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Award winning journalist Julian Assange and Stella Morris married at Belmarsh prison today with four guests and two witnesses in attendance. 

In a joint statement Julian and Stella called on ordinary people everywhere to continue the fight against his extradition to the United States: 

This wedding is more than just your average tying of the knot. This is a powerful statement to the world that love transcends all bounds, even those of powerful states bent on revenge and corrupt self-interest. Support our fight for freedom, for truth, and for love. Help us get Julian back to his family. It is only by standing together, that we can stand at all.’’ 

Below is a picture of Stella Morris, her children and Julian’s brother Gabriel on the way to the prison for the wedding ceremony.

WikiLeaks has pointed out that, “No pictures of Julian Assange from today are available as prison authorities deemed images of the groom a ‘security risk’.’’ 

On the same day as the wedding the National Union of Journalists has renewed its call for the British government to halt Assange’s extradition to the United States where he would be kept in inhumane conditions.

I will leave the last words on Julian’s case to his wife Stella: 

“Julian is not charged with a crime in the UK. The charges he faces in the United States are, according to Amnesty International, politically motivated. And according to every major press freedom organisation, the charges are also an attack on journalism itself, because they criminalise journalism and open the doors to imprisoning journalists for doing their jobs.

The urge of the authorities to silence and disappear Julian is born out of fear. We have the strength of our love and righteous conviction. Julian’s family will fight for his freedom and for his life, until he is free. Love over fear. Join us.’’

You can make a donation to the legal defence fund of Julian Assange to help his fight against extradition by the Biden regime.

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Dr. Leon Tressell is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

For Washington, War Never Ends: Diana Johnstone

March 24th, 2022 by Diana Johnstone

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The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.

It goes on and on. The “war to end war” of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?

The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III.

But this is not a new war. It is the same old war, an extension of the one we call World War II, which was not the same war for all those who took part.

The Russian war and the American war were very, very different.

Russia’s World War II

For Russians, the war was an experience of massive suffering, grief and destruction. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was utterly ruthless, propelled by a racist ideology of contempt for the Slavs and hatred of “Jewish Bolsheviks.” An estimated 27 million died, about two thirds of them civilians. Despite overwhelming losses and suffering, the Red Army succeeded in turning the Nazi tide of conquest that had subdued most of Europe.

This gigantic struggle to drive the German invaders from their soil is known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War, nourishing a national pride that helped console the people for all they had been through. But whatever the pride in victory, the horrors of the war inspired a genuine desire for peace.

America’s World War II

America’s World War II (like World War I) happened somewhere else. That is a very big difference. The war enabled the United States to emerge as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Americans were taught never to compromise, neither to prevent war (“Munich”) nor to end one (“unconditional surrender” was the American way). Righteous intransigence was the fitting attitude of Good in its battle against Evil.

The war economy brought the U.S. out of the depression. Military Keynesianism emerged as the key to prosperity. The Military-Industrial-Complex was born. To continue providing Pentagon contracts to every congressional constituency and guaranteed profits to Wall Street investors, it needed a new enemy. The Communist scare – the very same scare that had contributed to creating fascism – did the trick.

The Cold War: World War II Continued

In short, after 1945, for Russia, World War II was over. For the United States, it was not. What we call the Cold War was its voluntary continuation by leaders in Washington. It was perpetuated by the theory that Russia’s defensive “Iron Curtain” constituted a military threat to the rest of Europe.

At the end of the war, the main security concern of Stalin was to prevent such an invasion from ever happening again. Contrary to Western interpretations, Moscow’s ongoing control of Eastern European countries it had occupied on its way to victory in Berlin was not inspired so much by communist ideology as by determination to create a buffer zone as an obstacle to repeated invasion from the West.

Stalin respected the Yalta lines between East and West and declined to support the life and death struggle of Greek communists. Moscow cautioned leaders of large Western European Communist Parties to eschew revolution and play by the rules of bourgeois democracy. The Soviet occupation could be brutal but was resolutely defensive. Soviet sponsorship of peace movements was perfectly genuine.

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. The lackadaisical U.S. “de-Nazification” of its sector of occupied Germany was accompanied by an organized brain drain of Germans who could be useful to the United States in its rearmament and espionage (from Wernher von Braun to Reinhard Gehlen).

West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

America’s Ideological Victory

Throughout the Cold War, the United States devoted its science and industry to building a gigantic arsenal of deadly weapons, which wreaked devastation without bringing U.S. victory in Korea or Vietnam. But military defeat did not cancel America’s ideological victory.

The greatest triumph of American imperialism has been in spreading its self-justifying images and ideology, primarily in Europe. The dominance of the American entertainment industry has spread its particular blend of self-indulgence and moral dualism around the world, especially among youth. Hollywood convinced the West that World War II was won essentially by the U.S. forces and their allies in the Normandy invasion.

America sold itself as the final force for Good as well as the only fun place to live. Russians were drab and sinister.

In the Soviet Union itself, many people were not immune to the attractions of American self-glorification. Some apparently even thought that the Cold War was all a big misunderstanding, and that if we are very nice and friendly, the West will be nice and friendly too. Mikhail Gorbachev was susceptible to this optimism.

Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock recounts that the desire to liberate Russia from the perceived burden of the Soviet Union was widespread within the Russian elite in the 1980s. It was the leadership rather than the masses who accomplished the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia as the successor state, with the nuclear weapons and U.N. veto of the U.S.S.R. under the alcohol-soaked presidency of Boris Yeltsin – and overwhelming U.S. influence during the 1990s.

The New NATO

Russia’s modernization over the past three centuries has been marked by controversy between “Westernizers” – those who see Russia’s progress in emulation of the more advanced West – and “Slavophiles,” who consider that the nation’s material backwardness is compensated by some sort of spiritual superiority, perhaps based in the simple democracy of the traditional village.

In Russia, Marxism was a Westernizing concept. But official Marxism did not erase admiration for the “capitalist” West and in particular for America. Gorbachev dreamed of “our common European home” living some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of the West.

What happened next proved that the whole “communist scare” justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to perpetuate military Keynesianism and America’s special war to maintain its own economic and ideological hegemony.

There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no more reason to exist.

But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an aggressive military alliance. Yugoslavia had been non-aligned, belonging neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. It threatened no other country. Without authorization from the Security Council or justification for self-defense, the NATO aggression violated international law.

At the very same time, in violation of unwritten but fervent diplomatic promises to Russian leaders, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as new members. Five years later, in 2004, NATO took in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic Republics. Meanwhile, NATO members were being dragged into war in Afghanistan, the first and only “defense of a NATO member” – namely, the United States.

Understanding Putin – Or Not

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin as his successor, partly no doubt because as a former KGB officer in East Germany he had some knowledge and understanding of the West. Putin pulled Russia out of the shambles caused by Yeltsin’s acceptance of American-designed economic shock treatment.

Putin put a stop to the most egregious rip-offs, incurring the wrath of dispossessed oligarchs who used their troubles with the law to convince the West that they were victims of persecution (example: the ridiculous Magnitsky Act).

On Feb. 11, 2007, the Russian Westernizer Putin went to a center of Western power, the Munich Security Conference, and asked to be understood by the West. It is easy to understand, if one wants to. Putin challenged the “unipolar world” being imposed by the United States and emphasized Russia’s desire to “interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all.”

The reaction of the leading Western partners was indignation, rejection, and a 15-year media campaign portraying Putin as some sort of demonic creature.

Indeed, since that speech there have been no limits to Western media’s insults directed at Putin and Russia. And in this scornful treatment we see the two versions of World War II. In 2014, world leaders gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings by U.S. and British forces.

In fact, that 1944 invasion ran into difficulties, even though German forces were mainly concentrated on the Eastern front, where they were losing the war to the Red Army. Moscow launched a special operation precisely to draw German forces away from the Normandy front. Even so, Allied progress could not beat the Red Army to Berlin.

However, thanks to Hollywood, many in the West consider D-Day to be the decisive operation of World War II. To honor the event, Vladimir Putin was there and so was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then, in the following year, world leaders were invited to a lavish victory parade held in Moscow celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Leaders of the United States, Britain and Germany chose not to participate.

This was consistent with an endless series of Western gestures of disdain for Russia and its decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany (it destroyed 80 percent of the Wehrmacht.) On Sept. 19, 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on “the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe” which jointly accused the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany of unleashing World War II.

Vladimir Putin responded to this gratuitous affront in long article on “The Lessons of World War II” published in English in The National Interest on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. Putin answered with a careful analysis of the causes of the war and its profound effect on the lives of the people trapped in the murderous 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including his own parents whose two-year-old son was one of the 800,000 who perished.

The siege of Leningrad, 1942. (Av Boris Kudojarov/RIA Novosti arkiv. Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0)

Clearly, Putin was deeply offended by continual Western refusal to grasp the meaning of the war in Russia. “Desecrating and insulting the memory is mean,” Putin wrote. “Meanness can be deliberate, hypocritical and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the Soviet Union.”

And all this time, NATO continued to expand eastward, more and more openly targeting Russia in its massive war exercises on its land and sea borders.

The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine

The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.

Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing a leadership in Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.

By the end of the year, the government of “democratic Ukraine” was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.

Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company Barisma.

The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to the coup. 

The U.S.-installed regime in Kiev then launched a war against the provinces that continued for eight year, killing thousands of civilians.

And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia’s main naval base at Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.

But to the United States and most of the West, what was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.

The Oval Office Back Door to NATO

Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.

But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy” – Washington’s current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus Communism.

It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against Russia:

“In the 21st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering.”

The Statement also clearly described Kiev’s war against Donbass as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising assertion: “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” (my emphasis). This is followed by promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of recovery of Donbass and Crimea.

Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to “understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don’t. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.

Ambiguous Echoes

Putin explaining his reasons for going to war. (AP screenshot from YouTube)

Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in Ukraine as necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality, the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.

But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.

Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya provided a second example.

Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries, Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.

But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly “Asiatic” due to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.

Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they fight on our side against the Slavs?

Conflicting War Aims

For Russian leaders, their military “operation” is intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan trap (giving them “their Vietnam”), this is a psychological victory in their endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin. Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely want this “operation” to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation.

Today Volodymyr Zelensky implored the U.S. Congress to give Ukraine more military aid. The aid will keep the war going. Anthony Blinken told NPR that the United States is responding by “denying Russia the technology it needs to modernize its country, to modernize key industries: defense and aerospace, its high-tech sector, energy exploration.”

The American war aim is not to spare Ukraine, but to ruin Russia. That takes time.

The danger is that the Russians won’t be able to end this war, and the Americans will do all they can to keep it going.

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Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at [email protected]

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

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Memo to the White House: next time you video call a Chinese leader do not announce to the media that you issued a warning. The days of China heeding public warnings from a US president about Ukraine or any other issue, are over and it is bound to be detrimental to any outcome that would be advantageous to your point of view.  

By all means issue it privately but publically playing that card makes it sound as if you are threatening China.

This is not a redundant point of procedure, or protocol, good manners or understanding history. It matters because there will, more than likely, come a time over the next 30 months when you will have to privately warn China. It won’t be about Ukraine. It will be about Taiwan.

Several Asian nations have sought to bolster security ties with the US as a result of the Ukraine invasion. China has border disputes, sometimes deadly, with neighbors including Japan, India and Vietnam. Beijing has stepped up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan, sending warplanes on nearly 1,000 forays through the island’s air defense identification zone last year.

Consequently, the US has sought to build a coalition of democracies, including both traditional treaty partners such as Japan and the Quad, including Australia and India. Other nations in the region are looking to firm up their defense ties with Washington.

Ukraine has upset the apple cart. When Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping met at the Winter Games in Beijing in February, and hailed the “no limits” relationship between their countries, they wanted to establish another bloc to counter the declining West. That is not going to happen. Russia is diminished in China’s eyes not because of its actions in Ukraine but because it seemed so badly planned.

Planning is central to Xi’s philosophy or at least the appearance of having a plan. When Xi assumed office in 2012, he seemed a continuation of his steady but uncharismatic, actually deadly dull, predecessor, Hu Jintao. However, at the party congress of 2017 Xi revealed his “China Dream”.  This was nothing less than an attempt, a plan, to revive China’s glory era, normally considered before the 19th century and the arrival of the rapacious West, and crucially, cement the power of the party, weakened by decades of rampant east-coast led consumerism. A “well-off society and the modernization of socialism” before 2035 was the goal.

Another goal was to establish China as a country with, what it describes, international influence by the mid-century. All long term plans, so why the hurry, why is next year or 2024 so important? Simple answer. Time. Born in June 1953, Xi is 68. Not old for a Chinese leader but he is in a hurry as the economy is failing and nationalism has to replace the pursuit of wealth if the party is to remain in power. Nothing in China is as it seems. Taiwan is not about Taiwan. It is about Xi and the party and the spluttering economy. Taiwan may be the key, not the economy, to the party’s supremacy. Xi has always had an eye on the history books.  He wants to replace Deng Xiaoping, the real architect of modern China, as the most important leader since Mao Zedong.  The gasping economy won’t do it for him. Getting Taiwan back, he believes, will.

Memo to the White House: issue warnings privately.

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Geopolitical analyst Tom Clifford reporting from Beijing. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Xi, who was on a four-day state visit to the UK, addressed both Houses of Parliament at Westminster, 21 October 2015 (Licensed under Public Domain)

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First published on April 27, 2021

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With the world being told that so-called ‘vaccine passports’ will be required for all international travel in future, and in many countries even to enter shops, restaurants, bars, gyms, hotels, theatres, concerts and sports events, the impression we are being given is that the measure is a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic. In Europe, however, which hosts 8 of the top 10 pharmaceutical exporting countries, planning for vaccine passports began at least 20 months prior to the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. Apparently, the pandemic conveniently provided European politicians with the ‘excuse’ they needed to introduce the idea.

The ‘European Commission’ – the executive body of Europe – first published a proposal for vaccine passports on 26 April 2018. Buried deep in a document dealing with ‘Strengthened Cooperation against Vaccine Preventable Diseases’, the proposal was essentially ignored by the mainstream media.

A roadmap document issued in early 2019 subsequently set out specific plans for implementing the European Commission’s proposal. The primary action listed in the roadmap was to “examine the feasibility of developing a common vaccination card/passport” for European citizens that is “compatible with electronic immunization information systems and recognized for use across borders.” The plan aimed for a legislative proposal to be issued in Europe by 2022.

Interestingly, the roadmap uses several terms that, while relatively uncommon in most countries prior to the pandemic, have since become heard on a daily basis in the mainstream media. Perhaps the most notable of these is ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Supporting European countries in “countering vaccine hesitancy” is listed in the document as one of the key action points.

The possibility of pandemics and “unexpected outbreaks” occurring is also referred to in the roadmap. Revealingly, specific reference is made to supporting the authorization of “innovative vaccines, including for emerging health threats.” Stating that the “vaccine manufacturing industry” has a “key role” in meeting the aims described in the document, the roadmap lists “improving EU manufacturing capacity” and stockpiling vaccines as further action points to be considered. Towards strengthening “existing partnerships” and “collaboration with international actors and initiatives,” the roadmap also refers to a global vaccination summit meeting that took place in September 2019. A close examination of the attendees and subject matter for this meeting is revealing.

The 2019 Global Vaccination Summit

Unreported by most mainstream media outlets, a ‘Global Vaccination Summit’ was hosted in Brussels, Belgium, on 12 September 2019. Organized by the European Commission in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the meeting took place just 3 months before the coronavirus outbreak began. Significantly, this was also only 36 days before the now infamous coronavirus outbreak simulation exercise, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which took place on 18 October 2019.

An invitation-only event, the vaccination summit participants included political leaders, high-level representatives from the United Nations and other international organizations, health ministries, leading academics, scientists and health professionals, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations.

The summit was structured around three round tables entitled ‘In Vaccines We Trust’, ‘The Magic Of Science’, and ‘Vaccines Protecting Everyone, Everywhere’. Notable panel members for these round tables included Nanette Cocero, Global President of Pfizer Vaccines; Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, the Global Vaccine Alliance – an organization that has received vast amounts of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Joe Cerrell, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Managing Director for Global Policy and Advocacy.

Pandemic planning was clearly in evidence at this summit meeting. Key documents distributed to the participants included reports on ‘Pandemic influenza preparedness planning’, ‘A pandemic influenza exercise for the European Union’, ‘Avian Influenza and Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Planning’, ‘Pandemic influenza preparedness and response planning’, ‘Towards sufficiency of Pandemic Influenza Vaccines in the EU’, and ‘A “Public Private Partnership” on European Pandemic influenza vaccines’. Across all these documents, the goal of strengthening collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry is repeatedly stressed, as also is the message that a global pandemic was now inevitable.

Vaccine passports: who really benefits?

Who really benefits from vaccine passports? Certainly not ordinary people, for whom sharing their health records and other personal data could soon become mandatory merely for participation in society. Instead, the chief beneficiary will be the multinational pharmaceutical industry. With global drug and vaccine sales already forecast to reach $1.5 trillion this year, pharmaceutical companies and their investors are salivating at the prospect of vaccine passports becoming mandatory worldwide.

The total market for COVID-19 vaccines is predicted to be worth $100 billion in sales and $40 billion in post-tax profits. Annual vaccinations against mutations of the coronavirus could raise these numbers still further. Unless we resist vaccine passports and instead ‘vote for reason’, drug and vaccine makers could force the world into long-term economic and political dependency. Our urgent goal must therefore be to replace the greed-driven pharmaceutical ‘business with disease’ with a healthcare system based on truly preventive approaches. Accepting the pharmaceutical industry’s alternative to this is simply unthinkable.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings.

Featured image is from Dr. Rath Health Foundation

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Washington Is Driving the World to Nuclear War

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 23, 2022

Since the Russian action in Ukraine began, provoked by Washington’s cold shoulder to Russian security concerns, Washington, in addition to doing all possible to keep the conflict going, has also dumped three more provocations on the Kremlin:  an attempted coup or “color revolution” in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, NATO military maneuvers currently under way in the former Soviet republic of Georgia which is not a NATO member, and NATO maneuvers in Poland on the Border of Belarus, a former Russian province and current Russian ally.

What Is Blocking a Peace-Agreement Between Putin and Zelensky

By Eric Zuesse, March 23, 2022

Zelensky is now saying that “after a cease-fire and steps toward providing security guarantees,” Zelensky would negotiate “the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region held by Russian-backed separatists.” This is the first major change-in-position by EITHER side in the present conflict, and the fact that it is being made by Ukraine is indisputable proof that militarily Russia is winning the war.

Biden to Discuss Potential Use of Nuclear Weapons in Russian-Ukrainian Conflict

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, March 23, 2022

As the conflict continues to intensify in Ukraine, the West seems interested in driving a new wave of international nuclearization. Washington announced that it will be organizing a nuclear contingency plan in order to face an eventual escalation of the crisis between Ukraine and Russia.

23 Years Ago, NATO’s War on Yugoslavia: Kosovo “Freedom Fighters” Financed by Organized Crime

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 23, 2022

Twenty-three years ago marks the  beginning of NATO’s aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia (March 24, 1999 – June 10, 1999). The bombings which lasted for almost three months were followed by the military invasion (under a bogus UN mandate) and illegal occupation of  the province of Kosovo.

I Am Angry. I Am a Refugee. My Family Took Me Aged 5 from the War in My Country Which Killed 5 of My Brothers and Sisters.

By Mohamednur Abdi, March 23, 2022

I am so angry with the Greek government which only cares for refugees from the Ukraine. Its message to me is clear. The refugees from Ukraine are seen as people like the Greeks. But refugees like me from Africa and the middle eastern countries are not such ‘good’ humans.

NATO Is a Problem, Not the Solution

By Yves Engler, March 23, 2022

While in no way excusing Russia’s criminal invasion, NATO expansion eastward increased its likelihood. Although we’ll never know if the war would not have happened under different circumstances, after a month of Russian violence against Ukraine the two countries’ negotiators have reportedly agreed that it will reject joining NATO as part of a peace pact.

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Weaponizing Coal: Australia Gives Ukraine a Gift

March 24th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

Few would forget the antics of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who, as Treasurer, entered Parliament with a lump of coal and proceeded to praise it with the enthusiasm of a fetish worshipper.  “Don’t be afraid,” he told fellow parliamentarians.  “Don’t be scared.”

He has, with deep reluctance, conceded that climate change is taking place and, with even deeper reluctance, that human agency might be involved.  But under his leadership, the fossil fuel lobby of Australia has no reason to fear.  Denialism has simply become more covert.

This month, Industry Minister Angus Taylor, the government’s premier ignoramus on climate change, promised AU$50.3 million to fossil fuel entities to guarantee Australia against “the devastating impacts of a gas supply shortfall, as seen recently in Europe.”  His government was “accelerating priority gas infrastructure projects that will protect Australia from potential energy shortages, keep pressure on prices and create jobs in regional Australia as part of our plan for a stronger future.”

Indeed, the lobby has every reason to be delighted with that other recent announcement by Morrison to enlist Australian coal in Ukraine’s war effort.  With a shamelessness only he can muster, the Prime Minister has managed to make digging and exporting coal, even in small amounts at great cost, virtuous.  In an official statement, Morrison claimed that,

“in response to a direct request from Ukraine, Australia will donate 70,000 tonnes of thermal coal.  This will help Ukraine’s power generators operating and supplying electricity to the power grid at this critical time.”

Little by way of logistical or pricing detail was given.  We know who benefits the most from this.  A triumphalist Whitehaven Coal will supply it, and the cost to the Australian taxpayer will be in the order of AU$31 million.  Given that Whitehaven Coal has been a Liberal Party donor – AU$98,000 has been given over the last five years – the whiff of something rotten in the land of coal is strong.

The company’s board would have been delighted by the recent spike in its share prices.  It also remains unclear whether the company offered a discount on the coal to the government.  One thing is beyond doubt: Canberra is offering to foot the transport bill.

The coal, according to the Prime Minister, was needed “before the end of May and we have arranged the shipping for that to take place and are working with other countries to ensure it can get to Ukraine.”  With beaming delight, Morrison could say that “it’s our coal.  We dug it up.  We’ve arranged the ship. We’ve put it on the ship and we’re sending it there to Ukraine to help power up their resistance and to give that encouragement.”

Richard Denniss, an economist based at the Australia Institute, is doubtful about the whole operation.  “Sending a ship load of coal to Ukraine via Poland is just conservative virtue signalling.”  If anything, the measure was insensible, given that Poland itself had “lots of coal.  If we really thought Ukraine needed coal (I doubt it) we could just give them some money to buy Polish coal.”

The request is also slightly odd given that it was conveyed to Canberra from Poland itself. “It was made to me,” claimed Morrison, “through the Polish Prime Minister and we’re very pleased to be able to meet that need.”

The amount of thermal coal is also raising eyebrows amongst those not inclined towards astrological numbers and fantasy projections.  Australia is sending a mere 10th of Ukraine thermal coal reserves, described by Resources Minister Keith Pitt as making “a real difference for the people of Ukraine by providing continued energy security, ensuring continued electricity supply  to homes and industry”.  With little justification, Morrison is also making the claim that a million Ukrainian homes will be powered, though left the duration of that effort in doubt.

The answer to such a crisis is not coal nor, in fact, fossil fuel exports masquerading as humanitarian rescue.  Bernard Keane of Crikey makes a relevant observation: “the clear lesson of Putin’s aggression in energy terms is the need to get out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, removing the volatility and strategic weakness that reliance on global commodities brings.”

Whether the coal will ever reach its intended recipients is a question worth asking.  If the coal transits through Poland, it will have to be transported via rail to Ukraine, which raises issues of viable infrastructure.  Sea access is also bound to be unlikely, and even if that is taken, one analyst pithily notes that a vessel “should be quite a sitting target if the Russians knew what it was and where it was coming from.”

The Morrison government has made a habit of celebrating the announcement rather than the execution of detail.  Mendacity and incompetence are twinned in this government’s insignia, and Ukrainian officials best ready themselves for disappointment.

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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]

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***

The American Conservative magazine criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been on an embarrassing public relations campaign after being called out in Israel for historical revisionism relating to the Holocaust, attempting to elicit a disingenuous emotional response from the West, and demonstrating the illiberalism of Ukraine by banning political opposition parties.

Zelensky for quoting American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech to the US Congress on March 16.

“Zelensky also invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, not to advocate for peace and harmony but a no-fly zone, more military aid, and increased sanctions,” the article said in response to Zelensky telling Congress: “I have a dream. I have a need. I need to protect our skies. I need your help, which means the same you feel when you hear the words I have a dream.”

According to the author, the US assistance to Ukraine that Zelensky wants is unrealistic and would be very dangerous if the White House agreed. The journalist also criticized Kiev for exaggerating reality and outright lying. The author cited The Ghost of Kiev, claims of 11,000 dead Russian soldiers in just 11 days of fighting, and the Russians trying to destabilize nuclear material as examples of “when the Ukrainians have lied—or at least greatly overstated the truth—with the hope of eliciting an emotional response from the West that precipitates more Ukrainian aid.”

“I, too, hope Biden is a leader of peace, which is why the president and Congress should not give Zelensky what he wants,” the author concluded.

Although the Biden administration and its predecessors fuelled the war in Eastern Ukraine by arming and funding the Ukrainian military and its Far-Right militia partners, whilst ignoring international law breaches against Donbass civilians, it appears that a No-Fly Zone is an escalation too far even for Washington. None-the-less, this has not deterred Zelensky from lambasting and shaming Western countries for not imposing a No-Fly Zone.

Days later, on March 20, Zelensky caused outrage in Israel after delivering a speech to the Knesset that lawmakers described as “outrageous.” The Ukrainian President had the audacity to draw comparisons between the Holocaust and Russia’s military operation, whilst ignoring some Ukrainian’s complicity in the Nazi-led genocide.

Israeli Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel tweeted:

“I admire the Ukraine president and support the Ukrainian people in heart and deed, but the terrible history of the Holocaust cannot be rewritten.”

An unnamed senior minister told Ynet:

“Zelensky also distorted the part his country played in the murder of Jews.”

Religious Zionism MKs also criticized Zelensky, with the opposition party leader Bezalel Smotrich slamming the Holocaust comparisons and accusing the Ukrainian leader of trying “to rewrite history and erase the involvement of the Ukrainian people in the extermination of Jews.”

Although the West is whitewashing the prevalence of Nazi and Far-Right ideology in Ukraine and falsely alludes that the country is a liberal bastion struggling against an authoritarian Russia, the Israelis are not entertaining this notion. Although the West cheaply dismisses Ukraine’s harboring of Far-Right ideology within the political and military apparatus of the country because Zelensky is Jewish, journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal have already debunked this line of thinking.

More shockingly though, and exposing the illiberalism of Ukraine despite a constant media campaign to claim otherwise, Zelensky banned 11 opposition parties over alleged Russian links. However, even ignoring the contradiction of banning Russia-friendly political parties in a supposedly liberal and free society, many of the banned opposition parties in fact have no links to Russia and even condemned what they termed themselves as an invasion of Ukraine.

Avi Yemini, the Australian-Israeli Chief of Rebel News Australia, tweeted:

“Zelensky is so full of s***. First, he demands Israeli weapons from the Knesset, claiming Ukraine was a safe haven for Jews in the holocaust. And then, he banned 11 opposition parties but left the Nazi parties.”

Western media falsely claimed that all 11 opposition parties were Russia-linked, but as Yemini highlighted, the Nazi parties were left alone, something omitted from Western media reports. Western media intentionally omits such information as it once again indicates the illiberalism of Ukraine.

In this way, although Zelensky is mostly receiving endless plaudits from the West, cracks in the official narrative are beginning to emerge. Firstly, American conservatives called out Zelensky for attempting to manipulate the emotions of the US Congress to try and achieve a No-Fly Zone, something which will ultimately lead to a greater conflict. Then prominent Israeli voices did not hold back in calling out Zelensky’s attempts of historical revisionism regarding Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust. Finally, the banning of 11 opposition parties on March 20, something that alienates and isolates Ukraine’s ethnic Russian community, accounting for about 20% of the country’s population, rounds up Zelensky’s latest illiberal actions.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image:  Zelensky in 2019, photo by President.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0  via Wikimedia Commons

Washington Is Driving the World to Nuclear War

March 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

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***

Since the Russian action in Ukraine began, provoked by Washington’s cold shoulder to Russian security concerns, Washington, in addition to doing all possible to keep the conflict going, has also dumped three more provocations on the Kremlin:  an attempted coup or “color revolution” in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, NATO military maneuvers currently under way in the former Soviet republic of Georgia which is not a NATO member, and NATO maneuvers in Poland on the Border of Belarus, a former Russian province and current Russian ally. See this.

The signal Washington consistently sends to the Kremlin is aggression.  Why has no member of any government in the Western world, no presstitute in the Western media pointed this out?  It is difficult to fathom the irresponsibility of Washington adding to the Ukraine provocation three more provocations simultaneously.  Why provoke a country already concerned with its security with more security concerns unless you are trying to widen the war?

The US Treasury is working with Congress to prevent Russia’s use of her gold reserves that she kept in her own hands, with the bulk of Russian reserves having been seized, a theft made easy by the stupid fool that Putin keeps as head of the Russian central bank.  It is extraordinary that the Russian central bank kept Russia’s reserves in Western hands while Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine.  The Russian central bank must have wanted Russia to lose her reserves.

Now the remaining reserves are to be targeted by Washington in this way.  Sanctions will be applied to every country that permits or facilitates Russian payments in gold or the buying and selling of gold by Russia.  This, the US senator, Angus King, said, will collapse the Russian economy, leaving Russia no means of payment.

Senator King and the US Treasury are overlooking that all acts of war are not military, and what the senator is sponsoring is an act of war.  Putin recognizes it as such.  He declared it to be “a total undisguised aggression” and “a war waged by economic, political, and informational means.”

So what is Russia doing in response to the declared intent of the West to destroy her?  

She is enabling her own destruction.

She distributes her foreign exchange reserves among Western banks where they can be seized.

She keeps the economies of her enemies alive by continuing to supply them with energy and minerals–all because her moronic central bank thinks Russia needs foreign exchange, which will be seized regardless.

She continues with a go-slow war that gives her enemies more time to demonize Russia and create permanent hatred of Russia in the Western populations, that gives Western idiots more time to blunder into a wider war, such as the Western plan to deploy NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine.

In short, the Kremlin’s response to the sanctions is mindless.  Here for example is Germany’s own assessment of the impact on Germany if Russia stops sustaining Germany’s existence with Russian energy:

“A 2018 stress test run by the German civil defense agency, the BBK, found that all crucial services will be impacted by a gas supply shortage.The two-day crisis management exercise Lukex 18, which involved several states in southern Germany, found that the shortage of gas supply will have ‘a drastic effect on public life,’ including the closure of public and private facilities. The disruption of supply will also lead to ‘far-reaching, difficult-to-predict consequences for the service sector and the production of goods,’ according to the BBK.”

If Russia turned off the energy, Germany would force an end to the sanctions on Russia or Germany would leave NATO despite Germany’s occupation by US troops.  But apparently the Kremlin would rather risk Russia’s destruction than to violate a contract or forego foreign exchange earnings that it cannot use.  The Kremlin seems destined to forego the opportunity to crush the sanctions and continue selling energy to Germany until Germany has had time to locate and construct the facilities for an alternative means of supply.

The West’s naked aggression and the Kremlin’s insouciance guarantee a wider war ending in world destruction.  Can no one in leadership position see it coming?  Do Western politicians believe Russia will allow herself to be defeated by non-military means?  Does the Kremlin believe that resolving the Ukrainian situation will end the West’s attacks on Russia?  As always in human affairs, stupidity prevails.

That Washington and its despicable puppet states parade around like goody two shoes, shouting accusations at Russia when it is Washington and its puppets who are provoking war, and everyone falls for it tells me that Washington has the world on the road to nuclear armageddon.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Joe Biden said he would target Russia when he became US president. But, his war with Russia will have mainly European casualties. Photo Credit: The Cradle


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

Newly Released Pfizer Documents Reveal COVID Jab Dangers

March 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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***

A small batch of documents released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in mid-November 2021 revealed that in the first three months of the COVID jab rollout, Pfizer received 42,086 adverse event reports that included 1,223 deaths

The first really large tranche of Pfizer documents — some 10,000 pages — was released by the FDA March 1, 2022. Included are nine pages of recorded side effects, about 158,000 different health problems in all

An initial review of case report forms (CRFs) reveal significant data collection errors and anomalies

Problems included patients entered into the “healthy population” group who were far from healthy; serious adverse event (SAE) numbers that were left blank; sample barcodes that were missing; at least one death of a patient the day before being listed as being at a medical checkup; and second doses that were administered outside the three-week protocol window. There also are questions as to whether participants were properly observed for an adequate amount of time; plus adverse events were listed as “not serious” despite extended hospital stay and much more

A majority of the CRFs in this release were from Ventavia-run trial sites. Ventavia is currently facing a lawsuit brought by Brook Jackson, a former Ventavia regional director. Jackson was fired shortly after she brought concerns about potential data falsification and poor laboratory management to the attention of the FDA and higher-ups in the company

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In September 2021, a group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to obtain the documentation used to approve Comirnaty, including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports and lists of active and inactive ingredients.

When, after a month, the FDA still had not responded to the FOIA request, the PHMPT sued.1 Pfizer and the FDA asked the judge to give them 75 years to release all the documents (doling out just 500 pages per month)2 but, fortunately, the judge ruled that they have to release them at a rate of 55,000 pages per month.

COVID Jab Supporter Gets Red-Pilled

In mid-November 2021, the FDA released the first 91 pages,3,4 which alone revealed the FDA has been aware of shocking safety issues since April 30, 2021. For nurse educator John Campbell, featured in the video above, these documents appear to have served as a “red pill,”5 waking him up to the possibility that the jabs may be far more dangerous than anyone expected, but he didn’t get around to reviewing them until now.

In his video, Campbell reviews the documents listed as “5.3.6. Postmarketing Experience,” which were originally marked “confidential.” They reveal that, cumulatively, through February 28, 2021, Pfizer received 42,086 adverse event reports, including 1,223 deaths.

As noted by Campbell, “It would have been good to know about this at the time, wouldn’t it?” referring to the rollout of the jabs. Campbell has been fairly consistent in his support of the “safe and effective” vaccine narrative, but “This has just destroyed trust in authority,” he says.

To have 1,223 fatalities and 42,086 reports of injury in the first three months is a significant safety signal, especially when you consider that the 1976 swine flu vaccine was pulled after only 25 deaths.

Now, the number of doses shipped has been redacted under a FOIA redaction code that stands for “Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential.” Why would the number of doses shipped be confidential?

Campbell is clearly bothered by this redaction, as you cannot calculate the incidence rate or side effects if you don’t know what the denominator is. As noted by Campbell, that number cannot be proprietary. It’s being withheld for some other reason (and I just stated what that might be).

Even without knowing the underreporting factor, Campbell is appalled by the number of reported side effects. It is very clear that this information red-pilled Campbell. For an overview of the types of side effects recorded, check out Campbell’s video. I’ve already reviewed that in previous articles.

Here, we’ll move on to the first really large tranche of Pfizer documents, which was released March 1, 2022. In all, the FDA has some 450,000 pages of data from Pfizer’s COVID jab trials, and we now have just over 10,000 of those pages. You can find them all on PHMPT.org.6

Findings From Early Review of Case Reports

March 7, 2022, investigative journalist Sonia Elijah published a review of her initial findings on Trial Site News,7 having glossed through some of the thousands of newly-released documents.

Her review centers primarily on the case report forms (CRFs). These are documents used in clinical research to record standardized data from each patient, including adverse events. As such, they’re a crucial part of the clinical trial process.

A majority of the CRFs in this release were from Ventavia-run trial sites. Ventavia is currently facing a lawsuit brought by Brook Jackson, a former Ventavia regional director. Jackson was fired shortly after she brought concerns about potential data falsification and poor laboratory management to the attention of the FDA and higher-ups in the company.

Her testimony was published November 2, 2021, in The British Medical Journal — the oldest and most prestigious medical journal in the world — by investigative journalist Paul Thacker.8 Facebook fact checkers actually tried to “debunk” this BMJ article and censored it.

In her review of the CRFs, Elijah found a number of errors and anomalies that seem to corroborate Jackson’s claims, including the following:9

In closing, Elijah writes:10

“All the evidence gleaned over a limited time appears to back up whistleblower Jackson’s claims of poor trial site data management and raises questions as to how Ventavia conducted the Pfizer clinical trials.

The errors and anomalies in the CRFs also allude to her claims that the clinical research associates were not trained adequately, with many having had no prior clinical experience history. If such egregious findings are true at these sites, could they manifest at other trial sites around North America and beyond?”

Enormous List of Side Effects

The latest tranche of Pfizer documents also includes a whopping nine pages of recorded side effects — 158,000 in all! The picture below speaks louder than anything I can say about this list.

pfizer list release

Enormous Gap Between What We’ve Been Told and Reality

The Pfizer documents reveal an enormous gap between what we were told about the jab and what the FDA and Pfizer actually knew about it. In a recent article published by The Defender,11 Dr. Meryl Nass asks, “Pfizer, FDA documents contradict official COVID vaccine safety narrative — Is this fraud?”

As noted by Nass, what we’re told in the media is one thing, and what these documents reveal is another. And, importantly, the content of these documents “tell us what information Pfizer and the FDA are willing to stand by.” They also establish what the legal requirements for emergency use authorization and licensing.

“It may come as a shock, but what the FDA said when it issued both the EUA and the license for Pfizer’s vaccines was very different from what you heard from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the media and other sources,” Nass writes.12

One glaring example of official recommendations running counter to the data is the CDC’s recommendation to vaccinate during pregnancy. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly assured the public that the jab poses no health risks to pregnant women or their babies. Here’s Walensky in May 2021:

And here she is, in October 2021, still claiming there are no risks.

Similarly, in August 2021, when Comirnaty was licensed, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confirmed the COVID jab was safe during pregnancy:

Click here to watch the video.

How can this be, when as late as December 2021, the FDA and Pfizer claimed there was inadequate information to determine if there are risks in pregnancy? How can Walensky and Fauci make definitive claims about safety when there are no data?

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) also make definitive statements about safety, claiming “Vaccination may occur in any trimester, and emphasis should be on vaccine receipt as soon as possible to maximize maternal and fetal health.”13

What are they basing this on? The absence of data certainly isn’t a solid basis on which to make safety claims. As noted by Nass:14

“… the CDC, in its own Jan. 7 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,15 stated there was insufficient data to make any determination of COVID vaccine safety in the first trimester.

So, while the federal agencies had no reason to believe the vaccine was safe in pregnancy, and made sure their legal documents said so, they nonetheless advertised the vaccine as safe for pregnant women.

Then ACOG, a nonprofit professional organization of obstetricians, not only provided their members with false information on vaccine safety, but furthermore instructed them on the use of propaganda to convince expectant mothers to take the shot.”

CDC Guidance Contradicts Comirnaty Label

She also lists several instances where CDC statements to the public clearly contradict statements on the Comirnaty label. For example:16,17

  • While the CDC initially claimed that anaphylactic reactions to the jab occur at approximately the same rate as other vaccines, they’ve since removed that claim, and both the CDC and the Comirnaty label now states that administration of Comirnaty is limited to facilities that can medically manage anaphylactic reactions.

“This is not the case for other vaccines,” Nass says, adding that research from Harvard hospitals reveal the rate of anaphylaxis in employees who got the COVID jab was 50 to 100 times higher than the rate claimed by the CDC, which calculates that rate based on reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Interestingly enough, this matches up with what we believe to be the underreporting factor for VAERS might be.

  • While the CDC claims post-jab myocarditis is mild and resolves quickly, the Comirnaty label clearly states that “Information is not yet available about potential long-term sequelae.”
  • The CDC recommends the COVID jab for pregnant women, yet the label states that “available data on Comirnaty administered to pregnant women are insufficient to inform vaccine associated risks in pregnancy.”
  • The CDC, FDA and mainstream media contend that the COVID jab cannot cause cancer or fertility problems, yet the Comirnaty label clearly states that “Comirnaty has not been evaluated for the potential to cause carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, or impairment of male fertility.” If it has not been evaluated, how can they claim to know that it cannot cause these kinds of problems — especially considering the list of reported side effects, above?
  • Even though the stated purpose of mass vaccination is to create “herd immunity,” the FDA did not require Pfizer to assess whether the jab could protect against asymptomatic infection or prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

What Was It All For?

With each passing week, the cracks in the official COVID narrative keep multiplying and widening. It’ll be interesting to see what finally breaks the proverbial dam.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is now out there pushing for a fourth shot,18 saying a second booster will be “necessary for most,” as three shots not only can’t protect against variants, but they rapidly wane in strength. For those same reasons, Americans must expect to get an annual booster each fall.

Under normal circumstances, that should have ripped the wool off of people’s eyes, but the COVID brainwashing has been so successful, many still can’t see just how badly they’ve been lied to. I believe the final salvo that will wake up the masses will either be revelations about harms, or the realization of what the planned social credit system would actually mean for the average American.

In 2018, Pfizer proudly partnered with a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) payment platform, Alipay, which was used to implement an early Chinese version of vaccine passports, called the “Internet + Vaccination” initiative, aimed at creating “Disease awareness via mobile devices.”19

According to the U.S. State Department, Alipay is a “tool” used by the CCP in its build-up of “technology-facilitated surveillance and social control” network, also known as a social credit system. The same sort of system is now being rolled out in other parts of the world, including the U.S., so it’s interesting to note Pfizer’s involvement with that early digital vaccine passport initiative.

Mid-March 2022, Bourla gave an interview with Washington Post Live (above), admitting the decision to use mRNA technology in the creation of a COVID “vaccine” was “counterintuitive,” as Pfizer has “good experience” with several other vaccine technologies, but only two years’ worth of experience with mRNA, which had never been used in a commercially available medicine before.

In the end, Bourla may come to regret that decision, as it has turned out to be an incredibly lethal one. Although I guess it will depend on whether he’s ever held to account for those choices.

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Notes

1 The Defender November 19, 2021

2 Newsmax December 8, 2021

3, 6 PHMPT.org Pfizer documents

4 thekylebecker.substack.com November 21, 2021

5 Steve Kirsch Substack March 11, 2022

7, 9, 10 Trial Site News March 7, 2022

8 The BMJ 2021; 375:n2635

11, 12, 13, 14, 16 The Defender March 15, 2022

15 CDC MMWR January 7, 2022; 71(1): 26-30

17 Meryl Nass Substack March 14, 2022

18 NY Post March 13, 2022

19 The National Pulse December 29, 2021

Featured image is from The Vaccine Reaction

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On Monday, 21 March, AP reported that “Zelenskyy said that Kyiv will be ready to discuss the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region held by Russian-backed separatists after a cease-fire and steps toward providing security guarantees.” This milestone is the very first time that Zelensky has said that there might be circumstances under which “the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region held by Russian-backed separatists” could even possibly be negotiated by Ukraine’s government.

All Ukrainian-government leaders, after U.S. President Barack Obama perpetrated in Ukraine a violent coup which overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President and installed a U.S.-controlled rabidly anti-Russian government in Ukraine in February 2014, have said that Ukraine will never consider the status of those two former regions of Ukraine to be negotiable.

So: Zelensky is now saying that “after a cease-fire and steps toward providing security guarantees,” Zelensky would negotiate “the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region held by Russian-backed separatists.” This is the first major change-in-position by EITHER side in the present conflict, and the fact that it is being made by Ukraine is indisputable proof that militarily Russia is winning the war.

In other words: after a “cease-fire,” Ukraine would be in the weaker position, and, in that position, would then find itself obligated (by what Zelensky has just now said on this matter) to negotiate its acceptance that neither of those two regions is any longer a part of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine’s government would then be demanding from Russia’s Government “security guarantees.” Ukraine’s government would be requiring these “security guarantees” no longer from the U.S. Government (NATO), but instead from Russia’s Government.

Russia’s Government had invaded Ukraine on February 24th for two reasons:

(1) to permanently block Ukrainian membership for Ukraine in the anti-Russian military alliance NATO; and,

(2) to “denazify” Ukraine. The current breakthrough (“Zelenskyy said that Kyiv will be ready to discuss the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region held by Russian-backed separatists after a cease-fire and steps toward providing security guarantees”)

This opens the door to achieving (1); however, the deeper, and continuing deadlock is (2) denazification of Ukraine.

In my news-report on March 21, “Why The Question Of Which Side Is ‘nazi’ Blocks Any Peace Settlement”, was explained WHY that issue is so extremely unlikely to be able to be agreed-upon between Zelensky and Putin — and, therefore, why Russia will either have to accept defeat in this war, or else defeat Ukraine 100% militarily before there will be any capitulation by Ukraine in this conflict.

Since we now know that Russia is, at present, winning the war, the ONLY possibility by which Ukraine will be able to impose capitulation on Russia is by reversing the current military reality.

In any case, however, this is an extremely interesting situation. If Russia wins this conflict, then the post-World-War-II domination of the world by the United States will have definitively ended. However, if Ukraine wins it, then Russia will have to accept that, ultimately, it will become conquered by the U.S., and that the only agency remaining for Russia’s Government will be to decide whether that defeat will come by a peaceful capitulation, or, instead, by a world-annihilating WW III.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

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***

I wanted to turn your attention to a fascinating poll that came out the other day.

The Toronto Star hired a polling agency to survey Canadians about their views about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. What made this poll unique is that it separated the sides to three separate groups: the triple vaccinated, the double vaxxed, and the unvaccinated.

Now, it’s one thing to have taken two COVID injections, but those who committed to the repeated booster regime were either compelled to do so (frequently under duress) or became true believers to the COVID narrative. As the polling shows, this group, by and large, submits to authority figures and embraces the current narrative, regardless of the actual merits of the solutions.

The other group — and remember, unvaccinated Canadians have faced severe discrimination for not taking the mRNA injections — saw the government’s appeal to their supposed health, and wholly rejected the COVID narrative. Unvaccinated Canadians are still not allowed to leave the country. Their rejection of the government narrative comes at an incredible personal and professional cost.

While the triple shot crew fully embraces the Ukraine narrative, you can see that the unvaccinated are incredibly skeptical. Those who received two shots and stopped there are a mixed bag.

Those who were fully compliant to the booster regime are even willing to fight World War 3 over Ukraine, via a no fly zone, the poll shows.

Click this to see the full survey.

To me, this speaks to an incredible divide in western society today. We are not so much split between party lines as we are between compliant and non compliant citizens. There are those who instinctively question the commands coming on down from above from authority figures (we tend not to respect their credentials as a blanket appeal to our submission), and there are those who accept the government narrative, because they are under the impression that these authority figures are here to help us.

Supporting the Current Thing is encouraged by our leaders as a virtuous endeavor, and just like COVID Mania, there are perks attached to it. As with COVID Mania, it is much easier to adhere to the Ukraine narrative than to balk at it.

Not supporting a crippling sanctions regime on Russia, or arming neo fascist Ukrainian militias to the teeth, or even the imposition of a World War 3 level no fly zone over Ukraine, has become akin to being a bad person, and will sometimes even result in your labeling as a traitorous agent for a foreign regime. You don’t want to be a bad person, do you? The ruling class thinks it’s best for you to continue to support the Current Thing and leave independent thinking to your betters!

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Ukraine, Russia and the Sporting McCarthyites

March 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

The cultural vandals and iconoclasts have been busy of late, removing Russians from the stables at short notice and demanding what might be called a necessary affirmation of disloyalty.  It’s all good to talk about world peace and the resolution of disputes, but that will hardly do for the flag-bearing choirs who have discovered their object of evil.  Do you hate Vladimir Putin?  If so, good.  Do you love freedom?  Well, of course, as everyone does with squeaking enthusiasm, even if they cannot define it.

The main interest is never in the second answer, but the first.  Putin must be condemned and banished from your conscience, your mind and history.  Ignore the fact that he is the elected leader of a country – he remains a tyrant to be condemned to liberal democratic execration.  Best go about punishing people innocent of this fact.

Such a cringeworthy approach has seduced and trapped some able minds over the years.  During the Cold War, the division of camps and ideologies demanded unthinking loyalty, not so much to truth but a version of it long lost in political drag and the hypocrisy of appearances.  On September 22, 1947, delegates from Communist parties across the European spectrum heard the infantile ravings of the main Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov, who suggested with nether clenching tediousness that the world was divided between the “imperialist and democratic camp”.  The US, allied with Great Britain and France, made up the former.  “The anti-fascist forces comprise the second camp”, rooted in the USSR and its various, anomalously named “new democracies.”

In the United States, divisions were also being marked by the mind ravaging nature of ideological conformism.  Executive Order 9835, issued by President Harry Truman, focused on whether “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” with any organisation designated by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive”, or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”

The President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty (TCEL), packed with representatives from six government departments overseen by Special Assistant to the Attorney General A. Devitt Vanech, dealt with assessing federal loyalty standards and developing procedures to expunge or disqualify “any disloyal of subversive person” from federal service.

In this atmosphere, the vulgar and coarse Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy operated, at least for a time, with pugnacious impunity, claiming in his infamous Wheeling, West Virginia speech that 57 communists had found their way into the US State Department. The House Un-American Activities Committee also worked aggressively to advance the spirit of demonisation, ruining careers and blackening reputations.  The stupid tend to linger in political accusation.

The Ukraine War is now making Russian citizens, at the behest of various quarters, undertake acts of purification in various foreign theatres.  They are being told to engage in crude demonstrations of loyalty (or, in some cases, disloyalty).  Admit you hate Putin, and you can attend a tournament to earn your crust.

UK Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston has taken a keen interest in this daft effort, hoping to encourage the organisers of Wimbledon, the All England Law Tennis Club (AELTC) to take a more severe approach to players from “pariah states”, as long as they do not include such angelic wonders as Saudi Arabia.  Before a select parliamentary committee, Huddleston noted that, “Many countries have agreed that they will not allow representatives from Russia to compete.  There are also visa issues as well.  When it comes to individuals, that is more complex.”

Complexity and Huddleston do not get along.  “We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try to get some assurances along those lines.”

Tennis player Daniil Medvedev and his colleagues are facing the prospect that not engaging in public denouncement of the Kremlin will be insufficient to enable them to compete.  They are already not permitted to compete under the Russian flag, and they are being told that a Russian winning Wimbledon would be unpardonable for the glorious British tournament.  Their country has already been banned from competing in team events such as the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King tournaments.

Across the sporting world, players from Russia now see their country barred by the International Ski Federation, Formula One, hosting the European Champions League Final, the indefensibly boring European curling championships and the International Biathlon Union.

Such expectations are so extreme as to remind one of Cold War parallels.  An occasional voice of reason can be found, even if they come from an individual who has no reason to fear repercussions himself.  Australian tennis commentator and former player Todd Woodbridge told Nine’s Sports Sunday that this line of reasoning placed one on “slippery and dangerous ground.”  Everyone knew “they have families back in whatever part of Russia they are from, and you do not want to be on the wrong side of that, because your family will pay the price.”

Woodbridge is a reliably unworldly sort, but these are sensible, humane words lost in the feverish hysteria that will cake and cloak discussion in this field for months.  From culture to sporting fixtures, the smug, Putin hating establishment, under direction from their various advisors, are being told that denigrating and cancelling the representatives of Barbarian Rus is the way to go.  Individuals will be crucified.

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

Featured image: Daniil Medvedev’s ‘world peace’ post on Instagram. (Instagram)

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***

“The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”—Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.

Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”

Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report which was released 20 years ago—we are now trapped into a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2022.

Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.

Both worlds—our present-day reality and Spielberg’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. And bodily privacy and integrity has been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from an oblivious American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television and internet zombies, but we have been warned about such an ominous future in novels and movies for years.

The following 15 films may be the best representation of what we now face as a society.

Fahrenheit451B.jpg

Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, this film depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned, and firemen ironically are called on to burn contraband books—451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question his book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now pre-censors speech. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The plot of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated ship is orchestrated by a computer system—known as HAL 9000—which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point in human evolution, technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous and human beings will become mere appendages of technology. In fact, at present, we are seeing this development with massive databases generated and controlled by the government that are administered by such secretive agencies as the National Security Agency and sweep all websites and other information devices collecting information on average citizens. We are being watched from cradle to grave.

Planet of the Apes (1968). Based on Pierre Boulle’s novel, astronauts crash on a planet where apes are the masters and humans are treated as brutes and slaves. While fleeing from gorillas on horseback, astronaut Taylor is shot in the throat, captured and housed in a cage. From there, Taylor begins a journey wherein the truth revealed is that the planet was once controlled by technologically advanced humans who destroyed civilization. Taylor’s trek to the ominous Forbidden Zone reveals the startling fact that he was on planet earth all along. Descending into a fit of rage at what he sees in the final scene, Taylor screams: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you.” The lesson is obvious, but will we listen? The script, although rewritten, was initially drafted by Rod Serling and retains Serling’s Twilight Zone-ish ending.

THX 1138 (1970). George Lucas’ directorial debut, this is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with “pain prods”—electro-shock batons. Sound like tasers?

A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that cracks down on its citizens sporadically. Alex is a violent punk who finds himself in the grinding, crushing wheels of injustice. This film may accurately portray the future of western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force.

Soylent Green (1973). Set in a futuristic overpopulated New York City, the people depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit. Sound familiar?

Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade “replicants” (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is now dominated by mega-corporations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). Based upon a Philip K. Dick novel, this exquisite Ridley Scott film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.

Nineteen Eighty Four.jpg

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell’s dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state. The government controls the masses by controlling their thoughts, altering history and changing the meaning of words. Winston Smith is a doubter who turns to self-expression through his diary and then begins questioning the ways and methods of Big Brother before being re-educated in a most brutal fashion.

Brazil (1985). Sharing a similar vision of the near future as 1984 and Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, this is arguably director Terry Gilliam’s best work, one replete with a merging of the fantastic and stark reality. Here, a mother-dominated, hapless clerk takes refuge in flights of fantasy to escape the ordinary drabness of life. Caught within the chaotic tentacles of a police state, the longing for more innocent, free times lies behind the vicious surface of this film.

They Live (1988). John Carpenter’s bizarre sci-fi social satire action film assumes the future has already arrived. John Nada is a homeless person who stumbles across a resistance movement and finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see the real world around him. What he discovers is a world controlled by ominous beings who bombard the citizens with subliminal messages such as “obey” and “conform.” Carpenter manages to make an effective political point about the underclass—that is, everyone except those in power. The point: we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other up to start an effective resistance movement.

The Matrix (1999). The story centers on a computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias “Neo,” who begins a relentless quest to learn the meaning of “The Matrix”—cryptic references that appear on his computer. Neo’s search leads him to Morpheus who reveals the truth that the present reality is not what it seems and that Anderson is actually living in the future—2199. Humanity is at war against technology which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and Neo is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control. Neo soon joins Morpheus and his cohorts in a rebellion against the machines that use SWAT team tactics to keep things under control.

Minority Report (2002). Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg, the film offers a special effect-laden, techno-vision of a futuristic world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring you under control. The setting is 2054 where PreCrime, a specialized police unit, apprehends criminals before they can commit the crime. Captain Anderton is the chief of the Washington, DC, PreCrime force which uses future visions generated by “pre-cogs” (mutated humans with precognitive abilities) to stop murders. Soon Anderton becomes the focus of an investigation when the precogs predict he will commit a murder. But the system can be manipulated. This film raises the issue of the danger of technology operating autonomously—which will happen eventually if it has not already occurred. To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. In the same way, to a police state computer, we all look like suspects. In fact, before long, we all may be mere extensions or appendages of the police state—all suspects in a world commandeered by machines.

V for Vendetta (2006). This film depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. A vigilante named V dons a mask and leads a rebellion against the state. The subtext here is that authoritarian regimes through repression create their own enemies—that is, terrorists—forcing government agents and terrorists into a recurring cycle of violence. And who is caught in the middle? The citizens, of course. This film has a cult following among various underground political groups such as Anonymous, whose members wear the same Guy Fawkes mask as that worn by V.

Children of Men (2006). This film portrays a futuristic world without hope since humankind has lost its ability to procreate. Civilization has descended into chaos and is held together by a military state and a government that attempts to keep its totalitarian stronghold on the population. Most governments have collapsed, leaving Great Britain as one of the few remaining intact societies. As a result, millions of refugees seek asylum only to be rounded up and detained by the police. Suicide is a viable option as a suicide kit called Quietus is promoted on billboards and on television and newspapers. But hope for a new day comes when a woman becomes inexplicably pregnant.

Land of the Blind Poster.jpg

Land of the Blind (2006). In this dark political satire, tyrannical rulers are overthrown by new leaders who prove to be just as evil as their predecessors. Maximilian II is a demented fascist ruler of a troubled land named Everycountry who has two main interests: tormenting his underlings and running his country’s movie industry. Citizens who are perceived as questioning the state are sent to “re-education camps” where the state’s concept of reality is drummed into their heads. Joe, a prison guard, is emotionally moved by the prisoner and renowned author Thorne and eventually joins a coup to remove the sadistic Maximilian, replacing him with Thorne. But soon Joe finds himself the target of the new government.

All of these films—and the writers who inspired them—understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan, flag-waving, zombified states, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the sleepwalking masses (who remain convinced that all of the bad things happening in the police state—the police shootings, the police beatings, the raids, the roadside strip searches—are happening to other people) will have to wake up.

Sooner or later, the things happening to other people will start happening to us.

When that painful reality sinks in, it will hit with the force of a SWAT team crashing through your door, a taser being aimed at your stomach, and a gun pointed at your head. And there will be no channel to change, no reality to alter, and no manufactured farce to hide behind.

As George Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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***

Fears about the impact of climate change is a reality for billions of people around the globe.

In Southern Africa, a series of cyclones and tropical storms have done enormous damage in Mozambique, Madagascar and Malawi.

The most recent Cyclone Gombe resulted in the displacement of thousands of people in Mozambique and Malawi. An earlier Tropical Storm Ana struck Madagascar along with Mozambique and Malawi.

Cyclone Gombe reached the coast of Mossuril district in Nampula Province in Mozambique on March 11. The severe tropical event was marked by winds as high as 190km/h (118 miles) with rainfall at 200/24h (7.874 inches).

Gombe came just two months after Ana which struck Mozambique in January. In addition to this there was Tropical Depression Dumako which landed in February. Just in Mozambique, 200,000 people were impacted in Nampula, Zambezia and Tete provinces. Before the month of March was over there were forecasts for heavy rains in Zambezia, Sofala, Manica and Nampula provinces which could possibly result in flooding in Licungo and Zambezia river basins along with the southeast area of Tete.

According to an article on the climate situation in southeast Africa along the Indian Ocean, Afrik 21 notes:

“In neighboring Malawi, the disaster caused heavy rains leading to flooding in nine districts, including Machinga located 256 km (159 miles) from the capital Lilongwe. A total of seven people died in the south of the country, while authorities deployed rescue teams to flood-affected areas such as Liwonde, where the country’s fourth largest national park is located, and the Namandanje River, which serves as the border with Mozambique. Although Gombe did not reach Madagascar, the country most vulnerable to natural disasters in East Africa, the big island experienced other phenomena at the beginning of the year, such as cyclone Batisrai, which followed storm Ana and had wind gusts of 235 km (146 miles) per hour. After causing flooding across the country, destroying buildings and uprooting trees, the storm left 92 people dead and 50,000 displaced.”

All three of these states, Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar, belong to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional organization encompassing 16 countries across the entire sub-continent and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). SADC holds regular meetings to discuss issues of mutual concern including greater cooperation and economic integration among its members-nations.

However, the regional plans debated and ratified by SADC summits and working groups are impeded due to the repeated tropical storms and other weather disasters. The region of Southern Africa is endowed with natural resources and close proximity to the Indian Ocean, making its potential for growth and development unlimited.

For example, Mozambique is the center of a major energy project designed to produce Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) for export in Cabo Delgado province. Independent of the recent cyclones, there is an armed insurgency which has attacked towns and villages throughout the province stalling LNG development while prompting people to flee seeking safety outside the area. The SADC and Rwandan military forces have been deployed in Cabo Delgado to assist the Mozambique armed forces in anti-insurgency operations.

SADC countries are perhaps the most unified politically of the regional organizations across the continent. Even the African Union (AU), which encompasses 55-member states, which maintains a secretariat in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at its headquarters, has not been able to act as rapidly in implementing its proposals as the SADC.

Cyclone Gombe and other climate disastrous occurrences pose enormous challenges for the region along with geo-political areas. With the public health crisis over the last two years due to COVID-19, the compounding reality of cyclones and subsequent flooding, severely hampers the planning capacity for governments and other sectors of society. Consequently, cyclones are a contributing factor in the rising national debt levels of African states.

The Failed Legacy of COP26

Last year another major climate conference was sponsored by the United Nations in Glasgow, Scotland. The COP26 gathering was the scene of much political struggle surrounding the issues discussed and most importantly, the final declaration of the event.

The UN in their report on the meeting said:

“The UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) brought together 120 world leaders and over 40,000 registered participants, including 22,274 party delegates, 14,124 observers and 3,886 media representatives. For two weeks, the world was riveted on all facets of climate change — the science, the solutions, the political will to act, and clear indications of action…. ‘The approved texts are a compromise,’ said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. ‘They reflect the interests, the conditions, the contradictions and the state of political will in the world today. They take important steps, but unfortunately the collective political will was not enough to overcome some deep contradictions.’”

Yet these compromises are a direct result of the western states from Washington to Berlin which often objected to the adoption of concrete goals in regard to the emissions of greenhouse gases around the globe. It is the capitalist countries of the United States and Western Europe which are the most culpable in the degradation of the environmental status of the planet.

In fact, some studies suggest that it is the U.S. Department of Defense which is the largest polluter internationally. Through the demand for armaments, ordnances, fighter jets and other military equipment, along with the presence of more than 7,000 military bases established and administered by the Pentagon, Washington and Wall Street are behind the burning of harmful toxins which damage the air, land and water of countries around the globe.

A report published in 2016 on the link between the climate crisis and U.S. militarism says:

“Yet, despite being the planet’s single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the Pentagon has been granted a unique exemption from reducing – or even reporting – its pollution. The U.S. won this prize during the 1998 Kyoto Protocol negotiations after the Pentagon insisted on a ‘national security provision’ that would place its operations beyond global scrutiny or control…. The Air Force accounts for about half of the Pentagon’s operational energy consumption, followed by the Navy (33 percent) and Army (15 percent). In 2012, oil accounted for nearly 80 percent of the Pentagon’s energy consumption, followed by electricity, natural gas and coal.”

Imperialism and Climate Change

With these facts being placed in an article without any refutation by the Pentagon, illustrates clearly that the struggle against climate change must also encompass as an essential point of departure, the role of the Pentagon’s imperialist militarism. These issues remain with the international community in the current period due to the war initiated through attempts to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Eastern European to the state of Ukraine combined with efforts to rearm Germany and to reverse the neutrality of Finland and Switzerland.

Anti-imperialists and solidarity activists based in the western countries should never refrain from pointing to the role of Pentagon military bases and war efforts as the major contributing factors to the worsening of climate change. East Africa has been a focal point for what is often labeled as “natural disasters” beyond the capacity of human beings to prevent. Nonetheless, many scientists and analysts have repeatedly drawn a connection between mass production, light industry, mining, food production, military services and climate change.

The countries of Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar contribute almost nothing to the advent of climate disasters. These states should be assisted with relief efforts and the building of infrastructure designed to minimize the impact of cyclones and other serious weather disturbances.

Reconstruction of damaged communities in Southern Africa should be supported by people of goodwill in the imperialist countries since it is their own governments and corporations which have for decades implemented policies which have disproportionate negative impact on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as oppressed peoples and the working class inside the western industrialized states in North America and Western Europe.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: COP26 mass demonstration in Glasgow (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Troubled Ideas: A Nuremberg Tribunal for Putin

March 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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In a good number of Western states, the ruling classes, former and current, have lost their heads.  Bugbear and boogieman Vladimir Putin’s efforts in Ukraine have lent themselves to some rather extreme suggestions, ranging from assassination to potential war crimes trials.  This is not to say that the Russian leader has nothing to account for.  As ever, it all depends on who is making the accusation, and who is seeking retribution.

Trying leaders for war crimes does not lack merit, even if law remains, at best, a blunt instrument all too readily concealing a vengeful motive.  Butchers should never escape under the comfortable veil of state responsibility, claiming sovereignty as an all-dispensing reason to commit atrocities.  But any war crimes procedures are riddled with claims of bias, partisanship and self-interest.

Many voices from the noisy tribes of accountability are calling for Putin to face legal proceedings as soon as possible. Former UK Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Sir John Major have added their names to a petition calling for a Nuremberg-styled model similar to that used in 1945 by the victorious Allies against Nazi Germany.

Paving is being added to the proposition with remarks by US President Joe Biden that the Russian president is a war criminal.  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed.  “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”  A unanimous resolution by the US Senate has also condemned the Russian leader for “alleged war crimes”.

The International Criminal Court is already seized of the matter.  But on the issue of the crime of aggression, otherwise known as the crime against peace in the charter of the International Military Tribunal, the ICC would need a referral from the UN Security Council, something that Russia will most likely veto.

The choristers for a war crimes tribunal seem an odd bunch.  Some are individuals who themselves have committed, or approved of, acts of war that would qualify them for that very same process they now demand.  Gordon Brown may not have liked being a part of the unlawful attack on Iraq in 2003, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was the man overlooking the purse strings of Britain’s war effort.  The masterminds of that crime of aggression in Mesopotamia – US President George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Australia’s John Howard – were far from Brown’s mind as he told BBC Radio 4’s program that a “message” had to be “sent out” that such aggression would be judicially punished.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Brown attempted a sketch for the prosecution.  Putin was the “ringleader” of murderous efforts against opponents in the UK.  He invaded Georgia in 2008; annexed Crimea in 2014 and naughtily supported the Assad regime in Syria.  But the Ukraine War stood out.  “Aggression is Putin’s original crime: the planning, initiation and pursuit of a policy to declare and prosecute an invasion of Ukraine.”  At Nuremberg, Nazi war criminals were held to account.  “Eight decades on, we must ensure there will be a day of reckoning for Putin.”

Had these people consulted their history on this troubled subject, they would be aware that the tyrant-in-the-dock motif is a precarious one.  The original suggestion of a tribunal to try leaders for war crimes, specifically Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, was opposed by President Woodrow Wilson for one fundamental reason: US presidents might find themselves facing a prosecutor’s brief at some point in the future.  The motive was selfish but at least showed an awareness that such a course of action risked having a boomerang effect.

The issue did not go away during the Second World War.  As discussions about a proposed war crimes process at war’s end began to take place, George Orwell penned a characteristically devastating and clear-eyed piece on its weaknesses in an October 1943 issue of the Tribune.  In reviewing a work advocating Benito Mussolini’s trial, Orwell was firm.  “In power politics there are no crimes, because there are no laws.”

Even if so, who could actually sit in judgment of him?  True, the list of atrocities, brutalities and broken treaties were undeniable, the cruelty even admitted.  “The only troublesome question is: How can something that was praiseworthy at the time you did it – ten years ago, say – suddenly become reprehensible now?”

Were Mussolini to call witnesses at his trial, he would find many on the side of the Allies impressed and even supportive of his various ghastly deeds.  Lord Rothermere, for instance, in 1928, called the Italian leader “the antidote to a deadly poison.”  Lord Mottistone in 1935 on the barbarous Italian action in Abyssinia was all approving: “I wanted to dispel the ridiculous notion that it was a nice thing to sympathise with the underdog.”  It was the Abyssinians, “cruel” and “brutal” who were facing “others who are playing an honourable part.”  The gassed natives got what they deserved.

In the witness box, Orwell declares, any number of individuals would be able to testify that Mussolini’s actions, from stomping on the Italian trade unions to using mustard gas on the Abyssinians and even building a navy against Britain, had the support of the British government “through thick and thin.”

At Nuremberg, the grounds for an indivisible international morality for leaders was proposed.  Critics smelt a legally attired rat: What would this mean for the future of state craft and power politics?  The righteous US Supreme Court justice and prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, with an almost puritan certitude, stated the case for the prosecution.  All, including state leaders, would be equal in the dock as personally responsible for war crimes.  “The principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as logical one if international law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace.”

It is a view that has proven itself to be manifestly untrue in practice.  Justice and accountability are divisible.  Power politics continues to supply room for criminal conduct and excuse viciousness.  Individuals such as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, his blood spattered finger prints criss-crossing continents, hold sway with their view that international tribunals are unaccountable bodies dolling out unjust rulings against noble leaders.  President Donald Trump, in this true Kissingerian spirit, went so far as to directly sanction members of the ICC for daring to investigate potential US war crimes in Afghanistan.

Since 1945, the leaders tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, be they in the international criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the International Criminal Court, have tended to come from a broken and defeated side.  In some cases, the defeated, such as the UK and United States, have simply gone home to forget or justify their unlawful adventurism.  Bush decided to take up painting.  Blair decided to become a global consultant to dubious regimes.  They only meant well.  The Ukraine War promises to be no different for those in the Kremlin.

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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]

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***

On a really cold day at the beginning of March, 7 people drowned off the coast of Lesvos. They were refugees, some from Somalia where I was born. On the same day the Greek government was shouting out that it was opening its arms and sending planes and buses to bring refugees from Ukraine to Greece.

I am a refugee. My family took me aged 5 from the war in my country which killed 5 of my brothers and sisters; my father was badly injured and, until his death in Somalia 4 weeks ago, struggled to live with his body filled with bomb fragments. My own move to Uganda saved my life but was a total disaster. From 9 years old I was homeless and alone. I had no schooling, no bed and survived on the streets. At the age of 24 I had a friend who got me out to Turkey and then I came to Samos where I applied for asylum. As yet I have no decision. I live in fear of deportation. Greece’s government decided in June last year that refugees from Somalia are, as Muslims, safe in Turkey and should be returned to make their asylum case there. But the government here does not tell the truth. Turkey is not a safe place for refugees from Somalia and many places.

Yesterday I met a Ukrainian refugee in a hospital in Athens. She is quite old. She was in a bad way with wounds to her stomach. She told me that she was alone and when bombed had escaped from her home. She had left her pet cats and dogs and her chickens. They would be dead now. We cried together.

I am more than ok that the refugees from Ukraine are being helped by many European countries including Greece. I am pleased that they are being sent buses and planes to travel to Greece and are not expected to come here like me in a rubber boat at night. I am pleased that they will get very quickly the papers they need to stay, work and get medical help in Greece. I am pleased that they are being offered good places to stay and not being sent to refugee camps like the prison on Samos even though it has loads of space these days.

But

I am so angry with the Greek government which only cares for refugees from the Ukraine. Its message to me is clear. The refugees from Ukraine are seen as people like the Greeks. But refugees like me from Africa and the middle eastern countries are not such ‘good’ humans. We are insulted! All my friends are angry like me. Those who have got their papers are now being abandoned. Many are now loosing their homes as the big refugee aid groups like Praxis are closing down. And in the past week we see the police in Thessaloniki and Athens targeting non Ukrainian refugees. Last week in one neighbourhood in Athens they took 69 refugees for immediate deportation because they did not have any papers on them. On the same day I was followed by 2 police to my apartment where I was asked for my papers.

Most of us are convinced that what is happening now shows the deep racism of the current Government. We hate the minister responsible for refugees, Notis Mitarakis. He has never said or done anything good for us. His talking about the Ukrainian refugees as real refugees and us as fake is just one example of his racism. But what we find hard to understand is why the Greek government is now ok with being seen as racist. It seems stupid to us. Will so many people want to holiday here? We hope not.

One major point we talk a lot about is the ways in which we see Greece as being frightened of Islam. Many seem to think we want to convert all Greeks to our religion. Many seem to think that Islam completely controls our lives and makes us into different types of human beings with nothing in common with Greek people. So they say we have no place here. They tell us to see Greece only as a gateway to Europe. Move on. Don’t stay here. You will never belong here.

But it is crazy thinking. It is so wrong in hundreds of ways. There are thousands of Muslims now living in Athens and Thessaloniki from many different countries. Many live in peace with their Greek neighbours. We shop in the same places; work together and play together. Things are getting better in our relationships. We know that we face the same problems with many Greeks as petrol and electricity price rises cripple us. We help each other.

Like many of my friends I see the government and not the people as the problem. We are shocked by the war in Ukraine. We must help these refugees. But we must also speak out and demand that all refugees should be treated as the Ukrainians. We cannot accept the government dividing the refugees by saying that those from Ukraine deserve better and kinder treatment than us because they are not Muslims and are mainly with white skin.

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Featured image: Ukrainian refugees (Source: Twitter)

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***

As the conflict continues to intensify in Ukraine, the West seems interested in driving a new wave of international nuclearization. Washington announced that it will be organizing a nuclear contingency plan in order to face an eventual escalation of the crisis between Ukraine and Russia. The American arguments to “justify” this type of measure are based on distortions of previous pronouncements made by Moscow’s officials, which reveals that NATO is ready to do anything to make the current situation a pretext for global re-nuclearization.

American President Joe Biden is about to start his tour across Europe to attend meetings at the European Council and NATO, where the main topic to be discussed will certainly be Ukraine. In a recent statement, White House spokespersons said that among the issues on the agenda for discussion will be the potential use of nuclear weapons in the conflict, which is being treated with increasing attention by the US government – supposedly in response to an alleged “Russian nuclear threat”.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan commented on the case, stating:

“President Putin in the early days of the conflict actually raised the spectre of the potential use of nuclear weapons. It is something that we do have to be concerned about. Based on our current analysis we have not changed our nuclear posture to date. But we are constantly monitoring for that potential contingency and of course we take it as seriously as one can possibly take it. We will be consulting with allies and partners on that potential contingency among a range of others and discussing what our potential responses are (…) [Joe Biden] will work with allies on longer-term adjustments to NATO force posture on the eastern flank. He will [also] announce joint action on enhancing European energy security and reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas at long last”.

When mentioning Putin, the American adviser refers to the episode in which the Russian president ordered the country’s nuclear forces to be placed on alert, in the last days of February. At the time, there was great tension and misinformation around the world, with pro-Western media outlets claiming that Putin was “threatening to use nuclear weapons”, which is absolutely false, considering that Putin’s order was just a punctual response to a previous controversial and bellicose speech by the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, in which the possibility of NATO involvement in the conflict was mentioned.

In addition, later Russian spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also had her words distorted by the Western media. Zakharova had commented during a press conference that a possible Third World War would be nuclear – leading Russia to avoid this scenario. At the time, Western agencies distorted the spokeswoman’s speech, also alleging some kind of threat (when, in practice, Zakharova has only said an obvious thing that everyone understands: that a new world war would be nuclear – which is precisely the reason why international society has been trying to avoid this situation since 1945).

On several occasions, Moscow officials have shown efforts to make even clearer the Russian position of trying to avoid, not provoke, the nuclear escalation of the conflict. For example, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN that his country would only use nuclear weapons if there was an existential threat to the existence of the Russian state:

“We have a concept of domestic security, it is public, you can read all the reasons for [Russia’s] nuclear arms to be used (…) If it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be used in accordance with our concept”.

It is no secret that Washington has been trying to re-nuclearize international relations in recent years. In 2020, the US government began to discuss the possibility of resuming nuclear tests, for example. This type of attitude emerges as an extreme and reactive measure in the face of the process of geopolitical decentralization. In other words, in the midst of the rise of the multipolar world, Washington’s last resort to protect its global dominance is to drive a new nuclear wave.

The main problem, however, is trying to justify the re-nuclearization plan with distortions of Russian pronouncements. At no time was there any Russian position in favor of the nuclearization of the conflict in Ukraine. On the contrary, Moscow has been clear in its stance: nuclear weapons are out of the question unless there is an existential threat to Russia. The reason nuclear forces are on the alert is simply because of the escalation promoted by NATO itself, with some Western political leaders considering greater involvement of the alliance in the conflict. Obviously, an eventual NATO action in Ukraine could be interpreted as an existential threat, as the bloc accumulates the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. So, for there to be no risk of escalation and for the Russian alert to nuclear forces to be revoked, the first step to be taken is for NATO to abdicate any involvement in the conflict that could constitute an existential threat.

A re-nuclearization of the world is unlikely to mean any kind of bellicose use of such weapons. Neither side wins in a conflict where two nuclear powers face each other and a war between Russia and NATO would certainly be the end of the world. So, obviously, the American attitude would not be to use nuclear weapons against enemies, but only to drive a new wave of nuclearization, returning to the tensions of the Cold War era. It is possible that nuclear tests will be resumed, for example, and that the production of new weapons will be boosted, creating a new nuclear race.

Unfortunately, while a nuclear conflict is virtually impossible, some degree of nuclearization seems an inevitable side effect of the current situation.

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

Featured image is from Huffington Post


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

The wager by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that his country could ride out inflation and currency shock with low rates has been fading fast because of the sustained rise of crude oil prices, which is not being helped by the war in Ukraine. Ankara is facing a severe economic crisis as the gas import bill alone is expected to jump to $40 billion this year against the net official foreign reserves of $18 billion. Economists are now ratcheting up forecasts of a massive current account deficit and an annual inflation rate as high as 70%. This is affecting how the youth of Turkey view their president despite Erdoğan’s promise to raise a “pious generation.”

Erdoğan’s popularity is waning, which might bear upon the prospects of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) returning to power in the next general election. Amidst the rising cost of living and intensifying shortages of essential commodities, Ankara has seen more than 60 strikes, factory occupations, protests and boycott calls in less than two months, according to the independent Labor Studies Group. Workers in a various industries, including textiles, transportation, mining and construction have joined protests against the unaffordable cost-of-living, posing a massive threat to Erdoğan’s re-election campaign as he has failed to meet the people’s expectations.

As per the call of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), Turkey’s healthcare workers were on a two-day strike on March 14 and 15, which falls on “National Medicine Day.” The TTB accused the government of low wages and poor working conditions, and they demanded a minimum pay rise of 150% for healthcare workers.

The TTB said that working conditions for health workers and doctors in Turkey was very bad. At least 1,361 doctors left Turkey in the first 11 months of 2021, compared to 59 only in 2012. Long hours, low wages, violence toward healthcare staff, workplace bullying and poor working conditions have led many physicians to leave Turkey – thus fuelling an unprecedented brain drain.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), while criticizing the Erdoğan administration, stated that the government made incompetent and insensitive appointments to the executive positions and directed violence against all healthcare workers, which became widespread.

Atilla Yesilada, an Istanbul-based economist at emerging-market analysis firm GlobalSource Partners, predicted a tough battle. He said to Bloomberg, “you can try to attract investments with cheap labor as a developing nation, but you can’t convince people to live with conditions worse than they are used to”.

Support for Erdoğan’s AKP has declined, despite claims from loyalists about continued people’s confidence in the president. A Metropoll study in February showed 72% of Turkish citizens are unhappy with living conditions. Backing for the ruling party has fallen to 25%, its core level of support, according to Ozer Sencar, head of the leading Turkish pollster Metropoll.

Meanwhile, a study published in Ankara by University Professor Ali Caglar and commissioned by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) think tank, stated that a significant majority (62.5%) of the ‘Generation Z’ (18-25 years age group) are frustrated with the Turkish government. Increasing economic difficulties, diminishing returns on their education and high level of restrictions on civilian rights are cited as reasons for their dissatisfaction. College debt and unemployment aggravated their discontentment. They found that the government’s policies are mostly irrelevant for them.

Bilal Erdoğan, the son of Recep Tayyip, remarked at the opening ceremony of the Turkey Youth Foundation in the northern province of Samsun that ordering Turkish coffee at Starbucks instead of a latte is better as it is symbolically connected with their faith, religion, identity and culture.

In the past, the ruling AKP could connect with the youth. However, in the digital environment, photos showing the luxurious lifestyle of the president, who lives in a literal palace worth $600 million, is frustrating Gen Z. Despite all government resources, the Erdoğan administration has failed to raise a “pious generation”, as the Turkish president himself promised, and the interests of the youth in religion is decreasing.

In the upcoming general election, this age group (Gen Z), accounting for 13 million people (15%) of the electorate, is decisive. Erdoğan’s much hyped moulding of young Turks into a so called “pious generation” of Turkish nationalists following his brand of Islamic political rule seems to be failing as a younger generation longs for what the president refuses to grant them. If the economic crisis in Turkey is not resolved, it will likely see the AKP ousted in the next election and replaced with the CHP, who historically are much friendlier to Washington and the West.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from aa.com.tr

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***

On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden was barely probed about his long-standing support for the Iraq War, a fact he attempted to conceal. According to Biden (who repeatedly touted his experience in foreign policy in the lead-up to the presidential election), he had opposed the war from the very beginning — the “very moment” the first bombs came roaring down on Baghdad.

Not only did Biden cast a critical vote to authorize military force; he also played a crucial role in creating the case for war in the first place. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden built support for a bipartisan resolution that ultimately gave George W. Bush’s administration wide discretion to defend the United States from any perceived threat from Iraq. In the years since, Biden has argued that he only voted for the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq to enhance the United States’ bargaining power at the United Nations — as if putting a gun to the head of the international community (what Biden called “tough diplomacy”) represented anything other than a call for war.

Far from the reluctant warrior he’s portrayed himself as, Biden — by rejecting alternative resolutions that would have required the United States to predicate military action on authorization from the United Nations Security Council, and disparaging more progressive Democrats who balked at the prospect of war as purists — ultimately created the very conditions in which opposition to war became untenable in the first place.

Even a series of high-profile hearings Biden held in 2002 — ostensibly an evenhanded attempt to inform the US public of the risks of an invasion — was a ruse: he enlisted a host of pro-war operatives to parrot the Bush administration’s propaganda about Iraq’s mythic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with nary a skeptical voice among them. According to the chief UN weapons inspector at the time, Scott Ritter, the hearings were a “sham” designed to provide cover for Biden’s “pre-ordained conclusion” that either Saddam Hussein or his weapons had to go — despite the fact that the CIA’s George Tenet had personally told Biden there was no evidence these WMDs even existed.

In fact, Biden had called for war with Iraq for years. In 1998, he warned that the country represented a grave threat to US interests. According to Biden, it was impossible for inspectors to guarantee that Hussein would not develop WMDs in the future (if he didn’t have them already), and that “the only way . . . to get rid of [him]” was to put boots on the ground — sooner or later.

But the rationale that Biden had so diligently crafted for years — that Iraq posed an existential threat to the United States — never materialized. A desperate search for WMDs in the wake of the invasion produced nothing. Within a year, a majority of Americans realized that the invasion had been a mistake. And by the end of 2014, lawmakers and the intelligence community alike conceded that not only did Iraq have no such weapons — biological, chemical, or nuclear — but prewar intelligence had been deeply flawed.

And yet not even during the heated final debate of the primaries in 2020 did Bernie Sanders (who had voted against the invasion in 2002 as a representative of Vermont) make the case — which he had alluded to on the campaign trail more than once — that Biden was unfit to serve as president because of what was, in Sanders’s view, “the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of the United States.”

Elizabeth Warren, another candidate who had called the Iraq War a mistake, also failed to challenge Biden’s historical defense of the invasion — from denying that he had ever believed Hussein possessed WMDs to lamenting that the only mistake he had made was to trust the Bush administration. When asked whether Biden was to blame, Warren — a legal academic who had begun her political career taking on the president over the 2005 bankruptcy bill — demurred.

In fact, the most strenuous criticism against Biden’s role in the Iraq War was leveled in March 2020 by an air force veteran who accused Biden of having the blood of fellow service members on his hands. But despite his overtures that he had come to regret his support for the war — which became increasingly unpopular in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party in subsequent years — Biden never learned from his mistake.

Eleven years after the intervention in Libya’s civil war and twenty thousand deaths later, it’s clear the United States’ seven-month bombing campaign not only suffered from poor planning, no exit strategy, and flawed intelligence — the same faults Biden attributed to the Iraq War — but also had nothing to do with protecting civilians in the first place. Despite Barack Obama’s initial declaration that regime change was out of the question, Biden would come to praise NATO for removing the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Biden’s revelation, years later, that he had opposed the intervention from the beginning again shows how he continues to deny responsibility for the United States’ repeated misadventures in the Middle East — all on his watch.

“The Original Sin of the Twenty-First Century”

The fact that the Iraq War — one of the most heinous acts of aggression in modern times — was not only a complete disaster but an outright crime is seldom acknowledged in mainstream US politics. Since George Bush’s infamous address in May 2003 — in which he declared an end to major combat operations aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln a month after the invasion — hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed, millions have been maimed or injured, and many times more have been displaced.

Within a few years, studies concluded that over a million Iraqis had lost their lives, and, since the fifteenth anniversary of what the scholar Tallha Abdulrazaq calls “the original sin of the 21st century,” it’s estimated that the corpses of 2.4 million people litter the very cradle of civilization. In addition to leading to widespread death and destruction, destabilizing the region, and giving rise to the Islamic State, the war has also had more distant (albeit foreseeable) long-term effects, such as the global refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

American voters used to give a damn about the Iraq War. In 2008, Barack Obama leveraged widespread discontent with the war to secure the Democratic nomination, courting progressives and young people alike. In fact, it’s widely believed that Hillary Clinton lost to the senator from Illinois not just because she had voted for the war — and was instrumental in rallying ambivalent Democrats to the cause — but because Obama had decried the invasion from the start.

In later years, vast swaths of the American public became convinced that the war was a disaster. Bush’s approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 25 percent, based in large part on the widespread belief that the occupation was a mess. By 2016, even Republicans like Donald Trump, who had run on a nihilistic platform of killing the families of purported terrorists and “bringing torture back,” would come to attack Clinton’s lack of foresight from the left.

Obama’s obvious contempt for his predecessor’s war, based on a haphazard and incoherent policy in Iraq, was soon overshadowed by what can only be described as his neglect. Under his leadership, US forces withdrew in 2011, only to return a few years later with a seemingly never-ending mandate to fight ISIS — a creation of the occupation itself that the president not only gravely underestimated as al-Qaeda’s “JV team” but subsequently emboldened, spending billions of dollars more than Bush ever had in the process.

Despite inveighing at length against the Iraq War — calling it a “big fat mistake” — Trump would also come to authorize further troop surges and bombing raids. In July 2017, Trump joined Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi in declaring Mosul free from ISIS control after Iraqi and US forces completely destroyed the city in some of the most horrific violence since the invasion — based in no small part on the fact that Trump had removed restrictions on US military operations designed to reduce civilian casualties. Only in the dying embers of his first and final term did Trump decide to reduce troop levels in Iraq — by a pittance.

By the time the Iraqi people made their first forays into democracy in decades, the war had already faded from the American imagination. Following ISIS’s expulsion from Iraq in December 2017, massive demonstrations rocked the country again and again, with everyday people taking to the streets to protest high unemployment, widespread government corruption, and a lack of basic services like water and electricity. In 2019, Iraqis even burned down the Iranian consulate in the holy city of Najaf and forced the prime minister to resign — a powerful rebuke of an unpopular government that had killed hundreds of protestors.

But the convulsions in Iraq were barely reported in the United States. Media coverage of the war has fallen precipitously for years; even when it is in the news, it’s on the periphery. Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 drew censure from Democrats who condemned his failure to obtain congressional authorization for what was called an act of war. But the fact that the strike had taken place at the Baghdad airport, or that Iraqi authorities hadn’t been consulted in advance, wasn’t questioned at all.

During the Trump administration, the twin war in Afghanistan — the longest running armed conflict in US history, also born out of the events of September 11 — gripped the American imagination. Whether it was attempts to thwartthe International Criminal Court’s probe into US atrocities, the first use in combat of the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS, or Biden’s mishandled withdrawal from the country last August, the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer from Taliban rule, a massive humanitarian crisis, and ongoing pillage of their own funds by the United States.

The Iraq War made headlines again when, in a desperate response to his electoral loss, Trump declared that all troops in the country would be home by January 2021. But despite Biden’s belated decision to bring the nearly twenty-year conflict to an ignoble end (met with a combination of faux outrage, sentimental nostalgia, and legitimate concern), it’s unclear whether his announcement last December that the United States had concluded the combat mission in Iraq for the umpteenth time amounted to anything more than a verbal sleight of hand.

“The Supreme International Crime”

There’s a reason why Americans have become inured to constant violence in a country their government has been bombing for dozens of years: there has yet to be a shred of accountability. In late 2004, then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan declared that the Iraq War was an outright violation of the UN charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense. What’s more, the belligerents had been warned that invading Iraq would not only be illegal under international law but amount to a criminal act.

“Photo Op”. Credit: Imperial War Museum/Peter Kennard & Cat Philips (2005)

Before famously changing his mind, UK attorney general Peter Goldsmith advised Tony Blair on the eve of the invasion that the prime minister would be susceptible to prosecution in UK court for the “crime of aggression” — or what the Allies called “crimes against peace” — an offense established after World War II precisely to impose individual criminal liability on Axis leaders for the sin of having gone to war in the first place. According to the Nuremberg court, the crime of aggression “is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Subsequent calls around the world to bring the perpetrators to justice failed. In June 2008, thirty-five articles of impeachment against Bush were introduced in the House by Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler, fifteen of which had to do with the Iraq War alone. None made it to the floor. Obama, who ran on a campaign of accountability and transparency, later revealed he was reluctant to order an inquiry into the Iraq War in the first place, much less hold perpetrators accountable. In terms pithy and perverse, the president advised Americans that “we need to look forward,” despite his concession that “we tortured some folks.”

On the other side of the pond, Iraqi general Abdul-Wahid Shannan Al-Rabat brought a private prosecution against Blair, Goldsmith, and former foreign secretary Jack Straw in 2016 for the crime of aggression as well, based on the results of a yearslong investigation into the UK’s role in the Iraq War. The High Court subsequently dismissed the case.

For senior members of the Democratic Party, the crimes of the Bush era were largely inconsequential. Despite repeated calls for impeachment among leading Democrats at the time, House Leader Nancy Pelosi made it clear that it was “off the table,” even after the party gained control of Congress in 2006. Years later, she revealed that she knew Bush was lying through his teeth the whole time, and that the Iraq War was a sham — but that, in her view, it didn’t rise to an impeachable offense. Obama echoed this in his latest memoir, in which he praises his predecessor and chastises Americans who condemned Bush as a war criminal.

Republicans have strenuously defended Bush’s legacy as well. In November 2020, in a rare act of defiance, several prominent members of the party condemned Trump’s plans to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump himself granted clemency to US soldiers and contractors for some of the most heinous crimes committed on Iraqi soil, including the infamous massacre of seventeen Iraqis in 2007 by Blackwater mercenaries. And among his own party, Bush remains as popular as ever. As of 2018, his approval rating among Republicans hadn’t dropped below 75 percent in ten years.

The fact that not a single official has been held accountable for the decision to invade Iraq is emblematic of the “war on terror” in general. Whether it’s Abu Ghraib, torture, extraordinary rendition, black sites, secret surveillance, drone strikes, or Guantanamo, the United States has consistently denied responsibility for the crimes of the Bush administration and beyond. Perpetrators like former secretary of state Colin Powell and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld have also escaped justice altogether — in death. Even US allies have taken more responsibility for their respective roles. In recent years, Canada has compensated former detainees at Guantanamo, Italy has convicted CIA agents for torture in absentia, and Australia has concluded a probe into war crimes committed by special forces in Afghanistan.

Screenshot from Collateral Murder video released by WikiLeaks.

In contrast, investigations by the United States have probed only the extent to which the Iraq War represented a massive intelligence failure, precisely to avoid implicating the political leadership involved. The Chilcot report, released in 2016, not only laid bare the baseless and confused rationale for the war but placed the blame squarely on Blair’s government. And since taking office, Biden — just like his predecessor — has doggedly pursued whistleblowers like Julian Assange for the audacity of exposing, among other things, US forces murdering Iraqi civilians for sport.

The Forever Wars

Nineteen years later, it’s as if the Iraq War never happened. Following the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Trump administration did everything short of a declaration of outright war to provoke Iran — including protracted economic warfare, parking aircraft carriers in Iranian waters, and killing the country’s “second most powerful man.” A week before Biden took office, then secretary of state Mike Pompeo even announced that Iranian ties to al-Qaeda had been discovered — the same canard used to justify the Iraq War two decades prior. Biden later withdrew sanctions in the lead-up to diplomatic talks, only to thwart them altogether with strikes on Iranian forces — in a country we are not at war with (Syria), from a country we have no right to be in (Iraq). In recent days, the Biden administration has gone so far as to call President Vladimir Putin’s accusations that Ukraine is harboring bioweapons, a pretext for Russia’s invasion, everything from “disinformation” to outright “malarkey” — without a hint of irony.

Whether it’s proxy wars with neighboring countries or ongoing drone warfare in the region, the US continues to wage forever war against an inchoate enemy — with Iraq as base of operations. There is no indication that Biden intends to deliver any semblance of justice to the Iraqi people either. All eyes are on whether Congress’s decision to finally rescind the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force will bring an end to the carnage once and for all — or merely update it for yet another phase of US interventionism.

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Saif Ansari is a practicing attorney.

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No one should be surprised by the recent revelations that Israel had a secret base in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region. The news emerged after Iran launched ballistic missiles at the base last weekend, allegedly in retaliation for an Israeli attack on an Iranian military drone plant in Kermanshah.

While news of the Israeli base in Erbil might have caught some observers off guard, it actually follows from a long relationship between Israel and Iraqi Kurds. After the founding of Israel in 1948, many Kurdish Jews began emigrating to the country, with their population today standing at around 300,000.

In the mid-1960s, Israel sent Brigadier General Tzuri Sagi to Iran to mount a campaign against Iraq, whose forces had struck deadly blows against Israeli forces during the 1948 war. His mission also entailed bolstering the fight for an independent Kurdistan in Iraq, as he helped to build up and train the Kurdish army.

As the Kurds continued to battle for independence from Iraq, Israel supplied them with significant amounts of weaponry. Sagi once said he identified so closely with the Kurds that he “became a patriotic Kurd”.

Covert operations

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Kurds grew in strategic importance for Israel, representing a countervailing regional force that could destabilise the new rule in Tehran. This, in turn, fuelled enmity among Iranian leaders, who feared the Kurds could give the Israelis a deeper local foothold.

The Mossad has maintained a network of spies in Iraq’s Kurdish region, along with Azerbaijan and other sites bordering Iran. Back in 2005, Yedioth Ahronoth reported that former Israeli commandos were training Kurdish forces in “anti-terrorism” techniques.

Seymour Hersh reported on such operations in the New Yorker in 2004: “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria.” According to a CIA official cited in the piece, “the Israeli presence was widely known in the American intelligence community”.

At the same time, intelligence missions and attacks on Iranian targets have allegedly been planned and executed from Israeli bases, such as the one in Erbil. An Iranian general recently told a Yemeni news outlet that there are at least two other such bases in Iraq.

Potential for escalation

News about the Israeli base in Iraq brings to mind Israel’s close relationship with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, through which Israel reportedly gained access to Azeri airbases on Iran’s northern border. There have been reports that Israeli F-35s are now stationed there. Israel also provided Azerbaijan with deadly drones during the country’s 2020 war with Armenia.

Yet, despite the bravado of the Erbil-Kermanshah operation, such attacks have little long-term impact. Yes, they might deplete Iran’s drone capabilities. But not only does Iran have other drone bases, it also retains the know-how to replenish the destroyed stock. Given Israel’s repeated sabotaging of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iranian engineers have certainly built redundancy into all aspects of military planning and production.

If Israel’s attack was meant as a warning, Iran will surely not be listening. It will continue its efforts to penetrate Israel’s defences, whether by drones or other means. The recent attack may even escalate hostilities further, potentially leading to a larger-scale war.

Indeed, a miscalculation on either side could bring Israel and Iran into direct conflict, in which there may be no limits to the destruction wrought by both sides.

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Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)

NATO Is a Problem, Not the Solution

March 23rd, 2022 by Yves Engler

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While in no way excusing Russia’s criminal invasion, NATO expansion eastward increased its likelihood. Although we’ll never know if the war would not have happened under different circumstances, after a month of Russian violence against Ukraine the two countries’ negotiators have reportedly agreed that it will reject joining NATO as part of a peace pact.

Russia has long objected to NATO’s eastward expansion, particularly Ukraine’s de facto incorporation into the alliance. It repeatedly raised objections to NATO encircling its territory in the months leading up to its illegal invasion.

Last week the head of the European Union’s foreign policy, Josep Borrell, even admitted the push to expand NATO into Ukraine was an error.

I am ready to admit that we made a number of mistakes and that we lost the possibility of Russia’s rapprochement with the West,” he told French TV TF1. “There are moments that we could do better, there are things that we proposed and then could not implement, such as, for example, the promise that Ukraine and Georgia will become part of NATO.”

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro have all cited NATO belligerence as central to precipitating the current war.

Over many years Canadian parliamentary and media reports have noted Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion. A 2004 National Post story about Ukraine’s North American financed Orange Revolution explained why Moscow opposed its adhesion to the alliance. “For Russia,” wrote international affairs reporter Matthew Fisher, “if Ukraine were to join NATO, and turn its Black Sea ports and its northern airports into havens for Western warships and fighter jets, it would be like having a dagger plunged close to its heart.”

Joining NATO means subordinating Ukrainian military, and to a lesser extent foreign, policy to the alliance. As is the case with most other European NATO members, Ukraine would likely also host aggressive US weapon systems.

Regardless, Canada has forcefully promoted NATO expansion, which has seen the alliance increase from 16 members in 1999 to 30 members today. Despite promises to Soviet officials that NATO wouldn’t expand one inch eastward if they accepted German reunification, Jean Chretien pushed to bring in new members upon taking office in 1993. With Ukraine joining NATO’s Partnership for Peace and North Atlantic Cooperation Council in the early 1990s Canada added the country to its Military Training and Cooperation Program (MTCP), which among other things strengthens militaries’ capacity to operate in tandem with NATO forces. According to the government’s “Canada’s engagement in Ukraine” page, “Ukraine is the single largest recipient of training and funding under the MTCP” since 1993.

By 1996 Canada’s prime minister had publicly called for Ukraine to join NATO. But Ukrainians and their politicians were somewhat ambivalent on the issue. In 2004 Canada and the US helped bring to power an individual who strongly supported joining NATO. A month after becoming president in the Orange Revolution Viktor Yushchenko met George W. Bush on the sidelines of a NATO summit. During the February 2005 meeting the US president declared, support for Ukraine’s membership in NATO. At that summit Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin also expressed support for deepening Ukraine’s ties to NATO. Over the next year NATO would take steps towards incorporating Ukraine with Yushchenko pushing for full membership in NATO.

Not long after, however, Ukrainian electors delivered a blow to the NATO expansionists. In the 2006 parliamentary elections Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions won the most votes and at the start of 2008 parliament was effectively shuttered for six weeks due to a dispute over NATO. At this point polls showed that most Ukrainians rejected the idea of joining NATO. Barely a quarter of Ukrainians wanted to join the alliance, reported former Soviet specialist on the US National Security Council F. Stephen Larrabee in 2011. They generally viewed NATO as a threat rather than a form of protection.

That didn’t stop Stephen Harper from joining George W. Bush in pressing the issue. In the lead-up to the April 2008 NATO summit Canada’s PM expressed “strong support” for Ukraine to join NATO. “I call upon our NATO partners to agree that we should keep Ukraine moving forward toward full membership in the alliance”, declared Harper. But Germany and France strenuously opposed Ukraine joining. They were concerned about Russia’s reaction and how the North American dominated alliance would further undercut European centric security initiatives.

Image on the right: Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk © Alexandr Maksimenko / RIA NOVOSTI

Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk

When Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election NATO membership was put on pause. In June 2010 Ukraine’s parliament voted to abandon NATO membership. But the US and Canada helped oust Yanukovych in February 2014. The individual selected by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt to lead the unconstitutional post-coup government, Arsenii Yatseniuk, announced that he would ask parliament to put Ukraine on path towards NATO membership. In December 2014 parliament renounced Ukraine’s non-aligned statusand called for joining NATO.

Since that time Canada has devoted significant resources to preparing the Ukrainian military, which largely collapsed in the violent aftermath of Yanukovych’s ouster, to join NATO. For seven years 200 Canadian trainers through Operation UNIFIER have been working to “modernize the Ukrainian Armed Forces”, noted former defence minister Harjit Sajjan, so the country could join NATO. A 2017 Standing Committee on National Defence report on “Canada’s Support to Ukraine in Crisis and Armed Conflict” noted that “Ukraine intends … to achieve full military interoperability with NATO members” and that Canada was “actively engaged in assisting” them. On January 30, La Presse reported that “Canadian training allows Ukrainian forces to practice and do joint maneuvers with NATO.” The story quoted Lieutenant-Colonel Luc-Frédéric Gilbert saying,

“we are working to bring them to a context where they would be interoperable with NATO forces. That’s what we’re aiming for: changing an army that was based on a Soviet model to transform it to the NATO model.”

To support Ukraine’s possible accession to the alliance, Canada has supported the NATO-Ukraine Joint Working Group on Defence Reform and Canada has shared the role of NATO Contact Point Embassy in Kyiv since 2019.

In June 2020 NATO offered Ukraine “Enhanced Opportunity Partner status”. According to the British government report “Military assistance to Ukraine 2014- 2021”, “this status provides Ukraine with preferential access to NATO’s exercises, training and exchange of information and situational awareness, in order to increase interoperability. In September 2020 Ukraine hosted Exercise Joint Endeavour, with British, US and Canadian troops”, which was “the first exercise conducted under Ukraine’s new enhanced status.”

A number of other major exercises have been organized since and others, involving tens of thousands of troops, were planned for 2022.

In response to Ukraine’s growing NATOification Moscow became more belligerent. In April 2021 50,000 Russian troops were massed along its border to threaten Ukraine and at the end of November Russia once again stationed tens of thousands of troops near its neighbour. Moscow demanded a guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t be incorporated into NATO, which was formally rejected.

Viewing Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken Russia, Canada’s foreign affairs minister doubled down. In mid-January Mélanie Joly reiterated that “Canada’s position has not changed… We believe that Ukraine should be able to join NATO.”

While Russia’s invasion is a flagrant violation of international law, Canada should not have pushed Ukraine to seek membership in NATO. Now, Ottawa should state clearly that Canada opposes Ukraine’s adhesion to the alliance and supports the country remaining neutral (similar to Austria and Finland).

Peace minded Canadians should redouble our efforts to get Canada out of NATO. Even if the alliance’s eastward expansion played only a small part in precipitating Russia’s criminal invasion it’s an added reason to oppose an alliance that has attacked Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia over the past two decades.

Last week former Bolivian President Evo Morales said,

NATO is a danger to world peace, to security, so we are in the task of reaching agreements with social movements, not only in Latin America, but in all continents, to eliminate it. If nothing is done against NATO, it will become a permanent threat to humanity.”

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A Realist Take on the Ukraine War

March 23rd, 2022 by Roger Boyd

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Realism is a theory and approach to the study of international relations. Its main assumptions are that all nation states seek security within a generally anarchic (no overall authority) international system, and that national decision makers tend to act in a rational manner. The late Kenneth Waltz, an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, is the leading purveyor of what is known as defensive realism, in which states maintain careful and reserved policies. By comparison, offensive realism proposes that states actually seek security through maximizing their power position—security through dominance. This way of looking at the world can provide useful insights that cut through emotional responses and the distortions of the inevitable propaganda, particularly with respect to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Overwhelmingly, Western commentators have identified Russia as an aggressive actor, but this is normal in any such conflict: “we” are always said to be responding to “their” aggression. Correspondingly, the same position (reversing who is “we” and who is “they”) is being taken by official Russian commentators and their media and propaganda organs. National opponents are also usually vilified, as with the “Huns” (Germans) in the First World War, who were said to be bayoneting babies, the Japanese who were depicted as sub-human in Second World War propaganda, and more recently Iraqi soldiers “throwing babies from incubators” (a lie told by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States after being prepared by public affairs group Hill and Knowlton), or the Iraqi state producing the fictitious “weapons of mass destruction,” or the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was said to be attacking unarmed civilians during protests in 2011 (proven incorrect).

Another part of this is to claim it was Russia that attacked Georgia in their war of 2008, when in fact an investigation by the European Union found Georgia responsible for triggering that conflict. As the saying goes, truth is the first casualty of war. Opposition leaders may also be vilified, ridiculously being compared to the monster Hitler or being cast as “autocrats” even if they are duly elected. This is all par for the course and should be dismissed in any serious analysis.

No conflict “just happens,” it is an historical process and therefore we must look at that process. I propose that we start with the collapse of the Soviet Union; a time when the “peace dividend” was widely proclaimed. It has now been comprehensively documented that a number of US state officials made explicit promises that with the unification of Germany the Western NATO alliance would not move any further east. Instead, a neutral Eastern Europe was envisaged, especially by the Russians, as a way of ensuring an enduring peace. With the collapse of Russia into a depression worse than that suffered by the US in the 1930s, and the weakness of the Russian leadership of Boris Yelstin, such considerations were thrown aside.

In 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined the ranks of NATO members. In 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were added; with Latvia and Estonia sharing borders with the main part of Russia—the latter not far away from the major Russian city of St. Petersburg. Several years later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin explicitly stated his discomfort and alarm at the eastward march of NATO. His concerns were rejected out of hand by the West. Then came the 2008 war with Georgia, which was partly triggered by tensions arising from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili seeking NATO membership. At this time, Belarus was ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, a dictator who attempted to balance between East and West, while Ukraine was governed by the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko (after the 2004 Orange Revolution that led to the overturning of the election of the Russian-leaning Viktor Yanukovych) who stated a desire to join the EU and NATO. Russia’s concerns about having a large Western-aligned state only 500 kilometres from Moscow were partly assuaged with the election of Yanukovych in 2010.

Then came the fateful events of 2014, as Yanukovych struggled to balance between the EU and Russia, leading to his rejection of an EU association agreement that would have significantly damaged trade relations with Russia and aligned Ukrainian foreign policy more with that of the West. At this time, a compromise agreement between the EU and Russia would have maintained the balance in Ukraine and helped allay Russia’s security concerns, but that was not forthcoming.

At this point we should stop and think about what the response of the US would have been to, for example, a Cold War alliance between Canada and the Soviet Union. Indeed, any reasonable person would assume either a US-inspired coup or an outright invasion. Belarus and Ukraine are to Russia what Canada and Mexico are to the US. Instead of a compromise agreement, the elected president of Ukraine was deposed in a coup—openly supported by Western politicians and diplomats who spent significant time in Maidan Square egging the protesters on—that installed an extremely anti-Russian administration. Imagine Russian politicians and diplomats publicly endorsing protestors against the current Canadian government who amassed outside parliament last month. Of course, the US would be extremely concerned, just as Russia was in 2014.

In response to the Maidan coup, Russia acted to maintain its national interests, including its massive naval base in Crimea. The debate over whether this was a breakaway region freely voting to join Russia or an annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia is an endless one, but it is pointless from a realist point of view. Russia secured its security by maintaining its naval base in the Black Sea and making sure that such a base did not fall into the hands of the West. Russia also supplied arms and support to the two breakaway republics in the southwestern Donbas region, full of Russian speaking Ukrainians who did not wish to be ruled by a Ukrainian nationalist government.

Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling near Donetsk International Airport, eastern Ukraine, May 18, 2015. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons.

Since 2014 Ukraine has become increasingly aligned with the West, signing the EU association agreement and accepting extensive military training, coordination and munitions from Western nations, including Canada. Its leaders have increasingly called for membership of both the EU and NATO, with those calls escalating recently with little pushback from the West. Last year Putin stated Russia’s security redlines, which included a Ukraine in NATO, but again these were treated with disdain. Even his promises of a “military-technical” response by Russia were not heeded, and the Ukrainian president’s calls for Ukraine to become a nuclear power were not rejected by Western leaders.

Ultimately, Russia acted out of its rational self-interest after all of its calls for a non-military resolution to its legitimate, and actually existential, security concerns had been rejected. Russia invaded Ukraine and will turn it into a Russia-aligned nation, securing its own security; any commentators who think that Russia is not militarily capable of doing such a thing are ignorant of the basic facts on the ground and the Russian military.

All war is of course a horrible thing, as is the ongoing genocidal war in Yemen by a Saudi Arabia that Canada arms, as was the illegal war of aggression against Iraq by our ally the US, and as was the destruction of the state of Libya by NATO. Those who cry out against the civilian deaths in Ukraine must take time to consider why those other deaths aren’t as important, just as with the over 13,000 civilian deaths in the Donbas in the last eight years caused chiefly by Ukrainian government forces and pro-Kyiv militias. The answer is of course that they are not different, just some of the killing is done by those our state considers to be allies and some by those it considers to be enemies.

A realist analysis puts such considerations to one side and allows us to rationally assess what actions are appropriate; just as cooler heads prevailed during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and saved the world from nuclear annihilation. To get lost in our own propaganda is incredibly dangerous when our opponent is a nuclear power capable of ending human civilization.

This should be a time for reflection on the Western policy establishment’s responsibility for creating an existential threat to Russia that should have been expected to lead to a major response. The sanctions currently being leveled against the Russian economy are unlikely to dissuade Putin, and Russia has extensively prepared for them; it is a massive exporter of raw materials that the world cannot do without, and the ‘international community’ outside the West has refused to sanction Russia.

The extensive damage to Western economies, especially Europe, through the range of sanctions enacted, are currently being exacerbated through the theft of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. The West benefits hugely from the current global financial system based upon the US dollar, but it has now been displayed that the West thinks nothing of outright theft and financial warfare. The previous cases of Iran, Venezuela, and Afghanistan were relatively small. The case of Russia is large enough to catch other nation’s attention and lead them to create a parallel financial system.

What’s more, Western statements of support, no matter how fulsome, come to nothing when a real war starts with a country that possesses a highly competent military and nuclear weapons. Ukraine in reality is on its own against Russia, no matter how many Western sanctions are implemented or how much material is provided. Other nations will take note of this.

Reflection does not seem to be in order though, as the US has threatened nations who have refused to sanction Russia. The most profound outcome of such threats may be a reconciliation of India with China, and a closer relationship between India and its erstwhile ally Russia. This is not 1995, and the West can no longer push nations such as India around without significant blowback.

After the Cuban missile crisis, the US leadership realized that it must treat the Soviet Union with some respect if nuclear war was to be averted. The West must now learn to respect other nation’s security needs if it wants to avoid becoming increasingly separated from the rest of the world. As the philosopher Mike Tyson put it so well, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The Russian invasion is the West’s punch in the mouth, and it desperately needs a new plan.

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Roger Boyd is a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Prior to completing his doctoral studies he spent 25 years as an executive in the financial industry, and authoured a book exploring the links between the energy and financial systems. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Balsillie School.

Featured image: A Ukrainian servicemen stands by a burned military vehicle near Sytniaky, Ukraine, March 3, 2022. Photo courtesy General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Facebook.

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The US-backed war on Yemen started seven years ago this week, and after all this time US policy is practically unchanged. The coalition bombing campaign has picked up again in recent months with 700 airstrikes in February alone, and according to the Yemen Data Project the bombing has been more intense during this period than at any point since 2018. 1,500 civilians have been killed or wounded in these attacks. Despite being far more destructive and killing many more people, including 91 people in a migrant detention center, these airstrikes have received no criticism from the US.

Instead of withholding military assistance from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as it should have done, the Biden administration has been rushing more jets, ships, and air defense interceptors to the governments that have been brutalizing the people of Yemen directly and through their armed proxies. The US also backed a one-sided UN Security Council resolution that named the Houthis as a terrorist group while ignoring the many atrocities committed by the coalition governments and their proxies. While the US condemns aggression in Ukraine, it continues to support it in Yemen.

Yemen’s humanitarian crisis continues to worsen because far too little has been done to halt the slide towards catastrophe. The UN has warned again that famine is spreading in the country. According to their estimate, there will be 161,000 people in famine conditions this year, and that figure is five times larger than it has been in the past. The World Food Program’s David Beasley commented on the projection, “These harrowing figures confirm that we are on a countdown to catastrophe in Yemen and we are almost out of time to avoid it.”

Two days after he said that, the UN aid drive for Yemen came up with a paltry $1.3 billion in donations, far short of the $4.27 billion that they were requesting. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have donated to these drives in the past to distract from their responsibility for the crisis, but this year they gave nothing. Yemen desperately needs more resources to stave off the worst-case scenario of widespread starvation, but more than that it needs an urgent effort to halt the fighting and lift the blockade. Even when there were no other major crises in the world, Yemen’s plight was badly neglected, and now it is being almost completely ignored.

To make matters worse, the war in Ukraine threatens to drive food prices much higher. In countries where tens of millions are already severely food insecure, including Yemen and Afghanistan, the effects of food shortages and rising global food prices will hit hardest. Yemen and Afghanistan were already facing some of the worst man-made famines before this because of economic warfare being waged against them, and this makes mass starvation even more likely.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE assume that they can extract more support from the US on account of higher energy prices, and the Biden administration has given them every reason to think that this will work. The US put no real pressure on either government over the last year, and Biden has signaled to these clients that he will give them practically anything they want. As usual, letting client states get away with murder just encourages them to make more demands and complain that they are being abandoned if they are not immediately satisfied. This is what comes of Biden’s so-called “back to basics” approach to the region, where the US remains deeply complicit in the crimes of its clients without using any of its leverage to get cooperation from them.

The war on Yemen is undoubtedly a war of aggression, but because it is waged by US client states with US backing it is not widely condemned in the same way as Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. The only real difference between the two is that the Saudi coalition dresses up their aggression by claiming to be seeking to restore a deposed dictator as president, but that is a pitiful fig leaf for an unprovoked attack on a neighboring country. It certainly cannot justify the many thousands of airstrikes that have battered Yemen’s cities and villages and killed and injured tens of thousands of civilians. The people of Yemen have borne the brunt of the war for seven years, and they have done so mostly without the rest of the world paying them much attention.

The US has a special responsibility to bring this conflict to an end because our government has done so much to fuel and enable it, and time is of the essence in averting a major famine that this US-supported war is creating. The Biden administration has proven that it isn’t going to make more than a token effort on its own. It falls to the public and members of Congress to insist that the US use all the leverage that it has with these states to put a stop to this indefensible war.

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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor and weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image: WFP Provides Food Assistance to a Record 7 Million People In Yemen In August 2017. UN World Food Program. [Source: wfp.org]

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Sanctions Have Consequences

March 23rd, 2022 by JW Rich

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The Biden regime’s DOJ apparently needs to hire at least four new tort lawyers to help with vaccine injury cases against HHS — according to a new job posting on the federal government’s official hiring site USAJOBS.

The job posting is only open for a month —so they need them now.

Here’s the job description (italics are mine):

Trial attorneys in Office of Constitutional and Specialized Tort Litigation – Vaccine Litigation Staff – represent the interests of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in all cases filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (“Vaccine Act”). The cases involve claims of injury as a result of the receipt of vaccines covered by the Act. The position offers a unique experience in public service and involves trial practice. The legal and medical issues at stake in each case vary. Trial attorneys independently manage heavy caseloads, and while streamlined procedures are utilized, many cases involve complex scientific issues of causation that require employment of experts in medical fields such as pediatrics, neurology, immunology and epidemiology. In cases in which petitioners are found entitled to compensation, the litigation often requires retention and management of experts to develop an appropriate life care plan for the injured party — to include medical treatment, remedial care, rehabilitation, calculation of lost earnings, actuarial projections and structured settlements.

Attorneys appear frequently before the Office of Special Masters in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and also appear before the judges of the Court, as well as in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit when handling appeals. Responsibilities include factual and legal research, medical record review, brief writing, and working with expert witnesses to develop the defense of claims, as well as to address the life care needs of vaccine-injured petitioners. As the majority of cases are resolved through settlement, attorneys also engage regularly in settlement negotiations, including alternative dispute resolution, and drafting settlement memoranda and related documents. Due to a recent increase in cases filed under the Vaccine Act, the office is expanding to address the additional workload.

Notice that the candidates will need “top secret” security clearances to do their jobs. Now why would you need a top secret clearance to do vaccine injury settlements? My guess: the Biden regime will try to hide the roles of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Baric and DARPA/Moderna (and all the rest of them at the Pentagon and NIH) in creating COVID-19 by designating the obvious truth as classified information. It’s all bioweapons research after all.

That’s exactly how the U.S. government works.

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FDA Gives Green Light to Gene-Edited Cattle

March 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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While a lengthy approval process is typically necessary for gene-edited animals to enter the food market, the FDA streamlined the process for gene-edited cattle, allowing them to skirt the regular approval process

The FDA announced in March 2022 that Recombinetics’ gene-edited cattle received a low-risk determination for marketing products, including food, made from their meat

This marks the FDA’s first low-risk determination for enforcement discretion for an intentional genomic alteration in an animal for food use

The animals have genes modified to make their coats shorter and slicker, which is intended to help them better withstand heat stress, allowing them to gain more weight and increase the efficiency of meat production

In 2019, Brazil stopped its plans to allow a herd of Recombinetics’ gene-edited cattle after unexpected DNA changes were uncovered

Long-term safety studies have not been conducted, and experts are calling for long-term safety and toxicity studies

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In as little as two years, Americans could be biting into their first gene-edited burgers, courtesy of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory clearance of gene-edited cattle.1 The animals, created by bioengineering company Recombinetics, have genes modified to make their coats shorter and slicker.

The genetic modification to their coats is intended to help them better withstand heat stress, allowing them to gain more weight and increase the efficiency of meat production2 — but at what cost? While a lengthy approval process is typically necessary for gene-edited animals to enter the food market, the FDA streamlined the process for gene-edited cattle, allowing them to skirt the regular approval process.

FDA Grants First ‘Low-Risk Determination’ for Gene-Edited Cattle

The FDA announced in March 2022 that Recombinetics’ gene-edited cattle received a low-risk determination for marketing products, including food, made from their meat. “This is the FDA’s first low-risk determination for enforcement discretion for an IGA [intentional genomic alteration] in an animal for food use,” the FDA reported.3

The agency stated that the gene-edited beef cattle do not raise any safety concerns because the gene modifications result in the same genetic make-up seen in so-called “slick coat” cattle, which are conventionally bred. According to the FDA:4

“There are conventionally bred cattle with naturally-occurring mutations that result in the same extremely short, slick-hair coat. Reports in scientific literature indicate that cattle with this extremely short, slick-hair coat are potentially able to better withstand hot weather. Cattle that are comfortable in their environment are less likely to experience temperature-related stress and may result in improved food production.”

But are the conventionally bred cattle and the gene-edited cattle, known as PRLR-SLICK cattle, truly equivalent? The genomic alteration in the cattle is introduced using CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, gene-editing technology. CRISPR has been associated with unintended mutations that may not immediately be apparent, a concerning prospect since the genetic alterations are passed on to offspring.

The FDA, however, is allowing the technology to proceed anyway, stating that because it does not expect facilities producing PRLR-SLICK cattle using conventional techniques to register with them, it would not expect Recombinetics to do so either. They further state that food from both conventionally bred cattle and the gene-edited cattle is “the same,” based on data provided by Recombinetics:5

“The FDA reviewed genomic data and other information submitted by the product developer confirming that the IGA in genome-edited PRLR-SLICK cattle is equivalent to naturally occurring mutations that have arisen in several breeds of cattle as an adaptation to being raised in tropical or subtropical environments.

The data also confirmed that the IGA results in the same slick-hair trait as in cattle found in conventional agriculture. Further, the food from the cattle is the same as food from conventionally bred cattle that have the same slick-hair trait.”

Problems With CRISPR

CRISPR gene-editing technology brought science fiction to life with its ability to cut and paste DNA fragments, potentially eliminating serious inherited diseases. CRISPR-Cas9, in particular, has gotten scientists excited because,6 by modifying an enzyme called Cas9, the gene-editing capabilities are significantly improved.

To date, gene editing has been used to produce soybeans with altered fatty acid profiles, potatoes that take longer to turn brown and potatoes that remain fresher longer and do not produce carcinogens when fried. Other uses for gene-editing in foods include the creation of low-gluten wheat, mushrooms that don’t turn brown and tomatoes that can be produced in areas with shorter growing seasons.

Gene-edited foods have already been released into the food supply, but their safety is largely unknown, as gene editing isn’t a perfect science. Unintentional off-target edits could cause changes to plant DNA, with consequences that could include growth disturbances, exposure to plant diseases or the introduction of allergens or toxins.7

In animals, gene editing has led to unexpected side effects, including enlarged tongues and extra vertebrate.8,9 Often researchers don’t know the extent of a gene’s functions until they attempt to tweak it, and something like an extra vertebrate reveals itself. Speaking with Yale Insights, Dr. Greg Licholai, a biotech entrepreneur, explained some of the very real risks of CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies:10

“One of the biggest risks of CRISPR is what’s called gene drive, or genetic drive. What that means is that because you’re actually manipulating genes and those genes get incorporated into the genome, into the encyclopedia, basically, that sits within cells, potentially those genes can then be transferred on to other organisms.

And once they’re transferred on to other organisms, once they become part of the cycle, then those genes are in the environment.

That’s probably the biggest fear of CRISPR. Humans manipulating the genetic code, and those manipulations get passed on generation to generation to generation. We think we know what we’re doing, we think we’re measuring exactly what changes we’re doing to the genes, but there’s always the possibility that either we miss something or our technology can’t pick up on other changes that have been made that haven’t been directed by us.

And the fear then is that those changes lead to antibiotic resistance or other mutations that go out into the population and would be very difficult to control. Basically creating incurable diseases or other potential mutations that we wouldn’t really have control over.”

Brazil Scrapped Plans for Gene-Edited Cattle

It’s worth noting that, in 2019, Brazil stopped its plans to allow a herd of Recombinetics’ gene-edited cattle after unexpected DNA changes were uncovered. As with the FDA, Brazilian regulators had determined that Recombinetics could proceed without any special oversight, since their gene-editing involved modifying cattle with a naturally occurring trait.

In this case, instead of altering the cattle’s coats, Recombinetics was editing the cattle to be hornless — until something went wrong. Wired reported in 2019:11

“The company, Minnesota-based Recombinetics, started preparing shipments of sperm from one of their two gene-edited Holstein bulls, Buri. With it, breeders planned to create about 10 calves to prove the edit could be passed down, and to study their health for a few years while they lived in Brazil.

If it all went well, they’d try the edits in a more elite dairy stud (sorry, Buri) and move into the market. But now, WIRED has learned, those plans have been abruptly dropped.

Buri, it turns out, had more than just the hornlessness gene slipped into his genome. Part of the editing machinery, the piece of bacterial DNA that delivered the desired gene into Buri’s cells, called a plasmid, had accidentally gotten pasted into his genome. He was, in fact, part bacteria — a teeny tiny part, around 4,000 base pairs out of about 3 billion.”

Recombinetics had reportedly checked for unexpected alterations during the process, concluding in 2016 that none occurred. But, Tad Sonstegard, CEO of Recombinetics’ agriculture subsidiary, Acceligen, told Wired, “We weren’t looking for plasmid integrations. We should have.”12Recombinetics also asked the FDA to grant the gene-edited hornless cattle “generally recognized as safe” status in 2016, but the agency declined.

In 2017, the FDA announced it would begin classifying animals with edited or engineered DNA as drugs, prompting backlash from the biotech industry,13 which doesn’t want such foods labeled. Prior to this, in November 2015, the FDA approved AquaBounty salmon, which contains the DNA from two other fish, a growth-promoting gene from a Chinook salmon and a “promoter” gene from the eel-like ocean pout.

This genetic tweaking results in fish with always-on growth hormone, and because they grow so much faster than other salmon, they also require less food. The GE fish were first sold and eaten in Canada,14 but AquaBounty acquired a fish farm in Albany, Indiana, where eggs intended to grow the first GE salmon for human consumption in the U.S. arrived in May 2019.15

AquaBounty began harvesting the GE salmon in late 2020 and is in the process of building another facility in Pioneer, Ohio, which will have about eight times the output capacity of the Indiana farm.16They describe their next phase of growth as transitioning to a commercial production enterprise, even as the health and environmental consequences of consuming and producing these altered salmon — or other gene-edited foods — remain unknown.

Gene-Edited Cattle Coming to Supermarkets

The FDA’s decision to grant gene-edited cattle a low-risk determination marks the first time the FDA has used “enforcement discretion” for IGA in an animal for food use. However, it’s unlikely to be the last, paving the way for more gene-edited animals to quickly reach the U.S. food supply. In fact, Steven Solomon, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, made it clear that he hopes more gene-edited animals for food production will soon be brought to the market:17

“[The] decision underscores our commitment to using a risk and science-based, data-driven process that focuses on safety to the animals containing intentional genomic alterations and safety to the people who eat the food produced by these animals. It also demonstrates our ability to identify low-risk IGAs that don’t raise concerns about safety, when used for food production.

We expect that our decision will encourage other developers to bring animal biotechnology products forward for the FDA’s risk determination in this rapidly developing field, paving the way for animals containing low-risk IGAs to more efficiently reach the marketplace.”

Recombinetics plans to have the gene-edited meat products available to “select customers in the global market soon” while general consumers will be able to purchase gene-edited meat in as soon as two years.18 The public, however, may not be thrilled with the idea, especially as many increasingly seek out real, whole foods in lieu of GMOs. One survey found only 32% of Americans are comfortable with GMOs in their food.19

It’s important to note, too, that long-term safety studies have not been conducted. The Center for Food Safety’s Jaydee Hanson is among those who stated the FDA should study gene-edited animals for several generations to look for problems.20

In an interview with GM Watch, Michael Antoniou, a London-based molecular geneticist, also explained that significant changes could occur due to genetic editing, in both agricultural and medical contexts, necessitating long-term safety and toxicity studies.21 For now the best way to avoid gene-edited foods, if you so choose, is to purchase organic and, even better, biodynamic foods.

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Notes

1, 2, 20 Drugs.com March 8, 2022

3, 4, 5, 17, 18 U.S. FDA March 7, 2022

6 Nature Methods 14, 547–548 (2017)

7 Washington Post August 11, 2018

8 Sci Rep. 2016; 6: 25029

9 The Wall Street Journal December 14, 2018

10 Yale Insights August 21, 2018

11, 12 Wired August 26, 2019

13 Pacific Standard November 1, 2018

14 BioGraphic February 13, 2018

15 UPI May 30, 2019

16 GlobalNewsWire January 11, 2022

19 GMO Answers

21 GM Watch June 1, 2017

Featured image is from Mercola

Was the Azov Battalion Behind the Mariupol Theater Bombing? Or was it Russia?

By Eric Zuesse, March 23, 2022

How could the pro-Russian side have known about this in advance? If Russia had had any reason for bombing that theater, then the Ukrainian government’s account of the matter would be worth considering. But none of that is the case here. The breakaway republics had gotten advance warning from resident(s) in nearby Mariupol — maybe from relative(s)s of hostages being held in that theater.

F-15 Eagles from the 493rd Fighter Squadron at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England

Defense Giants Quietly Making Billions on Ukraine War

By Peter Bloom, March 23, 2022

Ahead of the conflict, top western arms companies were briefing investors about a likely boost to their profits. Gregory J Hayes, the chief executive of US defense giant Raytheon, stated on a January 25 earnings call.

Eight Years Ago: US-NATO Installed a Neo-Nazi Government in Ukraine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 23, 2022

Confirmed by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, key organizations in the Ukraine including the Neo-Nazi party Svoboda were generously supported by Washington: “We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals. … We will continue to promote Ukraine to the future it deserves.”

Why Ukraine is Important to Powerful People in Washington: Lara Logan Sets the Record Straight on Ukraine-Russia

By Alexandra Bruce, March 22, 2022

She explains that Ukraine is at the center of this cult of Globalists. It is the center of money-laundering for the oligarchs and their allies in the United States, it’s the center of the Russia Hoax and the Fake Impeachment.

Was Bombing of Mariupol Theater Staged by Ukrainian Azov Extremists to Trigger NATO Intervention?

By Max Blumenthal, March 22, 2022

Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.

Getting Away with Murder

By Philip Giraldi, March 22, 2022

A recent story illustrating just how deep the rot has penetrated the core of United States government and its institutions has predictably been given little coverage by the US mainstream media, but it is a tale that is appalling in its implications.

Zelensky’s Reckless Gamble

By Vasko Kohlmayer, March 22, 2022

What Zelensky is doing, in reality, is calling for is World War III. Such a war could very quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West. With both sides armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, this kind of conflict would result in a fathomless death toll and would almost certainly end the world as we know it.

CDC Removes Tens of Thousands of Deaths ‘Accidentally’ Attributed to COVID

By Megan Redshaw, March 22, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 14 removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had attributed to children, blaming an algorithm for “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”

Yemen: The Largest Humanitarian Crisis that No One Discusses

By Martin Armstrong, March 22, 2022

Yemen has been at war for the past seven years. A once great land of ancient trade, Yemen has become one of the poorest nations in the Arab world. Their GDP for 2021 was expected to reach only 26.9 billion USD. The World Bank estimated that over half of Yemen’s population lived in poverty prior to the pandemic, and that figure has now reached 71% to 78%.

2021 Amazon Deforestation Map Shows Devastating Impact of Ranching, Agriculture

By Maxwell Radwin, March 22, 2022

Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) found that around 1.9 million hectares (4.8 million acres) of the rainforest were lost last year, similar to annual forest loss rates in 2020 and 2019.

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Scientists expressed shock and alarm this weekend amid extreme high temperatures near both of the Earth’s poles—the latest signs of the accelerating planetary climate emergency.

Temperatures in parts of Antarctica were 50°F-90°F above normal in recent days, while earlier this week the mercury soared to over 50°F higher than average—close to the freezing mark—in areas of the Arctic.

Stefano Di Battista, an Antarctic climatologist, tweeted that such record-shattering heat near the South Pole was “unthinkable” and “impossible.”

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” di Battista wrote.

The joint French-Italian Concordia research station in eastern Antarctica recorded an all-time high of 10°F on Friday. In contrast, high temperatures at the station this time in March average below -50°F.

Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told The Washington Post that “this event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system.”

“This is when temperatures should be rapidly falling since the summer solstice in December,” Wille tweeted. “This is a Pacific Northwest 2021 heatwave kind of event,” he added, referring to the record-breaking event in which parts of Canada topped 120°F for the first time in recorded history. “Never supposed to happen.”

Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told USA Today that “you don’t see the North and the South [poles] both melting at the same time” because “they are opposite seasons.”

“It’s definitely an unusual occurrence,” he added.

As Common Dreams has reported, the Arctic has been warming three times faster than the world as a whole, accelerating polar ice melt, ocean warming, and other manifestations of the climate emergency.

“Looking back over the last few decades, we can clearly see a trend in warming, particularly in the ‘cold season’ in the Arctic,” Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Post. “It’s not surprising that warm air is busting through into the Arctic this year. In general, we expect to see more and more of these events in the future.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image is from Climate Reanalyzer

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


First published on March 18, 2022

***

On Wednesday, March 16th, Russia’s Tass news agency headlined “Azov battalion militants blow up Mariupol theater building — Defense Ministry”, and reported:

Militants of the Azov nationalist battalion blew up the Mariupol theater building, which they rigged with explosives earlier, Russian Defense Ministry announced Wednesday.

The Defense Ministry debunked Kiev’s accusations of an airstrike on the theater building, where civilians could have been held hostage.

“During daylight on March 16, Russian aviation carried out no missions involving strikes on ground targets within Mariupol limits. According to the verified information, militants of the Azov nationalist battalion carried out another bloody provocation by blowing up the rigged theater building,” the Ministry of Defense said.

The next day, CNN bannered “Survivors emerge from rubble of Mariupol theater bombed by Russia” and reported:

People sheltering in a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol are emerging from the building after it was bombed, the former head of the Donetsk region said Thursday.

Hundreds of people were thought to have taken shelter in the theater amid the ongoing Russian siege of Mariupol.

CNN had not asked Russia’s Ministry of Defense to show them the evidence they had backing up the claim that “During daylight on March 16, Russian aviation carried out no missions involving strikes on ground targets within Mariupol limits.” Apparently, CNN was interested ONLY in information that was being supplied by Ukraine’s government. Of course, ‘reporting’ in that way is only propaganda — not journalism.

See the detailed and fully documented account of this matter, here, which persuades me that Tass got it right, and that CNN got it wrong. I have checked out all of its linked-to sources and found them to be not only extremely credible but some of them are thoroughly mainstream, such as Deutsche Welle (the German public broadcaster), Newsweek, The Nation, Stanford University, and Amnesty International.

Striking satellite imagery taken on Monday of the Mariupol Drama Theatre—hit by an air strike today. 1,200 civilians were sheltering in it. The image shows that the word “children” is written in Russian in large white letters in front of & behind the theatre. (Source: @Maxar)

One source in it that is not mainstream is a posting by the breakaway republics in Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbass region, and it’s an announcement, dated March 12th, that:

The second provocation Zelensky is preparing for pictures in Western media, after unsuccessful provocation with Maternity hospital, [is that]Ukrainian forces … got Mariupol women, children and old people into the Drama Theater building in order to show the whole world that [after it will be blown up] the place was bombed by the Russian Federation.. … Don’t be silent! We need to make more people know about this[preparation]!

How could the pro-Russian side have known about this in advance? If Russia had had any reason for bombing that theater, then the Ukrainian government’s account of the matter would be worth considering. But none of that is the case here. The breakaway republics had gotten advance warning from resident(s) in nearby Mariupol — maybe from relative(s)s of hostages being held in that theater.

That rounding-up of those Mariupol civilians did occur, and Mariupol is (and has always been) ruled by the government in Kiev — the government that The West has been and is arming; so, this slaughter of those civilians definitely was either carried out by the government there (Ukraine) OR ELSE by the invading Russian forces. The question is: whom to believe? However, if Russia’s forces did it, then WHY would the pro-Russian breakaway republics have warned on March 12th that this would be happening there? And WHY would Russia have selected that specific building to blow up? It had no military value, and only civilians were inside it. They had been inside it ever since March 12th.

Indeed: WHY would only civilians have been there? Why would no Ukrainian government forces (which control the city) have been there? What military purpose would have been served by doing this except to fool yet more people in The West to send to the Ukrainian government yet MORE weapons so they can kill the invading Russian troops?

That city is controlled by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.

Mariupol happens to be a city just outside the Donbass breakaway region from Ukraine in Ukraine’s southeast, and its citizenry were publicly protesting against the February 2014 forced overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Mariupol’s residents had overwhelmingly voted in the latest Ukrainian Presidential election, which was in 2010.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had hired Ukraine’s highly organized racist-fascist anti-Russian “Right Sector” and other far-right forces to prepare and lead the 2013 “Maidan” demonstrations against Yanukovych and subsequently to be appointed themselves to the top national-security positions in the new, U.S.-installed, post-coup Ukrainian government. Here is a video, on 9 May 2014, showing Mariupol residents protesting peacefully against the overthrow of their President, and being shot by the newly installed government’s police:

The pro-coup-regime (i.e., pro-U.S.) national Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post headlined “Avakov says 21 dead in Mariupol after clashes between police and separatists” and reported violent actions by the opponents of this new government:

Kremlin-backed “terrorists” kidnapped Mariupol police chief Valeriy Androshchuk during today’s firefight over the local police headquarters, said lawmaker Oleh Liashko on his Facebook page who is in the Donetsk Oblast city at the moment.

He “fought until the end” but “terrorists” took him from the “burning police station in a car that was cut off by a sports utility vehicle,” wrote Liashko. “The fighters stabbed the jeep driver with a knife and placed Androshchuk inside the car trunk and drove off in an unknown direction.”

Liashko was one of Ukraine’s leading far-right politicians and a strong backer of the U.S.-installed government; so, Liashko called the protesters “terrorists”; and, soon thereafter, the Ukrainian government officially introduced what they called an “Anti Terrorist Operation” in order to kill as many resisting people as possible anywhere in the country.

(To resist the coup-installed government was to be a ‘terrorist’.) This was virtually the beginning of Ukraine’s civil war. But, even earlier, on 2 May 2014, the new government’s murderous character was displayed in Odessa (in south-central Ukraine), where Right Sector forces trapped an unknown number of protesters in the Trade Unions Building — and burned them alive in it. The most heart-rending compendium of videos of that was shown here. This horrific event immediately sparked the protests throughout Ukraine’s southeast, which started on May 9th of 2014, which began the civil war.

So, it’s not surprising that, in the current battles, between the invading Russian soldiers and the soldiers of today’s Ukraine (the defenders of the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime), human shields are being used for protecting (‘shielding’) the latter (America’s proxy-forces in Ukraine).

The news-reports on March 17th, about the bombing of 1,200 civilians inside the Mariupol theater, was making a different use of the local civilians — not as human shields, but instead as victims of a false-flag attack by the Azov Battalion, in order to blame Russia so as to be able to receive yet more weapons from The West.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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In this short clip from an interview with Donna Fiducia and Doug Neuen of CowboyLogic.us, Lara Logan outlines her brutally honest perspective on why Ukraine is so important to people in power within the DC system.

She explains that Ukraine is at the center of this cult of Globalists. It is the center of money-laundering for the oligarchs and their allies in the United States, it’s the center of the Russia Hoax and the Fake Impeachment.

She says,

“The Open Society Foundation, through the National Endowment for Democracy and all of these other fake NGOs, that are nothing more than Brown Shirts and SS rolled into one were running their radical policy through the United States Embassy, through USAID, using our tax dollars to slit our own throats!

“Now they’re covering their own tracks in Ukraine, not just hiding the evidence of John Kerry’s son, Biden’s son, Nancy Pelosi’s son. Mitt Romney’s son, by the way, who’s as disgusting as the rest of them.

“Not only are they covering their tacks, hiding all the evidence of their involvement in ‘Russia collusion’, hiding the evidence of the bioweapons facilities that the US has been funding there and yes, some of that was left over from the Soviet days, some of that has been turning bioweapons facilities into public health facilities but that is again, not the whole truth, is again, not the whole story.

“They’re covering their tracks in Ukraine, they’re hiding evidence, they’re exploiting the Ukrainian people to do so, nobody is trying to de-escalate, they’ve got this moron as a leader, who was an entertainer, who was obviously selected, because he’s out there in stilletos and black leather pants, doing spoof videos for Dancing with the Stars and now we’re supposed to fawn at the altar of Zelenskyy…for crying in a bucket! Wake up, People!

“Yes, there is real suffering in Ukraine, there’s a real war going on, just as there were real issues being protested in the wake of George Floyd’s death but they’re being exploited by evil, horrible people who want to rule over all of us and enslave us. And if you don’t think that’s true, you think that’s a conspiracy theory, I’ve got no time for you.

“We are past the ninth mile, we’re sitting at the gates of Auschwitz and we’re arguing about whether the smoke coming out of the ovens is Climate Change. C’mon!”

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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***

First published on CADTM in June 2021.

Like so many regions of the world, the 14 ‘Southern African Development Community’ countries are grappling with the complex problem of Chinese state and corporate involvement in divergent societies, politics, economies and ecologies. There is enormous concern rising now about these relationships, in part because of a new chapter in the Cold War between Beijing and Washington, leaving Southern Africa torn, divided and subject to new forms of exploitation. After centuries of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, a degree of political independence was won between the 1960s-90s, with a terrible loss of life due to white supremicism. But since then, the region has still suffered from neo-colonialism, inter-imperial rivalries, sub-imperialism, neoliberalism, sustained patriarchy, resource-looting and now also the global climate meltdown and differential access to Covid-19 treatment and vaccines. China’s role is often an amplifier of these forms of oppression, but not always. It is vital to distinguish between functions that may assist the region in autonomous, sovereign self-development, on the one hand, and those that have negative implications for the region’s relationship to the world economy on the other. Social activists often provide guidelines to help make these distinctions, critiquing China for its amplification of the region’s extreme uneven development.

Introduction: Trends in Chinese-Southern African relations during economic crisis

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) region consists of Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. What is the role of China in SADC, given not only massive recent investments, loans and trade relationships with these 14 countries, but also its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? After all, BRI’s reach is exceptionally ambitious, reaching as far off the beaten track as Southern Africa. Still, as of 2021, several SADC countries have not yet joined BRI: Mauritius, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Malawi and the DRC. And Eswatini’s long-standing Taiwan relations remain a source of growing tension with Beijing.

The main Chinese investments and loans in South Africa require unpacking because they are within the BRI, conceptually, but due to systemic corruption and ecological destruction, social resistance has arisen to the main projects. The ones discussed below are port expansion in Durban (already Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest), rail expansion to export coal from Limpopo province, an auto factory in Nelson Mandela Bay, the largest coal-fired power plant under construction in the world (Kusile), and the largest Special Economic Zone in South Africa (Musina-Makhado).

These projects were all begun during the 2010s with most continuing into the 2020s. Not only are they logical corollaries to the corporate/parastatal ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’ which exerts so much influence on local capital accumulation. They can also be understood as a function of a plenary talk at the World Economic Forum in early 2017, just before Donald Trump took power, in which Xi Jinping (2017) clarified his ideology: “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalisation.”

In a 2015 talk, Xi had insisted on the merits of trade among his emerging-economy partners in the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS bloc. These economies must “boost the centripetal (unifying) force of BRICS nations through cooperation in innovation and production capacity to boost competitiveness” (Xi 2015). However, in reality, the supposed ‘centripetal’ economic strategy – i.e., that as the world turns, it becomes more tightly integrated – was increasingly centrifugal, given tendencies to deglobalisation that were underway already by 2007, the peak of internationally-integrated trade, finance and investment.

Well before Covid-19 disrupted the world economy, part of the reason for this process was China’s own tendencies to capitalist crisis, resulting in a ‘going-out’ process to displace its massive industrial overcapacity, but in a context of slower rates of trade, investment and cross-border financial flows. Chinese exports and imports both rose rapidly on three occasions: 2003-08, 2009-15 and 2020-21. Two global crashes help explain the subsequent 2009 and 2020 upticks, but remarkable here is the slowdown from 2014-20. Notwithstanding the current spike, as a share of GDP, China’s trade is so far below 2007’s peak level, that it is the world’s main driver of deglobalization.

Moreover, the trade that was occurring just before Covid-19 hit was increasingly disconnected from what are known as ‘value chains’: globally-integrated production systems. McKinsey Global Institute’s 2019 ‘global flows’ analysis confirmed, “…a smaller share of the goods rolling off the world’s assembly lines is now traded across borders. Between 2007 and 2017, exports declined from 28.1 to 22.5 percent of gross output in goods-producing value chains” (McKinsey 2019). The decline in trade intensity in these chains was also led by China, where gross exports as a share of gross output in goods fell from 18 percent to 10 percent from 2007-17.

The centripetal strategy expressed by Xi in 2017 was not taking hold. Instead, a centrifugal process entails ever-greater outward stress on a system as it turns, pushing an object away from the centre, potentially leading to its disintegration. Ironically, even before Covid-19 briefly wrecked the global economy in the first half of 2020 beginning in China, the decline in world trade/GDP ratios was led not only by China but the rest of BRICS group; i.e., the economies that once were considered by Goldman Sachs manager Jim O’Neil (2001) to be what he called the ‘building BRICS’ of 21st-century capitalism.

South Africa was hit especially hard by the decline in Chinese commodity imports (coal, platinum group metals, gold and iron ore are the main four). South African trade fell from 73 percent of GDP in 2007 to 58 percent in 2017, compared to a world trade/GDP decline over that period from 61 percent of GDP to 56 percent. All the BRICS witnessed reduced trade in much greater degrees than the global norm, and three spent parts of 2015–19 in recession: Brazil, Russia and South Africa. In 2020, only one (China) recorded positive GDP growth.

One classical symptom of economic crisis that since the early 2010s has emanated mainly from Chinese companies, is what can be termed the overaccumulation of capital, reflecting systemic overcapacity. China has over-invested in its plant, equipment and machinery, so much, that the ability to continue to generate growth is limited. This overaccumulation of capital is recognised by left-wing and right-wing economists alike.

For radical critics, overaccumulation has various symptoms. Given the intercapitalist competition within and between industries which leads to ever rising capital intensity and hence overproduction, there is a tendency for gluts to develop: high inventory levels, unused plant and equipment, excess capacity in commodity markets, idle labour and bubbling financial capital. Because profits are higher in the banking sector and stock markets, corporations that had been accumulating within the productive economy find it more lucrative to shift from reinvestment in fixed capital, into purchasing ‘fictitious capital’ (financial, paper assets) (Bond 2019).

Among orthodox economists, staff at the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2017a) studied Chinese capital overaccumulation and found that in major sectors – coal, steel, nonferrous metals, cement, chemicals and others where Chinese demand is between 30-60 percent of the world market – there exists at least one third overcapacity in production. And due to overindebtedness, a financial crisis can break out at any time, causing domestic and global growth to fall and worsening the living conditions of hundreds of millions of Chinese people.

In a subsequent analysis of Chinese companies that are so far in debt that they are considered ‘zombies,’ the IMF (2017b) advocated “phasing out the implicit support and making better use of resources that are currently going to zombie firms, overcapacity industries, and state-owned enterprises.” And in an economic review published in late 2020, the IMF (2020, 9) remarked on how the state’s Covid-19 financial aid “contributed to a further increase in already very high corporate debt and exacerbated existing structural problems by prolonging the economic life of non-viable and low-productivity firms, including SOEs, particularly in capital-intensive sectors with overcapacity.”

This is not surprising, according to sociologist Ho-fung Hung (2015): “Capital accumulation in China follows the same logic and suffers from the same contradictions of capitalist development in other parts of the world . . . [including] a typical overaccumulation crisis.” Well before Covid-19 amplified the country’s economic stresses, these conditions were becoming acute. According to political economist Xia Zhang (2017, 321-22), they reflect Chinese capitalism’s “restructuring as the result of overaccumulation. Often jointly with various representatives of Chinese capital, the Chinese state is compelled to reconfigure Chinese capitalism on a much larger spatial dimension so as to sustain the capital accumulation and expansion.”

One recent IMF survey of economic sectors suffering low capacity utilization confirmed how overcapacity was correlated to Chinese firms’ overseas Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) during the critical period of ‘going out,’ as such overseas activity is termed, during the mid-2010s:

The IMF economists observed,

  • China’s export-driven growth model until the mid-2010s gave companies incentives to constantly expand capacities in sectors where their comparative advantage led to ever greater international market shares, which in turn reinforced such comparative advantages. However, as growth began slowing down in China, capacity utilization started to decline, putting pressure on corporate profitability. With limited room for to grow domestically, Chinese companies had to seek new markets to relocate capital and keep the pace of expansion, the latter an important consideration for the SOEs as they were often tasked to support governments at all levels to meet the growth targets. Indeed, there seems to be a negative correlation between China’s overall capacity utilization index and the level of its overseas investment. (Ding et al 2021, 19)

Progressive activists understand this too. As articulated by the 2017 Hong Kong People’s Forum on BRICS and the BRI,

  • Instead of offering an alternative, the BRICS actually offer a continuation of neoliberalism. On top of BRICS there is also China’s new mega project, the BRI whose main purpose is to export China’s surplus capital, and in this process seek the cooperation and ‘mutual benefit’ of big foreign TNCs and regimes which are often authoritarian. The price of these investments is often borne by the working people and the ecological balance. (Borderless Hong Kong 2017)

From overaccumulation to a ‘New Scramble’ and resurgent geopolitical tensions

The economic crisis conditions are also playing out in a manner they have in past confrontations, in the late-19th century era of imperialism that led to World War I. Geopolitical influences are today being acutely felt, in the tug of war between West and East. There is enormous concern about whether Sino-African relationships will become the source of Western-African conficts, in part because of the way U.S. President Joe Biden is maintaining the intensity of the new Cold War between Beijing and Washington begun by his predecessor Barack Obama (2009-17) and continuing under Donald Trump (2017-21), leaving SADC countries torn, divided and subject to new forms of exploitation.

Under Trump, there was practically no effort to woo African countries – which he infamously termed s*&!-holes – to the U.S. side. But this will change under the Biden Administration, as the G7 meeting in June 2021 confirmed the West’s desire to establish a global ‘Build Back Better World’ alternative plan to the dirty BRI infrastructure. As Biden put it, the strategy “will collectively catalyze hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure investment for low- and middle-income countries in the coming years” through “a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership led by major democracies to help narrow the $40+ trillion infrastructure need in the developing world.”

These ‘democracies’ – the U.S., Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada – include the three main colonial and neo-colonial powers whose infrastructure investments since the 19th century invariably aimed to link ports – via railroads, roads and bridges – to mines and plantations, so as to better extract minerals and cash crops. Their Cornwall meeting in June 2021 did include as guests the two most important pro-Western leaders from Asia (India’s Narendra Modi) and Africa (South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa). But their attempts to achieve their main stated objective – i.e., to solve the Covid-19 catastrophe by gaining universal access to generic vaccines and treatments – were rebuffed.

The G7 includes one country – the U.S. – whose leader bowed to popular pressure by accepting (in principle) the idea that Covid-19 vaccines could be removed from World Trade Organization Intellectual Property restrictions during the continuing pandemic. While G7 leaders had over-ordered vaccines for their citizenry (in Canada’s case by a factor of five), the Indian and South African peoples were suffering higher rates of infection and more rapidly-buckling health systems than anywhere else on earth. That made no apparent difference at the G7 summit.

The original ‘Scramble for Africa’ – when the continent’s borders were carved – occurred in 1884-85 in a Berlin conference room, and divided peoples as a result of the whims of representatives from Britain, Portugal, France, Belgium and the host Germany. In the SADC region, each colonial power land-grabbed and to differing extents, each established settler-colonial white power over the inhabitants and nature. This Scramble represented not just colonial powers taking territories, but capitalism expanding voraciously during its own economic crisis.

According to Rosa Luxemburg, the German Communist leader who read about Namibia, the DRC and South Africa and then wrote The Accumulation of Capital in 1913,

  • Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters… The most important of these productive forces is of course the land, its hidden mineral treasure, and its meadows, woods and water, and further the flocks of the primitive shepherd tribes. Since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organisations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development.

Is there a new Scramble for Africa now underway, as some describe the way not only the Western colonial powers, but also South Africa and China, behave in the region? As far as the BRI is concerned, it is undeniable that two serious problems with China’s strategy are emerging. First, tension with India is acute, due to BRI’s Kashmir link via Pakistan, close to the area where Delhi is repressing a political uprising and where Sino-Indian conflict in mid-2020 led to dozens of troops’ deaths, on both sides. The second, discussed below, is rising resistance to social, environmental, political and economic injustice, which though mainly directed against tyrannical governments (some supported by the West, some by China), also have roots in structural features of the China-Africa relationship, especially resource extraction.

Membership in the BRI is now taken for granted for those in proximity, with the exception of India, where the link from Pakistan’s Gwadar port to the western edge of China could make import of Middle East petroleum and other vital supplies much easier, and far less risky than the ocean route (what with its bottlenecks and geopolitical tensions). But India’s own agenda creates a competitive conflict that has not yet been resolved, in part because India began its own counter-BRI strategy, the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, in alliance with Japan in 2017.

Meanwhile, the West complains that as the BRI allows for China’s expansion, Beijing still does not play by ‘fair’ rules. Whether Obama, Trump or Biden, Washington attacks China’s currency (considered to be artificially low so as to make exports more competitive), Intellectual Property theft, generous subsidies to parastatal corporations and protected domestic markets. In turn, this leads to the thorny question of whether a new Cold War has begun, in which Africa will be a pawn, yet again.

While the Biden Administration will reverse some of the more irrational U.S.-China trade war provisions imposed by Trump, there are others in the realm of state security and Big Tech that will be continued. Some of Wall Street’s largest firms are extremely exposed in China through direct investment, supplier relations, Research & Development contracts (which earn the corporates massive royalties), and consumer markets. And Beijing still owns more than $1.1 trillion in Treasury Bills, although that holding has not increased since 2012.

In spite of these interconnections, geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea began rising in 2011 with Obama’s imperialist ‘pivot to Asia.’ This meant, wrote journalist John Pilger (2016),

  • almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020. Today, more than 400 U.S. military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.

In addition, Eurasia is a testing ground because of increasing investments in Chinese infrastructure via the BRI. These are being funded in part by the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), centering on Russian-Chinese energy cooperation, and moving quickly without Washington’s membership thanks originally to Obama’s (impotent, incompetent) opposition. The situation became yet more dangerous due to Trump’s mercurial character, ruthless pragmatism, exceptionally thin skin, crude bullying behaviour and ability to polarise his own society and the world.

Even though in early 2021, Trump was replaced by a much smoother U.S. leader, Biden, further belligerence can be anticipated, including aspects of the trade war that relate to U.S. military interests, where Biden will more reliably represent the Military-Industrial Complex than did the erratic Trump.

In contrast to Trump, Obama pursued a dual strategy not only of enhancing the military theat to Beijing, but also of assimilating China into Western-dominated multilateralism, including much bigger roles (and higher voting shares) in the traditionally exploitative Bretton Woods Institutions. In 2014, Obama agreed with The Economist (2014) magazine’s editor, who interviewed him about “the key issue, whether China ends up inside that [multilateral financial] system or challenging it. That’s the really big issue of our times, I think.” Obama replied, “It is. And I think it’s important for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome China as a full partner in these international norms.”

In contrast to this rhetoric, Obama in 2015 dogmatically (and unsuccessfully) discouraged AIIB membership by fellow Western powers and the Bretton Woods Institutions. It was his most humiliating international defeat. But when it came to intensified trade liberalisation in the WTO, recapitalisation of the IMF under neoliberal rule, and destruction of the binding emissions reductions targets on Western powers that characterised the Kyoto Protocol, Obama’s strategy of bringing China and the other BRICS leaders inside was much more successful.

For such reasons, the role of these countries can be considered ‘subimperialist,’ in the original sense of the term, as defined by the Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini (1972): “collaborating actively with imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key nation.”

This collaboration was expressed the day before Trump took office in early 2017, when instead of the New York real estate tycoon, it was Xi Jinping who went to the Davos World Economic Forum to commit to expanding global capitalism. In contrast to Trump’s protectionism and ‘America First’ rhetoric, Xi’s plenary talk clarified his ideology:

  • There was a time when China also had doubts about economic globalisation, and was not sure whether it should join the WTO. But we came to the conclusion that integration into the global economy is a historical trend… Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies, and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible… We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalisation… We will expand market access for foreign investors, build high-standard pilot free trade zones, strengthen protection of property rights, and level the playing field… China will keep its door wide open and not close it. (Xi 2017)

Actually, not only did Xi effectively respond in kind to Trump’s tariffs by imposing countervailing tariffs, he also engineered a decline in the Chinese currency to below RMB7/$ in August 2019. And well before Trump, Xi proved his rhetoric of liberalisation was not matched by reality, for during six months starting in mid-2015, Beijing imposed stringent exchange controls, stock market circuit breakers and financial regulations to prevent two Chinese stock market collapses from spreading beyond the existing $5 trillion in losses. Moreover, within eighteen months of his Davos speech, Xi had authorized a set of trade restrictions on US products in retaliation for Trump’s protectionist tariffs. Channeling toxic waters of excessively chaotic capitalist globalisation back into economic purification systems is indeed possible, and necessary.

The deglobalisation process illustrates the trend. As noted above, the trade/GDP ratio and share of output from global value chains were falling prior to Covid-10. So even as China continued to play the role of global leader in capital accumulation, becoming the largest economy in Purchasing Power Parity terms, the country’s GDP was estimated to rise at only around 6 percent in 2019, the lowest rate in 25 years, and 2020 growth was far lower due to Covid-19. Prior to the unsustainable late-2020 revival, the import shrinkage adversely affected African countries which had long become dependent upon Chinese purchasers of their commodities.

As a result, China’s internal economic contradictions are becoming more acute, in part because the national debt doubled from 150 percent of GDP in 2007 to more than 300 percent by 2018. In addition, the Chinese “elite who control the state sector seek capital flight, encroach on the private sector and foreign companies, and intensify their fights with one another,” explains Hung (2018, 162):

  • The post-2008 boom was driven by reckless investment expansion funded by a state-bank financial stimulus. This created a gigantic debt bubble no longer matched by commensurate expansion of the foreign-exchange reserve… The many redundant construction projects and infrastructure resulting from the debt-fueled economic rebound are not going to be profitable, at least not any time soon. The repayment and servicing of the debt is going to be challenging, and a major ticking time bomb of debt has formed. This overaccumulation crisis in the Chinese economy is the origin of the stock market meltdown and beginning of capital flight that drove the sharp devaluation of Chinese currency in 2015–16.

From late 2015, the Chinese imposed tighter exchange controls not only to prevent financial capital flight but also to confront overaccumulation with so-called Supply-Side Structural Reforms, so as to “guide the economy to a new normal.” Beijing had five strategies, namely, capacity reduction, housing inventory destocking, corporate deleveraging, reduction of corporate costs, and industrial upgrading with new infrastructure investment. The “three cuts, one reduction, and one improvement” was, according to a favourable World Bank staff review in 2018, “a departure from China’s traditional demand-side stimulus policies” (Chen and Lin, 2018).

The dilemma in coming years is whether the other contradictions in the Chinese economy, especially rising debt and the on-and-off trade war with the United States (potentially spilling into other economies trying to resist devaluation), will turn a managed process into the kind of capitalist anarchy that causes overaccumulation in the first place. If so, it will be ever more important to coordinate worker and community resistance to the devaluation process with international solidarity. What are currently tit-for-tat protectionist responses (often accompanied by right-wing xenophobic politics) must be transformed into a genuine globalisation of people, with the common objective of degrowth for the sake of socio-ecological sanity.

Civil, political, socio-economic and environmental factors

China has had a strong state for centuries, in spite of the era from 1839 to 1949 when first the British and French and then Japanese imperial powers invaded and occupied crucial parts of the country. In the past three decades, since the Tiananmen Square repression of 1989, many more human rights concerns – and social protests – have been expressed, with growing concern that Xi’s regime has taken its powers to extreme levels. Since the late 1970s, Beijing’s imposition of liberalising capitalist development – without democratisation – has entailed heightened authoritarianism, unprecedented levels of surveillance, repression of minorities especially in the Western provinces, rural land grabs in the context of an apartheid-like migrant labour system, selective prosecution of corruption, and the demise of the Iron Rice Bowl state welfare system.

Before the revolution led by Mao Tse Tung in 1949, rural China was fragmented, inefficient and repressive. His centralisation of agricultural production attempted to transform the peasantry, but led to mass starvation in 1959-61. Heavy industrial investment and strict planning allowed cities to capture surpluses, while the gap in society’s basic needs was met through an “iron rice bowl” welfare model that included state-company housing as well as schools and hospitals. Literacy improved from 20 to 83 percent of the population from 1952-78. The core system of labour control is ‘hukou’, whose parallels with apartheid’s migration constraints are notable. After liberalisation began, three hundred million rural workers moved to cities on a temporary registration basis. According to Kevin Lin (2015, 71),

  • The first generation [of migrant workers] were rural peasants who, pushed by rural poverty and pulled by the burgeoning urban economy, migrated to China’s urban centres in the 1980s. Their city wages were meagre but still higher than their rural incomes. For young women, factory work and urban life also brought a new sense of freedom. But the household registration system and their own rural roots meant that the first-generation migrant workers have been predisposed to eventually returning to their villages.
  • It is the family farm that lends the migrant worker away from home a substitute for the benefits he or she is not getting from urban work, as well as security in the event of dis-employment or unemployment or in old age, while this same worker helps supplement the otherwise unsustainably low incomes of the auxiliary family members engaged in underemployed farming of small plots for low returns. So long as substantial surplus labour remains in the countryside, the key structural conditions for this new half-worker half-cultivator family economic unit will prevail.

During an era in which millions of former Township and Village Enterprises have closed and there is no longer an Iron Rice Bowl, the ability of Beijing to maintain super-exploitative wages for the benefit of transnational corporate investors is partly based on the gendered dimension. As Julia Chuang (2016, 484) explains of rural gender relations,

  • In the sending community, women face a double bind: they are expected to support husbands who engage in precarious and high-risk migrations; and they are expected to negotiate with those husbands to channel a portion of remittance income to their aging parents, who lack access to welfare or social support.

The tasks are harder given how few resources Beijing allocates from its massive surpluses to social welfare. Among the world’s 40 wealthiest economies measured by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2019), the Chinese share of social spending to GDP – like South Africa’s – is just 8 percent, far short of the OECD average of 22 percent. Only India, Indonesia and Mexico are lower in this peer group.

One result is rising social discontent. The last year that the Chinese government released statistics on protests was 2005, when there were 87,000. In recent years, according to Bin Sun (2019, 429), “More than 600 mass protests a day erupt in China, more than 200,000 a year. Of these, over 100,000 occur in rural areas, of which perhaps 65 percent are linked to residents’ loss of land… Chinese governments will repress religiously rooted resistance, tolerate economically motivated actions, and encourage nationalistically inspired demonstrations.”

Sometimes the protests are a good pressure-cooker indicator, leading to adjustments in state practices, including removal of officials seen to be hostile to communities or workers. In his book Responsive Authoritarianism in China: Land, Protest, and Policy Making, Christopher Heurlin (2016, 3) shows how Beijing “proactively monitors citizen opposition to state policies and selectively responds with policy changes when it gauges opposition to be particularly widespread.”

However, the exceptional advances in Beijing’s Social Credit surveillance system are now capable of not only predicting the location and timing of protests – through systematic monitoring of grievances expressed on China’s Facebook equivalent, Weibo – but also punishing activists. Although the U.S. agency Freedom House is not always reliable, what it terms the China Model of Internet Control is undeniable, and entails the Great Firewall, content removal, revoking access by users, manipulation of social media and high-tech surveillance, as well as violence, arrests and repression. One example, internet journalist Lu Yuyu, was a prolific analyst of labour and social protests. He and his partner Li Dingyu were arrested in 2016 on charges of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble.” After jail beatings, Lu was sentenced in 2017 to four years in prison (Committee to Protect Journalists 2017).

Social Credit scoring was announced in 2014 as a way to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” By late 2018, Beijing’s National Public Credit Information Centre revealed, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights on 17.5 million occasions, and from buying train tickets 5.5 million times. The system’s roll out is scheduled for 2020. This is part of a general arsenal aimed at assuring totalitarian social control. As Wired magazine reported in 2019,

  • The Chinese government is already using new technologies to control its citizens in frightening ways. The internet is highly censored, and each person’s cell phone number and online activity is assigned a unique ID number tied to their real name. Facial-recognition technology is also increasingly widespread in China, with few restraints on how it can be used to track and surveil citizens. The most troubling abuses are being carried out in the western province of Xinjiang, where human rights groups and journalists say the Chinese government is detaining and surveilling millions of people from the minority Muslim Uyghur population on a nearly unprecedented scale. (Matsakis 2019)

Occupation and resident re-education camps are common especially in Xinjiang and Tibet, where minority ethnic nations have long demanded greater rights and self-rule. In November 2019, The New York Times (2019) published 403 pages of proof – the ‘Xinjiang Papers’ – from within the Chinese state, showing how after a train station attack by Islamic extremists in 2014, Xi ramped up the repression. He called for a ‘struggle against terrorism, infiltration, and separatism’ using the ‘organs of dictatorship,’ and showing ‘absolutely no mercy’ against those with ‘strong religious views,’ a process which began in earnest in 2017. Beijing’s répression of Hong Kong democracy protesters is playing out in the extraordinary activism now in process. The demonstrations are being watched closely by SADC activists since so many of the creative tactics being used to escape surveillance will be vital in a region whose authoritarian and democratic leaders have often stooped to illegal spying on the citizenry.

To illustrate, the confluence of Chinese elite interests and South African leaders was on display three times – in 2009, 2011 and 2014 – when the South African government denied or delayed a travel visa for the Dalai Lama, respectively for a peace conference, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday and a Nobel Peace Prize laureates’ workshop. On the final occasion, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesman celebrated “the respect given by the South African government on China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the support given to China on this issue” (Reuters 2014). In 2015, the Foreign Ministry’s lead Africa official, Lin Songtian, complained that while Beijing was helping Jacob Zuma develop ten Special Economic Zones, the Dalai Lama “can’t just come and spoil this for you and we want a friendly atmosphere and environment for this to happen. We invest a lot of money in South Africa and we can’t allow him to come and spoil the good relations” (Mazibuko 2015).

The sovereignty of the South African state was also violated in late 2015, in the reversal of the appointment of finance minister Desmond van Rooyen, who was widely seen as a dangerously ill-equipped crony of Zuma. According to Business Day publisher Peter Bruce (2016): “I have reliably learnt that the Chinese were quick to make their displeasure known to Zuma. For one, their investment in Standard Bank took a big hit. Second, they’ve invested way too much political effort in South Africa to have an amateur mess it up. Their intervention was critical.” (Bruce saw this as a highly favourable development.)

In the other case of a widely-applauded Chinese intervention in the affairs of an African state, the November 2017 coup against Robert Mugabe followed major investments and then a fall-out. China had been invited to Zimbabwe for weapons sales and stakes in tobacco, infrastructure and mining, and its retail imports continue to deindustrialize Zimbabwean manufacturing. Mugabe’s successor Emmerson Mnangagwa had fought Rhodesian colonialism in the 1970s, and was one of Mugabe’s leading henchmen, rising to the vice presidency in 2014. But Mugabe fired him on November 6, signaling his wife Grace’s ruthless ascent. Mnangagwa’s fate was the catalyst for an emergency Beijing trip by his ally, army leader Constantino Chiwenga, for consultations with the Chinese army command. Mnangagwa received military training in China during Mao’s days (CNN 2017).

Beijing’s Global Times, which is often a source of official wisdom, was increasingly wary of Mugabe. According to a contributor, Wang Hongwi (2017) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,

  • Mnangagwa, a reformist, will abolish Mugabe’s faulty investment policy. In a country with a bankrupt economy, whoever takes office needs to launch economic reforms and open up to foreign investment… Chinese investment in Zimbabwe has also fallen victim to Mugabe’s policy and some projects were forced to close down or move to other countries in recent years, bringing huge losses.

Amongst the populace, Mnangagwa remains widely mistrusted due to his responsibility for (and refusal to acknowledge) 1982-85 ‘Gukhurahundi’ massacres of more than 20,000 people in the country’s western provinces (mostly members of the minority Ndebele ethnic group, whose handful of armed dissidents he termed “cockroaches” needing a dose of military ‘DDT’); his subversion of the 2008 presidential election which Mugabe initially lost; his subsequent heading of the Joint Operations Committee secretly running the country, sabotaging democratic initiatives; as well as for his close proximity – as then Defence Minister – to widespread diamond looting from 2008-16 (Bond 2017a).

In 2016, Mugabe himself complained of revenue shortfalls from diamond mining in eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange fields: “I don’t think we’ve exceeded US$2 billion or so, and yet we think that well over US$15 billion or more has been earned in that area.” In order for Mnangagwa to establish the main Marange joint venture – Sino Zimbabwe – with the notorious (and now apparently jailed) Chinese investor, Sam Pa, the army under Mnangagwa’s rule forcibly occupied the Marange fields. In November 2008, troops murdered several hundred small-scale artisanal miners there (Bond 2017a).

There have been many other instances of Chinese investors propping up African dictators, but in the SADC region, the case of Sam Pa’s relationship with Jose Eduardo Dos Santos stands out. According to respected commentator António Pereira, “Pa exploited this relationship to secure total control over construction projects in Angola. The construction of the new airport [Aeroporto Internacional de Angola] is a continuation of Pa’s, CIF’s and by extension, China’s monopoly on Angola construction projects” (Africa News 2018). He also worked with Beijing parastatal Sinopec to acquire Angolan oil fields. Pa was arrested in China in 2015 after apparently falling foul of anti-corruption prosecutions that took down high-ranking party and state officials. His current whereabouts are unknown.

These are examples of local socio-economic, civil and political, and environmental violations. The most dangerous, however, are in the ways China, South Africa and other high-emitting countries continue to create climate-crisis conditions in the SADC region. Weak regulation of HCFCs, toxins and plastic products are becoming a major problem, although China’s lead in solar and wind energy generation and decision to ban waste imports are positive signs.

The combination of socio-economic and environmental damage is also evident in mega-projects, which we take up next in a brief review of the five main cases of Chinese investments and loans in South Africa.

China’s controversial role in South African mega-projects

The five largest projects involving South Africa are illustrative of the problems described above, especially those that conjoin political corruption, maldistributed economic benefits, social dislocation and ecological damage. The two biggest current projects in South Africa entail export of coal on a new rail line, and expansion of Durban’s port – the ‘Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission Strategic Integrated Projects’ 1 and 2.

Campaigns for reparations have been launched against Chinese vendors, especially in Transnet’s acquisition of rail equipment. They began to succeed in early 2018, due to blatant corruption in the state transport agency’s purchase of several hundred locomotives designated to export 18 billion tons of coal in what was then a $50 billion bulk rail upgrade project.

The Chinese connection also entailed a commitment by the China Development Bank in 2013 to provide $5 billion in credit to Transnet for its capital investments, a sum that would in part pay for China South Rail’s provision of locomotives. The purchase price also included $2.9 billion in ‘irregular expenditures’ apparently known to the firm’s CEO Zhou Qinghe ; these were corruption payments to the Gupta brothers via a Transnet official. Those brothers had notoriously ‘state captured’ the South African president at the time, Zuma, through his son Duduzane whom they had employed. As a result of the public outcry, Zuma was pushed out of power in early 2018, nearly a year and a half before his term ended (Bond 2020).

The second biggest mega-project in South Africa is the expansion of what is already the largest sub-Saharan African container terminal, costing $15 billion. In the first stage, a much smaller case of Gupta bribery occurred, again via Transnet, during the purchase of seven tandem-lift ship-to-shore cranes used mainly to import goods from East Asia. These were provided by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (in partnership with Liebherr-International of Switzerland) and entailed an $8 million payoff to the Guptas as part of what were termed the ‘world’s most expensive cranes’ due to the markup and supplier profiteering (Amabhungane 2017).

The most important point about the Durban port expansion, however, is that it is firmly opposed – and regularly protested – by the main social movement in the area, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance due to the large-scale pollution and displacement (Bond 2017b).

Third, another major port city further down the Indian Ocean coast is the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality (formerly Port Elizabeth). It includes a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with substantial tax benefits at the area known as Coega, and contains the largest single Chinese manufacturing investment in South Africa. The Beijing Automobile Industrial Corporation (BAIC) plant is co-financed by the South African state’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).

In mid-2018, the first semi-knock down Sport Utility Vehicle came off the BAIC assembly line, just a day before the BRICS Summit was to start in Sandton. The manufacturing plant cost nearly $1 billion (then R11 billion), and was the single largest Foreign Direct Investment in any of the main South African SEZs. In June 2018, Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Lin Songtian stated, “I’ve been to many developing countries and industrial development zones and the Coega SEZ is by far the best of them all” (Toussaint et al 2019).

However, in the subsequent year, the BAIC/IDC joint venture encountered many difficulties. The University of the Western Cape (Toussaint et al 2019) report on SEZs documented these:

  • Crises included inadequate Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise involvement, budget shortfalls for the start-up phase, differential labour laws, and delays in production, which played havoc with the image projected of a functional SOE partnership. As one report in the (partially Chinese-owned) Independentnewspaper chain confessed in 2019, “Serious doubts have been expressed in motor industry circles about the claims that the vehicle was manufactured in South Africa… Last September, the local media reported that the construction had been moving at a snail’s pace and all SMMEs had vacated the premises due to non-payment.”

Again, according to University of Western Cape analysts, one manifestation was local dissent:

  • Local journalist Max Matavire reported on extensive labour and small business protests against BAIC during construction, and titled a November 2019 article, “Overambitious production targets delay R11bn BAIC project,” since BAIC “has missed its deadline by two years because it failed to meet its own overambitious and unrealistic production targets set at the launch… Currently, they are producing 50 000 vehicles per year from the semi-knocked-down kits. This will increase to 100 000 a year when fully operational”… Inadequate pay at the factory was the source of further grievances, according to media reports. Workers demanded twice the R24/hour that they were earning in 2018, and were on strike for several weeks, for the second time. (Toussaint et al, 2019)

Finally, at what is potentially the biggest SEZ in South Africa – at the far northern tip of the country – there is a $10 billion China-funded metals-manufacturing facility planned in a corridor termed Musina-Mukhado. One smaller part of the SEZ is just 50 km from the Zimbabwean border post of Beit Bridge. But it is the rural Makhado section that Chinese entrepreneur Ning Yat Hoi and his Shenzhen Hoi Mor Resources Holding Company chose for an 8000 hectare project, bordering the main highway heading north. That part of the Musina-Makhado SEZ (MMSEZ) is the energy-metallurgical complex (hence sometimes termed EMSEZ).

President Cyril Ramaphosa had co-chaired the Forum on China-Africa China Cooperation in September 2018, and in addition to promoting the MMSEZ, he announced a further $1.1 billion (R16.5 billion) loan from the Bank of China for SEZs and industrial parks in South Africa (Mokone 2018). If approved, the MMSEZ will contain a coal washing plant (with the capacity to process 12 million tonnes per year); a coking plant (3 million tonnes); an iron plant (3 million tonnes); a stainless steel plant (3 million tonnes); a ferro manganese powder plant (1 million tonnes); a ferrochrome plant (3 million tonnes); a limestone plant (3 million tonnes); and most controversially, a 3300 MW coal-fired power plant.

The latter is not incorporated in South Africa’s official Nationally Determined Contributions to cutting emissions mandated in the Paris Climate Agreement, nor in the Energy Department’s Integrated Resource Plan for added capacity. Water to cool the plant is not immediately available, and will require an international transfer from deep aquifiers in water-starved western Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Even the company hired by the MMSEZ to conduct environmental analysis, Delta BEC (2020), admitted that in terms of greenhouse gases, “emission over the lifetime of the project will consume as much as 10 percent of the country’s carbon budget. The impact on the emission inventory of the country is therefore HIGH. The project cannot be implemented in the current regulatory confines.” Delta BEC suggested the environmental contradiction could be overcome with a carbon-capture-storage strategy for the vast CO2 emissions, although no such proven technology exists.

Pressures arose against Delta BEC in early 2021 as community consultations failed to win buy-in, so the main staffer quit in disgust. The provincial agency in charge of the project worked with Ning to scale down the project, displacing several components from Makhado and reducing the power plant to 1320MW. Still, environmental legal critiques, (white) conservationist opposition, and (black) community resistance facilitated by Earthlife South Africa remained intense.

Moreover, corruption is another concern in a part of South Africa, Limpopo Province, that has notorious legacies of state capture. Ning had spent much of 2017-18 defending himself in court and was even on the Interpol ‘Red List’ for theft. In 2015-17 he served as board chair of a mining company in Zimbabwe, ASA Resource Group, but was fired by the other directors and charged with $5 million in alleged graft. At a November 2018 London High Court hearing on the case, the judge ruled that there were credible allegations against Ning for “stealing money, a corrupt relationship between Mr Ning and the Chinese suppliers and an alleged tortious conspiracy between the Chinese directors. The pleadings are extensive.”

Investigative journalists at Amabhungane (South Africa’s leading reporters) identified many suspicious relations between Ning and South African officials. These included dereliction of duty by the South African Ministers of Trade and Industry responsible for giving Ning permission to operate that part of the MMSEZ, Rob Davies and Ebrahim Patel (Amabhungane 2020).

Still, the project would continue because, according to one reporter,

  • the concept of the MMSEZ was premised on extensive cross-border research to determine what commodities were crossing the Beit Bridge border with the top ten identified as being potential low-hanging fruit. The idea was that that instead of machinery and equipment being built in, say, Durban and shipped to a SADC country, it could far more advantageously be done in the MMSEZ (Ryan 2019).

In other words, the net benefit for South Africa was dubious, if the MMSEZ’s opening of new capacity in one part of the country simply shut down that capacity in another part, one where the tax rate was about twice as high. Indeed, the standard corporate tax rate for South African businesses was, in 1992 at the close of apartheid, 52 percent. It was reduced to 28 percent over the subsequent three decades and 27 percent in 2021. But still this was not sufficient to entice new investment by either local or foreign capital. The SEZ strategy is to lower the rate still further, to just 15 percent – the lowest corporate tax agreed by the G7 in 2021, to promote internationally.

In spite of the dilemmas associated with access to capital and to water, climate, and corruption, even the 2019 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) special SEZ report unequivocally promoted the MMSEZ:

  • In Africa, intercontinental trade and economic cooperation through border SEZs is also high on the agenda. The MMSEZ of South Africa is strategically located along a principal north-south route into the Southern African Development Community and close to the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe. It has been developed as part of greater regional plans to unlock investment and economic growth, and to encourage the development of skills and employment in the region (UNCTAD 2019: 160).

UNCTAD officials weren’t paying attention. There was a new truck route away from both Makhado and Musina, crossing Botswana in a northwesterly direction, avoiding the costly, inefficient northeasterly Zimbabwe border (Beitbridge) a few kilometers north of Musina. According to Africa trade analyst Diana Games:

  • In May 2021, the Kazungula Bridge across the Zambezi River linking Botswana and Zambia was opened by the presidents of the two countries. The construction of the bridge, which replaces the longstanding, slow ferry service across the river, means trucks on regional routes can now cross the river in a few hours, or less, rather than the previous three days to a week. It also means they can avoid using the biggest crossing between the ports and factories of South Africa and the rest of southern Africa, Beitbridge, which is also one of the most congested borders in Africa. A one-stop border post at the bridge will allow easier thoroughfare.

The diversion of traffic from this essential ‘Gateway to Africa’ truck route is a formidable deterrent to the MMSEZ’s overall rationale. In working through Ning’s firm, and emphasizing much closer ties to the Zimbabwean and South African governments – while suffering often frosty relations with Zambia – the Chinese economic diplomats and others in FOCAC who entertained such high hopes for the MMSEZ witnessed a string of profound disappointments.

Conclusion: Potentials for reviving positive Chinese-SADC relations

The adverse conditions Chine capital accumulation is encountering in the South African cases discussed above, and indeed across the region, are indisputable, and will continue to be contested. Yet many Southern Africans know a different face of China, not only that of the super-exploitative state and private firms now active in the region.

Many ask whether Chinese workers, peasants and progressives could one day, just as they did in 1949, wrest their society away from a self-destructive ruling class now controlling the economy and state? To be sure, China’s role in Africa has often been honorable, and there are many reasons to admire and offer return solidarity to those forces which have consistently sought liberatory allies in Africa.

Chinese socio-ecological-economic advances celebrated by progressives everywhere include:

  • China’s 1949 peasant-worker revolution and decolonisation – and later in the 1960s-70s, its crucial support for African anti-colonial struggles (especially Zimbabwe’s) and regional development aid (especially the Tanzania-Zambia railway);
  • China’s capacity for rapid pollution abatement and renewable energy dissemination (based partly on disregard for the West’s Intellectual Property);
  • China’s strength in maintaining international financial sovereignty through exchange controls and financial regulations (especially those imposed in 2015-16 to halt spreading stock market crashes into other markets);
  • China’s 2009-14 expansion of mass housing, services, recreational and transport innovations (especially the “Chongqing Model” of municipal development promoted by China’s neo-Maoist ‘New Left’);
  • China’s ongoing worker and peasant protests which are reputed to number more than 100 000 annually, in spite of often severe punishment;
  • Chinese internet users’ ability to avoid Beijing’s repressive surveillance systems (including ongoing democratic organising in Hong Kong).

There are also Zhou Enlai’s ‘Eight Principles’ for Chinese interrelations with Africa dating back more than 55 years. As the first Premier of China, Zhou listed principles for foreign aid during a trip to Africa in late 1963 and early 1964:

  • mutual benefit
  • no conditions attached
  • the no-interest or low-interest loans would not create a debt burden for the recipient country
  • to help the recipient nation develop its economy
  • not to create its dependence on China
  • to help the recipient country with projects that need less capital and quick returns
  • the aid in kind must be of high quality at the world market price to ensure that the technology can be learned and mastered by the locals
  • the Chinese experts and technicians working for the aid recipient country are treated equally with local ones, with no extra benefits to them (Shixue 2011).

While many such principles, innovations and aspirations are admired by SADC progressives, the pages above considered the more recent, generally négative aspects of China’s socio-economic and environmental advances. These include Chinese parastatal and corporate investments, financing and trade, as well as in China’s role in multilateralism and its geopolitical power in Africa. The conclusion, hence, is pessimistic regarding the relationship binding Chinese and SADC elites. Yet there are grounds for optimism regarding social resistances that in future may reconnect Southern African progressives with their Chinese counterparts.

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Patrick Bond, Professor, University of the Western Cape School of Government. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

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Xi, J., 2015. Jointly build partnership for bright future. Speech to the 7th BRICS Heads-of-State Summit, Ufa, Russia, 9 July. https://brics2017.org/English/Headlines/201701/t20170125_1402.html

Xi, J., 2017. Opening plenary address. World Economic Forum, Davos, 17 January. https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2017/sessions/opening-plenary-davos-2017.

Zhang, X. (2017), Chinese Capitalism and the Maritime Silk Road, Geopolitics, 22, 2, 2017, pp.310-331, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2017.128937

Featured image: “President Cyril Ramaphosa at 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation” by GovernmentZA is licensed with CC BY-ND 2.0. 

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Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.

Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.

The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”

A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.

Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives.

Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16.

While the Russian military operation in Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, it is clear that Russia gained nothing by targeting the theater, and virtually guaranteed itself another public relations blow by targeting a building filled with civilians – including ethnic Russians.

Azov, on the other hand, stood to benefit from a dramatic and grisly attack blamed on Russia. In full retreat all around Mariupol and facing the possibility of brutal treatment at the hands of a Russian military hellbent on “de-Nazification,” its fighters’ only hope seemed to lie in triggering direct NATO intervention.

The same sense of desperation informed Zelensky’s carefully scripted address to Congress, in which he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and played a heavily produced video depicting civilian suffering to make the case for a no fly zone.

By instigating Western public outrage over grisly Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s government is clearly aiming to generate enough pressure to overcome the Biden administration’s reluctance to directly confront Russia’s military.

But Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building.

Children undergo military training at a summer camp run by the Azov Battalion in 2015

Azov Battalion fighters grow desperate in Mariupol, plea for Western military intervention

The strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol has been held by the Azov Battalion since 2014. Since its seizure, it has served as a political and military base for the ultra-nationalist paramilitary as it launched assaults on pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway republic of Donetsk.

Gathered from the ranks of extreme right activists that provided protesters with street muscle during the 2013-14 Euromaidan coup, the Azov Battalion has been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard by the country’s Interior Ministry. It was founded by the openly fascist organizer Andriy Biletsky, who has vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

With the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol emblazoned on their uniforms and flags, Azov fighters make no secret of their ideological goals. Despite having been identified by the FBI, US Congress, and its own fighters as a neo-Nazi unit, and implicated in an array of sordid human rights violations, Azov has collaborated openly with US and Canadian military trainers.

Having accused Azov of seeking to exterminate the ethnic Russians of Donbas, Putin has marked its base in Mariupol as the front line of his stated campaign to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Since Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, the city become the site of ferocious urban fighting, with Russian special forces and Donetsk People’s Republic People’s Militia forces waging a block-by-block fight for control as artillery rained down on Azov positions.

On March 7, an Azov Battalion commander named Denis Prokopenko appeared on camera from Mariupol with an urgent message. Published on Azov’s official YouTube channel and delivered in English over the sound of occasional artillery launches, Prokopenko declared that the Russian military was carrying out a “genocide” against the population of Mariupol, which happens to be 40 percent ethnic Russian.

Prokopenko then demanded that Western nations “create a no fly zone over Ukraine support[ed] with the modern weapons.” It was clear from Prokopenko’s plea that Azov’s position was growing more dire by the day.

As Russia’s military rapidly degraded Azov positions throughout the second week of March 2022, Azov soldiers apparently directed elderly civilians as well as women and children into the wardrobe hall of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol.

A video filmed inside the dimly lit building on March 11 featured a local man claiming that one thousand civilians were trapped inside and demanding a humanitarian corridor to allow them to escape. Only a small group of civilians could be seen in the video, however.

“I’m begging you to stop all this, give us the corridor to get people out, to get out women, kids, the wounded…” a bespectacled narrator (seen below) declared in the video.

Azov soldier (L) appears on March 11 with a local man outside the Mariupol theater

Since Russia launched its invasion, Azov Battalion soldiers have been filmed preventing civilians from leaving Mariupol – even forcing men out of their cars and brutally assaulting them while they attempted to break through the paramilitary’s checkpoints. If testimony from many Mariupol residents was to be believed, Azov had used many of them as human shields.

Days before Mariupol theater incident, chilling warnings of a false flag “provocation”

On March 12, a chilling message appeared on the Telegram channel of Dmitriy Steshen, a correspondent reporting from Mariupol for the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

According to Steshen, local residents told him an alleged Russian bombing of the Turkish-built Kanuni Sultan Suleyman mosque in Mariupol that day was a false flag intended to “drag Turkey into the war,” and warned that a false flag attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater was imminent.

The Telegram message read as follows:

“Look at what our readers from Mariupol sent us. If the information can be verified, it needs to be highlighted [for the media]:

‘Zelensky prepares two [false flag] provocations in Mariupol!!! One of the [false flag] provocation is against the citizens of Turkey, who hid in the mosque built by Akhmetov, and this provocation has already begun by the Ukrainian artillery gunners shelling the grounds of the mosque, from their positions at [Zinsteva] Balka in Nizhniaya [Lower] Kirvoka. Zelensky was unable to drag the EU, USA and UK into the war against the Russian Federation. Now, Zelensky is trying to drag Turkey into the war, pinning his hopes on the explosive emotional character and the love the faithful feel for their sacred shrines.

The second [false flag] provocation Zelensky is preparing for use by Western media, after unsuccessful provocation with the [Mariupol] maternity hospital, Ukrainian soldiers, together with the administration of the Drama Theater, gathered women, children, and the elderly from Mariupol in the Drama Theater building, so as to – given a good opportunity – detonate the building and then scream around the world that this was by the Russian Federation air force and that there should be an immediate ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine.’”

Steshin’s message recounting the warnings from Mariupol residents has been seen by over 480,000 Telegram users. It is below and can also be viewed here.

On March 12, Western outlets like the Associated Press repeated Ukrainian government claims that the Turkish mosque in Mariupol had been shelled by Russia with 80 civilians inside, including children.

However, Turkish state media revealed that the Ukrainian government had misled Western reporters. The Kanuni Sultan Suleyman Mosque was not only fully intact, it had never been hit by Russian fire.

“Our mosque remained undamaged,” Ismail Hacioglu, head of the mosque’s association, told Turkey’s Andalou Agency on March 12.

Still filled with civilians, the Mariupol theater was next on somebody’s target list.

The Associated Press (top) relied entirely on Ukrainian government claims about the mosque in Mariupol, while Turkish media (bottom) interviewed the head of mosque. The contrast in coverage is revealing.

As Zelensky begs Congress for military intervention, news of a theater attack

Less than 48 hours after the debunked claims of a Russian attack on the mosque in Mariupol were introduced, humanitarian corridors finally opened up around the city. The flight of thousands of civilians toward Russian military positions further weakened the Azov Battalion, which was using Mariupol’s residents as collateral in its bid to compel a no fly zone.

On March 16, with his military collapsing under the Russian onslaught, the Ukrainian president and famed comedian-actor Zelensky appeared by video for a carefully scripted, elaborately produced presentation before an assembly of awestruck US members of Congress.

“I have a dream. These words are known to each of you today. I can say I have a need. I need to protect our sky,” Zelensky proclaimed. The Ukrainian president thus invoked the most famous words of America’s most revered antiwar activist, Martin Luther King Jr., to appeal for a no fly zone that would bring the nuclear-armed militaries of the US and Russia into direct confrontation.

Just hours after Zelensky’s address, news arrived directly from the Azov Battalion’s press department that Russia had bombed the theater in Mariupol.

With a monopoly over information from the scene of the supposed attack, with no other news outlets present, Azov’s press department disseminated photos of the destroyed building to media across the world.

The Azov Battalion’s watermark can be seen clearly in the lower right hand corner of the image below. Azov’s photo was republished by international outlets including Sky News, but with the paramilitary’s brand cropped out. When South China Morning Post ran the image, it removed the watermark and credited “Azov Battalion via AP.”

One of the most widely published images of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater was provided to international media by the Azov Battalion

Among the first English language media figures to convey the Ukrainian government’s narrative of the incident to a mass audience was Illia Ponomarenko, a Kiev-based, US-trained reporter who has managed to rack up over a million Twitter followers since Russia’s invasion began.

Ponomarenko happened to work for the Kyiv Independent, an outlet that has functioned as one of the most potent US information weapons in Ukraine. The paper had been set up with assistance from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US intelligence cut-out, and an “emergency grant” from its EU-funded cousin, the European Endowment for Democracy.

For his part, Ponomarenko has referred to the Azov Battalion as his “brothers in arms”, and boasted of “chilling out” with its fighters near “enemy lines.”

Seemingly swept up in the emotional maelstrom inspired by the news from Mariupol, President Joseph Biden blasted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “pure thug.”

Next, Human Rights Watch issued a hastily composed press releaseheadlined, “Mariupol Theater Hit By Russian Attack Sheltered Hundreds.” The billionaire-backed NGO acknowledged it had not interviewed any Mariupol residents after the attack, and provided no evidence to demonstrate Russian responsibility. Indeed, HRW’s lone source fingering Russia as the culprit was the Ukrainian governor of Donetsk.

Was Russia’s military so bloodthirsty – and politically self-destructive – that it had deliberately targeted a building that was known to be filled with children? Or had the Mariupol residents’ prediction of a false flag from four days before come true?

Suspicious signs, holes in the Ukrainian government’s narrative emerge

Though Azov boasts a sophisticated press unit which films its exploits in the field, and soldiers are publishing even the most banal video of themselves on social media, footage of the theater bombing was nowhere to be found.

Photos supplied by Azov to media in Ukraine and abroad invariably depict the bombed-out theater without any people in sight, living or dead.

One day before the bombing, on March 15, a group of military-aged men were photographed in front of the Mariupol theater. No women were visible anywhere in the image. The men can be seen placing pallets against the side of the building, ferrying large objects across the theater grounds, and cutting down a fir tree.

According to Human Rights Watch’s report on the theater incident, which contained no local testimony gathered after the attack, the men were “cook[ing] food on an open fire and collect[ing] water in buckets.”

As seen below, pallets and other objects were piled against the same area of the building hit by an explosive charge the following day.

While the theater appeared to have been heavily damaged – “they bombed the building to ashes,” claimed Ponomarenko – it turned out that not one person was killed by the blast.

“It’s a miracle,” the Kyiv Independent reporter chirped.

In a 7-minute-long March 17 package blending news and agitprop, ABC News claimed that all civilians had been saved from the theater, but that “hundreds were still missing.” Data on the modest-sized theater reproduced on its Ukrainian Wikipedia page puts its maximum seating capacity at 680, which raises questions about how “hundreds” could have fit in its basement.

Further, ABC claimed the theater had been hit by Russian artillery shelling, not an “air dropped Russian bomb” as Ponomarenko and many others have claimed.

Ukrainian media, meanwhile, has expressed confusion over the incident. The outlet 0629 has attempted to explain away the mysterious disappearance of the thousand civilians said to have been in the theater by claiming they were evacuated to the city of Zaporozhye a day before the supposed attack. “we are waiting for the official verified information and do not rush to conclusions,” the paper declared.

As Mariupol residents poured out of the city through the Russian military’s humanitarian corridors, testimonies began to emerge of ruthless Azov attacks on the fleeing civilians – and of a major deception at the local theater.

“When [Azov soldiers] were leaving, they destroyed the drama theater”

On March 17, a young woman delivered an eye-opening account of the situation inside Mariupol to ANNA, the Abkhazian Network News Agency.

“The Azov fighters were simply hiding behind us,” she told a reporter. “We were their human shields, that’s it. They were breaking everything, all around us, they were not letting us outside. We spent 15 days in a basement, with kids… They gave us no water, nothing.”

Describing how the Azov Battalion placed its tanks in front of local bomb shelters, the woman offered a revealing detail: “When they were leaving,” she said, referring to the Azov Battalion, “they destroyed the drama theatre. People with shrapnel were brought to us.”

Numerous evacuees echoed the woman’s testimony about Azov holding Mariupol civilians as hostages, and said they were targeted with gunfire as they escaped through humanitarian corridors.

“They burned everything,” an elderly woman recalled to Russian media. “They bombed [my] whole apartment…. They broke in and are sitting there, making Molotov cocktails. I wanted to come in, to take my things, but they told me: ‘No, you have no business here.’”

Asked by a reporter who attacked her and invaded her home, the woman replied, “Well, the Ukrainians, of course.”

A man intercepted by an ANNA reporter after escaping Mariupol fought back tears as he pointed back to the Ukrainian military’s positions. “Azov, those bitches… people tried to evacuate… Azov… they executed the people… the monsters, scum… they shot them up, entire buses.”

“The Ukrainian army was shooting us, shooting at people,” said another man who fled Mariupol. “Right at our house.”

“Ukraine didn’t let us leave the city, we were blocked,” another evacuee stated. “The Ukrainian military arrived and said, under no circumstances are you to leave the city if the Russian Federation opens a humanitarian corridor for you. We want to continue to use you as a human shield.”

The red line: lessons from Syria

Was the bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater of Mariupol a false flag attack executed by Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention, as some local residents claimed? If so, it was hardly the first cynical deception deployed by Ukraine’s government to draw the West into the conflict, and was unlikely to be the last.

On March 16, the day of the incident at the theater, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “we have real concerns that Russia could use a chemical weapon, another weapon of mass destruction.” In the next breath, Blinken pointed to Syria, where he claimed “we’ve seen them use or acquiesce to [chemical weapon] use.”

It was in Syria where the administration of President Barack Obama imposed its “red line” policy declaring that any chemical attack would automatically trigger a US military response. That policy set the stage for a series of incidents that appear to have been carried out by foreign backed Syrian opposition forces to compel the US to intervene against Damascus.

In the deadliest incident, hundreds of civilians were killed when sarin-filled rockets were fired – apparently from insurgent-controlled territory – at multiple sites in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21, 2013. After Obama blamed the Syrian government and prepared to launch strikes, dissenting administration officials leaked to the media that the intelligence blaming Damascus was in fact no “slam dunk,” a clear reference to the CIA’s pre-Iraq war fabrications. Journalist Seymour Hersh subsequently reported that the US had collected significant intelligence pointing to insurgent guilt in Ghouta. It was this information, Hersh reported, that convinced Obama to abandon his so-called “red line.”

Under President Donald Trump, the US attempted to revive the “red line” by bombing Syria over chemical weapons allegations in 2017 and 2018. But significant evidence in both cases points to staged incidents carried out by insurgents. In the case of the April 2017 incident in Khan Sheikhoun, Trump ignored intelligence and launched airstrikes on the Syrian military. And in the Damascus suburb of Douma the following year, OPCW investigators found no evidence of a chemical attack, but had their findings doctored and censored as US officials worked to pressure and co-opt the organization.

As a former US ambassador in the Middle East told journalist Charles Glass, “The ‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-­flag operation.”

Dubious allegations of a Russian attack on the theater in Mariupol have failed to trigger the Biden administration’s red line. The question now is how far Ukraine’s government is willing to go to trigger the no fly zone it needs to hold off the imminent defeat of its military forces.

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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican GomorrahGoliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated

Getting Away with Murder

March 22nd, 2022 by Philip Giraldi

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***

So Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “thug and a murderous dictator.” That is the judgement of President of the United States Joe Biden, delivered directly to Putin during a phone conversation, and it is backed up by a unanimous vote in the US Senate endorsing Biden’s more recently expressed view that Putin is also a “war criminal.” And if anyone doubted the sheer malignancy of America’s legislators, the viewing of a televised appeal by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskyy calling for US intervention in his war was met with cheers, shouts of approval and a standing ovation not seen in this hemisphere since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited a Joint Congressional session in 2015. Unfortunately, in spite of all the euphoria, these comments, gestures and allegations are completely gratuitous, whether they are wholly or partly true or not, and they guarantee that a normal relationship between Russia and the United States is not likely to be reestablished no matter what the outcome to the current fighting in Ukraine.

If that is what diplomacy looks like in 2022 America then we are in serious trouble. The fact is that the US record for committing what are potentially war crimes dwarfs that of Russia or any other country with the sole exception of Israel. One only has to go through the list starting with Vietnam and continuing with Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen to appreciate the places that have been on the receiving end of either covert actions or direct intervention by US armed forces or those of its close allies. Along the way, civilians have literally died in their millions as the Pax Americana has proven to be elusive in spite of a sprinkling of more than 1,000 United States military bases worldwide. Russia is a parvenu in comparison.

It is widely understood that the United States in the post-World War 2 world, shaped the new so-called international rules-based order to benefit itself, with the designation of the dollar as the world reserve currency for energy purchases, benefitting only Washington through the Treasury Department’s ability to print money without any commodity having real value to back it up. Combine that with de facto control over the international banking system and the US has been able to render itself bullet proof when it starts wars or commits other crimes. It does not accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, has even blocked the travel of ICC investigators to the US, and has never been held accountable for any of its questionable activities.

The end of the cold war brought about some adjustments in the international order, but, for the US, it meant an initial drive to loot the resources of Russia under Boris Yeltsin followed by Bill Clinton’s breaking the promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to take advantage of the changed circumstances to expand NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe. The current situation with Ukraine is a consequence of that continuous interference in Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence, which culminated with the regime change engineered by Washington in Kiev in 2014.

The United States is often regarded by other countries as a rogue nation, precisely because it shows little respect for the vital interests of others and is willing to manipulate international institutions in support of political and social objectives that have little or nothing to do with actual national security. Its sanctions frequently bring suffering to ordinary people in the countries targeted without affecting decisions made by the leadership. And the sanctions themselves are often poorly conceived while also being factually challengeable. The US governing elite invariably covers its misbehavior with self-serving aphorisms like the rubbish peddled by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when she enthused how “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Yes indeed, she actually said that.

Worse still, the sustained flood of government inspired propaganda used to justify questionable actions has had the regrettable consequence of turning inward, leading to charges of “treason” directed against the few journalists and politicians who dare to challenge conventional wisdom. In the current Ukraine crisis, journalists like Tucker Carlson are under fire, as are former politicians like Tulsi Gabbard, for having committed the crime of opposing America’s deepening involvement in the fight against Russia. Indeed, the blacklisting of Russian music and books as well as foods and even vodka represent something pathological in the mainstream response to the fighting. Reliably left-wing Move-On has launched its own in-house “Creative Lab” (sic) to produce its own propaganda videos. It describes as a “debunked conspiracy theory” the Carlson claim, originally surfaced from the US government itself, that the “Biden administration was funding secret biolabs in Ukraine.” It is seeking to discredit Carlson’s “lies” which “are now fueling Putin’s relentless campaign of death and destruction in Ukraine.” It is “freedom fries” all over again.

A recent story illustrating just how deep the rot has penetrated the core of United States government and its institutions has predictably been given little coverage by the US mainstream media, but it is a tale that is appalling in its implications. The story involves a March 3rd Supreme Court ruling on a motion filed by accused terrorist Abu Zubaydah, who is currently a prisoner held in Guantanamo, though he has never actually been convicted of anything and is being nevertheless held “incommunicado for the rest of his life.” Abu Zubaydah maintained that he was tortured extensively by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at a secret prison in Poland as well as in Thailand and Cuba.

The CIA captured a wounded Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian radical, in 2002 in Pakistan, and immediately acted on the belief that he was a leader of al-Qaeda. He was tortured for several years. The CIA “waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours,” and brutalized him through sleep deprival. They also hung him by his wrists on hooks, beat him physically and he, as a result, lost one eye. A heavily redacted CIA 683 page torture report to the Senate released in 2014, which included some details of the standard practices in place at that time, mentioned Abu Zubaydah over 1,000 times.

Abu Zubaydah was seeking release from Guantanamo based on the fact that the United States, in torturing him, had committed a war crime. His lawyers were seeking to subpoena and interview former CIA contractors to determine what exactly occurred in Poland. The US is, by the way, a signatory on the UN Convention Against Torture. The Abu Zubaydah suit may initially have appeared to be a slam-dunk given what was already known about CIA torture. The brutality was incredible. For example, newly declassified documents that surfaced last week revealed how a prisoner at an Agency “black site” in Afghanistan was used as a training prop to teach inexperienced operatives how to torture other prisoners, leaving him with serious brain damage.

Even given that and much other evidence of both illegal activity and crimes against humanity, the Supreme Court case was instead derailed by what is referred to as the “state secrets privilege.” The court’s 6–3 ruling, written by Justice Stephen Breyer included “To assert the [state secrets] privilege, the Government must submit to the court a ‘formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter.’” That done, the court “should exercise its traditional reluctance to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs.”

The court’s ruling thereby upheld a “state secrets” claim based on the fact that the Agency has never admitted that it had secret prisons in Poland to prevent Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers from seeking subpoenas on the two psychologists who created the CIA torture program or to use those insights to learn the details of the interrogations. The court also ruled against any attempt by Polish investigators to seek to obtain US government information about the possible crimes committed at the CIA “black site” in Poland.

So welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave…where you can be tortured at the whim of a government official, imprisoned without ever being convicted of anything, and, when you seek redress from a court, you can be told that “Too bad, it’s a state secret even though the government has already admitted having engaged in a criminal practice.” And one should not ignore in passing a related issue, the savage persecution of journalist Julian Assange for having exposed US government crimes.

An article on the case in the Los Angeles Times, one of the few to appear, puts it this way: “the government may invoke the ‘state secrets’ privilege to block former US contractors from testifying about the now well-known waterboarding and torture of prisoners held at CIA sites in Poland. By a 6-3 vote, the justices said the US government can claim a privilege of secrecy even if there is no secret.” An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who observed the process added that “US courts are the only place in the world where everyone must pretend not to know basic facts about the CIA’s torture program. It is long past time to stop letting the CIA hide its crimes behind absurd claims of secrecy and national security harm.” Or one might observe that it’s called in the vernacular “Getting Away with Murder.”

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off against another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom.

In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance. This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of US troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying.

Peace has been sacrificed for US global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen.

So what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse. So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted. So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth. In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the US will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays us, if we don’t first immolate ourselves in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood. The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler. The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing on Saturday an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet Bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked. Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third-, behind China and the United States. NATO battlegroups are being doubled in size in the Baltic states to more than 6,000 troops. Battlegroups will be sent to Romania and Slovakia. Washington will double the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland to 9,000. Sweden and Finland are considering dropping their neutral status to integrate with NATO.

This is a recipe for global war. History, as well as all the conflicts I covered as a war correspondent, have demonstrated that when military posturing begins, it often takes little to set the funeral pyre alight. One mistake. One overreach. One military gamble too many. One too many provocations. One act of desperation.

Russia’s threat to attack weapons convoys to Ukraine from the West; its air strike on a military base in western Ukraine, 12 miles from the Polish border, which is a staging area for foreign mercenaries; the statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda that the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons, by Russia against Ukraine, would be a “game-changer” that could force NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from direct military intervention — all are ominous developments pushing the alliance closer to open warfare with Russia.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when USAmbassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the US military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliot Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the US-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrowHugo Chávez.

“There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP will need to be spent on defense. We will need more conventional strength in ships and planes. We will need to match the Chinese in advanced military technology, but at the other end of the spectrum, we may need many more tanks if we have to station thousands in Europe, as we did during the Cold War. (The total number of American tanks permanently stationed in Europe today is zero.) Persistent efforts to diminish even further the size of our nuclear arsenal or prevent its modernization were always bad ideas, but now, as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weaponry and appear to have no interest in negotiating new limits, such restraints should be completely abandoned. Our nuclear arsenal will need to be modernized and expanded so that we will never face the kinds of threats Putin is now making from a position of real nuclear inferiority.”

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor, and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die. The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods.  And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated show On Contact.

Featured image: “Raft of Doom” / Illustration by Mr. Fish


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

Biden Attempts to Blame Russia for Economic Woes

March 22nd, 2022 by Paul Antonopoulos

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


According to an article authored by The Guardian’s Washington DC Bureau Chief, David Smith, Joe Biden has a “cursed presidency” because he has had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, the Russia-Ukraine War and rising energy prices. However, how many of these issues are of his own creation and will this affect the midterm elections?

Smith believes that this concoction of issues has the potential to affect the mood in American society. “Whatever the causes of inflation, history suggests that voters may punish him at the ballot box,” Smith wrote, adding: “all signs point to Republicans winning the House and possibly the Senate [in the upcoming midterm elections].”

Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, was quoted in the article as saying that “Biden has a cursed presidency.” He reiterated that Biden immediately faced the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of his presidency, saw inflation spiral out of control, and is now dealing with the Ukraine crisis, as well as rapid increases in energy prices – these issues will have serious repercussions at the ballot box.

The fact is though that energy prices began to rise long before Russia began its military operation in Ukraine. However, Biden attempts to attribute all the blame to Moscow. None-the-less, many Republicans took advantage of the situation to accuse the US leader of failing to deliver on his campaign promises and of attempting to deny the causes of the issue without correcting the mistake.

Although polls show most Americans support Biden’s actions regarding the situation in Ukraine, most voters will likely be influenced by the socio-economic situation in the US rather than the president’s policies towards Eastern Europe. Effectively, the article believes that the Democratic Party risks losing its majorities in both houses of Congress, which will then make it extremely difficult for the president to promote any initiatives.

The ban on oil and gas imports from Russia has hit the average American hard, which is affecting Biden at the polls. It is noted though that the Republicans who previously called for an energy embargo against Russia are now sharply criticizing the White House for raising fuel prices.

Biden restriced Russian hydrocarbon imports and released 30 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve to be put on the market to reduce prices and prevent supply disruptions. However, thus far, that measure has not helped and instead Biden continues to blame his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

“The decision today is not without cost here at home,” the American president said on March 8. “Putin’s war is already hurting American families at the gas pump.”

If social media is anything to go by, it appears that many Americans remember that inflation and energy prices were increasing before the Russian military entered Ukraine.

It is recalled that Biden tried to arrange video meetings with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE but was unsuccessful. American commentators are now discussing the emerging split between Washington and the Arab World. In fact, the Americans are so desperate to try and replace Russian energy that for the first time in years an American diplomat visited Caracas to meet Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Although it was promised that sanctions would be eased, Venezuela’s president put in place harsh conditions that the White House did not agree to.

With Biden failing to secure alternative energy sources, conservative commentators did not hold back their disdain. In one example, television host Tucker Carlson said that “Biden’s sanctions policy” was actually an economic “punishment for the American middle class” and “not Vladimir Putin.”

Compounding Biden’s problems is the fact that even the EU’s most important country Germany has made it clear that it is not ready to give up on Russian energy sources. For this reason, Americans are beginning to question why they could potentially end up suffering more so than the Europeans.

The American president had to admit that the upcoming midterm election “may be the most important off-year election in modern history.” If Democrats lose their majorities in the House and the Senate, he said, “the only thing I’ll have then is a veto pen.”

In the context of the Ukraine crisis, the president’s ratings have risen slightly: from 40% to 42.7%. But this is evidently not enough and it seems that all of Biden’s decisions has only benefited the Republicans. According to CNN data, among independent voters, Biden has one of the lowest ratings in history at a paltry 36%.

Falling living standards will surely affect the Democratic Party negatively in November’s election. As the price of gas is rapidly rising, many businesses are unlikely to survive. In this context, no amount of Russia blaming or deflecting will save Biden from facing the wrath of American voters.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from Pixabay

Zelensky’s Reckless Gamble

March 22nd, 2022 by Vasko Kohlmayer

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.


Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


“Meeting with Congress, Zelensky Asks for More Weapons and a No-Fly Zone” reads a recent headline from the New York Times.

It does not take great strategic acumen to realize that trying to put up a no-fly zone over Ukraine – whose airspace is now controlled by the Russians – would inevitably lead to a direct clash with the military assets of the Russian Federation.

Zelensky is thus, in effect, asking that the United States – as well as other NATO nations – enter into a shooting war in Russia.

What Zelensky is doing, in reality, is calling for is World War III. Such a war could very quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West. With both sides armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, this kind of conflict would result in a fathomless death toll and would almost certainly end the world as we know it.

Zelensky is effectively requesting that we commit suicide over Ukraine. It would be immense foolishness on our part to accommodate his ludicrous request given the fact that Ukraine is a poor, deeply corrupt country in which we have no vital national security interest.

We should not be at all surprised by Zelensky’s self-destructive recklessness and lack of judgment. He has demonstrated both of those in abundance ever since he took office, and now his people are paying a terrible price for his incompetence.

Conceited and foolish, Zelensky gave Putin the proverbial middle finger when the latter asked for accommodation and understanding. He even started talking about Ukraine obtaining its own nuclear weapons, replacing some of those it gave up in 1994 return for guarantees from Russia, the US, and Britain of Ukraine’s independence and existing borders in the Budapest Memorandum

Blinded by his own arrogance Zelensky completely misread Putin. So deep runs Zelensky’s naivete that he refused to believe that Putin would invade even though Russian armies stood assembled on his country’s borders, and he received reports from western intelligence services that an incursion was imminent. Rather than responsibly facing the gravity of the situation, the overconfident former comedian made light of those warnings.

When the incursion finally occurred, he was clearly surprised and shocked. His subsequent behavior further exposed his lack of judgment and puerility when in the days that followed, he bitterly complained that Biden and NATO were not coming to his aid. The inexperienced and gullible man that he is, he apparently believed that if his country was ever attacked, Western powers would promptly dispatch their militaries to fight the Russians in Ukraine, even though such military support was not explicitly promised in the Budapest Memorandum.

As a result of his wretched bungling, Zelensky’s country is now being wrecked. Tens of thousands of his fellow citizens have already lost their lives and millions have fled their homes.  Having wrecked his own country, Zelensky now wants to wreck the whole world by pulling the West into a nuclear war with Russia.

This foolhardiness is completely in character with his previous actions. In a way, his position now is rather understandable. Zelensky is now desperately trying to save his own skin and bury his mistakes in the rubble of a wider conflict. Even though Zelensky has shown himself to be utterly incompetent as a political leader, he remains a superb performer. A master comedian and entertainer, he surely knows how to work his audience.  (Watch, if willing, this clip from a 2016 performance in which Zelensky “plays” piano with his manhood.)

A consummate showman, after Russia’s invasion Zelensky embarked on a worldwide Zoom offensive in which he has been artfully tugging on the heartstrings of Western politicians and populations. So moving are his performances that even the official translators are reduced to tears. His presentations are complete with well-produced, emotionally moving videos depicting the suffering of his own people. Their suffering is indeed great, but it is Zelensky’s own incompetence that got them into their terrible predicament.

In one of the most brilliant PR campaigns in recent history, the hapless architect of this tragedy has managed to recast himself as a global hero. Rather than facing up to his own ineptitude, Zelensky now wants to set off a worldwide conflagration.

If we listen to this heedless and dangerous man and get involved in a shooting match with Russia, we may easily find ourselves paying the same – or worse – price than Zelensky’s own people are paying even as we speak. Given how tense things already are, the prospect of our cities turning into rubble beneath rising mushroom clouds no longer seems a distant possibility.

Zelensky is trying his best to nudge us toward this scenario. We must not take his insidious bait.

It is enough that Zelensky has ruined his own country. We must not let him ruin the rest of the planet as well.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.  

Vasko Kohlmayer was born and grew up in former communist Czechoslovakia. You can follow his writings by subscribing to his Substack newsletter ’Notes from the Twilight Zone’. He is the author of The West in Crisis: Civilizations and Their Death Drives.

Featured image is YouTube screengrab


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.


Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


A Ukrainian medic has apologised after claiming he ordered his staff to castrate any captured Russian soldiers following their occupation of the country.

Gennadiy Druzenko took on the role of a volunteer frontline medic after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine last month, and he has since described himself as one of thousands of Ukrainians working to defend his country.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered men aged 18 to 60 to stay in the country to help fight against the war, with some receiving combat training while others take on tasks to further help protect Ukrainian fighters and artillery from the enemy.

Druzenko co-founded a mobile hospital in 2014, and over the past eight years some 500 doctors have been involved in the setup, which deploys civilian doctors and nurses in the conflict zone close to separatist republics.

While speaking about his ongoing work as a medic in a recent interview with Ukraine-24, the medic claimed he has ‘always been a great humanist’ and previously he held the belief that ‘if a man is wounded, he is no longer an enemy but a patient’.

The medic then implied his opinion had changed with the invasion, however, as he told the broadcaster that he had ‘very strict orders to castrate all [captured Russian] men, because they are cockroaches, not people’.

The Investigative Committee of Russia opened an investigation into Druzenko in the wake of the comments, but the medic has since taken to social media to apologise for what he said, assuring that the hospital ‘does not castrate anyone and is not going to’, and explaining that his words came from ’emotions’.

A statement shared on the hospital’s website explained Druzenko ‘made an emotional statement about the sterilisation of the invaders’ and claimed it was ‘prompted by threats against Gennady and his family personally’.

Druzenko apologises for comments (Gennadiy Druzenko/Facebook)

Druzenko apologises for comments (Gennadiy Druzenko/Facebook)

The statement added that his words were ‘taken out of context and propagated by Russian propaganda channels’, before assuring it ‘has not engaged, is not engaged and does not plan to sterilise Russian invaders, let alone captured Russian soldiers and officers’.

“Our mission is to save lives… The head of PDMS apologizes for his emotions, caused, again, by brutal threats to him and his family,” it continued.

Performing castrations on soldiers would violate the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits ‘violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture’.

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Featured image is from Ukraine-24/Gennadiy Druzenko/Facebook

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***

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 14 removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had attributed to children, blaming an algorithm for “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on March 15 removed from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of the deaths the agency said had occurred among children.

In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said it made adjustments to the mortality data because the website’s algorithm was “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error,” the CDC’s website states. “This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.”

The agency also acknowledged COVID death data is not complete.

Prior to the adjustment on March 15, the CDC attributed 851,000 deaths to COVID, including 1,755 pediatric deaths, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who tracks CDC updates. After the change, COVID-related deaths dropped to 780,000.

The change resulted in the removal of 72,277 deaths previously reported across 26 states, including 416 pediatric deaths — a reduction of 24% to 1,341, the agency said.

The CDC’s COVID statistics, used to justify which age groups should receive vaccines, were used by U.S. health agencies to support the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for children 5 to 11 years old.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky referred to the tracker’s death total in November 2021, while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5 to 11 years old.

Children account for only 19% of all COVID cases, with .01% of childhood cases resulting in death, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

According to CNN, Moderna plans to report trial data in 2- to 5-year-olds in March and may seek authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “if the data is supportive and subject to regulatory consultation.”

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during a March 13 episode of CBS’ “Face the Nationsaid he expects to have a vaccine ready for children aged 6 months to 4 years old “potentially in May if it works.”

Johnson & Johnson has a late-stage trial of its vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds but nothing for the younger group.

It is unknown whether the pharmaceutical giants will use the CDC’s most recent COVID numbers in their risk-benefit analysis presented to U.S. health agencies to determine whether the risks of COVID outweigh the potential risks of vaccines in children.

CDC ‘cherry-picks’ COVID data for the public

Dr. Meryl Nass, physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee on March 19 wrote that the CDC cherry-picks the data it presents to the public to push its “health policies.”

The agency hides most of what it has and then “blames its ‘outdated’ IT systems for the problems if it gets caught,” Nass said.

Nass explained:

“CDC is not a public health agency. It is a public propaganda agency that collects a massive amount of data. CDC marshals its huge data library to create presentations that support the current administration’s public health policies.  CDC also has state-of-the-art PR staff, as well as TV studios, and produces videos, radio spots and an enormous number of press releases that are distributed to the media. CDC hosts many journalists at its Atlanta headquarters. Free junkets successfully cultivate U.S. health reporters.”

Quoting a 2007 Senate oversight report on the CDC, Nass said the agency spends “millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.”

‘Fact-checker’ claims no evidence COVID deaths have been overcounted

Health Feedback, a fact-checking initiative under the umbrella of Science Feedback, on March 1 said there “is no evidence COVID deaths have been overcounted,” and labeled posts stating otherwise as factually inaccurate, false and misleading.

Heath Feedback focuses on “correcting misinformation about vaccine safety,” and said it “reviewed multiple false claims” that COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths were inflated when “many public health experts believe that COVID-19 numbers are undercounted.”

Health Feedback also addressed death certificates listing COVID along with other health conditions, saying health conditions weaken a person’s resistance to disease and in “many such cases, a person with underlying health conditions wouldn’t have died at that time if it wasn’t for COVID-19.”

“This means that the cause of death is still COVID-19,” the website states.

Health Feedback did not acknowledge that deaths occurring when COVID and other health conditions are listed could be caused by underlying health conditions.

Health Feedback was established as part of the Vaccine Safety Net — a “global network of websites, created by the World Health Organization, that provides reliable information on vaccine safety.”

It also belongs to the International Fact-Checking Network, founded by the Poynter Institute and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook, the Omidyar Network and George Soros-owned nongovernmental organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and Open Society Foundation.

To date, Health Feedback has not issued a correction to its fact-check reflecting the CDC’s new mortality data.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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Yemen has been at war for the past seven years. A once great land of ancient trade, Yemen has become one of the poorest nations in the Arab world. Their GDP for 2021 was expected to reach only 26.9 billion USD. The World Bank estimated that over half of Yemen’s population lived in poverty prior to the pandemic, and that figure has now reached 71% to 78%.

The United Nations recently declared that 19 million people will go hungry in the coming months. Yemen is completely reliant on exports for basic necessities and 90% of its food supply is imported. One-third of imported wheat comes from Ukraine and Russia. The World Food Programme (WFP) said five million people are at “immediate risk” of slipping into famine-like conditions, and that their program needs $887.9 million to feed 13 million people over the next six months. Over 20.5 million people are without safe water as well.

Around 75% of the $14 billion donated to the nation came from the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and the European Commission. The World Bank expects inflation to reach 45% in Yemen this year but the rial is already worthless and the nation has yet to adopt a safe reserve currency.

I have yet to see a Yemeni flag or virtue signaling for the people living in this particular war-torn country as it is not part of the agenda. The media rarely reports on Yemen and most journalists likely would not be able to recognize Yemen’s flag. People are not driving around with “We Stand With Yemen” bumper stickers, and schools are not requiring children to make sense of this war. The public does not discuss or shed tears for the people of Yemen who live in unfathomable conditions because they are not a piece of the larger agenda and no one can profit off of their suffering at this time.

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On March 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly removed tens of thousands of alleged Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths from its data tracker website after claiming to have discovered an “error.”

Perhaps most notable was the removal of nearly a quarter of deaths listed in the under 18 years of age column, suggesting that the CDC has been lying about the risk of COVID among young people based on errant data.

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error,” the CDC is now claiming as an excuse. “This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.”

The CDC’s data tracker website relies on inputs from states and other jurisdictions that voluntarily report. It is more than likely wrong and wildly overinflated in order to push a scarier plandemic narrative.

Doctors and other jab-pushers have been relying on this false CDC data to make a case for mass Fauci Flu vaccination, particularly in young children. Rochelle Walensky, the current CDC head, routinely cites this false CDC data, including back in November when she pushed the CDC’s expert advisory to recommend COVID injections for all children aged 5-11.

According to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the CDC’s data updates, there used to be 1,755 child deaths from COVID listed on the agency’s website, along with approximately 851,000 deaths in other demographics. Now, there are suddenly 416 fewer child deaths listed, as well as 71,000 fewer other deaths listed.

The CDC said it previously adjusted the death count back in August as well “after the identification of a data discrepancy.” For some reason, the CDC cannot get its COVID death numbers to remain consistent and is constantly shifting them, usually to a much lower number.

“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue,” Krohnert wrote in an email to the Epoch Times about the issue.

“It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID.”

CDC has been lying to the world about COVID deaths

The CDC also manages the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which some claim is a more reliable source of COVID death data. Many doctors rely on the NCHS instead of the data tracker website.

The NCHS tally is compiled from actual death certificates, and it currently lists about 921 deaths in children who were jabbed, and 966,000 deaths among people of other ages who were jabbed. Keep in mind, however, that even the death certificates were being fudged.

Back in January, a spokesperson from the group explained to the Times that the NCHS death count includes a tally of people who died with the Wuhan Flu, as well as people who supposedly died from it. This distinction is often ignored in official government numbers.

“COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, or the primary death cause, on about 90 percent of death certificates at the time,” reports explain.

In the CDC’s other data count, other things such as drowning were listed as “COVID” deaths. We saw this same thing early on in the plandemic when motorcycle deaths, for instance, were blamed on “COVID.”

In a social media post, Dr. Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow for pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, wrote that it is “slightly worrying that this data was being used widely in the U.S. to guide or advocate for policy.”

“It’s outrageous to quietly footnote such a consequential error,” added Jessica Adams, a former regulatory review officer at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Three people suffering from cancer are set to face off against Monsanto in the latest courtroom battle over allegations that exposure to the company’s Roundup weed killer causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The trial will be the first to take place in the company’s former hometown, with jury selection set to start on March 24. (A previous trial in St. Louis was cancelled just hours before it was scheduled to begin due to a settlement agreement.)

The trial will focus on the complaints of three individuals: Robert Bird, an Iowa man who sprayed Roundup products routinely on a tree farm; Blake Buchan, a 39-year-old Georgia man who used Monsanto’s products to spray fence lines and other areas of two properties he maintained; and Ozie Parker, also of Georgia, who grew up helping out on his family farm, mixing and spraying Roundup weed killers on hundreds of acres for many years.

The plaintiffs allege that Monsanto was well aware of the risks of the active ingredient in its herbicides – a chemical called glyphosate – but hid the risks from consumers, failing to warn them despite scientific evidence showing the cancer-causing potential of the products.

Monsanto denies its products cause cancer, pointing to backing by the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators around the world for the safety of the glyphosate-based herbicides.

The case is being overseen by St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Michael Mullen, and is expected to last about five weeks, according to court spokesman Jacob Long.

Germany’s Bayer AG bought Monsanto in 2018, but Monsanto has maintained a large presence in the St. Louis area, and lawyers for both sides have been arguing over whether or not the company’s long-standing philanthropic role there could be introduced as evidence of what Monsanto attorneys call the company’s “good character.”

Because the plaintiffs will be seeking to convince the jury that Monsanto was “malicious, evilly motivated” or otherwise engaged in other bad behavior, “Monsanto is entitled to put forth mitigating evidence supporting its good character,” according to a recent court filing.

Plaintiffs attorneys, for their part, have warned that if Monsanto tries to curry favor with jurors by speaking of its charitable contributions to the community, or similar acts, they will be entitled to lay out the company’s long history of involvement with such things as Agent Orange poisonings and PCB contamination of communities across the country.

In a separate court filing on Thursday, lawyers for Monsanto also asked the judge to bar the plaintiffs’ attorneys from engaging in “chicanery” by presenting what Monsanto said would be “inflammatory” or “confusing” information to jurors. Monsanto specifically said the judge should bar any suggestion that jurors should consider their verdict as sending a message to Monsanto or Bayer; or comparisons between Roundup and tobacco, among other things.

The plaintiffs are among more than 100,000 people in the United States who have sued Monsanto claiming that exposure to the company’s glyphosate-based herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma. They all additionally allege that Monsanto was well aware of the risks associated with its weed killers but tried to suppress or discredit information about the dangers.

There have been five trials held to date since international cancer scientists declared glyphosate to be a probable human carcinogen in 2015. Monsanto lost the first three trials and won the last two.

Bayer has settled several other cases that were scheduled to go to trial over the last few years.

And in 2020, the company said it would pay roughly $11 billion to settle about 100,0000 existing Roundup cancer claims, and later said it would set aside another $4.5 billion toward Roundup litigation liability.

Bayer also announced it would stop selling Roundup, and other herbicides made with the active ingredient glyphosate, to U.S. consumers by 2023.

Courtroom View Network has requested to livestream the trial proceedings and the parties are scheduled to meet with the judge on Monday to discuss the request.

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The Amazon lost millions of hectares of primary forest in 2021, mostly as the result of cattle ranching and other agricultural activities, a new report reveals.

Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) found that around 1.9 million hectares (4.8 million acres) of the rainforest were lost last year, similar to annual forest loss rates in 2020 and 2019.

Most of the deforestation took place in Brazil, with Bolivia suffering the second-highest losses. Colombia and Peru also saw noticeable forest loss.

The results are based on University of Maryland satellite data that detect deforestation hotspots. The report compiled raw forest loss data to produce the 2021 hotspot map. Final annual data will come out later this year as additional analysis is done on more thorough satellite readings.

Most of the deforestation took place in Brazil, with Bolivia suffering the second-highest losses. (Image courtesy of MAAP)

Mapping the devastation

MAAP’s findings suggest that most deforestation in Brazil is happening along major roads through the eastern and southeastern states of Acre, Amazonas, Pará and Rondônia. These states are major hotspots for legal and illegal cattle ranching activity, as well as other agricultural production that relies on roads — most notably highways 163, 230, 319 and 364 — for moving goods in and out of the forest.

The report indicates that deforestation in Brazil isn’t happening in one massive wave but is instead chipping away along major roads in several parts of the country.

“We know from historical precedence that whenever you open up roads in these ecologically sensitive biomes, you’re literally opening routes for all kinds of illegal activities, including illegal deforestation but also land invasions of Indigenous land,” Adriana Abdenur, of Plataforma CIPÓ, a climate, governance and peace-building think tank in Latin America, told Mongabay.

She added,

“Whenever you see a road opening up previously pristine or even secondary forest, that’s generally a good predictor that a whole range of illegal activities are likely to take place in that area.”

Roads cutting through the Amazon. (Image courtesy of MAAP)

The maps for other parts of the Amazon biome, meanwhile, reveal other major drivers. In the Peruvian Amazon, for example, most primary forest loss didn’t occur along major roads but instead in a concentrated area where Mennonite settlements have been expanding.

Clearing by Mennonites is the new leading cause of deforestation in Peru, Mongabay reported last year. Since 2017, newly arriving colonies have cleared thousands of hectares of primary forest to set up farms and homes.

In the Bolivian Amazon, satellite readings show a more scattered pattern of deforestation throughout the southeastern Chiquitano dry forest. Unlike the moister parts of the biome in Brazil, the area is dry enough that farmers and ranchers lose control of fires more often, which then spread to primary forest.

Cattle ranching and small-scale subsistence agriculture are the main drivers of deforestation in Colombia. (Image courtesy of MAAP)

“You get a lot of ‘escaped’ fires,” said Matt Finer, the MAAP director and senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation. “You can really see the concentration of fire impacts in the dry forest of the southeast Bolivian Amazon.”

Another arc of deforestation, this one in the Colombian Amazon, has raised alarms among conservationists because much of it penetrates protected areas like Chiribiquete National Park, where more than 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres) of forest have been lost since 2018, MAAP estimates.

Cattle ranching and small-scale subsistence agriculture — often the result of land grabbing in and around protected areas — are the main drivers of deforestation in Colombia, Finer said.

Some silver linings

While MAAP’s report suggests deforestation rates didn’t improve last year and fire patterns suggest that future threats aren’t going away anytime soon, there are a few reasons to be hopeful about Amazon conservation in 2022 and beyond.

For example, the readings in Peru show significantly less deforestation in the Madre de Dios region than in years past. Historically, this region has struggled with illegal gold mining, logging and coca cultivation, among other deforestation drivers.

But in 2019, the Peruvian government launched Operation Mercury to eliminate illegal gold mining activities that were contributing to primary forest loss. In the most critical mining areas, deforestation decreased by around 90%, according to MAAP. In the broader region, it decreased by 78%.

Another positive takeaway is that most deforestation in the Amazon appears to be happening in the south, southeast and northwest parts of the biome, leaving a large, contiguous piece of forest in the central and northeast Amazon, which is holding the biome together, Finer said.

“This map really shows, on the positive, all the green that still represents the core Amazon that 50 years from now, will determine the state of the Amazon,” he said, “[depending on] how well we preserve that core.”

In addition to northeastern Brazil, much of that area falls within Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The MAAP team found Amazon deforestation in these countries was relatively low compared to other parts of the biome.

But Finer cautioned that even though deforestation in the northern Amazon may not be happening on the same scale, protecting the region from cattle ranching, agriculture and development is still critical.

“If we start building any of these cross-cutting roads — a road connecting Brazil with Peru — if that stuff starts to happen, if we start to lose the core Amazon, we’re in trouble,” he said.

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Featured image: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Image courtesy of CIFOR/Flickr.

US Funding Biowar Research—An Absurd Claim, Right?

March 22nd, 2022 by Jon Rappoport

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US government spokespeople—falling all over themselves to insist America would never ever set up, own, or fund biowar research labs in the Ukraine—

And would never lie about the subject—

Insisting America’s track record is clean—

And its motives pure as the driven snow—

So that’s it, right? Case closed.

Well, how about this for track record:

The US sends bio/chem/nuclear war materials and tech to a foreign nation.

Then threatens to invade that nation because it possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Inspectors travel to that nation.

The inspectors report they can’t find conclusive evidence of WMD.

The US invades that nation anyway. War.

“Well, we knew they had WMD because we sent WMD to them.”

How’s that for an insane situation and a war crime?

The foreign nation is of course Iraq. And George W Bush launched the war in 2003—with the approval of Congress.

If the federal government of that nation—AMERICA—told you, in 2022, ANYTHING about biowar labs or WMD, would you believe them?

Read on. Here is a strange twisted grotesque story of the US supplying WMD to Saddam Hussein. I wrote and published it in 2016.

Wherever the word “virus” appears or is implied, I now intend it to mean “serum containing many compounds, some of which are moderately toxic, but no proven viruses.”

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of other WMD. And by the way, one of the American suppliers? THE CDC. THE US CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL. You may have heard of them.

Here we go.

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In 1975, the US signed on to an international treaty banning the production, use, and stockpiling of biological weapons. Ditto for chemical weapons, in 1993. Another treaty.

Here’s a quote from the Washington Post (9/4/13), “When the US looked the other way on chemical weapons”: “…The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items…including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague…”

Between 1985 and 1989, a US 501C3 firm, American Type Culture Collection, sent Iraq up to 70 shipments of various biowar agents, including 21 strains of anthrax.

Between 1984 and 1989, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) sent Iraq at least 80 different biowar agents, including botulinum toxoid, dengue virus, and West Nile antigen and antibody.

This information on the American Type Culture Collection and the CDC comes from a report, “Iraq’s Biological Weapons Program,” prepared by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).

Then we have a comprehensive article by William Blum in the April 1998 Progressive called “Anthrax for Export.” Blum cites a 1994 Senate report confirming that, in this 1985-1989 time period, US shipments of anthrax and other biowar agents to Iraq were licensed by…drum roll, cymbal crash…the US Dept. of Commerce.

Blum quotes from the Senate report: “These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction. It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

This 1994 Senate report also indicates that the US exported to Iraq the precursors for chemwar agents, actual plans for chemical and biowar production facilities, and chemical-warhead filling equipment. The exports continued until at least November 28, 1989.

Blum lists a few other biowar agents the US shipped to Iraq. Histoplasma Capsulatum, Brucella Melitensis, Clostridium Perfringens, Clostridium tetani—as well as E. coli, various genetic materials, human and bacterial DNA.

Blum also points out that a 1994 Pentagon report dismissed any connection between all these biowar agents and Gulf War Illness. But the researcher who headed up that study, Joshua Lederberg, was actually a director of the US firm that had provided the most biowar material to Iraq in the 1980s: the American Type Culture Collection.

Newsday revealed that the CEO of the American Type Culture Collection was a member of the US Dept. of Commerce’s Technical Advisory Committee. See, the Dept. of Commerce had to license and approve all those exports of biowar agents carried out by the American Type Culture Collection. Get the picture?

Now, as to other US companies which dealt biowar or chemwar agents to Iraq—all such sales having been approved by the US government—the names of these companies are contained in records of the 1992 Senate hearings, “United States Export Policy Toward Iraq Prior to Iraq’s Invasion of Kuwait,” Senate Report 102-996, Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs, 102d Congress, Second Session (October 27, 1992):

Mouse Master (Georgia), Sullaire Corp (Charlotte, North Carolina), Pure Aire (Charlotte, North Carolina), Posi Seal (Conn.), Union Carbide (Conn.), Evapco (Maryland), BDM Corp (Virginia), Spectra Physics (Calif.).

There are about a dozen more.

This also from the Blum article: “A larger number of American firms supplied Iraq with the specialized computers, lasers, testing and analyzing equipment, and other instruments and hardware vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, missiles, and delivery systems. Computers, in particular, play a key role in nuclear weapons development. Advanced computers make it feasible to avoid carrying out nuclear test explosions, thus preserving the program’s secrecy. The 1992 Senate hearings implicated [Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, CA — among others].”

Hewlett Packard said that the recipient of its shipments, Saad 16, was some sort of school in Iraq. But in 1990, the Wall St. Journal stated that Saad 16 was a “heavily fortified, state-of-the-art [Iraqi] complex for aircraft construction, missile design, and, almost certainly, nuclear-weapons research.”

If you review and think about all these WMD shipments from the US to Iraq, you understand there were many US officials and corporate employees who knew about them. Knew about them then, in the 1980s, and knew about them later, during 2 US wars in Iraq, when American soldiers were sent to Iraq, and could have been exposed to the bio/chem weapons.

And these officials and employees said nothing.

Officials at the CDC and the Dept. of Commerce said nothing. People at the American Type Culture Collection said nothing. People at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSA said nothing. Presidents said nothing. Employees of the corporations who supplied germs and chemicals said nothing.

It’s clear that the US government shipped those bio/chem weapons to Iraq to aid it in its war against Iran. And yes, Iraq did use chemical weapons against Iran—and also against the Iraqi Kurds. Perhaps you remember that, much later, the US government repeated, over and over, “Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds, his own people,” as a reason for attacking Iraq.

So is there any limit beyond which the US government wouldn’t go to foment war, to wage war?

That’s a rhetorical question.

—end of my 2016 article—

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NOW, in 2022, when spokespeople proclaim the US government is innocent of all charges relating to bio/chem/nuclear WMD, we’re supposed to believe them?

Really?

And we’re supposed to have faith in the CDC concerning COVID—when the CDC was one of Saddam’s suppliers?

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China Sees Parallel Between Ukraine, Taiwan

March 22nd, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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The Chinese stance on developments around Ukraine was initially one-dimensional, namely, there is no conceivable comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan issues, as they are fundamentally different, because Taiwan is a part of China, whereas Ukraine is an independent country. Factually, that was a correct stance. 

However, there has been a shift lately toward acknowledging that the Eurasian tensions hold an analogy for Indo-Pacific region. The Chinese commentaries underline that the relentless expansion of the NATO in the post-Cold War era is the root cause of events unfolding over Ukraine. In the video call with President Biden in the weekend, President Xi Jinping implicitly touched on this aspect: 

“The US and NATO should also have dialogue with Russia to address the crux of the Ukraine crisis and ease the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine… As two Chinese sayings go, ‘It takes two hands to clap.’ ‘He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.’ It is imperative that the parties involved demonstrate political will and find a proper settlement in view of both immediate and long-term needs… An enduring solution would be for major countries to respect each other, reject the Cold War mentality, refrain from bloc confrontation, and build step by step a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture for the region and for the world…” 

In the spate of Chinese commentaries on Ukraine conflict, one report that catches attention for its incisiveness and insights is an interview in the Global Times entitled Russia-Ukraine conflict can be regarded as a ‘preview’ of US’ possible acts in Asia: Zheng Yongnian – NATO’s phantom. 

Zheng Yongnian is best known as an international authority on Chinese politics, political economy and the CCP. He opined categorically that NATO’s expansion will not stop and it will likely expand to Asia. 

In his view, the US is already putting in place “the prototype of an “Asian NATO” — referring to AUKUS, Quad, Five Eyes, Indo-Pacific Strategy, US moves vis-a-vis Vietnam and Singapore. Second, he said China should anticipate a Ukraine-style crisis taking place in “many countries and regions” in Asia and “the expansion of NATO will only stop when another bloc can compete with it and form a check and balance.” 

Third, while China’s economic openness and interdependence are its strong points, that may not prevent a war but can probably slow it down. He said bluntly: “Once fierce conflicts happen between China and the US, will the US kick China out of the SWIFT system as it did with Russia? My opinion is: 100 percent YES.” That said, China’s economy, deeply embedded in the West, can make the West feel real pain.

However, Zheng Yongnian also pointed out that it is not all black and white, either. One the one hand, while China and Europe have common interests and no geopolitical disputes, on the other hand, Europe’s current solidarity with the US is very fragile, as European interests are at risk in a longer term perspective and the EU itself is “at a particularly vulnerable moment.” 

Besides, a remilitarised Germany will cause uneasiness in the continent, especially for France, with geopolitical implications. Also, the spectre of nuclear proliferation haunts Europe now. It is no longer possible to rule out conflicts happening again within the Western civilisation. 

Interestingly, Zheng Yongnian also flagged that the geopolitical landscape of Asia may radically change if Japan, on the footfalls of Germany, also opts for remilitarisation. “This will impact on the entire East Asia, he warned.” 

The analysis is very profound and there is very little to add to it. China is wary that Washington is moving in the direction of creating a “Ukraine-like” strategic dilemma for Beijing apropos Taiwan. To be sure, China has been provoked by the abrasive remarks recently by Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of Pacific Air Forces, on the “key lessons” Beijing should draw out of the Ukraine conflict. 

The general listed them as the “solidarity of the global community” in opposing “an unprovoked attack on a neighbour” and “the onerous sanctions that have economically crippled Moscow”. Wilsbach threatened that if China behaves in the Russian way, “something more robust will happen.” 

In addition, he warned, China should also consider the opposition of regional countries, apart from the ravages of the war in human lives and treasure. It could not have been lost on Beijing that Wilsbach  shot straight from the hip just before Biden’s phone call to Xi Jinping. 

Against this backdrop, the speech by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng on Saturday at the Tsinghua University on the implication of the Ukraine developments for the Asia-Pacific region merits careful attention. 

These are the first authoritative remarks by a top Chinese official acknowledging that  “the Ukraine crisis provides a mirror for us to observe the situation in the Asia-Pacific. We cannot but ask, how can we prevent a crisis like this from happening in the Asia-Pacific?” They have followed immediately after the 2-hour long phone conversation between President Xi Jinping and President Biden.  

Le Yucheng took note that the Asia-Pacific is in “promising situation” today — an anchor of peace and stability, an engine for growth and a “pace-setter” for development. The region faces two choices between building “an open and inclusive family for win-win cooperation or go for small blocs based on the Cold War mentality and group confrontation.” 

Le Yucheng explained this binary choice as between: “peace and not undermining regional tranquility; so-called absolute security and common security; mutual respect and wanton interference in others’ internal affairs; and, unity and cooperation versus division and confrontation. Without doubt, he was sounding alert about the Us’ so-called Indo-Pacific strategy. 

Le Yucheng underscored that the India-Pacific strategy characterised by acts of provocation, formation of “closed and exclusive small circles or groups”, and fragmentation and bloc-based division can only lead to a situation “as dangerous as the NATO strategy of eastward expansion in Europe… (which) would bring unimaginable consequences, and ultimately push the Asia-Pacific over the edge of an abyss.” He underscored the criticality of the regional states pursuing “independent, balanced and prudent foreign policies” that dovetail with the process of regional integration. 

The parallels between the situations around Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, are being discussed explicitly in the Chinese commentaries and articulation — while the US “squeezed Russia’s strategic space” through NATO expansion and simultaneously incited Kiev to confront Russia, when it comes to Taiwan too, Washington is instigating the secessionist forces in the island upgrading arms sales to provoke Beijing. 

Of course, the US has refrained from direct intervention in Ukraine, as Russia is not only a military power but also a nuclear power. The big question is whether China will arrive at a conclusion that its best opportunity “to solve its internal Taiwan question” lies in confronting the US at the present juncture when “the US is short of confidence and needs to bluster to embolden itself” and when the NATO’s hands are full in Eurasia and it is unlikely that the US’ allies in the Asia-Pacific will want to intervene in Taiwan. 

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Featured image: On the evening of 18 March, President Xi Jinping (R) had a video call with US President Joe Biden at the request of the latter. (Source: Indian Punchline)

Inflation in America: End the Fed and Get More Doritos

March 22nd, 2022 by Rep. Ron Paul

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The US government’s Consumer Price Index indicates prices have increased 7.9 percent in the last year. While this statistic shows the highest rate of increase in forty years, it still understates the amount prices have increased, in part because the statistic is manipulated to minimize reported price increases.

A stealth form of inflation is “shrinkflation.” Shrinkflation occurs when businesses reduce the size of a product so its price can stay the same. For example, Frito-Lay recently began putting fewer chips in a bag of Doritos, reducing the weight of a bag about five percent from 9.75 ounces to 9.25 ounces in the process. Of course, charging the same for less is a type of price increase.

This week the Federal Reserve increased the interest rate by .25 percent. This increase, it said, is a step in combating inflation. The Fed also announced that it plans to raise rates six more times this year. However, even if the Fed follows through on this plan, rates will only increase from near zero to around 1.9 percent. This is unlikely to effectively combat inflation. The Fed also indicated a commitment to reducing its almost nine trillion dollars balance sheet, although its official statement did not specify details such as when the Federal Reserve would start reducing holdings.

The Federal Reserve is facing a dilemma of its own making. Continuing to keep rates low will cause a dollar crisis. A dollar crisis then can lead to a major economic meltdown worse than the Great Depression. However, if the Fed were to increase rates to anything close to where they would be in a free market, that would dramatically increase the federal government’s debt payments burden.

The only reason Congress’s reckless spending and the Fed’s reckless monetary policy have not yet caused a major economic crisis is the dollar’s world reserve currency status. One of the pillars of the dollar’s status is the use of the dollar in the international oil market. The “petrodollar,” though, may soon be replaced. Saudi Arabia is considering selling some oil for Chinese yuan instead of US dollars. India is considering using Russian rubles and Indian Rupees instead of US dollars in trade with Russia, including for the purchase of Russian oil. This will help get around US sanctions. Concerns about the stability of the US economy, combined with increasing resentment of our foreign policy, will cause other countries to abandon the dollar.

Economic instability can lead to political instability, violence, and an increase in support for authoritarian movements. A way to avoid this is for those of us who know the truth to spread the ideas of liberty. When a critical mass of people demands fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government, the politicians will comply.

To put an end to the welfare-warfare state, Congress can drastically reduce the military budget, end all corporate welfare, and shut down all unconstitutional cabinet departments. The savings can be used to pay down debt and to support those truly dependent on government programs while responsibility for providing assistance returns to local institutions and private charities.

Congress should also restore a sound monetary policy by auditing, then ending, the Fed, as well as by repealing both legal tender laws and capital gains taxes on precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Ending the era of the welfare-warfare state and fiat currency can lead to a transition to a new era of liberty, peace, prosperity — and full bags of Doritos.

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The Ukraine-Russia Negotiations Are Effectively Dead: Ukraine’s Refusal to “Denazify”

By Eric Zuesse, March 21, 2022

In order to be able to understand why the U.S. Government and its propaganda agencies downplay, or even outright deny, the overwhelming evidence that the post-2013 Ukrainian government is racist-fascist, or “nazi,” the strong connection between the post-WWII U.S. Government and nazism will need to become acknowledged and understood, because that connection is an essential part of today’s U.S.-Ukraine relationship, and helps explain the almost joined-at-the-hip relationship that exists, between post-regime-change-in-Ukraine, and America.

Eleven Years Ago: The US-NATO-Israel Sponsored Al Qaeda Insurgency in Syria. Who Was Behind the 2011 “Protest Movement”?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 21, 2022

Ten years since the beginning of the war on Syria in March 2011, so-called “progressives” have supported the so-called “opposition”, which is largely made up of Al Qaeda affiliated mercenaries.  A US-NATO led war of aggression is portrayed as a “civil war”. President Bashar Al Assad is casually described as a dictator who is killing his own people. The millions of deaths resulting from US-NATO led wars are not an object of concern.

Fires Rage within Canada’s Ukrainian Community as Professor Attacks the Myth of Holodomor

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, March 21, 2022

University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dougal MacDonald raised hell on November 20, 2019 by writing in a personal Facebook post that the 1932-33 genocide of Ukrainians referred to as Holodomor was a “myth fabricated by Hitlerites”.

Iran: How to Circumvent Sanctions – Now and in the Future

By Peter Koenig and Press TV, March 21, 2022

According to Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi, the greatest foreign policy achievement of the country in recent years has been the disgraceful failure of the United States’ maximum pressure policy in the face of the Iranian people’s resistance.

Interpreting Pakistani Prime Minister Khan’s Praise for Indian Foreign Policy

By Andrew Korybko, March 21, 2022

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan unexpectedly praised rival India’s foreign policy towards Russia during a rally on Sunday ahead of a scheduled no-confidence motion later this week that some observers suspect is secretly orchestrated by the US. He said that “I salute India today. It has an independent foreign policy. India is a member of Quad alliance which also has United States as a member. But it is importing oil from Russia which is facing sanctions. It calls itself neutral. India has a foreign policy dedicated to its people.” These surprising remarks deserve to be interpreted.

Swapping Russia’s S-300 Air Defense System From One NATO Member State to Another

By Nauman Sadiq, March 21, 2022

In a significantly escalatory move, potentially giving Russia justifiable pretext to mount an incursion in Slovakia, Bratislava appears to have struck a deal with NATO for transferring its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for Netherlands and Germany delivering three Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

Zelensky Causes Outrage in Israel After Comparing Russia’s Military Operation to the Holocaust

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 21, 2022

The American Conservative magazine criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been on an embarrassing public relations campaign after being called out in Israel for historical revisionism relating to the Holocaust, attempting to elicit a disingenuous emotional response from the West, and demonstrating the illiberalism of Ukraine by banning political opposition parties.

What Mothers Should Know About COVID and COVID-19 Vaccine for Children

By Barbara Loe Fisher, March 21, 2022

Public health officials want doctors to give the mRNA vaccine, which forces the body’s cells to manufacture the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, to the most vulnerable age group, the tiny babies and young children under 5 years old, whose immune systems and brains are not yet fully developed.

Propaganda 101: Ukraine 2022

By Colin Todhunter, March 21, 2022

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia did not happen out of the blue. It is not the result of the machinations of a power-hungry madman hellbent on taking over Europe, a notion that mainstream commentators have for a number of years tried to embed in the psyche of the Western public.

India Should Quit Quad Now!

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, March 21, 2022

The gravity of the situation is sinking in, finally. That is the message coming out of the Cabinet Committee on Security meeting convened by PM Modi on Sunday “to review India’s security preparedness, and the prevailing global scenario in the context of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” where he was briefed “on latest developments and different aspects of India’s security preparedness in the border areas as well as in the maritime and air domain.” 

Zelensky Says WWIII Assured if Negotiations with Russia Break Down

By Zero Hedge, March 21, 2022

Zelensky’s comments come as Turkey claims Moscow and Kiev are close to an agreement on key points – despite the Kremlin turning to “more destructive artillery” after revealing it used hypersonic “Kinzhal” missiles at least twice on Ukrainian targets.

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University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dougal MacDonald raised hell on November 20, 2019 by writing in a personal Facebook post that the 1932-33 genocide of Ukrainians referred to as Holodomor was a “myth fabricated by Hitlerites”.

If such remarks were made in most nations today, it wouldn’t be such a big deal (as only 16 nations have chosen to recognize this event as an act of genocide rather than the tragic act of nature which MacDonald and countless eminent scholars maintain.)

Canada is not however “most nations”, but has rather had the misfortune of hosting some of the most virulent groups of rabid ultra-right wing Ukrainian fascists who were transplanted into the Prairies and west coast by Anglo-American intelligence networks in the wake of WWII.

Today, many of these 2nd and 3rd generation Banderites control powerful institutions like the Ukrainian Congress of Canada (UCC) and have bred such confused and dangerous ideologues as Canada’s own Deputy Prime Minister (and leading Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland who sees no shame in her grandfather’s leading role as a Nazi collaborator in WW2 or in holding up right wing flags associated with the fascist Organization for Ukrainian Nationalists at a recent rally in Toronto.

Acting from the epicenter of this fascist nexus in Alberta, Professor MacDonald has courageously decided that “enough is enough” writing on the topic of the famine which Ukrainian fascists have mis-labelled a “genocide targeting Ukrainian nationalism”. In his controversial facebook post, MacDonald wrote that “it was the Hitlerite Nazis who created the famine myth in 1933 to discredit the Soviet Union, the enemy they most feared.  The Nazis wrote front page stories in German newspapers, which were then taken up by the reactionary British press.”

Within his very useful writings, there is something vital which Professor MacDonald fails to bring up.

The British Hand Behind Holodomor (and Nazism)

For those who are not aware, the two figures most responsible for the “on the ground evidence” of Holodomor were two journalists named Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge. By looking at these two figures, we should not be surprised to find ourselves bumping into the highest echelons of a British think tank named the Round Table, which acted as the guiding hand behind the rise of Nazism.

Both Jones and Muggeridge were deployed to Ukraine for several weeks in 1933 and their reports of controlled famine were the primary kindling for the anti-Russian fires which fueled the rise of Nazism which British Imperialists then hoped would lead to a German-Russian war of annihilation.

Jones’ entry into the Round Table’s sphere of influence occurred early in his years at Trinity College Cambridge when he led the Cambridge League of Nations Union promoting an end to nation states under supranational government.

The League of Nations was the brainchild of the Lloyd George government which was installed through a coup run by the Alfred Milner Round Table group which overthrew Herbert Asquith’s government in 1916 in order to steer the 1919 Treaty of Versailles in the hopes of designing the post-war world. Lloyd George’s entire cabinet was staffed with Round Table leaders from Lord Milner’s Kindergarten such as Leo Amery, Lionel Curtis, Lord Lothian and F.S. Oliver. It was also at that Paris venue, that the group created the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) with an American branch staffed with Rhodes Scholars set up in 1921 named the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

It is important to keep in mind that the CFR which so disfigured 20th century history was never American, but always followed the mandate set out in 1877 by Cecil Rhodes:

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

After American nationalist resistance proved fatal for the post-WWI global governance agenda, plans for a new war between fascism and communism was put into motion. While fascist governments were installed in Spain, Italy and Germany as “solutions” to the financial woes of the 1920s (and as fascist coups were planned in the USA, Canada, UK and France), Gareth Jones was recruited to become Lloyd George’s private secretary on January 1, 1930.

In 1931, Jones’ training as a perception manager for the empire took him to New York where he served as personal assistant to the infamous Ivy Lee. Ivy Lee was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations (AKA: The American branch of the Round Table) and worked with Edward Bernays as the head of public relations for the Rockefeller Family, IG Farben and Westinghouse, Charles Lindberg and other fascists who had supported Hitler throughout the war and arranged the failed 1934 coup in America which was exposed by General Smedley Butler.

Upon returning to his old post under Lloyd George in England, Jones became the first journalist to fly with Hitler and Goebbels upon the Fuhrer’s overthrow of Gen. von Schleicher in January 1933. After this, Jones was deployed to Russia, slipping covertly into Ukraine in March 1933 alongside another British Agent named Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge was the son of Fabian Society co-founder Henry Muggeridge and married the niece of Fabian leader Beatrice Webb. My recent paper What is the Fabian Society and To What End was it Created features a fuller picture of the dual role played by the Round Table/Rhodes Scholar networks of Oxford and the Fabian Society networks of the London School of Economics in jointly infiltrating all aspects of modern society with the single objective of undoing the American revolution and earlier 15th century golden renaissance.

Together, Jones and Muggeridge’s “on-the-ground” reports were published in the Manchester Guardian, Nazi press, and William Randolph Hearst press machine. When Hearst began publicizing Holodomor, he had already become a devout Hitlerite. Professor MacDonald notes that “in September 1934, multi-millionaire William Randolph Hearst, the leading U.S. publisher of the ‘yellow press’ and an open supporter of Nazism, met with Hitler and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin and signed a cash deal to promote a positive image of the Nazis in the U.S. The Hearst papers soon carried columns paid for by Hitler, Goering and Mussolini.”

Gareth Jones’ life was cut short in China in 1935 for reasons we may never know.

A Return to Professor MacDonald’s Battle

What we do know is that his anti-Soviet propaganda has fed a monster which an allied victory in 1945 was not able to destroy. This monster has grown throughout the post WWII years to reach incredible heights of power in Ukraine, the USA and Canada which brings us back to our current story.

In his controversial remarks professor MacDonald asked how could such a myth continue to be perpetuated for 70 years after the defeat of fascism to the extent that Canada has passed bills which recognize Holodomor memorial days? Here, the professor noted the Anglo-American operation to transplant leading SS war criminals into Canada saying:

 “In Canada, former Nazi collaborators and their spawn have long led the phony Holodomor campaign. After the Second World War, Canada became a haven for Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis and killed their own citizens to serve Nazi aims. Once in Canada and with the help of the Canadian state, these war criminals built reactionary domestic organizations (e.g. the UCC) which persist to this day. These organizations displaced already-established progressive Ukrainian organizations. Some collaborators achieved high positions, for example, Waffen SS member Petro Savaryn served as VP of the national PC Party and was Chancellor of the University of Alberta for four years.”

Of course the Ukrainian Student Association has demanded the Professor be fired saying in an open letter “we call upon the University of Alberta to immediately reprimand and terminate Dougal MacDonald for anti-Ukrainian hate speech and denial of Holodomor”.The UCC has organized vast pressure on the University to bend the knee resulting in public denunciations of MacDonald’s assertions by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney who condemned “western, supposedly-progressive voices who were complicit in one of history’s great cover ups”. Meanwhile the University’s dean has denounced MacDonald’s claims.

Yet, in spite of this pressure, 46 University of Alberta teachers have rallied support for Professor MacDonald signing a letter endorsing his right to free expression. Meanwhile the University itself appears to fear the public relations disaster which an expulsion could cause (and perhaps there is a fear that additional scandal would only put a spotlight on the myth of Holodomor which may cause more people to discover the ugly truth of Canada’s Nazi problem).

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Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .

Featured image: Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933. In Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1933: a memorial exhibition, Widener Library, Harvard University. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Library: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1986. Procyk, Oksana. Heretz, Leonid. Mace, James E. (James Earnest). ISBN: 0674294262. Page 35. Initially published in Muss Russland Hungern? [Must Russia Starve?], published by Wilhelm Braumüller, Wien [Vienna] 1935. (Licensed under the public domain)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


On March 18th, I headlined “How the Western Press Handles the Ukrainian Government’s Nazism,” but didn’t, at the time, know that what is blocking a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia, is, in fact, Russia’s demand, and Ukraine’s refusal, for Ukraine’s government to ‘denazify’.

In other words: the Western press’s handling of that very question, of whether Ukraine’s government has a ‘nazi problem’, was actually crucial to enabling a peace-settlement to be reached. The war goes on — and will continue now to go on, because of  that impasse in the negotiations.

Later on March 18th, Reuters headlined “Russian official sees progress with Ukraine on neutrality, not on ‘denazification’”, and reported that the official who represents Russia in those negotiations,

Vladimir Medinsky said the two countries were “halfway there” on the question of Ukraine adopting neutral status.

“On denazification, the situation is quite strange because our Ukrainian colleagues on the other side of the table consider there are no Nazi formations in Ukraine and this is not an issue in modern Ukraine,” he said.

Subsequently, on March 20th, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewed Zelensky, who described as “laughable” and “a joke” and “I cannot take these statements seriously”, any allegations that there are “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine’s government, and he went on to say that Putin must be divorced from reality, and in “an information bubble,” to be alleging otherwise. So: Zelensky and Putin cannot come to agreement about that, and this means that Russia now will have no other way possible (if any exists) to win this war than militarily, by a forced regime-change in Ukraine; it simply cannot be done by means of negotiation. The negotiations are now effectively dead.

Of course, in Russian newsmedia, the allegation commonly is presented that “Nazis” — the term which refers actually to the political Party that Adolf Hitler led — are running Ukraine’s government.

Ukraine’s government refuses to accept that.

However, the position to be documented here is not supporting either side in that debate, but instead a third position, which is this: Just as the term “fascism” refers to the might-makes-right ideology of Mussolini’s party in Italy, and “Fascism” refers to that Party itself, the term “nazism” refers to the racist-fascist ideology of Hitler’s party in Germany, and “Nazism” refers to that Party itself. Ukraine’s government does not have any “Nazis” in it, but is, in fact — as will be documented below, via the links to the sources — actually controlled by “nazis” (lower-case “N”, not the Party) and these people have threatened assassination against Ukraine’s President Zelensky if he ever fails to continue supporting and arming them.

Here, therefore, is the evidence regarding the actual facts behind this impasse in the negotiations, as I had presented on March 18th — and anyone who doubts the truth of any linked allegation in it will immediately see the documentation for it there just by clicking onto that link:

The evidence is undenied and undeniable that, ever since the U.S. government’s coup in Ukraine in February 2014, the Ukrainian government hates and wants to destroy Russians, very much like Adolf Hitler’s Nazis did during WW II. Seven examples of that evidence are provided in:

The commonest way of reality-denial on this matter is that the post-coup Ukrainian government has Jews within its ranks and avoids perpetrating any anti-Jewish atrocities (the U.S. government wouldn’t be supporting them otherwise, and they know it), but Obama didn’t install this regime in order to produce an anti-Jewish government on Russia’s border just a 7-minute missile-flight away from nuking Moscow; he did it in order to install an anti-Russian government there — one that could join NATO and then have U.S. nuclear missiles placed there.

Hitler himself even commonly used the phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism” in order to suggest that the Satanic attributes he assigned to Jews extended to the Soviet Union itself. However, whereas the original (German variety of) nazism was mainly against Jews and only secondarily against Russians, the Ukrainian variety, which Obama installed, is mainly (and sometimes even exclusively) against Russians.

And sometimes that hatred has been expressed by the Obama-installed regime’s hired Ukrainian thugs herding terrified peaceful pro-Russian demonstrators into a building and then burning them alive there. The U.S. press virtually ignored it, but there it is, plain as day.

Anyone who denies that Ukraine’s government ever since February 2014 has been, and is, nazi is denying what is clearly shown to be the case, by an overwhelming body of evidence.

However, because of the extremely heavy propaganda in the U.S.-and-allied world against Russians, Hitler’s hatred of Russians is ignored, and the U.S. government’s hatred of Russians is only broadcast, spread around the world, not exposed to the public as being the propaganda that it is.

Consequently, ONLY Hitler’s hatred of Jews — who were, indeed, his top target to destroy — defines “Nazism” in The West. (This is why even racist-fascist Jews, or “Zionists,” are not being referred-to as “nazis” — which they are: Jewish racist-fascists. The underlying false assumption there is that no Jew CAN BE a racist fascist; and though this assumption is plain stupid — and even racistly so — it is virtually universally believed to be true, at least in the U.S.-and-allied countries.)

Hitler’s OTHER racisms (especially against Russians and other “Slavs”) are virtually ignored, because those are “inconvenient truths,” not to be discussed (despite Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” to capture the Soviet Union in order to expand Germans’ Lebensraum and kill and enslave all “Slavs”), and most people choose to believe only what is convenient for them to believe (what is fashionable to believe) — even if it is demonstrably false.

In order to be able to understand why the U.S. Government and its propaganda agencies downplay, or even outright deny, the overwhelming evidence that the post-2013 Ukrainian government is racist-fascist, or “nazi,” the strong connection between the post-WW-II U.S. Government and nazism will need to become acknowledged and understood, because that connection is an essential part of today’s U.S.-Ukraine relationship, and helps explain the almost joined-at-the-hip relationship that exists, between post-regime-change-in-Ukraine, and America.

This American connection to Hitler’s racist fascism goes way beyond overtly racist U.S. organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, which have only an internal-U.S. focus on “White Supremacy.” The connection in the case of Ukraine focuses instead on U.S. foreign policies. America adopted nazism virtually as soon as U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945, and remains essentially nazi to the present day. Though the cover-story was ‘anti-communism’, the reality was U.S. global imperialism, and it secretly continued on even after the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact mirror to America’s NATO military alliance, all ended in 1991. Post-coup Ukraine’s nazism is an expression of this.

The only two nations that reliably vote at the U.N. against any resolution that condemns any sort of racism, including “Nazism” (and these resolutions spell that with the initial-cap “N”; and, therefore, to vote against the resolution is implicitly endorsing even specifically Hitler’s own Nazi Party, not merely the ideology of racist fascism) are the United States, and Ukraine. America’s allied nations (such as UK, France, and Israel) generally abstain from those votes, but some of them vote in favor of those resolutions — they do express their opposition to all forms of racism.

Only America and Ukraine vote consistently AGAINST those resolutions. Sometimes, America gives, as its reason, for voting against the resolution, that it wants to show its support for Ukraine.

The first such vote at the U.N. occurred just months after the regime-change in Ukraine, and was taken on 21 November 2014. I headlined about it, at the time, “U.S. Among Only 3 Countries at U.N. Officially Backing Nazism & Holocaust-Denial; Israel Parts Company from Them; Germany Abstains”, and reported that the three countries were U.S., Ukraine, and Canada, and that “Samantha Power, the U.S. Representative at the U.N., gave as her reason for voting against the resolution, its unacceptability to the Government of Ukraine.” After the 16 November 2017 U.S. vote for nazism, I headlined “Trump Continues Obama’s Support of Nazism. U.S. Votes Against UN Resolution Condemning Nazism”. The latest such vote occurred on 16 December 2021, and Craig Murray headlined about it, “Protecting the Nazis: The Extraordinary Vote of Ukraine and the USA”.

Clearly, all media that deny the nazism of the post-regime-change Ukrainian government are ignoring reality; and the U.S. Government simply ignores reality. After all: none of these U.N. resolutions so much as even just MENTIONS Ukraine. But the U.S.-installed Ukraine nonetheless refuses to vote FOR any such resolution; and the U.S. delegation doesn’t want Ukraine to be the ONLY delegation voting against it. (Sometimes, our delegation explains its vote as being a vote for ‘freedom of speech,’ but these resolutions aren’t about any “speech”; they are about bigotryof all sorts, and about violence that’s used in support of it. So: ever since the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine, the U.S. is now OVERTLY nazi, because Ukraine, after the regime-change, is ruled by U.S.-installed nazis; and they became immediately installed in the new government’s top ‘national security’ posts, and every elected leader in Ukraine now knows that to oppose their (those nazis’) demands would lead to the Ukrainian official’s overthrow and even to the person’s possible assassination by Ukraine’s nazi forces. History is important in order to understand this.

The Soviet Union lost 26 million dead from World War II; China lost 20 million; Germany lost 6 million;  Poland lost 6 million; Japan lost 3 million; but America lost only 419,400.

After the War, Truman’s America instituted its Marshall Plan to rebuild anti-Soviet European countries’ economies so as ultimately to conquer both China and the Soviet Union — those had been two of FDR America’s key allies which were essential to winning the anti-fascist war that the anti-fascist FDR and his allies had waged against fascism.

Also, Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief intelligence officer in his “Operation Barbarossa” invasion against the Soviet Union, was immediately hired by President Truman’s people in 1945-6, in order to set up West Germany’s new foreign-intelligence operation against the Soviet Union, and for Gehlen to advise on the creation of a replacement of FDR’s OSS.

When FDR’s OSS became replaced by Truman’s CIA in 1947, Gehlen helped to establish his friend, the rabidly anti-Russian (and anti-Semitic) Allen Dulles as its leader. Truman’s people had secretly brought Gehlen to stay at Fort Hood for nearly a year during 1945-6, where he conferred privately with Allen Dulles and six other top Truman people. Gehlen’s personal objectives were two: Protect the O.D.E.S.S.A (Organization of Veterans of the SS); and get the U.S. to continue Germany’s war to conquer Russia.

“The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.”

Gehlen achieved both of his objectives. Then, in 1949, Truman established his anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO. Six years later, in 1955, the Soviet Union created its NATO-mirror organization, the Warsaw Pact, as their response to America’s hostility.

President Truman rejected his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policies and personnel, and replaced them so as to bring into the U.S. many high Nazis, such as Gehlen, and such as their rocket designer Werner von Braun, and many who were far less famous.

So, given that Ukraine’s current government is nazi-dominated, and so is America’s (all being of the modernized liberal form of racist-fascism, not Hitler’s original blatantly anti-Jewish type), how do Western news-media deal with this reality?

On March 5th, NBC News headlined “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t”, and opined that:

Of the many distortions manufactured by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify Russia’s assault on Ukraine, perhaps the most bizarre is his claim that the action was taken to “denazify” the country and its leadership. In making his case for entering his neighbor’s territory with armored tanks and fighter jets, Putin has stated that the move was undertaken “to protect people” who have been “subjected to bullying and genocide,” and that Russia “will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

On its face, Putin’s smear is absurd, not least because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and has said that members of his family were killed during World War II. There is also no evidence of recent mass killings or ethnic purges taking place in Ukraine. Moreover, labeling enemies Nazis is a common political ploy in Russia, especially from a leader who favors disinformation campaigns and wants to stir up feelings of national vengeance against a WWII foe to justify conquest.

But even though Putin is engaging in propaganda, it’s also true that Ukraine has a genuine Nazi problem — both past and present. Putin’s destructive actions — among them the devastation of Jewish communities — make clear that he’s lying when he says his goal is to ensure anyone’s welfare.

That phrase “devastation of Jewish communities” is linked to this from the 1 March 2022 The Atlantic:

“What Putin’s ‘Denazification’ of Ukraine Really Looks Like: Fleeing Russia’s onslaught, a rabbi leads children from Odessa’s Jewish community through the Carpathian Mountains.”

It’s linked to the yotube video, “Rabbi Refael Kruskal: Farewell to Odessa Central Synagogue (2/25/22)”.

The article interviews “Rabbi Refael Kruskal, the vice president of the Jewish community in Odessa.” The youtube has viewer-comments such as “Heartbreaking” and “I pray that the Rabbi and his community stay safe. However ,rather than hoping to return ‘home’, perhaps he should now realize that the only true home he has is Israel.”

However, neither the magazine’s article nor that video provides any evidence that under Russian control, there would be more anti-Semitism in Odessa, or more governmental support of anti-Semitism there, than now exists. Both the article and the video are designed to elicit contempt against Russians, but zero evidence is being provided to support the unquestioned and unstated underlying assumption that Russia is anti-Semitic nazi — like the Nazi Party (the very same Party that had perpetrated Operation Barbarossa) — and that Ukraine is not.

Here is the reality regarding nazism in Odessa; and this nazism, being so publicly displayed on 2 May 2014 there, and which apparently was considered acceptable to Rabbi Kruskal and did not cause him to flee, was quite clearly anti-Russian, and was far less (if at all) anti-Semitic.

It’s titled

“How the thugs killed Odessa inhabitants in the Trade Unions House – the details of bloody scenario”.

For some ‘mysterious’ reason, many of the videos that were shown and linked-to there were subsequently removed from the Web, though nobody questions their authenticity, nor the reality that they had so clearly displayed.

For example, my own article about that burning-alive of the peaceful anti-coup demonstrators there was likewise based upon those videos, and I had carefully vetted each one before I would add it to my article; so, I know that this was news-reporting at the time, not any mere spreading of anybody’s propaganda.

These were videos taken there by many bystanders, and all of them show the same event from different standpoints, at different stages in the trapping-and-burning-alive of these victims. On 15 May 2014, the first article was published identifying whom the massacre’s masterminds were (all of whom were officials in the U.S.-appointed junta). (For persons wanting the most complete visual and audio recording of these events: here — amazingly still present at youtube — is Part 1 of the most complete video compilation and explanation of the sequence of events there. Part 2 shows that the event started with hooded Right Sector thugs pretending to be protesters and being accompanied to the extermination site accompanied and advised by leaders of the police. The victims had no idea that these people — then with their masks off — were their enemies until they were trapped.)

Western propaganda (such as from NBC and from The Atlantic magazine) isn’t making clear whether Rabbi Kruskal fled Odessa because there is now a full-fledged war there, or instead because he thinks that Russians are more anti-Semitic than Ukrainians are. But the propaganda-usage of his story is definitely being presented as-if his account somehow constitutes a ‘disproof’ of the actually undeniable nazism that America’s coup in Ukraine has installed to control that country.

The propagandists obviously think that America’s public won’t even notice that no evidence is actually provided to confirm that impression. But is the American public really that stupid — not even to notice that? (Of course, we are inundated with anti-Russian-government, pro-Ukrainian-government, propaganda, which contrasts starkly against the reality.)

Fufrthermore, clearly, Zelensky himself, who is also a Jew, is at least as unconcerned about that massacre in Odessa, when he describes as as “laughable” and “a joke” and “I cannot take these statements seriously”, any allegations that there are “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine’s government 

The liar in this matter is not Putin; it is such propagandists as have been exposed here.

To see the evidence that Zelensky knows that he could very likely be assassinated if he publicly acknowledges that his government is, in fact, controlled by ‘nazis’, click here.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

He 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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Verehrte Leserin, verehrter Leser, bitte sehen Sie mir die Überschrift des Artikels nach: Auch ich habe einen riesigen Schrecken bekommen, als ich dieser Tage in den Nachrichten hörte, dass westliche Kräfte in Erwägung ziehen, als Folge des Krieges in der Ukraine die Werke beziehungsweise Bücher des bedeutenden russischen Schriftstellers Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski zu verbrennen. Als Deutschem drängt sich unwillkürlich die Parallele zur dunklen Vergangenheit des Hitler-Faschismus auf. Auch damals begann es peu à peu – und endete in einem Kulturbruch. Diese deutsche Geschichte darf sich nicht wiederholen! Verstehen Sie meinen Kommentar deshalb als einen Hilferuf und eine Mahnung an alle Mitbürger, dass die Vernunft vor der öffentlichen Meinung niemals kapitulieren darf.

Ressentiments gegen alles Russische

Die seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg „gepflegten“ Ressentiments gegen Russland, alle russischen Präsidenten und russischen Bürger brechen seit Wochen aus dem Mund westlicher Politiker und westlicher Massenmedien ganz offen und in einer Schärfe aus, die einem den Atem nimmt. Ich werde die unglaublichen Sanktionen, Maßnahmen und Vorschläge nicht im Einzelnen aufzählen; sie können inzwischen in allen Medien nachgelesen werden.

Der in der Überschrift zitierte Satz Heinrich Heines stammt aus seiner Tragödie „Almansor“.  Sie wurde 1823 veröffentlicht und uraufgeführt. Dort äußert sich ein gewisser Hassan zu der Verbrennung von 5000 Büchern islamischer Theologie im Jahre 1499 folgendermaßen:

„Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.“ (1)

Dieser Satz wurde später als prophetische Äußerung Heinrich Heines im Hinblick auf die Bücherverbrennung 1933 in Deutschland gedeutet.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische- und Medien-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Noten 

1. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almansor…(Heine)

Featured image is from Penguin Random House

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“Where You Burn Books, You End Up Also Burning People.”

March 21st, 2022 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

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Dear reader, please forgive me for the title of this article: I, too, got a huge fright when I heard on the news these days that Western forces are considering burning the works or books of the important Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. As a German, a parallel to the dark past of Hitler’s fascism involuntarily suggests itself. Back then, too, it began peu à peu – and ended in a cultural rupture. This German history must not be repeated! Therefore, please understand my comment as a cry for help and a reminder to all fellow citizens that reason must never capitulate to public opinion.

Resentment against everything Russian

The resentment against Russia, all Russian presidents and Russian citizens that has been “cultivated” since the Second World War has been erupting for weeks from the mouths of Western politicians and Western mass media quite openly and with a ferocity that takes one’s breath away. I will not list the unbelievable sanctions, measures and proposals in detail; they can be read in all media by now.

The sentence by Heinrich Heine quoted in the headline comes from his tragedy “Almansor”.  It was published and premiered in 1823. There, a certain Hassan comments on the burning of 5000 books of Islamic theology in 1499 as follows:

“That was a prelude only, where you burn books, you end up also burning people.” (1)

This sentence was later interpreted as a prophetic statement by Heinrich Heine with regard to the burning of books in Germany in 1933.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almansor…(Heine)

Featured image is from Penguin Random House

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Background

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi says the first priority of his administration during the Persian New Year is boosting employment and creating new jobs.

He made the remarks in his New Year message aired live from the Grand Mosque of the southwestern Iranian port city of Khorramshahr on Sunday evening.

“My first Nowruz message as the servant of the public is the message of round-the-clock and incessant work to build a powerful and advanced Iran,” he said.

“No nation and no country has achieved anything without intensive work and the maximum use of human and natural resources. The New Year and the new century should be the beginning of a new era of productive, useful, fruitful, and progressive work for all of us,” the president added.

“During the current year, God willing, the issue of employment will be our first and foremost issue,” Iran’s president said, adding that unemployment is the root cause of all economic and social plights. As a result, he noted, supporting domestic production is at the top of his administration’s agenda.

Raeisi noted that during the seven-month lapsed since his administration was inaugurated, it has proven the he is determined to do what he says.

“We said that with the help of God and people, we would contain the coronavirus [pandemic], [and] thank God, it was done,” Iran’s president said.

He added,

“We said that the country and the economy would not be left in limbo pending [the conclusion] of the JCPOA [Iran’s deal with world powers]. Everybody saw that while engaging in negotiations [with other parties to the JCPOA] and taking advantage of political and legal means to dealing with the crime of sanctions, we also put our focus on thwarting sanctions.”

Washington says its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran has been an “abject failure.”

He pointed to the emerging signs of economic growth and stability as well as a significant increase in the volume of foreign trade and non-oil exports under his administration, saying, “We increased trade with our neighbors for the benefit of the people.”

“We said that we will set the production wheel in motion, [and] official statistics, released up to the end of the third quarter even show that economic growth has reached above 5%,” Iran’s chief executive said.

“We said that we will not trade the interests and security of the people with anything, [and] everyone saw that we gave priority to boosting the country’s defense, missile, and space capabilities, because the country’s security is a priority,” he added.

Raeisi also said the balance in the country’s foreign policy has been restored through an active diplomacy pursued under his leadership.

According to the president, the greatest foreign policy achievement of the country in recent years has been the disgraceful failure of the United States’ maximum pressure policy in the face of the Iranian people’s resistance.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi says Washington’s policy of maximum pressure has failed to achieve its goals.

Back in 2018, the administration of the former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and re-imposed the anti-Iran sanctions that were lifted under the accord while piling on with new ones. He said he was adopting a “maximum pressure” policy to force Tehran to negotiate a new deal.

In spite of his fierce criticisms of the “failed maximum pressure” campaign pursued by his predecessor, Biden has not only kept all the sanctions imposed under Trump but has also added new ones as well.

“We began running the country in the right direction. We do not see the fate of the nation in the hands of foreigners,” Raeisi stressed.

He noted that his administration did away with polarization, which he said undermines the nation’s strength, and instead demonstrated that the power of the [operations in the military] field is in line and parallel to the power of diplomacy.

“We used foreign relations in the service of [the country’s] economy, and that is the meaning of a transform-seeking and justice-oriented administration,” he added.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian president wished for the new Iranian year to be the end of the coronavirus pandemic around the world and also an end to wars in every corner of the world.

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PressTV: What would be possible ways to neutralize sanctions, regardless of the result of negotiations in Vienna [IAEA Nuclear Negotiations – ongoing]?

Peter Koenig: Thank you.

Please let me begin, if I may, with a quote from President Ebrahim Raeisi, after referring to Iran’s spectacular 5% growth, when he said: that we will not trade the interests and security of the people with anything, [and] everyone saw that we gave priority to boosting the country’s defense, missile, and space capabilities, because the country’s security is a priority.”

This is crucial. Iran’s Security. Must be a priority. This refers not just to military and geopolitical security, but also to economic security.

To neutralize sanctions current and potential future ones – it is important that Iran fully orient herself towards the East, towards China and Russia, in essence towards the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – of which Iran is now a full-fledged member. And away from the West.

Remember, I have said this before – the SCO comprises about half of the world population, in other words a huge market – and controls about 30% or more of the world’s GDP.

There is no need to continue depending on the West, the US and her allies or better, her vassals, the Europeans. They will always do what the Anglo-American empire dictates, because they are afraid themselves of sanctions.

The current case – the war between Ukraine and Russia – speaks for itself. The US dictates the sanctions for Russia and the European Union has to follow suit – or else. What is the result?

It’s a kind of economic suicide for the West; more for the Europeans than for the US. But also, the US suffers more from their imposed sanctions than does Russia. Because, Russia has gradually detached herself from the dollar-euro – economy, and oriented her trade and geopolitical relations towards the east, China and the SCO.

Of course, unplugging one’s economy from the west, from the dollar-euro hegemony, is a process – it doesn’t happen from one day to the next.

But Iran has already begun. In my opinion, it has to be continued immediately and fervently and carried out persistently. In that sense, in achieving economic independence – Russia may be an example. The current US-EU sanction regime hurt Europa and the US more than they hurt Russia, especially in what energy supply is concerned.

PTV: Also, considering the energy crisis in Europe, there may be possibilities for Iran to supply natural gas to Europe

PK: Of course, there may be possibilities. But knowing what we know about Europe, the US and sanctions, my recommendation is to abstain from supplying Europe with energy. There will be the day – when they are told that now Iran needs to be sanctioned, and all the contracts you, Iran, sign now, would be canceled, or simply disregarded, invalidated. And as you know, this is not new for Iran, the cancelation of contracts due to sanctions.

There is no reliance on Europe, nor, of course, as you know on the US.

A good example is the Russia-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is practically finished. Yet, Germany is being told not to buy Russian gas. However, Germany depends to about 50% of Russian hydrocarbons. Now what will happen – of course they go begging around the world, to fill the gap, possibly at much higher prices than the gas supply from Russia.

The Saudis have already said they would rather sell to China in Yuan. And they have categorically refused President Biden’s request to increase their oil production.

One must add, the Russian gas supply has always been reliable. Whatever the geopolitical differences, so far Russia has always maintained her contractual agreements and obligations.

Under the circumstances, Russia has already successfully diverted the supplies destined for Germany to China.

Another important factor is – the currency in which such contracts would be established, either in US dollars or in euros, the little brother of the dollar.

To the extent possible, Iran may want to stay away from these fiat currencies. These are also the currencies with which sanctions are dished out. So, its not a good idea to deal with these currencies. The Chinese Yuan – which will be rolled out still this year as a digital international payment mode, is much-much safer. –

The Yuan is backed by a solid Chinese economy. The US-dollar and the Euro are backed by nothing – literally by nothing – not even by trust.

PTV: And finally, the possibilities of developing relations with countries that they themselves are already under US sanctions

PK: Like what countries? – If you are thinking of the East bloc, like the members of the SCO, like China and Russia, yes, of course. They soon will have their own international payment system – actually it already functions between some countries, for example between China and India its already established – and that is SANCTION-FREE!!!

So, again, to stay away as much as possible from US sanctions:

  • do not trade in US-dollars or in Euros
  • stay away from dealing with the US and Europe – also do NOT keep your reserves in western countries – see what happened to Russia?

Half of Russia’s reserves, stored in London and NYC and possibly some other western countries, have been confiscated – in other words: stolen.

Keep you reserves in your own treasury or in an SCO country, where they are not accessible to the west – where they are safe from western sanctions.

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

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

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***

The western media is trying to turn the conflict in Ukraine into a legal discussion, putting “violators of international law” on one side and “defenders of justice and legality” on the other. Obviously, this type of narrative is extremely problematic, considering that the very “illegality” of the Russian intervention in the conflict is questionable, but this is not the main point of the matter. From the moment the West claims that Russia is acting illegally, it automatically implies that the entire international society must necessarily take a stand in favor of the Ukrainian side, which has generated great controversy.

As expected, the country most affected by this pro-Ukraine position requirement is China. As the second richest country in the world, equipped with enormous political, military, and diplomatic potential and maintaining friendly relations with Russia, China is a key point in the conflict, as its stance, if placed in favor of Kiev, could make Moscow diplomatically weak. This type of conduct is not typical of Chinese foreign policy, however, which is strongly marked by the defense of neutrality and the principle of non-intervention, which has led Beijing to avoid pronouncements on which side is right or wrong in the conflict, limiting its participation to mediation of diplomatic dialogue and increased economic cooperation with Russia, which is being sanctioned by the West.

Western leaders, however, insist on not respecting the Chinese diplomatic tradition and demand a stance totally in favor of the Ukrainian government, rejecting any form of neutrality. Recently, during a press conference NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg commented on the Chinese position stating that

“China should join the rest of the world in strongly condemning the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia (…) China has an obligation as a member of the UN Security Council to actually support and uphold international law and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of the international law so we call on [China] to clearly condemn the invasion and not support Russia”.

Stoltenberg’s unkind words – which literally demanded a violation of every ideological and strategic principle of Beijing’s foreign policy – did not go unnoticed by Chinese diplomats. A spokesperson for the Chinese mission to the EU spoke about the case saying: Chinese people can fully relate to the pains and sufferings of other countries because we will never forget who had bombed our embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. We need no lecture on justice from the abuser of international law (…)

“As a Cold War remnant and the world’s largest military alliance, NATO continues to expand its geographical scope and range of operations. What kind of role has it played in world peace and stability? NATO needs to have good reflection”.

The spokesperson’s words were very incisive, remembering that NATO is an organization with a vast history of violations of international law. The invasion of Yugoslavia, during which the Chinese embassy in the country was bombed, is a sad and important mark in the history of international relations, which will not be so easily forgotten. At that time, the Western military alliance was trying to demonstrate its power and assert its role as “global police” in the then newly born unipolar world order. The western attack on Yugoslavia ignored all the norms of international law and human rights, creating one of the biggest humanitarian crises ever seen on European soil – just in the name of asserting the alliance’s global power. Shortly thereafter, the same scenario was repeated in Iraq, creating a real illegal “custom” in international society according to which invasions could occur with impunity, provided they were carried out by NATO.

Since then, many jurists have tried to “theorize” this supposed “right” on the part of NATO to attack other countries, as seen in ideas such as the “anticipatory self-defense”, which literally legitimized Western military action against target countries in order to “prevent” future attacks by these countries on Western states – even if there was no material evidence that such threats were real. Now, if the Ukrainian case is analyzed according to the very principles of Western legal theories, there is, therefore, no illegitimacy in the Russian Operation, considering that there was vast evidence that Kiev planned to invade the Donbass and massacre the local population. Moscow acted preemptively in defense of third parties – the only “problem” for Western jurists is that this right is apparently unique to NATO.

In other words, NATO has vastly disturbed international law structures in recent decades, creating a state of chaos in global society. In the same way, international jurists came to consider “legal” everything that is done by the Western alliance, while seeing as “illegal” even the legitimate maneuvers of non-aligned countries. This is why there is no room for this kind of discussion in the Ukrainian issue. The case cannot be understood or resolved consulting legal experts because the current trend is to see everything done by non-NATO countries as “illegal”. In addition, it is necessary to remember that international law has failed to prevent the escalation of the conflict. If the international courts had punished Kiev for its crimes in the Donbass, Moscow would not have started the Operation.

So, there is no problem in the Chinese stance in abdicating any discussions on legality or illegality of the Russian actions. Beijing understands that even if there were illegality in the Operation (which does not seem to be the case), there would be no legitimacy for NATO to accuse this, considering the organization’s crimes. In fact, this type of neutral position is the most lucid to be taken by the parties not involved in the conflict, as it is the most consistent with the universal principle of non-intervention.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

The repeated euphemistic phraseology of ‘nuclear deterrence’, or of a ‘nuclear umbrella’, has lulled most people into a false sense of safety and security.

Reacting to Western support for Ukraine as Russian forces invaded, President Putin announced an increase in the alert level of their nuclear weapons. [1]  Many commentators expressed shock, assuming that ‘the world had moved on’ from such threats. But they forgot – or did not know – that there are already over 900 Russian, and an equivalent number of US, long-range warheads kept ready to fire at a few minutes’ notice. [2]  This has been the situation since the end of the Cold War, three decades ago. It is a highly risky situation that has been criticised even by many senior military and political figures. [3]  Indeed, UK and French nuclear weapons can also be made ready to fire with some 15 minutes’ notice in a crisis. [4]

The reality is that ‘nuclear deterrence’ threatens death and destruction on such an extreme scale that it is hard to imagine. This is no accident – a detonation above a city is chosen to maximise the lethal blast and fire radius.

SGR has extensively documented the risks, impacts and dangers of the deployment and use of nuclear weapons using the latest data from scientific studies. [5]

For example, the use of just one typical nuclear weapon [6] airburst over a major city would overwhelm any possible medical capacity with injuries including severe burns and radiation sickness. [7]  In this scenario, the casualty count could quickly climb to more than a million people. A larger weapon – such as routinely deployed by Russia or the USA – could kill and injure considerably more. [8]

Indeed, the use of no more than 100 nuclear weapons would be completely disastrous for all humanity in terms of death, injury, radiation releases and widespread ecosystem impacts. Nuclear fireballs would create huge ‘firestorms’, injecting smoke high into the atmosphere sharply reducing sunlight and creating a ten-year ‘nuclear winter’. This would bring about mass starvation and societal collapse as crops failed in unseasonal frosts and darkness. [9]

In 1985, the leaders of the USA and the Soviet Union agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. [10]  This was affirmed by the leaders of the five largest nuclear weapons nations – Russia, the USA, China, France and the UK – as recently as January this year. [11]  They are right. All the detailed military simulations of nuclear conflict come to the same conclusion – no one can ‘win’. All sides, bystanders and the global environment would be destroyed.

But the clear implication is ignored – that nuclear weapons are rationally unusable. Any use of a nuclear weapon would be disastrous in humanitarian and political terms and would quickly escalate, ending human civilisation. Having large numbers of unusable weapons makes no sense, but this is the policy pursued by the nuclear weapons nations who are all developing new nuclear weapons. Some states – such as the UK – are even increasing their warhead numbers. [12]

Putin seems to regard his latest nuclear threat as ensuring that he can conduct attacks using conventional weapons without direct retaliation from NATO, under his ‘nuclear umbrella’. This is an example of how nuclear deterrence can be used to facilitate conflict, leading to murderous acts and a humanitarian crisis.

With the war evolving in Ukraine, and as casualties mount, it is again time for organisations such as SGR and the wider peace and environmental movements to make it clear that any possession of nuclear weapons – and acceptance of ‘nuclear deterrence’ – is dangerous and irresponsible. There is no such thing as ‘limited’ nuclear weapons use, it would only lead to global catastrophe. We must take urgent action to publicise the genocidal, ecocidal, and suicidal risk posed by nuclear weapons before they are used by accident, due to equipment failure, or by an unbalanced political leader in a time of extreme tension. We must make the case that the nuclear weapons states should join the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons because it sets out a clear framework to negotiate and verifiably reduce numbers of nuclear weapons to zero. [13]  This would bring about the ultimate goal first set out in the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty – the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

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Dr Philip Webber is Chair of SGR, and has written on the threat from nuclear weapons for 40 years, including London After the Bomb (1982) and Nuclear Weapons: a beginner’s guide to the threats (2021).

Notes

[1] BBC News (2022). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60547473

[2] SGR (2021). https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/nuclear-weapons-beginner-s-guide-threats

[3] See, for example: Global Zero (2015). https://www.globalzero.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/global_zero_commission_on_nuclear_risk_reduction_report_0.pdf

[4] UK Parliament (2006). https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmdfence/986/6031402.htm

[5] SGR (2022). https://www.sgr.org.uk/projects/nuclear-weapons-threat-main-outputs ; SGR (2021) – as note 2.

[6] I refer here to a weapon with an explosive power or ‘yield’ equivalent to about 100 kilotonnes of TNT. Many warheads are much larger.

[7] ICAN (2022). https://www.icanw.org/report_no_place_to_hide_nuclear_weapons_and_the_collapse_of_health_care_systems

[8] SGR (2021) – as note 2.

[9] A nuclear winter would follow the use of 100 ‘small’ (about 15 kilotonne) detonations. SGR (2021) – as note 2.

[10] Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (1985). https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/joint-soviet-united-states-statement-summit-meeting-geneva

[11] The White House (2022). https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/p5-statement-on-preventing-nuclear-war-and-avoiding-arms-races/

[12] Federation of American Scientists (2022). https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/

[13] ICAN (2021). https://www.icanw.org/the_treaty

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


In a significantly escalatory move, potentially giving Russia justifiable pretext to mount an incursion in Slovakia, Bratislava appears to have struck a deal with NATO for transferring its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for Netherlands and Germany delivering three Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

Although NATO has provided thousands of anti-aircraft MANPADS to Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias, those are portable surface-to-air missiles, whereas S-300 air defense system, equivalent in capabilities to American Patriots, is a large and advanced system that constitutes a nation’s backbone of air defense capabilities.

The Kremlin would definitely view any potential move involving transferring S-300 batteries to Ukraine with as much alarm as it viewed the scuttled Polish deal of transferring its entire MiG-29 fleet of 28 aircraft to Ukraine in return for American F-16 fighter jets.

The Dutch government said [1] Friday, March 18, it would send a Patriot missile defense system to Sliac, Slovakia, as part of NATO moves to strengthen air defenses in Eastern Europe. “The worsened safety situation in Europe as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes this contribution necessary,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said in a statement. Germany was also sending two Patriot missile systems to Slovakia, the statement added.

Along with the Patriot batteries, the Dutch will also send [2] a small contingent of 150-200 troops, who would operate and also train Slovak forces in operating the American air defense system, as the forces of Slovakia as well as Ukraine are only trained to operate Russian-made military equipment, which many NATO countries that are former Soviet states possess.

Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Politico [3]:

“The U.S. was working with allies to send more S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Ukraine. The country has had the S-300 for years, so troops should require little-to-no training on how to operate the Soviet-era anti-aircraft equipment. CNN reported that Slovakia had preliminarily agreed to transfer their S-300s to Ukraine.

“A Western diplomat familiar with Ukraine’s requests said Kyiv specifically has asked the U.S. and allies for more Stingers and Starstreak man-portable air-defense systems, Javelins and other anti-tank weapons, ground-based mobile air-defense systems, armed drones, long-range anti-ship missiles, off-the-shelf electronic warfare capabilities, and satellite navigation and communications jamming equipment.

“To further help, there is a push to get Eastern European allies to send new air defense systems to Ukraine that the U.S. doesn’t have. At the top of the list are mobile, Russian-made missile systems such as the SA-8 and S-300. Like the S-300, Ukraine also possesses SA-8s. The SA-8 is a mobile, short-range air defense system still in the warehouses of Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. The larger, long-range S-300 is still in use by Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia.

“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Europe this week will include not only NATO headquarters in Brussels, but also stops in Bulgaria and Slovakia — countries that own S-300s and SA-8s — before heading back to Washington.”

Previously, Slovakia’s defense minister said Thursday, March 17, that the country was willing to give Ukraine its S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems if it receives a “proper replacement.” Speaking at a press conference in Slovakia alongside US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Slovakia was discussing the S-300s [4] with the US and Ukraine. “We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement. The only strategic air defense system that we have in Slovakia is S-300 system,” he added.

Lloyd Austin declined to say whether the United States might be willing to fill the gap. “I don’t have any announcements for you this afternoon. These are things that we will continue to work with all of our allies on. And certainly, this is not just a US issue. It’s a NATO issue,” Austin said while diplomatically evading confirming the barter deal for which he had traveled all the way from Washington to Eastern Europe.

NATO member Slovakia has one battery of the S-300 air defense system, inherited from the Soviet era after the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Following the Slovakia visit, Lloyd Austin also visited Bulgaria on Friday, March 18. Bulgaria has S-300 systems, but the country made it clear it had no plans to send any to Ukraine.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev prudently said [5] that any arms supplies to Ukraine were equivalent to the country being dragged into war. Ultimately, he said, such an issue should be decided by the parliament. He also said that Bulgaria needed its S-300 for its own air defense, particularly for the Kozlodui nuclear power plant.

On Wednesday, March 16, President Biden announced an unprecedented package of $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which includes 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 2,000 anti-armor Javelins, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems and 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones.

The $800 million will mean more than $2 billion in the US military assistance has gone to Ukraine since Biden entered office in Jan. 2021, as the Biden administration had previously pledged $200 million days before announcing the $800 million package, $350 million were disbursed immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the administration provided $650 million [6] in military assistance to Ukraine during Biden’s first year in office. In addition, the European Union pledged to commit nearly 500 million euros for its own military aid package.

The United States and its allies have reportedly infused [7] over $3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan coup. Recently, the Congress announced [8] $1.5 trillion package for funding the federal government through September, boosting national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6 percent increase.

On top of the hefty budget increase, the package is set to deliver $13.6 billion in emergency funding to help Ukraine, nearly twice the assistance package initially proposed, including $3 billion for US forces and $3.5 billion for military equipment to Ukraine, plus more than $4 billion for US humanitarian efforts.

In an explosive scoop, the Sunday Times reported [9] on March 4 that defense contractors were recruiting former military veterans for covert operations in Ukraine for a whopping $2,000 a day:

“The job is not without risk but, at almost $60,000 a month, the pay is good. Applicants must have at least five years of military experience in Eastern Europe, be skilled in reconnaissance, be able to conduct rescue operations with little to no support and know their way around Soviet-era weaponry.”

Russian media alleged [10] that the United States security agencies had launched a large-scale recruitment program to send private military contractors to Ukraine, including professionally trained mercenaries of Academi, formerly Blackwater, Cubic and Dyn Corporation.

Russia’s Defense Ministry’s spokesman Igor Konashenkov warned that foreign mercenaries in Ukraine would not be considered prisoners of war if detained in line with international humanitarian law, rather they could expect criminal prosecution at best.

In fact, private military contractors in close co-ordination and consultation with covert operators from CIA and Western intelligence agencies are not only training Ukraine’s military and allied neo-Nazi militias in the use of caches of MANPADS and anti-armor munitions provided by the US, Germany and the rest of European nations as a military assistance to Ukraine but are also directing the whole defense strategy of Ukraine by taking active part in combat operations in some of the most hard fought battles against Russia’s security forces north of Kyiv and at Kharkiv and Donbas.

In order to create an “international legion” comprising foreign mercenaries, Kyiv lifted visa requirements for anyone willing to fight. “Every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country, please come over,” Ukrainian President Zelensky pleaded at a recent press conference, adding “We will give you weapons.”

Ukraine has already declared martial law and a general mobilization of its populace. Those policies include conscription for men aged 18-60 and the confiscation of civilian vehicles and structures, while Ukrainian convicts with military experience are being released from prison to back up the war effort.

In a show of solidarity with Ukraine, several European nations recently announced they would not only not criminalize but rather expedite citizens joining the NATO’s war effort in Ukraine.

United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she supported individuals from the UK who might want to go to Ukraine to join an international force to fight. She told the BBC [11] it was up to people to make their own decisions, but argued it was a battle for democracy. She said Ukrainians were fighting for freedom, “not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe.”

Favoring providing lethal weapons only instead of deploying British mercenaries as cannon fodder in Ukraine’s proxy war, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace took a nuanced approach and said Ukraine would instead be supported to “fight every street with every piece of equipment we can get to them.”

Buzzfeed News revealed [12] on Feb. 27 thousands of foreign fighters had flocked to Ukraine since Russia’s war against the country began in 2014. While most of them had been Russians and citizens of other former Soviet republics, hundreds had come from the European Union.

“This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules, and peaceful coexistence,” Ukrainian President Zelensky said in a statement announcing a decree on the creation of a foreign legion. “Anyone who wants to join the defense of Ukraine, Europe, and the world can come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.”

The news of an official foreign unit was met with excitement by members of the Georgia National Legion, an English-speaking force of volunteers with Western military experience who train Ukrainian troops and sometimes deploy to the front line with the country’s marines. “This is what we have waited for. It’s very good,” Levan Pipia, a legion soldier and Georgian army veteran of the 2008 war with Russia, told BuzzFeed New.

In an exclusive report [13] on March 8, Reuters noted although the US and UK governments had nominally discouraged citizens from travelling to Ukraine to combat Russian forces, others, such as Canada or Germany, had cleared the way for citizens to get involved.

Despite formal directive by the UK government urging citizens against traveling to Ukraine, Reuters spilled the beans that among those who had arrived to fight for Ukraine were dozens of former soldiers from the British Army’s elite Parachute Regiment, according to an ex-soldier from the regiment. Hundreds more would soon follow, he said.

Often referred to as the Paras, the regiment has in recent years served in Afghanistan and Iraq. “They’re all highly trained, and have seen active service on numerous occasions,” the ex-soldier from the regiment said. The Ukraine crisis will give them purpose, camaraderie and “a chance to do what they’re good at: fight.”

With a vast mobilization of Ukrainian men underway, the country has plenty of volunteer fighters. But there is a shortage of specialists who know how to use Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles, which professional soldiers train for months to use properly.

Anthony Capone, a wealthy healthcare entrepreneur in New York City, said he was providing funding for hundreds of ex-soldiers and paramedics who wanted to go to Ukraine. Capone added he was only funding ex-soldiers whose military credentials he could verify, or paramedics who currently worked in an emergency trauma setting. About 60% of those who had been in touch were American and 30% European.

*

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Dutch, Germans to Send 3 Patriot Missile Defense Systems to Slovakia

[2] The Dutch will send a contingent of 150-200 troops with Patriots

[3] US sends Switchblade drones to Ukraine

[4] Slovakia Says It Will Give Ukraine S-300 If It Gets Replacement

[5] Russia says will attack Slovakia’s S-300 missile supplies to Ukraine

[6] Biden provided $650 million military aid to Ukraine in 2021

[7] US provided over $3 billion in arms to Ukraine since 2014

[8] $13.6 billion military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine

[9] Western mercenaries offered $2,000 a day to fight Putin

[10] Mercenaries of Academi, Cubic, and Dyn Corporation fighting in Ukraine

[11] Liz Truss said she supported individuals who might want to go to Ukraine

[12] Thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to Ukraine

[13] Ukraine offers purpose and camaraderie to mercenaries

Featured image: Slovak S-300PMU TELs, ready to launch (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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***

Public health officials want doctors to give the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to the most vulnerable age group, tiny babies and young children under 5 years old

It is the fastest development and mass administration of an experimental vaccine to healthy humans in history, and the first vaccine to be distributed and recommended for mass use under an Emergency Use Authorization

In June 2020, Congress completely shielded vaccine manufacturers and anyone administering the COVID vaccine from product liability and malpractice lawsuits in civil court

Studies have shown that most healthy infants and children with COVID disease either have no symptoms or much milder symptoms than adults, which last about a week

As of February 4, 2022, there were over 1.1 million adverse event reports following COVID-19 vaccinations filed with the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

You have the moral right and must have the legal right to gather information, consult with a health professional and follow your gut instincts when making a decision about whether or not your child should get vaccinated — without being coerced or sanctioned by anyone for the decision you make

*

On March 11, 2022, CDC researchers released results of a small study in children 5 to 15 years old, who had received two doses of the Pfizer mRNA COVID vaccine. The study’s conclusion, which included many caveats, was that there was reduction of COVID disease in just 31% of children aged 5 to 11 years compared to 59% in children 12 to 15 years old.

Despite questionable disease risk reduction from their own data, the recommendation was that all children as young as 5 years old should get the vaccine.1

Even though fathers are spending more time sharing the raising of children with mothers today,2national surveys show that women with minor children still remain the primary child care givers in America.3,4

The ones who usually take children to doctors, mothers on the front line are soon expected to make decisions about giving babies as young as 6 months old the new genetically engineered Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine when the FDA predictably approves it for emergency use this spring.5,6

Public health officials want doctors to give the mRNA vaccine, which forces the body’s cells to manufacture the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, to the most vulnerable age group,7 the tiny babies and young children under 5 years old, whose immune systems and brains are not yet fully developed.8,9,10 It is an age group that mothers historically have been the most responsible for nurturing and protecting from harm.

Fastest Development of An Experimental Shot in History

The targeting of infants and toddlers for COVID vaccination comes two years after the U.S. government declared a coronavirus public health emergency in January 202011 and then gave Pfizer and six other drug companies $9 billion to manufacture a coronavirus vaccine at warp speed.12

Most vaccines take at least 10 years to go through the development and testing licensing process before being approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for distribution.13

Pfizer spent just 248 days testing their experimental COVID vaccine using a never-before licensed technology, which injects synthetic mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles into the body to induce cells to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and become — in the words of the World Economic Forum — “vaccine production plants.”14,15

In December 2020, the FDA granted Pfizer and its German corporation partner BioNTech, an Emergency Use Authorization — or EUA — to release the unlicensed mRNA vaccine for use by every person over 16 years old.16,17 That EUA was quickly followed six months later by one for children as young as 12,18 then five months later with authorization for children as young as 5.19

It is the fastest development and mass administration of an experimental vaccine to healthy humans in history,20 and the first vaccine to be distributed and recommended for mass use under an Emergency Use Authorization.21 Although the FDA fully licensed Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine in August 2021 as “safe, pure and potent” for 16-year-olds,22 it still is not officially licensed for children younger than that.

FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization Comes With Big Assumptions

By February 2022, only about 55% of children over age 12 in America had gotten two doses of the Pfizer COVID vaccine, while just 30% of 5- to 11-year-olds had received at least one dose.23

Perhaps mothers are not impressed with the dodgy rationale FDA officials used to justify handing Pfizer an EUA using vague language with large assumptions like it is “reasonable to believe” the vaccine “may be effective” and “reasonable to conclude based on the totality of the scientific evidence available” that the “known and potential benefits … outweigh the known and potential risks of the vaccine.”24

Those kinds of sweeping caveats clearly demonstrate that an EUA allows a lower standard for scientific evidence of the product’s safety and effectiveness than full licensure.25 In fact, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the Pfizer COVID vaccine is still an investigational product, still experimental whenever it is given to a child under 16 years old.26,27

So far, parents in America are split down the middle when it comes to the idea of giving young children Pfizer’s new COVID-19 vaccine. Half of parents28 are uncomfortable with injecting synthetic mRNA coated in lipid nanoparticles into the cells of their child’s body, which is supposed to prevent a bad case of COVID disease — but not necessarily prevent their child from being infected with the virus and transmitting it to others.29,30

With researchers finding that many SARS-CoV-2 infections in young children are asymptomatic and go undetected,31 and with evidence that natural immunity from infection is broad and persistent,32,33parents are asking legitimate questions about why their young children are candidates for this vaccine.

A recent survey found that half of parents were worried about (1) whether the vaccine has been studied long enough in children; (2) whether there are long term side effects; (3) whether the vaccine’s experimental mRNA technology is safe; (4) whether the vaccines work, and (5) the effect of short-term side effects.34

Research published in February 2022 revealed that one-third of parents say they will “wait and see” before vaccinating a child under 5 years old and 26% say they will “definitely not” allow their infant or toddler to receive the COVID vaccine.35

With the majority of parents worried about whether Pfizer’s COVID vaccine carries unacceptable risks, is effective, or is necessary for their child, what kind of information about COVID disease and the vaccine is being given to mothers taking children to pediatricians around the country?

Are Moms Being Given Complete Information About COVID Shots?

Is the information accurate and complete? Are pediatricians treating mothers with respect and allowing them to exercise voluntary informed consent to COVID vaccination on behalf of a minor child, or are mothers being threatened and punished if they say, “no thanks?”36 How many doctors plan to deny medical care to children when their mothers decline the COVID vaccine?

A 2020 study reported that more than half of U.S. pediatricians refuse to care for a child if their mothers decline to give the child even one of the four dozen doses of other vaccines CDC officials insist all children must get before age 6.37,38,39,40

To stop mothers from being able to exercise informed consent to vaccination on behalf of their children, medical trade associations have lobbied state legislatures to pass laws giving doctors permission to extract consent for any type of vaccination from children as young as 11 years old without the knowledge of their parents41 and, in 2020, the District of Columbia was the first to pass that kind of law.42,43

Five states (Alabama, Oregon, South Carolina, North Carolina and Rhode Island) have passed laws to give doctors the power to persuade children between 14 and 16 years old to get COVID vaccine without telling parents.44

If you cringe thinking about whether your 11-year-old or teenager is intellectually, psychologically and emotionally equipped to accurately weigh the potential benefits and risks of a vaccine and resist the pressure from a doctor telling them what to do,45 you are not alone.

As a co-founder of the charitable National Vaccine Information Center established in 1982 to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education,46 I have never been more concerned about a new vaccine the government wants doctors to give to every infant and child.

As a mother of three and now a grandmother, as a college-educated woman who completely trusted my pediatrician when I took my healthy 2.5-year-old son for a DPT shot in 1980 and then watched him suffer a convulsion, collapse and brain inflammation reaction that put him in a special education classroom,47 I urge all mothers to become fully informed about the SARS-CoV-2 infection and the COVID-19 vaccine before making a vaccination decision for a child of any age.

All Vaccines Come With Two Risks

Vaccines are pharmaceutical products that come with two risks: a risk the vaccine will cause a reaction that could cause harm, and a risk the vaccine will fail to protect against infection and transmission of a disease that could cause harm.

Because we are all individuals born with different genes and environmental influences, the risks for disease complications or vaccine complications can be greater for some, depending upon genetic, epigenetic, environmental and other biological factors unique to the individual.48,49,50,51

If the risks of COVID vaccination turn out to be 100% for your child — whether it is because the vaccine causes a severe reaction or fails to prevent severe complications of the disease — you should know that in June 2020, Congress completely shielded vaccine manufacturers and anyone administering the COVID vaccine from product liability and malpractice lawsuits in civil court.52,53 So whatever happens, you will be on your own.

At the National Vaccine information Center, we do not make vaccine use recommendations, but we do defend without compromise the human right to exercise voluntary, informed consent to medical risk-taking.54 You have the moral right and should have the legal right to accept or refuse a vaccine for yourself or your minor child without being sanctioned in any way.55

This commentary offers an overview of COVID disease and the vaccine, with a focus on the genetically engineered messenger mRNA COVID vaccine manufactured by Pfizer being recommended for children by federal government officials and medical trade associations in the U.S. I encourage you to check out the library of over 200 live-linked references anchoring this commentary on NVIC.org to verify the content and do your own research.

Most Coronaviruses Cause Mild Symptoms Like the Common Cold

Coronaviruses are a group of diverse, single stranded RNA viruses that have been around for thousands of years and infect animals, as well as humans.

Coronaviruses usually cause mild respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms like those of the common cold,56 with the exception of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged in China in 2002, and the coronavirus causing Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) identified in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in 2012 – both of which had high mortality rates.57

About 20% of cold or flu-like upper respiratory infections each year are caused by coronaviruses and there is evidence that many people already have at least partial natural immunity to common coronavirus infections.

Some researchers think this may be one reason why the current SARS-CoV-2 infection is asymptomatic or mild for most healthy children and many adults,58 and why COVID-19 tests can generate false positive results because the tests pick up evidence of previous coronavirus infections.59,60

Controversy Over Origins of COVID, Shot Effectiveness, Safety

Since early 2020, public health officials have insisted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus spontaneously jumped into a human out of a bat at a wet food market in China and the only way to end the pandemic is to lock down, mask up, and require everyone to be vaccinated.61,62,63,64,65,66 There are prominent scientists, doctors, ethicists, attorneys, lawmakers and journalists around the world, who disagree with that view. They point out there is compelling evidence:

  • that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a lab and top health officials did not want the public to know about it;67,68,69,70
  • that fast tracked mRNA COVID vaccines have not been thoroughly tested by drug companies, which have failed to release all the clinical trial data, and both the companies and public health officials are downplaying serious vaccine-related reactions and deaths;71,72,73,74,75,76,77
  • that the most widely-used mRNA COVID manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna may prevent serious disease complications, but vaccinated people can still get infected with and transmit the new coronavirus to other people,78 and any temporary protection from COVID disease wanes quickly after vaccination;79
  • that the SARS-CoV-2 infection is mostly asymptomatic or mild in healthy children and young adults80 and that naturally acquired immunity is equal to or broader and longer lasting than COVID vaccine acquired artificial immunity;81,82,83,84 and
  • that governments have done more harm than good by locking down societies and creating masking and vaccine mandates;85,86,87,88,89,90,91

Here are four questions you need to keep in mind when you are making a COVID-19 vaccine decision for your minor child:

1. HOW SERIOUS IS COVID-19 DISEASE IN CHILDREN?

By February 2022, the new coronavirus had evolved from the original alpha variant that human populations had no immunological experience with, to the more transmissible and severe Delta variant that emerged in the summer of 2021, to the Omicron variant that became dominant in late 2021.92

Omicron is highly contagious but causes fewer complications and hospitalizations than Delta,93 and there is speculation that the fact so many people have developed various degrees of natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is one reason why hospitalizations and deaths are coming down in the U.S.94,95

As of February 14, 2022, COVID-19 death rates reported by states in the previous seven days ranged from 0.26 to about 1.5 deaths per 100,000 people.96

To put the worst case 1.5 COVID-related deaths per 100,000 people rate into perspective, the annual death rate for some of the leading causes of death in the U.S. in 2014 were: 193 deaths per 100,000 for heart disease; 186 per 100,000 for cancer; 46 per 100,000 for chronic respiratory disease; 24 per 100,000 for diabetes; 15 per 100,000 for drug overdoses.97

Severe COVID Most Likely in Chronically Ill People Over 65

At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, it became obvious that most of the serious complications of COVID-19 disease leading to hospitalizations and death do not occur in children or healthy young adults, but in people over age 65, especially if they have one or more chronic health problems.

In 2020, researchers projected that about 45 percent of the U.S. adult population was at increased risk for complications from SARS-CoV-2 infections because of underlying heart or respiratory disease, diabetes, hypertension and cancer.98

One big study sponsored by the CDC looked at the connection between underlying medical conditions and severe illness among more than 500,000 adults with COVID-19 admitted to 800 US hospitals in 2020 and 2021. Researchers found that 95 percent of adult COVID patients had at least one underlying poor health condition like high blood pressure and obesity.99 The strongest risk factors for death were obesity, anxiety and fear disorders, and diabetes with complications.

Children with chronic health problems are also at risk for COVID disease complications. The CDC states on its website that, “In the United States, more than 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition, such as asthma, obesity, other physical conditions, and behavior/learning problems.”100

Most Serious COVID-19 Occurs in Chronically Ill Children

A large cross-sectional study funded by the CDC examined the health records of more than 43,000 patients under the age of 18 with a COVID diagnosis who visited the emergency room or were admitted to 900 US hospitals in 2020 or January 2021.101

The median age of child COVID patients was 12 years old. Researchers found that about 29 percent of the child COVID patients had underlying chronic conditions like asthma; obesity; and neurodevelopmental, depressive, anxiety and fear-related disorders.

The strongest risk factors for hospitalization were type 1 diabetes and obesity. The strongest risk factors for severe COVID illness were type 1 diabetes and congenital cardiac and circulatory problems. Prematurity was a risk factor for severe COVID illness in children under two years old.102Those with a COVID diagnosis represented only about 1% of all children who visited an emergency room or were admitted to the hospital.

More than 81% of COVID related deaths in the U.S. have occurred in seniors over age 65 and deaths in that age group are 80 times higher than for people between 18 and 29.103 The COVID case fatality rate for children by February 2022 was measured at less than one percent in the U.S.104

Healthy Infants and Children Usually Have No or Mild Symptoms

Studies have shown that most healthy infants and children with COVID disease either have no symptoms or much milder symptoms than adults, which last about a week.105 COVID disease symptoms in the majority of healthy children are similar to a cold or flu-like illness and range from fever, sore throat, fatigue and body aches to runny nose and congestion, headache, cough, nausea and diarrhea.

As with most respiratory diseases, pneumonia is always a risk and, clearly, risks for COVID complications are higher for children with certain types of underlying chronic disease.106

Severe complications of COVID-19 disease in some individuals appear to involve a hyper-inflammatory response by the immune system to infection with SARS-CoV-2. This can lead to cytokine storm involving elevated levels of circulating cytokines and immune-cell hyperactivation that can lead to severe respiratory distress and death if the inflammation does not resolve.107

There is a condition called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) that has been reported rarely, and obese children are most at risk. Symptoms include a prolonged fever, unusual fatigue, vomiting and diarrhea, red skin rash, abdominal pain, red lips and eyes and swollen hands or feet.108

Children With COVID at Very Low Risk of Hospitalization, Death

While the majority of people diagnosed with COVID disease have mild to moderate symptoms, about 10 to 15% become severely ill and five percent become critically ill. Most recover in two to three weeks, but researchers estimate about one in five may have symptoms for five or more weeks and one in 10 people will have symptoms that last for 12 weeks or longer.109

Symptoms of “long Covid,” can include fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle pain, joint pain, headache, cough, chest pain, altered smell and taste, diarrhea, difficulty thinking clearly, memory loss, anxiety and sleep disorders. About four percent of children may experience “long Covid” symptoms like fatigue, headache and loss of smell and the majority recover within eight weeks.110

If infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, healthy children have a very low risk of being hospitalized or dying. A U.S. state data report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics on February 3, 2022 found that out of about 1.2 million COVID-related hospitalizations, only 3% were children. Out of 821,369 reported COVID deaths in the U.S., 828 of those deaths or .01% were in children.111

2. ARE THERE WAYS TO PREVENT OR TREAT COVID COMPLICATIONS?

One of the great tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic over the past two years has been that very few drugs and effective medical protocols have been approved by the government to help people prevent or recover from the SARS-CoV-2 infection.

About 95 percent of the public funds appropriated by the U.S. and other governments to fund the global response to the coronavirus pandemic were given to multi-national drug companies to develop and deliver vaccines, while only five percent was spent on exploring therapies to treat COVID disease.112 There are still very few FDA-approved drugs or therapies available for doctors to treat COVID disease.

Most of the anti-viral COVID drugs approved by the FDA under an EUA are very expensive,113,114,115and there are unanswered questions about risks and whether they work very well.116,117,118,119 In early 2020, practicing physicians searching for ways to help people with COVID began repurposing already licensed drugs for off-label use, a common practice that has been allowed under FDA law for many years.120

Some Doctors Use Repurposed Licensed Drugs to Treat COVID

Some of the more affordable licensed drugs that have been repurposed by physicians to treat COVID over the past two years include the Nobel award winning anti-parasitic, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory drug Ivermectin.121,122,123,124,125,126

Vitamins, minerals and supplements that have been used to help prevent or address COVID complications include the Vitamins D,127,128 C,129 and B complex;130 magnesium;131 quercetin;132,133melatonin,134 curcumin,135 zinc,136 NAC,137 probiotics,138 Omega 3s,139 glutathione140 and aspirin.141

As with all drugs and supplements, it is important to have a knowledgeable doctor direct treatment in the appropriate doses and for the right length of time, because what may work and is safe at one stage of the disease may not be during another stage.

The Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCCA)142 and World Council for Health143 are two groups of doctors who have developed COVID-19 treatment protocols that are not endorsed by government health officials but are being used by a number of health professionals around the world to treat adults and children with COVID.

High Mortality Rate for COVID Patients Hospitalized in US

With an average 38 percent mortality rate for seriously ill COVID patients admitted to U.S. hospitals in 2020,144 and with COVID patients who are put on a ventilator experiencing a 45 to 85 percent mortality rate,145,146,147 it is no wonder independent doctors have been exploring options for reducing COVID complications and keeping patients out of hospitals.

Yet, these doctors are being criticized by public health officials discouraging the use of repurposed licensed drugs like ivermectin148 and over-the-counter supplements149 that peer reviewed studies have shown either prevent severe disease and improve, or have the potential to improve, survival.150

Medical boards in some states are trying remove the medical licenses from those doctors,151 and it can be difficult to find a doctor in the U.S. willing to depart from the few government approved medical protocols for treating COVID.152 The National Institutes of Health warns that:153

“Research hasn’t clearly shown that any dietary supplement helps prevent COVID-19 or can decrease the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. Only vaccines and medications can prevent COVID-19 and treat its symptoms.”

No Drugs Specifically Approved to Treat Children With COVID

The only guidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control for treatment of children with COVID are dated December 2020 and state, “Currently, there are no drugs specifically approved by the FDA for treatment of COVID-19 in children.”154

NIH has a child treatment guide, which states that “Most children with SARS-CoV-2 infection will not require any specific therapy” and “There are limited data on the pathogenesis and clinical spectrum of COVID-19 disease in children.” It goes on to say that:

“There are no pediatric data from placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials and limited data from observational studies to inform the development of pediatric-specific recommendations for the treatment of COVID-19.”155

After lockdowns and forced masking and a year that saw many Americans subjected to mandatory COVID vaccination to enter public spaces and keep their jobs, it is very sad that government officials have done so little to investigate and approve therapies to address COVID disease.

One political explanation is that under FDA regulations, drug companies cannot receive emergency use authorization to distribute fast tracked experimental vaccines (or drugs) if there are “adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”156

3. HOW EFFECTIVE IS PFIZER’S COVID VACCINE?

After the coronavirus pandemic was declared by public health officials in early 2020 and governments asked drug companies to fast track development of experimental COVID vaccines, the FDA issued guidelines assuring the companies that vaccine trials would only have to demonstrate “at least 50%” efficacy in preventing severe COVID-19 disease.

There was no requirement for companies to prove their COVID vaccines prevent infection and transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.157,158 Perhaps that is one reason why the vaccines are called COVID vaccines and not SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

But the general public did not and still does not understand the difference. That is because for more than a century, people have been carefully taught to believe that a vaccine produces artificial immunity in the body to prevent transmission of contagious diseases to other people.159

CDC Changed Definition of ‘Vaccine’ and ‘Vaccination’

CDC officials frequently have referred to vaccines as “immunizations.”160 But in 2021, the CDC suddenly changed its definition of “vaccine” from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”161

The Merriam Webster Dictionary also changed its definition of “vaccine” to eliminate the concept that a vaccine stimulates “immunity” and replaced it with the concept that vaccines create an “immune response.”162

Up until now, the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” have been synonymous with creating “artificial immunity” in humans and animals.163

The rewriting of that definition to admit that vaccines cannot be presumed to confer immunity — only modify the person’s immune response — is stunning because mandatory vaccination laws historically have been based on the common belief that all infants and children must get vaccinated to create “herd immunity” and prevent the transmission of contagious diseases within a community.164,165

If the definition of “vaccine” and “vaccination” no longer includes the concept of immunity,166 then the definitions of vaccine “efficacy” and “effectiveness” have been forever changed as well.167,168

Public Misled That Shots Prevent Infection and Transmission

To obtain the EUA in late 2020, Pfizer published clinical trial data involving about 43,000 participants over age 16, with more than 21,000 of them injected with the company’s experimental mRNA COVID vaccine. Pfizer said the data showed that two doses of the vaccine achieved a 95% efficacy for preventing severe COVID disease.169,170

Most mainstream media reports publicizing the Pfizer clinical trial results misled the public into believing that a 95 percent “efficacy” rate meant the vaccine reliably prevented SARS-CoV-2 infection.171 Americans obeying mask mandates put into place before the vaccine was released, assumed that they would be able to ditch the mask and stop social distancing once they got vaccinated.172

But in early 2021 when CDC officials did not back away from mask mandates for vaccinated persons, people started suspecting something was wrong about that assumption. Fully vaccinated people were told to keep the masks on and socially distance like unvaccinated people.173

The logical question was: Why do fully vaccinated people have to worry about getting infected or infecting other people?

The answer to that question became obvious when study after study published in the medical literature since December 2020 showed that two or three doses of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine do not reliably prevent symptomatic or asymptomatic infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the vaccine has a very short shelf life for protection against COVID disease, waning within a few months of vaccination.174,175,176

While that reality sets in, studies are revealing that naturally acquired immunity from the new coronavirus infection is broad and long-lasting,177,178,179,180,181 perhaps two years or more.182

More COVID Booster Shots or Annual Re-Vaccination?

In fact, within four months of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine being approved by FDA for distribution, in April 2021 the company’s CEO called for a third shot — a booster dose — and suggested it was possible vaccinated people would have to get revaccinated every year.183

Seven months later, the FDA dutifully approved the Pfizer booster shot for emergency use by everyone over 18 years old,184 and on January 3, 2022, expanded the EUA to allow a third booster shot for children as young as 12 years old.185 Now there is talk about a fourth booster shot.186 And the Pfizer CEO is once again calling for annual COVID vaccinations in the future.187

On February 1, 2022, Pfizer applied for an EUA to give its COVID vaccine to infants and young children between 6 months and 5 years old.188

But, within 10 days, the request was suddenly withdrawn after indications that two 3-microgram doses of the vaccine did not prevent COVID disease symptoms in that age group and a third dose would be required to demonstrate efficacy.189,190

4. HOW REACTIVE IS THE VACCINE AND ARE THERE SERIOUS RISKS?

After the FDA gave emergency use permission to Pfizer in December 2020 to distribute their COVID vaccine, the nonprofit group Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the FDA to immediately release 450,000 pages of Pfizer vaccine testing data that the agency relied upon to grant the EUA.

FDA officials refused the request, claiming it would take them 75 years to release all the trial data to the public. A lawsuit was filed and, on Jan 6, 2022, a Texas federal judge ordered the FDA to release 55,000 pages every 30 days until all the requested pages were made public.191

The need for full public disclosure was reinforced by an allegation by a whistleblower, who had worked for a subcontractor involved in the first COVID vaccine clinical trial Pfizer conducted in 2020. She charged that there were serious irregularities in the trial, including falsification of data, lack of monitoring of trial participants after vaccination and failure to immediately follow up of patients who experienced adverse events.192

Questions About Vaccine Safety Testing, Lack of Transparency

Pfizer has been haunted by questions about what it does and does not know about the reactivity and long-term side effects of its COVID vaccine ever since the FDA granted emergency use authorization after only nine months of testing.193,194,195

To demonstrate safety, drug companies historically have been required to first test the experimental vaccine for toxicity in animals, followed up by Phase 1 and 2 human clinical trials to test the vaccine on a few hundred volunteers for detection of common side effects; then progress to Phase 3 trials that involve thousands of people to further identify potential serious reactions.196

Although Pfizer did publish a few small animal studies testing its mRNA COVID vaccine on mice, rats and monkeys, most of the focus was on showing the vaccine was effective, not that it was safe.197,198,199,200

To speed up the COVID vaccine testing process, FDA allowed Pfizer and other drug companies to conduct some of the animal and human clinical studies simultaneously, instead of sequentially.201,202

To further accelerate approval, FDA also allowed companies to provide testing data from previous research on other types of experimental mRNA vaccines as preliminary proof that COVID mRNA vaccines were effective and safe, even though those other mRNA vaccines were never licensed.203

Majority in Pfizer Clinical Trials Had Adverse Events

In December 2020, Pfizer published results of a Phase 2/3 randomized saline placebo controlled human clinical trial in a bid to be the first company to obtain Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA to distribute a COVID vaccine for mass use.

The company tested two 30 microgram doses of the vaccine given 21 days apart to about 21,700 healthy volunteers aged 16 and older who had not been previously diagnosed with COVID, and followed them up for between seven days and several months after the second dose to identify common and serious adverse events.204

The majority of vaccinated participants experienced a local or systemic reaction, with younger people more often reporting side effects like pain at the injection site, headache, fatigue, fever and swollen lymph glands that occurred more often after the second dose and lasted for several days but then resolved, according to Pfizer.

The few serious adverse events recorded after vaccination in the trial, such as cardiac arrythmia and a death from cardiac arrest, were dismissed by investigators as unrelated to the vaccine.205

In 2021, Pfizer published results of Phase 2/3 clinical trials testing two 30 microgram doses of its COVID vaccine on about 1,100 healthy 12- to 15-year-olds,206 and another one that tested two 10 microgram doses on about 1,500 healthy 5- to 11-year-olds, who had never been diagnosed with COVID.207

The children were followed up for seven days, one month and six months. For the 5- to 11-year-old children in the Phase 2/3 clinical trial who got the Pfizer COVID vaccine, researchers reduced the dose from 30 micrograms to 10 micrograms in an effort to lower the incidence of systemic reactions like fever.

On the CDC website in a summary of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reactions and adverse events, the CDC states that within seven days of vaccination over 90% of study participants aged 12 to 15 years reported at least one local or systemic reaction and among child study participants aged 5 to 11 years old, about 86% reported at least one local reaction and about 66% reported at least one systemic reaction like fever, chills, fatigue, headache, new or worsened muscle pain or swollen lymph nodes.208

Pfizer Unblinded Shot Trials, Vaccinated Placebo Participants

Although Pfizer says it plans to follow up clinical trial participants of all ages for two years, by March 2021 the company had unblinded the study and offered the COVID vaccine to placebo participants, which scientifically compromises evaluations and comparisons of long-term health problems in vaccinated versus unvaccinated participants.209,210 The unblinding of a clinical trial while follow up of participants is ongoing has never been done before — it is unprecedented.211

In those Phase 2/3 trials, including a six-month follow-up trial,212 and from anecdotal experiences reported by those who have gotten the Pfizer vaccine,213 it is obvious that the mRNA COVID vaccine is quite reactive.

The majority of vaccinated people, especially if they are younger and after receiving a second dose,214 experience acute reactions like injection site pain, fever, headache, fatigue, swollen lymph glands and body discomfort sometimes severe enough to require a day or two of recovery, which can include needing to stay home from work.215

One CDC official commented early on that, “People should be prepared to have pain” following vaccination, suggesting that pain is a sign that “It’s your body building an immune response to the protein that is mimicking the disease.”216

Other doctors point out that strong reaction symptoms like high fevers, chills, headache, joint and muscle aching, and disabling fatigue are evidence of an inflammatory response mounted by the innate immune system and that antibodies are later generated by the adaptive part of the immune system.217,218 It has long been recognized that strong reactions to pharmaceutical products can be a reason to exercise caution, especially with repeat doses.219,220,221,222,223

Blood, Cardiac and Brain Disorders After Pfizer COVID Shots

Since the Pfizer vaccine was released under an EUA, there have been serious blood, cardiac and brain disorders reported in the medical literature, and also by people who have received the vaccine.224,225,226,227

Among the more serious are immune thrombocytopenic purpura,228 which causes internal bleeding because the immune system attacks platelets and the blood cannot clot; heart inflammation that can cause a variety of cardiac problems;229 and immune mediated inflammatory neurological disorders230,231 like Guillain Barre Syndrome,232 Bell’s Palsy233 and Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.234,235

CDC officials have acknowledged only two major serious reactions related to Comirnaty vaccine: (1) anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction also known as shock that has symptoms like trouble breathing, swelling of the tongue and throat, hives and drop in blood pressure;236,237 and (2) heart inflammation, which is commonly diagnosed as myocarditis or pericarditis with symptoms like chest pain, fast beating, fluttering or pounding heart and shortness of breath.238

Inflammation of the Heart Reported After Pfizer COVID Shots

Inflammation of the heart is not a trivial complication, whether it is caused by an infection or a vaccine. Myocarditis is inflammation of the cardiac muscle and is more often seen in infants and teenagers, but can occur at any age, especially after a viral infection.239

Myocarditis and pericarditis, which is inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart, are thought to be largely immune-mediated and in serious cases, can lead to heart rhythm disorders, heart damage, heart failure and death.

Every year, heart disease kills nearly 660,000 Americans — 1 in 4. It is the leading cause of death in the United States among men and women of all races, costing the nation $363 billion a year.240Myocarditis is a known complication of smallpox vaccine241 and has been reported after influenza vaccine242 and now is being reported after the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.243,244

A controlled study using large national healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs found that individuals who had acute COVID-19 disease are at increased risk of many types of cardiovascular problems, including myocarditis and pericarditis; heart rhythm disorders; heart failure; ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease that can cause stroke and thromboembolic disease, or deep vein thrombosis involving blood clots.245

Although researchers said the greatest risk for COVID-related heart inflammation was in unvaccinated persons, the myocarditis risks were increased even for vaccinated people who got COVID.

A descriptive study conducted by CDC researchers analyzed reports to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database from December 2020 to August 2021 and found that crude reporting rates of myocarditis within seven days of mRNA vaccinations were higher than expected across multiple age groups and in both women and men.246

The rates of myocarditis cases were highest after the second dose in adolescent males, with about 70 cases of myocarditis reported per million doses of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in 12 to 15 year old males and about 106 myocarditis cases per million doses in males 16 to 17 years old. Most myocarditis symptoms appeared to occur and resolve more quickly after vaccination than after viral illness.

Still, the researchers admitted that, “the risks and outcomes of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination are unclear.”

Blood Clotting and Blood Vessel Disorders After Shots

Blood clotting and blood vessel disorders have also been reported after receiving Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. One self-controlled case series study looked at patient records of 29 million people vaccinated in England and hospitalized between December 2020 and April 2021.

Nine million patients in the health records database got the Pfizer vaccine and researchers discovered an increased risk for blood clotting and blood vessel disorders within 15 to 21 days of vaccination that can lead to death.247

The conclusion was that after receiving the Pfizer COVID mRNA vaccine, there are increased risks for arterial thromboembolism, which is a blood clot in an artery that stops the flow of blood to an organ or another part of the body;248 and for ischemic stroke, which is when a blood clot cuts off blood supply to the brain and brain cells begin to die within minutes;249 and for cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), which is when a blood clot forms in the brain’s venous sinuses and prevents blood from draining out of the brain.250

The researchers pointed out that these blood clotting and blood vessel disorders also are complications of SARS-CoV-2 infections and occur more frequently in seriously ill patients testing positive for COVID than after COVID vaccination.

Over 1 Million COVID Vaccine Reaction Reports Filed

As of February 4, 2022, there were over 1.1 million adverse event reports following COVID-19 vaccinations filed with the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System known as VAERS that was created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.251,252,253,254

COVID vaccine-related reaction reports represent more than 50 percent of the nearly two million total adverse event reports that have been made to VAERS for all federally recommended vaccines since the vaccine reaction reporting system became operational in 1990. It is estimated that only between one and 10% of vaccine adverse events that occur in the U.S. are reported to VAERS.255,256

Using MedAlerts, an independent search engine for VAERS established in 2003, I conducted a search the first week in February 2022 and found that about 624,000 of the COVID vaccine adverse event reports were associated with the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine,257 including over 130,000 events categorized as “serious,”258 and about 15,500 deaths.259,260

A portion of these reports have been filed by residents of other countries who have received the Pfizer COVID vaccine, and federal health officials warn that there is no proof of causation for any given vaccine adverse event report filed with VAERS.261

If your doctor refuses to report a serious health problem following vaccination to VAERS that you or your child have suffered, go to NVIC.org to learn how you can report it yourself.

Strong Inflammatory Responses Associated With mRNA Shots

What is it about the Pfizer mRNA vaccine that makes it so reactive? Because the Comirnaty vaccine was fast-tracked to licensure and all animal and human clinical trial data have not been fully released to the public, there has been speculation about the potential biological mechanisms for vaccine induced inflammatory disorders affecting the heart vessels and brain and other parts of the body.

The main concern about the Comirnaty vaccine’s reactivity is centered on the fact it uses a new mRNA technology platform that pushes synthetic mRNA coated with lipid nanoparticles into the body’s cells to force cells to produce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This is the first mRNA vaccine injected into humans on a mass basis and the first one using a lipid nanoparticle delivery system.262

A search of the medical literature and mainstream media articles quickly reveals that two years before Pfizer and Moderna got an EUA to distribute their mRNA vaccines, academic researchers warned of potential safety issues with the platform, like local and systemic inflammation; stimulation of hyper-inflammatory immune responses causing chronic inflammation and autoimmunity;263 and the presence of extracellular RNA that may cause edema and the formation of blood clots.264

The lipid nanoparticles that coat the synthetic mRNA in COVID vaccines can be highly inflammatory, as one recent study in mice demonstrated.265,266 This is the first human vaccine to include lipid nanoparticles and there are outstanding questions about biodistribution in the body and if they can accumulate in different organs of the body like the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys and perhaps crosses the blood brain barrier.267,268,269,270,271

There has been a debate about whether lipid nanoparticle coated mRNA that provokes cells to generate the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein ends up in the ovaries and could potentially affect fertility, with one of the inventors of mRNA technology and other scientists saying it could happen and other scientists saying it cannot.272,273

At the same time there is an investigation going on in Europe about menstrual irregularities and spontaneous bleeding in menopausal women who have gotten mRNA vaccines.274,275

There are also questions about antibody dependent enhancement (ADE),276,277 which could make certain people who already have coronavirus antibodies because they got vaccinated or had a previous infection more susceptible to severe COVID disease if they are infected or re-infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Public health officials disagree that COVID vaccine can cause antibody dependent enhancement, maintaining that vaccinated people who get COVID have milder, not more severe, disease.278

Questions About Few Contraindications, Long Term Safety

There are questions about the almost total absence of contraindications, which means reasons not to give the Comirnaty vaccine, and recommendations to give another dose after a previous reaction.279 Then there is the lack of published evidence for the blanket recommendation that it is safe to give Comirnaty vaccine at the same time with all other government recommended vaccines.280,281

At the end of the day, the biggest safety concern about Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine being given to children is that it just has not been studied long enough to determine if it will negatively affect the long term health of children.

Eminent scientists and doctors in the U.S. and around the world have been challenging official narratives about COVID and COVID-19 vaccines and asking all the right questions.282,283 A U.S. senator has held panel discussions on Capitol Hill to give a voice to these scientists and to those who have been injured by COVID vaccines or have had their informed consent rights violated.284

Americans all across the country have been defending civil liberties and informed consent rights in many different kinds of public forums, even as they face censorship and abuse from those who are trying to silence the public conversation about vaccination, health and autonomy.285,286

Concern About COVID Vaccine Mandates for Infants and Children

In closing, it is important to remember that the COVID-19 vaccine is the 17th vaccine U.S. health officials now direct doctors to give to children as young as five years old.287 When the FDA gives Pfizer the green light to distribute Comirnaty to children younger than that, the vaccine will be given to six-month old babies.

After 40 years of monitoring the science, policy, law and ethics of vaccination, my greatest concern is that this new vaccine eventually will be mandated for all infants and children, just like almost all vaccines that industry has created in the past century have been mandated.

We are responsible for protecting our children from harm, our children, who are now the most chronically ill and disabled children in the history of our nation.

Two in five children between six and 17 years old suffer with some kind of inflammatory immune or brain disorder like asthma, diabetes and epilepsy,288 and 1 child in 6 is developmentally delayed,289but there are no credible explanations coming from public health officials for why so many of our children are growing up sick and disabled and face a lifetime of chronic poor health.

Debate About Vaccination Is More Than 200 Years Old

Before the current public debate about COVID vaccine, there have been public debates about the wisdom of giving children many other vaccines that were very reactive. I joined with parents of DPT vaccine injured children to launch the modern vaccine safety and informed consent movement in 1982 because we wanted the toxic, highly inflammatory whole cell pertussis vaccine that had harmed our children taken off the market.290,291

We followed mothers and fathers in the 19th century, who protested the reactivity of the smallpox vaccine.292,293

Our activism in the late 20th century was followed by parents speaking out in the early 1990s about what happened to their children after being given the first genetically engineered vaccine for hepatitis B,294,295,296 followed by young mothers and fathers in the early 21st century once again asking government, industry and the medical establishment to expand knowledge about vaccine side effects and who is at highest risk.297,298,299

The charged debates about flawed vaccine science and the violation of the human rights inherent in mandatory vaccination laws have not changed in two hundred years. The fact that the debate about vaccination will not go away — no matter how much money and political power is thrown at it to make it go away — only confirms the universal need for it.

Moral and Legal Right to Make Voluntary Vaccination Decisions

As a mother, you have the moral right and must have the legal right to gather as much information as you can about COVID disease and the COVID vaccine, consult with a trusted health professional, and then follow your conscience and your gut instincts when making a decision about whether or not your child should get vaccinated — without being coerced or sanctioned by anyone for the decision you make.300

If you want to work in your state to protect your legal right to make a voluntary decision about vaccination, go to NVICAdvocacy.org and become a registered user of the free NVIC Advocacy Portal so you can stay informed about good or bad vaccine bills moving in your state and take action.

Last year, after NVIC worked with families across the country to successfully hold back state COVID vaccine mandates after the federal government issued strict vaccine mandates for both federal and private company employees, about 20 states passed laws in some way prohibiting COVID vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.

Not one state legislature passed a law mandating the COVID vaccine, even as Governors and local state officials in a few states enacted COVID vaccine mandates without getting legislature approval.301

Sign up for NVIC’s texting service and get NVIC’s weekly journal newspaper — The Vaccine Reaction — in your email box to stay up to date on breaking news.302 Read and download vaccine education information from NVIC.org and share it with your friends, family, legislators and thought leaders in your community.

Be the one who never has to say you did not do today what you could have done to change tomorrow. It’s your health, your family, your choice. And our mission continues: No forced vaccination. Not in America.

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List of notes here.

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The challenge to the existence of HIV was made public on the first day of the 1998 Geneva World AIDS Conference. 

A team of international scientists presented their conclusions. HIV has never been identified and there’s no proof that such a virus exists.

Watch the video below.

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Washington DOH Found 358,193 Vaccine Breakthrough Cases

March 21st, 2022 by Informed Choice Washington

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The WA State Department of Health states in their SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Breakthrough Surveillance and Case Information report dated February 16, 2022:

The criteria for identifying vaccine breakthrough cases include a positive lab test (either a PCR test or an antigen test) at least 14 days after a person received their last recommended dose of an authorized COVID-19 vaccine.

We wait 14 days because some people could get COVID-19 soon after vaccination when their body hasn’t had enough time yet to build full protection. These infections are not considered vaccine breakthrough cases because they could have been exposed before they were vaccinated. It typically takes about two weeks after the final dose of vaccine for the body to build a high level of protection against the disease.

The first COVID-19 vaccines were administered in Washington in mid-December 2020, so we started our surveillance for people who meet these case criteria during the week that began on January 17, 2021.

From January 17 [2021] – February 05, 2022:

358,193 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough cases have been identified in Washington State. Of these breakthrough cases:
– 19% reported symptoms
2% were hospitalized
– 0.4% died of COVID-related illness

[bold emphasis added]

Key points for reflection:

  • 358,193 lab-identified “breakthrough cases”, with 2% hospitalizations and 0.4% deaths are staggering and represent vaccine failure.
  • In order to fully understand the impact of the shots on an individual’s risk from SARS-CoV-2, more data is needed to be shared with the public. We need:
    • the number of breakthrough cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in those who have received one, two, three, four, and more injections but who were diagnosed before the 14 day window had passed since the last dose.
  • By claiming none of the COVID-19 cases occurring inside of the 14-day window are “breakthrough” cases, they are artificially increasing the rates of infection in the “non-vaccinated” group.
  • Under the DOH’s criteria, an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 who is beyond 14 days from their second dose, but has been recommended a third dose, is not considered a “breakthrough case.” They are considered a “non-vaccinated” case. Some hospitals and clinics only have “vaccinated” and “unknown” status on their forms. Someone with three shots could technically be marked as “unknown” using this criteria.
  • By not examining the number and severity of cases of COVID-19 in those who have had 1 or more shots in various windows of time, the DOH is not able to properly determine if the shot increases risk of infection, or increases risk of severity, hospitalization, or death within those windows.
  • Is DOH collecting data on the rates of non-COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the vaccinated? Deaths due to heart attack, stroke, autoimmune disease, etc?
  • In order to fully understand the impact of the shots on an individual’s risk of harm, proper data must be gathered. It is estimated that the underreporting factor for COVID shots to VAERS is between 6.5 (CDC claim) and 40 (independent evaluation) .
  • Why is the DOH not collecting numbers of breakthrough cases among those with natural immunity? Why aren’t they collecting the severity of the breakthrough illness? Hospitalization rates and deaths among those with natural immunity who have a breakthrough case?
  • If DOH truly wants to protect the public moving forward, they will gather and report ALL the data so that individuals can decide which is safest and most effective for themselves and their families. More than 150 studies on natural immunity are showing it is superior. Why is this mentioned nowhere on taxpayer funded “health” department websites?

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CJPME Statement on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

March 21st, 2022 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

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When the United Nations first established this Day against racism, they decided to mark it on the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when South African police killed 69 people during a peaceful demonstration against apartheid laws. Although South Africa’s system of Apartheid has long since ended, groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recently concluded that Israel also practices apartheid against the Palestinians.

The parallels of injustice are clear, but sadly the government of Canada has responded to each situation in radically different ways. While many Canadians are proud of the role that Canada took to oppose apartheid in South Africa, Canada today refuses to take any action against apartheid in Israel, and is completely unwilling to even engage with the work of human rights organizations on the ground. Instead, Canada has grown closer in its bilateral ties with the Israeli regime, and has condemned activists who speak out against Israel’s racist policies. This is not something that we can be proud of, but reveals a profound double standard in Canada’s foreign policy.

This moment also provides an opportunity to reflect on Canada’s refugee policies, and the ways that we tend to respond differently to different populations. We have seen Canada extend its arms to unlimited Ukrainian refugees who are fleeing Russian aggression, showing tremendous empathy and compassion. This is completely necessary and commendable. But the question must be asked: why have we been unable to extend the same support to refugees from outside of Europe, including from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or Palestine? Surely, we have the capacity to welcome any asylum-seekers fleeing conflict and strife, regardless of where they come from.

Underlining this problem is the fact that Canada’s refugee assistance measures are prioritizing Ukrainian nationals, while excluding foreign workers, students, or undocumented people from other countries who were living in Ukraine. There should be no distinction in our assistance to refugees, all of whom are fleeing the same war.

We know well that these struggles against racism and discrimination are not happening in isolation, and that are movements must be intersectional and connected. CJPME expresses its solidarity with all movements for racial justice, including Black Lives Matter, Indigenous land defenders, and migrant workers.

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If we are seeing this much criminal activity already, what will happen when the price of gasoline really spirals out of control?  I had heard that gasoline thefts were happening around the nation, but I had no idea how bad things really were until I started looking into it.  From coast to coast, gas stations are being targeted, and this is often being done by organized groups.  In other cases, criminals are going to private homes and are actually drilling directly into gas tanks in order to steal gasoline.  What we are witnessing is quite frightening, and it is yet another sign of how far our society has fallen.

Let me start by discussing an incident in a state that isn’t normally known for high crime.  According to CNN, this week at least 15 criminals worked together to steal almost 400 gallons of gas from a station in North Carolina

Nearly 400 gallons of gas were stolen from a North Carolina gas station this week, CNN reported.

More than 15 cars pulled up and filled up their tanks after business hours after someone used a special device allowing them to bypass the payment system. Over the course of about 45 minutes, $1,600 worth of gas was stolen from the Bizzy Bee Grocery Store and Gas Station in High Point, said owner Hardik Patel.

This sort of organized activity reminds me of the shoplifting mobs that we have seen around the country in recent months.

When the owner of the station was asked about this crime, he told CNN that he has “never seen something like this”

“I’ve been in business for 15 years and owned other gas stations. I have never seen something like this,” Patel told CNN. “It wasn’t free, they were stealing.”

Sadly, that wasn’t just an isolated incident.

In fact, this sort of thing is now happening all over the nation.  If you doubt this, just go to Google News and type in “gasoline theft.”

Down in Texas, a group of very brazen thieves just stole over 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel from a station in Houston

The manager of a family-owned gas station in Houston, Texas, says thieves targeted the business’s diesel fuel on four days last week, stealing more than 1,000 gallons. The thefts allegedly occurred on consecutive days in which the national gas price average repeatedly broke all-time highs.

According to the station manager, a “dark-colored van” would literally sit directly over the underground storage containers and siphon off hundreds of gallons

Thayil said a dark-colored van was seen parking over the underground storage containers on the dates of March 8-10 — days in which the national average price for a gallon of gas broke all-time records — and siphoned 360 gallons each day.

“They hit us like the days we were paying like a real premium on the diesel fuel,” Thayil told the outlet. “Altogether it was about $5,000.”

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis is rapidly disappearing.

I hope that you are prepared for “the new normal.”

To me, incidents where criminals actually go to private homes and drill holes in gas tanks are even more chilling.  Here is one example that just happened in Pennsylvania

A woman in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who did not want to be identified, says she and her neighbor were victims of a recent theft.

She says someone drilled a hole right into her gas tank. Home security video captured the alleged thief walking around her car with a drill and a five-gallon bucket.

Previously, criminals would siphon gas to steal fuel. But newer vehicles now have an anti-rollover valve, so thieves are now drilling right into the tank.

You may have a difficult time believing that this is actually happening in the United States of America.

But it is.

In Atlanta, police say that one man was “behind a series of costly gasoline thefts across the city”

Police in Atlanta said they arrested a man believed to be behind a series of costly gasoline thefts across the city.

It was a story FOX 5 first reported on Tuesday. Social media has been buzzing for the last few days about someone stealing gasoline out of tanks, but not by siphoning it out, but rather drilling a hole in the bottom of the tank and letting it drain out, leaving behind thousands of dollars’ worth of damage in the process.

As the price of gasoline continues to go up, this will probably encourage even more theft.

And it will also make it more costly for ordinary American families to heat their homes.

Not too long ago, one of my readers sent me an email in which she detailed how much her heating costs have gone up just since January…

“I received an oil delivery on Friday, March 7. I got 159 gallons @ $4.59 a gal. and it my ticket was $728.00. I got a delivery on Jan 12 for 161.5 gal. and the price was $3.39 and my ticket was $548.94.”

That is nuts.

But of course this is just the beginning.  We have entered a full-blown global energy crisis, and we are going to see things in the months ahead that are going to be absolutely unprecedented.

Sadly, one survey just found that rising costs are already a “significant source of stress” for 87 percent of U.S. adults…

According to the data, compiled after the APA surveyed 3,012 U.S. adults between Feb. 7-14, 87% of respondents cited rising costs of everyday items, including gas and groceries, as a “significant source of stress.” The same percentage said their mental health has been greatly impacted by “a constant stream of crises over the last two years.”

It has been estimated that rising energy prices will cost the average American family an extra $2,000 this year alone.

That is a lot of money.

I wish that I had better news for you.

I really do.

But the factors that are causing this energy crisis are not going away any time soon.

The best that we can hope for is a quick ceasefire in Ukraine.  In the short term, that would definitely help.

In the long term, we need to realize that our world is headed into a full-blown economic meltdown.

Decades of incredibly bad decisions have brought us to this point, and the current crop of global leaders is about the worst we have ever seen.

So anyone that is waiting for some sort of miraculous turnaround is going to be waiting for a very, very long time.

*

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Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. He has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, which are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  

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