member country government troubling itself to ask its parliament or Congress for authorization to do so.

In a word, the US has replaced existing International law by new Law IN the West on the model of its own old Law OF the West. Then in the 19th century, vigilante lynch mobs formed ad hoc to go hang whomever they wanted; and now the US is imposing this Vigilante “Law” on the rest of the world by force. And as the vigilantes bought off or terrorized the sheriff and the judge to ‘’legitimize” themselves, so is the US, doing the same world wide in the real world, following the scripts of fictitious Spaghetti Western movies.

The Media

And what of the Fourth Estate – the Media?

They are strictly the mouthpiece of the Administration.

Note their behavior at White House, State Department, or Pentagon news conferences. All their questions are limited to technicalities about the implementation of Administration policies that are themselves accepted as cartes blanches.

Never ever has any representative of the US media posed a question that challenges the basis of the official policy in even the most timid way.

Indeed, not only what the press says or does not say reflects the policy and press- releases of the Administration. The very Media selection of what is or is not ‘’news,’’ e.g on the 6.30 pm Evening News of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and shame on PPS for carrying the just as bad Jim Lehrer News Hour, is a simple reflection of what the White House or the State Department have declared to be ‘’news’’ that morning.

No matter how world shaking an event, if it has not shaken the piper, it does not merit mention by the media. But whatever the White House or the State Department declares to be news IS news. And even they have been obliged to make an agonizing reappraisal , albeit still only partial, of their own, after the revelations of torture of Iraqis has cast a shadow on their previous glowing reports about bringing democracy to them.

Their pieces in the press are little better. In a survey of op-eds in the Washington POST over four months, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman found twice as many columns for as against the war, and in February 2003 the count was 24 in favor and 10 against, while the POST itself brought 9 editorials of its own to support the war. And that was regarding a war that had the highest popular opposition ever.The TV and radio talk shows are even more dominated by defenders of Administration policy. No matter that the Administration cooks, blends, massages and even simply invents the news; as is finally emerging regarding the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which were the alleged reason for waging War against Iraq.

The Home of the Brave from 1984 to 2003

George Orwell would have to regard his dire predictions of Big Brother for 1984 as a benign Alice in a charming Wonderland version of Animal Farm. The latter is to be compared to the 2003 Bush and Ashcroft reality of double-think and new-speak in which, however, some are no longer equal than others, either at home or abroad, but still WAR IS PEACE – really – the President said so.

But the capacity of the United States to rule the world is more than questionable, especially after its 2003 debacle in Iraq.

Paper Tiger – The United States and the World

The US still has the world’s largest economy, which saw boom times during much of the 1990s, and it has unrivalled military power exceeding the total of the next dozen or more military powers combined. Moreover, the present Bush administration makes use of both of them in unilateral policies to impose its will on the rest of the world, friend and foe alike, to all of which Bush threw down the gauntlet of ‘’you are either with us or against us.”

With means you do as we say, and against means you are under threat to be destroyed economically and politically, as well as militarily if we wish.

In case there be any doubt about our intentions and capabilities, Russia and Argentina are prime examples on the economic front as are Iraq through the boycott, Serbia and Afghanistan are so on the military front as well. The latter – but really both – are what President Bush father called THE NEW WORLD ORDER when he bombed Iraq in 1991. I termed it THIRD WORLD WAR in two senses, one that it takes place in THE THIRD WORLD and secondly that this war against the Third World constitutes a THIRD World War [Frank 1991].

The prosperity and welfare of the American people rests primarily on its position in the world today as Britain’s did in the nineteenth century. That observation is fundamentally different from the political and media hype about the sources of American exceptionalism that are supposedly in its genius, morality, productivity, and other characteristics that allegedly differentiate America from the rest of the world. On the contrary, America rests on two – maybe three- pillars:

1.The DOLLAR as the world currency whose monopoly privilege the US has to print at will, and

2. The PENTAGON with its unrivalled military capacities.

3. A third pillar perhaps is the government, educational and media fed IDEOLOGY that obscures these simple facts from public view. Moreover each supports the other: It costs dollars to maintain the Pentagon, its bases in 80 countries around the world, and the deployment of its military forces around the globe. Military expenditures are the prime causes of the twin American deficits, in the federal budget and in the balance of trade. Conversely, Pentagon strength helps sustain global confidence in the dollar.

The Dollar is Literally a Paper Tiger

But this same mutual reliance for strength, therefore, also constitutes two mutually related American Achilles heels.

The dollar is literally a Paper Tiger in that it is printed on paper whose value is based only on its acceptance and confidence in the same around the world.

That confidence can decline or be withdrawn altogether almost from one day to the next and cause the dollar to lose half or more of its value.

Apart from cutting American consumption and investment as well as dollar-denominated wealth, any decline in the value of the dollar would also compromise US ability to maintain and deploy its military apparatus.

Conversely, any military disaster would weaken confidence in and thereby the value of the dollar. Indeed, at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos, the assembled world political and business elites expressed very serious fears that the mere deployment of the US military, e.g. against Iraq, would bring on a world depression. TIME Magazine this week reports on a comprehensive study of the US airline industry, which concludes that a war against Iraq would drive half of it into immediate bankruptcy. If so, what of still weaker non-American airlines? The insecurity that comes with military saber rattling and threats undermine confidence in the dollar and put brakes on investment. And no amount of ideology is sufficient completely to obscure that economic situation.

In fact, the world already is in depression, from which so far only the United States, Canada and Western Europe are partially exempt.

And the latter is so, because of the privileged position of the American economy within the global one, from whose mis-fortune Americans have been deriving the benefits of that position, which to repeat is essentially derived from the privilege of printing the world currency with which Americans can first buy up the production of the rest of the world at depressed prices and then have the same dollars be returned from abroad to be invested in Wall Street and US Treasury certificates for safe-keeping and/or higher earnings than are available elsewhere.

In the mid 1980s James Tobin [the inventor of the Tobin tax on financial transactions] and I were to my knowledge the only ones already to published predictions of DE-flation as the coming world economic danger. Economic policy makers however ignored these warnings and this risk [not really risk, but necessary consequence] while continuing their policies designed to fight IN-flation.

Nonetheless, since then commodity prices have fallen sharply and consistently and more recently industrial prices have fallen as well. Moreover in WORLD economic terms, high inflation in terms of their national currencies [pesos, rubles, etc.] and their sharp DEVALUATION against the DOLLAR world currency has been an effective de facto major DE-flation in the rest of the world. That has reduced their prices and made their exports cheaper to those who buy their currencies with dollars, primarily of course consumers, producers and investors in – and from ! – the United States. These additionally, which is hardly ever mentioned!, can and do buy up the rest of the world with dollars that ”cost” only their printing and distribution, which for Americans have virtually no cost. [The $ 100 dollar bill is the world’s most used cash currency on which runs the entire Russian economy, and there are two to now three times as many of them circulating outside as inside the US].

The American boom and welfare and then ”balanced” federal budget 1992-2000 Clinton administration, contrary to its populist claims, only happened to coincide with this boom. The also same 8 year long prosperity of the United States was entirely built on the backs of the terrible depression, deflation and thus generated marked increase in poverty in the rest of the world. During this one decade, production declined by over half in Russia and Eastern Europe and life expectancy in Russia declined by 10 – ten – years, infant mortality, drunkenness, crime and suicide increased as never before in peacetime. Since 1997, income in Indonesia declined by half and generated its ongoing political crisis. That is dissipation of entropy generated in the US and its export abroad to those who are obliged to absorb it in ever greater DISorder. It would be difficult to find better examples – except the destruction of the entire society in Argentina, Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone, previously prosperous and stable Ivory Coast – not to mention the countries that have been visited by destruction through American military power

All this has among others the following consequences: in the US. it can export inflation that would otherwise be generated by this high supply of currency at home, whose low rate of inflation in the 1990s was therefore no miracle result of domestic ”appropriate” Fed monetary policy.

The US has been able to cover its twin balance of trade and budget deficits with cheap money and goods from abroad. The US trade deficit is now running at over 500 billion dollars a year and still growing. Of that, 100 billion are covered by Japanese investment of their own savings in the US that saves nothing and which the Japanese may soon have to repatriate to manage their own banking and economic crisis – especially if an American war against Iraq causes a n even temporary spike the price of oil on whose import Japan is so dependent.

Another $ 100 billion comes from Europe in the form of various kinds of investment, including direct real investment, which could dry up as the European recession continues, the Europeans become exasperated with American policy, or they have any number of other reasons to reduce their dollar reserves and put them into their own Euro currency instead.

A third 100 billion is supplied by China, which first sells the US its cheap manufactures for dollars and then accumulates those dollars as foreign exchange reserves – thus in effect giving away its poor producers’ goods to rich Americans. China does this to keep its exports flowing and its industries going, but if it decided to devote these goods to expanding its own internal market more, its people would gain in income and wealth, and the United States would be out of luck. The remaining $ 200 billion of deficit are covered by other capital flows, including debt service from the poor Latin Americans and Africans who have paid off the principal of their debts already several times over and yet keep increasing the total amount owed by rolling it over at higher rates of interest. The idea of declaring US chapter 11 or 9 type insolvency is however finally catching on.

Thus, deflation / devaluation elsewhere in the world has like a magnet attracted speculative financial capital from the rest of the world – both American owned and foreign owned – into US Treasury certificates [ stopping up the US budget deficit] and into Wall Street. That is what fed and supported its 1990s bull market, which in turn has increased, supported and spread wider a speculative and illusory in increase in wealth for American and other stock holders and through this also illusory ”wealth effect” has supported higher consumption and investment. The subsequent and present bear market decline in stock prices nonetheless is a still a profit boon for enterprises who issued and sold their stocks at bull market high and rising stock prices. For they are now buying back their OWN stocks at what for them are bargain basement low prices, which represent an enormous profit for them at the expense of small stock holders who are now selling these stocks at low and declining prices. The US ”prosperity” now rests on the knife edge also of an unstable enormous domestic corporate and consumer [credit card, mortgage and other] debt.

Moreover, the US is also vastly over-indebted to foreign owners of US Treasury certificates, Wall Street stock and other assets, which can be called in by foreign central banks who have been keeping reserves in US dollars and other foreign owners of US debt. Indeed, it is the very US policy that has contributed so much to destabilization elsewhere in the world [e.g. through the destabilization of Southeast Asia that undermined the Japanese economy and financial system even more than it would otherwise have been] that now threatens and now soon makes much more likely that especially Japanese and European holders of US debt must cash it in to shore up their own ever more unstable instable economic and financial systems. The liabilities of the US to foreigners now equal two thirds of annual US GNP – and therefore can and will never be paid off. However any hick in rolling this debt over and over, can result in foreign attempts to get out as much money as they can – resulting in a crash of the dollar.

Another major consequence is that the US – and world! – economy is now in a bind from which it most probably can NOT extricate itself by resorting to Keynesian pump priming and much less to full scale macro-economic policy and support of the US and Western/Japanese economy, as the Carter and Reagan administrations did. Military Keynesianism, disguised as Friedman/Volker Monetarism and Laffer Curve Supply-Sideism, was begun by Carter in 1977 and put into high gear in 1979, when Carter the Fed was run by Carter appointee Paul Volker, who in October 1979 switched Fed monetary policy from high money creation / low interest price thereof to attempted low money creation / high interest [ to 20 percent monetary! ] to rescue the dollar from its 1970s tumble and attract foreign capital to the poor US. At the same time, Carter began Military Keynesianism in June 1979., which was then escalated further by President Reagan In that they then succeeded..

It is highly unlikely however that analogous policies could succeed again now. The US would need to invoke the same re-flationary policy again for itself and its allies, now. but it can not do so! The Fed has already lowered the interest rate so far that it cannot go much lower and is not likely to stimulate investment by doing so. On the other hand, raising the interest rate to continue to attract funds from abroad would risk choking off all domestic investment and working capital. Brazil tried that, admittedly with extravagant monetary interest rates at 60 percent to attract foreign capital, and ruined its domestic economy.

The US may [should? must ??] now attempt a repeat performance of the 1980s to spend itself and its allies [now minus Japan but plus Russia?] out of the present and much deeper world recession and threatening globe encompassing depression. The US would then again have to resort to massive Keynesian deficit [ using September 11 as a pretext for probably military] RE-flationary spending as the locomotive to pull the rest of the world out of its economic doldrums. However, the US is already the world consumer of last resort, but it can be so with the savings, investments and cheap imports from abroad, which themselves form part of the global economic problem.

Moreover, to settle its now enormous and ever growing foreign debt, the US may chose also to resort to IN-flationary reduction of the burden to itself of that debt and its also ever growing foreign debt service. But even the latter could – in contrast to the above summarized previous period- NOT avoid generating a further SUPER trade balance particularly if market demand falls further and pressure increases abroad to export to the US demand/er of last resort. But this time, there will be NO capital inflows from abroad to rescue the US economy. On the contrary, the now downward pressure to devalue the US dollar against other currencies would spark a

capital flight from the US, both from US Government bonds and from Wall Street where significant stock price declines generate further price declines and deflation in world terms even if the US attempts domestic inflation.

The price of oil is yet another fly in the political economic ointment, whose dimension and importance is inversely proportional to the health or illness of the ointment itself. And today that is quite sick and deteriorating already. The world price of oil has always been a two edged sword whose double cutting edges can be de-sharpened with the help of successful alternative economic and price policies. On the one hand, oil producing economies and states and their interests need a minimum price floor to produce and sell their oil instead of leaving it underground and also postponing further oil productive investment while waiting for better times. The US is a high cost oil producer. A high oil price is economically and politically essential also for important states like Russia, Iran and especially Saudi Arabia, as well as US oil interests.

On the other hand, a low price of oil is good for oil importing countries, their consumers including oil consuming producers of other products, and supports state macro economic policy, eg in the US, where low oil prices are both good politics and good for the economy. These days, the high/low price line between the two seems to be around US$ 20 a barrel – at the present value price of the dollar! But nobody seems to be able to rig the price of oil at that level. The present conflict, long since no longer within OPEC, is primarily between OPEC that now sells only about 30 to 40 percent of the world supply and other producers that supply 60 percent, today especially Russia but also including the US itself as both a significant producer and a major market, although that is increasingly shifting to East Asia. Recession in both and the resultant decline in demand for oil drags its price downward. US strategy and wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. is to gain as much CONTROL of oil as it can and for now to share as little of it as it must with Russia in Central Asia, Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions. And that control, even if it cannot control the price of oil, is to be used as an important geo-political economic lever to manipulate against US oil import dependent allies in Europe and Japan and ultimately its strategic enemy in China.

For US Keynesian spending re-flation as well as in-flation can no longer put the floor under the price of oil needed today and tomorrow. No policy, but only recovery generated world market demand I- and/or limitations in the supply of oil -can now provide a floor to and prevent a further fall in the price of oil – and its deflationary pull on other prices. And further deflation in turn will increase the burden of the already vastly over-indebted US, Russian and East Asian, not to mention some European and Third World, economies.

Thus the political economy of oil is likely to add to further deflationary pressure. That would – indeed already does – again significantly weaken oil export dependent Russia. But this time it would also weaken US oil interests and their partners abroad, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the low price of oil during the 1990s has already transformed the Saudi economy from erstwhile boom to a bust. That has already generated middle class unemployment and a significant decline in income that has also already generated widespread dissatisfaction and now threatens to do so even more at precisely the time when the Saudi monarchy is already facing destabilizing generational transition problems of its own. Moreover a low oil price would also make new investment unattractive and postpone both new oil production and eliminate potential profits from laying new pipelines in Central Asia.

indeed, there is an even more immediate urgent need for the US to control Iraqi oil reserves, the second largest in the region and the most under-drilled with a large capacity to increase oil production and drive down prices. But that is not all or even the heart of the matter. Many people were surprised when President Bush added Iran and North Korea to his ‘’axis of evil.” Though they may not be so surprised at American efforts to promote a coup and change of regime in Venezuela, which supplies about 15 percent of US imports. So what do these countries have in common, many people ask. Well, three of them have oil, but not North Korea. So what is its threat that puts it in Bush’s axis. Surely not geography or alliances [Iraq and Iran were mortal enemies, and North Korea does not play ball in their league.

The answer is simple and resolves not only that puzzle but what could otherwise appear as a rather confused and confusing US foreign policy:

[1.] Iraq changed the pricing of its oil from dollars to Euros in 2000.

[2] Iran threatens to do so.

[3] North Korea has changed to deal only in Euros.

[4] Venezuela has withdrawn some of its oil from dollar pricing and is instead swapping it for goods with other third world countries. Besides an old friend of mine, Venezuela’s Fernando Mires at OPEC headquarters in Vienna, proposed that all of OPEC should switch from pricing its oil in dollars to pricing it in Euros!

OPEC has recently re-examined his possibility and now Russia has as well. Nothing else, no amount of terrorism, could be more threatening to the US; for any and all of that would pull all support out from under the dollar as oil importers would no longer buy dollars but instead Euros to buy their oil. Indeed they would want also to switch their reserves out of the dollar and into the Euro. Iraq, prior to the invasion, already gained about 15 percent with its switch as the Euro rose against the dollar.

And besides, the Arab oil states who now sell their oil for paper dollars would be unlikely to continue turning around and spending them again for US military hardware. It is this horrific scenario that US occupation of Iraq is designed to prevent, with Iran next in line. Curiously, this oil-dollar-euro ‘’detail’’ is never mentioned by the US government or media. No wonder that major European states are opposed to Bush’s Iraq policy, which is supported only by the UK, which is a North Sea oil producer itself. Simple how one little piece of incidental information can make the other pieces of the entire jig-saw puzzle fall into place!

All of these present problems and developments now threaten to [will?] pull the rug out from under US domestic and international political economy and finance. The only protection still available to the United States still derives from its long since and still only two pillars of the ”NEW WORLD ORDER” established by President Bush father after ”Bush’s Gulf War” against Iraq and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Bush son is now trying to consolidate his father’s new world order [no doubt with the latter still as a power behind the throne] beginning with the WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN and threatening once again against Iraq, and the Bush-Putin effort now also to construct a US-Russian Entente – or is it Axis.

The dollar pillar is now threatening to crumble, as it already did after the Vietnam War but has so far remained standing through three decades of remedial patch work.

But as we have seen, the US is now running out of further economic remedies to maintain the dollar pillar upright. It’s only protection would be to generate serious inflation in the short run by printing still more US dollars to service its debt, which would then undermine its strength and crack the dollar pillar and weaken the support it affords still more.

That would leave only the US military pillar to support US political economy and society.

But it and reliance on it also entails dangers of its own. Visibly, that is the case for such countries as Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and of course all others who are thereby deliberately put on notice to play ball by US rules in its new world order on pain of eliciting the same fate for themselves.

But the political blackmail to participate in the new world order on US terms also extends to US – especially NATO – allies and Japan. It was so exercised in the Gulf War [other states paid US expenses so that the US made a net profit from that war], the US war against Yugoslavia in which NATO and its member states were cajoled to participate, and then by the War against Afghanistan as part of President Bush’s new policy pronouncement. He used the early Cold WAR terminology of John Foster Dulles that ”You Are Either With Us Or Against Us”] But US reliance on this, the then only remaining, strategy of military political blackmail can also lead the US to bankruptcy as the failing dollar pillar fails to support it as well; and it can come also to entail US ”OVERSTRETCH” in Paul Kennedy terms and ”BLOWBACK’ in CIA and Chalmers Johnson terms.

In summary and plain English, the US has only two assets left to rely on, both admittedly of world importance, but perhaps even so insufficient. They are the dollar and its military political assets. For the first, the economic chickens in the US Ponzi scheme pyramid of cards are now coming home to roost even in the United States itself.

The second pillar is now in use to prop up the new order the world over. Most importantly perhaps is the now proposed US/Russia entente against China instead of [or to achieve?] a US defense against a Russia/China [and India?] entente. The NATO War against Yugoslavia generated moves toward the latter, and the US War against Afghanistan promotes the former]. God/Allah forbid that any of these nor their Holy War against Islam blow us all up or provoke others to do so.

However that may be, US imperial political military blackmail may still blowback on the United States also, thus not out of strength but out of the weakness of a true Paper Tiger.

So who shows any strength? The Chinese Dragon! And THAT is now the primary pre-occupation and preparation of the Pentagon and of far sighted American strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski who has taken up the century old Huntington – not the clash of civilizations one but a previous one! – thesis about the geo/economic political need to control the Inner- Eurasian core.

Steps to that are not only the war against and control of Afghanistan and the string of military bases there and in a half dozen former Soviet Caucasus and Central Asian republics that are now converted into US client states under the Orwellian PfP rubric of “Partnership for Peace.”

Nor is it only controlling Central Asian oil and the pipelines for its export westward to Europe and southward to the Indian Ocean and Asia, but also precluding pipelines eastward in growing competition with China and its growing thirst for oil. It also includes maintaining military presence in the Korean Peninsula and Japan including especially Okinawa, and returning to the Philippines. All under the cover of fighting ‘’terrorism’’ and countering ‘’rouge’’ states, the overall U.S. strategy is to encircle China militarily and to straight jacket it economically as far as still possible. But how far is that?.

Fiery Dragon:- China in East Asia

A financial and economic crisis erupted in East Asia in 1997 and brought evident relief to many observers in the West. As a result and misled by day-to-day press media reports and short term business and government analysis and policy, even “informed” public opinion in the West has changed again. Now the former “East Asian Miracle” is said to have been no more than a mirage, a dream for some and a nightmare for others.

The previously supposed explanations and sure-fire strategies of success are being abandoned again as quickly as they had come into fashion. We hear less about Asian values or guarantees from the magic of the market and no more security from state capitalism . So much the better I would say, since these supposed explanations and correct policies were never more than ideological shams anyway.

The historical evidence presented here shows that no one particular institutional form or political economic policy offers or accounts for success [nor failure!] in the competitive and ever changing world market. The contemporary evidence shows the same. In that respect, Deng Xiao-ping’s famous aphorism is correct.

The question is not whether cats are institutionally, let alone ideologically, black or white; the real world issue is whether or not they catch economic mice in competition with others in the world market. And that depends much less on the institutional color of the cat than it does on its opportune position in the world economy at each particular place and time. And since the obstacles and opportunities in the competitive world market change over time and in place, to succeed the economic cat, no matter what its color, must adapt to these changes or fail to catch any mice at all. Among these different institutional forms including relations among state-finance- productive and sales organizations, perhaps the most attention and positive evaluation has been devoted abroad to those of Korea and then of Japan but also of Greater China including its vast network of overseas Chinese. But the very fact that they differ, and in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere as well, should already forewarn us against privileging one institutional form over all others.

At best and that is already very much, the evidence is that none of these institutional forms is necessarily an impediment or insurmountable obstacle to success on the domestic, regional and world market. Most noteworthy perhaps in view of the widespread Western propaganda about its own alleged virtues is the demonstrated fact that no Western model need or should be followed by Asians in Asia or even elsewhere.

The significance of position and flexible response in the world economy is particularly important during periods of economic crisis B phase that is in Chinese of [negative] danger and [positive] opportunity. In the present economic crisis so far, the focus has been far too predominantly on its undoubtedly serious negative consequences. But the opportunities it poses have received insufficient attention, except perhaps in the United States and China, both of which are seeking to reap competitive advantages from the political economic problems and alleged meltdown of Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

But the dismissal of East Asian and particularly Chinese economic strengths and prospects may be premature and certainly is based on a shortsighted neglect of the historical evidence as presented in my 1998 book ReORIENT and further pursued in my present work on the 19th century, as well as on a serious misreading of the contemporary evidence.

I believe that this latest quick dismissal of Asia is mistaken for the following reasons among others:

1] Since Asia and especially China was economically powerful in the world until relatively recently, and new scholarship now dates the decline as really beginning only in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is quite possible that it may soon be so again. Contrary to the Western mythology of the past century, Asian dominance in the world has so far been interrupted by an only relatively short period of only a century or at most a century and a half. The oft-alleged half century or more decline of China is purely mythological.

2] Chinese and other Asian economic success in the past was not based on Western ways; and much recent Asian economic success was not based on the Western model. Therefore, there is also no good reason why Japanese or other Asians need or should copy any Western or other model. Asians can manage their own ways and have no good reason to now replace them by Western ones as the alleged only way to get out of the present economic crisis. On the contrary, Asian reliance on other ways is a strength and not a weakness.

3] The fact that the present crisis visibly spread from the financial sector to the productive one does not mean that the latter is fundamentally weak. On the contrary, the present crisis of overproduction and excess capacity is evidence of the underlying strength of the productive sector, which can recover. Indeed, it was excess capacity and productivity leading to over-production for the world market that initiated the financial crisis to begin with when Asian foreign exchange earnings on commercial account were no longer able to finance its service of the speculative short run debt.

4] Not that economic recessions will or can be prevented in the future. They never have been prevented in the past even under state planning in China or the Soviet Union. More significant is that this is the first time in over a century that a world recession started not in the West and then moved eastward, but that instead it started in the East and then moved around the world from there. And that was precisely because as per # 3 East Asian and particularly Japanese, Korean and then Chinese productive and export capacity had grown so MUCH. This recession can therefore be read as evidence not so much of the temporary weakness as of the growing basic economic strength of East Asia to which the center of gravity of the world economy is now shifting back to where it had been before the Rise of the West.

5] The recession in the productive sector was short, especially in Korea., and so far absent in China. But it was also severe, especially in Indonesia. And the shock-waves from the financial sector to the productive, consumer and political ones were visibly – and to all but the totally blind, intentionally – exacerbated by the economic shock policies imposed on Asian governments by the IMF as usual following the dictates of the U.S. Treasury, which systematically represents American financial interests at the expense of popular ones elsewhere around the world. The former World Bank Vice-President, member of the US President’s Council of Economic advisers and now Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz [2002], has given us an insider’s view of these intentional events in his GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

That also permitted Western interests to take advantage of declines in productive and financial strength in Korea and elsewhere to buy up assets at bargain-basement fire-sale prices. Even so the underlying strength of the Korean economy was such that the foreigners were even then unable to alter the financial, productive, ownership and state structure significantly to their favor. The Korean productive and financial machine soon recovered again to forge ahead, but now with a costly lesson well learned. The lesson must have been learned elsewhere as well by comparing how relatively unscathed China and Malaysia [and as already mentioned for different reasons Korea] emerged from the financial crisis. They maintained controls over capital exports, compared to those countries that succumbed to the IMF and its lethal medicine by permitting a speculative capital outflow, which destroyed their productive apparatus and multiplied unemployment into an unbearable economic, social, and political problem, especially in Indonesia.

6] That underlying political economic strength also puts East Asia, and especially China, Japan and Korea in a much more favorable position than the rest of the Third World and even Russia and Eastern Europe to resist Western blackmail as it is now exercised by the U.S. Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, Wall Street and other instruments.

7] The very act and cost of East Asian concessions to this Western pressure during the past recession makes it politically more likely, since it is economically possible, that East Asia will take measures, including especially a new financial bloc and banking institutions, that can prevent a recurrence of the present situation in the future by escaping from the strangle-hold of Western controlled capital markets. Stiglitz observes such efforts already in his recent private discussions with Asian officials as reported in his book.

8]. Indeed, one of the present battles, first by the Japanese and now also by the Chinese, is to remodel the world financial and trade institutions that were designed by the United States to work in its favor. Thus, Japan wanted to establish an Asian monetary fund to prevent the East Asian recession from deepening as it has thanks to the International Monetary Fund based in and subservient to Washington. And China wishes to join the World Trade Organization but also seeks to have this Western dominated institution reformed to its advantage.

9] A related political economic struggle is the competition between the United States and China to displace Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia in the market by taking advantage of their bankruptcies. American capital is buying up some East Asian productive facilities at bargain basement prices, while China is waiting for them either to be squeezed out of the competitive market altogether, and if not to engage in joint operations. Indeed it had been the devaluation of the Chinese currency before 1997 that reduced the world market share of other Asian economies and helped generate the financial crisis itself. Only time will tell which strategy will be more successful, but the Chinese and perhaps also some Southeast Asians seem like the better bet over the long term. Moreover, no matter how deep the recession in Japan; it is not for that eliminated as an economic power, especially in Asia. However, there is evidence that China is trying to reconstruct the East Asian trade and tribute system at whose center it was in the eighteenth and that the ern colonial powers dismantled in the nineteenth century.

10] Equally significant is that India and to recently to a lesser extent China have remained substantially immune from the present recession, thanks in part to the inconvertibility of their remin ribao and rupee currencies and the valve in their capital markets that permits the inflow but controls the outflow of capital. The currency devaluations of China’’s competitors elsewhere in East Asia and the reduced inflow into China of Overseas Chinese and Japanese capital that is negatively affected by the recession in East Asia may oblige China to devalue again as well to remain competitive. Nonetheless and despite their serious economic problems, the Chinese and Japanese economies appear already to have and to continue to be able to become sufficiently productively and competitively strong to resist and overcome these problems. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia has successfully followed the Chinese model of opening its capital market to inflows but restricting especially speculative capital outflows from the same. Korea did not need such emergency measures, since it had received relatively little foreign capital to begin with.

11] Regarding the mainland Chinese economy, the President of the Chinese Society of World Economy, Pu Shan, observed already the in the mid 1990s:

Results of the economic reform are remarkable. Real gross national product in 1995 increased 4 times that of 1980, with an average annual growth rate close to 10% during that period. Real income peer capita more than tripled. Exports and imports of merchandize trade in 1995 increased more than 7 times that of 1980 in terms of U.S. dollars, while China’s share in world trade more than tripled And China became the largest recipient lf foreign direct investment among developing countries. It is also noteworthy that the large scale transfer of agricultural labor to industry has been accomplished amind unprecedented prosperity in the rural economy, unlike many other countries that went through the painful process of widespread bankruptcy of farmers (Pu 2004: 174].

In the decade since then, most of these trends have still continued, though the rural economy and agricultural income have lagged. In particular however, the ten percent annual growth rate has still been maintained, which means doubling in size in six years, soon to become the world’s second largest after that of the United States.

But China now also holds the greatest single share of the huge and ever growing American foreign debt, although it is doubtful that anyone will ever be able to collect on any substantial part of it.

Nor does this mean that China’s growth does not also pose immense problems, from gaping inequality between the coast and the interior or urban and rural, or its growing demand and import of raw materials and especially oil and soon of foodstuffs, and the menacing shortage of water.

Japan’s major fiscal and economic crisis of the 1990s has abated and economic performance and prospects have improved again despite the continuing debt overlag. As to India, although its growth has been lagging behind, it has recently increased and shows promise or at least possibility of further acceleration: from 1.5 percent annually during the three decades following independence to 5.5 percent over all and 3.5 percent per capita in the 1980s, and 6 and 4 percent respectively in the 1990s. For the next half decade, projections range from 5 to 7.5 percent annually. That is still less than for East Asia, but sufficient to double in a decade or so. All of these Asian medium term growth rates exceed by far those ever previously achieved anywhere in the West.

It is noteworthy that the economically most dynamic regions of East Asia today are also still or again exactly the same ones as before 1800 and which survived into the nineteenth century.

1. In the South, Lingnan centered on the Hong Kong – Guangzhou corridor,

2. Fujian, still centered on Amoy/Xiamen and focusing on the Taiwan straits and all of Southeast Asia in the South China Sea; and between them,

– 3. the Yangtze Valley, centered on Shanghai and trade with Japan that is already taking the lead away again from the southern and northern regions.

– 4. But already then there was also a fourth economic region around the North China Sea, the quadrangular trade relations among Manchuria and elsewhere in Northeast China, Siberia/Russian Far East, [northern?] Japan, and Korea, but also including Mongolia..

Although the first three above-named regions are already again undergoing tremendous economic growth [and political power?] in the absolute sense, the fourth one around Korea seems to enjoy the greatest relative boom, and within it that of Korean capital as well. It is helping to develop resources in the Russian Far East and as far west as Central Asian Khazhakstan. The Chinese population on the Russian side of the Amur River has been estimated already to exceed 5 million people as a pool of cheap labor.

Probable political change in the DRNK may well add a new source of cheap labor for this growing pool of labor in the Northeast Asian Region and for its Far East Russian also cheap base of ample metallurgical, forestry, agricultural and even petroleum resources. Korean and Japanese capital could make that a very attractive regional growth pole in itself and a highly competitive region on the world market.

All of these in turn were and still or again increasingly are important segments of world trade and of the global economy.

In that sense also the examination of the world economy and of the predominant place in it of the East Asian including the Korean economies points to the most fundamental bases of contemporary economic developments in the region and also presages important world economic ones for the foreseeable future.

The late Prof. André Gunder Frank was an outstanding political economist and historian  He passed away in April 2005. His legacy will live. 

At the time of writing he was an Associate of the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies, Luxembourg and Senior Fellow, World History Center, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.

For details on André Gunder Frank`s writings, see http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/index.html

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Um novo estudo envolvendo 23 milhões de pessoas prova que um efeito colateral da vacina COVID-19 – uma vez rotulado como “desinformação” – é real.

Assim afirmou o comediante, escritor e comentarista político Jimmy Dore no episódio de segunda-feira do “The Jimmy Dore Show”.

Dore examinou um artigo de 21 de abril no Expresso do Reino Unido, “Estudo de vacinas de 23 milhões mostra risco de ‘problemas cardíacos’ das injeções Moderna ou Pfizer”.

O artigo relatou uma investigação publicada on-line no JAMA Cardiology em 20 de abril: “Vacinação e miocardite contra SARS-CoV-2 em um estudo de coorte nórdico de 23 milhões de residentes”.

O estudo do JAMA justifica comentaristas que discutiram conexões entre problemas cardíacos e as vacinas COVID-19 meses ou até anos atrás – e que foram demitidos ou difamados, disse Dore.

O podcaster Joe Rogan, por exemplo, foi duramente criticado e acusado de espalhar “desinformação” quando discutiu pela primeira vez a conexão vacina-miocardite.

Mas, de acordo com o estudo, “tanto a primeira quanto a segunda dose de vacinas de mRNA foram associadas ao aumento do risco de miocardite e pericardite. Para indivíduos que receberam 2 doses da mesma vacina, o risco de miocardite foi maior entre homens jovens (com idades entre 16 e 24 anos) após a segunda dose.”

Especificamente, entre os homens jovens que receberam duas doses da mesma vacina, entre quatro e sete eventos de excesso de miocardite e pericardite ocorreram em 28 dias por 100.000 vacinados após a segunda dose da vacina Pfizer, e entre nove e 28 eventos de excesso de miocardite e pericardite ocorreram por 100.000 vacinados após a segunda dose da vacina Moderna.

O estudo concluiu: “O risco de miocardite neste grande estudo de coorte foi maior em homens jovens após a segunda dose da vacina SARS-CoV-2” e recomendou que “esse risco deve ser equilibrado com os benefícios da proteção contra a doença grave de COVID-19.”

A miocardite é uma inflamação do músculo cardíaco que pode levar à arritmia cardíaca e à morte. A pericardite é a inflamação do tecido ao redor do coração que pode causar dor torácica aguda e outros sintomas. The Defender apresentou histórias de pessoas que desenvolveram miocardite e pericardite após a vacinação contra o COVID-19.

Dore destacou que a Dinamarca em outubro de 2021 suspendeu a administração da vacina Moderna para menores de 18 anos, enquanto a Suécia fez o mesmo para menores de 30 anos.

Dore também lembrou os dias em que Kamala Harris e Joe Biden expressaram hesitação sobre a vacinação quando o então presidente Donald Trump a endossou.

Quando as pessoas formam uma opinião sobre as vacinas com base no clima político, não em dados, isso mostra que elas estão presas ao medo ou são falsas, disse ele.

Assista ao trecho aqui:

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Selected excerpts from article published by UK The Week, May 3, 2022.

Our thanks to The Week for bringing this text to our attention.

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Bill Gates has admitted that fundraising meetings held with the late-billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were a “huge mistake”. 

Discussing the role that his relationship with Epstein played in his divorce from Melinda Gates, the Microsoft billionaire told The Sunday Times that “at the time” he “didn’t realise that by having those meetings it would be seen as giving [Epstein] credibility”. 

“You’re almost saying, ‘I forgive that type of behaviour’, or something,” he added. “So clearly the way it’s seen, I made a huge mistake not understanding that.”

Speaking publicly about her separation from Gates for the first time in March, Melinda told CBS News that although “many things” contributed to her decision to end the pair’s marriage, she “did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no”.

She also told the broadcaster that journalists should ask Bill whether he had cheated on her during the course of their marriage. Asked by The Sunday Times’ associate editor Alice Thomson whether he would answer that question, he refused, saying: “No.”

>>>

According to The Daily Beast, Melinda was present for a meeting between her husband and Epstein at the latter’s Upper East Side mansion in September of that year, and afterwards told friends that “she was furious at the relationship between the two men”.

Melinda described “how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender”, the site said, and “told friends she wanted nothing to do with him”.

“I had nightmares about it afterwards. So, you know, my heart breaks for these young women, because that’s how I felt and here I’m an older woman. My god, I feel terrible for those young women. It was awful,” she said.

….

Gates has “done his best to minimise his connections” with the disgraced billionaire, The New York Times (NYT) reported, telling The Wall Street Journal in April 2021: “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.”

However, the NYT found that “beginning in 2011”, he “met with Epstein on numerous occasions”, including “at least three times at Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night”.

Employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “also paid multiple visits to Epstein’s mansion”, the paper added, while “Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund”.

The Gates’ charitable foundation has “championed the well-being of young girls”, The New York Times said. But at the point at which the meetings began, Epstein had already served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor and was registered as a sex offender.

One former employee told the magazine that Gates would often leave the Microsoft headquarters just hours after arriving, saying: “We all assumed that it was when he was with women. I knew there were many off-site meetings that were not on his calendar.”

Others told Vanity Fair that allegations against Gates have been “largely suppressed by Gates’s liberal use of nondisclosure agreements, ostensibly to keep more damning details under wraps”.

Sources in the room said Quick did not raise his links to the late-billionare paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. A third attendee told the paper he appeared “agitated” during the appearance, adding: “Bill Gates was pretty much a total asshole.”

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Discreetly, as under the radar as a looming virus, the 68th Bilderberg meeting is currently underway in Washington, D.C. Nothing to see here. No conspiracy theories about a “secret cabal”, please. This is just a docile, “diverse group of political leaders and experts” having a chat, a laugh, and a bubbly.

Still, one cannot but notice that the choice of venue speaks more volumes than the entire – burned to the ground – Library of Alexandria. In the year heralding the explosion of a much-awaited NATO vs. Russia proxy war, discussing its myriad ramifications does suit the capital of the Empire of Lies, much more than Davos a few weeks ago, where one Henry Kissinger sent them into a frenzy by advancing the necessity of a toxic compromise named “diplomacy”.

The list of Bilderberg 2022 participants is a joy to peruse. Here are just some of the stalwarts:

  • James Baker, Consigliere extraordinaire, now a mere Director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon.
  • José Manuel Barroso, former head of the European Commission, later the recipient of a golden parachute in the form of Chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
  • Albert Bourla, the Pfizer Big Guy.
  • William Burns, CIA director.
  • Kurt Campbell, the guy who invented the Obama/Hillary “pivot to Asia”, now White House Coordinator for Indo-Pacific.
  • Mark Carney, former Bank of England, one of the designers of the Great Reset, now Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management.
  • Henry Kissinger, The Establishment’s Voice (or a war criminal: take your pick).
  • Charles Michel, President of the European Council.
  • Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, which will duly  relay all major Bilderberg directives in the magazine’s upcoming cover stories.
  • David Petraeus, certified loser of endless surges and Chairman of KKR Global Institute.
  • Mark Rutte, hawkish Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
  • Jens Stoltenberg, NATO top parrot, sorry, secretary-general.
  • Jake Sullivan, Director of the National Security Council.

The ideological and geopolitical affiliations of these members of the “diverse group” need no further elaboration. It gets positively sexier when we see what they will be discussing.

Among other issues we find

  • “NATO challenges”;
  • “Indo-Pacific realignment”;
  • “continuity of government and economy” (Conspirationists: continuity in case of nuclear war?);
  • “disruption of global financial system” (already on);
  • “post-pandemic health” (Conspirationists: how to engineer the next pandemic?);
  • “trade and deglobalization”;
  • and of course, the choice wagyu beef steaks: Russia and China.

As Bilderberg follows Chatham House Rules, mere mortals won’t have a clue of what they actually “proposed” or approved, and none of the participants will be allowed to talk about it with anyone else. One of my top New York sources, with direct access to most of the Masters of the Universe, loves to quip that Davos and Bilderberg are just for the messenger boys: the guys who really run the show don’t even bother to show up, ensconced in their uber-private meetings in uber-private clubs, where the real decisions are made.

Still, anyone following in some detail the rotten state of the “rules-based international order” will have a pretty good idea about the 2022 Bilderberg chatter.

What the Chinese say

Secretary of State Little Blinken – Sullivan’s sidekick in the ongoing Crash Test Dummy administration’s Dumb and Dumber remake – has recently claimed that China “supports” Russia on Ukraine instead of remaining neutral.

What really matters here is that Little Blinken is implying that Beijing wants to destabilize Asia-Pacific – which is a notorious absurdity. Yet that’s the master narrative that must pave the way for the US to muscle up its  “Indo-Pacific” concoction. And that’s the briefing Sullivan and Kurt Campbell will be delivering to the “diverse group”.

Davos – with its new self-billed mantra, “The Great Narrative” – completely excluded Russia. Bilderberg is mostly about containment of China – which after all is the number one existential threat to the Empire of Lies and its satrapies.

Rather than wait for Bilderberg morsels dispensed by The Economist, it’s much more productive to check out what a cross-section of fact-based Chinese intelligentsia thinks about the new “collective West” racket.

Let’s start with Justin Lin Yifu, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and now Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, and Sheng Songcheng, former head of the Financial Survey and Statistic Dept. a the Bank of China.

They advance that if China achieves “dynamic zero infection” on Covid-19 by the end of May (that actually happened: see the end of the Shanghai lockdown), China’s economy may grow by 5.5% in 2022.

They dismiss the imperial attempt to establish an “Asian version of NATO”: “As long as China continues to grow at a higher rate and to open up, European and ASEAN countries would not participate in the US’s decoupling trap so as to ensure their economic growth and job creation.”

Three academics from the Shanghai Institute of International Studies and Fudan University touch on the same point: the American-announced “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework”, supposed to be the economic pillar of the Indo-Pacific strategy, is nothing but a cumbersome attempt to “weaken the internal cohesion and regional autonomy of ASEAN.”

Liu Zongyi stresses that China’s position at the heart of the vastly inter-connected Asian supply chains “has been consolidated”, especially now with the onset of the largest trade deal on the planet, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

Chen Wengling, Chief Economist of a think tank under the key National Development and Reform Commission, notes  the “comprehensive ideological and technological war against China” launched by the Americans.

But he’s keen to stress how they are “not ready for a hot war as the US and Chinese economies are so closely linked.” The crucial vector is that “the US has not yet made substantial progress in strengthening its supply chain focusing on four key fields including semiconductors.”

Chen worries about “China’s energy security”; “China’s silence” on US sanctions on Russia, which “may result in US retaliation”; and crucially, how “China’s plan of building the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with Ukraine and EU countries will be affected.” What will happen in practice is BRI will be privileging economic corridors across Iran and West Asia, as well as the Maritime Silk Road, instead of the Trans-Siberian corridor across Russia.

It’s up to Yu Yongding, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank, to go for the jugular, noting how” the global financial system and the US dollar have been weaponized into geopolitical tools. The nefarious behavior of the US in freezing foreign exchange reserves has not only seriously damaged the international credibility of the US but has also shaken the credit foundation of the dominant international financial system in the West.

He expresses the consensus among Chinese intel, that “if there is a geopolitical conflict between the US and China, then China’s overseas assets will be seriously threatened, especially its huge reserves. Therefore, the composition of China’s external financial assets and liabilities urgently needs to be adjusted and the portion of US dollar denominated assets in its reserves portfolio should be reduced.

This chessboard sucks

A serious debate is raging across virtually all sectors of Chinese society on the American weaponization of the world financial casino. The conclusions are inevitable: get rid of US Treasuries, fast, by any means necessary; more imports of commodities and strategic materials (thus the importance of the Russia-China strategic partnership); and firmly secure overseas assets, especially those foreign currency reserves.

Meanwhile Bilderberg’s “diverse group”, on the other side of the pond, is discussing, among other things, what will really happen in case they force the IMF racket to blow up (a key plan to implement The Great Reset, or “Great Narrative”).

They are starting to literally freak out with the slowly but surely emergence of an alternative, resource-based monetary/financial system: exactly what the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is currently discussing and designing, with Chinese input.

Imagine a counter-Bilderberg system where a basket of Global South actors, resource-rich but economically poor, are able to issue their own currencies backed by commodities, and finally get rid of their status of IMF hostages. They are all paying close attention to the Russia gas-for-rubles experiment.

And in China’s particular case, what will always matter is loads of productive capital underpinning a massive, extremely deep industrial and civil infrastructure.

No wonder Davos and Bilderberg messenger boys, when they look at The Grand Chessboard, are filled with dread: their era of perpetual free lunch is over. What would delight cynics, skeptics, neoplatonists and Taoists galore is that it was Davos-Bilderberg Men (and Women) who actually boxed themselves into zugzwang.

All dressed up – with nowhere to go. Even JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon – who didn’t even bother to go to Bilderberg – is scared, saying an economic “hurricane” is coming. And overturning the chessboard is no remedy: at best that may invite a ceremonious tuxedo visit by Mr. Sarmat and Mr. Zircon carrying some hypersonic bubbly.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Day 100 of the Russia-Ukraine War

June 7th, 2022 by William Walter Kay

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Historians will agonize over when the Russia-Ukrainin War actually started; but as Russia’s February 24 breach of Ukraine’s borders has been deemed by our media as Day One, let’s run with that. This makes June 4, Day 100.  

Western war reportage can be predicted a week in advance by the simple expediency of reading Russian Ministry of Defence communiques. For instance, Russian news outlets detailed the demise of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, complete with video of thousands of troops surrendering, a week before our media begrudgingly conceded this fact. This time lag repeats regularly, lending credence to Russian claims.

Conversely, Ukraine’s Centre for Information and Psychological Operations (the source of much media malarky) has been caught inserting video game clips into its pressers, and producing disinformation howlers like the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ fighter ace fables. They stage mock battles for propaganda.

Their most persistent myth has Ukrainian forces beating back Russian attempts to overrun Kiev and Kharkiv. In reality, Russian maneuverings around those cities were ruses. These feints superbly misdirected Ukrainian military assets at the expense of shoring-up forces along the eastern front.

How do we know this?

At no time did Russia have less than 15,000 crack troops enmeshed in the brutal 3-month Battle of Mariupol. At no time did Russia have as many as 15,000 troops in Kiev’s environs – a city 8 times Mariupol’s size. The Russians never assembled adequate forces to assault Kiev.

Circa Day 40, Russian forces north of Kiev and Kharkiv u-turned back to Belarus then wheeled around to flank Ukraine’s eastern front where Russia now enjoys a 7-to-1 troop advantage. Ukraine’s legendary re-capturing of territory north of Kiev and Kharkiv consisted of shotless excursions into vacated villages and farmland. Nevertheless, this nothing-burger is relentlessly mongered as Ukraine’s pivotal triumph.

How do we know the Ukrainians are preposterously lying and that Russian accounts are closer to the truth?

By every expert opinion the Russian Air Force is a modern, massive enterprise seconded only by their American counterpart. Ukraine’s air force barely ranked before February 24. Since then, 16 of its airfields, and 186 of its combat aircraft, have been destroyed. Ukraine has been effectively fighting without an air force throughout this entire conflict.

Moreover, unlike America’s foreign entanglements this war is not taking place on the other side of the planet from Russia. Its happening next door. Russia can concentrate vastly more air power onto Ukraine than the Americans could on Iraq.

Furthermore, the Russians have eliminated 329 Ukrainian anti-aircraft systems and scores of radar stations.

Finally, while Ukraine boasts a 2,700-kilometre coastline, their navy didn’t survive Day One.

The Russians have fired thousands of sea-launched and air-launched precision missiles at defenseless Ukrainian positions. This war is a turkey shoot.

After Day 40 the war became primarily an artillery dual with the Russians enjoying a massive firepower advantage. Said advantage has been multiplied by the destruction of 1,768 Ukrainian field artillery guns and 464 Ukrainian rocket launchers. These losses represent well over half of what Ukraine brought to this war, and virtually all of what they deployed along the eastern front.

NATO reinforcements arrive too little too late; if they arrive at all. They often get blasted before they reach the front. Warehouses storing western munitions, and barracks housing foreign mercs, have proven to be sitting ducks.

Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, describes the war as an opportunity to perfect the nexus between surveillance drones and artillery batteries. Drone operators spot Ukrainian troop concentrations. They immediately communicate these coordinates to gunnery captains who, as soon as possible, hammer those spots. In one recent 24-hour period Russian artillery barraged 1,100 locations.

Russia claims to have destroyed 3,399 armoured vehicles; 3,402 non-armoured military vehicles; 1,091 drones and 129 helicopters.

On March 25 Russia estimated Ukrainian casualties at 14,000 dead, 16,000 wounded. On April 16 they upped fatalityestimates to 23,000. This body-count now likely exceeds 40,000!

Ukrainian “blocker battalions” lurk behind Ukrainian lines to prevent flight, surrender, or any other real or imagined disobedience. One such battalion is dominated by ‘The Punisher’ – a notoriously trigger-happy masked sniper who is probably not a Ukrainian national and who probably deserves a Russian medal for having shot more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian has.

Despite Punisher’s best efforts 5,000 Ukrainians have surrendered. Rumours of mutinies and other indicia of discontent abound at all ranks of Ukraine’s army. Zelensky’s neck is on the block.

This isn’t Vlad Putin’s War. This is Whitey Biden’s War and it’s a monstrous fiasco. America’s historic party of slavery and war, the Democrats, have woefully mis-stepped and repercussions will be historic.

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This article is a snapshot from the Mapping Project: a project created by activists and organizers in eastern Massachusetts, investigating local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine, for colonialism and dispossession here where we live, and for the economy of imperialism and war.

***

“The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.”  Hugo Chavez

“The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.”  Xoài Pham 

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.” Frantz Fanon

US imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet, a force of ecological devastation and disaster impacting not only human beings, but also our non-human relatives.

How can we organize to dismantle the vast and complicated network of US imperialism which includes US war and militarism, CIA intervention, US weapons/technology/surveillance corporations, political and economic support for dictatorships, military juntas, death squads and US trained global police forces favorable to US geopolitical interests, US imposed sanctions, so-called “humanitarian interventions,” genetically modified grassroots organizations, corporate media’s manipulation of spontaneous protest, and US corporate sponsorship of political repression and regime change favorable to US corporate interests?

This article deals with US imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that US imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years

The exact death toll of US imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, US imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in:

 Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

This list does not include other aspects of US imperialist aggression which have had a devastating and lasting impact on communities worldwide, including torture, imprisonment, rape, and the ecological devastation wrought by the US military through atomic bombs, toxic waste and untreated sewage dumping by over 750 military bases in over 80 countries. The US Department of Defense consumes more petroleum than any institution in the world.

In the year of 2017 alone, the US military emitted 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a carbon footprint greater than that of most nations worldwide. This list also does not include the impact of US fossil fuel consumption and US corporate fossil fuel extraction, fracking, agribusiness, mining, and mono-cropping, all of which are part and parcel of the extractive economy of US imperialism.

US military bases around the world.

US military bases around the world (figure from Al Jazeera).

Dollar Hegemony

One central mechanism of US imperialism is “dollar hegemony” which forces countries around the world to conduct international trade in US dollars. US dollars are backed by US bonds (instead of gold or industrial stocks) which means a country can only cash in one American IOU for another. When the US offers military aid to friendly nations, this aid is circulated back to US weapons corporations and returns to US banks. In addition, US dollars are also backed by US bombs: any nation that threatens to nationalize resources or go off the dollar (i.e. Iraq or Libya) is threatened with a military invasion and/or a US backed coup.

US imperialism has also been built through “soft power” organizations like:

USAID, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS).

These nominally international bodies are practically unilateral in their subservience to the interests of the US state and US corporations.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, USAID (and its precursor organizations) made “development aid” to Asian, African, and South American countries conditional on those countries’ legal formalization of capitalist property relations, and reorganization of their economies around homeownership debt.

The goal was to enclose Indigenous land, and land shared through alternate economic systems, as a method of “combatting Communism with homeownership” and creating dependency and buy-in to US capitalist hegemony (Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners). In order to retain access to desperately needed streams of resources (e.g. IMF “loans”), Global South governments are forced to accept resource-extraction by the US, while at the same time denying their own people popularly supported policies such as land reform, economic diversification, and food sovereignty. It is also important to note that Global South nations have never received reparations or compensation for the resources that have been stolen from them – this makes the idea of “loans” by global monetary institutions even more outrageous.

The US also uses USAID and other similarly functioning international bodies to suppress and to undermine anti-imperialist struggle inside “friendly” countries. Starting in the 1960s, USAID funded police training programs across the globe under a counterinsurgency model, training foreign police as a “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.”

These USAID-funded police training programs involved surveillance and the creation of biometric databases to map entire populations, as well as programs of mass imprisonment, torture, and assassination. After experimenting with these methods in other countries, US police departments integrated many of them into US policing, especially the policing of BIPOC communities here (see our entry on the Boston Police Department). At the same time, the US uses USAID and other soft power funding bodies to undermine revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, by funding “safe” reformist alternatives, including a global network of AFL-CIO managed “training centers” aimed at fostering a bureaucratic union culture similar to the one in the US, which keeps labor organizing loyal to capitalism and to US global dominance. (See our entries on the AFL-CIO and the Harvard Trade Union Program.)

US imperialism intentionally fosters divisions between different peoples and nations, offering (relative) rewards to those who choose to cooperate with US dictates (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Colombia), while brutally punishing those who do not (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). In this way, US imperialism creates material conditions in which peoples and governments face a choice: 1. accommodate the interests of US Empire and allow the US to develop your nation’s land and sovereign resources in ways which enrich the West; or, 2. attempt to use your land and your sovereign resources to meet the needs of your own people and suffer the brutality of US economic and military violence.

The Harvard Kennedy School: Training Ground for US Empire and the Security State

The Mapping Project set out to map local US imperialist actors (involved in both material and ideological support for US imperialism) on the land of Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) and to analyze how these institutions interacted with other oppressive local and global institutions that are driving colonization of indigenous lands here and worldwide, local displacement/ethnic cleansing (“gentrification”), policing, and zionist imperialism.

A look at just one local institution on our map, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of US imperialism to function. (All information outlined below is taken from The Mapping Project entries and links regarding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please see this link for hyperlinked source material.)

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and its historical precursors have hosted some of the most infamous war criminals and architects of empire: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Susan Rice (an HKS fellow), Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Larry Summers. HKS also currently hosts Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, the academic laboratory of the US backed Venezuelan coup.

In How Harvard Rules, John Trumpbour documents the central role Harvard played in the establishment of the Cold War academic-military-industrial complex and US imperialism post-WWII (How Harvard Rules, 51). Trumpbour highlights the role of the Harvard Kennedy School under Dean Graham Allison (1977-1989), in particular, recounting that Dean Allison ran an executive education program for Pentagon officials at Harvard Kennedy (HHR 68). Harvard Kennedy School’s support for the US military and US empire continues to this day. HKS states on its website:

Harvard Kennedy School, because of its mission to train public leaders and its depth of expertise in the study of defense and international security, has always had a particularly strong relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The School has provided its expertise to branches of the US military, and it has given military personnel (active and veteran) access to Harvard’s education and training.

The same webpage further notes that after the removal of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) from Harvard Kennedy School in 1969, “under the leadership of Harvard President Drew Faust, the ROTC program was reinstated in 2011, and the Kennedy School’s relationship with the military continues to grow more robust each year.”

In particular, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides broad support to the US military and the objectives of US empire. The Belfer Center is co-directed by former US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (a war hawk who has advocated for a US invasion of North Korea and US military build ups against Russia and Iran) and former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach. Programs within HKS Belfer Center include the Center’s “Intelligence Program,” which boasts that it “acquaints students and Fellows with the intelligence community and its strengths and weaknesses for policy making,” further noting, “Discussions with active and retired intelligence practitioners, scholars of intelligence history, law, and other disciplines, help students and Fellows prepare to best use the information available through intelligence agencies.” Alongside HKS Belfer’s Intelligence Program, is the Belfer Center’s “Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship.” The Belfer Center claims that, under the direction of Belfer Center co-directors Ashton Carter and Eric Rosenbach, the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence.”

As noted above, the Harvard Kennedy School serves as an institutional training ground for future servants of US empire and the US national security state. HKS also maintains a close relationship with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As reported by Inside Higher Ed in their 2017 review of Spy Schools by Daniel Golden:

[Harvard Kennedy School] currently allows the agency [the CIA] to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s knowledge. When the officers apply – often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover – the university doesn’t know they’re CIA agents, but once they’re in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they’re undercover. Their fellow students, however – often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy — are kept in the dark.

Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide,” Golden writes. “For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence.”

In addition to the CIA, HKS has direct relationships with the FBI, the US Pentagon, US Department of Homeland Security, NERAC, and numerous branches of the US Armed Forces:

  • Chris Combs, a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership has held numerous positions within the FBI;
  • Jeffrey A. Tricoli, who serves as Section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division since December 2016 (prior to which he held several other positions within the FBI) was a keynote speaker at “multiple sessions” of the HKS’s Cybersecurity Executive Education program;
  • Jeff Fields, who is Fellow at both the Cyber Project and the Intelligence Project of HKS’s Belfer Center currently serves as a Supervisory Special Agent within the National Security Division of the FBI;
  • HKS hosted former FBI director James Comey for a conversation with HKS Belfer Center’s Co-Director (and former Pentagon Chief of Staff) Eric Rosenbach in 2020;
  • Government spending records show yearly tuition payments from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Homeland Security personnel attending special HKS seminars on Homeland Security under HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership;
  • Northeast Homeland Security Regional Advisory Council meeting minutes from February 2022 list “Edward Chao: Analyst, Harvard Kennedy School,” as a NERAC “Council Member”; and
  • Harvard Kennedy School and the US Air force have created multiple fellowships aimed at recruiting US Air Force service members to pursue degrees at HKS. The Air Force’s CSAF Scholars Master Fellowship, for example, aims to “prepare mid-career, experienced professionals to return to the Air Force ready to assume significant leadership positions in an increasingly complex environment.” In 2016, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf welcomed Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James to Harvard Kennedy School, in a speech in which Elmendorf highlighted his satisfaction that the ROTC program, including Air Force ROTC, had been reinstated at Harvard (ROTC had been removed from campus following mass faculty protests in 1969).

Harvard Kennedy School's links (graph view).

Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

HKS’s direct support of US imperialism does not limit itself to ideological and educational support. It is deeply enmeshed in the war economy driven by the interests of the US weapons industry.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, L3 Harris, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are global corporations who supply the United States government with broad scale military weaponry and war and surveillance technologies. All these companies have corporate leadership who are either alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), who are currently contributing to HKS as lecturers/professors, and/or who have held leadership positions in US federal government.

Lockheed Martin Vice President for Corporate Business Development Leo Mackay is a Harvard Kennedy School alumnus (MPP ’91), was a Fellow in the HKS Belfer Center International Security Program (1991-92) and served as the “military assistant” to then US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter, who would soon go on to become co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Following this stint at the US Pentagon, Mackay landed in the US weapons industry at Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin Vice President Marcel Lettre is an HKS alumni and prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Lettre spent eight years in the US Department of Defense (DoD). The US DoD has dished out a whopping $540.82 billion to date in contracts with Lockheed Martin for the provision of products and services to the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches of the US military.

Lockheed Martin Board of Directors member Jeh Johnson has lectured at Harvard Kennedy School and is the former Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out the US federal government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants. (Retired) General Joseph F. Dunford is currently a member of two Lockheed Martin Board of Director Committees and a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Belfer Center.

Dunford was a US military leader, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of all US and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Dunford also serves on the board of the Atlantic Council, itself a cutout organization of NATO and the US security state which crassly promotes the interests of US empire. Mackay, Lettre, Johnson, and Dunford’s respective career trajectories provide an emblematic illustration of the grotesque revolving door which exists between elite institutions of knowledge production like the Harvard Kennedy School, the US security state (which feeds its people into those elite institutions and vice versa), and the US weapons industry (which seeks business from the US security state).

Similar revolving door phenomena are notable among the Harvard Kennedy School and Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. HKS Professor Meghan O’Sullivan currently serves on the board of Massachusetts-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon.

O’Sullivan is also deeply enmeshed within America’s security state, currently sitting on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as “special assistant” to President George W. Bush (2004-07) where she was “Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan,” helping oversee the US invasions and occupations of these nations during the so-called “War on Terror.” O’Sullivan has openly attempted to leverage her position as Harvard Kennedy School to funnel US state dollars into Raytheon: In April 2021, O’Sullivan penned an article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s Wrong to Pull Troops Out of Afghanistan. But We Can Minimize the Damage.”

As reported in the Harvard Crimson, O’Sullivan’s author bio in this article highlighted her position as a faculty member of Harvard Kennedy (with the perceived “expertise” affiliation with HKS grants) but failed to acknowledge her position on the Board of Raytheon, a company which had “a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots and is a major supplier of weapons to the U.S. military.”

Donn Yates who works in Domestic and International Business Development at Boeing’s T-7A Redhawk Program was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015-16. Don Yates also spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. Former Northrop Grumman Director for Strategy and Global Relations John Johns is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy’s National and International Security Program. Johns also spent “seven years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Maintenance establishing policy for, and leading oversight of the Department’s annual $80B weapon system maintenance program and deployed twice in support of security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The largest US oil firms are also closely interlocked with these top weapons companies, which have also diversified their technological production for the security industry – providing services for pipeline and energy facility security, as well as border security.

This means that the same companies are profiting at every stage in the cycle of climate devastation: they profit from wars for extraction; from extraction; and from the militarized policing of people forced to migrate by climate disaster. Exxon Mobil (the 4th largest fossil fuel firm) contracts with General Dynamics, L3 Harris, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin, the top weapons company in the world, shares board members with Chevron, and other global fossil fuel companies. (See Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action.)

The Harvard Kennedy School and US Support for Israel

US imperialist interests in West Asia are directly tied to US support of Israel. This support is not only expressed through tax dollars but through ideological and diplomatic support for Israel and advocacy for regional normalization with Israel.

Harvard Kennedy School is home to the Wexner Foundation. Through its “Israel Fellowship,” The Wexner Foundation awards ten scholarships annually to “outstanding public sector directors and leaders from Israel,” helping these individuals to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Past Wexner fellows include more than 25 Israeli generals and other high-ranking military and police officials. Among them is the Israeli Defense Force’s current chief of general staff, Aviv Kochavi, who is directly responsible for the bombardment of Gaza in May 2021. Kochavi also is believed to be one of the 200 to 300 Israeli officials identified by Tel Aviv as likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court’s probe into alleged Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — himself accused of war crimes in connection with Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza — $2.3 million for two studies, one of which he did not complete.

HKS’s Belfer Center has hosted Israeli generals, politicians, and other officials to give talks at Harvard Kennedy School. Ehud Barak, mentioned above, was himself a “Belfer fellow” at HKS in 2016. The Belfer Center also hosts crassly pro-Israel events for HKS students, such as: The Abraham Accords – A conversation on the historic normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel,” “A Discussion with Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo,” “The Future of Modern Warfare” (which Belfer describes as “a lunch seminar with Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff for the Israel Defense Forces”), and “The Future of Israel’s National Security.”

As of 2022, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is hosting former Israel military general and war criminal Amos Yadlin as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer’s Middle East Initiative. Furthermore, HKS is allowing Yadlin to lead a weekly study group of HKS students entitled “Israeli National Security in a Shifting Middle East: Historical and Strategic Perspectives for an Uncertain Future.” Harvard University students wrote an open letter demanding HKS “sever all association with Amos Yadlin and immediately suspend his study group.” Yadlin had defended Israel’s assassination policy through which the Israeli state has extrajudicially killed hundreds of Palestinians since 2000, writing that the “the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply” vis-á-vis Palestinians under zionist occupation.

Harvard Kennedy School also plays host to the Harvard Kennedy School Israel Caucus. The HKS Israel Caucus coordinates “heavily subsidized” trips to Israel for 50 HKS students annually. According to HKS Israel Caucus’s website, students who attend these trips “meet the leading decision makers and influencers in Israeli politics, regional security and intelligence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the next big Tech companies.” The HKS Israel Caucus also regularly hosts events which celebrate “Israel’s culture and history.” Like the trips to Israel they coordinate, HKS Israel Caucus events consistently whitewash over the reality of Israel’s colonial war against the Palestinian people through normalizing land theft, forced displacement, and resource theft.

Harvard Kennedy School also has numerous ties to local pro-Israel organizations: the ADL, the JCRC, and CJP.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

In 2017, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center announced the launch of “The Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security,” which Belfer stated was “made possible through a gift from HRH Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Through this project, Harvard Kennedy School and the HKS Belfer Center have hosted numerous events at HKS which have promoted Saudi Arabia as a liberalizing and positive force for security and stability in the region, whitewashing over the realities of the Saudi-led and US-backed campaign of airstrikes and blockade against Yemen which has precipitated conditions of mass starvation and an epidemic of cholera amongst the Yemeni people.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security further normalizes and whitewashes Saudi Arabia’s crimes through its “HKS Student Delegation to Saudi Arabia.” This delegation brings 11 Harvard Kennedy School students annually on two-week trips to Saudi Arabia, where students “exchange research, engage in cultural dialogue, and witness the changes going on in the Kingdom firsthand.” Not unlike the student trips to Israel Harvard Kennedy School’s Israel Caucus coordinates, these trips to Saudi Arabia present HKS students with a crassly propagandized impression of Saudi Arabia, shoring up support for the “Kingdom” amongst the future leaders of the U.S. security state which HKS seeks to nurture.

Finding Our Mission

The vast network outlined above between the Harvard Kennedy School, the US federal government, the US Armed Forces, and the US weapons industry constitutes only a small portion of what is known about HKS and its role in US imperialism, but it is enough.

The Mapping Project demonstrates that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is a nexus of US imperialist planning and cooperation, with an address. The Mapping Project also links HKS to harms locally, including, but not limited to colonialism, violence against migrants, ethnic cleansing/displacement of Black and Brown Boston area residents from their communities (“gentrification”), health harm, policing, the prison-industrial complex, zionism, and surveillance. The Harvard Kennedy School’s super-oppressor status – the sheer number of separate communities feeling its global impact in their daily lives through these multiple and various mechanisms of oppression and harm – as it turns out, is its greatest weakness.

A movement that can identify super-oppressors like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can use this information to identify strategic vulnerabilities of key hubs of power and effectively organize different communities towards common purpose. This is what the Mapping Project aims to do – to move away from traditionally siloed work towards coordination across communities and struggles in order to build strategic oppositional community power.

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Appendix: The Death Toll of US Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of US Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the US government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives – as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to US Interventions (please note that my use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

  • Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
  • Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
  • Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
  • Cambodia: 2-3 million people
  • Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
  • Chile: 10,000 people (the US sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
  • Colombia: 60,000 people
  • Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by US corporations and the US sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
  • Croatia: 15,000 people
  • Cuba: 1,800 people
  • Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
  • East Timor: 200,000 people
  • El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
  • Greece: More than 50,000 people
  • Grenada: 277 people
  • Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
  • Haiti: 100,000 people
  • Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
  • Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
  • Iran: 262,000 people
  • Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by US sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
  • Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
  • Korea: 5 million people
  • Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
  • Laos: 50,000 people
  • Libya: at least 2500 people
  • Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (US backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
  • Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. US govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
  • Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
  • Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
  • Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
  • Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
  • Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
  • Somalia: at least 2,000 people
  • Sudan: 2 million people
  • Syria: at least 350,000 people
  • Vietnam: 3 million people
  • Yemen: over 377,000 people
  • Yugoslavia: 107,000 people
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In the last week, the sending of Western heavy artillery to Ukraine, with long-range missile systems, was one of the most commented topics in newspapers around the world. After the announcement by the American government that such equipment would be placed on Ukrainian territory, many experts began to fiercely criticize the measure, considering it a threat of escalation of the conflict. And, as expected by analysts and Russian authorities, weapons immediately began to be used illegally, resulting in new war crimes.

In a statement on June 6 the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, reported that Western long-range weapons in Ukraine have been used in recent days to attack civilian targets in the Donbass.

“We have taken note of the intention of the USA and the United Kingdom to supply long-range artillery and multiple launch rocket systems [MLRS] to Ukraine. …I would like to point out that the Kiev regime has already taken this as carte blanche to… intensify the shelling of civilian targets in Donbass, where after a number of recent defeats, the Ukrainian artillery was no longer able to reach”, said the ambassador.

According to him, therefore, since the long-range weapons were sent to Ukraine, Kiev’s artillery was able to hit certain regions of the Donbass over which they no longer had firepower until some days ago (before the arrival of the new weapons). Precisely in those regions where Ukrainian forces were no longer attacking, civilian life was returning to normal, which is why schools for children were operating again. And, among the targets attacked, according to Russian reports, the main ones would have been schools, with several occurrences of bombings against buildings during working hours in those regions. At least one child died in one of the bombed schools, in addition to an uncertain number of dead and wounded among the adults who were working in the facilities during the attacks.

Despite the gravity of the situation, this was an expected risk. The biggest fear, however, is that this Ukrainian ambition for new targets will reach the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. On some previous occasions, civilian targets in Russian space were already attacked by Ukrainian artillery, which was not responded with full force by the Russian troops involved in the operation, as the situation in Ukraine was under control and in a short time Kiev would totally lose its long-range power. But as the West supplies Kiev with new long-range weapons whenever Russia neutralizes that power, the situation is starting to demand more incisive action.

Before authorizing the shipment of long-range missile systems to Ukraine, Joe Biden stated that the equipment would under no circumstances be used against Russian territory, but at all times Moscow’s authorities and experts around the world expressed skepticism about that. Now, this distrust only tends to increase, as the Kiev’s forces have already demonstrated that they have not changed their combat perspective, maintaining the strategy of attacking civilian targets and without involvement in the Russian operation, making it predictable that soon Russian citizens will be hit as an attempt to destabilize the troops.

Repeatedly, Moscow’s authorities have stated that further Ukrainian incursions into Russian territory will result in attacks against the decision-making centers. This would be a difficult step and would mean a dangerous international escalation (since many Western advisers are currently based in Kiev), but it would be the only possible response on the part of Moscow to counter Kiev’s successive attempts to expand the conflict to Russia using Western weapons. It is a scenario that Russian forces are visibly trying to avoid, but one that grows closer every day as Kiev continues to target civilians.

Worsening the situation, the UK announced that it will join Washington in sending heavy artillery to Kiev, promising to provide long-range M270 rocket systems to the Ukrainian forces as soon as possible. According to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, tactics in support of Ukraine must adapt in order to improve the country’s ability to “protect” itself against the Russians. He added that he believes in the possibility of a Ukrainian victory if the West continued to supply Kiev with weapons.

It is difficult to think what a “Ukrainian victory” would be when Kiev’s targets are almost always civilian installations, generating innocent victims, including children. These weapons do not have the ability to reverse the scenario of the conflict and prevent Russian victory, but they have the power to bring about more unnecessary victims, destruction and chaos to regions where peace had already been restored. The Russian limit is very clear: weapons cannot reach the sovereign space of the Federation. If that happens, there will be a strong response against Kiev.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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In light of a well-earned Sinn Fein victory in a system set up to prevent republicans from winning, unity is on the cards — the left in Britain must now stand up for Ireland’s right to self-determination, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

Throughout my time in politics, there have undoubtedly been some hugely significant changes. Whilst many of these have sadly been negative for the left (most notably the rise of neoliberalism and its attack on organised labour), it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate examples of real progress — and the situation in Ireland has undoubtedly been one of those in recent years.

Britain’s history in the country is a long and bloody one going back centuries, but even in the context of the last 40 years alone you can see just how significant recent developments are.

At the height of the Thatcher government’s vicious and jingoistic offensive, myself and a group of other figures on the Labour left who used our positions in public office to call for peace and justice in Ireland were decried as “terrorist sympathisers.” The MPs and newspapers denounced us for arguing in favour of dialogue to end the conflict.

At the same time, those who made these attacks on us were rather less concerned about revelations of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries in cases such as the assassination of human rights lawyer John Finucane at his family home and the Loughisland Massacre, where six people were murdered in a bar whilst watching the Republic of Ireland play at the 1994 World Cup.

It was as recently as the mid-1990s that the ban on Irish republican voices even being broadcast in Britain was still in place — creating the farcical situation where interviews with figures such as Gerry Adams had to be dubbed with the voice of an actor.

Even things which are now treated as mainstream cultural celebrations, such as the St Patrick’s Day parade in London, faced a huge amount of resistance when my administration proposed it.

As recently as 2012, whilst running for re-election as Mayor, Boris Johnson defended his decision to scrap the annual dinner we held for London’s Irish community by dismissing it as “lefty Sinn Fein crap” — although clearly his aversion to putting on big social events didn’t last over the subsequent decade!

Yet today, following recent elections, Sinn Fein now stands as the largest party across Ireland, a pro-reunification party topping the Assembly poll in the North for the first time in a state that was designed to prevent this ever occurring.

As with most elections, there are numerous factors that can be taken into account here — the disastrous approach of the DUP undoubtedly being one of them (the DUP clearly learned nothing from the famous words of unionist leader Edward Carson: “What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.”)

With the various constitutional ramifications of Britain’s departure from the European Union continuing to shape much of the political landscape, more and more people are questioning how having two different states, currencies and sets of public services on an island with a population of around 7 million people can be said to make any kind of sense — including no small number in Britain itself.

And as more and more members of a generation who have grown up with most or even all of their lives spent under the Good Friday Agreement reach voting age, reactionary divide-and-rule scaremongering simply no longer holds the same sway, with many young people from a Unionist family background choosing options such as the liberal Alliance Party instead of the established right-wing parties.

There can also be no honest account of this result which doesn’t take into account the bold and strategic leadership provided by the republican movement in recent years. Sinn Fein have embraced the peace process and been prepared to engage pragmatically with those from different political traditions whilst maintaining a clear commitment to their core objectives and throwing themselves into movements for change and equality.

As with numerous other issues lately, the leadership of the Labour Party has taken a disappointing stance on Ireland.

Comments from Keir Starmer and shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy claiming the party would campaign on the unionist side of any future border poll are not only wrong politically, but fly in the face of longstanding party policy; even under Neil Kinnock, hardly a champion of Bennism, the 1987 manifesto stated that “we believe in a united Ireland” and New Labour at least emphasised neutrality.

They also undermine Labour’s historic links with Irish communities in Britain — with YouGov finding that a plurality of Labour voters supported reunification. Groups such as Labour for Irish Unity are quite right to oppose this shift.

Progressives in Britain should embrace the opportunities for change that the current period in Irish politics offers — first and foremost by demanding our government respects the Good Friday Agreement and supporting the basic principle of self-determination in recognising the right to hold a border poll.

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Featured image: Ken Livingstone, pictured (left) with Gerry Adams in London in 1983, promoted dialogue with Sinn Fein during the Troubles (Source: Morning Star)

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It still makes me sick to my stomach — this time the sworn testimony of CIA contract psychologist/torturer James Mitchell that Gina Haspel was watching as he and psychologist/torturer colleague John Bruce Jessen waterboarded Saudi captive Ab al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand. See this.

For services performed (and obfuscated), Haspel passed muster in the Senate and was confirmed as CIA Director on May 17, 2018. It was hard for me to believe she had been nominated, harder still to believe the Senate Intelligence Committee, knowing what they knew about Haspel, would give her a pass. So I went to the Committee hearing on May 9, 2018.

Letting Haspel Off the Hook

It was very difficult to watch some of my former colleagues file into the front rows in full support of the nomination of a torturer to head the CIA. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who had published a damning report on CIA torture in Dec. 2014, lost her nerve and let Haspel off the hook when she asked her if she had overseen the interrogation of al-Nashiri. Haspel: it’s classified. And, in fact, the answer was successfully kept out of the media until now, with Mitchell’s testimony.

Intelligence Committee Chair, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) waxed eloquent, telling Haspel:

“You are without a doubt the most qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency. You have acted morally, ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”

See what I mean by getting sick to my stomach?

Point of Order!

I interrupted the hearing to expose the farce, reminding the senators that they knew a boatload of disqualifying facts about Haspel — including the answer to Feinstein’s question; and that, yet, they were about to approve her nomination to be director of the CIA.

Burr had me seized. Joe Lauria described what happened next. The 24 hours I had to spend in a very small cell in a dank DC jail felt right — even at the time. Feels more so in retrospect.

I have this moral thing about torture; I had thought almost everyone did! It turns out that Pete Hoekstra, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (2004-2007), had a different view. On March 2, 2006. I visited Hoekstra’s office to return the Intelligence Commendation Medallion given me at retirement for “especially meritorious service,” explaining, “I do not want to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture.” It was no secret he fully supported the CIA methods; I did not hear back from him.

Years later, however, I welcomed the chance to elicit from Hoekstra open acknowledgement that he knew of and condoned the abuses carried out by the CIA (over which his committee was supposed to exercise oversight). On Dec. 11, 2014, I confronted the former Congressman live on CCTV’s “The Heat”, while discussing the Senate Intelligence Committee findings released two days before damning CIA torture.  It was a unique chance to hold Hoekstra publicly accountable for condoning torture, and the Michigan congressman rose to the occasion better than I could have hoped. (See minutes 8:15 to 10:41 of video below.

Not Only Intrinsic Evil; Also Ineffective

For me torture belongs in the category of intrinsic evil — always wrong — in the same category as rape and slavery. Human beings simply do not do such things to other human beings. As an Army Combat Intelligence officer, I also knew that torture does not “work”. So, four months after I gave back my commendation medallion, I felt affirmed and gratified that the head of Army Intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes”, insisted:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Gen. Kimmons’s integrity and guts also made me proud again of my parent service, the U.S. Army. And get this: Kimmons chose to say this at a Pentagon press conference he himself arranged for Sept. 6, 2006, the same day on which he knew President Bush would publicly advertise the efficacy of an “alternate set of procedures” for interrogation.  These were given the euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” They include, under the exact same title in German (verschaerfte Vernehmung), interrogation “techniques” listed in the Gestapo Handbuch.

The NY Times story reporting that Haspel watched the waterboarding, typically of such stories, was buried on page 17 in the Saturday edition. The good news, I suppose, is that the draft got past the NYT censors and (I’m guessing here) that those censors may have shunned the usual procedure of seeking a prior nihil obstat from Headquarters in Langley. Below is a trimmed-down version of Saturday’s article, which was written by Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes:

Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at C.I.A. Black Site, Psychologist Testifies

The testimony emerged in pretrial hearings in the Cole bombing case at Guantánamo Bay, where the war court is wrestling with the legacy of torture after 9/11.

By Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes

WASHINGTON — During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s torture program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

The C.I.A. has never acknowledged Ms. Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time Mr. Nashiri was being tortured, which Dr. Mitchell described in his testimony.

Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

Dr. Mitchell described how in late 2002 he and another C.I.A. contract psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, waterboarded Mr. Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000. Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack.

During three separate sessions, Dr. Mitchell held a cloth over the man’s face and adjusted it to direct the water as Dr. Jessen poured. …

The interrogation team shifted to other “coercive techniques,” including forcing the prisoner to spend time in a small confinement box. Dr. Mitchell said he had a “general memory of what was done” — the detainee, who was nude and sometimes hooded, was probably slapped and had the back of his head slammed into a burlap-covered wall — but testified that he did not have a “blow-by-blow recollection of any of that stuff.”

It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them. [Emphasis added.] …

The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., agreed to allow Dr. Mitchell to testify because the C.I.A. had destroyed videotapes that defense lawyers argue showed the psychologists torturing and interrogating Mr. Nashiri and another prisoner at the black site in Thailand. Defense lawyers said that deprived them of potential evidence, including something they might have wanted to show a military jury deciding whether to impose a death penalty.

The disclosure that the C.I.A. had destroyed the tapes — most of them showing Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee taken into custody and known to be tortured by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks — prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the black site program.

Ms. Haspel has acknowledged her role in the destruction of those tapes as a chief of staff to the operations chief, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her confirmation hearing, she said, “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.”

Observers at the site in Thailand watched waterboarding and other interrogations via a closed-circuit video feed to a separate room. … The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the C.I.A. program, only a part of which is public, said that interrogators wanted to stop using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Mr. Nashiri because he was answering direct questions, but they were overruled by headquarters.

Mr. Nashiri would also be tortured later, after Dr. Mitchell had taken him to a different C.I.A. black site. Another interrogator revved a drill next to the naked detainee’s hooded head, apparently to try to get him to divulge Qaeda plots. At another black site in 2004, the C.I.A. infused a dietary supplement into his rectum for refusing to eat. His Navy lawyer has called the procedure rape.

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

***

Anybody else sick to their stomach?

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That dwindling band of observers that continues to express concern over the catastrophe that constitutes United States foreign policy under President Joe Biden have come to realize how the Ukraine situation is being used as cover for interventions and other similar mischief in other parts of the world. Recent reporting, for example, reveals that the Biden Administration has decided “to reestablish a persistent US military presence in Somalia to enable a more effective fight against al-Shabaab” in spite of the fact that “there is absolutely no constitutional authority for President Biden to send troops into Somalia or drop bombs on Somalia.” Nor does al-Shabaab represent a threat to Americans or American interests.

To be sure, the emphasis on Ukraine has a certain cogency as it is particularly dangerous and could lead to nuclear devastation in a situation where intervention by the United States was not only unwarranted but also unresponsive to any actual national interest of threat. And escalate it will if the White House continues on its current path. Ukrainian government sources are now stating that the United States is preparing to destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet to end the blockade of Ukraine’s ports. The commander of US forces in Europe General Christopher Cavoli seems to be confirming that report when he refers to the preparation of “military options” to help export Ukrainian grain.

One might suggest that such a move could just be enough to start World War III and World War III would almost certainly turn nuclear very quickly. Some might consider that taking a deliberate step that would inevitably escalate into destruction of the entire planet as we know it just might be a foreign policy mistake on the part of the President Joe Biden Administration but I’m sure the chairborne warriors down at Foggy Bottom would disagree, pointing out that nothing would make old Vladimir Putin run and hide faster than a barrage of harpoon missiles imbibed with his breakfast tea.

And, of course, there’s more. There’s always more. The focus on Ukraine in the US and international media combined with a stream of befuddling malapropisms coming out of the White House has obscured what is going on in other corners in the world, where Washington is also flexing its biceps in full knowledge that a manageable war or two will surely help one’s favorability rating come elections in November.

And there is always Israel. The Israeli army and police have recently been shooting dead Palestinian teenagers on a nearly daily basis, and that comes on top of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh a month ago. Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz was in Washington two weeks ago to meet and greet and one might suspect that he just might have been in town inter alia to express some apology for his army’s assassination of Abu Akleh, but that would be to misunderstand the bilateral relationship. In reality, when Israel shouts “jump” the Biden Administration responds “how high, sir?”

Also in the Middle East and also related to Israel, the US State Department has gone into a hissy fit over the May 26th Iraqi parliament’s unanimous vote to make illegal all “normalization” ties with Israel. State was quick to react, in contrast to its torpor dealing with most issues, but it was Israel involved, not just “most issues.” A statement was issued saying “The United States is deeply disturbed by the Iraqi Parliament’s passage of legislation that criminalizes normalization of relations with Israel [while also] jeopardizing freedom of expression and promoting an environment of antisemitism…” Ah yes, the old anti-semitism canard surfaces yet again!

There is also several interesting stories relating to Syria, which continues to be a hotspot because Israel wants to maintain its ability to freely bomb targets that it describes as “terroristic” or connected to arch enemy Iran. The bombing has continued regularly since the Ukraine situation started and has hardly ever been reported in the US media. And, yet again, there is more to the story in terms of US involvement. First of all, Russia reacted to the lukewarm Israeli support for its invasion of Ukraine. An Israeli attack on targets in Syria last week was met by a S-300 missile fired by Russian army manned air defenses. Up until now, Moscow has refrained from attempting to shoot down Israeli warplanes, but the missile was clearly a warning of what might be coming if Israel persists in its attacks.

Also relating to Syria, it is ironic that the US has accused Russia of war crimes over its intervention in Ukraine while at the same time continuing its own illegal occupation of Syria. And it has its own war crimes record. Last week the Pentagon announced that it had completed its investigation into an attack in Syria on March 18, 2019 that killed some presumed ISIS guerrillas as well as four civilians while wounding fifteen others. The Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the Defense Department had determined that that the airstrike “did not violate the laws of warfare or the rules of engagement. Neither the ground forces commander nor anyone involved in carrying out the airstrike ‘acted inappropriately or acted with malicious intent’ or ‘deliberately wanted to and sought out to kill civilians.’” In an earlier investigation concluded last December, the Pentagon said “it would not hold anyone accountable for a drone strike also in Syria in late-August that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. A review of the strike concluded it was a ‘tragic mistake’ that was the result of ‘execution errors.’”

And there are also credible reports that the United States is preparing to de facto partition Syria, to create a separate state run by its Kurdish allies in the country’s northeast that would be under Washington’s protection and would include a garrison of American troops. Such a move would, of course, be completely illegal and is in fact eerily reminiscent of the alleged “war crimes” that the US is claiming regarding Russia for its attempted partition of Ukraine. Interestingly, the planning has not been reported in the mainstream media, yet another instance of the Ukraine crisis serving as cover to drown out all background noise and provide the US with opportunities to increase its meddling in places like the Middle East on behalf of feckless allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Ironically, when the United States initially intervened in Syria, it claimed to do so to fight the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria (ISIS). Subsequently, it cooperated with an al-Qaeda affiliate while close ally Israel had a similar arrangement with ISIS itself. The Kurds and both ISIS and al-Qaeda are all believed to be involved in the theft and sale of Syrian oil. Now the US, which also has been stealing the oil, is seeking something like a permanent presence to solidify its control over Syrian resources.

Interestingly, the planning by Washington to create a sub-state or autonomous region in the north east of Syria was revealed by no less than State Department number three Victoria Nuland at a recent conference held in Morocco. Nuland, who was the driving force behind regime change in Ukraine in 2014, described the Syria development as a “stabilization” activity. The new entity would include Syria’s major oil producing region, which is currently being exploited by Washington and its “allies,” as well as much of the country’s arable land.

Washington has already applied unprecedented punitive sanctions on the parts of Syria controlled by the Russians and President Bashar al-Assad, to include the so-called Caesar Syrian Civil Protection Act’s secondary sanctions that punish anyone trying to avoid the restrictions placed by Washington. Former US Ambassador to Syria James Jeffrey put it this way “And of course, we’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a very effective strategy….” He also added “My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians.”

To circumvent the existing sanctions, the new mini-state would therefore be granted economic viability by making it sanction free as an inducement for foreign investment and development of settlements largely inhabited by Kurds associated with the United States. A “general license” will be issued to facilitate investment and other economic activity. The US will commit $350 million to the project, which is being carried out with the cooperation of the Turkish authorities controlling their own militias along the border. By securing the north east of Syria, Washington would also be able to maintain and protect the illegal US Al-Tanf military base in the south-east of the country bordering Jordan. Al-Tanf blocks the creation of a contiguous “Resistance Axis” from Iran to Lebanon and ultimately to Palestine, thereby maintaining “Israeli security” in the region. As is all too frequently the case, Israeli interests always come first in the minds of Washington politicians.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The United States plans to spend billions of dollars to surround China with missiles. But a US military-sponsored study concluded its Pacific allies South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia are unlikely to host the offensive weapons.

The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to surround China with missiles. But it’s having trouble finding an Asian country willing to host the offensive weapons.

The US military commissioned a study from the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-backed research group, to assess the feasibility of deploying intermediate-range missiles to the Pacific.

The study closely analyzed the US government’s relations with its five treaty allies in the region: Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand.

Citing “an inability to find a willing partner,” the RAND report concluded that the chance of these nations hosting US ground-based intermediate-range missiles “is very low as long as current domestic political conditions and regional security trends hold.”

The Donald Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. This means Washington can now deploy ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, RAND noted.

The study refers to these weapons as ground-based intermediate-range missiles, using the acronym GBIRMs.

“Finding an ally willing to host GBIRMs is more challenging than finding allies willing to host other types of U.S. military forces, such as air bases,” RAND wrote.

RAND conceded that this opposition is logical:

“There are several reasons why U.S. allies could deny access to and use of their territories, including fears that hosting such systems could intensify a regional arms race with China; the risk of the deployment being seen as provocative, sparking harsh reactions from Beijing; and fears of entrapment in a conflict between the United States and China that does not directly involve the ally.”

Given this reality, the RAND report suggested other possibilities for the US to militarily encircle and threaten China, including by deploying ground-based intermediate-range missiles instead to Guam, which is a US colony in the Pacific.

RAND concluded that the most realistic approach would be for Washington to strengthen Japan’s military to counter China.

US military to spend $27.4 billion to surround China with missiles

The major Japanese media outlet Nikkei published an article on this RAND study. It noted,

“In a six-year investment plan submitted to Congress in February last year, the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command made it clear that ground-based weapons will be crucial in breaking through China’s defense systems.”

In 2021, Nikkei exclusively obtained a copy of the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” that US Indo-Pacific Command submitted to Congress.

The strategy revealed that the US military plans on spending $27.4 billion over six years to install precision-strike missiles on the first island chain – the first chain of islands off of the coast of East Asia, which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

The US military proposal lamented that Beijing is challenging Washington’s hegemony in the region, writing,

“Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China is emboldened to take action in the region and globally to supplant U.S. interests.”

Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a former vice president of and lobbyist for weapons corporation Raytheon, said in 2019 that the United States sought to deploy intermediate-range missiles to the Pacific region “sooner, rather than later.”

Acknowledging that the Joe Biden administration has continued Trump’s aggressive policies against China, the RAND report emphasized,

“The strategic logic that underlies this thinking did not change with the transition of administrations in Washington.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a historic speech on May 26 making it clear that the US government is waging a policy of containment and siege against China, similar to the one that Washington pursued against the Soviet Union in the first cold war.

Country by country

The RAND report, which is titled “Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles in the Indo-Pacific Assessing the Positions of U.S. Allies,” was commissioned by the US military’s Pacific Air Forces, and was written by political scientist Jeffrey W. Hornung.

It analyzes Washington’s relations with its five treaty allies in the Pacific region, and explained why they are unlikely to host US ground-based intermediate-range missiles.

RAND wrote,

“It is highly unlikely that Thailand, the Philippines, or the Republic of Korea (ROK) would agree to host U.S. GBIRMs, and there is a small likelihood that Australia or Japan would do so, although the possibility that an agreement might be struck with Tokyo is only slightly greater.”

Thailand

“Thailand would be highly unlikely to accept,” the RAND study conceded. It noted that the Thai “government shows a propensity to pursue closer ties with China.”

Philippines

“The Philippines is extremely unlikely to accept the deployment of U.S. GBIRMs,” RAND wrote, adding that the “U.S. alliance with the Philippines is in a state of flux, although it is improving.”

RAND continued:

“While the Philippine public and elites generally support the United States and the alliance, President Rodrigo Duterte has pursued policies that negatively affect ties. Specifically, Duterte has advocated closer ties with Beijing while pursuing policies that weaken core pillars of the U.S.-Philippine alliance.”

South Korea

South Korea, officially known as the Republic of Korea (ROK), “retains a close relationship with China,” RAND cautioned.

The study concluded that

“a general deterioration of U.S.-ROK relations suggest that it is highly unlikely that the ROK would consent to host U.S. GBIRMs.”

Australia

“The U.S. alliance with Australia is strong. Australia also remains economically close to China, but their bilateral ties have been fraying,” RAND wrote.

Yet “Australia’s historical reluctance to host permanent foreign bases, combined with the geographical distance of Australia from continental Asia, makes this possibility unlikely.”

Japan

The RAND report assessed that

“Japan is the regional ally that appears most likely to host U.S. GBIRMs.”

It acknowledged, however, that this possibility “remains low, heavily caveated by the challenge of accepting any increase in U.S. presence and deploying weapons that are explicitly offensive in nature.”

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President Joe Biden has unveiled a three-part plan to fight inflation — or at least make people think he is fighting inflation. One part of the plan involves having government agencies “fix” the supply chain problems that have led to shortages of numerous products. Of course, any attempt by the government to solve the supply chain problems (which were caused by prior government interventions such as shutting down the economy for over a year) will not just fail to solve the supply shortages but will create new problems.

Deficit reduction is another part of Biden’s anti-inflation plan. However, Biden is not proposing cutting welfare or warfare spending. Instead, his deficit reduction plan consists of “tax reforms to increase revenue,” which is DC-speak for tax increases. History shows that tax increases unaccompanied by spending cuts end up increasing the deficit.

The last and most important part of Biden’s inflation plan is recognizing that the Federal Reserve “has the primary responsibility to control inflation.” President Biden has pledged to “respect the Fed’s independence,” unlike former President Trump, who Biden accused of “demeaning the Fed” by subjecting the central bank to mean Tweets.

It is hard to believe that someone who has been in DC as long as Joe Biden really thinks Donald Trump was the first President to try to influence the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy. Since the Fed’s creation, Presidents have used public and private pressure to “convince” the Fed to tailor monetary policy to advance their policy and political goals. When it comes to “demeaning” the Fed, Trump has nothing on Lyndon Johnson, who, frustrated over the Fed’s refusal to tailor monetary policy to finance the Great Society and Vietnam war, threw the Fed chairman against a wall.

By “passing the buck” on inflation, Biden no doubt hopes to deflect blame from himself and his party before the midterm elections. Unlike Biden’s previous inflation scapegoats — greedy corporations and Vladimir Putin — the Fed actually is responsible for creating and controlling inflation.

Price increases in specific sectors of the economy may be caused by a variety of factors, but economy-wide price increases are always the result of the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies. Inflation is actually the act of money-creation by the central bank. Widespread price increases are a symptom, not a cause, of inflation.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell remains committed to more rate increases this year. However, even if the Fed follows through on all its projected rate increases, rates will still be at historic lows. While there are those on the Fed board who want more and bigger rate increases, others worry that going too far too fast in increasing rates will cause a recession. Already many economic experts are saying America should be prepared for increase in unemployment caused by the Fed’s efforts to vanquish inflation. This “tradeoff” between high prices and high unemployment illustrates the insanity of our monetary policy.

Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen and Chairman Powell have both admitted they were wrong to publicly dismiss inflation as “transitory.” The fact that the two most recent Fed chairs made such a huge blunder (or purposely refused to admit what was clear to many people for over a year), shows the folly of relying on a secretive central bank to manage monetary policy. Instead of “respecting the Fed’s independence,” President Biden should work with Congress to audit, then end the Fed.

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Canada voted last week against a set of recommendations calling on the international community to support access to healthcare for Palestinians, Canadian media reported

The vote took place during a World Health Assembly (WHA) session on May 25. The WHA is a yearly meeting of World Health Organization (WHO) member states, held annually in Geneva to determine the policies of the WHO for the following year.

Delegations attending the WHA were asked to vote on the recommendations of a report on the state of Palestinian healthcare, which documented 235 attacks against health care workers and facilities in the occupied territories in 2021 that injured over 100 health workers. The WHO has already confirmed 58 attacks on health workers and facilities since the beginning of the year, which caused at least one death and 47 injuries.

In its final recommendations, the report called on Israel to end its denial of healthcare to Palestinians in occupied territories, to allow Palestinians to travel to seek healthcare, and to refrain from targeting healthcare workers.

Canada was in a group of 14 countries – including Israel and the US – that voted “no” to the recommendations. 83 states voted in favour, and 39 abstained. At the same meeting, Canada later co-sponsored a resolution condemning Russian attacks on healthcare in Ukraine.

The theme of this year’s WHA was “Health for peace, peace for health”.

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Cyprus’ main opposition party has slammed a large Israeli military exercise which took place on the island recently, warning of the consequences of dragging Cyprus into any regional conflict.

The exercise, which ended last week and is believed to be one of Israel’s biggest, simulates a ground offensive deep inside Lebanon in a potential conflict with arch-rival Hezbollah.

Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel have fought several wars before, and Lebanon and Israel are still enemy states.

The Progressive Party of Working People, or AKEL, blasted the government for hosting the drills, calling it “a dangerous development for Cyprus.”

According to the Cyprus Mail, AKEL compared the Israeli army to the Turkish military that occupies the northern half of divided Cyprus.

“Territories and cities of our country cannot be turned into training grounds for any foreign armies,” AKEL was quoted as saying.

“On top of that, Cyprus should avoid cooperating with a foreign army with a history of occupation, colonisation, war crimes and violation of international laws, all of which remind us of the Turkish occupation in the island,” the party added.

Cyprus was chosen for the drills due to its terrain’s similarity to slightly bigger Lebanon, reported the Times of Israel.

Mediterranean neighbours Lebanon and Cyprus share close and historic ties, which has raised questions about why the latter gave Israel the green light to carry out the large exercise.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdalla Bou Habib met with Cypriot Ambassador to Beirut Panayiotis Kyriacou earlier this month, who denied that the drills were aimed at Lebanon, in contrast to what was being said in Israeli media.

Cyprus did not participate in the exercise.

While Lebanese media spoke of the drills, the issue did not make major headlines.

The development takes place amid rising tensions between Lebanon and Israel over the latter’s plans to begin drilling for offshore gas in disputed maritime territory. Beirut has warned Tel Aviv of provocations, considering any plans to extract gas in a disputed zone was “an act of aggression.”

Israel said it was taking measures to protect its offshore drilling from potential Hezbollah strikes.

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April 6 through April 8, 2022, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and The Atlantic magazine cohosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” The event revealed mainstream media is so beholden to Washington Democrats, they’re incapable of reporting the news

UC freshman Christopher Phillips, a writer for the University of Chicago’s paper, the Chicago Thinker, confronted CNN about several instances where the outlet pushed proven hoaxes, misinformation and disinformation

The Atlantic editor-in-chief accused student reporters who asked probing questions of waging a “disinformation campaign” at the conference

All warfare is based on deception, and we are currently at war. This is why we’re constantly being bombarded with the idea that truth tellers are lying, and that liars are telling the truth

The Biden administration’s “Ministry of Truth” has, for the time being, been put on hold, and its chief, Nina Jankowicz, has resigned

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April 6 through April 8, 2022, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and The Atlantic magazine cohosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.”1

The three-day event explored “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” Speakers included former President Barack Obama, columnist Jonah Goldberg, Marxist history expert Anne Elizabeth Applebaum and CNN anchor Brian Stelter, just to name a few.

But, as noted by Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson (video above), what they didn’t count on was the fact that not everyone has been brainwashed into oblivion. Some college students still have mental faculties operating at full speed. During one Q & A session, UC freshman Christopher Phillips, a writer for the University of Chicago’s paper, the Chicago Thinker,2 asked the following question:

“You’ve all spoken extensively about Fox News being a purveyor of disinformation, but CNN is right up there with them. They pushed the Russian collusion hoax, they pushed the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smeared Justice Kavanagh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandman as a white supremacist.

And yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop as pure Russian disinformation. The mistakes of the mainstream media, and CNN in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction. Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence, or is there something else behind it?”

CNN — An Unrepentant Chronic Offender

Stelter responded, “I think you’re describing a different channel than the one that I watch. But I understand that that is a popular right-wing narrative about CNN.” So, first, he rejected the premise of the question in the first place, and then he discredited Phillips for asking the question.

April 8, 2022, Phillips appeared on Carlson’s show to discuss what prompted him to confront these self-proclaimed experts on disinformation. He pointed out that the conference was filled with legacy media personalities who have spent their entire careers spreading disinformation, and now they’re supposed to teach us about and protect us from disinformation?

Phillips said that while he didn’t expect Stelter to “hand over the keys” to CNN and admit they’re corrupt, he was hoping he’d admit that mistakes had been made and corrections had been issued. Alas, none of that happened. There was no remorse. No apology. No retractions.

Instead, Stelter gave a rambling non-answer defense that made little sense to anyone, basically proving CNN has no intention to live up to journalistic standards and expectations. Applebaum’s response to a question about the Hunter Biden laptop was perhaps even worse (below).

All Warfare Is Based on Deception

At this point, it should be clear to everyone that we are at war, albeit undeclared, and as noted by Sun Tzu in “The Art of War,” all warfare is based on deception. This is why we’re constantly being bombarded with the idea that truth tellers are lying, and that liars are telling the truth.

We’re living in an inverted reality, where up is down and left is right. Deception is the hallmark of the day, and the reason we’re bombarded with deception is because this is an information war. Instead of firing missiles at our heads, the attackers are firing missives into our brains.

But the end goal is the same as in any other war. The attacker always attacks with the intent of gaining something, and in this case, the technocratic transhumanist cabal hell-bent on world domination is intent on us surrendering to their ambitions.

Biden Administration’s Ministry of Truth

In late April 2022, we discovered that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had quietly, behind the scenes, created a Disinformation Governance Board.3,4 The backlash was immediate. The Orwellian connotations were just so blatant, few were able to dismiss them.

The woman chosen to lead this Ministry of Truth was Nina Jankowicz,5 a “Russian disinformation expert” best known for tweeting out now well-recognized lies and singing made-up show tunes about disinformation and erotic Harry Potter songs6 on TikTok.

In one instance, she claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Trump campaign product,”7 even though there’s not a shred of evidence to back up that claim. In another, she brushed it off as a “fairytale,”8 even though there’s plenty of evidence confirming its authenticity.

Jankowicz has also publicly opposed the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, saying free speech is bad for “marginalized communities.” Yet in the next breath, she insisted that “protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights and civil liberties” would be “a HUGE focus” of the new disinformation board.9

How can you protect free speech and simultaneously combat it? It doesn’t make sense, but then again, it’s not intended to make sense. People are more suggestible when confused, and irreconcilable double-speak is definitely confusing.

‘Anti-Disinformation Expert’ = Propagandist

Independent journalist Glen Greenwald highlighted Jankowicz’s obvious lack of real credentials in a May 4, 2022, Substack article, noting that:10

“The concept of ‘anti-disinformation expert’ is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are …

There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity … The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and deceive, not enlighten and inform.

The level of historical ignorance and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth is off the charts … That nobody should want the U.S. Government let alone Homeland Security arrogating unto itself the power to declare truth and falsity seems self-evident.”

Ministry of Truth Hits a Roadblock

Fortunately, the public mockery turned out to be too great to bear, so the Ministry of Truth has, for the time being, been put on hold,11 and Jankowicz has resigned. According to a DHS spokesperson:12

“The Board’s purpose has been grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner … As its executive director, Nina Jankowicz was subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats …”

Threats against Jankowicz aside, the Board’s purpose was hardly mischaracterized, and clearly about censorship and policing speech on behalf of the government, in clear violation of the Constitution. The very title of the board clearly informs us that it was about the governance of disinformation.

“Governance” is defined as “the act or process of governing or overseeing the control and direction of something.” Synonyms include “authority, jurisdiction, regime” and “rule.”13 So, “Disinformation Governance” clearly means the board was intended to have the jurisdiction to rule over information deemed to be false.

Jankowicz has even asserted that “trustworthy, verified people,” such as herself, should have the authority to edit other people’s tweets and social media posts!14 “Verified people can essentially start to edit Twitter the same sort of way that Wikipedia is, so they can add context to certain tweets,” she said. How is that not censorship? How is that not policing speech?

Define ‘Governance’

Properly defining words and using them correctly have never been more important, because in many respects, the very sanity of our society hinges on it. Every day, it seems, the enemy is trying to redefine or muddle the definition of words that have very clear and specific meanings, because without clear definitions, we cannot have a rational conversation, and without rational conversation, they win.

A 1981 quote widely attributed to former CIA director William Casey that seems well worth reiterating here was, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”15

While some doubt Casey ever said this, Barbara Honegger, who at the time was the assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, has publicly confirmed she was present when he said it. According to Honegger, Reagan asked Casey what his goal was as director of the CIA, and that was his reply.

While the CIA, in 1981, was neck deep in a plot to overthrow the government in Libya, that same year, an investigative reporter named Jack Anderson also revealed the CIA was waging a disinformation war against the American public. According to Anderson, Casey argued for the government’s “right to mislead the public by planting phony stories in the press.” But as Thomas Jefferson noted, “the people’s right to know is more important than the officials’ right to govern.”

Casey was supposedly a patriot who saw lying as a means to gain the public’s support for political, economic and military measures. One could argue that little harm was done to the American public in the process, aside from breeding ignorance about geopolitical truths. The lies we’re being fed today, however, are in some cases a threat to life, and they’re most definitely a direct threat to liberty.

Liberal Obsession With Disinformation Is Backfiring

In a May 20, 2022 Intelligencer article, Sam Adler-Bell notes:16

“According to [Washington Post’s Taylor] Lorenz and her sources … Jankowicz was taken down ‘by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating’ … In other words, the Disinformation Governance Board was undone by a ‘textbook disinformation campaign.’

This version of the story is richly ironic and tragic … [F]rom another perspective, the right’s campaign against the Disinformation Board resembled any other successful advocacy effort to halt a government initiative …

I don’t see how a fully operational Disinformation Governance Board could have prevented this outcome — except via the very means conservatives (mistakenly?) feared it would possess.

If, as Lorenz is careful to note, ‘neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech,’ then how would it have prevented right-wingers from tweeting terrible, dishonest things about Jankowicz? …

[T]he other pernicious problem with liberals’ fixation on ‘disinformation’ is that it allows them to lie to themselves. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 posed a painful psychic challenge to liberal elites.

It suggested the possibility that many millions of Americans were motivated by deep, venomous dissatisfactions with the world they had helped create, that our cultural disagreements were profound, not superficial, and that our perspectives were practically irreconcilable inversions of each other …

‘Disinformation’ was the liberal Establishment’s traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection …

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place.”

Bell goes on to discuss the University of Chicago’s Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference, noting that “gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago — so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside — strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.”

Indeed, Stelter’s response to Phillips’ question about CNN’s disinformation record does nothing to improve trust in the mainstream media. What’s more, I believe most people instinctively sense that there’s something really fishy about the mis- and disinformation mania. As noted by Joseph Bernstein in his September 2021 article,17 “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation”:

“A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, the New York Times, Stanford University, MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.

That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose, or hope to regain … However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality.”

I think that explains why people instinctively don’t trust those who resort to screaming about “disinformation” at every turn. Universally, people understand that no one person, and certainly no government agency, has unfettered “special access to the fabric of reality,” as Bernstein puts it.

The Privatization of Censorship

Government officials realize that while they long for total information control, censorship is a bad look. This, I believe, is why the Biden administration pulled the plug on the Ministry of Truth. It wasn’t that the Disinformation Governance Board was being mischaracterized and unjustly opposed.

It was that too many people understood that the board was about unconstitutional government-sanctioned censorship. That widespread understanding has brought bad PR on top of already record-low popularity. That doesn’t mean the censorship effort won’t continue, however. So far, they’ve been exceptionally effective at outsourcing the censorship to private companies. Taking direct ownership of it with a government-run board was simply too big a step at this time.

So, without doubt, we can expect Facebook, Twitter and the rest to continue censoring on government’s behalf, until or unless the U.S. judicial branch proves it’s not entirely corrupt and does something about it. For the time being, we may have to look to other venues for that kind of justice.

Fact Checker on the Run

According to independent journalist Paul Thacker,18 Emmanuel Vincent, president of Science Feedback, a Facebook fact checking service, has been ordered to appear in court to answer for it’s deceptive fact check claims, and is now on the run.

In one so-called “fact check,” Science Feedback slapped a misinformation label on an essay by Johns Hopkins physician-researcher Marty Makary, in which he predicted that COVID-19 herd immunity was imminent. As noted by Thacker:19

“Here’s the thing, you don’t need a Ph.D. in epidemiology to understand that when experts analyze studies and make predictions they might be wrong. Duh. Predictions are opinions, not facts.

And while there’s nothing wrong with Science Feedback posting a contrary prediction, labeling their own opinion a ‘fact’ just proves they fail at logic.

This inability to grasp the difference between opinion and fact has made Science Feedback the butt of online scorn, but what landed Vincent in a police station and sent him fleeing from justice … is colluding with Facebook and the federal government to deny people their First Amendment rights.

All while pretending to be an ‘independent fact check’ … [T]he charge alone has sent Vincent running from address to address, all over Paris.”

Vincent apparently has been served multiple times, but has refused to sign for any of the documents, claiming it’s really a company called SciVerify, a Science Feedback subsidiary, that works in partnership with Facebook, not Science Feedback itself. What is he hiding from?

In short, he’s desperately trying to “avoid public accountability before a judicial system that is not (yet) rigged by Facebook,” Thacker writes. We now know Facebook and its outsourced fact checkers are colluding behind the scenes to censor on behalf of the government,20 and that is blatantly unlawful.

The Erosion of Democracy Is Real

Getting back to where we started, with the University of Chicago disinformation conference, one of the biggest revelations from it was that the mainstream media is so beholden to Washington Democrats, they’re incapable of reporting the news.

The Atlantic editor-in-chief even accused Phillips and other student reporters who asked probing questions of waging a “disinformation campaign” at the conference!21 That’s how vulnerable they are, and how one-note their defense. They really have no defense when faced with truth, so they yell “Disinformation!” As reported by American Thinker:22

“It is important to understand that when liberals use words such as bias, partisanship, disinformation, distortions, and spin, they are exclusively directed at right-leaning media.

Prominent members of conservative media such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and the late Rush Limbaugh have adjectives such as ‘right-wing’ … prefixed to their names. They are even called propagandists. However, the likes of Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper are called journalists; no adjectives are applied.

Fox News will be called a right-wing news network, whereas MSNBC or CNN is merely called a news outlet. For anybody who wishes to study liberal echo chambers, the Disinformation Conference is the ideal forum.

There was not even a pretense to conceal biases … The views expressed are not similar, but identical. Their sanctimony has caused such levels of delusions that they think of themselves as the sole custodians of facts, truths, and taste …

The forum and the utterances from Stelter and Applebaum prove what conservatives have known for a long [time]: the mainstream media are the propaganda wing of the Democrat party.

There are adept wordsmiths and disinformation strategists within the Democrat leadership who provides the media with buzzwords and talking points for the day which they meticulously follow. This explains why they have identical views and use identical words …

The Disinformation Conference demonstrates that there never will be any course correction simply because the propagandists do not think they have erred in any way. This truly is an erosion of democracy.”

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Notes

1 University of Chicago, Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy

2 The Chicago Thinker Christopher Phillips

3 The Postmillenial April 27, 2022

4, 7 Daily Mail April 27, 2022, Updated April 28, 2022

5, 9 Newsweek April 28, 2022

6, 8 The Post Millennial April 27, 2022

10 Glen Greenwald Substack May 4, 2022

11 McMorris.house.gov May 20, 2022

12 YouTube Breaking Points May 24, 2022, 0:44 minutes

13 Merriam-Webster, Governance

14 Fit News May 11, 2022

15 History Heist, William Casey Quote

16 Intelligencer May 20, 2022

17 Harpers September 2021

18, 19 Disinformation Chronicle Substack May 24, 2022

20 Yahoo July 15, 2021

21 Mediaite April 8, 2022

22 American Thinker April 8, 2022

Featured image: Official government portrait of Nina Jankowicz, appointed to serve as Executive Director of the new “Disinformation Board” to be housed within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (posted by Jankowicz to Twitter)

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Conservation groups joined the Havasupai Tribe today to denounce the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s approval of a key permit for a uranium mine near Grand Canyon’s South Rim. On Friday the Tribe sent a letter to Arizona officials reasserting its opposition to the mine and calling for new hydrological studies, regular meetings and monitoring data for the Pinyon Plain Mine.

“Our identity as a people is intrinsically intertwined with the health of Havasu Creek and the environment to which it gives life. We use this water for drinking, gardening and irrigating, municipal uses, and cultural and religious uses,” the Tribe’s letter said. “If the water source becomes contaminated like we have seen in other areas of Arizona due to uranium mining, we will no longer be able to live in our homes and Supai Village will become extinct.”

The mine, owned by Energy Fuels Resources, has a history of flooding as it drains shallow groundwater aquifers that flow into South Rim springs. The mine also threatens to contaminate deep aquifers that feed Havasu Creek and other Grand Canyon springs.

“State regulators are bowing to the uranium industry while risking irretrievable harm to groundwater feeding Havasu and other Grand Canyon springs,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Charging forward amidst dangerous scientific uncertainty threatens human rights and makes the Grand Canyon state the Grand Canyon’s worst enemy. Mine remediation and closure remains the only safe option.”

In April the state issued an aquifer protection permit for the mine, located in the Red Butte traditional cultural property on the Kaibab National Forest. For years the Tribe and conservation groups have urged the state to close the mine.

“Sierra Club continues to vociferously oppose this uranium mine as we have for several decades and will work with the Havasupai Tribe and our partners to do everything possible to keep it from harming the waters of Grand Canyon and Havasu Creek,” said Sandy Bahr, director of Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “Pinyon Plain Mine and this permit demonstrate that our state and federal laws need to be stronger to protect our waters and critically important cultural areas from harmful uranium mining. It is why we need mining law reform, the Grand Canyon Protection Act, and stronger state water protection policies.”

The agency’s permit downplays research from the U.S. Geological Survey showing “a hydrologic connection in the area of Canyon Mine” between the Coconino aquifer, which is flooding into the mine, and the deeper Redwall-Muav aquifer, which is the source of the largest springs in the Grand Canyon and Havasu Springs on the Havasupai Tribe’s land.

It also sidesteps federal research that “contaminants, either from land-surface or subsurface sources, are likely to be transported into the deep aquifer.”

“The Pinyon Plain Mine threatens groundwater and defaces an area of profound cultural significance to the Havasupai Tribe,” said Amber Reimondo, energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust. “By approving this permit, the state is gambling, but the Grand Canyon region’s water is too precious to risk. Uranium mining should be permanently banned near the Grand Canyon.”

In 2016 mineshaft drilling pierced shallow aquifers, causing water pumped from the mine to spike from 151,000 gallons in 2015 to 1.4 million gallons in 2016. In the years since then, inflow has ranged from 8.8 million gallons in 2017 to 10.76 million gallons in 2019; most recently, the mine took on 8,261,406 gallons of groundwater in 2021. Since 2016, dissolved uranium in that water has consistently exceeded federal drinking water toxicity limits by more than 300% and arsenic levels by more than 2,800%.

“Mining uranium in the Grand Canyon watershed threatens the landscape and jeopardizes the water supply of the Havasupai people,” said Michè Lozano, Arizona program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “The Pinyon mine should be closed and uranium mining near the Grand Canyon permanently banned. Passing the Grand Canyon Protection Act will provide lasting protection for the sacred sites and critical waterways in this region.”

As early as 1986 some state officials warned that mining could pierce and drain shallow aquifers into the mine and contaminate the regional groundwater that feeds seeps and springs in the Grand Canyon. Other hydrologists have since echoed that warning, pointing to more recent science suggesting that uranium mines could contaminate and deplete aquifers connected to Grand Canyon springs.

“In the face of millions of gallons of groundwater now pumping out of the Pinyon Plain mineshaft each year, the state still finds ‘no evidence’ of risk to aquifers from this uranium mine, and makes a glaring oxymoron of the aquifer protection permit,” said Wild Arizona’s Executive Director Kelly Burke. “The Havasupai people and Grand Canyon deserve far greater professionalism, and stronger, more enduring protections like the Grand Canyon Protection Act, to defend the Canyon’s life-giving waters.”

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Featured image: A spring near Grand Canyon contaminated by nearby uranium mining. Photo   Kristen M. Caldon 2015, www.kmcaldon.com.

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As the US takes one step closer to crossing a Russian red line with approval of new, more sophisticated weaponry for Ukraine, the threat of a new class of armaments in the hands of the unstable Ukraine President Zelensky raises great cause for concern.  Protecting Russian sovereignty from NATO border provocations (including the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Crimean peninsula which both split from Ukraine and unified with Russia in 2014)  was the prime reason for February’s special military operation (SMO) in the first place.    

The Russians have reiterated  a dire warning about how it will further protect its own sovereignty:

That is, any attack by a US provided weapon or a US weapon operated by US personnel that strikes within Russia’s border will be interpreted by the Russians as crossing The Red Line, as an attack by the US on the Russian people; thereby ensuring a swift and significant military response directly to the US homeland.

US media outlets have confirmed that numbskulls in the Biden Admin have agreed to provide Ukraine with another $700 M in order to acquire the long range  Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) which has a range of 186 miles, well within the Russian land mass and its more light weight companion, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) which can be fired from a mobile vehicle at land targets within a range of 50 miles.  With multiple missile pods, both long range missiles need to be operational by highly trained personnel qualified to adapt to specific operational requirements who perhaps may be stationed at the Pentagon.

In  addition the US weapons package imminently on its way to Ukraine is said to include four armed MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones, as part of an advanced ‘killer’ drone system able to deliver a payload of hellfire missiles. While the Grey Eagle may still need legislative approval, that should be a slam-dunk for the Raytheon and Lockheed Martin clientele in Congress.  While its primary purpose is surveillance, the Grey Eagle can also provide  attack, assault and reconnaissance missions at 30,000 feet and function for up to 45 hours.  The drone would also need to be operated by trained personnel which would also presumably need to be American, perhaps located at the Pentagon.

In response to Ukraine’s new military escalations, the Jerusalem Post has reported that Russia has increased its naval presence in the Black Sea with a landing force ready to perform its ‘intended tasks’ as part of the SMO with a dozen landing ships participating in the flotilla; three from the Northern Sea fleet, three from the Baltic Sea fleet and six from the Black Sea fleet.  The ships are described as “large landing vessels capable of breaching and unloading soldiers and vehicles for an amphibious assault as well as transporting war materials to ports.”   A good guess would be that the flotilla will be focused on protecting Odessa and the Crimea, both Black Sea ports, from a Ukraine invasion.

Whether the Biden Administration, he who is clearly not in charge of the Ship of State, has totally lost control of the Ukraine conflict has been obvious since the outset in February.  Even as the conflict in Ukraine has never favored the Kiev government, compromised media sources have exaggerated and outright lied about the Ukraine Army trouncing the Russians creating the false narrative of a formidable Ukraine resistance while portraying Russia as fleeing from one defeat to another.

Now, after more than three months of conflict, the chickens are coming home to roost as the truth is undeniable.   It is the dire military circumstances that require The West to bring up new guns in the hopes of staunching the flow of Ukrainian blood and halting the Russian advance.   Even Zelensky has now agreed that Russia has ownership of 20% of Ukraine – the key 20% that Putin originally identified as needing to be ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification’ in addition to Zelensky’s admission of outside ‘pressure to seek a “peaceful resolution.”

Nevertheless,  the conflict continues.

In response, while the Biden Administration has ‘received assurances’ from Ukraine that the long term missiles will not be used to wage war against Russia’s territory; but then …

On June 1st, when the White House announced that it would be sending to Ukraine weapons that might be used for invading Russia, Jonathan Finer, deputy White House national security adviser, said Washington had asked Ukraine for assurances the missiles would not strike inside Russia. On June 3rd, Ukraine’s Government rejected that request.  

However, Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Alexey Arestovich claimed that “Crimea is ours. It belongs to Ukraine. And they [Russia] know it.”   Ukraine politician Egor Chernev, a Ukrainian MP, said on Wednesday that Russian aircraft and military stationed on Russia’s territory are legitimate targets” and in a frightening lack of conscience suggested “We have taken on certain obligations, but no one can guarantee where the missile will strike.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev explained the details of Russia’s proposed response:

 ‘If any weapon supplied by western nations hit Russian soil, we will hit the decision making center that sent the weapons.”  Russia will strike if these types of weapons are used against Russian territories, the armed forces of our country will have no choice but to act to defeat decision making centers. Everyone understands what kinds of center these are; they are not located on the territory of Kyiv.   This is certainly a threat that will need to be taken into account.” Medvedev went on to explain that “The Americans stipulate this by saying that these systems will only be used on the territory of Ukraine; but for obvious reasons they do not fully control these decisions, which are applied and adopted by the Ukrainian authorities.  Therefore, this is a threat of course that we must respond.”

And finally

“These are not forecasts.  This is what is already happening.  We can assume that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on their way already.  All our hope is in Almighty God.”

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected]

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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***

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled recently on the government’s use of the state secrets doctrine in an opinion that will make it easier for intelligence agencies to evade accountability in future individual rights cases. In U.S. v. Zubaydah, government torture policy and state secrets converge. A torture victim requested information related to his treatment at a CIA “black site,” and the government blocked that request, citing national security interests. Seven members of the Court joined parts of an opinion siding with the government, with only Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch dissenting. The case has implications for other torture-related cases and for government accountability more broadly as it expands state secrecy powers based on a doctrine that was already overbroad, and suspect in its origins.

The Zubaydah case is procedurally unusual. Abu Zubaydah is currently detained at Guantanamo, but the history of his confinement and treatment at numerous sites over the past two decades is well-known. The government has admitted to waterboarding him and subjecting him to other forms of torture, and the 2014 Senate Report on Torture refers specifically to Zubaydah at numerous points. Moreover, former President Obama conceded that Zubaydah was tortured. In the course of seeking a tribunal that would hear his claims, Zubaydah asked the Polish government to investigate criminally the interrogations that took place at a CIA black site in Poland, Stare Kiejkuty. Since much of the supporting evidence was located in the United States, Zubaydah had to petition a US District Court for an order compelling its production. Federal law allows for such a petition, but when it was filed, the US government objected, citing the state secrets doctrine. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court and the Court ruled for the first time in years on the scope and application of the doctrine.

The state secrets privilege (SSP) is an evidentiary doctrine originating in the 1953 case of US v. Reynolds, a Cold War-era dispute involving the crash of a military aircraft. In Reynolds, the victims’ families sought information about the crash, specifically survivors’ statements and an accident report. The government objected, claiming that revealing this information would endanger national security. The Supreme Court agreed, and their ruling gave birth to the SSP, which expanded in use over the ensuing seven decades. In short, the ruling says that the government is entitled to withhold information, in the course of litigation, where there is a “danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.”

But the potential for such a broadly stated secrecy power to be abused is self-evident and was so even in the Reynoldscase itself. As Louis Fisher has shown, the information withheld in Reynolds surfaced on the Internet in the 1990s and was quite mundane, containing not military secrets but evidence of government negligence instead.

Courts have applied the SSP to thwart discovery of evidence in a case where a twelve-year-old boy came under CIA scrutiny for writing letters overseas, where government workers sought information about deadly chemicals to which they had been exposed (so they could get treatment for their illness), and where the victim in an earlier torture case sought relief. But some questions had not been settled. Could the very subject matter of a case be a state secret, so that no discovery requests could even be made? Could trial courts order production of alleged secret evidence in chambers so a judge could view it before ruling on the SSP? And most centrally relevant to Zubaydah’s case, could the SSP apply to information already in the public domain (in other words, to non-secrets)?

It is this last question—whether the SSP applies to already-known information—that the Court took on in its recent opinion. The existence of Stare Kiejkuty is well-known, described in various sources. And the witnesses whose testimony Zubaydah sought to procure had already testified in similar proceedings. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were government contractors—psychologists specializing in family therapy who developed coercive interrogation protocols and then supervised their use by the CIA on-site. One of them even wrote a book about his exploits, and both had already testified about their interrogation work in other cases, such as the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohamed.

Despite all of this publicly available information, the government contended that further testimony from the CIA contractor psychologists would endanger national security if allowed to proceed. According to the government’s reasoning, even though Mitchell and Jessen are private parties, they had knowledge of government operations and therefore their confirmation of any fact would be an admission of its accuracy by the government. Government confirmation of a given fact is different, they suggested, from reporting that same fact in the media or other open sources.

The Supreme Court accepted this argument and in doing so expanded the scope of the SSP for future cases. Now it would cover non-secrets as well as secrets. The matter came to the Court because the trial court had initially dismissed Zubaydah’s application, but the Ninth Circuit disagreed, suggesting that discovery on some matters could proceed despite potential state secrets concerns. Not surprisingly, given its current composition, the Court ruled in favor of the government. Among other reasons, the Court cited potential harm to diplomatic relations and international cooperation resulting from an official acknowledgment of Stare Kiejkuty.

The opinion is fragmented and takes some careful reading to understand. While seven justices signed on to Justice Breyer’s reasoning about publicly known secrets, only six of them agreed that the case should be dismissed at this stage (Justice Kagan declined to join that part). Justice Thomas urged the Court to go even further than it did, opining that Zubaydah’s need for the information was not great and that therefore there was no reason for the Court to proceed any further (beyond noting that lack of need) with its analysis. Thomas’ concurrence is not compelling. He distorts the framework for approaching state secrets cases set forth in Reynolds, and he denies, on page 13 of his concurrence, any connection between English precedents and the state secrets privilege ruling, ignoring the fact that Reynolds makes specific reference to its reliance on English precedent.

The heart of the ruling, agreed upon by six justices, is that confirmation of the Stare Kiejkuty site’s existence by CIA contractors would endanger national security, and therefore Zubaydah’s application to secure the contractors’ testimony must be dismissed. The Court ruled this way even though the European Court of Human Rights and the former Polish president have acknowledged the Polish black site’s existence, and even though it has been reported widely in the media. The Polish government’s statements about the site, and the fact that a Polish prosecutor is investigating this case, would seem to vitiate any concern about diplomatic repercussions.

Justice Gorsuch offered a stark critique of the opinion in his dissent. “There comes a point,” he wrote, “where we should not be ignorant as judges of what we know to be true as citizens.” Although it is somewhat surprising to see Gorsuch taking a pro-civil liberties position here, he unsparingly presents the facts that we as the public “know to be true.” CIA interrogators “waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours, and performed rectal exams.” After six days of this treatment, he was “sobbing, twitching and hyperventilating.” And yet even after extended periods of torture, the interrogators could not confirm that Zubaydah was involved in the 9/11 plot.

Gorsuch noted the government’s overreaching and abuse of the SSP in past cases, as well as the dramatic increase in the number of SSP assertions between 2001 and 2021. In view of those practices, he cautioned against taking the Executive Branch’s invocation of the SSP “at face value.” One safeguard against unnecessary and overbroad secrecy assertions is to allow trial judges to examine purportedly secret documents in chambers and then to decide based on that examination whether the SSP was properly asserted. The Reynolds court declined to require that process in every SSP case but did not preclude it wholesale either. Gorsuch also suggested that discovery related to the black site could proceed under code names, as it has in other cases. Use of code names and in chambers inspection would be two ways to reverse the present trajectory of SSP cases, where the Court has “replaced independent inquiry with a rubber stamp.”

Only one other member of the Court—Justice Sotomayor—joined Gorsuch in dissent. So, the approach he recommends for trial courts handling SSP cases would require three more adherents before it could have the force of law. Until that time, jurisprudence concerning state secrets will be even more favorable to the government, and it will be even more difficult for individual litigants to break through secrecy barriers in national security cases.

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Robert Pallitto is an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University and a former trial attorney. His latest book, Bargaining with the Machine, was published in August 2020 by the University Press of Kansas.

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***

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US has aimed to turn Moldova towards the West and create an anti-Russian atmosphere with the intention of turning the country into a new hotspot on Russia’s southern geopolitical flank. Undoubtedly there has been a significant portion of Moldova’s population over the past 30 years that has reoriented from pro-Russian positions to pro-Western ones.

Therefore, the Americans understand that serious shifts, in terms of Moldova’s diminishing neutrality, can greatly deteriorate relations between Chisinau and Moscow in the context of the Ukrainian crisis, and therefore they have decided to turn the war to their advantage with the help of soft and hard power.

The US Agency for International Development intends to allocate $35m for structural reforms in Moldova. The goal is to secure the country’s pro-Western course and support anti-Russian rhetoric in the Moldovan media. The job, according to US documents, will be awarded to Nathan Associates, and the implementation of these institutional and structural reforms in Moldova was triggered by the Russian military operation against Ukraine. None-the-less, the $35m to be spent on the program is quite insignificant as the Americans have spent just under $1 billion on this type of project over the past two years.

Since Moldova is currently ruled by a party defined by a Western liberal orientation, the efficiency of this project may be greater in the sense that there is no need to bribe or convince the elite that these projects are needed – the elite itself will gladly accept this new political, economic and societal order.

The West is ordering the Moldovan leadership to take anti-Russian steps, hence all the recent trips to Chisinau by senior US and European delegates. The Moldovan leadership has so far refrained from major moves, but pressure is certainly mounting as the program is part of Washington’s efforts to turn Moldova into another anti-Russian stronghold.

Specific economic reforms aim to reorient the Moldovan economy to Western markets as the war in Ukraine has affected trade corridors, supply chains and demand for products. Effectively, Moldova is reorienting its economic flows to the West.

US officials openly admit they have plans to terminate trade and economic ties between Moldova and Russia. To achieve these goals, the US has also provided a specialised subgrant program for influencing public opinion in Moldova. American finances will develop new transport infrastructure and logistics hubs, strengthen Moldova’s internal logistical potential, and optimize customs procedures at border crossings between Moldova and the EU – all in the effort of dealing with a new European continent that will supposedly emerge after the Ukraine war, in which Russia is isolated and alone.

On June 2, a decision was made that Moldova’s television channels will only be allowed to air entertainment shows from Russia and not political or analytical programs. This is part of the information war being waged by the Americans against Moldovans. In this way, Washington will undoubtedly continue to spend money on reshaping public opinion in Moldova.

NATO is considering the possibility of weapon deliveries to Moldova and training the Moldovan army. This comes at a time when Moldovan President Maia Sandu, whilst speaking at the European Parliament, urged Russia to withdraw troops from the breakaway region of Transnistria, noting that their presence “violates the neutrality” of Moldova.

However, Moldova’s supposed neutrality has long been violated, especially as the country continues a slow integration into NATO in everything but name. As an example, the Moldovan military even participates in occupations, such as the so-called NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, thus making a mockery of the claim that Sandu’s Moldova is neutral.

By arming the military, pumping the public sector with money to develop an anti-Russian position and advising the ruling elite to develop an absolutely anti-Russian foreign and domestic policy course, the US hopes to finally turn Moldova against Moscow. Whether the US will succeed in its mission will largely depend on the situation in Ukraine. In that sense, the fate of Transnistria could depend on Odessa and whether the city will remain Ukrainian or come under Russian control.

This occurs following the May 24 arrest of former Moldovan President and current leader of the main opposition Socialist Party, Igor Dodon, who advocated the co-operation between Chisinau and Moscow. He is a central figure in Moldova and his arrest negatively affected the state of the opposition bloc.

On the other hand, his arrest could unite the bloc to act very strongly against the ruling government. However, according to local media reports, the opposition has remained fractured and there are no strong leaders who can instigate widespread protests as the population is more focussed on improving low living standards and not political games.

In this way, Moldova under Sandu will continue to integrate into the image of a Western liberal country whilst destroying traditional ties with Russia. This becomes all the more problematic as large segments of Moldovan society, including the near entirety of the breakaway Transnistria region, remain pro-Russia and do not want to see traditional ties ruined for the sake of serving Washington’s interests.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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***

Article by Deutcshe Welle. Selected Excerpts

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been calling for heavy weapons to repel the Russian invaders. Several allied nations, including US and Germany, have announced they will supply new military kit.

The fight over Ukraine’s Donbas can only be won with heavy weapons, military experts all agree. Ukraine’s allies have so far supplied thousands of weapons and considerable amounts of ammunition to help the besieged nation stand up to Russia, which possesses far greater military capabilities than Ukraine. If military aid for Ukraine dries up, the nation would lose the ability to defend itself.

NATO, meanwhile, does not want to risk provoking war with Russia. Moscow has warned repeatedly that it could interpret Western arms deliveries as a threat to its own security, especially when those weapons could be used to target Russian territory. Ukraine’s allies are therefore carefully weighing up which weapons systems they will deliver.

In May, US President Joe Biden announced the US would fulfill Kyiv’s request to supply mobile rocket launchers. The country will deliver the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), and the lighter High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

A HIMARS drill in California

A HIMARS drill in California

Both mobile platforms can be used to fire various rocket types. Whereas the MLRS is based on tracked vehicles, the HIMARS utilizes an armored truck design with wheels. While this limits the latter’s ability to navigate uneven terrain, it reduces fuel consumption. Weighing a third less than the MLRS, the HIMARS is also easier to transport by plane.

Both systems can fire intermediate range missiles over hundreds of kilometers. The US government has, however, decided not to supply missiles of this caliber. Instead, Ukraine will be given rockets with a maximum range of 80 kilometers. This, the US says, will suffice to repel Russian attacks on Ukrainian soil. It will also supply anti-artillery radar to Ukraine. The US government says Ukraine has promised not to use these weapons to attack targets on Russian territory.

M777 howitzers on a transport airplane

The US and others NATO states have supplied dozens of M777 howitzers to Ukraine

US arms deliveries have made up the lion’s share of weapons supplied to Ukraine since war broke out. Portable Javelin anti-tank missile systems and Stinger anti-aircraft rockets may have played a key role in slowing the Russian invasion in the early days of fighting.

The US and other NATO states have also supplied helicopter gunships and howitzers using NATO-standard 155 mm caliber ammunition to bolster Ukraine’s war effort in the Donbass. Further deliveries of this kind have been pledged.

Click here to read the full article.

 

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Featured image: Ukraine has began fielding US M777 howitzers to repel Russia (Source: US marines/Zumapress/picture alliance)

Activism: A Write-off and Autopsy

June 7th, 2022 by Dustin Broadbery

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***

If Extinction Rebellion is the midlife crisis of activist causes, the war in Ukraine is the crack cocaine of moral high grounds.

For those finely attuned to consensual reality, activism is the perfect oasis from which to emulate dissent, while keeping one’s head beneath the parapet.

Gone are the old hellraisers on the left stickin’ it to the man. Instead, you have a bunch of snowflakes looking to extricate themselves from moral responsibility by signalling their righteousness, rather than embodying it.

Activism, for want of a better word, has become an assembly point to a fire drill. A part time hobby for those on the cultural backwaters who mistake hoax for reality and other people’s misfortune as their personal consolation.

These Innocent fun and games aside, however, the rebranding of groupthink into advocacy has caused the corporate power which activists mistake for social cohesion, to destroy the values they misjudge themselves custodians of.

Without a bone of contention for the government, today’s activists are essentially doing for civil society what lobbyists do for politicians. What should be a dichotomy of opposing ideologies is an entanglement of vested interest. For the first time in history the polarising ideals of ordinary people and the predator class have been lumped together, the former doing the unofficial bidding of the latter.

It’s not so much that a good crisis is irresistible to those lacking in imagination, it’s that people’s legitimate grievances with a broken system are being used to smooth out its creases and rampart its empire, it’s that the real issues get triangulated into manufactured crisis, and it’s that the incessant handwringing and harrumphing of a select few super-spreaders of official rhetoric, drown-out any sensible demands for positive, tangible change. On this crooked path to reform, you have more of the same government causing much of the same problems.

Global Warming Meltdown

Today, there’s but one emergency and its climate change. The greatest historical interference with our rights and liberty is of little importance to those warning of the coming apocalypse.

But this consensual focus on the wrong cause is not only greasing the wheels of globalisation, its lubricating civil society for a proper shafting, so much so, that activism has become a clearinghouse for global policies.

Policies that would ordinarily be shunned by the rank and file are embraced with peak indiscretion. Just as those who would ordinarily keep their mouths shut and not venture to think out loud are given a loudhailer to gerrymander the rest of us, until their high vis opinionating becomes our mandate for change. This soapboxing by an outlier of suburbia, amplified across corporate media and cheered on from the political pulpits, eventually blights all quarters of society with its posturing, until everyone’s spouting the same end of the world, kitchen sink, histrionics, and offering to the gods, their own moral virtuosity as the cure-all for the world’s problems. As a general rule, whoever is the most mortally offended is granted the most media coverage.

NGOs and the Billionaire Class

The largest sphere of influence over activism is NGOs and big foundations.

Bloomberg Philanthropies funds activists campaigning on issues as diverse as LGBTQ rights to gun control.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation channels millions of dollars into several NGO’s clamping down on free speech online.

As improbable as it may seem, the Ford Foundation was funnelling money into the Tides Foundation who, at the time of the first Occupy Wall Street, were funding organisers, Adbusters.

The most dangerous man in Babylon, however, is George Soros, whose Open Foundation can be found everywhere there is civil unrest, from Extinction Rebellion to BLM, from the 2014 Ukrainian coup, to anti-Brexit groups in the UK.

When he’s not stoking civil unrest, Soros can also be found at the epicentre of the culture wars, funding critical race theory in US classrooms and normalising gender dysphoria and reassignment to children as young as 5.

Soros understands that the proclivity of ordinary people towards a fairer, more inclusive world is a powerful force for the wrong kind of change.

And what better way to vent your frustration with the system than by joining one of numerous intern programs spun out of the industrial NGO complex that exploits people’s desire for a more egalitarian world, by giving them an apprenticeship in advocacy, amounting to little more than laundering the dirty reputation of the elites into squeaky clean exemplars of the public sphere, while pushing the envelope of global policies that are shifting our constitutional landscapes towards a technocratic world order.

By his own admission, Soros sees nationalism as the great enemy to an open society. Launching at Davos 2020 a $1 billion inter-university program that teaches about the pitfalls of nationalism. Indoctrinating future generations into the ideologies of the predator class, masquerading as social reform, is what’s really going on here.

The Climate Industrial Complex

If you want to know how the science got settled, look no further than the multi-billion-dollar climate racket, valued at $632 billion in 2020, and predicted to reach an astonishing $4 Trillion by 2030.

That kind of stimulus buys a lot of noise, science papers, advocacy, and the rest of it. But it also helps to gloss over everything else being ushered in through the backdoor of climate policies, from pro-world taxation to resource misappropriation to one world government.

On one end of the shakedown, you have the doom merchants at ER telling us the end is nigh. On the other end you have the world’s most powerful institutional investors, blue chips, and multinational energy corporations. The mob, controlled by the billionaire class, demands solutions, and the billionaire class implements their agenda.

That Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, has taken up the cudgel of climate activists bears inconsistencies with reality that are impossible to reconcile. Blackrock, together with Vanguard, dominate all facets of our daily lives, controlling everything we eat, drink, wear or use.

Carbon Based Lifeforms

The war on carbon is, in fact, a war on life. And if the likes of Fink and Soros have their way, humanity will be the carbon that gets eliminated.

We are, after all, carbon-based lifeforms. Carbon is the chemical foundation for all life on Earth. With more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you have more photosynthesis and, therefore, more plants.

The weather is changing alright, but it’s getting colder – we are living through some of the coldest weather on record, it’s called the Grand Solar Minimum. But these are changes to our weather systems which people are unprepared for.

They’re unprepared because climate change is more than just a business. For the morally and ideologically impoverished, it’s a spiritual world order of biblical proportions, as was originally intended by the man who put the UN into the climate change business – billionaire oil tycoon Maurice Strong.

In 1994 Strong, together with the former supreme leader of world communism, authored The Earth Charter to enshrine the environmental movement into a bona-fide cult for the new age. As Strong succinctly put it: ‘The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.’

Counterfeiting Reality

Come rain or shine, climate apocalypse or grand solar minimum, activists continue to soldier on up the moral high ground, only to be sold down river on their descent. To these rebellious freethinkers it’s more Important to be on the same page with prevailing narrative than on the right side of history.

That’s because the gentrification of our grassroots movements has rendered people’s ability to muddle through the socio-political perplexities, inoperative, to such a degree, they can no longer distinguish between a social cause and hole in their back side, let alone point out tyranny in an identity parade or take any steps to holding its pirateers to account.

Running amok of our social movements, the virtuoso criminal masterminds managing Planet Earth Plc have built themselves an industrial counterfeiting press, which spits out ready-to-think, activist causes, to keep us close to our morality, but not close enough to derail their scheme.

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Dustin is a writer and researcher based in London who has been writing about the New Normal these past two years, particularly the ethical and legal issues around lockdowns and mandates, the history and roadmap to today’s biosecurity state, and the key players and institutions involved in the globalised takeover of our commons. Aside from COVID-19, Dustin writes about the intelligence state, big tech surveillance, big philanthropy, the co-option of activism and human rights.

You can find his work at https://www.thecogent.org and https://dustinbroadbery.substack.com/ Or follow him on twitter @TheCogent1

Featured image is from Julia Hawkins/Flickr

Most Americans Accept “Ukrainian Defeat”: Opinion Poll

June 7th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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One of the largest American think tanks, Democracy Institute, recently carried out an opinion poll on some topics concerning the Ukrainian issue, assessing the popularity of the Biden administration’s actions in the conflict. The results showed an extreme distrust of the American people towards its own government, with disapproval of the attitudes that have been taken so far in order to help Kiev. Almost half of the interviewees showed that they did not care about a Ukrainian defeat scenario, which shows a real failure of the anti-Russian campaigns promoted by the mass media agencies.

The data shows how Americans are tired of seeing their government involved in a conflict whose results will not bring any improvement to the people. Only 36% of the respondents said they supported Biden’s policy in Ukraine, while 53% said they were against it.

The numbers concerning other questions asked to the respondents corroborate the Democratic President’s unpopularity. For example, 45% said they would be fine if the US “allowed” the Ukrainian defeat, stopping sending military aid and letting the conflict end with the inevitable Russian victory. In the same vein, 50% of respondents were against the billion-dollar aid packages for Ukraine, and only 5% claimed to see Kiev as a priority for the US.

Furthermore, 16% of respondents claimed that they would like to see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the leader of the US. Despite the number being quite minority, the peculiarity of the question makes the answer truly curious. Apparently, a portion of Americans have more sympathy for the president of Washington’s biggest rival nation than for the leader of the White House himself. This reveals not only how unpopular Biden currently is, but also how the American people are ceasing to believe mainstream media narratives and starting to have sympathy for political leaders that contradict Western interests.

The results, although curious, were really expected. American popular support for the Biden management of the Ukrainian crisis has been minimal. The reasons are obvious: there is no improvement coming from American participation in the conflict. More than that, the life of the American people has worsened significantly, as the economic crisis, which existed before Russia launched the special military operation, was exacerbated by the constant transfer of public money to Kiev. In the life of the American citizen, the Ukrainian conflict represents uncontrolled inflation and supply crisis, in addition to the constant fear of an escalation in Europe that makes the country involved in yet another war.

In any society, public opinion is formed not only by mass media propaganda, but also by the direct experience of the people. No matter how much media agencies say it is “necessary” to support Ukraine, if this support materializes in harming the lives of ordinary citizens, the popularity of the measures will be inevitably low. In the midst of a serious social and economic crisis, accumulating problems such as absence of food for children, unemployment, growth of crime and illegal immigration, the tendency is for American citizens to ignore any foreign policy issue and demand from their government a focus on domestic problems. Of course, this includes popular demand for public money to stop being spent in Ukraine and start being invested in order to alleviate the effects of the internal emergency.

Commenting on the case during a recent interview, Democracy Institute’s founding director, Patrick Basham, said:

“A plurality of Americans can accept Ukraine losing the conflict with Russia because they do not consider the conflict to be of utmost importance to them. Americans are preoccupied with economic and social problems at home, such as inflation, supply chain disruptions, crime, and illegal immigration. These problems are affecting them every day, and in the most tangible ways. The Ukraine conflict is not. So, Americans continue to oppose Russian actions in Ukraine, but they do not see those actions as necessarily threatening the American people, themselves”.

Furthermore, it is necessary to mention the fact that the western narrative is ruined. The Russian advance in Azovstal made any claim of a “Ukrainian victory” impossible, which even led many pro-Western analysts, in order to save their credibility, to reverse some of their earlier arguments and begin to admit the evident scenario of defeat by the Kiev’s forces. It is unrealistic to believe that Ukraine, receiving Western aid, will be able to reverse the situation of the conflict. And ordinary people are starting to realize this, noticing that their tax money is being spent needlessly on a conflict where the US proxy’s victory is impossible.

In fact, popular support for American foreign policy depends on domestic economic and social stability, which cannot be achieved today. If the Democratic Party wants to remain in power in the next elections, what must be done is simply strong internal pressure for Biden to resolve national demands and stop worrying about conflicts on other continents. Otherwise, Biden’s unpopularity will materialize in mass protests and support for Republicans.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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Author/Journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf reveals shocking Pfizer & FDA malfeasance (most likely criminal acts) & terrifying revelations re vaccines that her 3000-strong army of relevant experts uncovered in the Pfizer document dump that FDA wanted to keep hidden for 75 years.

Dr Naomi Wolf discusses her recent article ‘Dear friends, Sorry to announce a Genocide. It’s really true, they know they are killing the babies‘. The article is based on a review by The War Room / Daily Clout regarding Pfizer document research that the FDA wanted to keep under wraps for 75 years. Dr Wolf is one of the worlds most influential feminists and a best selling author, columnist and professor. Her book ‘Give me liberty ; A handbook for American Revolutionaries predicted the current crisis in authoritarianism.

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This interview was originally published on TNT Radio.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), the English Romantic artist who lifted landscape and seascape painting to new and enthralling heights will never cease to amaze, inspire and make us question what we thought we knew about painting, about what colored pigment on canvas can do. “Turner’s Modern World” at the Boston Museum of Fine Art allows viewers to revisit and rediscover this modern ‘Oracle’, as the philosopher Deleuze would refer to him. Turner is indeed like the Oracle of Delphi, not simply because his work evinces the ambiguity and mystery that was characteristic of the Oracle’s pronouncements; but because the Oracle was a priestess of Apollo, Olympian god of the Sun and Light – and Turner is, in his way, also a priest of Apollo: a painter for whom the Sun is truly an appearance of the divine.

We must never forget Turner’s final words on this earth: “The Sun is God.” That is the key to Turner’s art. The Sun, the light, the eternal, the divine. No matter what he was exploring – the latest technological innovations, a cannon foundry, a speeding train, the growth of modern industry, it was with a mind to what is abiding in the evanescent, the kernel of eternal truth hiding within the ever-fleeting moment. That is what painting can do – it can transcend time; or rather act as a kind of time machine, color and light can transport us across the eons.

This exhibition underscores Turner’s drive to paint the world he saw changing around him; not only to confront modernity but to create works that are no less daring than the industrial revolution that he saw taking shape in England, first and foremost. The contemporary painter, Adrian Ghenie, emphasized just how revolutionary Turner was to paint a speeding train when no one else was doing anything of the kind.

Several of Turner’s greatest achievements in oil are in display here, including “Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” (1812), a tour de force which revels in the indomitable power of the natural world, the insignificance of mighty armies even as they strive to conquer the unconquerable. The painting features Hannibal’s famed Carthaginian army, elephants and all, beset by a massive storm as it struggles to make its way into Italy amidst the towering peaks of the Alps.

The devastation of war is a recurring theme in Turner’s work, and unlike his contemporaries Turner is willing to forego the occasion to bolster national pride or the patriotism of its fallen heroes. In “The Field of Waterloo” (1818), Turner’s great tragic vision of war, “The…  dead of both sides lay intertwined, nearly indistinguishable surrounded by the gloom of night.” Near the bottom center there are three women. The one farthest from us is bearing a child and in her right hand a torch which illumines the sea of mangled bodies. Beside her is another woman struggling to keep a third (also with child) from collapsing outright. Turner reflects not only on the dead and dying, but on the widows and orphans that war produces.

“The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory” (1806-8), is among the most ambitious and extraordinary paintings included in the exhibition. For Turner’s contemporaries the painting was a ‘British epic picture… the first picture of the kind that has ever… been exhibited.’ It is indeed an epic depiction of Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish navies at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. However, it is also much more than that. Ships close in on one another, with claustrophobic proximity; creating a wilderness of masts and sails and smoke in the upper three-quarters of the canvas. The viewer hovers above Nelson’s flagship Victory, where we can see the French have finally conceded defeat by laying their tricolour flag on the deck; but just beyond that Nelson lays dying, struck by a French sniper’s bullet. It is a painting in which tragedy and triumph are intertwined, as close to each other as the ships themselves: victory is won but at a steep price.

Oil painting of boats, water and a battle.

The Battle of Trafalgar, 1806-08 (Source: Museum of Fine Arts Boston)

“The Slave Ship” (1840) is undoubtedly one of Turner’s greatest masterpieces – a painting which his friend and critic John Ruskin would praise above all others, observing that it is “the noblest sea Turner ever painted, an, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man.” The scene depicts a slave ship that has thrown over a part of its “cargo” that is, human beings whose limbs can be seen as they are tossed among the violent waves. It is a scene that cries out against man’s inhumanity to man. As Ruskin points out, the masts of the slave ship “are written upon the sky in lines of blood.”  Turner’s condemnation of the guilty ship is expressed with color, “that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes it flaming flood with the sunlight.” The sinking sun itself seems to be enflamed by the horror it must gaze upon.

impressionistic painting depicting sunset-lit ocean with tall sailing ship in the distance, and bodies and cargo floating in waves in foreground

Slave Ship, 1840 (Source: Museum of Fine Arts Boston)

“The Fall of Anarchy” (c. 1883-4) is remarkable for being unlike anything else we might associate with Turner: half hidden within the mist and fog, a skeleton with its arms outstretched, lies sidelong over the back of a white horse. The vision is at once a terrifying one, but at the same time it is a moment of triumph, of victory. As we have seen, Turner is fond of these images that embrace ambiguity, where different, even opposing feelings intermingle.

Turner was no less a master of watercolor, and these paintings continue to astound us not merely or mainly for their virtuosity, which is undeniable, but for their expressive power, an “indistinct and harmonious magic,” as one contemporary critic put it – Turner’s ‘magic’ persuades us “… to consent to abandonment of solid truth and real nature altogether.” As with many of his oil paintings, Turner’s watercolors can verge on abstract expression: take for example “The Burning of the House of Parliament” (1834-5) and the ghostly “Adieu Fontainebleau” (1841-2). Look at Turner’s “Vignette Study for Kosciusko’” (1835-6), and the “’Sauve Qui Peut’: Column of Red Figures, Some on Horseback” (1841-2) which is no less extraordinary for its abstract minimalism.

Among Turner’s many achievements, perhaps none was greater than what we might call his liberation of color. That is, color is liberated, first and foremost, from reality: it is no longer beholden to the requirements of realist representation. For Turner, Light is not a symbol of the divine – it is divine, but if that is so then so is color: Light and color are both an appearance of God, a kind of theophany. Turner is led toward the emancipation of color because it is only thereby that the painter can use color not simply to represent reality but to represent divine reality, the eternal truth of the sensible reality, of the fleeting and intransient moment. Turner’s paintings are of a world in constant flux, a world of towering impermanence – what unites them all is light and color. It is through light and color that the sensible present is touched by eternity.

Turner’s greatness simply cannot be measured because he always remains ahead of us: an impressionist a hundred years early, and an abstract expressionist two hundred years ahead of his time. I am sometimes inclined even to think that his limitations such as they were – the human figure, for example, was never his forte, but even this was a kind of blessing, because in some way it seemed to make him less wedded to representation. His genius was to turn even his faults into virtues. His figures become nebulous, ghostly, merely hinted at, less tied down to the earth, more transient, and ephemeral. It allows him to reveal what is eternal, what is truly real and divine: Light, whether on a moonlit night, or at the dawn of time.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

We’re Now in the Last Stage of a Tyrannical Takeover

By Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Naomi Wolf, June 06, 2022

There are 10 steps that leaders who want to crush a democracy will always take. We are now in Step 10, and traitors are dissolving the boundaries and sovereignty of the United States. The same is also taking place in other nations.

The Top Ten Creepiest and Most Dystopian Things Pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF)

By Vigilant Citizen, June 06, 2022

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the most powerful organizations in the world. And, throughout the years, people at the WEF have said some truly insane and dystopian things. And they’ve managed to word these things in the creepiest ways possible. Here are the top 10 most insane things said by the WEF.

US Battled World War II Nazis, Today US Side-by-side Ukraine Nazis

By Renee Parsons, June 06, 2022

As the Biden Administration and American war machine ignore the cruel connection of that obscene war as a current sham of EU, NATO, US solidarity as a dishonor, if not a disgrace, to the memory of those 405,000 Americans who gave their lives fighting the Nazis and thousands more who served with honor while presumably defeating the Third Reich; that war which cost many American families, including my own the loss of my father’s twin brother, a paratrooper in Holland who stepped on a land mine days before the April, 1945 armistice.

Study Finds Athlete Deaths Are 1,700% Higher Than Expected Since COVID-19 Vaccination Began

By The Daily Expose, June 06, 2022

An investigation of official statistics has found that the number of athletes who have died since the beginning of 2021 has risen exponentially compared to the yearly number of deaths of athletes officially recorded between 1966 and 2004.

ALBA and Nicaragua – Defending Solidarity in a Divided World. Confronting the Monroe Doctrine

By Stephen Sefton, June 06, 2022

Controversy has dogged this June’s United States government organized Summit of the Americas. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela had already abandoned the OAS, seriously damaging the credibility of the Organization of American States as a trustworthy hemispheric forum for the countries North America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Rethinking the Second Amendment. “Those Lost to Gun Violence”: Dr. Naomi Wolf

By Dr. Naomi Wolf, June 06, 2022

The last thing keeping us free in America, as the lights go off all over Europe- and Australia, and Canada – is, yes, we must face this fact, the Second Amendment.

Are France and NATO Shipping Depleted Uranium Weaponry Into Ukraine?

By Freddie Ponton, June 06, 2022

An Elysian source specified that a few dozen MILAN anti-tank missiles (French-German manufactured) “have already been given” to the Ukrainian armed forces, confirming that these weapons were taken from the stocks of the French armed forces, according to the Elysée Palace (although these numbers seems very conservative).

‘Beacon of Democracy’: Kiev Regime’s Practice of Kidnapping People Spirals Out of Control

By Drago Bosnic, June 06, 2022

On June 3 the Donetsk People’s Republic Ombudsman Daria Morozova stated that Donetsk People’s Republic services have provided information on mass abductions of people by the special services of Ukraine, primarily the infamous SBU. Ukrainian services carry out illegal mass arrests on ideological grounds.

Psychopathic Politicians: Role Models of a “Slave Society”

By Julian Rose, June 06, 2022

Unless one can grasp the nature and motivation of those who attack one, one cannot come up with a strategy to overcome them. And right now we have a vital need to come up with such a strategy in order to throw a spanner in the works of a political system that has ‘psychopath’ written all over it.

Ukraine May Have to Give Up Some Land in ‘Negotiated Settlement,’ Biden Says

By Gerald Celente, June 06, 2022

President Joe Biden on Friday acknowledged for the first time since the Ukraine War broke out that Ukraine may eventually have to cede land to Russia if it wants to reach a ‘negotiated settlement’ and end the death and destruction.

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Labor activists from across the country, members of a number of unions, publicly announced the creation of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on the AFL-CIO International Operations, over the weekend of April 8-9. They held a press conference outside AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C., on April 8th, and followed with a four-hour educational conference at the University of the District of Columbia the following day.

This is the first project to focus on AFL-CIO operations around the globe since efforts to pass the “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers World-wide” resolution at the AFL-CIO’s 2005 National Convention in Chicago.

This new project, LEPAIO, is hoping to build support leading to the AFL-CIO’s 2022 National Convention in Philadelphia on June 12-15.

Speakers at the educational conference spoke on a number of issues, noting that the education conference on April 9th came on the 20th anniversary of the attempted (but failed) coup against democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez.

Speakers Margaret Flowers, William Camacaro, and James Patrick Jordan spoke of the on-going U.S. attacks on Venezuela that continue today, particularly through economic sanctions supported by the AFL-CIO.

This writer later noted the similarities between the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela and the 1973 Chilean coup that overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende, about which the AFL-CIO’s involvement in the latter through its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) had been revealed by the late Fred Hirsch of Plumbers and Pipefitters #393 in San Jose, California, in 1974.

These talks were followed by a heart-felt talk by David Hemson about how the progressive non-racial unions of South Africa were created, beginning with the mass strikes in Durban in 1973. Hemson had been one of the original organizers there.

Hemson spoke about how the AFL-CIO had supported the apartheid regime, especially through the on-going support of Zulu Chief Gatscha Buthelezi. Buthelezi and his people had physically attacked COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) members and affiliated unions in an internal war in the early 1990s in the province of Kwa-Zula/Natal. The AFL-CIO, ironically, had given Buthelezi the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Award for Human Rights in 1982.

Lou Wolf of CovertAction Magazine talked about the CIA’s operations around the world, and AFL-CIO involvement in their operations. (For example, see Rob McKenzie’s new book, El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA and the Coup at Ford in Mexico, recently published by Pluto Press.)

Lou Wolf speaking via Zoom. [Photo courtesy of Thomas O’Rourke]

This author followed, talking briefly about the AFL-CIO operations in Chile, the Philippines and Venezuela. However, most of my talk was about current events, with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center serving as one of the four core “institutes” of the Reagan administration-created National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Prior to the development of the NED, the U.S. would intervene in response to social crises in countries it deemed important to its global empire; this was the case in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973)—all of which first the AFL and then the AFL-CIO participated in other than Iran—and in each case, overthrew the respective democratically elected government.

However, exposures of these operations during the 1970s resulted in the development of the NED and a shift toward intervention before-hand, where they developed and/or found organizations that would support U.S. operations before a crisis would develop. (This happened after their work in El Salvador in the early 1980s, where they definitely intervened in response to the revolutionary upsurge.) NED has supported these organizations with considerable amounts of money so as to give them considerable sway in the future direction of their country.

There are four “core institutes” of the NED: the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, the international wing of the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO. These are the organizations at the heart of the NED and its operations. And whatever one thinks about either the Democrats or the Republicans, labor collaboration with the US Chamber of Commerce is despicable.

That does not mean that the Solidarity Center’s particular operations are necessarily evil, as was true of predecessor “institutes” in Africa, Asia and Latin America; there have been some projects where they have been helpful or at least “not evil.” However, the fact is that the AFL-CIO is complicit in the NED, which is designed to maintain the dominance of the U.S. Empire and its capitalist infrastructure.

Frank Hammer then discussed the assassination of his brother, Michael, along with two associates, in El Salvador while working on “land reform” for AIFLD in 1981. The U.S.-funded land reforms combined with right-wing military repression in the countryside were designed to defeat the revolutionary upsurge by the peasantry. Hammer noted that it was the oligarchs, that AIFLD was trying to protect, who were responsible for the assassination.

Following Hammer, Carol Lang spoke about the Histadrut, a long-time colonialist project in Israel, designed to maintain Palestinian and Arab worker subjugation, and which has long been supported by the AFL-CIO, particularly by getting member unions to purchase Israel Bonds that support the apartheid state.

And finally, Steve Zeltzer spoke on Solidarity Center ties to right-wing labor in Ukraine. Zeltzer again called for the AFL-CIO to “open its books” on their foreign operations.

In short, what was presented was a vehement condemnation of the AFL-CIO’s international operations from a global perspective, and an argument that we cannot have a labor movement promoting popular democracy at home while supporting fascism elsewhere. We must unite directly with workers around the world and must do so if growing crises, like climate change, war, suppression of labor rights, etc., are to be challenged.

In response, conference attendees (in person and via Zoom) passed a strong resolution that is now on the LEPAIO website: https://aflcio-int.education/.

The Educational Conference in Philly will take place on Saturday, June 11, from 1:00-5:00 pm at The Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103.

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Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana. He is the author of the 2010 book, AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or Sabotage?, and of the 2020 article, “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Program:  Where Historians Now Stand,” available on-line for free from the peer-reviewed journal Class, Race and Corporate Power (Political Science Department of Florida International University in Miami):  https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss2/5. He is also a member of the National Writers’ Union, AFL-CIO.  Details on McKenzie’s book:  London:  Pluto Press, 2022  ISBN:  978 0 7453 4562 8 (paper). Kim can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Educational conference on April 9th which was part of an ongoing effort to expose AFL-CIO connection to U.S. imperialism in South America. [Source: Photo courtesy of Thomas O’Rourke]

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Consortium News is being “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views.

The organization has accused Consortium News, begun in 1995 by former Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry, of publishing “false content” on Ukraine.

It calls “false” essential facts about Ukraine that have been suppressed in mainstream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine. Reporting crucial information left out of corporate media is Consortium News‘ essential mission.

But NewsGuard considers these facts to be “myths” and is demanding Consortium News “correct” these “errors.”

Who is NewsGuard?

NewsGuard set itself up in 2018 as a judge of news organizations’ credibility. The front page of NewsGuard’s website shows that it is “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as with several major corporations, such as Microsoft. The nature of these “partnerships” is not entirely clear.

NewsGuard is a private corporation that can shield itself from First Amendment obligations. But it has connections to formerly high-ranking U.S. government officials in addition to its “partnerships” with the State Dept. and the Pentagon.

Among those sitting on NewsGuard’s advisory board are Gen. Michael Hayden, the former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director; Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Homeland Security director and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO. NewGuard says its “advisors provide advice and subject-matter expertise to NewsGuard. They play no role in the determinations of ratings or the Nutrition Label write ups of websites unless otherwise noted and have no role in the governance or management of the organization.”

The co-CEO, with former Wall Street Journal publisher Louis Gordon Crovitz, is Steven Brill, who in the 1990s published Brill’s Content, a magazine that was billed as a watchdog of the press, critiquing the role of the media to hold government to account.  NewsGuard is a government-affiliated organization judging media like Consortium News that is totally independent of government or corporations.

NewsGuard has a rating process that results in a news organization receiving either a green or red label. Fox News and other major media, for example, have received green labels.

Getting a red label means that potentially millions of people that have the NewsGuard extension installed and operating on their browsers will see the  green or red mark affixed to websites on social media and Google searches. (For individuals that do not already have it installed and operating on Microsoft’s browser, it costs $4.95 a month in the U.S., £4.95 in the U.K., or €4.95 in the EU to run the extension.)

According to NewsGuard, libraries in the U.S. and Britain have had it installed on their computers, and it is also being put on computers of U.S. active duty personnel.  Slate reported in January 2019 that NewsGuard:

struck a deal with Microsoft to incorporate those ratings into the tech giant’s Edge browser as an optional setting. That’s when the Guardian noticed that the Mail Online had been tagged by NewsGuard with a ‘red’ label, a reliability score of 3 out of 9, and the following warning: ‘Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.’ For Microsoft Edge users with the ‘News Ratings’ feature turned on, that warning appeared alongside every link to the Mail Online—whether in Google search results, Facebook or Twitter feeds, or the Mail’s own homepage.”

NewsGuard has a partnership with the Pentagon. (Joe Lauria)

Approach to Consortium News

Consortium News was contacted by NewsGuard analyst Zachary Fishman. In his request to speak to someone at Consortium News he said categorically that CN had published “false content” and that the interview would be on the record. “I’m hoping to talk with someone who could answer a few questions about its structure and editorial processes — including its ownership, its handling of corrections, and its publication of false content,” he wrote in an email.

As editor-in-chief, I informed him that our founder, editors and writers came from high levels of establishment journalism. I told him that in thousands of press interviews I’ve conducted over nearly half a century in journalism I had never known anyone accusing a prospective interviewee of misconduct upfront and then determining that the interview would be on the record, when the ground rules are usually set by the person being interviewed. 

Fishman apologized and tried to say his mind wasn’t made up about Consortium News, when he had clearly stated that it was. “I do apologize that the wording of my email insinuated that I had come to a predetermined conclusion on whether your website has published false content, when I have not — be sure that I am interested in your responses to my questions,” he wrote in an email.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Fishman had one previous job in science and financial journalism that lasted 15 months for a company called Fastinform that is now defunct. Last month, all the links of his published pieces on LinkedIn went to a site that no longer exists. The links have now been removed.

Fishman has degrees in health, environment and science journalism and engineering physics. He has no experience in political reporting and especially of the politics of Eastern Europe and U.S.-Russia relations.

NewsGuard’s determination on Consortium News will be made by the analyst and, “At least one senior editor and NewsGuard’s co-CEOs review every Nutrition Label prior to publication to ensure that the rating is as fair and accurate as possible.”

Charge: There Was ‘No US-Backed Coup’

Violence during the Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

NewsGuard alleges that Consortium News has published “false content” by reporting that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have significant influence in the country.

Fishman took issue with a:

“February 2022 article ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflection,’ [which] asserted, ‘Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) … .’

Fishman then wrote:

“The U.S. supported the Maidan revolution that ousted then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — including a December 2013 visit by John McCain to Kyiv in support of protesters — but there is no evidence that the U.S. ‘organized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the markings of a popular uprising, precipitated by widely covered protests against Yanukovych’s decision to suspend preparations for the signing of an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union.”

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certifiedby the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine.  Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the violence used to overthrow the government, by Prof. Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the overthrow succeeded because of  “the embeddedness of violent groups” in a non-violent protest. The violence began on Dec.  1, 2013 when these violent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bulldozer through police lines.  The police viciously fought back that day.

As the International Business Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

“According to a member of anti-fascist Union Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nationalists here [EuroMaidan] including Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.

Different groups [of anarchists] came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting, a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the anarchists things like Jews, blacks, communists. There weren’t even any communists, that was just an insult. The anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated,’ a member of the group continued.”

The violence by far-right groups was evidently condoned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his support for the uprising by addressing the Maidan crowd later that month. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt visited the square after the violence had broken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the early elections, “angry protestors demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation,” and he fled on that day after “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts.” NewsGuard then says “protestors took control of several government buildings the next day.”

Government Buildings Seized

But protestors had already seized government buildings as early as December 2013. On Jan. 24 protestors broke into the Agriculture Ministry building in Kiev and occupied it. On the same day barricades were set up near the presidential headquarters.  Government buildings in the west of the country had also been occupied. The Guardian  (green check) reported on Jan. 24:

“There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.

Thousands also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne on Thursday, breaking down doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency reported. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building and lit fires outside the building.

Similar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Party of the Regions said.”

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Therefore NewsGuard has published “false content” by reporting that government buildings were occupied the day after Yanukovych fled the capital. It should print a correction.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada voted without the presence of Yanukovych’s party — the largest in the country — to impeach him after the fact of his violent overthrow. NewsGuard omitted the key fact that the impeachment vote was tainted by the absence of Yanukovych’s party and that the impeachment became largely irrelevant after violence forced him to flee the capital.

Democratically-elected leaders are removed by electoral defeat, impeachment or votes of no confidence, not by violence.  NewsGuard writes that “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why.  As Jacobin (NewsGuard green check) magazine reports:

“Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police ‘could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,’ writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.”

NewsGuard calls the events a “revolution,” yet revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not against democratically-elected leaders. For instance, the 1776 American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and countless others were against monarchs. Coups have been against both elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems, usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not changed, only its leader.

As a reader, Adrian E.. commented below on this article:

“When a movement that is supported by about half the population and opposed by about half the population violently overthrows a democratically elected government, this may be given different names (e.g. coup), but it is certainly not a “popular revolution”.

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.”

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

Circumstantial Evidence

McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

In its version of these events, NewsGuard only refers to circumstantial evidence of the coup, interpreting it as U.S. “support” for a “revolution” against a democratically-elected president.

NewsGuard fails to point out that McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) as well as  Nuland appeared on stage in the Maidan with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the Neo-fascist Svoboda Party, formerly known as the Social National Party.

NewsGuard does not consider how such events would be seen in the United States if a senior Russian foreign ministry official, two leading Russian lawmakers and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. appeared on stage with a far-right American leader to address a crowd on the Washington Mall seeking to oust an elected U.S. president. If that president were overthrown violently, would Americans think it a Russian-backed the coup?

NewsGuard discusses Nuland’s 2013 speech in which she revealed that since 1991 the U.S. had spent $5 billion to help bring about Ukraine’s “aspirations.” What it fails to point out is that U.S. aspirations were to turn Ukraine towards the West and away from Russia. And the U.S. had work to do.

In a 2008 poll, 17 years after this U.S. effort began, and the year in which the U.S. said Ukraine would one day join NATO, 50 percent of Ukrainians actually opposed NATO membership against just 24.3 percent who favored it. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 40 percent of Ukrainians viewed NATO as more threat than protector.  Just 17 percent had the opposite view. So building up civil society through U.S.-funded NGOs to favor the West was the U.S. challenge.

NewsGuard does not mention that part of the $5 billion the U.S. spent was to help organize protests. There was genuine popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovych that the NED nurtured and trained. Jacobin reported of the 2014 events:

“US officials, unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.”

In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported “played a big role in getting the protest up and running,” led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”

Writing in Consortium News six days after Yanukovych’s ouster, Parry reported that over the previous year, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funds NGOs in countries the U.S. targets for regime change, had bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine totaling more than $20 million. Parry called it “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

The NED, on Feb. 25, the day after the Russian invasion, deleted all projects in Ukraine it funded, which are archived here. The NED meddled in Ukrainian politics in 2004 in the so-called Orange Revolution.  The Washington Post (green check) wrote in 1991 that what the C.I.A. once did in secret — destabilizing and overthrowing regimes —  the NED was now doing openly.

C.I.A. or NED-led coups are never made up out of whole cloth. The U.S. works with genuine opposition movements within a country, sometimes popular uprisings, to finance, train and direct them. This U.S. has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments, the most infamous examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954,  and Chile in 1973.

In September 2013, before the Maidan uprising began, long-time NED head Carl Gerhsman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Washington Post op-ed piece, and warned that “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In 2016 he said the NED has been involved in Ukraine since the 1980s and he praised the “overthrow of Yanukovych.”

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Omitted

Most significantly, NewsGuard’s attempt to refute U.S. involvement in the coup omits the 2014 intercepted and leaked telephone call between Nuland and Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before Yanukovych was overthrown.

On the leaked tape, Nuland and Pyatt talk about “midwifing” a new government; Vice President Joe Biden’s role, and setting up meetings with Ukrainian politicians to make it happen. Nuland says the prime minister should be Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and indeed he became prime minister after the coup.

At the time, the BBC (green check) wrote of the leak: “The US says that it is working with all sides in the crisis to reach a peaceful solution, noting that ‘ultimately it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide their future’. However this transcript suggests that the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals.”

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the EU.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark as a distraction from the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Why did Nuland say, “Fuck the EU”? At the time she said it, France, Germany and Poland were working for the EU on a political settlement with Russia to the Maidan crisis that would leave Yanukovych in power.

Indeed the E.U. brokered a deal with Yanukovych, who agreed to early elections by December, a restoration of the 2004 Constitution and an amnesty for all protestors, clearing the way for no one to be held responsible for the violent ouster. Yanukovych  announced the agreement, with E.U. officials at his side in Kiev, on Feb. 21, 2014. Later that day he was violently driven from power.

Leaving the historic role of the NED and the essential Nuland-Pyatt conversation out of its reporting is an omission of evidence by NewsGuard, typical of corporate media. Omitting crucial elements of a story changes its meaning and in this case undermines NewsGuard’s account of the events of 2014.

This is an excellent example of why Parry started Consortium News: to report on crucial information that corporate media sometimes purposely and deceptively leave out to change the meaning of a story. NewsGuard should correct its story about the coup, not Consortium News. NewsGuard invites readers to request corrections by emailing them at [email protected].

Likely Reasons for the Coup

Wall Street and Washington swept in after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 under a pliable Boris Yeltsin (who received direct U.S. help to win re-election in 1996) to asset-strip the formerly state-owned industries, enrich themselves and a new class of oligarchs and impoverish the former Soviet people.

The ascension of Vladimir Putin to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 gradually began to curb U.S. influence in post-Soviet Russia, especially after Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted U.S. unilateral aggression, especially in Iraq.

Eventually Putin restored sovereignty over much of the Russian economy, turning Washington and Wall Street against him.  (As President Joe Biden has now made clear on more than one occasion, the U.S. aim is to overthrow him.)

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, former U.S. national security adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and dominating Moscow as it did when this was written in the 1990s.

Deep Western involvement in Ukrainian politics and economy never ended from those early post-Soviet days. When Yanukovych acted legally (the Rada authorized it) to reject the European Union association agreement in favor of a Russian economic package on better terms, it threatened to curtail Western economic involvement. Yanukovych became a marked man.

Yanukovych had already made Russian an official language, he had  rejected NATO membership, and reversed his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators. Yanukovych’s predecessor, President Viktor Yuschenko, had made Ukraine’s World War II-era fascist leader Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine.”

There was genuine popular dissatisfaction among mostly Western Ukrainians with Yanukovych, which intensified and became violent after he rejected the EU deal.  Within months he was overthrown.

After the Coup

The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine.

Videos have emerged of Biden giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.

Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released this year and published by Just the News (green-check) actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried.

Eight days after nearly 50 anti-coup protestors in Odessa were burned to death on May 2, 2014 by far-right counter-protestors dominated by Right Sector, the coup-resisting provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region declared independence from Ukraine. Russia began assisting them and, after a visit to Kiev by then C.I.A. Director John Brennan, Poroshenko launched a war against the separatists that lasted eight years, killing thousands of civilians, until Russia intervened in the civil conflict in February.

After the coup, NATO began arming, training and conducting exercises with the Ukrainian military, turning it into a de facto NATO member.  These were not just the interests of part of Ukraine that were being served, but those of powerful foreign actors. It was akin to a 19th century-style colonial takeover of a country.

Charge: Nazi Influence ‘Exaggerated’

The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles.  Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.

The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”

The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’”

Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization….’”  An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations … “

Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ that the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.”

Bandera Revival

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of Yanukovich’s regime, the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the Neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before McCain and Nuland appeared with its leader the following year.)

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by Yanukovych, who was overthrown.

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:

“On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine” by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’”

Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year.

Mainstream on Neo-Nazis

From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard says doesn’t exist, reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup.

As The New York Times reported, the neo-nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of Neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:

And this one in July 2015:

After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from Neo-fascist parties.  NBC News (green check) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”

Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (green check) reported:

“In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainain president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:

“[Parliament] recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine’s legislature] not to associate with, endorse, or form coalitions with this party.”

Such mainstream reports on Banderism have stopped as the Neo-fascist role in Ukraine was suppressed in Western media once Putin made “de-nazification” a goal of the invasion.

The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

In 2014 the now Azov Regiment was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is further integrated into the state by working closely with the SBU intelligence service. Azov is the only known Neo-fascist component in a nation’s military anywhere in the world.

As part of the Ukraine military, Azov members have still sported yellow arm bands (until this week) with the Wolfsangel once worn by German SS troops in World War II. Including the atrocities it has continued to commit, Azov shows the world that integration into the state has not denazified them.  On the contrary, it may have increased its influence on the state.

The U.S. and NATO have also trained and armed Azov since Barack Obama had denied lethal aid to Ukraine. One reason Obama declined sending arms to Ukraine was because he was afraid they may fall into these right-wing extremists’ hands. According to the green-checked New York Times,

“Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment — do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?”

NewsGuard’s Objections

NewsGuard’s argument against the major influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine rests on Neo-fascist  political parties faring poorly at the polls. This ignores the stark fact that these groups engage instead in extra-parliamentary extremism.

In its charge against Consortium News for publishing “false content” about Neo-fascism in Ukraine, NewsGuard’s Fishman wrote:

“There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine. Radical far-right groups in Ukraine do represent a ‘threat to the democratic development of Ukraine,’ according to 2018 Freedom House report. But it also stated that far-right extremists have poor political representation in Ukraine and no plausible path to power — for example, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the far-right nationalist party Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote, while the Svoboda candidate, Ruslan Koshulynskyy, won just 1.6 percent of the vote in the presidential election.”

But this argument of focusing on elections results has been dismissed by a number of mainstream sources, not least of which is the Atlantic Council, probably the most anti-Russian think tank in the world.  In a 2019 article, a writer for the Atlantic Council said:

“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of ‘red herring.’ It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.” [Emphasis added.]

“Fear that they might turn on the state itself,” acknowledges the powerful leverage these groups have over the government. The Atlantic Council piece then underscores how influential these groups are:

“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote ‘national patriotic education projects’ in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”

The Atlantic Council is not the only anti-Russian outfit that recognizes the dangerous power of the Neo-fascist groups in Ukraine.  Bellingcat published an alarming 2018 article headlined, “Ukrainian Far-Right Fighters, White Supremacists Trained by Major European Security Firm.”

NATO has also trained the Azov Regiment, directly linking the U.S. with far-right Ukrainian extremists.

The Hill reported in 2017 in an article headlined, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” that:

“Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.

There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing.

Azov’s logo is composed of two emblems — the wolfsangel and the Sonnenrad — identified as neo-Nazi symbols by the Anti-Defamation League. The wolfsangel is used by the U.S. hate group Aryan Nations, while the Sonnenrad was among the neo-Nazi symbols at this summer’s deadly march in Charlottesville.

Azov’s neo-Nazi character has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Reuters, among others. On-the-ground journalists from established Western media outlets have written of witnessing SS runes, swastikas, torchlight marches, and Nazi salutes. They interviewed Azov soldiers who readily acknowledged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unambiguous headlines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. backing in Ukraine?” and “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russian propaganda?

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch have accused Azov, as well as other Kiev battalions, of a litany of human rights abuses.”

Neo-facism has infected Ukrainian popular culture as well. A half-dozen neo-Nazi music groups held a concert in 2019 commemorating  the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Amnesty International in 2019 warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”

Zelensky & Neo-Nazis

One of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs from the early 1990s, Ihor Kolomoisky, was an early financial backer of the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. According to a 2015 Reuters (green-checked) report:

“Many of these paramilitary groups are accused of abusing the citizens they are charged with protecting. Amnesty International has reported that the Aidar battalion — also partially funded by Kolomoisky — committed war crimes, including illegal abductions, unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions.

Other pro-Kiev private battalions have starved civilians as a form of warfare, preventing aid convoys from reaching separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, according to the Amnesty report.

Some of Ukraine’s private battalions have blackened the country’s international reputation with their extremist views. The Azov battalion, partially funded by Taruta and Kolomoisky, uses the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, and many of its members openly espouse neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic views. The battalion members have spoken about “bringing the war to Kiev,” and said that Ukraine needs “a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.”

In April 2019, the F.B.I. began investigating Kolomoisky for alleged financial crimes in connection with his steel holdings in West Virginia and northern Ohio. In August 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture complaints against him and a partner:

“The complaints allege that Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.  The two obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from approximately 2008 through 2016, when the scheme was uncovered, and the bank was nationalized by the National Bank of Ukraine.  The complaints allege that they laundered a portion of the criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the United States.  As alleged in the complaint, the loans were rarely repaid except with more fraudulently obtained loan proceeds.”

Meanwhile, the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports, including this one by Radio Free Europe (not rated).

During the presidential campaign, Politico reported:

“Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile.”

Before their run-off election, Petro Poroshenko called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet.” According to the Pandora Papers, Zelensky stashed funds he received from Kolomoisky off shore.

During the campaign Zelensky was asked about Bandera. He said it was “cool” that many Ukrainians consider Bandera a hero.

Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post (green check) reported:

“When one veteran, Denys Yantar, said they had no arms and wanted instead to discuss protests against the planned disengagement that had taken place across Ukraine, Zelensky became furious.

‘Listen, Denys, I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.

‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.

‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”

It was a demonstration of the power of the military, including the Azov Regiment, over the civilian president.

After the Russian invasion, Zelensky was asked in April by Fox News about Azov, which were later defeated in Mariupol. “They are what they are,” he responded. “They were defending our country.” He then tries to say because they are part of the military they are somehow no longer Neo-Nazis, though they still wear Nazi insignia (until Tuesday). (Fox’s YouTube post removed that question from the interview, but it is preserved here:)

Outrages Greek Officials

Also in April, Zelensky infuriated two former Greek prime ministers and other officials by inviting a member of the Azov Regiment to address the Greek Parliament. Alexis Tsipras, a former premier and leader of the main opposition party, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance, blasted the appearance of the Azov fighters before parliament.

 “Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But nazis cannot be allowed to speak in parliament,” Tsipras said on social media. “The speech was a provocation.” He said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “bears full responsibility. … He talked about a historic day but it is a historical shame.”

Former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called the Azov video being played in parliament a “big mistake.” Former Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias said: “The Greek government irresponsibly undermined the struggle of the Ukrainian people, by giving the floor to a Nazi. The responsibilities are heavy. The government should publish a detailed report of preparation and contacts for the event.”

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party said  Zelenky’s appearance turned into a “Nazi fiesta.”

Zelensky has also not rebuked his ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, for visiting Bandera’s grave in Munich, which provoked this reaction from a German MP: “Anyone like Melnik who describes the Nazi collaborator Bandera as ‘our hero’ and makes a pilgrimage to his grave or defends the right-wing Azov Battalion as ‘brave’ is actually still benevolently described as a ‘Nazi sympathizer.’”

Zelensky has closed media outlets and outlawed 11 political parties, including the largest one, Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh) and arrested its leader. None of the 11 shut down  are far-right parties.

Donald Trump was rightly castigated for remarks he made about white supremecists in Charlottesville. But Zelensky, whose oligarch backer funded Azov, and who brought a Neo-Nazi to address a European Parliament, is given a pass by a Democratic administration and the U.S. media though he condones the far worse problem of Neo-fascism in Ukraine.

‘Infested’ 

NewsGuard’s Fishman took issue with similar phrases that appear in Consortium News articles by columnist Patrick Lawrence, and by legendary journalist John Pilger. Lawrence refers to the Ukrainian government as a “Nazi-infested regime” and Pilger to the “the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis.” NewsGuard objects to this characterization because the political wings of violent neo-Nazi groups fare poorly in Ukrainian elections.

Fishman wrote:

“The March 2022 article ‘PATRICK LAWRENCE: Imperial Infantilism’ stated: ‘Now the names we have for Putin roll around among like pinballs. ‘Hitler’ has fallen somewhat out of fashion, the hyperbole having proven too silly, or maybe because NATO is now arming a Nazi-infested regime,’ which was a reference to the Ukrainian government.

The February 2022 article “John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda” stated: “Vladimir Putin refers to the ‘genocide’ in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by former U.S. President Barack Obama’s ‘point person’ in Kyiev, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.” This article makes the claims similar to the ones highlighted in the previous … articles, and are seemingly false for the same reasons.”

One can quibble over whether “infested” is the best choice of words, but it is clear that the Ukrainian state has long protected influential Neo-Nazism. Consortium News gives a wide latitude to columnists and commentators like Lawrence and Pilger, both vastly experienced journalists, to express themselves. There is no doubt about the outsized influence of Neo-fascism in Ukrainian society and government, especially since the events of 2014.

NewsGuard’s dismissal of the influence of Neo-fascism by looking only at election results completely misses the point. Fishman has demanded CN correct its reporting on neo-Nazism in Ukraine. But Fishman’s statement that “There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine” should instead be corrected by NewsGuard.

The ‘G’ Word

Fishman also took exception to the use of the word “genocide” in two Consortium News articles published about Ukraine.

“I also found some instances where Consortium News appeared to publish false or misleading claims, and I’d like to get your comments on them. I’ve listed some examples and provided brief explanations on why they seem to be false:

The March 2022 article ‘A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War’ stated: ‘The government of Ukraine has denied human rights and political self-determination to the peoples of the Donbass. Some 13,000 people have died during the eight years since the 2014 coup, according to the United Nations. The Ukrainian government has overtly genocidal policies toward Russian minorities.’

The February 2022 article “John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda” stated: ‘Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 …  the coup regime … launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.”

Fishman went on:

“The International Criminal Court, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have all said they have found no evidence of a genocide in Donbas. For example, A 2016 report by the International Criminal Court found that the acts of violence allegedly committed by the Ukrainian authorities in 2013 and 2014 could constitute an ‘attack directed against a civilian population,’ but it also said that’“the information available did not provide a reasonable basis to believe that the attack was systematic or widespread.’

And the U.S. Mission to OSCE stated in a February 2022 Twitter post, ‘The SMM [Special Monitoring Mission] has complete access to the government controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims [of genocide in Ukraine].’”

Genocide is defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by 153 nations.  The convention says:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Convention adds:

“The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.”

Based on the convention, an argument for and against genocide in Donbass could be made. The Ukraine military and extreme right militias have undoubtedly carried out attacks on civilians who, by reason of their language and religion, constitute a separate ethnic group.  Points (a) and (b) of the definition are certainly true, (c) and (d) are questionable.  The question of “intent” is crucial. Have the Ukrainian authorities had the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”?

The charge of “genocide” is thrown about by political opponents with less than due care to its actual definition. For instance, Biden and Zelensky have both accused Russia of “genocide” in its ongoing military operation. There is no defined number of civilian deaths that constitute an intent to destroy a people “in part.” Three months after the Russian invasion, the OSCE reports around 4,000 civilians killed. Both sides are shooting and killing civilians.

It is a judgement call whether genocide has taken place. The ICC report, referred to by Fishman, says Ukraine’s military action against Donbass could “constitute” an “attack directed against a civilian population,” but the ICC’s judgement about genocide was not definitive as it was based on “the information available.”

His second reference does not come from the OSCE itself, but from the U.S. mission to the OSCE, undercutting its objectivity since it is a narrow, national view from a country with a distinct political interest in events in Ukraine.

Consortium News has not taken a position that genocide was committed in Donbass. These are the only references made to genocide in Donbass and both CN articles are clearly labeled as commentaries with the disclaimer: “The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Pilger only says that Putin “refers to genocide,” while Pilger himself calls it “a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass.”

Consortium News did not endorse the judgment of these two commentators as it often publishes material with which it does not share editorial positions. Genocide in the context of Donbass is an arguable point, and therefore CN published these commentaries.

Financing and Other Questions 

NewsGuard has also demanded detailed information about Consortium News‘ financing. Consortium News is funded almost entirely by small contributions from its readers raised during three public fund raisers per year.

IRS rules require donors who contribute more than $5,000 in a year be told to the tax agency. But their names do not have to be revealed to the public to protect the donors’ privacy. CN has made public its two major donors from its last tax returns. Roger Waters, the rock musician of Pink Floyd fame, donated $25,000 in both 2020 and 2021. The other major donor is the New York-based Cloud Mountain Foundation, which has donated $25,000 in each of the past three years.

Consortium News has never taken a penny from any government, corporation or advertiser. To prove this, CN is hiring an independent auditor to attest to this fact. It will publish on this website the independent audit statement as soon as it is prepared to once and for all end any smears or suspicions about the sources of CN‘s funding.

Fishman also mistakenly wants to know why authors’ bios don’t appear below CN articles, when they clearly do. NewsGuard wants to know what CN‘s corrections policy is. It is as follows: typos are corrected without a notice, factual errors are corrected with a CORRECTION notice at the bottom of the article.

A History of Dissent

The United States was founded by dissenters. The Declaration of Independence is one of history’s most significant dissenting documents, inspiring people seeking freedom around the world, from the French revolutionists to Ho Chi Minh, who based Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France on the American declaration.

But over the centuries a corrupt centralization of American power seeking to maintain and expand its authority has at times sought to crush the very principle of dissent which was written into the United States Constitution.

Freedom to dissent was first threatened by the second president. Just eight years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, press freedom had become a threat to John Adams, whose Federalist Party pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Laws. They criminalized criticism of the federal government.

The Union then shut down newspapers during the U.S. Civil War.  

Woodrow Wilson came within one vote in the Senate of creating official government censorship in the 1917 Espionage Act.  The 1918 Alien and Sedition Act that followed jailed hundreds of people for speech until it was repealed in 1921.

Since the 1950s, McCarthyism has become the byword for one of the worst periods of repression of dissent in U.S. history.

The closest we’ve come to Wilson’s troubling dream is the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, now on hold. 

The roots are in the earliest English settlers in North America, described in The Scarlet Letter and applied to McCarthyism in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Though its industrial and scientific achievements are most lauded, America’s tradition of dissent is probably the greatest thing in U.S. history and it is once again under threat.

The Current Climate

NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have been kicked off  Twitter.

PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News‘ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.

CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to; the coup and 8-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

Consortium News can be wrong at times, but never as wrong as mainstream media was on WMD in Iraq or Russiagate. CN got both those consequential stories right while they were happening, and contends it is correct in its analysis of the Ukraine crisis.  In any case, it is entitled to its analysis. On Iraq, Russiagate and Ukraine, Consortium News has clashed with the conventional wisdom forged by powerful forces and its corporate media allies. In response CN has been repeatedly smeared as agents of Iraq and Russia.

An overly self-confident Western establishment cannot appear to understand how experienced Western journalists could exercise their own agency and editorial judgment to critique U.S. foreign policy in real time, without them being agents of a foreign power. Consortium News sued the Canadian television network Global News for publishing such a smear.

It is evidently not enough for powerful forces to simply disagree and respect CN‘s constitutional right to free speech.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States wrote:  “[T]hat the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” Justice Louis Brandeis added in Whitney v. California that the remedy for ill-conceived speech is more speech, not enforced silence.

NewsGuard’s review of Consortium News and other independent media is a test case: Can the U.S. establishment tolerate dissent or is it joining the tradition of Adams and Wilson to crush it?

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Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe  

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In late February, much of the American public had little understanding about Russia’s “special military operation” (smo) that focused on the “denazification” of Ukraine.  Despite opinion polls confirming the media as a lying, scheming venture, Americans foolishly invest their myopic trust as it continues to build disinformation upon hogwash until an unsuspecting citizenry can no longer discern the most basic facts from fiction.  The unacceptable expansion of NATO on Russia’s border as an instrument of US foreign policy has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the default of its 1990 promise to Gorbachev.  

Even prior to Russia’s SMO, The West had been deliberately violating the international sovereignty of the Black Sea and Russia’s proximity  as the HMS Defender recklessly sailed willy-nilly as if the entire world was its oyster.  By February, 2022, Ukraine, NATO, the US and its EU coalition of western groupies had crossed Russia’s red line in their refusal to implement the 2014 Minsk Agreement as Russia reacted to protect its own sovereignty.

In denial, if not mystified, about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reference to denazification was that a significant number of bona fide German Nazis remained in what was not yet the independent country of Ukraine (1991) after WWII.  It was with the 2014 coup that those Nazis organized into neo-nationalist militias like the Azov Battalion, the Right Sector and Svoboda to take over the Kiev government as they embedded within the Ukrainian National Guard and prepped for military action against Russia.

In other words, there has been no Great Awakening or an OMG moment that the US, NATO and EU have been fighting on the same side as descendants of the German Nazis whom they all fought against during WW II.  How could that not have been an obvious fact to any American with half a brain –  we can debate whether the public school system is teaching critical analytical thinking.  Given the awareness of the history between the Russians and the Nazis during The Great Patriotic War, you might expect some level of self-loathing for those Europeans who chose to align with today’s Ukraine Nazis, yet those same countries have proven they are missing a modicum of moral integrity as that repulsive fact gave not one moment of hesitation to join the effort to destroy Russian sovereignty.  Today’s Ukraine Nazis are no better, with no more trace of humanity and no less evil or diabolical than the Nazis of the 1930’s and may have further descended into the pits of Hell.

As the Biden Administration and American war machine ignore the cruel connection of that obscene war as a current sham of EU, NATO, US solidarity as a dishonor, if not a disgrace, to the memory of those 405,000 Americans who gave their lives fighting the Nazis and thousands more who served with honor while presumably defeating the Third Reich; that war which cost many American families, including my own the loss of my father’s twin brother, a paratrooper in Holland who stepped on a land mine days before the April, 1945 armistice.

The current generation of Americans remain equally unaware that the Potsdam Conference of 1945 agreed to disarm and demilitarize German Nazism, to repeal Nazi regime laws, to remove Nazis from the German education and court systems, and to arrest and try Germans who had committed war crimes. The belief that ‘The West’ won WW II became somewhat tarnished as the US, unbeknownst to the American public, undermined its own victory in 1947 by introducing over 2,000 scientists, engineers and high level Nazis into NASA, Plum Island, the US defense industry and other specialized departments.

Fast forward to 2022:  soon after the coup, the United States spent unspecified millions of dollars training and arming Ukraine troops; not to mention  $54 Billion allotted directly to Ukraine since February during which the US coordinated a phony proxy war with no formal declaration of war,  as neither political party, one more duplicitous than the other, sought to demand a War Powers Act vote or cited Constitutional violations.

As Russia has continued in the eradication of Nazi neo-nationalists throughout the entire Donbass region and nailed down important key locations, Zelensky has dramatically flipped from his usual dismissal of the Russian Army to admitting that the Donbass had deteriorated to “indescribably difficult” for the Ukrainian Army.  At the same time, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba was speaking at the World Economic Forum soiree in Davos and conceded that the “situation in Donbas is extremely bad” offering a  rare glimpse into what Ukrainian troops described as staggering losses, mutiny in the ranks, and starvation in the trenches while also pleading for MLRS from any one who would listen.

Also during the WEF meeting, the decrepit former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested a return to the status quo of  ceding Donbass and Crimea land to Russia and that “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”  Kissinger’s warning fell on deaf ears as Kuleba confirmed that peace negotiations with Russia were going “nowhere”. Brash and inexperienced, Zelensky reiterated that Ukraine would only accept Russia giving up all its historic claims to Ukraine land and stage a total withdrawal adding that “It seems that Mr. Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022, but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos, but in Munich of that time.”

However, Kissinger understood better than his World Economic comrades that Russia’s imminent success was about to publicly display Ukraine’s utter military thrashing as well as discredit any credibility related to their precious Globalist New World Order  (Conspiracy) Dream of Nirvana – all of which are imminently going down the tubes thanks to the arrogant incompetence of The West.

Meanwhile, as gas supplies have been cut off to the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland and Poland for not opening a ruble account,  it is now  apparent that Russia has not crumpled under the economic sanctions levied by the West which foolishly believed its petrodollar and its SWIFT system (replaced by China’s CIPS) to both be sacrosanct as the Russian Army is now mopping the floor with the Nazi neo-nationalists in the Donbass section and Ukraine‘s geography east of the Dnieper River just  as Putin promised.

Even as Putin offered a “significant contribution to overcome the food crisis’ with increased wheat and fertilizer shipments in exchange for  reconsideration on some of the politically motivated sanctions, some  of which have proven to be ineffective or have boomeranged back on its western perpetrators creating their own self-made crisis.   Yet the know-nothings in the EU and United States would rather see their citizens in dire straits, experience the truth of starvation and the deep anxiety that comes with a family and its children enduring the trauma of severe food insecurity than ever admit they failed to consider the full implications of their errant policy.   Russian officials indicated that the ports of Mariupol and Berdynask have been cleared of Ukraine mines and was now free for the export of 20 million metric tons of Ukraine grain.

Yet Brit Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has suggested that western allies need to be ready for the long haul’ with ‘no talk of ceasefires or appeasing Putin” while at the same time, taking no personal responsibility for a belligerent attitude with “it is completely appalling that Putin is trying to hold the world to ransom, and he is essentially weaponizing hunger.”  In addition, EU President Ursula von der Leyen suggested  “..Putin might be able to take the oil that he does not sell to the EU to the world market, where the prices will increase, and sell it for more – and that would fill his war chests.”

What is appalling is that the EU/US Globalist Club never considered the implications beyond their own narrow self-serving policies and would now rather fall on its sword than ever admit they goofed; that they have no understanding of the cause-and-effect of their own policies, that they did not bother to confirm what they thought they already knew from their own altar of self-superiority and that they made a serious miscalculation that will now cost their own citizens to suffer unnecessarily.

The truth of reality is that their self-aggrandizement sanctions were not the end-all as expected even prior to the utter shock that  Russia is  more of an economic and agricultural self-sufficient country than any of these weasels in the west would have ever considered.   With a strong agricultural baseits  exports exceed arms sales by more than a third. $28.8 billion from agricultural sector, $15.6 billion from the defense industry,” while in 2015, Vladimir Putin openly opposed genetically modified food and announced Russia’s goal to become the world’s largest supplier of organic produce.

Meanwhile, the US removed evidence of bioweapon labs in Ukraine as the West continue to escalate their delivery of weapons to the Zelensky government.

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected].

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com

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***

President Joe Biden on Friday acknowledged for the first time since the Ukraine War broke out that Ukraine may eventually have to cede land to Russia if it wants to reach a ‘negotiated settlement’ and end the death and destruction.

Biden said he will not tell Kyiv how to proceed, but it “appears to me that at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here.”

“And what that entails, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows at the time. But in the meantime, we’re gonna continue to put the Ukrainians in a position where they can defend themselves,” he said, according to The New York Post.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that Russian forces and separatists now control about 20 percent of the country as they continue to advance in the country’s eastern flank.

Russian forces and Ukrainians have been fighting it out in Donbas, which Kyiv said is the fiercest fight in Europe since WWII. Zelensky said earlier this week that his country is losing as many as 100 soldiers a day in the conflict.

“The most difficult situation is in the east of Ukraine and southern Donetsk and Luhansk​,” Zelensky told Newsmax.

“The situation is very difficult. We’re losing 60 to 100 soldiers per day as killed in action and something around 500 people as wounded in action. So we are holding our defensive perimeters​,” he said.

Biden recently riled Russia when he said the U.S. will send advanced rocket systems to Ukraine that Moscow has called a “red line.”

The Kremlin said the U.S. is adding “fuel to the fire.”

“We know that the United States has been purposefully and meticulously adding fuel to the fire,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said, ABC News reported. “The United States pursues the course towards fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said last week what The Trends Journal has been advocating since the start of the Ukraine War: Zelensky should negotiate for a peaceful resolution and prevent thousands more from dying needlessly.

Ukraine has said it will not stop fighting until Russia retreats from the country.

Kissinger’s comments follow nonagenarian Noam Chomsky’s earlier statements about the dangers of a prolonged conflict in Ukraine. Chomsky, correctly, stated earlier this month that Ukrainian leadership’s cry for more heavy weapons is actually the Western “propaganda system.”

TRENDPOST: Hearing Zelensky speak, one might start to think that he’s coming from a position of power. He talks to Western leaders the way a college boy complains to his parents to send more money while away at school.

Russia could have rolled up Kyiv in a week if it unleashed its military’s full might.Ukrainian troops are only fighting today because of the historic amount of Western support. They would have been forced to negotiate weeks ago. Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, told TASS last month that Moscow is willing to resume negotiations, but Kyiv must make the first step.

“For our part, we are ready to continue the dialogue. But I will emphasize once again: the ball for the continuation of peace talks is in Ukraine’s court. Freezing the talks is entirely Ukraine’s initiative,” Medinsky said.

The time is now.

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***

Unless one can grasp the nature and motivation of those who attack one, one cannot come up with a strategy to overcome them. And right now we have a vital need to come up with such a strategy in order to throw a spanner in the works of a political system that has ‘psychopath’ written all over it.

One does not need to be a professional psychologist or psychiatrist to recognise the symptoms of the hardened political psychopath. They are visible every time one checks ‘the news’ on mainstream media. After a short time one recognises that ‘what they say’ – and ‘what they do’ are very often precisely opposite from each other, and that the double-speak involved is intensely characteristic of the reversal of reality practised by satanists.

That’s why, when you turn on your TV to watch ‘the news’ what you are seeing is ‘the psychopathic spin of the day’. The fact that you don’t react by turning-off the set means you are still unable to discern truth from lie. Or, in rare cases, that you are watching in order to study the behaviour patterns of professional liars.

Here is a recent example of how the State employs its psychopathic double speak to ‘get the job done’. 

In a contract employed by the Polish hierarchy to get the roll-out of new electromagnetic utility cables into peoples homes, it states in the preamble of the contract (May 2020) that these cables are needed to ‘improve communications’ in order to combat the spread Covid-19; and that one should therefore use one’s common sense by not resisting the installation of these (overhead) cables and the equipment which goes with them.

As one’s jaw drops open at the sheer audacity and absurdity of this statement, the thought flashes through one’s mind “they are using coded language (double speak) to tell us that these cables are being laid to aid the spread of 5G electronic pulses linked to sicknesses aggravated by the metallic elements hidden in the Covid ‘so called vaccines’.”

Such con-tricks are legion at this time. The fact that they are broadly accepted by those whom they are designed to ‘help’ – is down to the fact that most of society operates on the principle of a passive slave relationship with the political authorities running their countries.

Within the political deception which surrounds WEF’s Great Reset/Green Deal, we find a starkly obvious case of theft. To be precise, theft of the early ecological movement’s long-term holistic agenda for the bio diverse trusteeship of the land.

The WEF’s vision consists of distorting this environmentally friendly vision and turning it into a global political tool for enforcing Klaus Schwab’s fascistic brave new world of synthetic foods, robot-mechanised farming, ‘rewilded’ gated private forests and 5G powered ‘smart cities’ for disenfranchised country dwellers and redundant farmers.

By twisting the true ecological approach to land management into a thoroughly distorted and fake look-alike, the word ‘Green’ has been 100% hijacked by the New World Order/Great Reset cabal. Tried and tested Real Green approaches have been usurped, in favour of macro scale industrial and digital mechanisation programmes for achieving the hallowed goal of ‘zero carbon’. If there ever could be such a thing as zero carbon– none of us would be able to breathe.

How is the hijacking done?

In the book ‘Political Ponerology – a Science of the Nature of Evil – the author, psychologist Andrew M Lobaczewski, speaks of the ‘spellbinding techniques’ of psychopaths and how the thought patterns given-off by them “take hold in human minds, insidiously destroying their way of reasoning and their ability to utilise their healthy common sense.” He further states “This role has proved essential because their activities as fanatical leaders or spellbinders in various ideologies, open the door to psychopathic individuals and the view of the world they want to impose.”

In the case of ‘the green movement’, government technocrats are encouraged to set to work with their well practised ‘spell binding’ techniques in forming a centralised top-down anti-human ‘green’ agenda that bends the true green ideology into its precise opposite, yet in a manner which hypnotises its followers into thinking it must simply be ‘a politically regulated’ extension of their original idealogical cause.

Many early pioneers of genuine green thinking made the fundamental error of regarding this politicization process to be a necessary part of having ‘finally made it’ into the power house of the political status quo and the domain of national/international rule makers. A situation further aggravated by the notion of ego driven NGO leaders that they will become important figureheads on the national/world stage once government enfolds them in its cold embrace.

The embrace of a python that crushes truth and reassembles it as a lie.

This form of trickery is how the fake science behind Global Warming, Zero Carbon, Green Deal and Fourth Industrial Revolution has been spun into a seemingly authoritative voice claiming it has the patent on the ‘only way of saving the planet’.

The so-called global warming alternative energy ‘solutions’ that go under the banner of ‘Green Deal’ e.g. vast wind farms, hectares of solar energy panels and giant industrial agricultural projects currently being imposed by psychotic political rule makers – are a grand distortion of genuine empirical human scale solutions proposed by bona fide eco-practitioners and deep thinking farmers.

These were born out of a sensitivity for localised self sufficiency schemes that free mankind from the corporate behemoths wielding their limitless financial powers to crush anything that smacks of a revival of human scale common sense and creative imagination.

From being the benign tools of liberation, these pragmatic working models have – under the pathological leaders of today – been twisted into the harsh tools of suppression and dominating forms of techno-fascism.

The deep state criminal cabal who direct and institute the ‘grand plan’ are life-hating megalomaniacs whose psychological condition suggests a direct affiliation with satanic indoctrination. The satanic, after all, demands the reversal of all values and sets the tone for the course charted by political empire builders.  It can be no coincidence that the British House of Commons has two Masonic lodges directly within its Westminster premises.

Demons invert/reverse all that they touch. The psychopath uses the same trick. And the ‘political’ variety set to work on inverting all professional spheres of society. Which is how education becomes indoctrination; the medical profession becomes the causative agent of sickness; the legal profession upholds fundamental injustice; science reduces life to a gene and religion becomes indoctrination to an anti-life formula leading to the soulless trans-human replacing the spiritual human.

A widespread political pathocracy does not depend on all politicians becoming schizoid. It just requires that a few leading figureheads possessed of this characteristic, enforce the anti-life psychopathic agenda as part of the ‘party loyalty’ scheme. This ensures sufficient conformism so that others fall in line, ‘spellbound’ by the sub-human vibrational waves that these key figureheads generate.

For ‘we the people’ to break this spell requires us to recognise, hidden in the shadows of ourselves, the existence of a state which is capable of distorting our natural emotions into something cold, indifferent and devoid of love.

This can only approximate the actual condition experienced by the psychopath – but by touching this realm we can start to understand something about a state of existence which plays a key role in this time, yet appears to defy our comprehension.

In other words we can ‘reverse engineer’ the psychology of the demon which gives the psychopath his dark powers of destruction and the ability, via such professions as banking and corporate leadership, to capture and retain control over a very large percentage of the world population.

Their ability to do this is, in large part, governed by an unwillingness to explore the darker side of ourselves and/or of life itself. The political psychopath survives because too few ‘normal’ humans seek to enter his territory and start to shine a torch on where the dark seems most impenetrable.

But once that dark place is penetrated, the sense of being impregnable is deflated. The arrogance is broken. The power to do evil is irrevocably punctured.

Our task is to recognise that – when activated – our God given powers are far more powerful than that distorted field of energy directed to deceive humanity into taking the lie to be the truth.

As those who are destined to take the helm of planet Earth, the task of illuminating and disempowering demons is our particular lot. There is no escaping it. It’s why we came here at this time.

All who still fail to discern the nature of evil and the ‘art of the lie’ must become self-psychologists and discover where this ability to twist the truth into its opposite comes from.. Only then can the sickness be put right and the world led out of darkness and into light.

The demonic forces represent the unenlightened side of ourselves. The refusal of consciousness. A state of death over a state of life. In this state all are demons. The political psychopath counts on you and I remaining that way. Accomplices in suppression of enlightenment.

As soon as we break that spell their power over us is lost – and we are free.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. Julian’s acclaimed book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Ever since the Obama administration orchestrated the 2014 Euromaidan color revolution (US/NATO’s weapon of choice when hijacking entire nations), the mainstream media have been feeding the political West’s populace the narrative of Ukraine being the “freedom and democracy lighthouse in the dictatorial post-Soviet darkness”. However, after the start of Russia’s special military operation more than three months ago, this narrative went into orbit. Still, in order to proclaim a country “the beacon of freedom and democracy”, let alone claim the said country could “teach Americans and the world a thing or two about democracy”, certain standards should be met.

One of the first postulates of freedom and democracy should be the freedom of thought, speech and expression. This includes both mass media and individuals. However, one problem with this is that not even the West respects these basic principles, as most alternative sources of information there have been suppressed. Thus, in practice, Ukraine does follow the political West’s definition of “freedom and democracy”.

Worse yet, Ukraine goes even further in implementing it. And it does so by physically removing any individual with “dissenting” views and opinions. All one needs to do is disagree with any of the Kiev regime’s decisions, policies or laws and they’re immediately removed. As in, quite literally taken, or more precisely, kidnapped by the regime, in particular its SBU enforcers, in a manner echoing the “best” CIA and NSA practices.

In recent months, these practices have escalated out of control. On June 3 the Donetsk People’s Republic Ombudsman Daria Morozova stated that Donetsk People’s Republic services have provided information on mass abductions of people by the special services of Ukraine, primarily the infamous SBU. Ukrainian services carry out illegal mass arrests on ideological grounds. Most disturbingly, this also includes the kidnapping of minors.

“With the start of the special operation, ideologically motivated kidnappings not only resumed, but also acquired a massive character,” Morozova commented on the situation in Ukraine. “I received reports of mass abductions, including of minors. At present, I have received a certain number of applications from relatives of those abducted on the territory of Ukraine,” the official stressed.

Morozova described the illegal detention of citizens as “methods of the US and UK.” The abducted are kept in special prisons and are subjected to “illegal methods of interrogation” or more precisely, torture. The ombudsman cited statistics from the Office of the UN High Commissioner – from April 2014 to April 2022, up to 4,000 people were arbitrarily detained by Ukrainian services in connection with the situation in Donbass, with approximately 60% of arrests made without legal grounds.

In Kharkov, Ukrainian security services kidnapped the daughter of Vladimir Demchenko, an officer of the DPR People’s Militia. He spoke about this at a briefing on June 3 in Donetsk. The Special Operations Forces (SOF) of Ukraine have already contacted the military and tried to force him to cooperate with them.

“I received a message via Telegram: ‘Dad, they took me because of you, tomorrow at 11:00 they will get in touch.’ They told me that they represent the special operations forces and added ‘you will talk to us or it will be different from what you want.’ The conversation we had lasted about 21 minutes, during which they tried to persuade me to cooperate,” Demchenko stated.

Another instance of the Kiev regime’s view on “freedom and democracy” is the fate of Elena Berezhnaya, the founder and director of the Institute for Legal Policy and Social Protection. For nearly three months, she has been in the dungeons of the SBU. Berezhnaya, one of the most prominent human rights activists in Ukraine was arrested by the SBU on March 16 in her Kiev apartment and thrown into the Lukyanovka pre-trial detention center. As of this writing, there has been no contact with her, and nothing is known about her condition. Berezhnaya has been reporting on the state of human rights in Ukraine since 2014. She provided irrefutable evidence of the atrocities committed by numerous Neo-Nazi groups and their connections with the Kiev regime, including crimes against civilians and violations of the rights of Russian-speaking citizens.

Berezhnaya is well known for her report to the German Bundestag, in which serious Kiev regime violations of the European Convention on Human Rights were documented in detail. OSCE also received her reports on justice in Ukraine and the disastrous consequences of reforms and discriminatory laws passed by the Kiev regime. Despite regular and close cooperation with international organizations, they completely ignored the kidnapping and arrest of the Ukrainian human rights activist and did not even try to arrange her release. The SBU accused Berezhnaya of “treason” – a very serious charge used as an excuse for arresting any dissident with supposedly “pro-Russian views.”

Days prior to Berezhnaya’s arrest, on March 10, a well-known Ukrainian poet and publicist Yan Taksyur was detained by the SBU and thrown into a Kiev pre-trial detention center without the right to protection, treatment or any information about his condition. Taksyur also has cancer, making his arrest all the more troubling. The 70-year-old poet is a Soviet and Ukrainian satirist known for ridiculing and criticizing the parasitism and crookedness of Ukrainian elites. The SBU “found signs of treason” in his works, namely in his articles titled “Fascism will not pass or the Banner of Victory in the darkness of Enslavement” and “Classics in Ukraine or return the Russian book to Kiev!”

The Kiev regime’s repressive state apparatus conducts particularly harsh reprisals against the leaders of the Ukrainian left. The founder of the Ukrainian Union of Left Forces, publicist and political scientist Vasily Volga was also detained back in March. During his arrest, Volga was wounded and then tortured during interrogation. He was also denied medical care. The Kononovich brothers from Kiev were also arrested and subjected to severe torture. Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich were the leaders of the Ukrainian Komsomol and their “crime” was the condemnation of the Kiev regime’s attempted ethnic cleansing and armed aggression in Donbass. As of this writing, no information about their fate is available. Neither relatives nor lawyers have been able to contact them.

Orthodox journalist Dmitry Skvortsov, writer-historian Alexander Karevin, TV presenter and political scientist Dmitry Dzhangirov, political scientist Yury Dudkin, leader of the “Faithful Cossacks” Leonid Maslov and hundreds of others have also been subjected to searches, threats and detention in Kiev. The SBU freely conducts government-approved mass terror, while nothing is known about many of those arrested. Arrests are being carried out in all cities controlled by the Kiev regime.

A prominent Odessa-based journalist Yuri Tkachev was also arrested. During a search, SBU supposedly “found” explosives Tkachev apparently left in plain sight in his Odessa apartment. Also in Odessa, SBU kidnapped the daughter of Mikhail Vyacheslavov, a man killed in the 2014 House of Trade Unions fire. Elena was accused of attending rallies, where Odessans paid tribute to the memory of people which Neo-Nazis burned alive in the House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of how the Kiev regime sees “freedom and democracy”. Suppression of free speech, freedom of thought and expression might pale in comparison to the horrendous war crimes the Western-backed Neo-Nazi regime is committing in Donbass, however, the sheer hypocrisy of portraying the Kiev regime as a “beacon of freedom and democracy” makes the political West complicit in all of the crimes committed against not just the people of Donbass, but the people of Ukraine itself as well. The crimes we know of so far (which, in reality, might be orders of magnitude worse) should be more than enough to strip the Kiev regime of any legitimacy. That is, if there’s any legitimacy left.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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***

The US is falsely accusing Ethiopia and Eritrea of hindering food aid and committing genocides in the ongoing war in Tigray. The charges are false and the US has no right to make such a claim on its own. Ann Garrison continues reporting from the region. 

During the Obama Administration, the excuse for US wars of aggression shifted from the War on Terror to the so-called humanitarian wars to stop genocide and mass atrocities, which were then championed by top Obama officials Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The US and NATO destroyed Libya and began the relentless bombing of Syria “to stop genocide.”

In November 2020, Ethiopians and Eritreans began to fear—with good reason—that they’ll be next. That fear continues today, as the US threatens them with an illegal “legal designation of genocide” in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region.

I’m still writing from Ethiopia, specifically from Bahir Dahr, the capital of Amhara Region, today. Water politics are essential in the Horn and the wider region, so I hear about them every day. As a result, I’ve only recently learned that, during NATO’s war on Libya, it deliberately destroyed that country’s water infrastructure, a war crime under the Geneva Convention. The destruction of Libya was itself an international crime, the destruction of its water infrastructure a crime within that crime.

Black Agenda Report readers are no doubt aware of this, but before going on, I should nevertheless note that according to international law, only the UN Security Council (UNSC) has the international legal authority to rule that genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity are happening or have happened. According to the UN Charter, the UNSC can then organize a multilateral military response or refer cases to the International Criminal Court. U.S. policymakers’ claim to have the legal right to “legally designate” the international crimes which they themselves are most guilty of is just more of the arrogance of power in pursuit of global hegemony.

As I write this I remember Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asking a State Department official how close they are to a “legal designation” that Ethiopia and Eritrea are committing genocide in Tigray. I remember a State Department official replying, essentially, that they’re still working on that. In other words, that they’re still hanging it over Ethiopia and Eritrea’s heads.

Congressman Brad Sherman can’t wait

In a Congressional hearing last week, California’s 30th District Congressman Brad Sherman repeated his demand that the State Department issue that “legal designation” that both Ethiopia and Eritrea are committing genocide by blocking food aid convoys to the country’s Tigray Region, so as to justify the use of military force against both. Sherman wants Biden to deploy the U.S. Navy to block Eritrea’s ports, Massawa and Assab , which would be an act of war in violation of international law:

“I’ve suggested ways to pressure the Ethiopian and especially, and particularly, the Eritrean government, which has, of course, the ports that could be used, particularly by interrupting sea traffic going, you know, even hundreds of miles away from Eritrea. And I think a determination of genocide would spur our administration to do more than simply send harsh letters to Addis Ababa and Asmara . . .  Only the Administration can provide the pressure, and only the Administration can use the US Navy to put additional pressure on the two countries involved.”

There is no siege of Tigray

This week New Zealand journalist Alastair Thompson and I both returned from Ethiopia’s Afar Region, where we saw aid convoys traveling on the Djibouti-Ethiopia Highway to Mekelle, the capital of Tigray. In Semara, I spoke to Kenyan convoy drivers returning from Mekelle, who said that they had traveled unhindered from Nairobi to Addis Ababa and then to Mekelle to deliver aid for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

I asked Alastair Thompson to describe aid convoys he saw while traveling north to Abala, a town on Afar Region’s border with Tigray Region.

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Alastair Thompson: I traveled north on Saturday, the 14th of May, to Abala, which is on the border with Tigray, as you point out, and where there has been significant amounts of conflict. And on the way I saw a large number of trucks driving up. We drove past them because they were traveling more slowly than we were. And on the following day, when we returned, we saw more trucks traveling up and we also saw a large convoy staged at Silsa, about maybe 100 kilometers from Semara that was about to depart from Mekelle.

AG: Did you see any sign that the convoys were being hindered?

AT: None whatsoever. After the convoys depart from Silsa, the security is fairly simple. There are a series of checkpoints, not that many of them, at different intervals along the road manned by the Afar. There’s no sign of the Ethiopian army in the area. And there seems to be a very orderly running of the convoys.

And my understanding is that over the past couple of weeks there have been a lot more convoys than there have been in the past.

AG: Are there scanners?

AT: Yes. The scanners are outside Semara at a place called Sardo, which all the trucks have to go through. They’re large scanners that the trucks have to drive through and they’re capable of identifying electronic devices and metal and so forth—contraband. All the trucks have to pass through those before they reach Silsa and the staging point and they are guarded from there, and then they depart for Mekelle.

AG: So Brad Sherman’s claim that the trucks are being stopped from traveling on to Mekelle seems unfounded to you?

AT: That’s completely unfounded in terms of the current situation. To the extent that there have been blockages this year, they were caused entirely by the TPLF’s own invasion and occupation of the northern Afar Region.

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Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann(at)anngarrison.com.

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***

As Western triumphalism is fading, many analysts are seriously considering future scenarios. In his article, Andrew Latham, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington D.C., analyzes the possible outcomes of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Firstly, he rules out the possibility of a “total” Russian victory, that is, Ukraine becoming a “vassal state”, be it by annexation or by falling into the “Russian sphere of influence (like Belarus).” Andrew Latham describes this as an impossible scenario, but even so, here one must notice that being within the sphere of influence of a great power was never the same thing as being a “vassal” to it.

The other impossible scenario Latham describes is the opposite: a “complete” Ukrainian victory, including the “restoration” of its pre-2014 borders – this would mean recapturing the two new independent republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, and Crimea. A victorious Kiev, in this impossible scenario, would then be “free to join NATO and/or associate with the European Union.” Here, it is easy enough to agree: there are plenty of reasons why such is an impossibility, as US colonel Macgregor has pointed out a number of times, for instance.

The third scenario also deemed as impossible by the expert is a “limited Ukrainian victory”. In this case, Kiev would reverse Moscow’s gains since the beginning of war on 24 February 2022. Thus, Crimea and Donbass would remain “in Russian hands”, but all territory currently occupied by Moscow’s troops would be restored to Ukraine’s control. This is impossible too for pretty much the same reasons the first scenario is not possible.

For one thing, the Kremlin would not “withdraw” from such a strategic place as Crimea, especially, as it is fully integrated as an autonomous republic of the Federation since 2014 (after the referendum), and also holds enormous historical, symbolic and cultural importance for Russians.

Here too, we must once again note that having military troops in its soil does not necessarily make a territory part of the state that controls such troops. The US invaded Iraq and also Afghanistan and militarily occupied both countries (until recently in the case of the latter) and yet no one described them as having been “conquered”. As of now, Moscow maintains a “peace mission” in Nagorno-Karabakh, but this does not mean at all that the Kremlin has “conquered” that territory. Plus, Russia formally recognized Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states on February 21, which is indeed quite different from annexing them.

Dispensing with the impossible scenarios, Andrew Latham then concludes that a “partly dismembered” Ukraine is the “only conceivable outcome”: it will not get back neither Crimea nor the Donbass republics. In his view, this means that Kiev will not be “free” to join neither NATO nor the EU, and thus will neither become part of the Western nor part of the Eurasian bloc – and this will certainly not be a Ukrainian victory, but a Russian one, albeit “partial”, according to him.

Militarily, the outcome described by Latham indeed seems to be the “less improbable” one, as evidenced by all the recent Western and Ukrainian talk about “concessions”. One could argue though that such a scenario resembles a transitory and unstable situation, not an “outcome” that could last very long. Moreover, such partial “victory”, if it materializes, would be – as  long as it remains this way – as much a victory as Moscow could desire.

In terms of its Compatriot Policies, stopping Kiev’s aggressions against the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk has always been the Kremlin’s goal. In fact, Russia has been the only power to denounce that there has been a humanitarian disaster going on in Donbass since at least 2014. As is the case with any state in the world, Moscow’s will to protect its people often comes alongside its strategic interests. In any case, the plight of the Donbass people under Ukraine’s chauvinistic policies is real enough.

Finally, in terms of security, the Kremlin’s main point’s alway been about keeping NATO out of its own geostrategic environment. Ironically, a neutral Kiev would be the best solution for the West itself – even an American diplomat of the stature of Henry Kissinger acknowledges so. Instead, the US opted for escalating tensions and pushing NATO’s expansion, which makes the West responsible for the current crisis, as John Mearsheimer puts it. It remains to be seen how far the US-led West is willing to go, even after a Russian victory, considering the Western persistent plans to integrate Ukraine or part of it in its structures by whatever means possible – be it by a new “European community” or by a Polish-Ukrainian confederation.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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***

During a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this past week, President Emmanuel Macron insisted that France would step up its military and humanitarian support for Ukraine.

There is no question that Macron is committed in this respect. Following his re-election during the final round against challenger Marine Le Pen, he was adamant about his desire to work actively during his second term to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, while always maintaining close coordination with his European partners and allies. He also indicated France’s readiness to contribute to an agreement that provides security guarantees for Ukraine.

Of course, a key part of this support is the supply of weapons. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, France has always refused to specify exactly what type of armaments it was sending to Kiev.

The secret was finally revealed by Macron himself during an interview he gave on Thursday 21stApril to news media outlet Ouest France.

When asked if Europe was in the process of supplying heavy weapons, especially tanks, as Germany has done with its Leopard tanks, he replied:

Everyone takes their responsibilities with their political balances, and I do not interfere in the political life of others. We are very coordinated. The day before yesterday I spoke to Chancellor Scholz on this subject. We still deliver substantial equipment, from the MILAN [anti-tank missiles] to the Caesars [guns], including several types of weapons. I think we have to continue on this path. Always with a red line, which is not to enter into co-belligerence.

The interviewer went on asking if tanks were necessary, and this is Macron’s reply:

Some countries have made this choice. It is a debate at the heart of German political life, it is a choice that belongs sovereignly to Germany, and we respect it. We have the same strategy as the Chancellor, which is to say: we must help the Ukrainians as much as possible, but we must be careful never to be co-belligerent.

Furthermore, Agence France-Presse (AFP) asked the Élysée Palace for comments, but they did not specify the number of MILAN missiles and Caesar guns delivered, so as not to “give operational information” which could be used by the Russian Army.

Milan anti-tank missiles.

An Elysian source specified that a few dozen MILAN anti-tank missiles (French-German manufactured) “have already been given” to the Ukrainian armed forces, confirming that these weapons were taken from the stocks of the French armed forces, according to the Elysée Palace (although these numbers seems very conservative).

The delivery of the Caesars guns was already in progress at the time, and is believed to have been shipped out with thousands of potentially lethal shells en route to Ukraine.

Spurred on by a voracious defense industry lobby, western leaders have been pouring unprecedented amounts of money and arms into this conflict zone. Since the start of Russian’s military intervention in Ukraine, some 13 billion euros worth of humanitarian, military, and financial support has been provided by G7 and European Union countries, according to data provided by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and reported by Bloomberg.

According to L’Opinion, French aid covers several different areas. One of the most important contributions also relates to satellite imagery. France has several observation satellites (Helios, Pléiades and CSO) which allow it to provide images several times a day to the Ukrainian general staff. It is likely that this activity will place the French in close collaboration with the allies, particularly with the United States military.

Referring to French aid which is worth a total of 120 million euros (if not more), French news media L’Opinion clarified that France also offered Javelin anti-tank missiles, and Mistral short-range anti-aircraft missiles.

Light missiles:

France delivered at least three types of light missiles:

  1. Old MILAN anti-tank systems
  2. Javelins anti-tank missiles (US made)
  3. Mistral Short-range Anti-Aircraft Missiles

The French government is yet to release the exact volume of these deliveries.

The supply of these weapon systems was also accompanied by the training of Ukrainian military personnel called upon to implement them.

It is not a state secret that Emmanuel Macron likes to pose as the guarantor of the Paris Agreement for the climate and sometimes as the Ambassador of the One Health Approach which was resumed in his 24th May 2021 speech which he gave at the 74th World Health Assembly in the presence of Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

This article will now focus on the actual weapons France and its allies are sending to Ukraine and examine the real danger they represent – not only for the environment, but also to people’s health.

According to the various statements made by Macron’s government, we can gather that Milan missiles, Caesar guns and shells, are the bulk of these deliveries. It is very clear that this material was chosen because it meets the following criteria:

  • End-of-life equipment (old)
  • Depleted uranium bombs/missiles

This second item is by far the most problematic. Before analyzing these weapons it is important to understand the knowledge and perception associated with the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions in military warfare.

Which raises the obvious question: are France and NATO shipping depleted uranium weaponry into Ukraine? As this article will demonstrate, the preponderance of evidence strongly indicates that they are doing this. And the ramifications are huge, not just politically, but also legally, environmentally, as well as regarding health effects to combatants in this war. Most importantly though, we are really talking about the long-term public health for people living in and around the country of Ukraine – through the careless spreading of highly toxic and radioactive material in the region.

What is Depleted Uranium?

Watch this brief video presentation of the risks posed by DU munitions:

According to the European Commission and their Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks (SCHER), depleted uranium is a dense metal produced as a by-product of enrichment of natural uranium for nuclear fuel. It is still radioactive, but at a lower level than the material at the beginning of the process. It is used in armour-piercing ammunition, shells and bombs, in order to provide more penetrating power. Such munitions were used in many wars including in both Gulf Wars in Iraq, and also in NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, specifically in battle theatres like Serbia and Kosovo.

Their repeated use has raised concerns about health threats from exposure to the distributed uranium material and particle dust. Many studies have reported evidence of its prevalence, as well as a lack thereof, depending on whose report you are reading. Suffice to say, reporting on this subject still remains very controversial.

The European commission is well aware of the hazards such weapons represent, here for instance one of the many replies from the European Commission, addressed to Florent Pirot, the Secretary of the European Association Against Depleted Uranium (EAADU):

For this reason, France’s weapons deliveries into the Ukraine war zone will have international implications. The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) appears to be advocating for a ban on the use of uranium in all conventional weapons and weapon systems, and is engaged in monitoring, health care, compensation, and environmental remediation for communities affected by its use. However, this group has a very limited definition of DU weapons and munitions.

Sadly the ICBUW seems to believe that only a limited number of depleted uranium weapons, namely 105 and 120 mm tank shells, and small caliber bullets (15/25/30 mm) represent an actual danger to people and the environment, which naturally triggers the usual criticism towards the US government and others like it when such munitions are used, and therefore completely ignoring aircraft-dropped bombs (GBUs), cruise missiles, and other types of anti-tank missiles.

Why would that be?

The topic of depleted uranium is a sensitive one, even though governments have more or less acknowledged the use of uranium in these weapons. Yet, the fact remains that they are used much more widely, because of uranium being the best penetrator against tanks and bunkers.

During our research, we were amazed to find so many reports and cases where higher concentrations of uranium were found near bomb craters and other sites where missiles and bombs have landed. We are meant to believe missiles or bombs land away from the populated areas, but in the reality of warfare, such assumptions are simply not accurate.

An excellent article published 19 June 2016 by Florent Pirot the EAADU Secretary, provides a trove of information and data on this subject including a link to The Washington Spectator who published a damning report entitled “Irradiated Iraq: The Nuclear Nightmare We Left Behind,” which describes the health effects, including horrendous birth defects, resulting from the US military’s prolific use of weapons made with depleted uranium.

Although Barbara Koeppel, who wrote this article faced the wrath of the usual scientific experts (which reminds me of the scientific experts of the COVID 19 so-called pandemic), it is hard to ignore the alarm sounded in 2000 of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a cancer research scientist and consultant to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (she died in 2012), who stated that, “DU is some thousand times more radioactive than the uranium found in soil and rock.

“Regardless of whether the bombs, bullets, or missiles are made with depleted, un-depleted, or slightly enriched uranium, they are all radioactive”.

Now let’s take a look at the weapons and ammunitions Macron is currently sending to Ukraine.

MILAN anti-tank guided missile

The MILAN is a product of Euromissile, a Franco-German missile development program dating back to the 1960s. The system entered service in 1972 as a second generation anti-tank guided missile, and soon became a standard anti-tank weapon throughout NATO, in use by most of the alliance’s individual armies.

With its rather short range (2000 meters), it is an old anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), and is known for its depleted uranium contents.

To put things into perspective, it is important to be aware that between 1986 and 2003, European armies such as the Italian Army’s combat units, were equipped with MILAN shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, which emitted thorium-232, a notoriously radioactive metal which emits particles that are six times more hazardous to human health than those released by already hazardous depleted uranium.

Below you can see in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Defense Forces are undergoing intensive training in mastering MILAN-2 anti-tank systems.

The MILAN-2 ATGM in service in Ukraine, footage from a CNN video (April 2022).

The MILAN system was designed as per the requirements of the German and French armed forces whilst still considering the general requirements of NATO Command for such weapons.

Thus, the international association Euromissile has developed a system that, due to its high performance, has become the most widely used (after the TOW ATGM) of all anti-tank missiles, currently deployed in different countries.

The MILAN anti-tank system is used by military ground forces in 40 countries, including Germany, France, other NATO countries, and of course now Ukraine.

Watch this brief presentation on the MILAN 2 anti-tank system:

The use of depleted uranium weapons is again causing concern. I am saying this with the people of Serbia and Kosovo in mind, who discovered that the conflict which ended in 1999-2000 had left serious levels of radioactive contamination, just as it did in Kuwait some nine years before.

Why do the United States and NATO allies continue to use a waste product of the nuclear industry in their weapons? Some commentators allege that it is a conspiracy between the military and the nuclear industry to dispose of dangerous waste in hostile countries. While this may be partly true, the real reasons are certainly more complex.

As we speak, depleted uranium munitions are being fired on a regular basis at one of France’s military testing grounds, known as Canjuers. Many French soldiers have reported on the danger associated with the MILAN anti-tank guided missile. The following is the kind of comment you will hear from soldiers using it:

“Depleted uranium, we use it everyday in Canjuers” – they said “Do not come near the target, it is contaminated with depleted uranium, this is dangerous” (soldier explaining what the officer told them when training with Milan missiles in Canjuers).

More of these testimonies can be found here.

The ‘Javelin’ anti-tank missile

The Javelin, although known largely as an anti-tank missile packing a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round that can penetrate the latest armor, is really a multi-role shoulder-launched missile system capable of taking out everything from heavy armor, to troops hiding behind cover, to low and slow flying aircraft. Its reusable command launch unit can also be used independently as a thermal imaging surveillance system which can drastically improve austerely equipped troops’ ability to surveil their surroundings, especially at night. It features wide-angle viewing modes as well as a zoom-in mode of up to 12X.

MistralShort Range Anti-Aircraft Missiles (SATCP)

The MISTRAL is manufactured by Matra (now MBDA). Its first version was put into service in the French army in 1989. It is a very short-range surface-to-air weapon system intended to complete the surface-to-air coverage of the armored and mechanized corps. It provides isolated units with their own air defense capability. Its targets are airplanes flying up to Mach 1.2 between 10m and 3000m and helicopters in motion or hovering. Its range is over 6km.

Watch the following brief presentation on the MISTRAL mobile SAM system:

UK Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW)

We thought it would be unfair to not mention the British government, who out of the kindness of their heart have donated thousands of Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW) anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) to Ukraine.

This missile system weighs 12.5 kg each, and has a range of no more than 1 kilometre. These features indicate that these missiles (made by Sweden’s leading defense contractor Saab Bofors, and manufactured in Ireland) include a substantial amount of depleted uranium. Given its density, even relatively small quantities of DU would add significant mass to a missile, greatly curtailing its range, but with the added benefit of its armor penetrating ability.

These missiles explode above the tank to spray it with DU together with the surroundings.

We now know that there have likely been at least 8 shipments of these missiles sent. “Thousands” of NLAWs have been promised, meaning thousands of kilograms of depleted uranium has already entered Ukraine.

Journalist Fra Hughes from Al Mayadeen explains the potential legal conundrum for countries like Sweden who are trafficking arms under the cover of a NATO-sponsored proxy war:

“One of the communications unveiled quite clearly that the Swedish government does not want the Ukraine government to publicly acknowledge its acceptance of these deadly weapons, which were dispatched on March 25, 2022, one day after the Swedish Parliament confirmed it would send aid to Ukraine.

There are many military weapons manufactured by both private arms companies and governments, which are in contravention of international law and or the Geneva convention.

Examples include depleted uranium which is used in ammunition that remains radioactive for decades. The American army used these munitions in Fallujah (Iraq), leading to severe birth abnormalities among the local population.

Air to ground missiles and bombs containing phosphorous are also banned under international law.”

Again, these weapons are a known environmental and radioactive hazard, and when used in areas where civilians live, one can easily see why some, including weapons experts, regard their prolific use as a crime against humanity.

Watch this brief presentation on the NLAW anti-tank system:

You may have heard of Doug Rokke, the US Army veteran with a doctorate in radiation protection, who fell gravely ill from depleted uranium contamination. His work was nothing short of exemplary, especially for his reports on the Iraq War, exposing areas destroyed by cruise missiles which were found to be radioactive.

Doug made a video (I warn you the video quality is rather poor, but I believe the content is the real take way) for the US Army as part of a program he was commissioned to prepare to educate soldiers on the dangers of uranium (a 40-hour training program that eventually ended up on the shelf. He explains in his video that uranium was not only used in small calibre and tank shells, but also as a “ballast” in missiles. The video was meant to become an official training video on the “dangers of depleted uranium.”

Why is the use of DU controversial?

The use of DU ammunition has been considered controversial because of its potentially harmful effects on the environment and human health. It was alleged that the enriched uranium exposure resulted in an increase in birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq. The dust particles or fragments resulting from the use of DU ammunition could also contaminate the environment through air, soil, and the water.

However, there is still a dearth of conclusive research or evidence which directly links the adverse effects on humans and environment to the use of DU ammunition, most likely because of the incredible implications it could have for governments involved in their manufacture and use. Hence, much more research and scientific studies need to be conducted and brought forward for the benefit of millions around the world.

The United States has already confirmed that DU ammunitions were used in Syria. The use of such weapons has long been criticized for posing health risks to both combatants and civilians, not to mention the environment, but to date, the US has shown very little interest in taking responsibility for any of the fall-out from DU use in the field.

We must also ask: what are the potential legal issues arising out of the use of DU in various international and non-international military operations and armed conflicts?

Here is an article about it, asking the right questions.

What else is on its way to Ukraine?

France’s Defence Minister Florence Parly confirmed on Twitter that France would also send “several Caesar artillery cannons and thousands of shells”.

Built by partly state-owned arms maker Nexter, the Caesar is a 155mm howitzer mounted on a six-wheeled truck chassis, capable of firing shells at ranges of more than 40km (25 miles).

Ukrainian officials including President Zelenskyy have repeatedly implored European and NATO powers to provide heavier weapons, especially artillery.

The Caesar artillery system is a self-propelled gun that is manufactured by Nexter Systems in Versailles. The weapon is the product of a collaboration with Lohr Industrie of Hangenbieten, in France, and was first ordered by the French Army in 2003. By December 2004, at least 72 more Caesars were ordered for the French Army, and used to replace the old TRF1 Howitzer artillery systems.

The weapons system officially entered into regular production in 2006.

You can find out more about the Caesar Gun and the destructive nature of the Ogre shell bomblets at: www.army-technology.com.

How about Germany’s generosity toward Ukraine?

Last week, Germany reversed a historic policy of never sending weapons to conflict zones, saying the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an epochal moment that imperiled the entire post-World War II order and threatened security across Europe, according to their statement reported by Politico.

Eventually, Berlin finally bowed to that pressure. The decision was an abrupt change in course, coming after Berlin clung to its initial position for weeks despite huge Russian advances, and relentless pressure from EU and NATO allies.

From its own stockpile, the German government will send 1,000 anti-tank weapons, and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine.

The FIM-92 Stinger is a man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS) that operates as an infrared homing surface-to-air missile (SAM). It can be adapted to fire from a wide variety of ground vehicles and helicopters.

The German government has decided to allow on Tuesday 26th April, the export of anti-aircraft armored “Cheetah” fighting vehicles, better known as the “Flakpanzer Gepard.”

This self-propelled anti-aircraft gun has been decommissioned by the German armed forces and will now be refurbished and sent to Ukraine,” said Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht.

The German defence minister also said that Berlin was working with the US to train Ukrainian soldiers on German soil. It is yet to be seen if Germany’s 1970s era Gepard tanks will actually make a difference in the context of Ukraine war theater.

German Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to enter Ukraine (Source CRUX Youtube):

In the final report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Kosovo war), evidence of use of depleted uranium (DU) projectiles by NATO aircraft during the bombing campaign is acknowledged. The report confirms that no specific treaty ban on the use of DU projectiles actually exists. There is a developing scientific debate and concern expressed regarding the impact of the use of such weapons, and it is possible that, in the future, there will be a consensus view in international legal circles that the use of such projectiles violates general principles of both domestic and international law applicable to use of weapons in armed conflict.

Finally, it is also acknowledged that analysis undertaken with regard to environmental damage would apply, mutatis mutandis, to the use of depleted uranium projectiles by NATO. Furthermore, in the report we can read the committee shot down a potential OTP investigation before it even started.

One would hope that we could learn our lessons of history and past wars, and heed the ominous warning issued in this article, “The Depleted Uranium Weapons: Lessons from the 1991 Gulf War”.

Since their first use during the Gulf War by the US and UK, depleted uranium weapons have since been deployed as well in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, and again in the war in Iraq by the US and UK from 2003 onwards. There is also a suspicion that the US have used DU in Afghanistan from 2001, although this has been routinely denied by the government.

Its dangers cannot be understated: it produces an oxide dust while burning, and this dust simply cannot be inhaled and retained by the lungs, as  it can lead to uranium deposits left in the lymph nodes, bones, brain and testes. A sharp increase in various cancers, breast cancers, and lymphoma, as well as birth defects has been observed in the countries where DU has been used. Knowing this, we must then consider the reckless actions of governments involved, and of organisations like NATO, all of whom seem content to turn a blind eye to this issue.

The effects on the troops themselves is also endemic. There have been numerous incidents of deleterious health effects from exposure to depleted uranium on military personnel as well as civilians, including devastating respiratory disease, gastrointestinal problems, neurological disorders, kidney stones, skin and vision problems, and various forms of cancer and birth defects. A number of leukemia deaths within a year among 60,000 Italian soldiers serving in Kosovo have been linked to depleted uranium.

For those interested in reading more about the health effects associated with depleted uranium weapons, I invite you to read this study from M. Ragheb which provides a more scientific approach and an open discussion on the topics of DU.

Conclusion

While we were initially focusing on France’s DU weaponry being shipped into Ukraine, it’s clear that other countries, including the US, UK, Sweden, and possibly Germany – are also trafficking vast amounts of deadly depleted uranium products into that country. By the time this latest war is over, it is very likely that the amount of DU material released in Ukraine may surpass levels seen in the Yugoslavian War, and the Iraq wars.

How long will international human rights, anti-war, and nonproliferation organizations stay silent on this crucial issue?

The lack of any treaty regulating the use of DU, and the curious absence of applicable rules under existing international humanitarian law (IHL) treaties have created a legal lacuna concerning the use of DU in military training, and especially international armed conflicts (IAC) or non-international armed conflicts (NIAC). As most armed conflicts in the contemporary world are often non-international in nature, but with certain cross-border elements, it raises the critical question of whether a common international framework to regulate DU in IAC and NIAC is required.

Finally, much more research is needed to better understand the adverse effects resulting from the use of DU in order to create a general consensus to seriously regulate or prohibit its use.

Special thanks to Florent Pirot for his amazing work and relentless efforts for exposing Governments and NATO armed forces’ use of depleted uranium (DU) and much more. Please check his blog here and perhaps take the time to read his report on “Uranium and other alpha emitting nanoparticulates: the forgotten pollutant.”

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Controversy has dogged this June’s United States government organized Summit of the Americas. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela had already abandoned the OAS, seriously damaging the credibility of the Organization of American States as a trustworthy hemispheric forum for the countries North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. However many countries decide in the end not to attend the event, the fact that Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico and the Caricom countries have called their own participation into question has no doubt shaken even the sinister, implacable ideologues running US foreign policy. That policy remains firmly rooted in the Monroe Doctrine, endowing the US practically feudal rights over all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

If anyone is curious about what the US, Canada and their European Union allies want for the region, one has only to look at Haiti. There, the Western model of democracy and freedom, of free market neoliberalism, of United Nation’s and OAS run elections, of wholesale NGO managerial interventions, have had a free rein for almost twenty years. The horrific results are self-evident:  economic impoverishment, political instability, extreme inequality, appalling public health outcomes, chronic citizen insecurity and similar outcomes in terms of practically any other social and economic indicator. If they were to get the chance, those levels of immiseration and exploitation is what the US and its allies have in mind for Latin America and the Caribbean.

However the determined and resilient impulse for emancipation in the region continues as strong as ever. The leaders of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) countries held a summit meeting in Havana at the end of May this year. Of the four biggest ALBA-TCP countries, Bolivia has recovered from the 2019 US backed coup Nicaragua and Venezuela have both overcome recent US organized coup attempts. Cuba has survived 60 years of US trade and financial blockade while Venezuela and, so far to a lesser degree, Nicaragua are both subject to damaging illegal coercive economic measures. Even so, despite all that relentless US and allied aggression, this was the 21st such summit of the ALBA-TCP countries.

The summit issued a Declaration reaffirming the ALBA-TCP principles of “solidarity, social justice, cooperation and economic complementarity; with genuine regional integration led by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)”. The declaration also reaffirmed support for multilateralism and its opposition to efforts at imperialist domination, denouncing the US government’s discriminatory behavior over the June Summit of the Americas and too its economic aggression against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Important Caribbean island nations supported the declaration, including Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

The survival, endurance and resistance of the ALBA-TCP countries combines now with other factors that belie the feudal seigneurial assumption of the US ruling class that time is on their side and that if they apply sufficient coercion over sufficient time they will prevail. That assumption is no longer valid, if it ever was. Just as they have failed to subdue the liberation and emancipation impulse in Latin America and the Caribbean so too they have failed elsewhere. The debacle in Afghanistan, the failure to overthrow the government of Syria, let alone Iran, the practical expulsion from West Africa of US allied French forces, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and China’s no nonsense rejection of US meddling in Taiwan, all mean one thing: time is fast running out for the US ruling elite and their allied network of vassal states across North America, Europe and the Pacific.

Irrational US and European trade and financial sanctions against Russia and Belarus have deepened the developing global energy and food crisis already in train resulting from measures introduced to address Covid-19 over two years starting in early 2020. But instead of seeking to de-escalate this developing crisis, slow down their relative decline and accommodate to new global realities, the US and its allies have increased ultimately ineffective sanctions against Russia and are wantonly menacing China. The majority world watches as the US teeters on feet of clay toward a truly comprehensive and deeply ignominious strategic political, economic and ultimately military defeat. In that global context, the ALBA-TCP summit is yet another example of the global division the US and its allies have provoked which is leaving them steadily more isolated.

Voting patterns in the UN General Assembly this year have reflected this reality while also suggesting a multifaceted and radically nuanced range of interest-based policy decisions rather than any kind of clear-cut set of allegiances like those of the Cold War. That said, and in the context of the Americas, it may be helpful to identify what seem to be two clear ideological poles towards which different countries and their governments in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean tend currently to gravitate one way or another. The US and its allies group around an imperialist pole, while the ALBA-TCP countries embrace anti-imperialism. It may be helpful to summarize that opposition as follows.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the US is unable to suppress resistance to their imperialist policies. By contrast, the Bolivarian Alliance countries in particular have successfully challenged US regional policies and their local elite enforcers. Nicaragua’s case bears out ALBA’s overall regional example. Since taking office in January 2007,  Nicaragua’s Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have decisively prioritized social and economic policies centred on the needs and aspirations of the human person.

Regional autonomy, infrastructure investment, active promotion of cultural identity and diversity have all radically empowered Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples. Nicaragua’s foreign policy long ago stopped favoring the interests of North America and Europe. By re-opening its relations with the People’s Republic of China last year, developing its relationship with Iran and reaffirming its historic relations with Russia, Nicaragua is simply deepening its commitment to a multipolar world based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations.

Within Central America and the wider region Nicaragua has worked constantly since 2007 towards integration favoring the needs and aspirations of the region’s peoples based on the ALBA-TCP principles of solidarity and complementarity. The main factors blocking the development of the Central American Integration System are the recalcitrance of Costa Rica, US intervention in Honduras and Guatemala and Nayib Bukele’s reactionary position representing El Salvador. The neocolonial collaboration of local elites in Central America with their foreign patrons contrasts increasingly starkly with Nicaragua’s commitment to creating sovereign national wealth via productive investment. Especially since the failed coup attempt in 2018, Nicaragua has been the country in the region where grass roots social and economic democratization has most clearly prevailed against he local foreign-aligned oligarchy.

In all these dimensions and senses, Nicaragua accompanies Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela. Under the redoubtable leadership of President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela has miraculously overcome more than a decade of relentless US aggression so as to remake its economy and society. Bolivia’s President Luis Arce and his team have steadily made good the huge damage and deep social and economic wounds inflicted on the country and its people by the US backed coup of 2019. Against all odds, revolutionary Cuba survives and looks forward to a better future, despite the crushing burden and difficulties of 60 years of continuing genocidal blockade by the US authorities. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, in the Americas the ALBA-TCP countries have demonstrated that the United States and its allies have acted above all to isolate themselves, while the rest of the world goes on advancing without them towards a better future of peace and prosperity.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from TCS

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An investigation of official statistics has found that the number of athletes who have died since the beginning of 2021 has risen exponentially compared to the yearly number of deaths of athletes officially recorded between 1966 and 2004.

So much so that the monthly average number of deaths between January 2021 and April 2022 is 1,700% higher than the monthly average between 1966 and 2004, and the current trend for 2022 so far shows this could increase to 4,120% if the increased number of deaths continues, with the number of deaths in March 2022 alone 3 times higher than the previous annual average.

According to a scientific study conducted by the ‘Division of Pediatric Cardiology, University Hospital of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland which was published in 2006, between the years 1966 and 2004 there were 1,101 sudden deaths among athletes under the age of 35.

Source

Now, thanks to the GoodSciencing.com team, we have a comprehensive list of athletes who have collapsed and/or died since January 2021, a month after the first Covid-19 injection was administered to the general public.

Because it is such a long list, we are not including it in this article so that full list can be accessed in full here.

The following chart shows the number of recorded athlete collapses and deaths between January 2021 and April 2022, courtesy of the linked list above –

As you can see there has certainly been a rise from January 2021 onwards, the question is whether this was ordinary and to be expected?

In all, between Jan 21 and April 22 a total number of 673 athletes are known to have died. This number could, however, be much higher. So that’s 428 less than the number to have died between 1966 and 2004. The difference here though is that the 1,101 deaths occurred over 39 years, whereas 673 recent deaths have occurred over 16 months.

The following chart shows the number of recorded athlete deaths in different time periods –

The yearly average number of deaths between 1966 and 2004 equates to 28. January 2022 saw 3 times as many athlete deaths than this previous annual average, as did March 2022. So this is obviously highly indicative of a problem.

The 2021 total equates to 394 deaths, 14x higher than the 1966 to 2004 annual average. The Jan to April 2022 total, a period of 4 months, equates to 279 deaths, 9.96x higher than the annual average between 1966 and 2004.

However, if we divide the 66 to 04 annual average by 3 to make it equivalent to the 4 months worth of deaths so far in 2022, we get 9.3 deaths. So in effect, 2022 so far has seen deaths 10x higher than the expected rate.

The following chart shows the monthly average number of recorded athlete deaths –

So between 1966 and 2004. the monthly average number of deaths equates to 2.35. But between January 2021 and April 2022, the monthly average equates to 42. This is an increase of 1,696%.

So why have we seen such a dramatic increase?

The answer most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was alleged to protect against Covid-19 disease but instead caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.

study of 566 patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines shows that signs of cardiovascular damage soared following the 2nd shot. The risk of heart attacks or other severe coronary problems more than doubled months after the vaccines were administered, based on changes in markers of inflammation and cell damage.

Source

Patients had a 1 in 4 risk for severe problems after the vaccines, compared to 1 in 9 before. Their 5-year heart attack risk went from 11% to 25% thanks to the vaccines (that is a 227% increase).

Dr. Steven Gundry, a Nebraska physician and retired cardiac surgeon, presented the findings at the Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association’s annual conference in Boston On November 12-14. An abstract of his paper was published on November 8 in Circulation, the AHA’s scientific journal.

See this.

But we really don’t need to look any further than the number of cases of myocarditis caused by Covid-19 vaccination. Myocarditis is a condition that causes inflammation of the heart muscle and reduces the heart’s ability to pump blood, and can cause rapid or abnormal heart rhythms.

Eventually, myocarditis weakens the heart so that the rest of the body doesn’t get enough blood. Clots can then form in the heart, leading to a stroke or heart attack. Other complications of the condition include sudden cardiac death. There is no mild version of myocarditis, it is extremely serious due to the fact that the heart muscle is incapable of regenerating. Therefore, one the damage is done, there is no rewinding the clock.

The following chart shows reports of myocarditis to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) by year –

Heart damage is ubiquitous throughout the vaccinated population, and the damage is being diagnosed in multiple ways. Acute cardiac failure rates are now 475 times the normal baseline rate in VAERS. Tachycardia rates are 7,973 times the baseline rate. Acute myocardial infarction is 412 times the baseline rate. The rates of internal haemorrhage, peripheral artery thrombosis, coronary artery occlusion are all over 300 times the baseline rate.

Fully vaccinated people are suffering like never before.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Covid-19 vaccination is the reason the monthly average number of athlete deaths is now 1,700% higher than the expected rate.

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I wrote this essay some weeks ago, but I kept waiting to publish it til tragic mass shootings were no longer in the news. But that day looks as if it will never come, so I am publishing it anyway, with grief and mourning for those lost to gun violence, as we must nonetheless have this difficult conversation.

The last thing keeping us free in America, as the lights go off all over Europe- and Australia, and Canada – is, yes, we must face this fact, the Second Amendment.

I can’t believe I am writing those words. But here we are and I stand by them.

I am a child of the peace movement. A daughter of the Left, of a dashingly-bearded proto-Beatnik poet, my late dad, and of a Summer of Love activist/cultural anthropologist, my lovely mom. We are a lineage of anti-war, longhaired folks who believe in talking things out.

By the time I was growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s, weapons were supposed to have become passe. When I played at friends’ houses in our neighborhood in San Francisco, there were posters on the walls: “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” Protesters had iconically placed daisies in the rifle barrels of unhip-looking National Guardsmen.

We were obviously supposed to side with the daisies.

Weapons were archaic, benighted — tacky. A general peace was surely to prevail, in the dawning Age of Aquarius.

My young adulthood too unfolded in a context that reviled all guns all the time. The media was seared with images of gun mayhem. Drive-by shootings devastated inner cities. Gun violence was glorified in hip-hop videos, which in turn was rightly denounced by leaders of victimized communities.

As I grew older, the catastrophes related to lawless gun violence in this country did not abate: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook — the horrors were endless. After every burst of violence, the same questions were asked: how can we allow anyone access to any weapons as these cause such devastation?

Because there were mass shootings and criminal gun violence in America, and because Americans, unlike citizens of other nations, owned and had access to firearms, guns themselves were identified, uncritically, in my progressive circles – (or perhaps I should say, in my former progressive circles) as being the scourge. My liberal community generally reacted to gun violence with a simple, literal arithmetic. Surely the sensible reaction to these catastrophic scenes was simply to remove the guns. End of problem.

The catastrophic scenes of gun violence were connected, in my former circles, directly to all gun owners, but without much equivocation or nuance. And since none of us actually knew people who owned firearms, or had ever asked them why they did so, it was easy to believe in broad generalizations and crude, even racist stereotypes: all gun owners or NRA members, for instance, we were sure, were unexploded emotional landmines – any one of them could become a mass murderer in a heartbeat. All gun owners or NRA members were surely, we believed, one cheap beer or one fentanyl hit away from spraying a church or workplace or parade with bullets.

It was hard for us to conceive that anyone might own guns and actually be law-abiding, responsible and peaceful.

My former progressive circles even saw hunting not as a sign of conservatorship of the land nor a symbol of sustainable food sourcing, and a relatively humane one compared with the harvesting of animals in factory farms, but rather they saw hunting as a symbol of the bloodlust of backwoods yokels straight out of Deliverance.

We assumed all gun owners were driven by fear or by rage.

It certainly did not occur to us that anyone might enjoy marksmanship, or like being a collector, and that thus there might be good reasons to own more than one firearm.

We always interpreted the ownership of multiple weapons as a sign of mental instability. Obviously! Who would need more than one gun, we asked one another, even if one conceded that anyone needed a gun at all?

Living in safe (wealthy) neighborhoods, assuming that a stable democracy would last forever, and relying with our costly educations on talking above all, we could not fathom the “need” for guns or for gun rights.

We used to roll our eyes at the claims made by supporters of the Second Amendment. In my former circles, “2A” was often interpreted, even by Constitutional scholars, and certainly by the news outlets which we read, as applying only to government-run militias such as the US Army or the National Guard. I was told more times than I could count that the Second Amendment was never meant to apply to individuals’ ownership of guns; and I believed that.

Grammar too was used to make the case against individual gun ownership. Often, commentators in our circles described the phrasing of the Second Amendment as being so twisted and archaic that no one today could never truly confirm the Founders’ intentions regarding gun ownership by individuals.

Indeed, I heard these truisms so often, that when I actually sat down and read the Second Amendment carefully — as I was writing my 2008 book about the decline of democracies, The End of America — I was startled: because the Second Amendment wasn’t unclear at all.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” [See this]

Critics on the Left of individual gun rights often described this sentence as being opaque because it has two clauses, and two commas prior to the final clause; so they read the first two sections as relating unclearly to the last assertion.

But if you are familiar with late 18th century rhetoric and sentence construction, the meaning of this sentence is transparent.

The construction of this sentence is typical of late 18th into early 19th century English grammar, in which there can be quite a few dependent clauses, gerunds and commas that come before the verb, and the object of, the sentence.

Thus, the correct way to read the Second Amendment, if you understand 18th century English grammar, is:

“A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Or, translated into modern English construction: “Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free State, therefore the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Here is another example of many dependent clauses, commas and gerunds prior to the verb and object of the sentence: from the second paragraph of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776):

“As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good People of this Country are grievously oppressed by the Combination, they have an undoubted privilege to enquire into the Pretensions of both, and equally to reject the Usurpation of either.” [See this].

This would translate into modern English: “The good people of this Country are grievously oppressed by the combination of a long and violent abuse of power and of the King of England’s support of Parliament in what he calls his rights and theirs. Thus, the [good people of this country] have an undoubted privilege to enquire into [ask about] the Pretension [claims] of both [King and Parliament], and by the same token to reject the Usurpation [of rights] of either.” The logic of the sentence, with its multiple clauses, gerunds and commas before the final verb and object of the sentence, is perfectly clear to anyone who is familiar with 18th century rhetoric.

Here is the famous first sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with the similar construction — common still in 1813, though uncommon today — of two commas and two clauses prior to the verb and object of the sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

So: there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the Second Amendment to readers of Paine and Austen. The Second Amendment says with zero ambiguity, in the English grammar of 1787, that Americans have an absolute right (“shall not be infringed”) to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms because they as individuals may be summoned to become a ‘well-regulated militia’. In the grammar of the 18th century, it’s the militia that is ‘well-regulated’ – orderly, in a clear chain of command, not a chaotic mob — and not the guns.

Why do I raise this all of this?

In part because — I have evolved my view about firearms, and I understand that doing so is in fact in alignment with the Constitution. And the thing about really supporting the Constitution is that you do not get to pick and choose. I can’t choose my favorite Amendment, the easy one, the First Amendment, and then shy away from the glass-clear directive of the Second Amendment, simply as a result of my own cultural discomfort. You have to stand up for it all, if you are to call yourself a supporter of the Constitution.

In part I am addressing this difficult, tender topic because I now know people who “keep and bear arms.” And they do not match the stereotypes I had long taken for granted.

Indeed I met my husband, as many know, because I was receiving death threats and I needed protection. He was highly trained in the use of firearms, via eleven years in active duty service with the U.S Army — in military intelligence, seven of which he spent assigned to two Special Forces Groups — and another ten years working in various Defense and Intelligence roles as a contractor. The fact is, I was relieved to have someone who could physically protect me during a time that felt dangerous to me. I’d be a hypocrite if I pretended that that was not the case.

Reader, I married him.

Indeed I have recently become a firearm owner myself.

Nonetheless my old resistances died hard.

For years, I remained jumpy knowing he had weapons in our home. People from my cultural background are taught to think of firearms as being innately incredibly dangerous; as being always loaded, always half an inch away from causing a fatal accident indoors. I had no idea, until Brian showed me, of how safely one can store a weapon responsibly; or of the many layers of prevention, from storing ammunition separately, to the safety on the firearm itself, that should keep accidents from happening in conscientious homes. I also did not know, until I met responsible gun owners, that most of them do not in fact want mentally ill or unstable people to have access to arsenals at will; most support reasonable restrictions such as safety classes and background checks.

Nonetheless, for years, I had intense anxiety when Brian would keep his Glock in the glove compartment of his vehicle, or when he had his weapon on his person. When we arrived at our country home late at night after being away, if something seemed “off” – a light on, or a screen door open, for example — he would check the perimeter of the property to make sure all was safe, armed with a flashlight, and with his gun ready to be drawn. I would lock myself in the car and look away, heart racing. But I was…glad that it would be safe.

And then…there was the day a relative took us shooting, and I was carefully taught to fire a pistol against a deserted hillside in the Pacific Northwest. It terrified me, and I vowed never to do it again.

And then…there was the day, a bit later, that the same relative took me back to the hillside, and carefully taught me to fire a Galil ACE assault rifle. I leaned into it as instructed, and I shot the target, and hit it; and I felt that the weapon was not a chaotic animal that could turn on me or another, creating havoc, but rather that it was an instrument of power that I could control, and use with direction and will.

And then…there was the night Brian had to be away from home, and he showed me how to shoot his 12 gauge Mossberg shotgun that he keep in a safe. I was scared – but then I was not scared. I prepared to go to sleep with it within arm’s reach, in a safe place in the bedroom.

I thought of the many nights when I had been a single mother in that house, when any sound outside, especially sounds of footsteps — animal footsteps often sounded human – would turn me rigid from fear in my bed, wondering what to do. Back then I’d have been nearly helpless if an intruder, armed or unarmed, had, God forbid, tried to come in and harm us.

But now, after I’d gotten used to the shotgun being in my bedroom, I fell asleep; and then I slept the sweetest sleep I’d ever slept out of all of the nights I’d spent alone, or with small children to protect, in that house.

When I awoke, I thought: could it have been this easy the whole time? And then I thought: I was irresponsible, as a single mother, not to have been trained and not to have been armed.

And then…there was the day this week when I went to a gun shop with Brian, because we were about possibly to lose our national sovereignty; and he wanted to make sure I can protect myself, God forbid, if needed. In the gun shop, a smart, pleasant 27 year old woman named Nadine showed me what she recommended for me — a handgun that would fit nicely in a woman’s hand, and that would not have too much of a kick. She showed to me the size of the bullets that would stop an intruder. And she showed me a holster, designed by a woman, with soft edges, that fit around one’s hips and tucked into the waistband of one’s jeans. If your blouse is a bit loose, no one knows you are carrying a weapon.

She demonstrated, hitching the holster around her own hips and tucking the handgun under the waistband of her jeans. Her light cotton summer blouse indeed concealed it.

She looked like any slight young woman who was ready to go out to a concert, or a club. But she was secretly armed, and no one could harm her.

I thought of all the young women I knew who were harmed — badly — at concerts, at clubs, in alleyways. I thought about what would happen to rapists and abusers if young women — if women in general — were armed, or were even if many were reputed to be armed. And I thought of my decades of struggling with the issue of female victimization: the existential vulnerability of women who are always in danger from anyone bigger and stronger who wished to injure or exploit them.

And I thought: could it always have been this easy?

Could women resist and deter victimization — by simply owning, and knowing how to use, firearms?

Obviously.

How had this issue escaped me so long, as a rape survivor myself, and as a feminist? The rape survivor in me longed, on an animal level, for a weapon. Longed, on an animal level, to deter any future attacker. The rape survivor in me wanted a weapon the way an injured creature wants teeth and claws.

I did not buy the handgun, as I need a class and a permit and four references. That is as it should be. But I did buy a .22 Rossi Rimfire Rifle.

Brian assembled it. When I came downstairs in the morning, he had attached a “bipod” and had positioned it above my computer on my writing desk (with a safety lock and no ammunition nearby, of course). My assortment of dried flowers in a vase, and the stacks of books from my research, surrounded it.

I started laughing at the contrast: the elegant diagonal line of the sleek black weapon, stabilized and ready to be placed into defensive use (of course with the safety on) — standing guard over my computer.

It was nonetheless a powerful symbol — as powerful as had been the image of the holster tucked low around the hips of the now-not-vulnerable young woman.

I thought not only of rape survivors. I thought too when I saw the rifle on my desk, of writers, of journalists, of critics of the State, of dissidents. I thought of reporters hauled off to prison around the world by the minions of tyrants. I though of our own recently created Ministry of Truth, and of the armed men who might make note of what was emerging from the computers of American writers.

What would happen to tyrants….what would happen to threats of violence and arrests for free speech — if writers too were defensively trained and armed? What if words themselves had a defense against violent tyranny, one that was always mounted?

The writers of our nation’s birth — they were armed. The writers who forged our country’s founding documents were armed because they were writers, and because they knew perfectly well that in Britain, King George III simply hanged defenseless writers for sedition.

*

I am also re-examining my reflexes about the Second Amendment because I believe that we are at a moment that our Founders, in their nearly-Prophetic wisdom, knew might come to pass. We are at the kind of moment for which the Second Amendment may have been written in just the clear, unequivocal way that it was.

You know that I see tyranny descending all around the formerly free nations of the world. I say these days that the coup in America has already taken place — a stealthy, sneaky coup, mounted without a shot being fired.

President Biden extended Emergency Powers in February 2022 due to COVID. [See this]. A few days ago, he extended emergency powers again — I didn’t see this massive news covered anywhere — but this time, bizarrely, with COVID in retreat, he extended emergency powers due to the challenges posed by the stabilization of Iraq. [See this]

At which we must ask: who writes his material? But under emergency law we remain.

States around the country, such as New York State, where I write, are still under continually-renewed emergency laws. New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul extends emergency law month after month [See this].

But there is no medical emergency here in NYS.

These orders strip us of our usual protections provided by legislative actions and they leave us vulnerable to future depredations: the return of “lockdowns”, of forcible quarantines such as in Shanghai, of confiscations of our property, of mandated masks and injections, and of indeed far worse. That is the nature of emergency laws in history. They are never given up willingly. They always lead to the imprisonment or terrorization of the now-subject people.

The democratic protections of the formerly free nations of the world — Canada, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand — have been shut down with the ease of someone switching off a light, and with almost no resistance from citizens. Yes, there have been protests, and there have been petitions, and innumerable complaints online; and a few brave legislators have spoken up, if only to echoing chambers.

But the fact remains that when the unidentifiable police or mercenary forces, as in Canada, are violent, and the protesters have nothing but the moral high ground with which to deter their violence, then even the bravest of resistances is fleeting.

In Australia, citizens are now arrested when they seek to escape forcible quarantine. This happened so easily. Australians yielded 650,000 privately owned guns in 1996-7 [See this]. Australians can now offer little deterrence to this kidnapping by the state.

The unarmed people of Shanghai have nothing which which to deter their mass incarceration. Neither can the unarmed citizens of China as a whole deter the transportation of ethnic minorities into detention camps, or organ harvesting or forced abortions.

You can hate guns. I have hated guns most of my life. I hate violence. I hate gun violence. I hate the slaughter of innocents. I am a peaceful person.

But it is becoming obvious even to us pacifists, vegans, and tree huggers, that formerly free people who are unarmed are defenseless against the criminal tyrannies exerting massive violence and control upon them.

And it is becoming obvious that similar tyrannical moves against the people of the United States have been thwarted in advance or deterred – and only state by state — pretty much only because the people of the United States have the right to own and carry weapons, and because many do so.

This question of who has access to firearms has become all the more serious as the war against the US and the free world is ramping up. The mostly-Bill Gates- and CCP-funded WHO planned at the end of May to try to drain sovereignty from sovereign nations, in the name of “Global Health” and the prospect of “future Pandemics”; in the interest of “Global Health Security”.

This power grab was delayed. It is not off the table.

Who then will be the armed men at your door? They can easily be global private mercenaries, sent by Tedros Ghebreyesus; mercenaries sent to lock you in your home, or take you to a quarantine camp against your will, under the guise of a “public health emergency.”

What will stop this, if not states’ refusal to comply, and if not the weapons of citizens?

Bill Gates has been making the case for just this structure of transnational power for a long time.

A mock field hospital for Ebola was set up as at the 2015 TED conference in Vancouver by Bill Gates — a non-physician — who explained, seven years ago, the need for global “Germ Games” to address the next pandemic:

“Playing the part of an Ebola-fighting doctor involved wriggling into oversized rubber boots and yellow bodysuits. Rubber gloves were layered over hands, sealing tightly at sleeve cuffs.

Heads and faces were covered with hoods, goggles and breathing masks.

Under it all went a new cooling vest developed by the Gates Foundation. The vest was lined with ice packs to offset stifling heat inside suits.

Luanne Freer, a doctor who worked with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone with nonprofit Partners in Health, recalled sweating so much into her face mask that “it was like waterboarding.”‘ [See this]

Bill Gates is still trying to have his fetish-y, psychotic adolescent fantasies come true, worldwide; but this time not at a TED conference in make-believe Ebola camps, but for real, with real quarantine camps and with his own private One Health army. He won’t give up, nor will the WEF and the WHO. We don’t know who the unnamed, dark-clad — police? Mercenaries? — were, who violently beat the Canadian truckers, and we don’t know who the unnamed dark-clad — police? Mercenaries? — were, who violently beat the protesters against ‘lockdowns’ in France. There are mercenary armies available to private individuals or nonprofit entities around the world, with a phone call. The Second Amendment, along with our sovereignty, alone protects us from them.

This is hard to accept. But risks of criminal gun violence, while always tragic, are risks that sadly can’t be done away with altogether, if we are to secure a more fundamental safety for more people and more lives; the right as a nation of 330 million people, to deter massive planned violence, criminal detentions, “lockdowns”, theft of assets, and violent crimes at the state, and now at meta-state, levels, against our lives and freedoms and yes, against our children.

Without the brilliantly-conceived and clearly-worded Second Amendment, without the deterrent to state and transnational violence of responsible, lawful, careful and defensive firearms ownership in the United States of America, it is clear that nothing at all will save our citizens from the current fates of the people of China, Australia and Canada; including the children; who are facing — unarmed, defenseless as their parents sadly are — even worse fates, perhaps, still ahead.

*

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Featured image: The foundation of the United States is embedded in gun violence. (Photo: Joe Loong)


undefinedThe Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human

By Naomi Wolf

Publisher: ‎All Seasons Pr (May 31, 2022)

ISBN-10: ‎ 1737478560

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1737478560

Reviews

“Naomi Wolf is one of the bravest, clearest-thinking people I know. The reason you hear the forces of repression so desperately trying to dismiss her is because she is right.” – Tucker Carlson

“The pandemic response is the biggest crisis of our time. It is going to make wars look small. There are very few books exploring the pandemic, its origins and the ramifications of the response. Dr. Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Bodies of Others’ focuses on the extremely important issue of bodily autonomy, that you decide what happens to your body. The greatest loss to our freedom is when our leaders makes decisions on the bodies of others. Buy this important book to understand the consequences.” – Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist, COVID-19 early treatment advocate, president, Cardio Renal Society of America

“Dr. Naomi Wolf’s book stands apart in a world of groupthink. It is an impeccable, thought-provoking compilation of the troubling and distressing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, including censorship and the suppression of alternatives to the mainstream narrative.” – Dr. Paul Alexander, former WHO COVID pandemic evidence-synthesis advisor

Click here to order.

We’re Now in the Last Stage of a Tyrannical Takeover

June 6th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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***

There are 10 steps that leaders who want to crush a democracy will always take. We are now in Step 10, and traitors are dissolving the boundaries and sovereignty of the United States. The same is also taking place in other nations

The COVID pandemic was used to strip us of our liberties and to conceptually terraform America into being ready to accept a CCP-style World Economic Forum-guided post-humane and post-constitutional world

We are at war, and the federal government, institutions and agencies of various kinds, and the media, have all been weaponized against the public

Hopelessness leads to inaction, and without action, we’re guaranteed to lose everything. The one thing the technocrats’ technology cannot compete with is the analog world — analog devices and in-person relationships — so that’s where our greatest strength lies

General guidance on how to prepare for near-future events, and what is needed for survival and success in the long term are addressed

*

Repeat guest Naomi Wolf is the author of “The End of America,” published in 2007, and “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” which was released at the end of May 2022.

In our previous interview, we discussed how “The End of America” dovetailed with current pandemic events. (You can download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.1)

Here, we review what lies ahead if we don’t challenge and stand firm against the global control agenda. It’s really important to realize that the progression toward tyranny and loss of freedom is neither new nor accidental — and really has nothing to do with COVID or biosecurity per se.

These are just convenient justifications for the unjustifiable. No, this is a comprehensive plan for a global takeover that’s been in the works for many decades. What we’re seeing now is just the final implementation.

“I wrote ‘The End of America’ when I saw that issues around terrorism and the terror threat post-9/11 were being used in such a way as to hype fear and strip us of our civil liberties,” Wolf says. “There are 10 steps to fascism that leaders who want to crush a democracy will always take. They’re the same 10 steps whether the leaders are on the left or on the right. It really doesn’t matter.

So, I looked at history at different times and places in which a robust democracy was crushed. You start with invoking a terrifying threat. It can be a real threat, but it’s hyped. You go on to surveil citizens. You create militia groups unaccountable to the rule of law.

 You create a Gulag. You start to demonize whistleblowers and critics. You start to call dissent, treason or espionage or subversion. And then you get to Step 10, which is martial law, declaring emergency law. Well, here we are at Step 10.”

The Race Toward a Post-Humane World

In the summer of 2020, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared residents could not have more than six people in their homes. As noted by Wolf, this is a massive and very clear violation of the First and Fourth Amendments — the right to privacy and the right to assembly.

That was the moment when Wolf knew for sure that the lockdowns had nothing to do with a public health emergency. That’s when she knew we were right smack dab in the middle of Step 10.

“We were seeing a wholesale race to exploit what was messaged as a global pandemic in such a way as to strip us of our remaining liberties and to terraform America, conceptually, into being ready to accept a CCP-style World Economic Forum-guided post-humane and post-constitutional world,” she says.

“And that’s only escalated. So, [in ‘The Bodies of Others’] I walk the reader through the money flow. I show how bad actors ranging from the World Economic Forum, to the Chinese Communist Party, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and of course, to big tech companies, massaged pandemic policy in various ways to suit their ends.

I show how millions are flowing to big tech companies especially, as a result of completely medically unnecessary pandemic policies. And finally, I explain — speaking as a tech CEO, which I am now — that what the tech companies are driven by is that human beings in human space, having human conversations with human smiles and touch, are a competition that they cannot compete with.

So, a lot of the policies that were rolled out, as related to a public health emergency, really serve to kill off that human advantage and transfer assets to big tech companies.”

Yes, We Are at War

Part of Step 10 is the proposed World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty, which would give the WHO unbridled privilege to declare an emergency and then have total authority to dictate the global response, even if that response contradicts the constitutional rights of a member state. And, while it may not strike most people as an act of war, it is in fact part of the global war effort against the public, the citizens of the world.

“Indeed, that’s what’s happening,” Wolf says. “And the fact that Americans have not been able to see this treaty easily to lobby their representatives … that’s just an example of why these metanational treaties are so extraordinarily dangerous …

I wish people would wake up sooner, honestly. I’ve been warning people for about six months that a war is being waged against us here in the United States. We are at war, even though we think we’re not. We don’t see bullets flying.

This is a new kind of war, and it’s a war that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed very skillfully. Stalinists also developed it skillfully. It’s never been done to us like this before, but look at the big picture please. Our southern border is open. Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring in.

I’m in favor of legal immigration. I’m the daughter of immigrants. However, what’s happening, according to my sources, is that fighting-age men from Ukraine and Afghanistan are pouring in. Millions of dollars in state-of-the-art equipment — night vision goggles, military equipment — vanished in Afghanistan. We didn’t recover it.

Where is it? Who knows? But these are men who are going all over the country, they’re not being identified. Their destinations are not identified. They could be put in place. We are very vulnerable. And then, north of us, our historically peaceful neighbor, Canada, their World Economic Forum puppet, Justin Trudeau, declared martial law for about 24 hours when the truckers were protesting in Ontario.

What you saw there was unidentified, very mercenary looking — were they police? Were they soldiers? Very hard to tell because they weren’t identified, which is characteristic of an unaccountable mercenary. And they were very violent toward peaceful, lawful Canadian protestors.

You saw the same black-clad, unidentifiable, super fit looking mercenaries … in France. When there were protests against the Green Pass, there was dramatic violence, shocking scenes, by these unidentifiable mercenaries.”

Emergency Powers Are Being Used as a Weapon of War

As noted by Wolf, all the pieces of the “emergency” also point in an obvious direction. In April 2022, President Biden extended emergency law for the eighth time, and this time he didn’t even pretend that it was related to a public health emergency. He said it was due to instability in Iraq. By extending his emergency powers, he can funnel millions of dollars, without accountability, into the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS).

“He’s basically weaponizing HHS, all the way down to boards of health, which have been weaponized during the pandemic,” Wolf says. “So, we are at Step 10. This is Step 10.

Nothing legally prevents, right now, here in New York state, the governor from doing what she’s trying to do, which is to create quarantine facilities and have a regulation to drag people off to open-ended quarantine if they’re exposed to a bloodborne pathogen.

We narrowly defeated a similar regulation proposal in Washington state. But with the World Health Organization treaty, they will have that right. Nothing will stop them from having mercenaries that I can’t identify show up at the end of my driveway and say, ‘Naomi Wolf, you’re a public health threat.’ And the reason they can do this, also, is that this messaging is focusing on mental health too.

So, if you fold mental health into public health, then you get a rationale to say, ‘Oh, dissent is a form of craziness,’ the way that it’s framed in, for instance, communist China. So, we are dissolving sovereignty all over the world if the WHO treaty is signed. It’s absolutely terrifying. We need to wake up and realize that this war is being waged against us. Traitors are dissolving the boundaries of our nation.”

Who Are the Perpetrators?

I suspect the perpetrators of this war are the global cabal that embraces technocracy and transhumanism. Wolf believes perpetrators fall into several different camps.

“You were way ahead of the curve in identifying how serious this was, and the sources from which it would emanate. But I don’t see them as having no light between them. I see that they’re loosely operating in concert. Certainly, technocrats. Big Tech is an alliance of technocrats. Certainly, the World Economic Forum …

Big Pharma isn’t even the main driver, in my judgment, as powerful and scary as it is. I think they’re using pharma as a global weapon.

So, these entities — and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other bad nonprofits like the EcoHealth Alliance, which is at the center of everything, and other aligned bad nonprofits like the Committee for State and Territorial Epidemiologists — these third-party nonprofits allow government agencies like the CDC to offshore their criminality.

For instance, the CDC contracted with these third parties to manage their data. My book shows how there’s been a consistent mismanagement or manipulation of data around the pandemic to the extent that one of my chapters is called ‘The Unverifiable Pandemic.’

All of these bad actors are loosely aligned. They’re talking to each other. Amazon, Google and Microsoft benefit from the pandemic. Google owns Baseline, which you have to sign in to, to get a CVS PCR test. Microsoft builds the vaccine passports. Bill Gates is invested in the vaccines. I just did a bombshell interview with RFK Jr. in which he said all of the big tech companies are invested in vaccines.

It’s a pretty fully fleshed out methodology that involves Big Tech, the CCP, the World Economic Forum, and now the WHO as a delivery method, to create a one world matrix in which nation states are meaningless, parliaments and congresses are meaningless, and all of us are surveilled, tracked and regularly injected or forced to take whatever pill or treatment they want us to take in such a way as to make freedom a thing of the past.

And also in such a way as to harvest all of our data continually, which is gold for tech companies.”

No Respect for Human Life

Ultimately, the perpetrators of this global war view human beings as a resource fit for harvest. Everything about us is up for grabs, including our DNA. Wolf’s husband, Brian O’Shea, a highly-trained investigator who spent 12 years in military intelligence and the Special Forces, has evidence showing that by 2049, China wants to be the repository of all the world’s DNA — the DNA of every human on the planet.

It’s been rumored that the COVID nasal swabs may be sent back to a DNA repository in China. No one knows where they go, really. If this is true, what’s the danger? Well, for starters, organ trafficking is a lucrative business in China, and now, startups are popping up everywhere to assess the health of your organs. Is it inconceivable to think they might be compiling databanks on potential organ sources?

“These people have no respect for human life,” Wolf says. “I think these people will stop at nothing … I mean there are new laws that have been passed that allow a newborn to be euthanized within a month after birth.”

We Live in Unprecedented Times

According to professor Mattias Desmet, totalitarian regimes inevitably always self-destruct. Because of this, one might be tempted to think that future “doomsday” predictions won’t materialize, as the system can’t survive long-term. However, we also must remember that by the time totalitarian regimes collapse, they’ve already killed tens of millions, and none of the previous ones had the technological advantages of the current system.

The totalitarian regime being erected now could easily wipe out most of humanity before its ultimate demise. Wolf also questions whether some of the previous totalitarian regimes actually did collapse and die out. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, for example, is a direct heir of Nazi eugenicists, and Bill and Melinda Gates are still carrying out Nazi eugenicists approaches.

Everywhere we look today, we see the Nazi mentality at work behind the scenes. So, the ideology that drove the Nazi regime did not vanish. It simply went underground. Wolf comments:

“The way the World Economic Forum is trying to manage human beings descends from Nazism. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m the granddaughter of woman who lost nine brothers and sisters to Nazis. So, I don’t say this slightly, and don’t take this out of context, but Nazism was too good an idea for it to be killed off in 1945, meaning it was too effective.

We’re [now] seeing Nazi approaches to human life. The creation of a two-tier society, vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, life vs. unworthy of life. I’ve got a section in my book looking at the history of restrictions and how, always, restrictions on assembly, restrictions on commerce, restrictions on where Native Americans could travel, how they could trade, those always proceed theft of assets.

That’s what’s happening now to the whole world with lockdowns. All of humanity was restricted in advance of a massive theft of their assets. And that’s going to continue unless we resist it. But no, I don’t agree that totalitarian regimes self-destruct.

First of all, in the 20th century, they collapsed after massive death, starvation, and upheaval and suffering. But second of all, the holy Roman empire lasted for 800 years, and it was pretty totalitarian. They crucified people. It was pretty totalitarian.

Living in Palestine in Jesus’ time, under the occupation of the Romans, that lasted for centuries. So, sure, if we’ve look 500 years or 800 years into the future, maybe the global totalitarianism that’s being erected right now will have collapsed, but I don’t think we should relax because of that.

There is another distinguishing factor that we have to take into account with this erection of totalitarianism globally compared with those in the past, and that’s the role of artificial intelligence. AI now has the capability to tell the same story at the same time, around the world, at a scale that no human propagandists could ever match.

AI can take inputs from India about how people are receiving a propaganda message and adjust it. Or it can take inputs from people’s behavior in real time, or the reactions on social media and adjust it. And people haven’t even been informed about the extent to which AI can even tweak existing journalism.

For instance, every time you read the word ‘Delta variant,’ you would see in front of it the words ‘highly transmissible.’ And every time you saw the word ‘myocarditis,’ you would see in front of it, ‘extremely rare.’ That’s AI, and that’s happening all over the world with virtually all flows of communications.

So, people can be propagandized … They can be hypnotized and lied to and an artificial reality could be created for them, conceptually, at a much more sophisticated level than human beings have ever accomplished.”

The One Thing the Technocrats Cannot Compete With

While the situation may seem hopeless, we must not give up hope, because hopelessness leads to inaction, and then we are guaranteed to lose everything. The one thing the technocrats’ technology cannot compete with is the humane analog world, so that’s where our greatest strength lies.

For example, no one can hack or surveil an in-person assembly, provided you don’t have your cell phones on you. So, get into the habit of carrying your phone in a faraday bag, or leave it at home. Physical book stores, physical libraries, physical houses of worship, physical money — none of those can be surveilled or tracked. Combustion engine cars as opposed to electric cars also cannot be tracked as easily or thoroughly.

“I tell people to get off of digital technology,” Wolf says. “Most of the narratives around what COVID was doing were communicated to us by digital technology, by Google, Facebook and Twitter, which are deplatforming people like you and me and putting alarm signals everywhere.

But if you just count on your own lived experience, the bodies were not stacking up. I’m not saying it was a trivial public health problem. But if we had lived through 2020 to 2022, relying on human life experience, the stories our neighbors were telling us what we were hearing from our friends, we would’ve lived through a time in which there was a bad respiratory disease around, but not in which all human activity had to come to a close.”

Wolf’s Predictions for the Near Future

Almost universally, those aware of the facts and who are knowledgeable in this area agree that things are about to get far worse. The COVID pandemic was just the warmup, and right now we seem to be in a deceptive lull before the storm.

We don’t know when it’s going to get worse. It could be next week. It could be two or three years. I don’t know, but I think it’s going to be sooner rather than later, so getting prepared is an urgent necessity. Many also wonder what they should prepare for.

Food shortages? Famine? Power failures? Gas shortages? The breakdown of transportation and distribution of goods? The collapse of one or more fiat currencies? The collapse of the entire financial system? Cyber attacks? Nuclear war? Any and all of those are on the table.

“Here’s my sense of the immediate timeline — and I’ve been, unfortunately, right with every projection since I started making them, when this pandemic began,” Wolf says.

“The timeline is not good. November [2022] is going to be a very dangerous month in America. I mean, these people will stop at nothing and I’m literally afraid of a nuclear attack. I’m afraid the war in Ukraine will be the proxy or the rationale for an attack on the whole land. It’ll be blamed on Russia, but it could be [done by] anyone.

I think we’re even beyond a false flag right now in America because I thoroughly believe our White House is captured by China, that we have a puppet government … I voted for the Biden administration — which is embarrassing given that they’re committing treason — but they can’t resist what China and the World Economic Forum want them to do.

If you look at the harms in the Pfizer documents … this is a biological attack. The disruption of our food supplies is an attack. We are under occupation now. It’s not going to happen in the future. We have to notice that we are already under occupation.

I used to be a political consultant. Every single thing that the Biden administration has done in terms of messaging and symbolism has served to lower the status of the United States internationally. Even little things like checking his watch three times at a military funeral. That’s not an accident. Those things are highly scripted.

Over and over again, you can see an external hand dialing down the prestige and authority of the United States. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, that did nothing but trash our standing internationally. The point is, we have a captured White House and that’s very dangerous, because it means the FDA may or may not let poisonous food reach our shelves.

The FDA turned a blind eye or colluded with unbelievable harms revealed in the Pfizer documents, so the FDA can’t be trusted. The CDC can’t be trusted. Basically, you can expect more and more disorienting narratives of confusing public events, more and more ‘It’s monkeypox, it’s smallpox, it’s tuberculosis,’ to make you feel off kilter and panicked right up until November.

In November, I anticipate a giant crisis, which will have the effect of, ‘It’s not safe to leave your homes.’ Everything is radioactive, or there’s smallpox everywhere, or there are mass shooters on the loose. This will drive voters to vote by mail instead of in person.

I say this as a political consultant: There is no way these people are acting like there’s going to be midterm [elections]. They’re acting like there’s never going to be accountability. There’s never going to be investigations. They’re never going to be impeached. So there will be no midterms. If I were to bet, I would bet the midterms will be dramatically compromised, if not taken off the table altogether, or made cursory.

I imagine we’re going to see more and more gangs … militias, and you don’t know who they are. We’re going to see more and more gangs wreaking havoc in inner cities, wreaking havoc with businesses … We don’t know who they are and their job will be to terrorize everyone … and create the complete loosening of social bonds and the civil contract.

The defunding of the police is directly contributing to this. It’s part of this process, and it’s worked … Along with that, there’ll continue to be disruptions in the food supply, certainly disruptions in the energy grid and probably cyber attacks.

There’s going to be parts of the country that are going to be in darkness or unable to communicate intermittently and that will add to our fear. All of this is going to play out around the world, and they’re not going to stop.

A lot of it will play out this year, but not dramatically enough to elicit an effective counter reaction. And that’s their goal. Having said that, there are many things that you can do. So, there’s going to be a degradation around the world of the right to assembly. Parliaments will be told it’s not safe to convene. You won’t be able to see what parliament is doing. You won’t be able to see what Congress is doing.”

The Next Step, Historically

Going by the historical timeline of how a tyrannical regime takes over, the next step will involve a period when opposition leaders, civil rights leaders, outspoken journalists and editors will be arrested and taken to some unknown location. Many will simply be “disappeared.” That’s the point at which civil society just shuts down, even without a coup, because everyone’s too afraid.

After that, mercenaries will show up to reimpose order, but they won’t be our mercenaries. They’ll be working on behalf of the enemy regime. At that point, the United States will formally cease to exist. The takeover will be complete.

As noted by Wolf, right now, “we’re in a time of radical testing of our free will.” If we don’t wake up in sufficient numbers, the end result is already determined. Without pushback, it can’t end any other way. Fortunately, “there’s a robust grassroots resistance to this in the United States,” Wolf says. “And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the Second Amendment is the key to the U.S. having hope that other countries don’t have.”

Recommendations Moving Forward

So, what can we do to prepare? How do we fight back? Regardless of where you are in the world, there’s a lot you can do. The key to success is to focus the fight on the local and state level. There are also preparations you can (and need) to do on a personal level.

“I’m learning marksmanship. I hate to say it, but this is where we’re at,” Wolf says. “I’m a peaceful person. I hope no one takes this out of context, but you need to be able to defend your family. You need to be able to hunt. We are getting to that point. Even if you hate guns, now is the time to learn marksmanship and be comfortable with a weapon because you may need to kill for food.”

There’s an educational curve when it comes to firearms — how to store, carry and clean them, for example — and you really need to engage in that if you’ve never had any training in that area.

Secondly, know where your food comes from. Make friends with farmers. Create or join a CSA with your neighbors. Learn how to grow some food. There’s a steep learning curve there too. Next, prepare a plan for what to do if there’s no electricity and/or digital communications.

“I tell people to print out their bank statements and asset statements because in The Great Reset, you should expect that there’ll be some giant blitz and it’ll all vanish,” Wolf says. Make sure you have hardcopies of important documents, such as the deed for your home. If you can’t produce it, expect the new regime to claim ownership.

Much can also be done on the state level. For example, in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has stated he will not enforce the will of the World Economic Forum. The New Hampshire legislature has also passed a really good bill declaring that if the federal government passes an unconstitutional law, it will not be enforced in New Hampshire.

“We have been very successful at DailyClout, state by state, mobilizing people to lobby their state representatives. But they have to pass laws fast, and show massive grassroots movement to not enforce the World Economic Forum diktats at the state level. And, our founders were such geniuses, because they set up our system so that states could do this,”Wolf says.

Importantly, states must accept and be prepared to forgo federal funding and subsidies to retain their sovereignty. We need a new movement where institutions and local leadership publicly forswear any and all corruptible funding, be it from the CCP, the federal government, the WEF or anything else. These individuals and institutions must be willing to disclose the source of all funding, and reject any funds that might make them beholden to an enemy power.

We Need to Build an Alternative Society

The ultimate goal right now is to begin creating a whole alternative civil society. A “reset,” yes, but not the technocratic, transhumanist reset imagined by the globalists. We need to create uncorrupted science, uncorrupted journalism, uncorrupted medicine. We need governors, business leaders and heads of universities and so on to take a pledge to create uncorrupted institutions that are answerable to the people.

“By showing people how the legislative process got corrupted and providing, on my site, DailyClout, the way to draft your own laws and pass your own laws, I am also providing people with very concrete ways to protect their liberties and to know what to do in the future,” Wolf says.

“And, I feel remiss if I didn’t add, I personally had to give up my status as a media darling on the left, my friends, and my networks … when I began to do real reporting on this pandemic and on the mRNA vaccines. We are in a time where people will have to decide, ‘What am I here for on this planet?’ Know that if you cling to lies, and you cling to your professional status, your children will live as slaves and so will you.

It’s time to be brave, because if we’re a little bit brave now, we don’t have to be horrifically brave in the near future … I also think we’re in a massive spiritual moment, that we’re in a biblical moment, and that there’s a level of metaphysics over and above the material and the political assault on us in our reaction.

I’m just speaking for myself, but I do feel like this is part of the picture, the nature of the evil that is unfolded around us … The way the mRNA vaccines target the fetus, target the amniotic membrane, target lactation, this is an evil beyond what Nazis could accomplish. This is an evil of a Miltonic scale.

I’ve looked at it from all sides, and I’m just going to say this, I can’t account for it with purely human material processes. It’s got an element of sophistication and scale and grandeur that really seems beyond the human to me, and to have an element of massive existential evil.

I’m Jewish, so we don’t have a highly-developed notion of Satan, but the these seem to be malevolent forces that can accomplish things beyond what human beings can accomplish.

As a result, I have started to believe in God in a more literal way than I used to, because these malevolent forces seem to be directed at what is good. What is divine? The human face, which my tradition says is an image of God. The human body, which is made in God’s image. Love, which is a manifestation of the divine according to many religious traditions. The family.

It’s like all the things that are being targeted are what is divine about our human journey on this planet. I don’t know where to go with that, except that it seems we’re in a moment in which — in addition to all the other things we can do, and I’m just speaking for myself — I think we can pray.

We don’t have the ability just as human beings to get out of this. It’s too big. I believe that getting out of it requires an awakening that’s massive. And, for myself anyway, asking for divine help has worked before.”

To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” and subscribe to the Daily Clout newsletter on Dailyclout.io. You can also follow Wolf on GETTR.

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1 Chelsea Green Publishing, The End of America by Naomi Wolf

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Look at this map of Ukraine.

Can you see what’s going on? The Russians are creating a buffer zone along their western perimeter.

Why are they doing that? What benefit do they derive from a buffer zone?

Well, a buffer zone creates a distance between Russia and Ukraine which Putin thinks is necessary since Ukraine is threatening to join NATO. So, he’s creating his own DMZ on his western flank.

But what does that prove?

It proves that we’ve been lied to from the very beginning. Putin was not planning to reconstruct the Soviet Empire like the media told us. He did not want to seize the Capitol, Kiev, and he did not want to conquer the entire Ukrainian landmass. That was all baloney.

What he wanted to do, is what he has done.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the map. You don’t need CNN or Rachel Maddow to tell you what you can see with your own two eyes. This is the reality ‘on the ground’.

This is a buffer zone. It creates a distance between Russia and Ukraine, it protects the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, and it establishes a landbridge to Crimea where Russia’s vital deep-water port of Sevastopol is located. In other words, it achieves what Putin wanted to achieve from the very beginning, that is, enhanced security along his western border.

What we are seeing is the basic parameters of Russia’s “Special Military Operation”. Yes, many people will prefer to call it a “war”, but the term is not nearly as precise as “Special Military Operation”.

Why?

Because “Special Military Operation” indicates that the main objective is to save the lives of the ethnic Russians who had been under constant bombardment for the last 8 years and, also, to create a security zone that prevents a hostile NATO army and its missile system from being deployed to Russia’s border. These are the goals of the “Special Military Operation”; to “demiliterize” and “denazify” the area under Russia’s control. Get it?

Will the “Special Military Operation” go beyond the Donbass to Kiev and cities in the west?

Probably, not. Going beyond the Donbass would likely involve a complete mobilization of men and resources which has not yet taken place in Russia. By not mobilizing, Putin is signaling to the west that he will limit his operation to the area on the map. (With some slight expansion) Putin is indicating that his main concern is security, and since his concerns were casually brushed aside by Biden and Zelensky, he took matters into his own hands. In other words, he imposed his own settlement.

Okay, but if these are the parameters of the Special Military Operation, then what are the chances of a wider war?

That depends on Biden. If Washington continues on the path of escalation –by sending weapons systems that can strike targets in Russia– then Putin will respond. We should know that by now. Putin is not going to back down no matter what. If Washington wants to up-the-ante, then they should prepare for an equal response. That’s the way it’s going to work. For now, the “Special Military Operation” is just a “Special Military Operation”. But when it becomes a war, then all bets are off. Then we will see a full mobilisation, a complete rupture in US-Russo relations, and a halt to all hydrocarbon flows from east to west.

Do you think Europe and the United States are prepared for that? Do you think the EU can replace the 25% of the oil and 40% of all the natural gas it presently imports from Russia? Do you have a wind-powered car that will get you to work on time or a factory that will run on solar power? Do you have a plan for heating your house with hydrogen or perhaps a battery from an old Prius?

No, you don’t, and neither does Europe. Europe runs on fossil fuels. America runs on fossil fuels And the more fossil fuel that is consumed, the more the economy grows. The less fossil fuel is consumed, the more the economy shrinks. Are you prepared for life in a shrinking economy with high unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, unending recession, and deepening social malaise brought on by your government’s misguided desire to “stick it to Putin”?

That’s a bad choice, isn’t it? Especially when a face-saving deal can be made at anytime. In fact, Biden could stop the fighting tomorrow if he extended the hand of friendship to Putin and declared that, yes, Ukraine will accept neutrality til the end of time and NATO expansion will stop ASAP.

That’s all it would take. Just extend the olive branch and Putin will ‘call off the dogs’. Guaranteed.

That’s what this guy would have done. Remember him? Remember how bad things were when Trump was in office and gas was 2 bucks a gallon, and everyone had a job, and there was no inflation, and violent crime was under control?

Listen to what Trump had to say about Russia:

“Well, I hope we do have good relations with Russia. I say it loud and clear and I’ve been saying it for years. I think it’s a good thing if we have a great relations with Russia. That’s very important. And, I believe, some day that will happen. It’s a big country, it’s a nuclear country, it’s a country we should get along with, and I think we will eventually get along with Russia.”

He’s right, isn’t he? We need to get along with Russia and put an end to the fighting before these morons drag us into World War 3.

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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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Israel’s defence minister Benny Gantz arrived in India’s capital this week to commemorate 30 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries. 

Gantz met with his counterpart, Rajnath Singh, as well as with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “with the aim of expanding and deepening cooperation between the establishments”.

Several other senior Israeli officials from the Defence Ministry’s Directorate for Defence Research and Development, as well as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, accompanied him on his trip, as well as representatives from Israel’s arms industries.

In recent years, the Israeli government has placed great importance on the Indian arms market as its largest and possibly most dependable customer of military hardware.

According to weapons monitors, India is the largest purchaser of Israeli-made arms, spending in excess of $1bn per year.

India, since 2017, has also become a strategic partner and a co-producer of Israeli weapons. Over the past five years, both countries have conducted joint military drills and hosted police and army training and exchange visits.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Until 1992, India did not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

The following graphics illustrate how India’s arms trade, and its relations with Israel, have changed over the past 30 years.

1. A brief history

Though military deals only proliferated once diplomatic ties were established, the countries did have clandestine relations before 1992.

Israel provided India with weapons in 1962 and then in 1965 in the wars against China and Pakistan. By the early 1970s, the Indian military establishment was impressed by and enamoured with Israeli technology.

Following several interactions between military leaders in the early 1990s, India agreed to assign a defence attache to Tel Aviv in 1995.

In 1999, Israel provided India with urgent assistance in its war with Pakistan, a move that established Israel as a reliable military partner.

India Israel arms trade 3

2. Ties thaw after Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, India has sought to diversify its weapon suppliers.

Russia remains its largest supplier, with the US, France and the UK remaining key suppliers, too. But it is India’s relationship with Israel that has demonstrated the most promise.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), India’s military expenditure in 2021 amounted to $76.6bn, the third-highest in the world, after the US and China. Between 2017-2021, India and Saudi Arabia were the world’s leading importers of arms, each accounting for 11 percent of global trade.

Increasing hostilities between India and China has also meant that a de facto arms race has emerged between the two countries.

In 2021, India and China accounted for around 63 percent of the entire military expenditure for the Asia and Oceania region.

“The economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have not ended the continuous upward trend in world military expenditure seen since 2015,” Sipri said in April.

India Israel arms trade 2

3. India as a destination for Israeli arms

Between 1997 and 2000, 15 percent of all Israeli arms exports travelled to India. By the mid-2000s, this had increased to 27 percent, with India broadening its range of purchases, such as surveillance equipment, drones and surface-to-air-missiles. Between 2000 and 2010, India spent around $10bn on Israeli arms.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered office in 2014, around 42.1 percent of all arms exports from Israel have landed in India, with Azerbajiain (13.9 percent) and Vietnam (8.5 percent) and the United States (6.2 percent) making up the other major customers.

According to Sipri, weapons deliveries to India from Israel increased by 175 percent between 2015 and 2019.

Meanwhile, Israeli arms exports increased 19 percent between 2012-16 and 2017-2021. Its own spending on arms increased by 3.1 percent.

But the military relationship goes beyond military hardware. In 2019, after India fully annexed Indian-occupied Kashmir, a senior Indian diplomat in the US suggested India replicate the “Israeli model” in the territory, in reference to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 2020, India and Israel also signed an agreement to expand cooperation in cyber-security.

“Deepening cooperation with India is another important step in confronting global cyber threats,” Yigal Unna, director-general of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate (INCD), said at the time.

According to The Hindu, cyber-security “was identified as an important area of cooperation during Modi’s visit to Israel in July 2017”.

Earlier this year, a New York Times investigation alleged that it was during Modi’s 2017 visit that India procured the Pegasus software used to hack into the personal accounts of around 300 Indians, including activists, journalists and opposition leaders.

India Israel arms trade 1a

4. What weapons does India purchase from Israel?

The first purchases India made from Israel were two Super Dvora Mk II fast patrol boats in the mid-1990s.

Soon New Delhi began importing high-end defence equipment, including Israeli Searcher and Heron unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and armed drones, missile systems, and sensors and electro-optical systems or Tavor assault weapons used by Indian Special Forces in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

Between 2014 and 2021, India received combat aircraft radar equipment, armed UAVs, anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles, among other hardware from Israel. The Indian military is reportedly in possession of 108 Israeli Searcher drones and 68 unarmed Heron 1s. It also has several Harpy drones – also known as suicide attack drones.

“Israel has maintained its occupation of Palestinian lands for over 70 years, where millions of Palestinians live under military control and suspension of their civil rights. It is an apartheid and settler-colonial state, carrying out its illegal activities with impunity because of the support it receives from states and corporations,” said a 2020 report published by BDS India, in collaboration with People’s Dispatch and Newsclick.

Just as the Covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020, Modi’s government ordered 16,479 Negev light machine guns, sparking outrage among some Indian activists.

In its recent “surgical strikes” on Pakistan in 2019, India used Israeli-made “Spice 2000” bombs.

Last year, during the standoff with China, India leased and finally bought four Heron-TP Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAVs from Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI).

India Israel arms trade 5

5. Co-production of arms

Over the past decade, India has prioritised the modernisation of its armed forces and laid significant emphasis on self-reliance in arms production, in line with Modi’s “Make in India” plan.

“In a drive to strengthen the indigenous arms industry, 64 percent of capital outlays in the 2021 Indian military budget were earmarked for acquisitions of domestically produced arms,” Sipri said.

As part of this drive, India has worked with Israel in co-producing weapons.

In 2017, Israel Weapons Industries and Indian construction company Punj Lloyd created the first private small arms factory in Malanpur, under the name Punj Lloyd Raksha Systems, or PLR Systems.

According to PLR Systems, also a joint venture with Adani Group and the SK Group, the factory produces the Tavor Assault Rifle, X95 Assault Rifle, Galil Sniper Rifle, Negev Light Machine Gun and the Uzi Sub Machine Gun used by the Indian military, including Indian Special Forces.

Later in 2017, Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd (KRAS), a joint venture between India’s Kalyani Strategic Systems Ltd and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Systems, began manufacturing Spike anti-tank guided missiles for the Indian army.

It was the first private company to produce missiles in India.

In 2019, KRAS received an order of $100m to produce the Barak-8, a long-range surface-to-air missile, for the Indian navy.

“We at Rafael are proud of our role – not only in KRAS – but also of our participation in Make in India, and our strong relationship with the vibrant talent across India’s defence industries,” Retired Brigadier General Pini Yungman said in a statement.

In late 2021, the military ordered Skystriker drones. This will now be produced in a joint venture between Israel’s Elbit Systems and India’s Adani-owned Alpha Design Technologies, in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru.

“India’s good at large-scale things, like call centres and software development, but Israel’s doing package software. India’s doing back-office biotech research, but Israel actually has products that are out there in the global markets more than India does,” Richard Rossow, senior adviser and Wadhwani Chair in US-India Policy Studies at CSIS, told CNBC.

“So it could be Israeli companies looking for a larger production base, in which case India’s ready to go.”

India Israel arms trade 4

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Four Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces across the West Bank in the span of just 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed this year to 62. 

Those killed, including a child and a journalist, died in four separate incidents across the occupied territory.

This year, 14 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, including six since May.

In Gaza, a fifth Palestinian, identified as Yaseral-Masry, 41, from Deir al-Balah, succumbed on Wednesday to wounds he sustained in May 2021 during the Israeli offensive against the besieged Strip, which killed at least 248 Palestinians including 66 children.

Below are the stories of the four Palestinians who were killed in the West Bank.

Ghufran Warasneh, 31 (Died 7.30am, 1 June, al-Arroub, Hebron)

Warasneh’s brother Mohammad told Middle East Eye that his sister had joined the local news agency, Dream, at the the start of the week.

She underwent a few trial shifts and on Tuesday, 31 May, was told that she had been offered a full-time job.

On Wednesday, she was asked to go in early to sign her contract and submit her first report before 10am.

Thrilled with her new job and eager to impress on her first day, Warasneh prepared the report the day before. Its subject was Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Palestinian journalist killed last month by Israeli soldiers while covering a raid in Jenin.

A graduate of the journalism school at Hebron University, Warasneh had worked with a few local media networks before joining Dream.

Mohammad said she had met up with a friend on her way out of their neighbourhood, passing through al-Arroub refugee camp.

It was a quiet morning with no confrontations or any trouble, he said. Right after they passed the military checkpoint, two bullets were shot in their direction.

“Both bullets hit my sister. They pierced her left side just under the armpit and left through her chest,” said Mohammad.

“They were exploding bullets, so they left a gaping wound; there was no flesh or bone. Her heart completely vanished.

“All the eyewitnesses confirmed to us they did nothing suspicious. Everything was normal.”

Warasneh’s friend was hit by shrapnel and managed to escape from the scene to get treatment, but no one was able to reach Warasneh’s body as soldiers blocked access to her. People slowly began to arrive at the scene and demand the soldiers let them take her to hospital.

Around 25 minutes later, the soldiers were outnumbered and residents managed to force their way in and pick up Warasneh’s body.

The soldiers, overwhelmed by the number of people surrounding them, fired live ammunition into the air and began dispersing the crowd attempting to retrieve the body, causing it briefly to fall.

A medic was hit in the commotion by a soldier and needed treatment himself.

In the end, the crowds managed to get Warasneh’s body inside an ambulance, which drove away to the hospital.

Responding to Israeli claims that Warasneh had been carrying a knife, Mohammed said: “There is no justification to her killing. This was a criminal murder.

“They try to downplay their crimes [with these claims] to save their reputation to the outside world.”

In the hospital, doctors tried to resuscitate Warasneh but it was too late and she was declared dead within minutes of her arrival.

After her body was prepared for burial, her family and neighbours carried Warasneh back to her to final resting place, having to pass the spot where she was killed.

There, a group of Israeli soldiers were waiting for them. The funeral was attacked as soldiers tried to prevent its passing, firing stun grenades, tear gas and beating the pallbearers.

“Abu Akleh was a journalist. My sister was a journalist. Abu Akleh was killed on the job. My sister was killed on her job,” said Mohammad.

“Abu Akleh’s funeral was attacked. My sister’s funeral was attacked.”

Defiant residents refused to back down despite the Israeli army assaults and forced their way through to reach the cemetery, where they buried Warasneh.

“Ghufrane was a strong and ambitious person. She taught me how to be strong,” said Mohammad.

“For eight years after her graduation she couldn’t get a full-time job, but she never gave up.

“Whenever something happened in the area, she would go report it and send it to Palestine TV and Al Jazeera.

“It was voluntary. She did it out of her ambition and pure love for journalism. And on the day she finally got a full-time job, she was martyred.”

Bilal Kabaha, 25 (Died 9pm, 1 June, Yabad, Jenin)

Shortly after sunset on Wednesday, Israeli forces raided Yabad in the Jenin district of the northern West Bank. Dozens of Israeli military jeeps entered the town, along with bulldozers.

The military was conducting a raid to demolish the home of Diaa Hamarsheh, who was killed in March after he allegedly carried out a shooting attack in a Tel Aviv suburb that left five people dead.

According to locals, Israeli snipers positioned themselves on rooftops as soldiers besieged the area surrounding the Hamarsheh family home.

The raid sparked confrontations with local youths, who attempted to resist the incursion into their town. One of the young Palestinians who had taken to the town square was 25-year-old Bilal Kabaha.

“Bilal went out with the other youths into the village. The raid had barely started, and all of a sudden we heard that Bilal had been shot,” Suhaib Kabaha, 28, Bilal’s cousin, told Middle East Eye.

“He was shot several times with live ammunition, at least five or six times in the chest.”

According to Suhaib, shortly after Bilal was shot, Palestinian medics arrived at the scene to evacuate him in an ambulance to a nearby hospital. But when the ambulance arrived, Suhaib said Israeli forces opened fire again, striking Bilal’s lifeless body with several more bullets.

“The ambulance tried to come and evacuate him from the area, but the soldiers were shooting, so they couldn’t reach him,” said Suhaib.

“He was laying on the ground for 12 minutes before the medics could reach him, but it was too late.”

Image on the right: Bilal Kabaha: When the ambulance arrived, Israeli forces opened fire again, striking the lifeless body with several more bullets, his cousin Suhaib said (Social media)

when the ambulance arrived, Suhaib said Israeli forces opened fire again, striking Bilal’s lifeless body with several more bullets

Hours after raiding the town, killing Bilal, and injuring several other Palestinians there, Israeli forces blew up the Hamarsheh family home.

“It is all very sad. Our family is devastated,” said Suhaib.

“One of Bilal’s brothers was injured during a raid recently, one of his other brothers is in prison,” he said, adding that Bilal himself had been arrested and injured by Israeli forces before.

“Bilal had a simple life. He loved his family, his friends, and people in the village loved him. He never caused any problems,” said Suhaib.

“The world needs to demand that these crimes be investigated. The [Israeli] occupation keeps killing our people without any reason.

“Why was Bilal shot so many times? Why was he left lying on the ground? There should be answers to these questions.”

Ayman Muhaisen, 29 (Died 5am, 2 June, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem)

Mohammed Muhaisen, 42, was still awake in the middle of the night on Thursday, like many of the residents of the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem city. Israeli soldiers were raiding the camp, and he could not sleep.

“At around 4.45am, my brother Ayman called me to tell me that there were soldiers in the area and to be careful,” Mohammed recounted. “I told him not to worry.”

Around 15 minutes later, Mohammed got a call from a friend, saying that Ayman had been shot and he was in critical condition at a hospital in Bethlehem.

“I didn’t believe it, but I rushed to the hospital,” said Mohammed.

“The whole time I was thinking there was a mistake, that it couldn’t be Ayman. By the time I arrived, he was dead.”

Mohammed said that, as the soldiers were reportedly retreating from the camp, Ayman left the house to look around the neighbourhood, and “check that everything was okay”.

It was something he and the other guys in the camp would normally do, Mohammed said. Ayman was shot shortly after leaving the house.

“We were shocked. We are still in shock. This is the biggest shock of our lives. We never imagined this would happen,” said Mohammed.

Ayman leaves behind three children – two boys, aged one and three, and a five-year-old daughter, who had her kindergarten graduation ceremony just the day before he was killed.

“The kids loved their father so much. They don’t realize what is happening. Every day they cry while going to sleep because they want to be with their dad,” Mohammed told MEE.

“Ayman loved life. All he wanted in his life was to be happy, to have a home, and to have a happy life with his family and his children.

“Ayman was killed in cold blood. He was unarmed. He was killed for no reason.”

Odeh Sadaqa, 16 (Died 4pm, 2 June, al-Midya, Ramallah)

Odeh Sadaqa, 16, was hanging out with his friends on the outskirts of his hometown of al-Midya, northwest of Ramallah.

The village sits right along the Green Line, which separates Israel from the West Bank.

“Odeh was with his friends in an area close to the wall, just a few hundred metres away from his home, when Israeli forces opened fire on them,” Mufid Saleh, 39, Odeh’s uncle, told MEE, adding that there were “absolutley no clashes, confrontations, or any problems” in the area at the time.

When the group tried to flee, Odeh was struck by a live bullet in his back, according to the Defence for Children International Palestine, an independent non-governmental organisation. The bullet struck his heart and exited through his chest

Saleh said that when his friends tried to evacuate his nephew from the scene, the soldiers continued to open fire on them.

Eventually, they were able to get him out of the line of fire from the soldiers and into a car.

“He was evacuated in a private vehicle to the hospital in Ramallah, but that took lots of time,” Saleh said, adding that the village has no emergency medical services, and that the ambulance they called did not arrive in time.

“If there was an ambulance that had taken him fast enough, maybe he would have had a chance to live,” Saleh said.

Sadaqa was pronounced dead at around 3pm.

“We are devastated as a family,” Saleh said. “My brother had plans for his son’s life, for his future.

“And all of that was taken away with a single bullet, by one soldier who decided he want to kill.

“Odeh had dreams. He was a beautiful, kind boy, with one of the most beautiful personalities. He had such a sweet soul. He loved life.

“The Israeli occupation is responsible for killing our children, our boys and our girls, and for killing their dreams.”

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Additional reporting by Amjad Khawaja

Featured image: Warasneh had under gone a few trial shifts at the local news agency, Dream, and on 31 May was told that she had been offered a full-time job (Twitter)

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A New War in the Middle East? Israel Military Exercises Simulates Invasion of Lebanon, War with Hezbollah, and Iran

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, June 04, 2022

As Russia edges closer to defeating the US-NATO backed Ukrainian military and its neo-Nazi battalions, a new war in the Middle East will take center stage, perhaps a repeat of the 2006 Lebanon War that Israel started, which will lead to a wider war with Syria and Iran.

Landmark California Task Force Calls for “Comprehensive Reparations” for Slavery

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, June 06, 2022

California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present.

Yes, the Navy Is Trying to Recruit at ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Screenings

By Nicholas Slayton, June 06, 2022

The U.S. military is feeling the need–the need to get more recruits at the movies. 36 years after the U.S. Navy infamously set up recruitment booths at movie theaters as Top Gun screened, they’re back, in time for the sequel Top Gun: Maverick. The film hit theaters on Thursday and viewers are already reporting seeing booths near concession stands.

The Pandemic Treaty: WHO Suffers Defeat as Countries Massively Oppose Globalist Plans

By Free West Media, June 06, 2022

Countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States expressed support for the amendments and called on other countries to do the same, effectively giving away their sovereignty, writes Australian MP Stephen Andrew. However, countries are massively opposing the plans of the globalists. “Great news!” announced Andrew. On May 25, Africa Day, Botswana read a statement on behalf of 47 African member states. The country said it would not support the “reforms”, which Africans are very concerned about.

COVID Mandates: Tyranny of the Modelers. “Far Worse than We Knew”: Dr. Robert Malone

By Dr. Robert Malone, June 05, 2022

There are so very many factors that have contributed to the clear and compelling reality that the public health response to the global SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been one of the greatest failures in public policy in modern history. But chief among those has been the grossly overestimated modeling projections of likely disease and death due to the virus.

School Mask Mandates: Lancet Study Debunks CDC’s Justification

By Leah Barkoukis, June 05, 2022

Specifically, the study not only replicates the CDC study, which found a “negative association” between masks and pediatric cases of Covid-19, it also extends the study to include more districts over a longer period of time. In the end, the new study had nearly “six times as much data as the original study.”

Bayer Head Admits COVID-19 Vaccine Is Gene Therapy

By Martin Armstrong, June 05, 2022

Stefan Oelrich, head of Bayer’s pharmaceuticals department, admitted at the World Health Summit that the COVID-19 vaccine is gene therapy. He smugly stated that the drug companies knew people would reject the vaccine if they knew it was in fact a gene-altering injectable.

Africa’s Escalating Food Crisis: African Union (AU) Leaders Meet with Russian Government

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 05, 2022

President Macky Sall of the West African state of Senegal, the current elected chairman of the 55 member-states African Union (AU) along with AU Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat, visited the Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss measures which could alleviate the escalating problems related to the lack of food and agricultural inputs.

Pressure Mounts on Pentagon Over Lack of Oversight for Ukraine Military Aid

By Dave DeCamp, June 05, 2022

Some members of Congress are putting pressure on the Pentagon over the lack of oversight for the billions in US weapons that are being pumped into Ukraine. Politico reported Thursday that there are lawmakers who have warned the Biden administration that the overwhelming congressional support for Ukraine aid could wane if the issue is not addressed.

Spanish Court Demands Pompeo Testify on Apparent Plot to Kill Assange

By Rachel Olding, June 05, 2022

Donald Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been ordered to appear in a Spanish court to explain a possible U.S. government plot to kidnap and assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, ABC Spain reports, citing legal sources close to the case.

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California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present. It calls for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression.

“Segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect, and other atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations,” the report says.

“The California Reparations Commission’s first report is historic,” Chris Lodgson, Lead Organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, told Truthout. “It details the atrocities and human rights violations committed against African American Freedmen in California.”

This report does not include detailed proposals for reparations. It “lays the foundation for the Commission’s work over the next year, which is developing the Reparations Plan, including direct financial compensation, land, and more,” Lodgson said.

From 1619 to 1865, slavery was sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution and statutory laws. More than 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States, deprived of their life, liberty, citizenship, economic opportunity and cultural heritage. After the abolition of slavery, federal, state and local governmental entities continued to condone, perpetuate and profit from white supremacy. As a result, African Americans today suffer from economic, health and educational inequality.

On September 30, 2020, the California legislature enacted AB 3121, which established the Task Force and charged it with conducting an “inquiry into the ongoing effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the United States.”

AB 3121 mandates that the Task Force recommend appropriate remedies, including compensation, rehabilitation and restitution for African Americans, particularly descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States. The bill requires that the Task Force address how its recommendations “comport with international standards” provided by “various international protocols, laws, and findings.”

Key Findings

“From colonial times forward, governments at all levels adopted and enshrined white supremacy beliefs and passed laws in order to maintain slavery, a system of dehumanization and exploitation that stole the life, labor, liberty, and intellect of people of African descent,” the report finds.

Indeed, 160 years after slavery was abolished, “its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America.” The Task Force cites “[r]acist, false, and harmful stereotypes” that continue to plague African Americans today.

Slave Codes “reborn as the Black Codes, and then as the Jim Crow laws” segregated Blacks and whites “in every aspect of life.” They were emblematic of “a national desire to reinforce a racial hierarchy based in white supremacy.”

In 1852, California enacted a fugitive slave law that was crueler than the federal fugitive slave law “and this made California a more proslavery state than most other free states,” according to the report.

Racial terror which “pervaded every aspect of post-slavery Black life” precluded African Americans from earning wealth and political influence equal to that of white Americans. Lynchings in the South weren’t just isolated hate crimes, but rather “part of a systematic campaign of terror to enforce the racial hierarchy.”

“Today, police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California in the same manner as they do in the rest of the country,” the report notes.

The Task Force report documents the political disenfranchisement of African Americans, stating that California’s voter suppression laws provided a model for those in the South. It also discusses housing segregation through redlining, zoning ordinances and California’s “sundown towns,” which required that African Americans leave by dusk or face violence.

In addition, the report highlights separate and unequal education. Whereas slave states denied nearly all enslaved people an education, the North and Midwest segregated their schools, limiting or denying access to freed African Americans.

Brown v. Board of Education held in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Congress and the courts erected barriers to integration of schools. California is the sixth most segregated state in the country for African American students.

The report also details racism in the environment and infrastructure. Residential segregation has led to poor-quality housing for African Americans, “exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing risk of infectious disease.” California follows the national pattern, where Black people are more likely than white people to live in overcrowded housing and near hazardous waste sites. Redlining, racially restrictive covenants and racial violence led to the exclusion of Black Californians from access to clean water in the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

Another consequence of racist government policies and practices is the pathologizing of the Black family. As of 2019, while Black children comprised only 14 percent of American children, 23 percent of them were in foster care. This is not because Black parents mistreat their children more often than whites, but is rather a result of racist systems and poverty. The disparities in foster care are even higher in California than the national average.

The report cites control over creative cultural and intellectual life, where federal and state governments failed to protect Black artists from discrimination. They have allowed whites “to steal Black art and culture with impunity” and deprived Black creators of valuable patent and copyright protections. California has criminalized African American rap artists and allowed rap lyrics to be introduced as evidence in cases involving “street gang activity.”

Employment discrimination against African Americans did not decrease from 1989 to 2014, according to one meta-study cited in the report. Today, California’s two primary industries — Hollywood and Silicon Valley — employ disproportionately fewer Black people.

The report also documents the inequities in the legal system, citing the “tough on crime” and War on Drugs era, when politicians criminalized African Americans in order to win elections. That criminalization is “an enduring badge of slavery” and has led to over-policing of Black neighborhoods, the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration of African Americans. “Like the rest of the country, California stops, shoots, kills, and imprisons more African Americans than their share of the population,” the report says.

Mental and physical harm and neglect are also highlighted in the report. It states that “race-related stress may have a greater impact on health among African Americans than diet, exercise, smoking, or low socioeconomic status.” Black Californians are more likely to get diabetes, be hospitalized for heart disease, die from cancer, and suffer from psychological distress, depression, suicide ideation and other mental health afflictions than white Californians.

Finally, the report describes the wealth gap between Black and white Americans, both nationally and in California. It details the history of exclusion of African Americans from Social Security and the G.I. bill and discrimination in the federal tax structure.

Preliminary Recommendations

The report sets forth recommendations for future deliberation by the Task Force. The recommendations include deleting language in the California Constitution that allows involuntary servitude as punishment for crime; enactment of legislation prioritizing education, substance use and mental health treatment and rehabilitative programs for incarcerated people; compensation for work performed while in prison; and prisoners’ right to vote.

Additional recommendations involve making it easier to hold law enforcement officers, including correctional officers, accountable for unlawful harassment and violence; governmental acknowledgement and apology for political disenfranchisement; legislation to prevent redistricting that dilutes the voting power of Black Californians; elimination of anti-Black housing discrimination policies; and low interest rates for qualified Black mortgage applicants in California.

Other recommendations include elimination of racial bias in standardized testing; free tuition to California colleges and universities; college scholarships for Black high school graduates; and requiring that curricula be inclusive and free of bias.

The report advocates a “K-12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity; accurately depicts historic racial inequities and systemic racism; honors Black lives, fully represents contributions of Black people in society, and advances the ideology of Black liberation.”

In order to address the racial injustice in the criminal legal system, the Task Force recommends the elimination of “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force, and racial profiling of African Americans.” In addition, it recommends eliminating racial disparities in police stops and criminal sentencing, the over-policing of predominantly Black communities, and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, as well as addressing implicit and explicit bias in the criminal legal system.

The report includes recommendations for compensation of “individuals whose mental and physical health has been permanently damaged by anti-Black healthcare system,” including forced sterilization, medical experimentation, police violence, racist sentencing disparities, environmental racism, and psychological damage from race-related stress.

Finally, the Task Force recommends the implementation of “a detailed program of reparations for African Americans.”

Comprehensive Reparations Plan to Be Issued Next Year

In March, the Task Force voted to limit reparations to descendants of African Americans living in the United States in the 19th century. There is a split in the Task Force about whether to include direct cash payments.

If the call for reparations for African Americans is ultimately successful, it will be unprecedented. As Nikole Hannah-Jones notes in her book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, the only Americans who have ever received restitution by the government for slavery were white enslavers compensated after the Civil War “for their loss of human property.”

Federal Legislation

At the federal level, HR 40, which was introduced more than three decades ago by former Rep. John Conyers, finally has enough votes to pass in the House, according to supporters.

The purpose of the legislation is:

To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.

But the future of HR 40 in the Senate is not so promising. Instead, supporters are urging President Joe Biden to issue an executive order that would establish a reparations commission. So far, Biden has refused to respond.

The Reparations Movement Is a Continuation of the Civil Rights Movement

In his keynote address at the 2006 reparations conference at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Conyers said, “The reparations movement is grounded in the civil rights movement and the social justice movements of the 1960s – 1980s.” That struggle has continued in response to the public execution of George Floyd and the ubiquitous police murders of Black people.

In the international arena, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet issued a report in June 2021, calling for reparations for victims of systemic racist police violence. She wrote, “Reparatory justice requires a multipronged approach that is grounded in international human rights law,” noting that reparations include not only monetary compensation, but also formal apologies, memorialization, educational and institutional reforms, and acknowledgement of the State’s legal responsibility for violations “linked to truth, justice and guarantees of non-recurrence.”

Bachelet cited the April 2021 report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, for which I served as a rapporteur.

Ultimately, as Margaret A. Burnham says in her forthcoming book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, the collective call for a system of reparations must go beyond efforts toward individual healing. It must also engage wide-ranging social transformation and expose the historical underpinnings of racial violence in this country.

Real change requires not just reforms, but also tackling the entire system of white supremacy.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. She is co-host of “Law and Disorder” radio.

Featured image: The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans holds a public meeting in San Francisco, California, on April 13, 2022. (Source: CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE)

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The U.S. military is feeling the need–the need to get more recruits at the movies. 36 years after the U.S. Navy infamously set up recruitment booths at movie theaters as Top Gun screened, they’re back, in time for the sequel Top Gun: Maverick. The film hit theaters on Thursday and viewers are already reporting seeing booths near concession stands.

The strategy was a bold move in 1986. Interest in the military was down after Vietnam. Top Gun was written to be a sports movie with planes, and audiences loved it. And the Navy capitalized on that. Moviegoers walking out of the theater wanting to be the next Maverick, Iceman or even Goose could find out more about the Navy and even sign up. It allegedly was so successful in  boosting the branch’s public image that the Navy tried that again in 1990 when Navy SEALs came out, to much less acclaim.

The new Top Gun is a Memorial Day weekend hit. Early reports suggest it opened to $151 million, which means a lot of moviegoers and a lot of potential recruits. Since the recruitment strategy has become infamous, whether or not it actually succeeded, some viewers shared their amazement and amusement at the Navy actually trying to do recruitment again.

The Navy certainly hopes it will get a public relations boost. Instead of Vietnam, the U.S. military is dealing with the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cmdr. David Benham, director of public affairs for Navy Recruiting Command, told USNI News that he thinks Top Gun: Maverick can at the very least increase interest in the Navy. The movie comes as the Navy is trying to meet FY 2022 recruitment goals–it wants to get 40,000 new enlisted sailors and 3,800 new officers. It’s an issue affecting the entire military.

And even though Top Gun is about Navy aviators, the Air Force is also trying to get new members at the movies.

A special Air Force advertisement is also airing before screenings of Top Gun: Maverick. Again, Top Gunis a movie series about Navy pilots.

The new film follows an older Maverick (Tom Cruise) being brought in to train a new generation of Navy aviators for a special mission. Joseph Kosinski directs in place of the late Tony Scott.

So will the effort pay off? Is time a flat circle? The Navy itself has said there was no distinct boost in recruiting after the 1986 film, although interest in naval aviators did shoot up. Its advertising budget has increased since the mid-1980s. Time will tell if any of the recruiters outside Top Gun: Maverick actually succeed. Anyone who does make it into the Fighter Weapons School (formerly known as TOPGUN) be warned: You get fined if you quote the original film. That might be updated to include any quote from the sequel.

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Last week the World Health Assembly was held in Geneva. The member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) met on controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations, among other things.

Countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States expressed support for the amendments and called on other countries to do the same, effectively giving away their sovereignty, writes Australian MP Stephen Andrew.

However, countries are massively opposing the plans of the globalists. “Great news!” announced Andrew. On May 25, Africa Day, Botswana read a statement on behalf of 47 African member states. The country said it would not support the “reforms”, which Africans are very concerned about.

Other countries also expressed reservations about the amendments and expressed no support, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran and Malaysia. Brazil said it would rather leave the WHO than subject its people to the new amendments.

Ultimately, the WHO was forced to take a step back. “But they haven’t given up yet. Rather, they have formed a new working group to ‘provide technical recommendations on the proposed amendments’, which will be re-tabled in 2024 at the 77th Health Assembly along with the pandemic treaty,” Andrew said.

He noted that in the US the Republicans are strongly pushing back and have introduced bills that should prevent the WHO from gaining even more power. Andrew stressed that citizens must continue to increase pressure on the ESG agenda. ESG stands for “Environmental, Social, and Governance”. Globalists are increasingly applying these ideological non-financial factors to identify economic “risks and growth opportunities”.

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***

There are so very many factors that have contributed to the clear and compelling reality that the public health response to the global SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been one of the greatest failures in public policy in modern history. But chief among those has been the grossly overestimated modeling projections of likely disease and death due to the virus.

Those well versed in the world of computer software coding are intimately familiar with the problem of “Garbage in – Garbage out” (GIGO), which is short slang for the real world issue that the utility of any coded data set analysis is a function of the quality of the underlying data being analyzed and the assumptions engineered into the computer code.

In retrospect, it is abundantly clear that the underlying data and assumptions which were used to develop the modeling which formed the basis for global public health policy decisions concerning the management of the outbreak were seriously flawed. These flawed analyses, which were promoted via a wide range of government policy analysis and media channels, almost universally wildly over-estimated the risks of the virus.

At the core of both the national and globally-coordinated public health policy COVID-19 response decisions lies a philosophical belief system known as Utilitarianism. This is also the core philosophy often employed by Globalist organizations such as the World Economic Forum, and can be found intertwined with another logical framework known as Malthusianism. We are most familiar with the philosophy of Utilitarianism in the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number”.

Quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory.

Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one’s own good.

The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value. They also held that we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’.

Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone’s happiness counts the same. When one maximizes the good, it is the good impartiallyconsidered. My good counts for no more than anyone else’s good. Further, the reason I have to promote the overall good is the same reason anyone else has to so promote the good. It is not peculiar to me.

All of these features of this approach to moral evaluation and/or moral decision-making have proven to be somewhat controversial and subsequent controversies have led to changes in the Classical version of the theory.

Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. The theory is most clearly described in a 1798 treatise titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus.

This is the philosophy underlying the often noted positions of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum which call for a drastic reduction in global human population, often referred to as the depopulation agenda. This illogic is examined in a succinct analysis published in Scientific American by Michael Shermer entitled “Why Malthus Is Still Wrong. Why Malthus makes for bad science policy” As Mr. Schermer nicely summarizes,

“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.

In his book The Evolution of Everything (Harper, 2015), evolutionary biologist and journalist Matt Ridley sums up the policy succinctly: “Better to be cruel to be kind.” The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” A few decades later Francis Galton advocated marriage between the fittest individuals (“What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providently, quickly and kindly”), followed by a number of prominent socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells, who openly championed eugenics as a tool of social engineering.

This is the philosophical basis of the depopulation agenda and policies which Mr. Gates and his Oligarch colleagues at the World Economic Forum seek to impose on all of us, for our own good of course. It is Malthusianistic theories which underly the idea that the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming is by restricting carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. This is a philosophy which completely disregards the amazing innovative, adaptive problem solving capabilities of the human mind.

As taught in most Universities, “Public Health” (as in the Masters of Public Health degree programs) is also largely based on these two 18th and 19th century philosophical theories (utilitarianism and malthusianism). As opposed to the disciplines of Medicine and clinical research, which are grounded in the principles of the Hippocratic oath and beneficence as applied to the individual patient. Examples of beneficence in clinical research and medical practice include “Do no harm,” “Balance benefits against risks,” and “Maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.”

And here is where we get to the crux of the issue. Medical hubris and the public health. First a brief definition, so we are all on the same page:

Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/; from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’), or less frequently hybris (/ˈhaɪbrɪs/), describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.

Apparently unaware of the irony, the WEF recognizes (in a very limited way) the problem of “How hubris put our health at risk”.

The core thesis of modern public health is that a utilitarian approach can be used to generate a sort of spreadsheet of maximal public health benefit. To take an extreme example to illustrate the point, here is a sort of parable:

A man walks into his doctor’s office for a health checkup. After completion of the exam, he asks “Doc, how am I doing?”. His utilitarian MD-MPH turns and says “you are in perfect health. Your heart is perfect, your liver is perfect, and your kidneys are perfect. And I have four other patients that will die in the next week if they do not get transplants requiring a donated heart, liver or kidney. So I will be prepping you for surgery in one hour.”

Four lives saved for one sacrificed. I think that we can all agree that, while this scenario may meet a utilitarian standard, it fails to meet the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian belief systems regarding the Hippocratic oath and principle of beneficence. But if reports are correct, in the very utilitarian, marxist reality which is modern China under the CCP, organ harvesting is a fact of life. And I believe that the utilitarian bias of the WHO and US HHS, combined with the hubris of a belief system that assumes that the likes of Anthony Fauci and other bureaucrats have sufficient comprehension of the enormous complexity of the interactions of an emergent viral variant with a global human population has lead us to a very similar endpoint.

To a considerable extent, this has been driven and justified by the hubris of public health modelers who believe that they have sufficient knowledge to be able to identify all of the important interacting variables in this interaction of virus with human host population, to be able to reduce this complexity to a set of equations or a spreadsheet, and with this tool in hand, to be able to calculate the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number”. And of those arrogant academic modelers whose hubris has lead to massive suffering and avoidable loss of life, chief among them is Neil Ferguson, the physicist (!!) at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiology model behind the lockdowns.

Quoting from Phillip Magness’ article “The Failure of Imperial College Modeling Is Far Worse than We Knew”:

Ferguson predicted catastrophic death tolls back on March 16, 2020 unless governments around the world adopted his preferred suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to ward off the pandemic. Most countries followed his advice, particularly after the United Kingdom and United States governments explicitly invoked his report as a justification for lockdowns.

Ferguson’s team at Imperial [funded by the Gates Foundation] would soon claim credit for saving millions of lives through these policies – a figure they arrived at through a ludicrously unscientific exercise where they purported to validate their model by using its own hypothetical projections as a counterfactual of what would happen without lockdowns. But the June hearing in Parliament drew attention to another real-world test of the Imperial team’s modeling, this one based on actual evidence.

As Europe descended into the first round of its now year-long experiment with shelter-in-place restrictions, Sweden famously shirked the strategy recommended by Ferguson. In doing so, they also created the conditions of a natural experiment to see how their coronavirus numbers performed against the epidemiology models. Although Ferguson originally limited his scope to the US and UK, a team of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden borrowed his model and adapted it to their country with similarly catastrophic projections. If Sweden did not lock down by mid-April, the Uppsala team projected, the country would soon experience 96,000 coronavirus deaths.

I was one of the first people to call attention to the Uppsala adaptation of Ferguson’s model back on April 30, 2020. Even at that early date, the model showed clear signs of faltering. Although Sweden was hit hard by the virus, its death toll stood at only a few thousand at a point where the adaptation from Ferguson’s model already expected tens of thousands. At the one year mark, Sweden had a little over 13,000 fatalities from Covid-19 – a serious toll, but smaller on a per-capita basis than many European lockdown states and a far cry from the 96,000 deaths projected by the Uppsala adaptation.

The implication for Ferguson’s work remains clear: the primary model used to justify lockdowns failed its first real-world test.

As we look back at the long list of public health lies and tragedies that have occurred since January 2020, I have been trying to think through what systemic changes should be implemented to help prevent such catastrophically poor decision making in the future. I suggest that at the top of the list we include jettisoning both the philosophical dependence of public health decision making (as taught in MPH programs) on utilitarian philosophy, and instead substitute a Judeo-Christian values-based public health decision making process. We have let the MPH utilitarians interject themselves in place of the traditional role of the Physician, and have had to live through the consequences.

And we need to stop letting arrogant physicist modelers generate garbage out from their inadequate models that is then hyped by the press and employed by public health bureaucrats to justify globally deployed “solutions” which caused enormous suffering, avoidable death, and economic devastation.

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Featured image is from Robert Malone

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