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The American truckers are gearing up for a massive protest in Washington DC in opposition to tyrannical COVID mandates.

Similar to the truckers in Ottawa, the US Convoy plans to disrupt traffic in DC over the coming days and weeks, beginning around the time of Joe Biden’s upcoming State of the Union Address that’s scheduled for Tuesday, March 1st.

Thousands of protesters are expected to arrive for the demonstration, with several groups departing from across the country daily.

One of the largest of these groups – The Peoples Convoy – is rapidly growing as it finishes day six of eleven of its cross-country journey to the DC swamp. On Monday morning, the convoy had grown to around 3,000 vehicles as it reached the state of Missouri, which is about double what it was just two days ago when the convoy passed through Texas.

Just like the other states on this journey, the truckers were greeted with a warm welcome in Missouri, with countless supporters showing up at several overpasses to demonstrate their support.

Watch, from El American:

After picking up several more additions throughout the day, the convoy made camp for the night in Cuba, Missouri. Once again, a crowd was waiting to greet them when they arrived, bringing another round of donations, food, drinks, and supplies with them to be used in the upcoming protest.

The support that Americans have shown for the convoy has been overwhelming everywhere they have gone.

Tomorrow, the people’s convoy will depart Missouri and make its way to Indianapolis, where several other groups of vehicles are expected to merge with the convoy as it enters the last leg of its journey to Washington DC. Convoy Organizers who spoke with El American explained that they have been speaking with at least SIX other convoys that are planning on meeting up with the main group on Wednesday.

When the groups merge, the convoy is expected to be over 10,000 vehicles strong.

EPIC!

If this keeps up like this, Biden and the DC Swamp won’t know what hit them – the convoy is already 3,000 strong, and that’s without the reinforcements from the other groups who are planning to join.  This protest is gearing up to be something truly historic.

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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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.  

The Israeli proposal to mediate is an important initiative.


The world community is aghast over the acute tensions between the United States and its NATO allies on one side and Russia on the other, which is poised critically on the brink of a military confrontation, the like of which the world didn’t see in the entire Cold War era. 

The shocking part is that it has become a no-holds barred struggle that is being fought with tooth and claw, as hidden racial and religious prejudices  lying just below the surface have welled to the surface in the Western world. 

The amusing sight of western TV Channels openly discussing why an open door policy toward refugees from Ukraine is warranted in European countries underscores the subterranean cultural cross currents beneath the thin veneer of modernity. 

The western journalists have argued passionately that these refugees are not like those sub-humans from Muslim countries who knock on the doors of Europe seeking asylum, but these Ukrainian refugees are Christians — and that too, with blond hair and light eyes! 

It is when traumatic times come that the veneer of culture and modernity of the Europeans peels away and true human nature surfaces in all its naked crudity. This is not a matter of education or wealth. 

We have seen that even António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is a changed man nowadays. He behaves more like a westerner from Portugal and a Roman Catholic than as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. After Dag Hammarskjöld, Guterres is the first secretary-general of the UN who has clashed with a permanent member of the Security Council — or, more precisely, identified totally with one of the UNSC members against another. 

Hammarskjöld’s clash with the US was not personal, but on principles and ideology. Whereas, Guterres’ motives are dubious. (Is it a coincidence that his special representatives in the trouble spots in the world wherever western interests are at stake — be it Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan or Venezuela — happen to be nominees from the Western countries?) 

Of course, Guterres won’t meet with the tragic fate of Hammarskjöld (whom the CIA eliminated) because Russia doesn’t do such ghastly things. But Guterres demeans his own organisation where the big majority of countries are from the non-western world. 

Not a single Muslim country has voiced support for Washington in its confrontation with Russia. Although they are stakeholders in a Third World War, they prefer not to think about it. The heart of the matter is that they think this is another crusade of the Christian countries — cloaked as values and ‘rules-based order’ — which they’ve experienced so often. They see that the Western countries are back to their bestial wars endemic to European history through centuries. 

If reports are to be believed, Saudi Arabia point blank refused to pay heed to the Biden Administration’s entreaties to break up its energy alliance with Russia known as OPEC+ which fine tunes the supply position in the world oil market. Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran and Syria have openly supported Russia. Turkey offered mediation between Russia and Ukraine and indeed had a hand in arranging the talks in Belarus. 

However, it is Israel that made the most memorable overture to Russia of a historical nature suffused with great poignancy. Israel prevented the US from transferring to Ukraine its Dome missile defence system which would have been a game changer in the present conflict on the plea that it did not want to act against Russia! 

Both Washington and Tel Aviv hushed up this spat until its disclosure recently by the media. Then came the request from the Biden Administration seeking support from Israel to co-sponsor its resolution in the Security Council regarding Ukraine. Israel refused! The US made its displeasure known. 

Following that, in a conversation at the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow, the Israeli ambassador was apparently asked by the Russian side whether his country wasn’t aware of what’s going on in Ukraine — where the calculus of power lies in the hands of Neo-Nazi groups acting with the support of the western countries. 

To be sure, Israel must be well aware of the situation. Ukraine is not like any other country for Israel. It was the country where the horrific massacres took place in late September 1941 when the invading Nazi army, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries perpetrated one of the largest massacres of World War II. 

It took place at a ravine called Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) just outside the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev. According to the Holocaust Encyclopaedia, “Germans continued to perpetrate mass murders at this killing site until just before the Soviets re-took control of Kyiv in 1943. During this period, Germans shot Jews, as well as Roma, Ukrainian civilians and Soviet POWs. In the decades after the war, Babyn Yar symbolized the struggle over the memory of World War II and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.” 

We will never know the Israeli ambassador’s reaction to the Russian demarche, but Moscow had a pleasant surprise when Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday offering mediation on Ukraine. The Russian readout said briefly,

“In his turn, Naftali Bennett offered Israel’s mediation services in order to stop military actions.”

Putin of course briefed Bennett on the special military operation to defend Donbass and explained that Moscow

“is ready for talks with Kiev’s representatives, who have shown an inconsistent approach so far and have not yet used this opportunity.” 

Israel finds itself in a delicate situation. The US is Israel’s close ally and Bennett has been treading a careful line not to let differences with the Biden administration become disputes — unlike his abrasive, acerbic predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu. 

On the other hand, Israel has a very special relationship with Russia in terms of the fact that it also had suffered greatly at the hands of the marauding Nazi invaders. After all, over 20 million Soviet citizens perished during World War II. 

Equally, Israel is acutely conscious that Russia is deeply committed to the campaign against fascism at a time when the western world has turned its back on it and has decided to not only move on but also acquiesce with the recrudescence of Nazi ideology in the European societies lately.

Surely, German involvement with the Neo-Nazis in Ukraine must be known to the Israeli intelligence. But what can Israel do on its own? It is a deeply painful reality for both Israel and Russia that in the western political ecosystem, Nazi ideology is no longer reprehensible.  

Isn’t it amazing that two of the three Abrahamic religions are in a quandary over the war cries in the Christian world? The crisis over Ukraine indeed makes strange bed fellows. The UAE, a staunch ally of the US in the West Asian region, abstained twice in the recent days over the US-sponsored resolutions condemning Russia at the UN Security Council. 

Guterres has taken personal charge of marshalling support for the US at the special session of the UNGA today regarding Ukraine. American diplomats are pulling all stops. If a big chunk of UN members still choose to abstain, it will be a big blow for Guterres personally. Will he quit if that happens? Of course, that is too much to expect. Americans simply won’t let him, having retained him for a second term.    

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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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is banning the Russian news agency Sputnik and the Russia Today channel so that “they can no longer spread their lies to justify Putin’s war with their toxic disinformation in Europe”.
The EU thus officially establishes the Orwellian Ministry of Truth
, which by erasing memory rewrites history. Anyone who does not repeat the Truth transmitted by the Voice of America, the official agency of the U.S. government, which accuses Russia of “horrible, completely unprovoked and unprovoked attack against Ukraine” is outlawed. Outlawing myself, I report here in extreme synthesis the history of the last thirty years erased from memory.

 

In 1991, as the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself, the United States unleashed the first post-Cold War war in the Gulf, announcing to the world that “there is no substitute for the leadership of the United States, which remains the only state with global strength and influence”.

Three years later, in 1994, NATO under U.S. command carried out in Bosnia its first direct action of war and in 1999 attacked Yugoslavia: for 78 days, taking off mainly from Italian bases, 1,100 aircraft carried out 38,000 sorties, dropping 23,000 bombs and missiles that destroyed bridges and industries in Serbia, causing victims especially among civilians.

While demolishing Yugoslavia with the war, NATO, betraying the promise made to Russia “not to enlarge an inch to the East”, began its expansion to the East more and more close to Russia, which would lead in twenty years to expand from 16 to 30 members, incorporating countries of the former Warsaw Pact, the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia, preparing to officially include Ukraine, Georgia and Bosnia Herzegovina, which were already part of NATO (Il Manifesto, Che cos’è e perché è perico-loso l’ampliamento a Est della NATO, 22 February 2022),

Passing from war to war, the US and NATO attacked and invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, demolished the Libyan State with war in 2011 and began the same operation in Syria through Isis, partly blocked four years later by Russian intervention. In Iraq alone, the two wars and the embargo directly killed about 2 million people, including half a million children.

In February 2014, NATO, which had seized key positions in Ukraine since 1991, carried out through specially trained and armed neo-Nazi-steal formations the coup d’état that overthrew the duly elected president of Ukraine. It was orchestrated according to a precise strategy: to attack the Russian populations of Ukraine in order to provoke a response from Russia and thus open a deep rift in Europe. When the Crimean Russians decided in a referendum to rejoin Russia, of which they had previously been a part, and the Russians in the Donbass (bombed by Kiev with white phosphorus) entrenched themselves in the two republics, NATO’s escalation of the war against Russia began. It was supported by the EU, in which 21 of the 27 member countries belong to NATO under US command.

In these eight years, US-NATO forces and bases with nuclear attack capabilities have been deployed in Europe closer and closer to Russia, ignoring Moscow’s repeated warnings. On December 15, 2021 the Russian Federation handed over to the United States of America an articulated draft treaty to defuse this explosive situation (The Manifesto, Russian “Aggressive Move”: Moscow Proposes Peace, December 21, 2021). Not only was it rejected but, at the same time, the deployment of Ukrainian forces began, under US-NATO command, for a large-scale attack on the Russians in the Donbass.

Hence Moscow’s decision to put a stop to the aggressive US-NATO escalation with the military operation in Ukraine.

Demonstrating against the war by erasing history, means to contribute consciously or not to the frantic US-NATO-EU campaign that brands Russia as a dangerous enemy, that splits Europe for imperial designs of power, dragging us to catastrophe.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Selected Articles: Stop the Possible World War III Scenario!

March 1st, 2022 by Global Research News

Stop the Possible World War III Scenario! International Peace Conference to Dissolve NATO and for Global Denuclearization. Prof. Francis Boyle

By Prof. Francis A. Boyle, February 28, 2022

This war must be immediately terminated before it expands and sucks in the European NATO States and the United States. Towards that end, President Biden must publicly announce that NATO Expansion is over for good  and that Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will not be joining NATO as member States.

60 Years Too Long – End the US Blockade

By Cuba Solidarity Campaign, March 01, 2022

Successive US governments have carried out a campaign of destabilisation and subversion against the Cuban Revolution for more than six decades. Fundamental to this policy has been the US blockade.

Canada’s Freezing of Protesters’ Finances Shows How the “War on Cash” Ends

By Robert Fellner, February 28, 2022

The deputy prime minister announced that they will retain these so-called emergency powers permanently going forward and will also seek to implement additional measures to further restrict the ability of political protestors to raise funds or otherwise use the banking system.

The Mad Men of Washington

By Ben Schreiner, February 28, 2022

It’s hard to exaggerate just how energized the Washington elite has been by the outbreak of war in Europe. The resurgent Russian menace clearly portends a prosperous future of ever larger defense budgets, not to mention offering a much-needed reprieve from the domestic tumult of a fraying political system.

The Plandemic Enters Final Stage, Real Purpose Exposed

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, February 28, 2022

As noted by the National Review, we can already tell what the Canadian government will do with those expanded surveillance powers. We’re seeing their intentions in action. By invoking the Act, Trudeau has given himself the unilateral power to destroy the lives of Canadians who happen to disagree with him, regardless of the issue at hand.

How the U.S. Started a Cold War with Russia and Left Ukraine to Fight It

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, February 28, 2022

President Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in Eastern Ukraine, with 5,667 violations and 4,093 explosions.

Locking Down Liberty

By Colin Todhunter, February 28, 2022

Remember how the notion of freedom was spun by the ideologues of neoliberalism for decades prior to COVID? The freedom to consume. The freedom to make money. The freedom to be plunged into poverty and debt.

Syrian UN Envoy Accuses US Occupation of Enabling Terror Groups and Controlling Food Supply

By The Cradle, February 28, 2022

Syria’s envoy to the United Nations Bassam al-Sabbagh accused the United States and other NATO members on 25 February of hindering efforts by the Syrian government to put an end to the 11 year-long war and rebuild the country.

Ukraine: The Mess that Nuland Made

By Robert Parry, February 28, 2022

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

My Day in Palestine: The Stunning Beauty and Cruel Reality of an Occupied Land

By Miko Peled, March 01, 2022

The enormity of the process that is unfolding in Sheikh Jarrah is hard for people to grasp. Those of us who show up to express solidarity and to stand with the Palestinians who are victims of this crime against humanity cannot possibly feel the pain and fear that the Palestinians, who live through it and whose lives are being ruined, experience.

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In a country expert in killing off mammal species at a rate exceeding that of others (to be fair, there are so many more to destroy, with more to come), Australians now face the prospect that the koala, one of its most singularly recognisable animals, has its days numbered.

Divergent attitudes to such animal species, notably indigenous ones, has been a point of some despair for conservationists.  In 1995, Ron Green, the zoological director of Canberra’s Australian National Wildlife Sanctuary, put his finger on the matter by suggesting that Australians were “unique” in their “blasé” disposition.  “They’ll look at the white rhinoceros going into extinction on the TV, and become outraged but [have] an illusion that everything is fine in Australia; the ‘She’ll be right, mate’ syndrome, but we’ve wiped out the most mammals of any country in the world.”

Despite an emerging ecological awareness in Australia, the syndrome still stalks the halls of power. Last month, the Morrison government found itself in the unenviable position of having to declare the koala an endangered species in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.  In 2012, the species had been listed as “vulnerable” in the same jurisdictions.  As conservation scientist Stuart Blanch from WWF-Australia glumly observed, “Koalas have gone from no-listing to vulnerable to endangered within a decade.  This is a shockingly fast decline.”

The koala species has been savaged by an assortment of environmental changes, many of them of human making.  Through the 1920s, hundreds of thousands were shot for their fur.  Then came the devastating effects of tree-clearing in such states as Queensland and New South Wales for reasons of urban and agricultural development.  The effects were such that they led the Australian Koala Foundation in the mid-1990s to urge the Queensland government to place the species on the endangered list.

Over the vicious summer of 2019-2020, the Blackfire bushfires killed some 5,000 and affected 24% of the habitats in New South Wales alone.  The entire conflagration is said, according to WWF-Australia, to have “killed, injured or affected in some way” 60,000 koalas.

The endangered status imposes no obligation upon the government to actually take any measures, odd as that sounds, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison never misses a chance to advertise a funding spray.  At the end of January, a joint media release from his office and that of Environment Minister Sussan Ley announced that $50 million would be provided “to boost the long-term protection and recovery efforts for Australia’s koalas.”

The package would, in the Prime Minister’s words, aid in “restoring koala habitat, improving our understanding of koala populations, supporting training in koala treatment and care, and strengthening research into koala health outcomes.”

On February 11, Ley was tooting and hooting away with another announcement that levels of protection for the species would be boosted “under National Environmental Law.”  The government was “taking unprecedented action to protect the koala, working with scientists, medical researchers, veterinarians, communities, states, local governments and Traditional Owners.”

When struggling for answers, those in power find it best to defer matters to a committee or working group.  Not wishing to buck this tendency, Ley announced that the Threatened Species Scientific Committee would be considering “the status of the Koala.”

The language of the announcement was a jarring mix of promotion and doom, with the doom element – namely, declaring the koala as endangered in three jurisdictions – buried in over the rainbow promises of protection. “Together we can ensure a healthy future for the koala and this decision, along with the total $74 million we have committed to koalas since 2019 will play a key role in that process.”

Such empty displays of political theatre are acts of distraction and denial.  The koalas may have been offered “a nice new word,” huffed Deborah Tabart, veteran chairwoman of the Australia Koala Foundation, “but behind all the photo opportunities and political rhetoric they continue to approve the destruction of the koala habitat.”

Little is made of climate change, a phenomenon which Morrison has found hard to contend with.   There is also little in the way of teeth in the proposed actions.  Blanch makes the point that slapping an endangered status upon a species is one thing but, in this case, it “won’t stop koalas from sliding towards extinction unless it’s accompanied by stronger laws and landholder incentives to protect their forest homes.”

The Australian Koala Foundation also notes the absence of specific legislation across the country to protect koalas and their habitat.  It recommends the drafting and passage of the Koala Protection Act, with a focus on protecting the trees themselves.  “The reason we have been so clear about protection of trees is because if you are a Koala and lose your home, you have nothing to eat, and you are lost, leaving you more susceptible to threats such as cars and dogs.”

The organisation claims to have a “precise list of trees” covering the geographic scope of the koala and insists that the onus be placed on any developer to demonstrate that their actions “will be benign to the landscape.”

With such stewards of the environment as Ley, animal species are doomed.  This was predictable enough.  For decades, Australia’s environmental portfolio has been leased, if not bought outright, by fossil fuel and developer interests.  It was Ley who used her good offices to convince international officialdom that the world need not worry about the ailing health of the Great Barrier Reef.  It was yet another example of the odious “She’ll be right, mate” syndrome.

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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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Walking through the low hills of the Naqab as the sun sets and the moon comes up is an experience that allows us to imagine what Palestine was like before it was torn apart by Zionists and what can still be saved if we act fast.

The ruins of the Palestinian village of Sataf sit on the slope of a beautiful hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Today the area is a Jewish National Foundation (JNF) park called “Har Eitan,” or Mount Eitan. It is covered in pine trees that were planted by the JNF to hide the Zionist crime of ethnic cleansing, a crime that has been designated as a crime against humanity.

In 2021, massive fires broke out on the hills surrounding Jerusalem and countless pines were burned, including the ones around Sataf. There is an 8 kilometer trail that goes around the mountain and people use it to hike and jog and sometimes ride mountain bikes. Parts of this trail are very steep and in some cases these steep parts go on for a good mile.

When I am in Jerusalem, Sataf is where I like to run, and the day after my arrival here in mid-February I went on a run. I don’t always run the full 8 kilometer circle because those steep hills are a killer, but this time I did. Running through the mountain I saw burnt towering pine trees, standing like a monument to the arrogance and stupidity of British and Zionist settlers and colonizers who think they know what’s good for the “colony.”

As I ran, I saw laborers, mostly Palestinians, cutting down these tall burnt matchsticks and I could see for the first time that the ground was visible. The plain earth under the trees was visible after all these years, and there was Palestinian landscape right there alive and well.

The terraces that were built and cultivated by Palestinian farmers throughout the centuries are still there, as are the olive trees, the occasional fig, and countless almonds that are now in full bloom. It is cold and rainy in Jerusalem now and so the ground is covered with small pink cyclamens and tall pancratium with white flowers that grow everywhere this time of year.

Sataf ruins

Trees planted by the Jewish National Fund engulf the ruins of Palestinian homes in Sataf. Photo | Zochrot

Reality confronts nature

The Northern Naqab is also green this time of year. Vast green spaces that have not yet been spoiled by Zionist encroachment allow for a truly wonderful getaway for an afternoon. Walking through the low hills of the Naqab as the sun sets and the moon comes up is an experience that allows us to imagine what Palestine was like before it was torn apart by Zionists and what can still be saved if we act fast. The reality of life in Palestine could hardly be more frightening and less inspiring than the natural phenomena I was describing.

Better still to do this with young Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab who know the land and appreciate its value and beauty in ways that privileged settlers could never comprehend. I had an opportunity to have a chat with some young Palestinian Bedouins in Bi’r Al-Saba. It was a small gathering organized ad-hoc by activist friends who reject Zionism, stand up to defend their lands, and demand their right to maintain their way of life.

An Israeli woman who happened to be present when I spoke stormed out of the meeting. She said that I and the organizers were poisoning the young minds of these Palestinians. This arrogance, which is sadly characteristic among Zionists, leads many to believe that the problem is not the crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Palestinians in the Naqab but rather their peers and people like me talking to them about it.

Sheikh Jarrah

In a moment of caring in the midst of madness and violence, like a lotus flower rising from the mud, a clown was walking among the crowd at the Sheikh Jarrah protest. I had seen her before many times; she gives out little heart-shaped stickers and in the summer she has a little spray bottle and she sprays people with cold water. The police brutalize her as they do anyone who dares to challenge them, even a clown.

In the protest that took place on Friday, February 18 she was there. The police acted with hate and brutality that matched the Amnesty International definition of Israeli crimes as Crimes against Humanity. At one point the clown, whose name I don’t know, stood in a row with other protesters facing the Israeli terror squads. They wanted the protesters to back off and immediately began to push.

When these guys push, they do it with the brutality of a herd of mad buffalos. The clown was pushed so hard it looked as though her entire torso was going to snap off. When the pushing and shoving begins, everyone runs or gets trampled. The violence was unprovoked, inexcusable and certainly unnecessary. The only violence during these protests comes from the police.

Sometimes empathy is all we have

Later in the evening, before I left the scene, I walked over to the clown to say thank you and see if she was alright. She was standing next to one of the older gentlemen, who lives in Sheikh Jarrah. Just as many of the other veteran residents of this neighborhood, he cannot wrap his mind around the reality that is unfolding around him. One cannot blame him, since it is a madness that no healthy mind can understand.

This gentleman was venting; then he went from venting to lecturing, then to expressing his rage and frustration, and then again confusion. The whole time I stood there she was present, listening to the man go on and on. She reached her hand out to me for a moment to say, “I know you’re here,” and she kept listening with her heart open to this man whose life is being terrorized by maniacal, racist, violent gangs who have the full weight of the Israeli state behind them. He clearly needed to speak out, even if it was to a clown.

The enormity of the process that is unfolding in Sheikh Jarrah is hard for people to grasp. Those of us who show up to express solidarity and to stand with the Palestinians who are victims of this crime against humanity cannot possibly feel the pain and fear that the Palestinians, who live through it and whose lives are being ruined, experience. To see this Palestinian gentleman stand before a clown and vent his feelings, and to see the heartfelt way in which she was listening, was a great way to end a very difficult day.

A stun grenade

About 10 minutes after I had left, while I was walking to my car, I heard two loud explosions. It was strange because the protest had ended, the police were just casually standing around and all that remained were people from the neighborhood singing and dancing. But that too needed to stop so they threw two stun grenades into the crowd.

The battle for Sheikh Jarrah could not be more important. The only way we can prevent the total destruction of the lives of the Palestinians in Jerusalem – and the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in particular – is by demanding that governments and nongovernmental organizations around the world apply the recommendations of Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid, including compelling Israel to grant Palestinians their human rights, guarantee their right of return, and provide them with reparation for the loss of land and property they have endured under Israeli occupation.

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Miko Peled is MintPress News contributing writer, published author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. His latest books are ”The General’s Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine,” and “Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.”

Featured image is from Jewish Voice for Labour

60 Years Too Long – End the US Blockade

March 1st, 2022 by Cuba Solidarity Campaign

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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***

 

 

 

“The human damage of the blockade is incalculable. No Cuban family is spared from the effects of this inhuman policy. Nobody could honestly state that it has no actual impact on the population…The blockade is a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights of all Cuba’s people. According to Article II c) of the Geneva Convention of 1948, it constitutes an act of genocide…This is an extraterritorial economic war against a small country, already adversely affected by the recession and global economic crisis caused by the pandemic that has deprived us of much needed income.”  – Bruno Rodríguez, Cuban Foreign Minister speaking at the UN, June 2021

Successive US governments have carried out a campaign of destabilisation and subversion against the Cuban Revolution for more than six decades. Fundamental to this policy has been the US blockade.


TAKE ACTION
Dear President Biden, End the US blockade!

To mark the 60th anniversary of the US blockade, CSC has luanched an open letter calling on President Joe Biden to reverse Trump’s sanctions and end the US blockade.

Please add your name today.


Sixty years ago on 3 February 1962 President John F. Kennedy formalised the US blockade of Cuba by signing ‘Proclamation 3447 – Embargo on All Trade with Cuba.’ The policy officially came into play a few days later, at midday on 7 February. There were already several acts of economic and physical aggression from the US government that preceded this date. In 1959 President Eisenhower approved a programme of raids and sabotage. By 1960 he had also cancelled Cuba’s sugar quota by 95 per cent; used the existing Trading with the Enemy Act to block most US exports; and pressured Latin American countries to cut ties with the island and expel it from the Organisation of American States. In the first year of his presidency, Kennedy gave the green light to the Bay of Pigs invasion and banned US citizens from visiting Cuba without a special licence in 1961.

But it was Kennedy’s 1962 Proclamation that officially started the longest blockade in the world, and signalled the beginning of a hostile policy that his own legal advisors determined “could be regarded by Cuba and other Soviet bloc nations as an act of war.”

And it is a war: economic warfare intended to inflict the maximum suffering on the Cuban people. This was the explicitly stated goal of the policy as set out in a 1960 State Department memorandum which calculated that by “denying money and supplies to Cuba,” the US could “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

With the exceptions of President Carter, who briefly ended travel restrictions, and two years of rapprochement under Barack Obama’s presidency, successive US administrations have maintained and tightened the blockade.

In 1982 Regan placed Cuba on the US ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ list hindering international financial transactions. In 1992 Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which included restrictions on US subsidiaries in other countries and prevented ships from travelling to the US for 18 months after docking in Cuba. Congressman Robert Torricelli who sponsored the Act said it was intended to “wreak havoc on that island.”

The 1996 Helms-Burton Act codified the extraterritorial nature of the blockade, providing measures to penalise any company that invested in properties nationalised by the Cuban government, and to give support to groups that sought a change in the Cuban government and economic system. Until President Trump, every US president for 23 years waived the part of this legislation (Title III) which enabled Cuban-American former owners of properties to sue for damages.

President Trump launched a draconian policy of “maximum pressure” against Cuba and in less than four years introduced 243 new sanctions and punitive measures – 90 of which cruelly came during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The impact of the blockade on the lives of Cubans has been brutal. In 1997 the American Association for World Health reported that it had “dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens” and “caused a significant rise in suffering — and even deaths — in Cuba” through “critical shortages of even the most basic medicines and medical hardware.”

Cuba estimates it has cost the economy more than $135 billion in the last six decades. Between April 2019 and March 2020, financial loses amounted to $5.570 billion. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the cruelty and immorality of the sanctions. In July 2020, a UN special rapporteur concluded the blockade was “obstructing humanitarian responses to help the country’s health-care system fight the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In June 2021, Oxfam joined US NGOs to blast the policy which they said “did nothing to help the Cuban people” and that “seeking to provoke hunger, especially during a global pandemic is unjust and immoral.” They called the Biden administration’s decision to defend their position at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) vote “a shameful embarrassment.”

30 years of UN votes

This year will also witness the 30th United Nations General Assembly vote on Cuba’s annual resolution demanding an end to the US sanctions. Since 1992 the UN has condemned the blockade, apart from in 2020 when the vote was postponed due to the pandemic. All along, the United States and Israel have opposed the resolution, alone on ten occasions. Only once have they abstained: in 2016, the year that Obama travelled to Havana following the all too brief rapprochement in Cuba-US relations. Twelve months later Donald Trump was in the White House and the US vote reverted to the norm. In June 2021, 184-2 countries voted in favour of Cuba. Only the US and Israeli governments stood against the rest of the world – Colombia, Ukraine and Brazil abstained.

The US blockade has not achieved its objective of overturning the Cuban Revolution. It has alienated the US government in Latin America, brought condemnation from around the world, and caused immeasurable pain to the Cuban people. The only people to have benefited from the failed policy are those exile groups in Florida, beneficiaries of a ‘regime change’ industry which has seen millions of dollars in US government funding channelled to them through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In 2011, describing the blockade policy, former US Senator Gary Hart said: “Though it started out to be a measure of an administration’s resistance to Castro’s politics, it very soon became a straitjacket whereby first-generation Cuban-Americans wielded inordinate political power over both parties and constructed a veto over rational, mature diplomacy.”

The same can be said today. Florida politicians wield undue influence on the White House. President Biden has maintained Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure”, even though its key architects and supporters – right-wing, Republican Cuban Americans in Florida – are unlikely to vote for him for doing so.

For the last few years, as a result of Trump’s extra sanctions and the pandemic, Cubans have faced an increasingly dire economic situation. Food shortages, long queues, and a lack of medicines have pushed the nation into the worst economic and humanitarian crisis it has faced in recent history.

In the midst of such hardship, Cuba has continued to inspire. It sent more than 4,000 medics to 40 countries to help fight COVID-19. It started to roll out its ambitious ‘Tarea Vida’ (Life Project) plan to confront global warming and rising sea levels on the island. And most impressively, it has developed homegrown COVID-19 vaccines which have saved countless lives in Cuba, and may provide a lifeline to countries in the global south.

Climate change and global pandemics bring real threats. Engaging with Cuba on these issues would be in the best interests of the US as well as Cuba. But first the White House needs to break away from an archaic blockade policy, born in the early days of the ‘Cold War.’

With the stroke of a pen, President Biden could reverse all of Trump’s measures, reopen negotiations with the Cuban government, and start working towards normalising relations and ending the blockade.


TAKE ACTION
Dear President Biden, End the US blockade!

To mark the 60th anniversary of the US blockade, CSC has luanched an open letter calling on President Joe Biden to reverse Trump’s sanctions and end the US blockade.

Please add your name today.


 

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The Mad Men of Washington

February 28th, 2022 by Ben Schreiner

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***

It’s hard to exaggerate just how energized the Washington elite has been by the outbreak of war in Europe. The resurgent Russian menace clearly portends a prosperous future of ever larger defense budgets, not to mention offering a much-needed reprieve from the domestic tumult of a fraying political system.

Of course, it all very well may foretell a calamitous global conflagration as well. But for many in Washington, that appears to be the point.

Appearing on CNN Saturday, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander of Europe Wesley Clark mused on the potential of catapulting the world into a nuclear war.

Speaking to Jim Acosta, Clark offered that “a lot of people are talking about a no-fly zone… I’m recommending we look at things like this.”

Clark, it must be noted, came to prominence leading the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in order to back separatist rebels in Kosovo. To be clear then: separatists in Kosovo, good–separatists in the Donbas, bad.

Russiagater’s favorite GOP lawmaker, Adam Kinzinger, has similarly advocated for the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Recall that the last no-fly zone NATO established led to scores of civilian deaths in Libya. But no matter that.

Thus, “all options are on the table,” including a no-fly zone apparently. So as Moscow puts its nuclear forces on high alert, there are those in Washington actually agitating for the shooting down of Russian warplanes. Although, as Clark bizarrely continued, “[Putin] has chemical weapons, maybe he has nuclear weapons.” Maybe?

Acosta didn’t challenge Clark on his absurd pronouncement on Russia’s nuclear status. Instead, Acosta opined on Putin’s mental state, recklessly asserting, “It seems like he’s gone mad. He’s gone mad!”

Image on the right: Adam Schiff (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

One can imagine an American CNN viewer fed the Washington propaganda of Russia evil, Putin mad, wondering why the hell the force for good that is the US military just doesn’t go in already and take out this “next Hitler.” After all, as another prominent Russiagater Adam Schiff has asserted, the US must “fight Russia over there [so] we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

But maybe a no-fly zone is too much. Sanctions are needed instead. We need to make the Russian economy scream.

Officials in Washington are now reportedly looking at attempting to remove the Russian economy in its entirety from the SWIFT banking system, which they deem the “nuclear weapon of sanctions.” An apt name, given that such a move would likely do significant damage to the American economy as well. Amazing how Democrats in the Congress are so willing to risk their electoral lives for Ukraine’s NATO membership, but are never so willing to risk it on anything like addressing climate change or providing healthcare to all Americans.

The Russian sanctions are reported to be based on the Iran model. But what have the sanctions on Tehran done other than cause needless suffering for ordinary Iranians? Have sanctions turned the Iranian people against their government? No. The truth is that sanctions never work the way their proponents claim. They are not humane alternatives to war either; they are war.

Not only that, sanctions can easily lead to further escalation. There’s a direct line from the oil embargo of Imperial Japan and the start of the second world war in the Pacific. Are we really going to fall into a catastrophic global conflict over an attempt to fulfill the dream of easing the sale of American made weapons systems to a newly minted NATO regime in Kyiv?

Who is it that has gone mad?

But maybe we ought to pump the breaks on the WWIII talk for now. Clark went on in his CNN appearance to speculate that Russian generals will do the job for us and will eventually stand up to Putin and end this war.

Not likely, of course. If generals were to be counted on to stand up and stop illegal criminal wars the people of Afghanistan and Iraq would have been spared the hell of US imperialism. But US generals have a long and storied history of not standing up. Oh, well. But we shouldn’t conflate Iraq and Afghanistan with Ukraine. It’s all so different.

As CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata explained the difference, “this place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades…this is a relatively civilized, relatively European” place. One wonders what the people in Afghanistan and Iraq have to say about those “relatively civilized, relatively European” invading hordes who unleashed those conflicts that raged for decades. That would be the very same “civilized” people who now appear poised to play nuclear chicken with Russia.

But whether the Russian generals abandon their orders or not is ultimately a moot point. Rest assured; the fate of Ukraine is actually in American hands. As Clark asserted, it’s “up to us. It is about American leadership, ultimately.”

It was much the same across the Sunday shows this week. Military and political elites derided Moscow’s aggression against a sovereign state (a war crime for thee, not for me) and boasted about how the US and its NATO lackies were ultimately the ones with the power to shape events on the global stage.

The sun never sets on American hubris.

Let us pray Washington’s spiking war fever is in reality nothing but a reckless grift meant to help pump more money into the coffers of American arms manufacturers. But for an American leadership that has seemingly long since gone mad, there’s no telling where the grift ends and the barbarism begins.

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Ben Schreiner is an American writer.


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.

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***

 

The Canadian government is now freezing the bank accounts and personal assets of those who donated to support the Freedom Convoy, which is an organized political protest of the vaccine mandates. The deputy prime minister announced that they will retain these so-called emergency powers permanently going forward and will also seek to implement additional measures to further restrict the ability of political protestors to raise funds or otherwise use the banking system.

This highlights the need to eliminate the state’s control over money, at least in societies that wish to remain free. As articulated in a fascinating Twitter thread, constitutional rights become utterly meaningless if there are no practical means to exercise them. Free speech rights and the right to assemble are of little use to those who have no ability to access their money. Organizing an assembly requires being able to afford the costs associated with travel. Exercising free speech rights, at least if one wishes to do so effectively, requires at least some funds to ensure that the message reaches a large audience.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau understands this fact, which is why his administration has chosen to freeze the bank accounts of those directly involved in the protest, as well as those who merely donated to help support the protest efforts. When a similarly power-hungry tyrant seeks to do the same here in the United States, the Constitution will be utterly powerless to stop them. Good luck mounting an effective protest to an unjust and tyrannical government without having access to money or the banking system.

It is therefore necessary that Americans start taking the necessary measures to help ensure such tyranny cannot come here. While the ultimate solution will require finding a path to free-market money, the Canadian experience makes clear that simply waiting for that to happen is too risky.

In the meantime, more must be done to bring the government’s war on cash to an immediate end. A future president and Congress can accomplish this by requiring the US Treasury to start printing $500 and $1,000 bills immediately, to make up for the loss in purchasing power that has occurred since the Treasury formally discontinued those higher-denomination bills back in 1969.

There should also be a requirement that new higher-denomination bills be introduced when needed to offset the effects of inflation. In other words, when the cumulative effects of inflation inevitably produce another 50 percent decline in the value of US currency, the Treasury should also be required to automatically introduce a $2,000 bill into circulation, for example. This is necessary to ensure that Americans’ fundamental right to access cash is not eroded by the silent, but incredibly pernicious, effects of inflation. And while the practical value of this reform is admittedly modest, its main value lies in what it accomplishes in terms of reframing the debate regarding the nature of money and the state.

In other words, it is much easier for a government to implement the totalitarian measures currently on display in Canada when the populace already concedes that the state has the right to monitor banking transactions and views unmonitored transactions as synonymous with illicit activity. Merely protecting the right to access physical cash is thus an inherent repudiation of this view and instead signals a recognition that Americans are entitled to money and banking, especially to those forms of money that are hard for the government to control. And successfully shifting the Overton window in that way would greatly increase the likelihood of enacting more substantive reforms, like repealing the Patriot Act and other bank-monitoring laws.

So, as we wait for the widespread adoption of an alternative to government-controlled money, whether in crypto or elsewhere, those who believe in freedom should consider making the reintroduction of large-denomination bills a political priority. The level of oppression currently on display in Canada makes clear that we must do everything possible to prevent the same from coming here.

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Robert Fellner is the director of transparency research at the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

Featured image is from Mises Wire

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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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, discusses the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia with Richard Medhurst.

According to Ritter, this is a massive Russian operation that aims to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine which means two things. One, Ukrainian military will cease to exist. And two, Ukrainian government will be gone because President Putin says it is a Nazi government.

Watch the interview below.

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The Plandemic Enters Final Stage, Real Purpose Exposed

February 28th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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***

February 21, 2022, the Canadian Parliament approved Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the peaceful trucker protest against vaccine mandates

Under the Act, Canadian banks can seize the personal bank accounts of anyone suspected of participating in or supporting the protest, and these financial surveillance powers are intended to become permanent

February 14, 2022, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules to cover crowdfunding platforms and their payment service providers. The broadened surveillance power requires all digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (Fintrac)

What’s happening in Canada should be a sobering wakeup call for the whole world. Governments intend to control dissent through financial blackmail, which is why they’re also pushing for programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)

Programmable currency is digital cash programmed to ensure it can only be spent on essentials or goods that an employer or government deems to be sensible. In other words, the issuer of the money would have complete control over how you spend your own money, and could punish you for undesirable opinions or behavior by restricting your purchasing ability or seizing your funds altogether

*

February 21, 2022, the Canadian Parliament approved Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act, with 185 votes for and 151 against, in response to the peaceful trucker protest against vaccine mandates.While Trudeau in a February 14, 2022, press conference (above) promised the Act would be limited in time, geographical location and scope, he’s already reneging on that promise.

Financial Surveillance Powers Will Be Permanently Expanded

The act was invoked to allow the government to physically disperse the trucker convoy without actually listening to their complaint, and to punish anyone who has supported the protest.

Under the act, banks are empowered to seize the personal bank accounts of anyone suspected of participating in the protest, or supporting it with as little as a $25 donation. Disturbingly, the surveillance powers over financial transactions granted by the act are actually intended to become permanent. As reported by National Review:2

“In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden ‘the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.’

That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., ‘Fintrac’).

‘As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,’ Freeland said.

She justified the move as a way to ‘mitigate the risk’ of ‘illicit funds’ and ‘increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement’ …

Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had ‘highlighted the fact’ that digital assets and funding mechanisms ‘weren’t captured’ by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers.

As a result, she said, ‘the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.’”

As noted by the National Review, we can already tell what the Canadian government will do with those expanded surveillance powers. We’re seeing their intentions in action. By invoking the Act, Trudeau has given himself the unilateral power to destroy the lives of Canadians who happen to disagree with him, regardless of the issue at hand.

Without court order or due process, the government can now freeze bank accounts, cancel insurance policies and revoke drivers’ licenses, and the victims have no recourse or remedy.

“All this, of course, flies in the face of Trudeau’s promise that the Emergencies Act powers would be temporary,” National Review notes, adding:3

“When he announced his invocation of the order, he promised the Canadian people that his expanded authorities would ‘be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.’ Not a single part of that sentence has proved to be true.”

Government Wants to Decide How You Spend Your Money

What’s happening in Canada should be a sobering wakeup call for the whole world. They’re showing us exactly what’s in store for all of us. Governments will basically control dissent through financial tyranny and blackmail.

The next step in that direction is the implementation of programmable digital currencies, worldwide. As reported by The Telegraph in June 2021, the Bank of England has already started moving on a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC), and there’s no doubt that this is the plan of all central banks worldwide.4

Executive board member of the European Central Bank, Fabio Panetta, mentioned it in his December 10, 2021, lecture on the future of digital money in Rome, Italy.5

What’s meant by a “programmable” currency? As explained by The Telegraph,6 “Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or government deems to be sensible.” In other words, the issuer of the money would have complete control over how you, the recipient, spend it.

“Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference … that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency …” The Telegraph reported.7

“He said … what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way. But at the same time it could be a restriction on people’s freedoms.’”

Absolute Control Through Financial Slavery

That programmable currency might restrict freedom is probably the understatement of the century. It’s an absolute given. Imagine your employer, your government and the central bank itself having the privilege to dictate how you spend your own money!

Imagine a third party deciding how much you’re allowed to spend on rent, what kind of food or clothing you’re allowed to buy, or what hobbies you’re allowed to spend money on and when. That’s the power they intend to obtain, and current events in Canada prove it.

The “socially beneficial outcomes” Mutton is hinting at are basically that an unelected cabal will have the ability to micromanage your personal finances, and hence dictate your behavior in every area of your life. As noted by British activist and radio presenter Maajid Nawaz in the Joe Rogan clip above, with a programmable CBDC, the British government would have complete control over anyone who disagrees with their policies or activities.

For example, with other surveillance, they could determine that he was planning to appear on Rogan’s show and simply reprogram his CBDCs with the click of a button, such that he would not be allowed to purchase a plane ticket. So much for that plan then.

Of course, CBDCs will exist by themselves. They’re designed to be used together with digital ID and a social credit score, like that in China. The COVID vaccine passports are one type of platform that could be used for this, but even if a state or country rejects vaccine passports, don’t for a moment think you’re out of the woods, not by a long-shot. Chances are, they’ll introduce a digital ID system instead, which will serve the exact same function.

Global Leadership Has Been Infiltrated

In the full Rogan interview, Nawaz goes on to discuss how governments around the world have been infiltrated by World Economic Forum (WEF) members whose agenda it is to implement global authoritarianism. As reported by Life Site News:8

“… the WEF has installed its members in national leadership roles around the world to further the organization’s sprawling authoritarian agenda. Explaining that government leaders worldwide have begun lifting COVID-19 mandates and restrictions while leaving in place an apparatus of digital tracking and identification that forms the embryonic stages of a digital social credit score.

Nawaz said the WEF under Schwab has worked on ‘embedding people in government who are subscribed to’ the Great Reset agenda. ‘That’s what they say themselves,’ Nawaz said, pointing out that the so-called Great Reset, whose advocates have famously asserted that by 2030 people will ‘own nothing and be happy,’ is explained in detail on the WEF’s website.9

In a 2020 book entitled ‘COVID-19: The Great Reset,’ Schwab openly argued that the COVID-19 response should be used to ‘revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions’ …

The WEF has clearly articulated10 its interest in pursuing a global digital ID system. ‘So this is going to be this never-ending process to slowly move the goal posts,’ Rogan surmised. ‘Towards more and more authoritarianism,’ Nawaz added. ‘Checkpoint society. It’s all there. They’ve told us this.’”

How exactly has the WEF infiltrated governments and leadership roles around the world? In part by getting members of its Young Global Leaders group elected or installed in key positions. Would it surprise you to learn that Trudeau went through Schwab’s Young Global Leaders program?

Other members whose dictatorial mindset cannot be disguised any longer are New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron. Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have also gone through the program, and both are clearly supporting and promoting The Great Reset agenda through their respective business ventures.

Globalists Plan to Seize Control of Health Systems Worldwide

Your money isn’t the only thing the globalist cabal wants to control, however. In a February 18, 2022, article, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey,”11warns that the next move in the globalists’ war on humanity is to seize control over the health care systems of the entire world:12

“We have discovered the next move of the global predators — already in progress — in their escalating assaults against individual and political freedom. The next big assault on human freedom involves a legalized takeover of national healthcare systems by the World Health Organization (WHO).

This stealth attack — with its initial plans already backed by many nations — will begin full implementation in 2024 if it is not quickly recognized and fought! … The Chinese Communist influence over WHO has been solid for more than a decade, and the party was able to install Tedros without any competition.

He became the first and only Director-General who is not a physician and instead is a communist politician. Now the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — known simply as Tedros — has unveiled plans to take charge of all global health.

While addressing the WHO Executive Committee on January 24, 2022, Director-General Tedros spelled out his global health plan, including his final priority for his enormous scheme: ‘The fifth priority is to urgently strengthen WHO as the leading and directing authority on global health, at the center of the global health architecture.’

Tedros’s closing words to his report to the executive committee are chilling in their grandiosity and echo Marxist exhortations to cheering mobs by a Stalin, Mao, or Xi Jinping: ‘We are one world, we have one health, we are one WHO.’ Tedros seeks to become super-Fauci for the world, and, like Fauci, he will do it on behalf of the global predators.”

Health Fascism

As explained by Breggin, the global health care takeover really began with Gates’ Decade of Vaccines, announced in 2010 at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos. At that time, Gates installed Dr. Anthony Fauci on his vaccine advisory board, thereby guaranteeing his plans would receive support from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci is the head of. Breggin continues:13

“A theme for the Decade of Vaccines was ‘Public-Private Partnerships Drive Progress in Vaccine Development, Delivery’ — essentially the precursor to the Great Reset establishing a world governance of public and private health united in the spirit of fascism.

By 2012, Gates achieved official UN approval for his scheme, establishing a broad network of global predators aimed at exploiting and dominating humanity through public health. Communist China would play a prominent role through its control over the UN and WHO and through its close relationships with global predators like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Mike Bloomberg, Big Tech executives, and many other billionaires and world leaders.

A decade and more later, during COVID-19, WHO has proven its usefulness to the predators in orchestrating science, medicine, and public health in the suppression of human freedom and the generation of wealth and power for the globalists.”

Under the guise of a global pandemic, the WHO, the WEF and all of its installed leaders in government and private business, were able to roll out a plan that has been decades in the making. The pandemic was a perfect cover. In the name of keeping everyone “safe” from infection, the globalists have justified unprecedented attacks on democracy, civil liberties and personal freedoms, including the right to choose your own medical treatment.

Now, the WHO is gearing up to make its pandemic leadership permanent, and to extend it into the health care systems of every nation. “The idea is ‘the principle of health for all’ — universal health care organized by WHO as part of the Great Reset,” Breggin explains.

Pandemic Treaty Is Being Established

May 24, 2021, the European Council announced it supported the establishment of an international Pandemic Treaty, under which the WHO would have the power to replace the constitutions of individual nations with its own constitution under the banner of “pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”14

“The world has already seen how any pandemic emergency, real or concocted, now or in the future, could then justify WHO taking over the entirety of government operations of sovereign nations, robbing all individuals of their freedoms, and fully crushing the democratic republics of the world,” Breggin warns.15

“The spirit of Communism can be felt throughout the document. We are told that the ‘purpose’ of the new strategy will be ‘guided by a spirit of solidarity, anchored in the principles of fairness, inclusion, and transparency.’ Notice, as in all pronouncements by global predators; there is no mention of individual rights, political liberty, or national sovereignty.

The great engine of human progress, human freedom, will be replaced by the great destroyer of humanity, collectivism, under the rule of the elite. Tucked into the report were the real goals … Here are three main purposes or goals of the proposed treaty:

1. response to any future pandemics, in particular by ensuring universal and equitable access to medical solutions, such as vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics

2. a stronger international health framework with the WHO as the coordinating authority on global health matters

3. the ‘One Health’ approach, connecting the health of humans, animals, and our planet

The report adds, ‘More specifically, such an instrument can enhance international cooperation in a number of priority areas, such as surveillance, alerts, and response, but also in general trust in the international health system.’ Clearly, they were building support for Tedros’s January 24, 2022 announcement that WHO would take over the international health care system.”

Even Your Food Will Be Under Their Control

In addition to your finances and your health care, the global cabal also intend to control the food supply and dictate what you can and cannot eat, in the name of combating climate change and saving the planet. The Great Reset16 is indeed the reset of life and society as we know it. Not a single area will be left untouched.

Sustainable development, Agenda 21, the 2030 Agenda, the New Urban Agenda, the Fourth Industrial Revolution,17 “Build Back Better,”18 green economy, the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement and the global warming movement in general all refer to and are part of The Great Reset agenda and its resource-based economics.

The common goal of all these movements and agendas is to capture all of the resources of the world — the ownership of them — for a small global cabal that has the know-how to program the computer systems that will ultimately dictate the lives of everyone.

When they talk about “wealth redistribution,” what they’re really referring to is the redistribution of resources from us to them. The goal is for you to own nothing. Everything you need, from the shirt on your back to a roof over your head, you’ll have to rent from the globalist owners.

Even the food you put into your mouth is planned to be under their complete control. To this end, the WEF has partnered with the EAT Forum, which will set the political agenda for global food production. The EAT Forum was cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, which in turn was established with the financial help of GlaxoSmithKline.

EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments across Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia, and maintains close relationships with imitation meat companies such as Impossible Foods, which was cofunded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.19 Gates has also been gobbling up farmland, becoming one of the largest private land owners in the U.S.20

EAT has developed a “Planetary Health Diet” that is designed to be applied to the global population and entails cutting meat and dairy intake by up to 90%, replacing it largely with foods made in laboratories, along with cereals and oil.21

Not surprisingly, Gates is on record urging Western nations to stop eating real meat altogether,22and articles have been published in the past three years insisting people need to get used to eating bugs and drinking reclaimed sewage,23 all in the name of sustainability and saving the planet.

Being able to see the globalists’ plan as clearly as we can see it now, we have an obligation to future generations to resist, denounce and refuse any and all implementations of the technocratic agenda. We can win, for the simple fact that there are more of us than there are of them, but we have to be vocal about it — we need to join forces and present a united front, resisting peacefully, like the Canadian truckers.

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Notes

1 Breitbart February 21, 2022

2, 3 National Review February 20, 2022

4, 6, 7 The Telegraph June 21, 2021 (Archived)

5 ECB Europa December 10, 2021

8 Life Site News February 21, 2022

9 WEF The Great Reset

10 WEF Digital Identity

11 COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey

12, 13, 14, 15 America Out Loud February 18, 2022

16 Technocracy.news June 25, 2020

17 Gov.uk The Fourth Industrial Revolution

18 UN.org April 22, 2020

19 The Defender November 9, 2020

20 Land Report, January 11, 2021

21 Eatforum.com The Planetary Health Diet

22 Forbes March 22, 2021

23 The Conversation September 1, 2019

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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression, shaming the rest of the world and the UN Security Council for its failure to protect them. It is an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this war before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, and forces hundreds of thousands more to flee. 

But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.

President Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in Eastern Ukraine, with 5,667 violations and 4,093 explosions.

Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, consistent with incoming shell-fire by Ukraine government forces. With nearly 700 OSCE ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as U.S. and British officials claimed.

Whether the shell-fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend the DPR and LPR from those attacks, making it disproportionate and illegal.

In the larger context though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent U.S. Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

In December 2021, after a summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with 9 articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis in Ukraine was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member, which is not on the table in the foreseeable future in any case. But the Biden administration brushed off Russia’s entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations.

So why was negotiating a mutual security treaty so unacceptable that Biden was ready to risk thousands of Ukrainian lives, although not a single American life, rather than attempt to find common ground? What does that say about the relative value that Biden and his colleagues place on American versus Ukrainian lives? And what is this strange position that the United States occupies in today’s world that permits an American president to risk so many Ukrainian lives without asking Americans to share their pain and sacrifice?

The breakdown in U.S. relations with Russia and the failure of Biden’s inflexible brinkmanship precipitated this war, and yet Biden’s policy “externalizes” all the pain and suffering so that Americans can, as another wartime president once said, “go about their business” and keep shopping. America’s European allies, who must now house hundreds of thousands of refugees and face spiraling energy prices, should be wary of falling in line behind this kind of “leadership” before they, too, end up on the front line.

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved, and NATO should have been as well, since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes.

In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial at The Hague for the appalling war crimes he committed under the cover of NATO bombing, including cold-blooded murders of hundreds of prisoners to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in 30 declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.

After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has predictably come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. U.S. nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the U.K. already have their own nuclear arsenals. U.S. “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border.

Another Russian request in its December proposal was for the United States to simply rejoin the 1988 INF Treaty(Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Trump withdrew from the treaty in 2019 on the advice of his National Security Adviser, John Bolton, who also has the scalps of the 1972 ABM Treaty, the 2015 JCPOA with Iran and the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea dangling from his gun-belt.

None of this can justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine.

There are many successful precedents, like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Costa Rica. Or take the case of Vietnam. It has a common border and serious maritime disputes with China, but Vietnam has resisted U.S. efforts to embroil it in its Cold War with China, and remains committed to its long-standing “Four Nos” policy: no military alliances; no affiliation with one country against another; no foreign military bases; and no threats or uses of force.

The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe UN Secretary General Guterres or a UN special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the UN. This will not be easy – one of the still unlearned lessons of other wars is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end a war once it has started.

If and when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow all the people of Donbas, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO members to live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others.

The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti,Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States and its allies have committed in our illegal wars.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from CODEPINK

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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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg.

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From March 10-12, 1972, an estimated 7,000-10,000 African Americans gathered in Gary, Indiana for the National Black Political Convention (NBPC).

The confab was covered extensively in the Black, left and mainstream press due to the significance of the event which brought together a wide spectrum of political currents within the African American community from elected officials, functionaries of the Democratic and Republican parties to leaders of revolutionary grassroots organizations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Congress of African People (CAP).

One account of the event from the Indiana Historical Bureau says:

“Approximately 3,000 official delegates and 7,000 attendees from across the United States met at Gary’s West Side High School from March 10 to March 12. The attendees included a prolific group of Black leaders, such as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Amiri Baraka, Muslim leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz. Organizers sought to create a cohesive political strategy for Black Americans by the convention’s end.”

Gary, an industrial city known for the production of steel, was representative of the then emerging Black political movement sweeping urban areas throughout the United States. In 1967, Carl B. Stokes won the mayoral elections in Cleveland, Ohio against a white opponent who appealed to the racist sentiments of those feeling threatened by the Hough Rebellion of the previous year.

That same year, 1967, Richard Hatcher won the mayoral race in Gary which was by that time a majority African American city. Millions of African Americans between the First and Second World Wars flooded into the cities seeking employment in industry and to escape the violent institutional racism of the Jim Crow South. After World War II, more African American migrated into the urban areas of the North and West while those remaining in the South launched the independent Civil Rights Movement beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), the sit-in movement and the Freedom Rides of 1960-1961.

A new radicalized African American political mood was in evidence by the early years of the 1960s, when organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) took over the leadership of the mass struggle for the elimination of segregation and disenfranchisement. By 1963-64, urban rebellions accelerated making their mark on at least 200 cities from Los Angeles on the west coast to Chicago and Detroit in the Midwest all the way South to Birmingham, Cambridge, Nashville, Atlanta, Miami and Memphis to New Jersey, Philadelphia and New York City in the east.

The gains won through the mass struggles led to legislative reforms with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, adopted as the flames of rebellions across the U.S. raged encompassing broader segments of the Black population.

However, the racist system struck back with repression including the killings of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Clark, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair (four African American girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham), among countless others. Hundreds of members of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa, and numerous organizations, were jailed, imprisoned and driven into exile by the early 1970s. The NBPC represented an effort to realign the African American struggle through the building of broader unity across ideological perspectives.

Outcomes of the NBPC

The strength of the Gary Convention was that it was able to mobilize such a broad-based collection of Black organizational leadership. At the same time, this very important advancement in the overall movement contained the elements which hampered its effectiveness. A myriad of issues and questions were before the African American people in 1972.

Image on the right: Shirley Chisolm Presidential Campaign, 1972 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives, had launched a presidential campaign during the primaries. Chisolm was an advocate of progressive social policies including the full rights for women. Her campaign for the Democratic Party nomination gained significant support including an endorsement from Huey P. Newton, former political prisoner and co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

At the same time, there were numerous organizations which called for the immediate formation of a mass Black political party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. This question was the subject of intense debate and saw formidable opposition from African American elected officials such as Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit and then State Senator Coleman A. Young, who would be elected as the first Black mayor of the City of Detroit the following year of 1973. Resolutions related to the support for an independent party led to the walk out of some of the Michigan delegation including Diggs and Young.

The Indiana Historical Bureau said of the outcomes of the NBPC that:

“After intense debate, a steering committee tentatively adopted a National Black Agenda. The committee officially published the 68-page document on May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday. The resolutions included Black representation in Congress proportionate to the U.S. Black population, a guaranteed minimum income of $6,500 for four-person households, a 50% cut in the defense and space budgets, and an end to national trade with countries that supplied the U.S. drug market. The resolutions, designed to move Black Americans towards ‘self-determination and true independence,’ represented major, yet tenuous compromise among the Black community.”

The aftermath of the NBPC saw the formation of a National Black Political Assembly (NBPA) which held conferences in 1974 and 1976. By 1980, there was a call to transform the NBPA into the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP). This same year saw the eruption of a rebellion in Miami while the failure of the presidency of Jimmy Carter had further alienated many African American activists from the Democratic Party. The disillusionment of African Americans, a key demographic within the electoral framework of Democratic politics along with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran for more than a year, contributed to the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan and the advent of a new era of imperialist militarism, political repression and economic recession.

Although the NBIPP was never able to consolidate into an effective fighting organization for various reasons which extend beyond the scope of this analysis, the presidential primary campaigns of Reverend Jesse Jackson during 1984 and 1988 mobilized African Americans, labor and some elements within the U.S. left into a coalition which was able to raise issues such as plant closings, Palestinian statehood and the liberation of South Africa and Namibia from the apartheid settler colonialism.

Lessons from Gary for Today

At present the legislative agenda of President Joe Biden is stalled within Congress largely due to the obstruction from moderate Democratic lawmakers. The progressive wing of the Democratic House and Senate are at variance with the moderates and conservatives. Republicans within the House and Senate are united in their opposition to all initiatives proposed by any faction of the Democratic Party.

Inflation is escalating rapidly while the social spending aspects of the Biden agenda has been largely abandoned as a legislative measure. While sinking rapidly within the polls, Biden has turned to provoking a military conflict with the Russian Federation over the status of Ukraine and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

A convergence of the burgeoning economic crisis with the prospects for a protracted war in Eastern Europe could result in major setbacks for the Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Such a scenario does not bode well for the African American working class and impoverished.

In similar historical circumstances, African Americans have called their own independent conferences, conventions and congresses. Beginning in 1829 during the period of antebellum enslavement in response to the Ohio Exclusionary laws related to African people, a convention movement arose which lasted through the Civil War until the conclusion of the 19th century.

A resource website on this political history says of the convention movement that:

“Providing a powerful structure and platform for Black organizing, more than 200 state and national Colored Conventions were held between 1830 and the 1890s. Filling churches, city hall buildings, courthouses, lecture halls, and theaters, the well-attended Colored Conventions illustrate the diversity of cultural life and political thought among Black communities and their leaders. The meetings included the most prominent writers, organizers, church leaders, newspaper editors, educators, and entrepreneurs in the canon of early African American leadership—and tens of thousands more whose names went unrecorded. While most delegates were male, Black women participated through their newspaper work, entrepreneurial activism, political commitments, and especially their presence. They embodied the movement’s core values and challenged traditional beliefs about women’s place in public society.”

Although it is difficult to predict which form this independent political tradition will take in the 21st century, undoubtedly African Americans will assess their social situation and move towards new tactics and strategies aimed at achieving full equality and self-determination.

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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: Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher opening the NBPC, March 1972 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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.


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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


 

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media’s most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet’s largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.

Kinzinger’s fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia.” The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”

Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

As I examined in the first part of that video discussion, war propaganda stimulates the most powerful aspects of our psyche, our subconscious, our instinctive drives. It causes us, by design, to abandon reason. It provokes a surge in tribalism, jingoism, moral righteousness and emotionalism: all powerful drives embedded through millennia of evolution. The more unity that emerges in support of an overarching moral narrative, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to critically evaluate it. The more closed the propaganda system is — either because any dissent from it is excluded by brute censorship or so effectively demonized through accusations of treason and disloyalty — the more difficult it is for anyone, all of us, even to recognize one is in the middle of it.

When critical faculties are deliberately turned off based on a belief that absolute moral certainty has been attained, the parts of our brain armed with the capacity of reason are disabled. That is why the leading anti-Russia hawks such as former Obama Ambassador Michael McFaul and others are demanding that no “Putin propagandists” (meaning anyone who diverges from his views of the conflict) even be permitted a platform, and why many are angry that Facebook has not gone far enough by banning many Russian media outlets from advertising or being monetized. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), using the now-standard tactic of government officials dictating to social media companies which content they should and should not allow, announced on Saturday: “I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda.” Suppressing any divergent views or at least conditioning the population to ignore them as treasonous is how propagandistic systems remain strong.

It is genuinely hard to overstate how overwhelming the unity and consensus in U.S. political and media circles is. It is as close to a unanimous and dissent-free discourse as anything in memory, certainly since the days following 9/11. Marco Rubio sounds exactly like Bernie Sanders, and Lindsay Graham has no even minimal divergence from Nancy Pelosi. Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Timesabout the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging. And U.S. public opinion has consequently undergone a radical and rapid change; while recent polling had shown large majorities of Americans opposed to any major U.S. role in Ukraine, a new Gallup poll released on Friday found that “52% of Americans see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests” with almost no partisan division (56% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats), while “85% of Americans now view [Russia] unfavorably while 15% have a positive opinion of it.”

The purpose of these points, and indeed of this article, is not to persuade anyone that they have formed moral, geopolitical and strategic views about Russia and Ukraine that are inaccurate. It is, instead, to highlight what a radically closed and homogenized information system most Americans are consuming. No matter how convinced one is of the righteousness of one’s views on any topic, there should still be a wariness about how easily that righteousness can be exploited to ensure that no dissent is considered or even heard, an awareness of how often such overwhelming societal consensus is manipulated to lead one to believe untrue claims and embrace horribly misguided responses.

To believe that this is a conflict of pure Good versus pure Evil, that Putin bears all blame for the conflict and the U.S., the West, and Ukraine bear none, and that the only way to understand this conflict is through the prism of war criminality and aggression only takes one so far. Such beliefs have limited utility in deciding optimal U.S. behavior and sorting truth from fiction even if they are entirely correct — just as the belief that 9/11 was a moral atrocity and Saddam (or Gaddafi or Assad) was a barbaric tyrant only took one so far. Even with those moral convictions firmly in place, there are still a wide range of vital geopolitical and factual questions that must be considered and freely debated, including:

  1. The severe dangers of unintended escalation with greater U.S. involvement and confrontation toward Russia;
  2. The mammoth instability and risks that would be created by collapsing the Russian economy and/or forcing Putin from power, leaving the world’s largest or second-largest nuclear stockpile to a very uncertain fate;
  3. The ongoing validity of Obama’s long-standing view of Ukraine (echoed by Trump), which persisted even after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 following a referendum, that Ukraine is of vital interest only to Russia and not the U.S., and the U.S. should never risk war with Russia over it;
  4. The bizarre way in which it has become completely taboo and laughable to suggest that NATO expansion to the Russian border and threats to offer Ukraine membership is deeply and genuinely threatening not just to Putin but all Russians, even though that warning has emanated for years from top U.S. officials such as Biden’s current CIA Director William Burns as well as scholars across the political spectrum, including the right-wing realist John Mearsheimer and the leftist Noam Chomsky.
  5. The clearly valid questions regarding actual U.S intentions concerning Ukraine: i.e., that a noble, selfless and benevolent American desire to protect a fledgling democracy against a despotic aggressor may not be the predominant goal. Perhaps it is instead to revitalize support for American imperialism and intervention, as well as faith in and gratitude for the U.S. security and military state (the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer suggested this week that this is the principal outcome in the West of the current conflict). Or the goal may be the re-elevation of Russia as a vital and grave threat to the U.S. (the above polling data suggests this is already happening) that will feed weapons purchases and defense and intelligence budgets for years to come. Or one might see a desire to harm Russia, as vengeance for the perception that Putin helped defeat Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump (that the U.S. is using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” was explicitly stated by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)).Or perhaps the goal is not to “save and protect” Ukraine at all, but to sacrifice itby turning that country into a new Afghanistan, where the U.S. arms a Ukrainian insurgency to ensure that Russia remains stuck in Ukraine fighting and destroying it for years (this scenario was very compellingly laid out in one of the best analyses of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, by Niccolo Soldo, which I cannot recommend highly enough).

    Jeff Rogg, historian of U.S. intelligence and an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Citadel, wrote in The LA Times this week that the CIA has already been training, funding and arming a Ukrainian insurgency, speculating that the model may be the CIA’s backing of the Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan that morphed into Al Qaeda, with the goal being “to weaken Russia over the course of a long insurgency that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as Russian lives, if not more.”

Again, no matter how certain one is about their moral conclusions about this war, these are urgent questions that are not resolved or even necessarily informed by the moral and emotional investment in a particular narrative. Yet when one is trapped inside a system of a complete consensus upheld by a ceaseless wave of reinforcing propaganda, and when any questioning or dissent at all is tantamount to treason or “siding with the enemy,” there is no space for such discussions to occur, especially within our minds. When one is coerced — through emotional tactics and societal inventive — to adhere only to one script, nothing that is outside of that script can be entertained. And that is all by design.

Besides 9/11 and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Americans have been subjected to numerous spates of war propaganda, including in 2011 when then-President Obama finally agreed to order the U.S. to participate in a France/UK-led NATO regime change operation in Libya, as well as throughout the Obama and early Trump years when the CIA was fighting a clandestine and ultimately failed regime change war in Syria, on the same side as Al-Qaeda, to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. In both instances, government/media disinformation and emotional manipulation were pervasive, as it is in every war. But those episodes were not even in the same universe of intensity and ubiquity as what is happening now and what happened after 9/11 — and that matters a great deal for understanding why so many are vulnerable to the machinations of war propaganda without even realizing they are affected by it.

One realization I had for the first time during Russiagate was that history may endlessly repeat itself, but those who have not lived through any such history or paid attention to it previously will not know about it and thus remain most susceptible to revisionism or other tactics of deceit. When Russiagate was first unveiled as a major 2016 campaign theme — through a Clinton campaign commercial filled with dark and sinister music and innuendo masquerading as “questions” about the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin — I had assumed when writing about it for the first time that most Americans, especially those on the left taught to believe that McCarthyism was one of the darkest moments for civil liberties, would instantly understand how aggressively the CIA and FBI disseminate disinformation, how servile corporate media outlets are to those security state agencies, how neocons are always found at the center of such manipulative tactics, and how potent this sort of propaganda is. The common theme is creating a foreign villain said to be of unparalleled evil or at least evil not seen since Hitler, then accusing one’s political adversaries of being enthralled by or captive to them. We have witnessed countless identical cycles throughout U.S history.

But I also quickly realized that millions of Americans — either due to age or previous political indifference — began paying attention to politics for the first time in 2016 due to fear of Trump, and thus knew little to nothing about anything that preceded it. Such people had no defenses against the propaganda narrative and deceitful tactics because, for them, it was all new. They had never experienced it before and thus had no concept of who they were applauding and how such official government/media disinformation campaigns are constructed. Each generation is thus easily programmed and exploited by the same propaganda systems, no matter how discredited they were previously.

Although such episodes are common, one has to travel back to the period of 2001-03, following the 9/11 attack on U.S. soil, and through the invasion of Iraq, in order to find an event that competes with the current moment in terms of emotional intensity and lockstep messaging throughout the West. Comparing that historical episode to now is striking, because the narrative themes deployed then are identical to those now; the very same people who led the construction of that narrative and accompanying rhetorical tactics are the ones playing a similar role now; and the reaction that these themes trigger are virtually indistinguishable.

Many who lived through the enduring trauma and mass rage of 9/11 as an adult need no reminder of what it was like and what it consisted of. But millions of Americans now focused on Ukraine did not live through that. And for many who did, they have, with the passage of two decades, revised or now misremember many of the important details of what took place. It is thus worthwhile to recall the broad strokes of what we were conditioned to believe to see how closely it tracks the consensus framework now.

Both the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq were cast as clear Manichean battles: one of absolute Good fighting absolute Evil. That framework was largely justified through its companion prism: the subsequent War on Terror and specific wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) represented the forces of freedom and democracy (the U.S. and its allies) defending itself against despotism and mad, primitive barbarism. We were attacked not because of decades of intervention and aggression in their part of the world but because they hated us for our freedom. That was all one needed to know: it was a war between enlightened democrats and psychotic savages.

As a result, no nuance was permitted. How can there be room for nuance or even questioning when such clear moral lines emerge? A binary framework was thus imposed: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” decreed President George W. Bush in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Anyone questioning or disputing any part of the narrative or any of the U.S. policies championed in its name stood automatically accused of treason or being on the side of The Terrorists. David Frum, fresh off his job as a White House speechwriter penning Bush’s war speeches, in which Bush proclaimed the U.S. was facing an “Axis of Evil,” published a 2003 article in National Review about right-wing opponents of the invasion of Iraq, aptly titled: “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Go look how cheaply and easily people were accused of being on the side of The Terrorists or traitors for the slightest deviation from the dominant narrative.

David Frum, National Review, Mar. 25, 2003

Like all effective propaganda, the consensus assertions about 9/11 and Iraq had a touchstone to the truth. Indeed, some of the fundamental moral claims were true. The civilian-targeting 9/11 attack was a moral atrocity, and the Taliban and Saddam really were barbaric despots (including when the U.S. had previously supported and funded them). But those moral claims only took one so far: specifically, they did not take one very far at all. Many who enthusiastically embraced those moral propositions ended up also embracing numerous falsehoods emanating from the U.S. Government and loyal media outlets, as well as supporting countless responses that were both morally unjustified and strategically unwise. Polls at the start of the Iraq War showed large majorities in favor of and believing outright falsehoods (such as that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attack), while polls years later revealed a “huge majority” which now views the invasion as a mistake. Similarly, it is now commonplace to hear once-unquestioned policies — from mass NSA spying, to lawless detention, to empowering the CIA to torture, to placing blind faith in claims from intelligence agencies — be declared major mistakes by those who most vocally cheerlead those positions in the early years of the War on Terror.

In other words, correctly apprehending key moral dimensions to the conflict provided no immunity against being propagandized and misled. If anything, the contrary was true: it was precisely that moral zeal that enabled so many people to get so carried away, to be so vulnerable to having their (often-valid) emotions of rage and moral revulsion misdirected into believing falsehoods and cheering for moral atrocities in the name of vengeance or righteous justice. That moral righteousness crowded out the capacity to reason and think critically and unified huge numbers of Americans into herd behavior and group-think that led them to many conclusions which, two decades later, they recognize as wrong.

It should not be difficult, even for those who did not live through those events but who can now look back at what happened, to see the overwhelming similarities between then and now. The role of bin Laden and Saddam — as unhinged, mentally unwell, unrepentant mass murderers and despots, the personification of pure evil — is now occupied by Putin. “Putin is evil. Every American watching what’s happening in Ukraine should know that,” instructed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the author of the virtually identical 9/11 and Iraq morality scripts. Conversely, the U.S. and its allies are the blame-free, morally upright spreaders of freedom, defenders of democracy and faithfully adhering to a rules-based international order.

This exact framework remains in place; only the parties have changed. Now, anyone questioning this narrative in whole or in part, or disputing any of the factual claims being made by the West, or questioning the wisdom or justice of the role the U.S. is playing, is instantly deemed not “on the side of the terrorists” but “on the side of Russia”: either for corrupt monetary reasons or long-hidden and hard-to-explain ideological sympathy for the Kremlin. “There is no excuse for praising or appeasing Putin,” announced Rep. Cheney, by which — like her father before her and McFaul now — she means anyone deviating in any way from the full panoply of U.S. assertions and responses. Wyoming’s vintage neocon also instantly applied this accusatory treason matrix to former President Trump, arguing that he “aids our enemies” and his “interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.”

Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, Feb. 24, 2022

Everyone watching this week-long mauling of dissenters understood the messaging and incentives: either get on board or stay silent lest you be similarly vilified. And that, in turn, meant there were fewer and fewer people willing to publicly question prevailing narratives, which made it in turn far more difficult for anyone else to separate themselves from unified group-think.

One instrument of propaganda that did not exist in 2003 but most certainly does now is social media, and it is hard to overstate how much it is exacerbating all of these pathologies of propaganda. The endless flood of morally righteous messaging, the hunting down of and subsequent mass-attacks on heretics, the barrage of pleasing-but-false stories of bravery and treachery, leave one close to helpless to sort truth from fiction, emotionally manipulative fairy tales from critically scrutinized confirmation. It is hardly novel to observe that social media fosters group-think and in-group dynamics more than virtually any other prior innovation, and it is unsurprising that it has intensified all of these processes.

Another new factor separating the aftermath of 9/11 from the current moment is Russiagate. Starting in mid-2016, the Washington political and media class was obsessed with convincing Americans to view Russia as a grave threat to them and their lives. They created a climate in Washington in which any attempts to forge better relations with the Kremlin or even to open dialogue with Russian diplomats and even just ordinary Russian nationals was depicted as inherently suspect if not criminal. All of that primed American political culture to burst with contempt and rage toward Russia, and once they invaded Ukraine, virtually no effort was needed to direct that long-brewing hostility into an uncontrolled quest for vengeance and destruction.

That is why it is anything but surprising that incredibly dangerous proposals like the one by Rep. Kizinger for deployment of the U.S. military to Ukraine have emerged so quickly. This orgy in high dudgeon of war propaganda, moral righteousness, and a constant flow of disinformation produces a form of collective hysteria and moral panic. In his 1931 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley perfectly described what happens to humans and our reasoning process when we are subsumed by crowd sentiments and dynamics:

Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very ex­citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called “herd-poisoning.” Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in­telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.

We have seen similar outbreaks many times over the last couple of decades, but nothing produces it more assuredly than war sentiments and the tribal loyalties that accompany them. And nothing exacerbates it like the day-long doom scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which so much of the world is currently doing. Social media platforms, by design, enable one to block out all unpleasant information or dissident voices and only feed off content and claims that validate what they wish to believe.

Kinzinger’s call for a US-imposed no-fly zone is far from the only unhinged assertion or claim spewing forth from the U.S. opinion-shaping class. We are also witnessing a radical increase in familiar authoritarian proposals coming from U.S. politicians. Two other members of Congress who are most beloved by the media, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), suggested that all Russians should be immediately deported from the U.S., including Russian students studying at American universities. The rationale is similar to the one that drove FDR’s notorious World War II internment of all people of Japanese descent — citizens or immigrants — in camps: namely, in times of war, all people who come from the villain or enemy country deserve punishment or should be regarded as suspect. A Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen, proposed banning all Russia athletes from entering the U.S.: “No Russian NHL, football, or tennis players so long as the war and claims on Ukrainian territory exist.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), long a vocal advocate of requiring congressional approval for the deployment by the president of military forces to war zones, argued on Friday that Biden’s troop movements to Eastern Europe constitute war decisions that constitutionally necessitate Congressional approval. “President Biden’s unilateral deployment of our Armed Forces to the European theater, where we now know they are in imminent hostilities, triggers the War Powers Act, necessitating that the President report to Congress within 48 hours,” he said. Sen. Lee added: “The Constitution requires that Congress must vote to authorize any use of our Armed Forces in conflict.”

For this simple and basic invocation of Constitutional principles, Lee was widely vilified as a traitor and Russian agent. “Are you running for Senator of Moscow? Because that’s where you belong,” one Democratic Congressional candidate, the self-declared socialist and leftist Joey Palimeno (D-GA), rhetorically asked. Now-perennial independent candidate Evan McMullin, formerly a CIA operative in Syria, dubbed Lee“Moscow Mike” for having raised this constitutional point, claiming he did so not out of conviction but “to distract from the fact that he traveled to Russia and brazenly appeased Vladimir Putin for his own political gain.”

Other than calling Lee a paid Russian agent and traitor, the primary response was the invocation of Bush/Cheney’s broad Article II executive power theories to insist that the president has the unfettered right to order troop deployments except to an active war zone — as if the possibility of engaging Russian forces was not a primary motive for these deployments. Indeed, the Pentagon itself said the troop deployments were to ensure the troops “will be ready if called upon to participate in the NATO Response Force” and that “some of those U.S. personnel may also be called upon to participate in any unilateral actions the U.S. may undertake.” Even if one disagrees with Lee’s broad view of the War Powers Act and the need for Congress to approve any decisions by the president that may embroil the country in a dangerous war, that Lee is a Kremlin agent and a traitor to his country merely for advocating a role for Congress in these highly consequential decisions reflects how intolerant and dissent-prohibiting the climate has already become.

Disinformation and utter hoaxes are now being aggressively spread as well. Both Rep. Kinzinger and Rep. Swalwell ratified and spread the story of the so-called “Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said to have single-handedly shot down six Russian planes. Tales and memes commemorating his heroism viralized on social media, ultimately ratified by these members of Congress and other prominent voices. The problem? It is a complete hoax and scam, concocted through a combination of deep fake videos based on images from a popular video game. Yet to date, few who have spread this fraud have retracted it, while censorship-happy Big Tech corporations have permitted most of these fraudulent posts to remain without a disinformation label on it. We are absolutely at the point — even as demands escalate for systematic censorship by Big Tech of any so-called “pro-Russian” voices — where disinformation and fake news are considered noble provided they advance a pro-Ukrainian narrative.

Western media outlets have also fully embraced their role as war propagandists. They affirm any story provided it advances pro-Ukrainian propaganda without having the slightest idea whether it is true. A charming and inspiring story about a small group of Ukrainian soldiers guarding an installation in a Black Sea island went wildly viral on Saturday and ultimately was affirmed as truth by multiple major Western news outlets. A Russian warship demanded they surrender and, instead, they responded by replying: “fuck you, Russian warship,” their heroic last words before dying while fighting. Ukraine said “it will posthumously honor a group of Ukrainian border guards who were killed defending a tiny island in the Black Sea during a multi-pronged Russian invasion.” Yet there is no evidence at all that they died; the Russian government claims they surrendered, and the Ukrainian military subsequently acknowledged the same possibility.

Obviously, neither the Russian nor Ukrainian versions should be accepted as true without evidence, but the original, pleasing Ukrainian version should not either. The same is true of:

But we are way past the point where anyone cares about what is or is not factually true, including corporate outlets. Any war propaganda — videos, photos, unverified social media posts — that is designed to tug on Western heartstrings for Ukrainians or appear to cast them as brave and noble resistance fighters, or Russians as barbaric but failing mass murderers, gets mindlessly spread all over without the slightest concern for whether it is true. To be on social media or to read coverage from Western news outlets is to place yourself into a relentless vortex of single-minded, dissent-free war propaganda. Indeed, some of the above-referenced stories may turn out to be true, but spreading them before there is any evidence of them is beyond reckless, especially for media outlets whose role is supposed to be the opposite of propagandists.

None of this means the views you may have formed about the war in Ukraine are right or wrong. It is of course possible that the Western consensus is the overwhelmingly accurate one and that the moral framework that has been embraced is the correct prism for understanding this conflict. All sides in war wield propaganda, and that certainly includes the Russians and their allies as well. This article is not intended to urge the adoption of one viewpoint or the other.

It is, instead, intended to urge the recognition of what the effects of being immersed in one-sided, intense and highly emotionalized war propaganda are — effects on your thinking, your reasoning, your willingness to endorse claims or support policies, your comfort with having dissent either banished or inherently legitimized. Precisely because this propaganda has been cultivated over centuries to so powerfully and adeptly manipulate our most visceral reactions, it is something to be resisted even if — perhaps especially if — it is coming from the side or viewpoint you support.

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Locking Down Liberty

February 28th, 2022 by Colin Todhunter

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Remember how the notion of freedom was spun by the ideologues of neoliberalism for decades prior to COVID? The freedom to consume. The freedom to make money. The freedom to be plunged into poverty and debt.      

Platitudes about ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘standing on your own two feet’. A relentless ideological attack on the state and collectivism. Ideologically, at least, the individual and ‘the market’ were paramount. But in reality, of course, there was no genuine rolling back of the state: its machinery was used differently to facilitate the needs of global capital while attacking the labour movement.

In all this ‘freedom’, there was never much talk in the mainstream political and media narrative about the plight of the poor or workers who felt the brutal effects of the brave new world of neoliberal capitalism.

Never sufficient analysis either about offshoring manufacturing and service-sector jobs to cheap labour economies to boost profits. This was merely presented as efficiency and job creation for poorer countries, as if the owners of industry were on some kind of humanitarian mission.

But it was only ever the old colonialist mentality passed off in new clothing.

Today, this mentality manifests by subjecting poorer nations to IMF-World Bank ‘structural adjustment’ directives and beating them into being ‘business friendly’ and compliant with the needs of Western capital. Spin it any way you like, whether ‘foreign direct investment’ or ‘liberalising’ the economy, it amounts to richer countries merely using or loaning back money to the poorer countries (with strings) that they stole from them over the centuries.

Courtesy of lop-sided trade deals, the WTO and the international financial institutions, we see a model of ‘development’ characterised by indebtedness, displaced populations resulting from ‘infrastructure projects’ (to facilitate the needs of capital) and a deliberate running down of indigenous models of agriculture.

There was not much talk about ‘freedom’ in relation to the subsequent state-corporate economic brutality experienced by society’s most marginalised, highlighted for instance by Arundhati Roy in ‘The Ghosts of Capitalism’ – the ‘invisible’ and shoved-aside victims of a rampant neoliberalism, with a good dose of state-backed violence always on hand to secure compliance.

Their ‘freedom’ never amounted to much in the first place.

Economic structural violence waged against people, economies and ecosystems courtesy of elite interests bent on monopolising energy, money, food, land and violence across the globe.

Yet the system now purports to care about the well-being of those it persistently regards as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘economic fodder’. A system that by its very nature concentrates money, control and power at the top of the pyramid.

Consider that prior to COVID, Pfizer was “the least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector in the United States”, according to Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice.

But we are supposed to have faith in Pfizer and disregard its lengthy corporate rap sheet and its unscrupulous profiteering practices regarding its COVID vaccine rollout across the globe. We are supposed to trust its products and its vaccine data that it is trying so hard, with help from the US Food and Drug Administration, to keep from the public.

At the same time, to facilitate uptake of Pfizer’s injections, we hear a lot about ‘collective responsibility’. A much-maligned concept in a dog-eat-dog neoliberal regime. Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and others spin vaccine sceptics’ talk of ‘freedom’ of choice regarding what is allowed to be injected into their own bodies as selfish and the domain of right-wing women haters and fascists.

The right to protest, to free speech, to associate and so forth were (and often continue to be) suspended as people were locked down waiting for ‘the vaccine’ thanks to a virus that mainly targets those over 80 and those with compromised immune systems due to existing (serious) morbidities.

We have seen all manner of state interference in the private lives of citizens over the past two years.

Political leaders like Macron, Trudeau, Biden, Merkel and Arden – the frontline managers and facilitators of private capital – have seemingly become so concerned about the public’s welfare that their freedoms and rights must be trampled on by the state.

Those who demand freedom and have questioned the mainstream COVID narrative have been labelled ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘granny killers’, irresponsible and as prioritising their own selfish needs over those of the collective.

Even those who claim to be of the ‘left’ have become part of the ideological apparatus of the state: joining in the chorus and defending tyranny as well as Big Pharma’s rushed-to-market injections and its right to your body and right to make billions in the process.

Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine brought in $37bn in 2021. Nick Dearden calculates the NHS has paid a mark-up of at least £2bn – six times the cost of the pay rise the UK government agreed to give nurses last year.

Moreover, Dearden argues companies like Pfizer behave more like hedge funds, buying up and controlling other firms and intellectual property, rather than traditional medical research companies.

He says:

“The truth is, they aren’t the sole inventors of the vaccine. That was the work of public money, university research and a much smaller company, Germany’s BioNTech. As one former US government official complained, the fact we call it the ‘Pfizer’ vaccine is ‘the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals’.”

Even though many on the ‘left’ have campaigned against the brutality of capitalism over the years, they bought into the fear propaganda from the start without question, helping to pave the way for pharma’s distorted profits, the destruction of small businesses and the loss of countless livelihoods due to lockdowns.

They stood by and watched the mega rich accrue enormous profits. Research by Oxfam has shown that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between March and December 2020. The world’s 10 richest billionaires collectively saw their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.

While lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses, the winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and an entire panoply of civil rights.

A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) stated that COVID-19 policies had severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which were in emerging and developing countries.

Among the most vulnerable were the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who were working in sectors experiencing major job losses or had seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of these were self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.

For policies that were supposedly brought in to protect health, there has also been immense damage resulting in lengthy non-COVID healthcare waiting lists for all manner of life-threatening diseases and conditions.

A more logical approach to protecting public health would have involved the promotion of a targeted strategy based on risk along with early intervention treatments as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration. But this was not even up for debate. Censorship and smears were the norm.

Locking the global population in their homes, or in places like India compelling millions to walk huge distances or travel in crowded conditions to return to the countryside, until a vaccine was made available smacks of incompetence or worse – a predetermined agenda.

Writing in the Contemporary Voice of Dalit journal (31 October 2021), researchers Krishna Ram and Shivani Yadav note the effects of COVID policies in India:

“The economic tumult caused by the pandemic over the past two years has the potential to double the nation’s poverty… Our calculations show that around 150–199 million additional people will fall under poverty in 2021–2022; a majority of which are from rural areas, owing to the immiserate nature of the rural economy. Further disaggregation reveals that the SC/ST [Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes], casual labour and the self-employed are the most impacted groups.”

It is clear who was influencing the lockdown-COVID public health policy. In a report by Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement, it is described how the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have infiltrated and co-opted key public health institutions at the national level in India, not least the COVID-19 National Task Force.

Tengra says his report has exposed:

“… not just the names of those who are sitting in this task force but also how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine mafia. This task force has been responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatics, dropping ivermectin and hcq from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and a lot more!”

It was fitting that an MP recently asked in Canada’s parliament just who does the government serve: Klaus Schawb and the World Economic Forum (WEF) or Canadian citizens?

A pertinent question. But any enquiry should look beyond the WEF to include the wider digital-financial-industrial complex which has used COVID as cover for bailing out and restructuring capitalism and trying to manage its long-term falling rate of profit.

These issues are at the heart of the ‘Great Reset’ or ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that Klauss Schwab and others talk of. Concepts that – like neoliberal globalisation in the 1980s – are given a positive spin and which supposedly symbolise a brave new techno-utopian future.

The WEF, Big Finance, Big Tech, the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have been heavily promoting the COVID-Great Reset agenda from the start. This has to date resulted in the reinvigoration of an ailing pharma sector with a multi-billion-dollar windfall, the eradication of smaller firms and jobs and the injection of much-needed liquidity into what were by late 2019/early 2020 collapsing financial markets.

Former WEF-sponsored ‘young global leaders’ like Trudeau, Macron, Merkel and Arden rose to the political helm of various countries. Destined for the top, they were groomed for their future role to steer a corporate-led global agenda.

Given AI-related automation combined with the levels of unemployment manufactured via the lockdowns, it is debatable whether a mass labour force and the means to reproduce it (through mass education, healthcare, etc) will still be required.

Today’s ‘global leaders’ will continue to fulfil their roles by managing dissent through mass surveillance and clamping down on civil rights as the effects of inflation (induced by the liquidity injected into the system), joblessness and post-COVID austerity measures kick in.

They will of course still facilitate freedom: that of capital first and foremost.

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 Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Featured image is from OffGuardian


Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read it.

Ukraine Crisis Raises Concern in Arab World Over Wheat Supplies

February 28th, 2022 by Middle East Monitor

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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.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could lead to bread shortages across parts of the Arab world, including war-torn Yemen, where millions are already on the brink of starvation.

According to a special briefing by the US-based Middle East Institute (MEI) earlier this week, “the Ukraine crisis could trigger renewed protests and instability in several MENA countries.”

The region is heavily reliant on wheat supplies from both countries in the conflict, with half of Ukraine’s wheat exports make their way to the Middle East North Africa region and Russia also providing a significant amount of wheat.

“If a war causes disruptions to these supplies, this could hit food import dependent countries like Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, and others hard,” the report added.

“Between rising energy and food prices, the Ukraine crisis could trigger renewed protests and instability in several MENA countries.”

Last year, findings published by the US Department of Agriculture noted that the Middle East imported more than 36 million metric tons of wheat, most of which came from Russia and Ukraine. The region is also forecasted to increase its dependence on foreign grain, exacerbated by below-average rainfall and high temperatures, impacting wheat yields in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

In Yemen, bread is considered a luxury for millions, where the seven-year war has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“Most people can barely afford the basic foods,” and the war in Ukraine will only “make things worse”, Walid Salah, 35, a civil servant in the capital Sanaa, told AFP.

Meanwhile, David Beasley, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) executive director, said the Ukraine-Russia area provides half the agency’s grains. The war, he said, “is going to have a dramatic impact”.

According to the WFP, 12.4 million people in Syria are also struggling with food insecurity, which prior to the 2011 uprising and ensuing civil war, was self-sufficient in meeting the needs of its population but now has to import food, last year importing 1.5 million tonnes of wheat mostly from Russia.

On Thursday, Syria’s Council of Ministers announced that the country will begin rationing its reserves of wheat and other essentials and basic goods, amid shortages caused by the conflict in Ukraine.

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Syria’s envoy to the United Nations Bassam al-Sabbagh accused the United States and other NATO members on 25 February of hindering efforts by the Syrian government to put an end to the 11 year-long war and rebuild the country.

In an address to the UN Security Council, Sabbagh said the occupation of large tracts of Syrian territory by the US perpetuates the activities of the armed groups that are causing instability in the country and the entire region.

“The suffering of the Syrian people continues as a result of the practices of Western countries whose interests and agendas have prevailed over the lives of Syrians and the security and stability of the region,” the Syrian envoy charged.

Sabbagh also slammed the sanctions that the US government has imposed on Damascus. He said such coercive measures have significantly reduced the ability for the Syrian government to access the financial capital needed to rebuild the country and to resettle the millions of people who were displaced by the western-backed insurgency.

He appealed to the UN to speak out against the “blatant violations of international law and the UN Charter” by the US.

Sabbagh emphasized that his country was food self-sufficient before the US illegally wrested control of most of Syria’s wheat producing regions.

Prior to the US occupation, the envoy said, Syria produced over 2.5 million tonnes of wheat per year but is now forced to import most of the wheat needed for domestic consumption.

Washington has deployed its troops across much of eastern and northeastern Syria under the pretext of preventing the oil fields in the region from falling into the hands of ISIS.

Damascus has, however, accused the US of using its occupation to loot and plunder Syrian resources, such as wheat and oil.

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Russophobia in Western Sports Media

February 28th, 2022 by Kim Petersen

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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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Article 33: Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage and reprisals. “No protected person may be punished for any offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. — Fourth Geneva Convention

Rick Westhead of the Canadian sports network, TSN.ca, has presented the opinion of Bruce Kidd, a former Canadian Olympian, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the school’s ombudsperson, advocating that the government of Canada suspend future travel visas to Russian athletes because of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine.

The western legacy media has been conducting its own witch hunt, calling on Russian athletes to denounce their fatherland. Hockey superstar Alexander Ovechkin decried war and was criticized afterward for “deliberately squandering an opportunity to make a real difference in this world” and for his relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russian Alexander Medvedev, the newly ascended number one male tennis player and his compatriot, Andrey Rublev, ranked number seven in the tennis world, were also called onto the media carpet where they stood for peace.

That a sports website can be so opinionated can be shrugged off. But that its senior correspondent, Westhead, and a university professor emeritus, Kidd, would give such a poorly thought out opinion, one that is so morally repulsive, is disappointing. They have succumbed to the blatantly obvious logical fallacy of guilt by association.

Kidd notes that Canada — ignoring that Canada is an apartheid country itself — fought apartheid by banning South African professional golfers and tennis players from competing and training in Canada in 1988. Kidd claims that banning South African athletes was an effective tool in bringing an end to apartheid. Whether or not the ban was successful is besides the point. It is morally wrong.

Preceding the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Bible forcefully argued,

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son. — Ezekiel 18:20

The Russian athletes are not politicians. They do not have a say in the day-to-day decisions of the government. Yet TSN.ca holds that Russian athletes should be banned based on the happenstance of their birth, regardless of their views on the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

There are several other moral quicksands in which Westhead and Kidd sink. Implicit in the argument propounded by TSN.ca and Kidd is that Canada is some paragon of morality. Far from it. That being the case, another piece of biblical wisdom is pertinent. When men, as prescribed by Mosaic law, were poised to stone a woman for adultery Jesus intoned: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7)

COAT (the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade), with an eye to Ukraine, has called upon the Canadian government since last October to cease the funding of groups that glorify Nazi collaborators.

Canada has its own nasty history, past and current. It is a country established through genocide, a genocide that is ongoing. Witness the weaponized gendarmerie of Canada trespassing in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory to raze buildings and arrest Wet’suwet’en defenders and media members. And why? To force through a corporate pipeline despite the unanimous opposition of the hereditary chiefs.

Do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd condemn the great crimes in their backyard and call for the banning of Canadian athletes from competition?

Did TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd call for the banning of Ukrainian athletes while Ukraine was shelling Donbass for the last eight years? Do they even know the history of the region?

Do they know that the United States and NATO shrugged off Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion. That the eastward expansion represents a violated promise of the US secretary-of-state James Baker to USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev to not move one step further eastward? Bear in mind that former president Barack Obama absurdly declared Venezuela a national security threat to the US. Recall that president Ronald Reagan raised the alarm of a Central American threat, saying: “I’m speaking of Nicaragua, a Soviet ally on the American mainland only two hours’ flying time from our own borders.”

Have TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd condemned Israeli war crimes, apartheid, the siege on Gaza, and slow-motion genocide against Palestinians? Have they denounced grave Israeli war crimes against Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians? Have these sports pundits called for a ban on Israeli athletes?

Canada, which occupies First Nation, Inuit, and Michif territory, is a staunch ally of the self-designated Jewish State that also occupies all of historical Palestine, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon?

Does TSN.ca call for the banning of American athletes? In recent times, the US devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria (with the support of Canada). The US occupies an area of Syria, an area of Cuba, Guam, Saipan, and more. Hawai’i was annexed, and there was no referendum by Hawaiians seeking such a union (unlike in Crimea). The continental US represents a colossal genocidal theft by European settlers/colonialists. The military-industrial-governmental complex of the US has been warring around the globe and breaking promises and treaties with Russia. Do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd realize any of this or do they just refuse to denounce this?

Are they aware that the Ukrainian government is a $5 billion US-leveraged coup by Neo-Nazi elements that form part of the government and military in Ukraine?

Having recognized the independence of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia had available the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine used by NATO. Or do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd think this doctrine only applies to western nations? In which case that would only compound the prejudice shown by the TSN.ca talking heads.

Crimes and punishment must not be pick-and-choose affairs. All crimes must be denounced and the punishment meted out must be equitable.

Every side loses in war. But for a government to neglect the security of its territory and citizens, especially as a self-declared foe draws nearer and nearer while arming neighbors in the region, would be a severe dereliction of duty. Russia, which was twice denied NATO membership, made overtures, stated its red lines, sought mutual security guarantees and was pretty much dismissed. Russia was pushed. It is human nature, rightly or wrongly, that when one is pushed to want to push back.

It is hoped that the Russian invasion ends soon with as few casualties as possible, that Ukraine is denazified, and that the US and western world will henceforth realize that western hegemony and bullying will no longer be tolerated in a multi-polar world. It is past time that the US return the militarily occupied Chagos archipelago to the Chagossians, stop stealing Syria’s oil and end its illegal occupation there, stop financing Israeli crimes against Palestinians, stop supporting the Saudi war against Yemen, return the Afghan people’s money to Afghanistan, and have its junior partner in crime, Great Britain, return the gold it confiscated from Venezuela. If so, then a lot of good will have come out of Putin’s steely resolve.

The next step, the ultimate step, is to end war everywhere. The nations of the world must be verifiably disarmed. There are other urgent and important battles to be fought and won. Poverty must be eliminated. The environment must be rehabilitated and stewarded. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases, for which militaries bear a huge responsibility, must be reined in.

Finally, until that glorious day when militaries are no more, let’s not go down the rabbit hole of witch-hunting and penalizing otherwise uninvolved athletes for the decisions of politicians.

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Kim Petersen is a scuba diver and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin during game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Tampa Bay Lightning, May 21, 2018, at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ukraine: The Mess that Nuland Made

February 28th, 2022 by Robert Parry

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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.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


This article was originally published on Consortiumnews in 2015.

As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

To sell this latest neocon-driven “regime change” to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor. For the U.S.-organized propaganda campaign to work, the coup-makers had to wear white hats, not brown shirts.

So, for nearly a year and a half, the West’s mainstream media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, twisted their reporting into all kinds of contortions to avoid telling their readers that the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians.

Azov Battalion members. ( Gianluca Agostini/Wikimedia Commons)

Any mention of that sordid reality was deemed “Russian propaganda” and anyone who spoke this inconvenient truth was a “stooge of Moscow.” It wasn’t until July 7 that the Times admitted the importance of the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists in waging war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. The Times also reported that these far-right forces had been joined by Islamic militants. Some of those jihadists have been called “brothers” of the hyper-brutal Islamic State.

Though the Times sought to spin this remarkable military alliance neo-Nazi militias and Islamic jihadists as a positive, the reality had to be jarring for readers who had bought into the Western propaganda about noble “pro-democracy” forces resisting evil “Russian aggression.”

Perhaps the Times sensed that it could no longer keep the lid on the troubling truth in Ukraine. For weeks, the Right Sektor militias and the neo-Nazi Azov battalion have been warning the civilian government in Kiev that they might turn on it and create a new order more to their liking.

Clashes in the West

Oct. 8, 2014: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service Base in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

Then, on Saturday, violent clashes broke out in the western Ukrainian town of Mukachevo, allegedly over the control of cigarette-smuggling routes. Right Sektor paramilitaries sprayed police officers with bullets from a belt-fed machine gun, and police backed by Ukrainian government troops returned fire. Several deaths and multiple injuries were reported.

Tensions escalated on Monday with President Petro Poroshenko ordering national security forces to disarm “armed cells” of political movements. Meanwhile, the Right Sektor dispatched reinforcements to the area while other militiamen converged on the capital of Kiev.

While President Poroshenko and Right Sektor leader Dmitry Yarosh may succeed in tamping down this latest flare-up of hostilities, they may be only postponing the inevitable: a conflict between the U.S.-backed authorities in Kiev and the neo-Nazis and other right-wing fighters who spearheaded last year’s coup and have been at the front lines of the fighting against ethnic Russian rebels in the east.

The Ukrainian right-wing extremists feel they have carried the heaviest burden in the war against the ethnic Russians and resent the politicians living in the relative safety and comfort of Kiev. In March, Poroshenko also fired thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky as governor of the southeastern province of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Kolomoisky had been the primary benefactor of the Right Sektor militias.

So, as has become apparent across Europe and even in Washington, the Ukraine crisis is spinning out of control, making the State Department’s preferred narrative of the conflict that it’s all Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fault harder and harder to sell.

How Ukraine is supposed to pull itself out of what looks like a death spiral a possible two-front war in the east and the west along with a crashing economy is hard to comprehend. The European Union, confronting budgetary crises over Greece and other EU members, has little money or patience for Ukraine, its neo-Nazis and its socio-political chaos.

America’s neocons at The Washington Post and elsewhere still rant about the need for the Obama administration to sink more billions upon billions of dollars into post-coup Ukraine because it “shares our values.” But that argument, too, is collapsing as Americans see the heart of a racist nationalism beating inside Ukraine’s new order.

Another Neocon ‘Regime Change’

Much of what has happened, of course, was predictable and indeed was predicted, but neocon Nuland couldn’t resist the temptation to pull off a “regime change” that she could call her own.

Her husband (and arch-neocon) Robert Kagan had co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for “regime change” in Iraq, a project that was accomplished in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s invasion.

As with Nuland in Ukraine, Kagan and his fellow neocons thought they could engineer an easy invasion of Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and install some hand-picked client in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi was to be “the guy.” But they failed to take into account the harsh realities of Iraq, such as the fissures between Sunnis and Shiites, exposed by the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

In Ukraine, Nuland and her neocon and liberal-interventionist friends saw the chance to poke Putin in the eye by encouraging violent protests to overthrow Russia-friendly President Yanukovych and put in place a new regime hostile to Moscow.

Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy, explained the plan in a Post op-ed on Sept. 26, 2013. Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

For her part, Nuland passed out cookies to anti-Yanukovych demonstrators at the Maidan square, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” declared “fuck the EU” for its less aggressive approach, and discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leaders of Ukraine should be. “Yats is the guy,” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office.

But that wasn’t enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. With armed thugs patrolling the corridors of power, the final path to “regime change” was clear.

Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime “legitimate.” Nuland’s “guy” Yatsenyuk became prime minister.

While Nuland and her neocon cohorts celebrated, their “regime change” prompted an obvious reaction from Putin, who recognized the strategic threat that this hostile new regime posed to the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. On Feb. 23, he began to take steps to protect those Russian interests.

Ethnic Hatreds

Lviv (west Ukraine) during WWII. Inscription on Soviet poster says: Destroy German Monster. (Unknown/Wikimedia Commons)

What the coup also did was revive long pent-up antagonisms between the ethnic Ukrainians in the west, including elements that had supported Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two, and ethnic Russians in the south and east who feared the anti-Russian sentiments emanating from Kiev.

First, in Crimea and then in the so-called Donbas region, these ethnic Russians, who had been Yanukovych’s political base, resisted what they viewed as the illegitimate overthrow of their elected president. Both areas held referenda seeking separation from Ukraine, a move that Russia accepted in Crimea but resisted with the Donbas.

However, when the Kiev regime announced an “anti-terrorism operation” against the Donbas and dispatched neo-Nazi and other extremist militias to be the tip of the spear, Moscow began quietly assisting the embattled ethnic Russian rebels, a move that Nuland, the Obama administration and the mainstream news media called “Russian aggression.”

Amid the Western hysteria over Russia’s supposedly “imperial designs” and the thorough demonizing of Putin, President Barack Obama essentially authorized a new Cold War against Russia, reflected now in new U.S. strategic planning that could cost the U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars and risk a possible nuclear confrontation.

Yet, despite the extraordinary costs and dangers, Nuland failed to appreciate the practical on-the-ground realities, much as her husband and other neocons did in Iraq. While Nuland got her hand-picked client Yatsenyuk installed and he did oversee a U.S.-demanded “neo-liberal” economic plan slashing pensions, heating assistance and other social programs the chaos that her “regime change” unleashed transformed Ukraine into a financial black hole.

With few prospects for a clear-cut victory over the ethnic Russian resistance in the east and with the neo-Nazi/Islamist militias increasingly restless over the stalemate the chances to restore any meaningful sense of order in the country appear remote. Unemployment is soaring and the government is essentially bankrupt.

The last best hope for some stability may have been the Minsk-2 agreement in February 2015, calling for a federalized system to give the Donbas more autonomy, but Nuland’s Prime Minister Yatsenyuk sabotaged the deal in March by inserting a poison pill that essentially demanded that the ethnic Russian rebels first surrender.

Now, the Ukraine chaos threatens to spiral even further out of control with the neo-Nazis and other right-wing militias supplied with a bounty of weapons to kill ethnic Russians in the east turning on the political leadership in Kiev.

In other words, the neocons have struck again, dreaming up a “regime change” scheme that ignored practical realities, such as ethnic and religious fissures. Then, as the blood flowed and the suffering worsened, the neocons just sought out someone else to blame.

Thus, it seems unlikely that Nuland, regarded by some in Washington as the new “star” in U.S. foreign policy, will be fired for her dangerous incompetence, just as most neocons who authored the Iraq disaster remain “respected” experts employed by major think tanks, given prized space on op-ed pages, and consulted at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

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The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He began Consortium News in 1995.

Featured image: Nuland in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Maidan coup. Image is from The Unz Review

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.


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 condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to be put on “special” alert in response to Western sanctions and what he said were “aggressive statements” made by NATO countries.

“Top officials in NATO’s leading countries have been making aggressive statements against our country. For this reason, I give orders to the defense minister and chief of the General Staff to introduce a special combat service regime in the Russian army’s deference forces,” Putin said, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.

According to RT, Putin activated a “deterrent force,” which includes both nuclear and conventional strategic weapons that can be used offensively or defensively. The Russian military says the force is designed “to deter aggression against Russia and its allies, as well as to defeat the aggressor, including in a war with the use of nuclear weapons.”

Putin’s move comes after the US and its European allies announced that they are expelling some Russian banks from the SWIFT international financial system. The US and its allies have imposed a series of harsh sanctions on Russia since its assault on Ukraine began.

The Western powers are also taking steps to send more weapons to Ukraine to help them fight Russia. On Saturday, the US announced an additional $350 million in military aid for Ukraine. “This package will include further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne, and other threats it is now facing,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on the new aid.

On Friday, the White House asked Congress for $6.4 billion for military and humanitarian aid to give to Ukraine and other countries in the region. At this point, it’s not clear how the US will deliver the aid since Ukraine’s airspace is not safe. Ukraine’s defense minister has suggested shipping the arms to Poland from where they can be taken across the border.

Putin has said that if Ukraine declares neutrality from NATO and agrees to demilitarize that the assault will stop. Ukraine and Russia have reportedly agreed to hold ceasefire talks, although there have been conflicting statements from each side as to where they will be held.

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

Featured image is from Sputnik News/Alexey Nikolsky


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.

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As everyone faces difficult times, the company which deals with the fulfillment of book sales on behalf of Global Research is no longer able to provide its services. We are unfortunately suspending the sale of print books until further notice.

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Today the Threat of Nuclear War Is Real: “Wipe the Soviet Union Off the Map”, 204 Atomic Bombs Against 66 Major Cities, US Nuclear Attack Against USSR Planned During World War II

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, February 27, 2022

The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The dangers of nuclear war are real.  In recent developments, President Putin has “ordered Russian nuclear deterrent forces to be on highest alert in response to “hostile” rhetoric by top NATO officials”.

Russia’s Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist

By South Front, February 27, 2022

Throughout February 26, sporadic exchanges of fire occurred on the streets of Kyiv between groups of residents who had previously been given weapons, including SBU officers, militia from the territorial defense units, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Francis: A Pope of the Poor? A Pope for the Environment? Or a Pope for the Global Elite?

By Matt Smyth, February 27, 2022

It is with Bayer-Monsanto and BP that Francis hopes to save the planet, with Bank of America as well as Big Pharma’s own Merck and Johnson & Johnson he fancies conjuring up an ethical capitalism. Would he be then more like the pope of a new marketing logic?

Ukraine Will Never be the Same Again

By Konrad Rękas, February 27, 2022

First of all, in the current situation, let’s demand seriousness, not cabaret. This is not the time, nor a place, for empty gestures and tearful “declarations of solidarity”. Responsible leadership should focus on the specifics. It is important not only how to de-escalate the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, but also how to limit its scope.

UK Commanders in Ukraine Met Neo-Nazi-linked National Guard to ‘Deepen Military Cooperation’

By Matt Kennard, February 27, 2022

Ukraine’s National Guard says that in meeting last year the UK military agreed to start training its forces, which include a thousand-strong neo-Nazi unit. The UK Ministry of Defence disputes the claim. Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kyiv, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU) last year.

Think Carefully About Accepting the Concept of Vaccine Passports

By Sundance, February 27, 2022

Right now, as you are reading this, under the guise of enhancing your safety, the U.S. federal government is in discussions with multinational corporations and employers of citizens to create a more efficient process for you to register your vaccine compliance.

Video: Herding Human “Livestock” Under Elite Rule: Deep COVID Crisis History

By Kristina Borjesson, Reiner Fuellmich, and Alex Thompson, February 27, 2022

During a grand jury hearing held by an international group of attorneys, including Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, Alex Thompson, a veteran of Britain’s equivalent of the U.S.’s National Security Agency details how London is the power center of the world and how the handful of elites who control it—along with their Wall Street proxies in the U.S.—have been working to gather the world’s population, or “livestock” as they refer to the world’s people, under their rule, using wars, psychological operations and crises (manufactured or otherwise), like the pandemic, to further their one-world government agenda.

The Economic Consequences of the Ukraine War

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, February 27, 2022

A large collapse of financial markets is typically accompanied by a fall in the value of a country’s currency and Russia’s Ruble was no exception. It too fell. A currency collapse means a country must pay more for imports of goods. However, existing import contracts don’t change in price.

Immune to Irony: Nazi Collaborators and Authoritarian Personalities Denounce Russia

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, February 27, 2022

In response to Russia’s recognition of the East Donbass republics, Justin stated “Canada and our allies will defend democracy”. Referring to the wide array of sanctions and Canadian troop deployments to Latvia, Trudeau said “we are taking these actions to stand against totalitarianism.”

Ukraine: Understanding the Concern of the Other

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, February 26, 2022

The roots of the present conflict have to be traced back to the end of the Cold War in 1991. The leader of the Union of  Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia’s predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev felt that if peace is to greet the demise of the Cold War then the military posturing that signified that era should be buried once and for all.

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Video: Ron DeSantis 2022 CPAC Speech

February 28th, 2022 by Ron DeSantis

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#CPAC2022 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke at the 2022 CPAC Conference on February 24, 2022 where he criticized President Joe Biden

The event was held in Orlando, Florida.

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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

A  Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

.
***

 

With Kyiv’s refusal to implement the Minsk agreement, coupled with threats of restarting a nuclear program from a production facility in the city of Dnipro, Russia lost patience with protracted negotiations that did not lead to a resolution on Ukraine’s NATO membership or resolve the situation in Donbass after eight years. Moscow then took the drastic step of pre-emptively striking Ukraine’s military capabilities to ensure the security of Russia and Donbass. Such an action could open the way for Turkey to reconcile with Washington after estrangement following Joe Biden’s ascendency to the White House.

Russian strikes reportedly destroyed Ukraine’s fleet of Bayraktar drones, something that will surely anger the Turkish military industrial complex and war hawks in Ankara.

As recently as February 3, Ankara and Kyiv agreed to co-produce the Turkish-made drone at a production site in Ukraine. Ukrainian Defense Minister Olesii Reznikov told reporters in Kyiv at the time that the coproduction compound would also include a training center where Ukrainian pilots would be trained. This agreement comes as in September last year, the Ukrainian government announced that it was planning to buy 24 more Turkish drones.

Reznikov said that the coproduced drones would be dubbed the Turkish-Ukrainian Bayraktar. However, it appears that hopes for the Turkish-Ukrainian Bayraktar were dashed even before they could be mass produced as Russian forces allegedly destroyed the production facility in Ukraine.

It is recalled that the distribution of Bayraktar drones to Russia’s borders were welcomed by the US and it was naively expected that it would be a gamechanger or tip the balance of power. In one instance, Senior Hudson Institution fellow Michael Doran audaciously tweeted in May 2021 that: “Turkish drones are slowly beginning to surround Russia. Ukraine and Poland to the west, Turkey and Azerbaijan to the south and possibly Kazakhstan to the east. That’s how you contain Russia.”

The prevailing idea was that because of the success of Bayraktar drones against impoverished militias from Ethiopia or a country like Armenia, whose population is four times smaller then Moscow’s alone, it would be replicated against the Russian military, which is ranked second out of the 140 countries considered in the annual Global Fire Power review. Russia achieved a “perfect score” of 0.0000 according to their 2022 index.

According to Dr Spyros Plakoudas, a professor on security studies at Rabdan Academy, Turkish-Ukrainian drones “were destroyed on the ground most likely. The Russian military forces targeted not only the bases of the Bayraktar but also the factory of Motor Sich (supplier of the engines for Bayraktar and Akinji UAVs).”

Effectively the Russian military destroyed in a single night the Turkish-Ukrainian coproduction that was many years in the making. For now, it is likely that Ankara will remain silent on the destruction of its coproduction with Ukraine, including the drones, as the Bayraktar failure to defend Ukraine damages the reputation of Turkey’s military industrial complex. It is reminded that this author received a seize and desist order or face a Turkish court for just merely publishing images of destroyed Turkish drones in Libya.

None-the-less, Ukraine is still pinning its hopes on Turkey to reverse Russia’s operation. Ukraine’s Ambassador to Ankara Vasyl Bodnar personally relayed to the Turkish Foreign Ministry the request to close “the Dardanelles and Bosporus for Russian ships.”

According to the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey has control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits leading from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. The Montreux Convention allows Black Sea states unlimited access to the Black Sea but imposes strict limitations on naval vessels from other states. Restricting Russian warships will inevitably lead to a major crisis as Moscow will certainly not tolerate being locked in the Black Sea and its Mediterranean fleet being isolated.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hypocritically described Russia’s operation “contrary to international law” and a “heavy blow to the peace, tranquillity and stability of the region.” Ankara justifies its occupation of northern Cyprus and Syria for lesser pretexts, and it could be assumed that if Greece or Syria were to state its goal of acquiring nuclear weapons, Turkey’s response would be just as proportionate as Moscow’s.

Given Turkey’s isolation from the West, Ankara could use the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to reconcile with the US. The Turkish economy is under huge strain, something that has plummeted Erdoğan’s popularity, and although Turkey is unlikely to close the Straits to Russian ships, using this as a threat could be the first step in reconciliation with Washington.

It is not forgotten that Ankara continues to make fake allegations of Russia’s persecution of Crimean Tartars, and over the course of the war, we could see Turkey advocating for Turkic Tartars in Ukraine as another way to pressure Moscow.

Although Turkey has fostered areas of close cooperation with Russia, such as building nuclear plants and the S-400 deal, Moscow and Ankara are not strategic allies.

However, Ukraine and Turkey certainly are strategic allies, and if Ankara is given an opportunity to reconcile with the West by strongly supporting Kyiv against Moscow, then it may certainly take it.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

This article was first published almost eight years ago on May 4, 2014, less than three months after the February 2014.  EuroMaidan.

This is what I wrote eight years ago:

“The killings of civilians in Eastern and South Eastern Ukraine by Neo-Nazi mobs and members of the civilian militia opens up the possibility of a broader conflict within Ukraine, which could potentially lead to escalation. Moreover, prevailing divisions within Ukraine’s  armed forces could lead to military action directed towards unseating the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime.

Known and documented, escalation is part of a longstanding scenario of military confrontation directed against the Russian Federation”

Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

We must understand the history of the Ukraine crisis and the role of  Neo-Nazi mobs which have been supported by US-NATO.

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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

The US-NATO sponsored Kiev coalition government is responsible for the killings perpetrated by Neo-Nazi Right Sector mobs and security forces in Odessa in which at least 43 people were killed. 

In Odessa, Right Sector thugs set fire to the city’s Trade Union building leading to countless deaths of innocent civilians who were burnt alive within the building which had been set ablaze.

“Such actions are reminiscent of the crimes of the Nazis,” said Russia’s Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin.

The “international community” has turned a blind eye, the Western media has described the Neo-Nazi Brown shirts as “freedom fighters”. In the words of Eric Sommers:

May 2, 2014 –  the date that fascist forces supported by the U.S. government attacked and murdered helpless civilians in the Ukraine – is a day which will live in infamy”. 

In recent developments, Obama has granted full support to the crackdown on so-called “pro-Russian” activists. This movement against America’s fascist regime in Kiev is widespread. It is not limited to “ethnic Russians” as conveyed by the media. The leaders of this movement are Ukrainians.

The Neo-Nazi mobs bear the hallmarks of  US sponsored terrorism (e.g Syria) trained to commit atrocities against civilians.  America’s Neo-Nazi Government in Kiev is a reality. Confirmed by Germany’s Bild: “Dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government”

“Citing unnamed German security sources, Bild am Sonntag said the CIA and FBI agents were helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure.”

Escalation

The killings of civilians in Eastern and South Eastern Ukraine by Neo-Nazi mobs and members of the civilian militia opens up the possibility of a broader conflict within Ukraine, which could potentially lead to escalation. Moreover, prevailing divisions within Ukraine’s  armed forces could lead to military action directed towards unseating the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime.

Known and documented, escalation is part of a longstanding scenario of military confrontation directed against the Russian Federation.

“The Anti-Terrorist Operation”

The killings are part of the so-called “anti-terrorist operation” initiated by the Kiev government with the support of the Pentagon.

The “anti-terrorist operation” is coordinated by the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU). (Рада національної безпеки і оборони України), which is controlled by Svoboda and Right Sector. Dmytro Yarosh, Neo-Nazi leader of the Right Sector delegation in the parliament, oversees the National Guard, a loyal civilian militia created in March with the support of Western military advisers. Paramilitary training of the National Guard commenced in mid-March, north of Kiev.

While the media has presented the crisis as a confrontation between “pro-Russian” and “Ukrainian nationalists”, the grassroots movement in Eastern Ukraine has widespread support. It is largely directed against the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime supported by the West.

The National Guard

In the wake of the Coup, divisions have emerged within Ukraine’s regular military forces and police, which “can not be trusted” in carrying out an “anti-terrorist operation” on behalf of the Kiev regime directed against civilians:

Concerns over the loyalty of the Ukrainian army and security agencies have pushed Kiev to start forming an additional armed branch, which it will fully control.

The National Guard is designed to be 60,000-strong and completely independent from the country’s military and police.

Recruitment across Ukraine began on March 13, with around 20,000 people already joining the new uniformed service. RT

In eastern Ukraine, the National Guard has been given the mandate to “reinforce regular military units defending against a feared Russian invasion… it it is intended to act as a counterinsurgency force.”

Members of this civilian militia operating alongside Neo-Nazi mobs have been set loose in Eastern Ukraine and Odessa.

Right Sector can be identified by its members openly wearing Nazi insignia, as well as carrying crimson and black banners. Mobs supporting the Svoboda party are also present among recent clashes, wearing yellow armbands with the Nazi wolfangel symbol upon them. Odessa Massacre Pushes Ukraine to the Edge. Towards a Larger Destructive Conflict? By Tony Cartalucci, May 03, 2014

The actions of the National Guard are coordinated by the RNBOU. In turn, the riot police and units of the armed forces are also overseen by RBOU, which is controlled by the two Neo-Nazi parties.

These killings of civilians are part of a carefully planned military agenda involving both the National Guard as well organized armed Neo-Nazi mobs, casually described by the media as pro-Ukrainian activists. These are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance.  The Odessa killings bear the fingerprints of a US-NATO led intelligence operation, with both National Guard and Right Sector militants trained in paramilitary combat skills including the killings of innocent civilians.

Ironically, the Israeli media, while largely supporting the Kiev regime, has tacitly acknowledged that the threat of civil war emanates from the Neo-Nazi elements within the government: “Neo-Nazi Militia Leader Threatens ‘Civil War'” according to Israel National News.

Meanwhile, NATO has scheduled military exercises in Poland “as part of NATO reassurance measures in response to the Ukraine crisis”.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has pointed to an extensive and unprecedented buildup of NATO forces within proximity of Russia’s  borders.

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Russia’s Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist

February 27th, 2022 by South Front

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***

What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Throughout February 26, sporadic exchanges of fire occurred on the streets of Kyiv between groups of residents who had previously been given weapons, including SBU officers, militia from the territorial defense units, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). The armed groups have no system of identification of their friends or foes. The actions of armed looters and criminal gangs instigate the chaos. Dozens of civilian casualties are reported as a result of such exchanges of fire.

Russian forces near Kiev:

Ukrainian policemen detained an SBU employee

In the first half of the day, the large settlement of Stanytsia Luhanska came under the control of LPR forces. Along with Stanytsia Luhanska, the LPR units occupied Krymskoye and Markovka in the same direction. However, it was not possible to pass through the AFU units at their positions north of Luhansk. No breakthroughs of the LPR units succeeded. The AFU withdrew its troops from the Starobelsk and will now be able to engage them to stabilize the front line near Severodonetsk and Izyum.

The LPR corps did not receive the necessary support from the Russian Armed Forces to accomplish the constraining offensive task. This significant miscalculation by the Russian command may lead to a change in the situation in other parts of the front.

War In Ukraine Day 3: Russia's Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist (Videos 18+)

The DPR People’s Militia took control of Novoapostolovka, 6 km east of Volnovakha, and other locations in the vicinity of Volnovakha. At the same time, the successes of DPR and Russian forces in this direction are purely tactical in nature. Volnovakha has not been taken, and they have not even been able to get close to it.

War In Ukraine Day 3: Russia's Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist (Videos 18+)

War In Ukraine Day 3: Russia's Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist (Videos 18+)

Despite the continuing offensive of the DPR units in the Mariupol direction and the occupation of Pavlopol and Pischevik, there is no “blockade” of Mariupol yet. The information on the complete blockade of the city does not correspond to the reality as on 8 p.m. local time. The Ukrainian units are resisting relatively successfully and in an organized manner, which threatens the likelihood of a breakthrough from the encirclement if the “Crimean” group’s offensive slows down.

The exit of civilians from Mariupol is blocked by fighters of nationalist battalions. There is video evidence of civilians being shot, when they were trying to leave the city, including women and children.

There are battles with the use of MLRS, artillery and tanks in the Kharkiv direction. This is currently the most difficult battlefield for the Russian Federation. The Russian Armed Forces suffered significant losses there, and several columns of equipment were destroyed. Sources familiar with the situation near Kharkiv report that there is poor coordination of the Russian units, communication failures and errors of command.

By the afternoon of February 26, it became known that the AFU had regained control of Kherson. In the afternoon, fighting in the outskirts of the city continued.

Near the city of Zhytomyr, the AFU air defense forces reportedly shot down a Russian Air Force aircraft.

In turn, over the Chernihiv region Russian air defense shot down 2 Bayraktars.

The AFU blew up a bridge between the Odessa and Mykolaiv regions. On the evening of February 26, Russian units began to enter Nikolaev.

The Russian military is strengthening its position in Melitopol, Zaporizhia region. The city of Melitopol is completely under Russian control. In this direction, the Russian grouping is developing success in the direction of Molochansk and Tokmak, as well as in the direction of Mariupol. Near Molochansk, an AFU column was destroyed. At the same time, the advancing Russian units encounter strong resistance.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported that 16 Ukrainian naval boats, using “swarm tactics”, attempted yesterday to attack Russian Black Sea Fleet ships, which had evacuated 82 surrendered Ukrainian servicemen from Zmeiniy Island.

Part of the attacking boats acted under the cover of civilian vessels. The purpose of the attack was primarily to retaliate against the laid down soldiers and to accuse the Russian army of destroying prisoners, the report said. Six Ukrainian boats were destroyed. None of the 82 Ukrainian servicemen from Snake Island were injured.

When the Ukrainian boats attacked the Russian ships near the Snake Island, the US strategic drones RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-9A Ripper were barreling over the area of provocation. It is highly probable that it was the American drones that guided the Ukrainian boats to the ships of the Russian fleet.

War In Ukraine Day 3: Russia's Advance Slowed Down. Ukrainian Forces Resist (Videos 18+)

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Pope Francis. A pope of rupture. A pope for ecology. Inimical to capitalism, but compassionate to the poor and the migrant.

The gay friendly pope. Lenient with divorcees, but hostile to traditionalists and conservatives.

The reformer of the corrupt Roman curia, the destroyer of sexual abuse perpetrated by clerics…

Or rather the pope of paradoxes?

It is with Bayer-Monsanto and BP that Francis hopes to save the planet, with Bank of America as well as Big Pharma’s own Merck and Johnson & Johnson he fancies conjuring up an ethical capitalism.

Would he be then more like the pope of a new marketing logic?

As it happens, it is precisely in the name of defending the environment, inclusivity, equity or social justice, that the corporate ‘stakeholders’ of the global governance are trying to enforce their agenda — which is nothing less than converting the whole planet and every human dwelling on its surface as assets tradable on the stock market. 

Bergoglio, in that respect, is a case study

In the wake of Davos’ World Economic Forum (WEF), he has restructured the Vatican as a spokesperson of the global governance.

Meanwhile, the policymakers of this very governance, since they are no longer willing to exploit the consumerist lust for happiness of the mass, but would now rather bet on coercion, have wrought a new marketing strategy.

They hide their old endless yearning for power behind a fresh storytelling: the need to part radically with individualistic, energy intensive, neoliberal capitalism. The global elite accumulates all the goods they are still short of, confiscates civil liberties and concentrates all the power in its own hands, however this coup is staged within a new narrative concerned about climate change and biodiversity, dedicated to the common good, hostile to individual freedom, and negative when it comes to free market. Otherwise stated: communitarian. As a matter of fact, Francis’ message to the world epitomizes this new kind of ‘responsible capitalism’ PR. To every single catchword.

The pope of lockdowns, contact tracking, forced medical experiments and segregation

Pope Francis emerged, at the end of winter 2020, as one of the major public voices in favor of the so-called sanitary restrictions that were implemented around the globe at the time by national public health agencies and governments, in accordance with the WHO’s guidance.

When, to the great dismay of many Catholics, governments began to outlaw religious gatherings, the pope didn’t lose time to add all his own clout to these policies.

For the first time in history, a Successor of Peter, together in this with the secular powers, forbad Catholics to go to Mass, nor to any other ceremony, even Easter Vigil, calling for people to stay ‘obedient’ to their governments’ lockdown measures.

The few bishops, such as Bp Schneider, who dared to oppose these restrictions would get scolded or ignored —as they were conservatives whose words were easy to spurn in the eyes of mainstream media.

For instance, Abp Viganò was quick to expose publicly this collusion between the present papacy and the corporate global governance, but mainstream medias made sure his message wouldn’t get through.

His Polish predecessor’s favorite phrase had been ‘Be not afraid’, but the Argentinian pope had no qualm joining his voice to the choir of all those who sung, like the former British health secretary Hancock or his French counterpart Véran, the antiphon composed by ‘health experts’: Be afraid! An antiphon which verse could have been: Until we have a vaccine, we have no other option to curb the infection rate than XI Jinping’s brand-new approach.

In November 2020, Francis took upon himself to defend the Chinese tactic from the general public’s skepticism in the so very consensual New York Times:

‘As if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom!’ People are stuck in home detention, families can’t be reunited, collective rites are banished, elderlies die in isolation, family business are wrecked, thousands of youngsters are pushed to commit suicide, but it’s for their own good. The few governments that dare not to give in to panic, and would not comply with the directives from the CCP and the WHO, were severely chastised by Bergoglio as: ‘governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences.’

Since then, he has become the staunch advocate of the universal genetic experimentation campaign known as vaccination.

Not a word on the success of early treatments trialed in poor countries. Not a word on the extremely low lethality of SARS-CoV2.

And, of course, not a word on the highly experimental nature of the injections concocted by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson.

Again, Bergoglio falters not one iota from the official narrative relentlessly hammered within the mainstream medias: the world is confronted with a daunting threat; stay home or at least practice ‘social distancing’, abide contact tracking and wear a mask; universal vaccination is the one and only road to salvation.

In his interview book Oltre la tempesta, Francis, along with MSM and politicians, preaches the public to ‘Believe in science.’ The Successor of Peter sets his faith and hope into the triumphant announcements of Pfizer or Moderna, just as his predecessors would have done with the articles of the Christian Creed: ‘We need to regain our hope and faith in science today: thanks to the vaccine, we shall slowly find back our way to the light.’

We cannot, even for a second, presume that he chose this wording ‘faith and hope’ by accident. Out of the mouth of a pope, such words can only refer to the first two Christian virtues known as the theological virtues.

Francis exerts all his clout to foster the global policy implemented by (more or less) all the G20 governments (and quite a few more). Like the other heads of state, he wishes to enforce on every human a genetic experimentation, be that through marketing, blackmail or simple coercion.

In a famous video, the pope doesn’t refrain from describing the injection as a ‘moral duty’, and even as an ‘act of love’ (the third theological virtue, as it happens). The potential dangerousness of the said injections doesn’t seem to worry him in the least. Nor what the outcome might be for the children, since he wishes to see them all getting the injection, even the very young ones. And the Vatican has now a vaccine mandate.

Even more surprising: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith —the former Holy Inquisition— published a document in order to remove any reluctance the faithful might have felt to the idea of being injected with a product developed from cells derived from aborted human fetuses. Rome, thus, and all the episcopal conferences in the rest of the world, in order to conform with the official vaccinal orthodoxy preached by the likes of Bill Gates, did not back down from breaching a two thousand years taboo of Catholic orthodoxy on abortion. Because of the public health emergency. Again, Francis had only to deal with a handful of dissenting bishops.

It is no surprise then that Francis is very much in favor of the health passport. He imposed the said passeport within the Vatican territory and within some seminaries. Furthermore, as I mentioned, the genetic experimental injection is now compulsory at the Vatican. In its wake, some zealous dioceses, notably in Canada, have begun to require proof of ‘vaccination’ from churchgoers. The blackmail, violation of privacy, digital universal surveillance and social segregation that the health passport implies don’t seem to bother very much our Argentinian pontiff.

A pope to the global partnership

Is this simply another example of an institution swimming with the stream? After all, the pope is merely singing the same tune as all the other Western heads of state. But there is more to it: Francis Bergoglio sees himself as an active partner of the great social and economic upheaval instigated by the global governance in the wake of the CoVid crisis, and advertised by the WEF under the ‘Great Reset’ brand name.

As it happens, this global governance is supposed to gather the world’s public and private ‘stakeholders’ inside a ‘partnership’. The latter, which is more like a subservience of the state to the corporate global elite, is meant to allow the technocratic managerial ruling class to decide the planet’s future afar from any democratic process. This is what they call the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP or G3P).

‘Stakeholder capitalists’ as they fancy calling themselves represent the senior partners. Basically, these are mainly the financial and Info Tech complex, that is to say the finance industry (BlackRock, Vanguard and the SIFI international investment banks) in collusion with Info Tech (Big Tech), under the clout of the central banks (BIS, Fed, ECB and BoE), while good old Big Oil carries on standing in the background. All of those consider themselves to be responsible for global public common good in a decisive and vital way.

These CEOs and chairmen are the real policymakers.

The junior partners are the governments and their respective state apparatus (with the exception of China which holds a specific position in the food chain). States are some kind of ‘middle-management’ to the global corporate oligopoly… The global governance also relies heavily on international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO or OECD, NGOs such as the WHO, and, of course, the main private NPOs such as the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust or Rockefeller Foundation… 

And then come the stakeholders’ global assemblies (for want of a better word), among which the Vatican looks forward to hold rank. The task of these particular NPOs is to think over the agenda conducted by the senior partners, and to coordinate the decisions of those in charge of implementing the policies derived from this agenda. Right now, the main one is undoubtedly the World Economic Forum (WEF), whose lifelong chairman Klaus Schwab managed over time the Davos Forum to become the inescapable ‘hub’ of the said global partnership. Contrarily to the low-profile clubs such as the central banker’s Group of Thirty, the public-private Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission, or the older Chatham House and Council for Foreign Relation, the WEF takes on with a lot of publicity the mission which it is endowed with, by virtue of the stakeholders it serves.

The global governance does not need to hide any longer. Actually, the WEF is in charge of its public relation, and is therefore at the helm of a huge marketing campaign designed to push ‘civil society’ to welcome the governance new policies: the Great Reset and the subsequent 4th Industrial Revolution. Upon the wreckages left by the COVID crisis and thanks to the narrow ‘window of opportunity’ the latter offers, stakeholder capitalists will be able to implement a new ‘responsible capitalism’ transcending both Keynesianism and Neoliberalism. Or so they say.

This glorious future, dreamed by the stakeholders for ‘those who are nothing’, as French president and WEF’s Young Global Leaders Macron likes to say, is genially described by WEF own Ida Auken now famous words as an era where you ‘own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better’

(https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-own-nothing-have-no-privacy-and-life-has-never-been-better-ee2eed62f710).

Such a paradisiac lifestyle will be generously endowed to the plebeians by the great financial cartel in control of the multinational corporations’ oligopoly.

The latter will exploit a global captive market, after the planned disappearance of most of the independent small companies. Such an absolute concentration of wealth and power in the hand of the technocratic elite will be achieved for good when fully controlled digital currencies, digitalization of manufactured objects (IoT: Internet of Things) and digitalization of human activities (IoB: Internet of Bodies) are implemented, allowing for continuous human data-mining through blockchain technology.

That’s why this new era will entail the complete ending of our privacy to the benefit of total digital surveillance. In this ideal future, humans will be locked up in ‘smart —but sustainable— cities’ to fight climate change and defend biodiversity. They will eat synthetic but eco-responsible food (produced by our eco-friendly agro-business giants), and they will welcome the modifications allowing them to become ‘augmented’…

This planetary coup, which could also be summarized as the grab and monetization of every natural good, is to be rolled out —needless to say— for ‘our own good.’ Hence, the governances’ insistence on establishing a responsible, ethical net-zero, ‘green’ capitalism, willing to give everyone its chance in life, and ready to offer optimal health for everyone. This is how the gigantic financial and industrial corporations, whose infinite greed has so for made such a good job at methodically destroying the planet and ruin our health, intend to seize —so they are better protected of course— the last ‘assets’ (as they call them) that escape them (green plan to transform the global financial system). Our bodies, our freedoms and the ‘commons’…

Well, the Vatican, as I mentioned, is really keen to hold its rank among the stakeholders’ global assemblies, under the aegis of the financial titans such as BlackRock, along with the WEF or the Chatham House. But with a subtle ‘religious’ and ethical dimension adorned by a venerable heritage. Such a prestigious patina is more than ‘bankable’ in the eyes of all these technocrats standing on the cutting edge of modernity. Very much like the ‘Mindfull Meditation’ popularized by Jon Kabta Zinn, since blessed by the Davos managerial elite. Francis is able to grant the latter an ethical guarantee that is both televisual and ancient. 

These are assets the global governance is not willing to disdain, just as much as it doesn’t disdain the prestige of showbiz celebrities. Francis doesn’t quite compare with Davos’ figures such as Leonardo Di Caprio or Greta Thunberg, but he enjoys some kind of planetary popularity, notably outside his Church. To be sure, Catholicism is going through a sharp decline, even in its African or Latin-American past strongholds, within which Evangelical Churches are leaving deep dents. However, the pope remains the one and only religious leader whose clout extends to the entire world. No other religion is able to boast about such a global leadership. Thanks to an amiable papacy, the global governance is able to reach out to the entire world from the height of the See of Peter (and at least to what remains of the Catholic flock). I bet Klaus Schwab, who sees himself as the vicar of the world elite’s parish, appreciates.

The pope of the Great Reset

In addition to his role as a moral guarantee, Francis — but not quite as raucously — plays the same part in the game as poor Greta Thunberg with whom the Davos Forum likes to show up. In the same fashion as her, the present pope is a staunch critic of the actual economic system, and a champion for a net-zero sustainable world. As I mentioned, this is precisely the kind of narrative that the global policymakers, such as  BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, have decided to highjack in order to sell us the great transformation they wish to implement.

Unsurprisingly, the Vatican is tightly linked with the international financial world: since 2006, the APSA (Amministrazione del Patrimonio della Sede Apostolica, the entity in charge of managing the Vatican’s huge stock exchange and real estate portfolios) could rely on Peter Sutherland as a Special Advisor. A loud champion of the ‘open border’ policy, he was also given to preside over the International Catholic Commission on Migrations from 2015 to his death in 2018. This father of globalisation was the GATT’s former chairman, then the WTO’s co-founder, but also a chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs, and needless to say a member of the WEF’s Foundation Board, among many other things… 

Similarly, in 2021, Pope Francis appointed a WEF’s Agenda Contributor, the very Malthusian economist Jeffrey Sachs, to the same Pontifical Academy of Social Science (Jeffrey Sachs who happens to be the director of the Lancet’s Committee on CoViD and also to be a friend of Peter Daszak chair of Ecohealth-Alliance, whom Sachs nominated at the head of the Lancet commission on the origins of the pandemic, the same Daszak who supervised the financing of the coronavirus’ ‘Gain of Function’ research in Wuhan, because it’s indeed a small world).

As for Francis himself, the WEF was able to make use of his planetary image, since Francis sent no less than four times a message to the annual Davos Summit. Furthermore, a roundtable is presided at Davos by a Vatican delegate every year. 

Again, he appears to be a faithful spokesperson of the WEF’s storytelling. He hopes to be one of the communicators of the great transition packaged by Klaus Schwab under the ‘Great Reset’ brand. The introduction of the encyclical Fratelli Tutti (October 2020) is quite telling in this respect:

‘…the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities. Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident. For all our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality’.

According to Bergoglio, the crucial element of this mutation is precisely the establishment of such a global public-private partnership governance. In his 2021 message to the World Bank and IMF, framed with all the communitarian pathos, he states that the present genetic experimentation rollout opens a perfect window to this global partnership (devoid of too many democratic constraints):

‘we especially need a justly financed vaccine solidarity, for we cannot allow the law of the marketplace to take precedence over the law of love and the health of all.

“Here, I reiterate my call to government leaders, businesses and international organizations to work together in providing vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy (Urbi et Orbi Message, Christmas Day 2020). It is my hope that in these days your formal deliberations and your personal encounters will bear much fruit for the discernment of wise solutions for a more inclusive and sustainable future.  A future where finance is at the service of the common good, where the vulnerable and the marginalized are placed at the center, and where the earth, our common home, is well cared for.’

It is a leitmotif. John XXIII (encyclical Pacem in terris), the Second Vatican Council (Constitution Gaudium et spes), and also Benedict XVI (encyclical Caritas in veritate) all shared the belief that there is ‘urgent need of a true world political authority’ (Caritas in veritate § 67).

However, Bergoglio, in his encyclical Laudato Si’ of 2015, or in his message to the UN the same year For an Integral Ecology, relentlessly calls upon a stronger global governance, notably in face of climate change. This call to policymakers for a mobilization against global warming is an aspect of a more general denunciation of free market economy, along with the consumerism and commercial competition that are integral part of it. Again, this ‘progressive’ narrative is fully in line with the global elite’s agenda: consumerism and competition do not fit with a captive market in the hands of an oligopoly; while the climate or infectious threats that are supposed to be our current nemesis are the closing stage of the Westphalian nation-states’ history.

Quite logically, Francis calls upon the birth of a new world order out of the ruins left by the ‘pandemic’:

‘Let us all keep in mind that there is something worse than this crisis: the drama of wasting it. We cannot emerge from a crisis the same as before: we either come out better or we come out worse.’

It is difficult to fail to recognize the now familiar storytelling of the WEF’s chairman Klaus Schwab

‘The pandemic represents a rare window of opportunity rare to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.’

Furthermore, pope Francis joined the choir of world leaders (or ex leaders), Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Justin Trudeau, Mark Rutte, Jacinda Ardern, Bill Gates, Tony Blair, Prince Harris, Antonio Gutteres, Obama, Hilary and Bill Clinton, Sadiq Khan, pleading to ‘build back better’ once the ‘pandemic’ is over. For instance, according to Francis, ‘The path to humanity’s salvation passes through the creation of a new model of development, which unquestionably focuses on coexistence among peoples in harmony with Creation’ (God and the World to Come), and, therefore, it passes through the policies advocated by global governance, such as Universal Basic Income (in the wake of the COVID crisis of course).

The pope of Bayer-Monsanto: a historical turning point  

Internal crises are not a new thing to the papacy. Rome, for a long while, became a tool in the hands of power-hungry pontiffs filled with earthly ambitions, or on the contrary a tool in the hands of a prince in need of apostolical standing. The Holy See is known to have, once or twice, sought some rather embarrassing external help or compromise. In 1830, Pie VIII condemned the Polish Catholic insurgents to please the Czar.

In 1888, Leo XIII excommunicated Irish Catholic protestors to gain the favor of the British Empire. Since then, the Vatican would enter lengthy negotiations with Lenin, strike a deal with Mussolini and sign a concordat with Hitler… However, this is a turning point: never had the pope been tempted to embrace the ideologies of the regimes with whom he had pursued an arrangement. Never had the papacy been driven by the ambition to spread their agenda.

Today, nonetheless, an institution that proclaims its universal jurisdiction over Christians endeavor at the same time to become partner with a technocratic global governance thriving under the aegis of big corporations. Rome sees itself as some kind of ‘spiritual’ partner of the corporate elite aspiring to completely dominate the planet.

This affiliation to the global agenda was formally acknowledged when Lynn Forester de Rothschild launched the Council for Inclusive Capitalism with The Vatican, under the ‘guidance’ of pope Bergoglio and Cardinal Turkson.

Around the pope, and around the smaller fellowship of ‘Guardians for Inclusive Capitalism’, the Council gathers ‘world’s business and public sector leaders’, notably CEOs in search of a ‘sustainable’, ‘resilient’, ‘inclusive’, ‘responsible’, ‘equitable’ and ‘fair’ capitalism (I hope I didn’t miss a catchword), such as the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Bank of America, BP and Bayer-Monsanto (whose ethical and environmental expertise is recognized worldwide).

By their side, we find the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations chairmen, and the herald of the Net-Zero finance industry, the ubiquitous Mark Carney. The Council ‘is an historic collaboration of CEOs and global leaders inspired by the moral guidance of His Holiness Pope Francis. Ours is a moral and market imperative to make economies more inclusive and sustainable with a movement of bold, business-led actions that span the economic ecosystem.’ 

The founder and chairwoman of ‘The Council’ (as they say), Lynn Forester de Rothschild, herself managing partner of Inclusive Capital Partners, states that ‘Capitalism has created enormous global prosperity, but it has also left too many people behind, led to degradation of our planet, and is not widely trusted in society. This Council will follow the admonishment of Pope Francis to listen to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” and answer society’s demands for a more equitable and sustainable model of growth.’ Unsurprisingly, their website (‘commitments’) is patterned along that of the seventeen UN’s and WEF’s Global Goals for 2030.

Our ‘inclusive capitalists’, in the wake of the WEF, hope to display a narrative that is intended to be perceived as ‘leftist’ or at least communitarian: they insist that modern big economical movers should be held accountable for their impact on the environment, notably about climate; for their choice to be inclusive with all kind of minorities; for their will to give everyone his chance; for what they do to welcome refugees… In the same fashion Francis, the smiling and benevolent fatherly figure of ‘responsible capitalism’, wishes to be perceived as the ‘green pope’, the gay friendly pope, a friend to the migrants, and a hardcore militant against climate change. In other words, pope Bergoglio is orchestrating a marketing campaign for the global governance’s agenda.

The same narrative —with all its catchwords— is displayed within the documents of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development created in 2016 with the merging of various other Roman commissions, and presided by the same Cardinal Turkson from the Council of Inclusive Capitalism. ‘The Dicastery […] expresses the Holy See’s concern for issues of justice and peace, including those related to migration, health, charitable works and the care of creation.’ Notably, the Dicastery is asked by the pope ‘to express the Church’s solicitude and care for the whole human family facing the COVID-19 pandemic.’ Indeed, since ‘The COVID-19 pandemic is the defining crisis of this generation.’ Thus, the Dicastery supervises ‘research and studies of the present COVID-19 epidemic and its related issues and to think about a post Covid-19 society and world, especially in areas of ecology, economics, labor, healthcare, politics, communications and security’ (vatican-covid-19).

The pope of the 4th Industrial Revolution and Transhumanism

With whom should we reflect on this future ‘post-Covid society and world’? Well, for instance, with the Roman NPO humanity2-0.org, ‘Developed’ by Father Philip Larrey, 

‘Developed in collaboration with the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development at the Holy See and a consortium of leaders and luminaries, Humanity 2.0 seeks to unite humanity in the common cause of realizing a better world for our children’. And since

‘Humanity 2.0 is a vehicle for facilitating collaborative ventures between the traditionally siloed public, private and faith-based sectors,’ CEOs such as the ones of CISCO, Virgin or Publicis, have joined in to bless this partnership with their corporate power. No reference to Christianity on its website, watched by a figure of the Goddess Athena, but a brief quote from Thomas Aquinas.

Its chairman, Father Larrey, is a priest and the dean of Faculty of Philosophy at the Latran University, but also an apostle of the 4th Industrial Revolution (actoninstitute.it), dear to the heart of Klaus Schwab. He is the author of Artificial Humanity, a book where he displays his faith in future Artificial Intelligence —as an entity endowed with real intelligence—, but hopes that it remains human. 

Francis, while proclaiming his faith in what he believes to be tomorrow’s technology and AI in particular, seems to be quoting father Larrey almost ad verbatim, adding only his own personal communitarian tone. In a short videoclip, the pope invites Christians to

pray for a “human” AI.’ Because ‘robotics can make us a better world possible if it is joined to the common good. […] Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind. We could say: may it “be human”.’

At the Davos Summit, but in the context of growing unemployment due to automation, he declared that ‘Artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological innovations must be so employed that they contribute to the service of humanity and to the protection of our common home, rather than to the contrary’ (Davos Forum 2018). We are not very far from the transhumanist creed advocated by its mainstream media spokespersons such as Yuval Noah Harari. AI might actually be dangerous, however for the plebs to be protected from its potential evils, we need the technocratic elite to be in charge …

Transhumanist ideology, notably its belief in the future advent of a Great Biodigital Convergence, is a key point of the 4th Industrial Revolution preached by the WEF.

The human and the machine will have to merge through data-mining, with the help of genome editing and digital implants, so that we can give birth to an ‘augmented human.’ The barrier between random biological entities and programmable digital technologies will be removed. The very idea of life as well as that of freedom are obsolete: life and notably the human soul are but extremely complex algorithms drawn from chemical and electromagnetic reactions. He who will master the data of these algorithms will thus be able to ‘hacker’ human beings, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it, in a speech delivered to his Davos masters in 2018. Furthermore, even the transhumanistic hope in an eternal life fulfilled through, either through cellular ageing prevention, either through “Whole Brain Emulation”, is starting to attract large investments from big companies. But, even with a lot of imagination, it seems rather difficult to reconcile these dreams with the teaching of Francis predecessors.

This didn’t stop Father Larrey presiding over two meetings given in Rome at the Tutonic College, along with Carlos Moreira and David Ferguson, under the patronage of a mysterious Elite Global Leaders Conference. Both Moreira and Ferguson are famous for being advocates of  transhumanism, for having co-authored the Transhumancode, and created the oiste Think Tank which is part of the WEF’s galaxy. The first, held in July 2019, dealt precisely with the Transhuman Code. The same zealous apostles of the future technocratic utopia came back in October 2021 to discuss the ‘Technology that Empowers Humanity’…

‘For things to remain the same…’

How could the papacy transform itself so radically? It is a challenging question to the historian. The various ecclesiastical scandals with which Bergoglio is personally involved might provide us with the beginning of an explanation. This pope is known for covering up to the bitter end the crimes perpetrated by high prelates (McCarrick, Zanchetta, Maradiaga and many more), although all of them were facing grave and well documented accusations of sexual abuse or financial corruption, or even both. Only full public exposure made possible their dismissal. Bergoglio emerged as what he really is: a bureaucrat ready to protect his fellow collaborators at all price. On the other hand, it is the same man who was trying to please public opinion while strengthening Rome’s policy against sexual abuses committed by ordinary priests. Held by a strong esprit de corps, a decent communicator as are most modern top managers, he is always ready to spin himself out of trouble with a well-practiced storytelling.

Religious conservatives who are worried with the exposition of Pachamama statuettes in a church nearby the Vatican, need not to be. Such displays do not constitute a statement of syncretism nor of ecological neopaganism. No more than the loud public pledges to the ‘defense of the planet’, nor ‘against climate change,’ nor ‘in favor of the environment’ » staged by the financial or industrial stakeholders. Francis doesn’t worship Mother-Earth any more than his private sector partners, hellbent on a massive grab of what natural goods are left. This is pure spin.

However, the world is indeed changing and Rome is changing too. Clearly, the top of the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t want to take a counter-cultural stand: it would rather follow dominant ideology, even to the price of swallowing a certain amount of transhumanism. Was the Jesuit Bergoglio once under the influence of the mystical scientism of Teilhard de Chardin S.J.? Maybe. However, there is another simpler reason for this move. The papacy is now in reality extremely weak and Francis cannot accept this. All over the world, churches are empty or emptying, like in Latin-America. The only communities that survive are tiny, scattered, and display a fair amount of conservatism, even sometimes traditionalism. The Vatican, as such, has become a terribly outdated institution, not very well suited to the size and reach of the communities it is meant to supervise. The pope, although he carries on to do so, and despite official statistics, doesn’t have the means to speak to humanity as if he were still some spiritual and moral authority followed all over the world by more than a billion of faithful. The only card left in his hand in front of a secularized world, is what he still represents in theory, but not in reality: a certain aura associated with his white cassock, Saint Peter’s Plaza and Basilica, the Vatican palace, the Sistine Chapel, the Swiss Guards (provided they are  vaccinated’ of course!) and the pontifical universities. 

Bergoglio’s entire existence is a life of compliance to hierarchical structures to which he identified. His career is built upon a constant and faithful conformity to the successive dominant narratives he went through: from Peròn’s populist narrative (pope Francis the Dictator) to Schwab’s elitist narrative. Catholicism is now too weak to be able to provide him with a socially hegemonic ideology, while at the same time his deepest bureaucratic instinct prevents him to turn away from contemporary groupthink. Furthermore, if Francis had opted to dedicate himself to the tiny catholic minority that still exists, he would have taken the risk to push the old pontifical Rome into oblivion and anonymity in the eyes of the general public. That was not a choice a man of the apparatus like him could have made. His wish was to remain faithful to Rome as he sees it: a world leading institution —like it was before. Francis, therefore, has chosen to try and become one of the stakeholders of the global governance. Thus, he is willing to impart what’s left of the ageless cachet of his position to their new gigantic corporate partners. Thus, he is willing to actively cooperate enforcing a global totalitarian system, ultimately based on digital surveillance and genetic experimentations that are killing millions of people. ‘Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi!’

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Ukraine Will Never be the Same Again

February 27th, 2022 by Konrad Rękas

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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What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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First of all, in the current situation, let’s demand seriousness, not cabaret.  This is not the time, nor a place, for empty gestures and tearful “declarations of solidarity”.  Responsible leadership should focus on the specifics.  It is important not only how to de-escalate the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, but also how to limit its scope.  Another set of issues will be finding oneself and facing the challenges of the political reconstruction of Ukraine (or perhaps its decomposition), and the new international order that is being shaped before our eyes.

Sicilian Defence

We must also be fully aware that a politician such as Vladimir Putin would never have taken such a determined action – if he had not been forced to do so.

And it is by no means a question of “absolving” anyone, as politics does not recognise such a concept.  Simply, the real President Putin (not his media caricature) is an emblematic representative of a defensive strategy.  Heir to Kutuzov, certainly not Suvorov. 

The order could only be issued when the Russian side had reliable information about the expected enemy attack.  And not only against Donbass, but probably the Russian Federation itself.  Vladimir Putin attacks only when this is the absolutely only form of… defence.  And it is hardly surprising that the Russians, instead of defending themselves just few miles from Moscow again or worrying how to feed people of Leningrad – preferred to land near Kharkov.

Of course, there were probably other factors and concerns.  Over the past few months, it has been hard to resist the impression that the United States and the United Kingdom in particular are outright encouraging and almost forcing Russia to an invasion.  And all this with an unequivocal rejection of Russian attempts to return to negotiations on the Donbass question, i.e. giving a real shape to the Minsk format, effectively sabotaged by Kiev.  On the other hand, President Volodymyr Zelensky, also because of his original profession, should remember that when staring in the camera mirror, none should call out three times “Putin! Putin! Putin!” – because a wish can come true and the called will come…

Don’t play of chick with Russians!

The Kiev junta screamed “Wolf, wolf!” so many times that nobody treated it seriously anymore, of course except in the sphere of media propaganda.  Thus, the six-month-long threat of a Russian invasion took on the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet Vladimir Putin clearly, openly and publicly presented the Russian position.  In the face of the Westerner’s désintéressement with the Minsk format – i.e. the peaceful denazification and federalisation of Ukraine – Russia has thrown another lifeline to the other side.

The recognition of the sovereignty of the Donbass People’s Republics has clearly delineated the Russian sphere of interest.  Let’s admit – really cautious concerning the accusations against Moscow.

It was also decided not to respect this.  “Putin is running away! Putin is over!” – they shouted, although the Russian president had not even started yet, as it turned out.  The media offensive was also intensified, with a clear message: “Do not dare to defend yourself, because we will say that you started it!”.  Well, straight – there was an attempt to play a game of chick with Russia.  And already a few months ago I warned that Putin is not the one to swerve first.

So since Russia had sanctions against itself anyway, since she was accused of aggression and invasion anyway, without doing anything, and the fact that the next step of the West would be a direct attack – a pre-emptive strike was the only option.  Elementary, when the costs are the same and delay would only be fatal.

What peace?

In fact, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict itself should concern us as little as possible, in contrast to its potential consequences.  Of course, the natural position of neighbours is to keep problems away from their own borders, looking for solving everything as soon as possible.

This is what Belarus is doing by proposing talks in Minsk again.

Also in the West, for example in France, there are voices about the need for urgent NATO-Russia talks (Éric Zemmour, who is running for the presidential election, supported French initiative in this matter, of course adding a ritual condemnation of the Russian intervention).

The Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, also took a balanced position.  Unfortunately, we can be sure that most of the US Central European vassals, led by Poland and Lithuania, will not follow the path of reason and will not propose anything sensible.  Reaching instead to the proven arsenal of appeals, summons, speeches, highlights, FB overlays and screams.  And also spending taxpayers’ money to support the policy of a collapsing Nazi-oligarchic Ukrainian state.

Meanwhile, regardless of the result of the Russian intervention, Ukraine will not be the same anymore.

We do not yet know the scope or assumptions of the denazification announced by President Putin.

However, if we take it seriously, and the presence of the Russian troops adds the seriousness to such a declaration – it can be concluded that the Russians do again the whole dirty job for other Europeans, as during WW2.

Because getting rid of the Nazi Banderites from Ukraine is indisputably in the common interest.

We also do not know what the assumed military range of the operation is and whether it is assumed to cover the entire Ukrainian state within its current borders.

Above all, however, we should remember that anyone who repeats “this is not the moment to demand anything from Ukraine” is a TRAITOR or a fool.  Now is the time to make demands from Ukraine denazification, expulsion of the U.S. biological and chemical weapons laboratories, ban on GMOs, blacklisting terrorists in the service of Washington, and other U.S. garbage. Unfortunately, we can be sure that no one will do it. Of course – except for Russia.

If a decentralised, federal and, above all, denazified Ukraine is created – ethnic minorities will regain their language rights, Nazi symbols will disappear from the public space, and poverty and hopelessness could someday stop to be everyday challenge for Ukrainians.

In turn, the complete disintegration of the Ukrainian state, or its division into a Western and Eastern-Southern part – would raise the question of who would rule the Western one: then mainly oligarchs and thieves or mainly Nazis and murderers.  Or both, as is it now.  If the Russians do not operate beyond the pre-WW2 border of Poland, all of Europe will become a forced neighbour of the Bandera’s Ukrainian Nazi Reich.  With all the consequences.  The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation progresses as quickly as possible – are therefore in the European absolutely basic interest.  And after that – final, righteous and just peace.

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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Sputnik News/Alexey Nikolsky

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.

***

What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Ukraine’s National Guard says that in meeting last year the UK military agreed to start training its forces, which include a thousand-strong neo-Nazi unit. The UK Ministry of Defence disputes the claim.

Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kyiv, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU) last year.

Declassified understands the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed the September 2021 meeting to be private and should not have been publicised. There is no mention of the meeting in any UK records that are publicly available.

Three British commanders of Operation Orbital – the UK military’s training mission in Ukraine – are pictured, alongside three NGU officers. They sit around a table taking notes.

The MoD refused to give Declassified the names of the UK personnel who attended the meeting, citing operational and personnel security issues.

However, the NGU report names Lt Col Andy Cox, deputy commander of Orbital, while two other British officers are pictured, one with his name tag prominently displayed.

Orbital, which was launched in 2015, has so far only trained Ukraine’s regular armed forces. Expanding it to include the National Guard would be controversial due to sensitivities around the far-right sympathies of some of its units.

Neo-Nazi insignia on the helmets of Azov fighters in eastern Ukraine. (Image: ZDF)

Neo-Nazi insignia on the helmets of Azov fighters in eastern Ukraine. (Image: ZDF)

The NGU was formed in 2014 to incorporate an array of paramilitary and volunteer battalions which were fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. This included a neo-Nazi unit, the Azov Battalion, which reportedly has a thousand soldiers.

Now an official regiment within the NGU – and therefore part of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs – Azov fighters have been pictured in eastern Ukraine with Nazi insignia such as swastikas and SS runes on their helmets.

The battalion’s founder has said that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”

‘Develop combat capabilities’

The NGU report quotes Lt Col Cox as promising “the British military is ready to involve representatives of the National Guard of Ukraine in the training activities being conducted today for units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to develop their combat capabilities.”

Cox adds:

“We are currently considering training with the National Guard of Ukraine on defence operations and the work of staff officers.”

He continued:

“We will start this work with the inclusion of NGU representatives in the training activities that are already being conducted by British instructors in some units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

But the MoD told Declassified it has no plans to start training the NGU and that Cox was misquoted, probably due to a translation error.

An MoD spokesperson told Declassified:

“The UK does not conduct training with the National Guard of Ukraine. This meeting was a routine engagement between personnel deployed on Operation Orbital and a government organisation in Ukraine to improve mutual understanding.”

Photos of the Kyiv meeting between British military commanders and the NGU in September 2021. (Photos: NGU)

‘Peculiarities of combat operations’

The September meeting, however, appears to be a significant engagement between the British military and the NGU.

The report notes that British commanders were “acquainted with the history of creation, tasks and structure of the National Guard of Ukraine”, “the peculiarities of the combat operations of NGU units” as well as its “role and place in the security and defence sector of the state.”

The NGU write-up of the meeting was titled: “The National Guard of Ukraine will deepen military cooperation with the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom”. It added: “The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the expansion of further military cooperation”.

Other NATO militaries are cooperating with the NGU. Close to 2,000 NGU fighters have been trained by the Canadian military as part of its Operation Unifier mission which began in 2015.

But it has proven controversial. In June 2018, Canadian military officers were briefed (Ottawa Citizen) by leaders from the Azov Regiment and were photographed with its officials despite warnings about the unit’s Nazi ideology.

Azov then posted the photos on social media, adding that the Canadian delegation had expressed “hopes for further fruitful cooperation.” Internal Canadian documents, later released, show the government feared the meeting being exposed in the media.

In the September 2021 meeting, Colonel Serhiy Maltsev, head of international cooperation for the NGU, told the British commanders: “The contribution made by the Canadian military to building the capacity of the Guards is difficult to overestimate.”

He added: “Our joint achievements with our Canadian counterparts can serve as an example for the future cooperation of the NGU with [the UK’s] Operation Orbital.”

‘True patriots of Ukraine’

Four months before the meeting with British commanders, the same NGU website posted a statement to mark the Azov Regiment’s seven-year anniversary. Titled “Seven years of victory”, it gushed with extravagant praise for the neo-Nazi unit.

“In early May 2014, the ‘black men’ arrived in Berdyansk,” it noted, referring to the port city on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov. “These were true patriots of Ukraine, who gathered here from all over the country and rallied to repel the occupiers who encroached on Ukrainian sovereignty.”

“The newly formed volunteer unit was formed by caring men”, it continued, adding “The Azovs survived, hardened in fierce battles.” It concluded: “Today, Azov is one of the most capable units of the Ukrainian army, whose fighters have professional skills at the highest level, have the latest weapons and equipment and the same thirst for victory as seven years ago.”

But it is not only Ukraine’s NGU which is linked to far-right extremism.

In 2015, Dmytro Yarosh, then leader of the far-right Right Sector party, was appointed a military adviser to Colonel General Viktor Muzhenko, then Ukraine’s chief of general staff.

Yarosh is commander of Right Sector’s paramilitary branch, the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, which never came under government control.

Dmytro Yarosh (right), commander of far-right paramilitary group Ukrainian Volunteer Army, is appointed advisor to Colonel General Viktor Muzhenko (left), then Ukraine’s chief of general staff, 5 April 2015. (Photo: Ukraine Ministry of Defence)

Dmytro Yarosh (right), commander of far-right paramilitary group Ukrainian Volunteer Army, is appointed advisor to Colonel General Viktor Muzhenko (left), then Ukraine’s chief of general staff, 5 April 2015. (Photo: Ukraine Ministry of Defence)

But in 2017, the Kyiv Post reported that “around 130 former Right Sector fighters are now contracted soldiers in the Ukrainian army proper”.

In November, Yarosh reported that he had been appointed an adviser to Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Yarosh calls himself himself a follower of Stepan Bandera, a militant Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi collaborator during World War Two.

When the Nazis invaded the USSR in June 1941, Bandera’s followers murdered 4,000 Jews in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, in a few days, using weapons ranging from guns to metal poles.

It is estimated that up to 1.6m Ukrainian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

A report last year from the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University found another far-right group, Centuria, boasting that its members currently served as officers in Ukraine’s military.

It said they “have succeeded in establishing cooperation with foreign colleagues from such countries as France, the United Kingdom, Canada, the USA, German and Poland”.

The report found one apparent member of Centuria had received 11 months of officer training at Britain’s elite military training facility Sandhurst, graduating in 2020.

Britain’s Operation Orbital has so far trained 22,000 members of Ukraine’s armed forces. In 2020, that training was expanded “to incorporate broader operational and capability orientated maritime and air capacity building.”

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Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt

Featured image: British commanders (left) meet with senior officials from Ukraine’s National Guard in Kyiv, September 2021. (Photo: NGU)

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***

As the architects of the Build Back Better society assist you in creating easier ways to show your vaccinated and compliant status, perhaps it is prudent to pause and think about the discussions that take place behind the opaque glass doors.

Right now, as you are reading this, under the guise of enhancing your safety, the U.S. federal government is in discussions with multinational corporations and employers of citizens to create a more efficient process for you to register your vaccine compliance.

You may know their conversation under the terminology of a COVID passport. The current goal is to make a system for you to show your authorized work status; which, as you know, is based on your obedience to a mandated vaccine.

Beta tests are being conducted in various nations, each with different perspectives and constitutional limitations based on pesky archaic rules and laws that govern freedom. For the western, or for lack of a better word ‘democratic‘ outlook, Australia is leading the way with their technological system of vaccination check points and registered state/national vaccination status tied to your registration identification.

The checkpoints are essentially gateways where QR codes are being scanned from the cell phones of the compliant vaccinated citizen. Yes comrades, there’s an App for that.

Currently the vaccine status scans are registered by happy compliance workers, greeters at the entry to the business or venue. Indeed, the WalMart greeter has a new gadget to scan your phone prior to allowing you custody of a shopping cart.

In restaurants, the host or hostess has a similar compliance scanner to check you in prior to seating or reservation confirmation.

It’s simple and fun. You pull up your QR code on your cell phone (aka portable transponder and registration device), using the registration App, and your phone is scanned delivering a green check response to confirm your correct vaccination status and authorized entry.

The Australian government, at both a federal and state level, is working closely with Big Tech companies (thirsting for the national contract) to evaluate the best universal process that can be deployed nationwide.

As noted by all six Premiers in the states down under, hardware (scanners) and software (registration) systems are all being tested to find the most comprehensive/convenient portable units to settle upon. Meanwhile in the U.S., cities like Los Angeles and New York await the beta test conclusion before deploying their own version of the same process.

Then again… “For those in the privileged class allowed to shop, take note of Covid signs which encourage cashless transactions under the guise of ‘health’. Messaging around cards being ‘safer’ will increase until the Treasury tries to remove cash entirely, almost certainly with public approval.”

Wait, now we are squinting at that familar image on the horizon because we know those who control things have been talking about a cashless society for quite a while.

We also know that data is considered a major commodity all by itself. Why do you think every system you encounter in the modern era requires your phone number even when you are not registering for anything. It, meaning you, us, are all getting linked into this modern registration system that is defining our status. We also know that system operators buy and sell our registered status amid various retail and technology systems.

Yeah, that opaque shadow is getting a little clearer now.

Perhaps you attempt to purchase dog food and get denied entry into Pet Smart because you didn’t renew the car registration.  Or perhaps you are blocked from entry because you forgot to change the oil on the leased vehicle you drive and Toyota has this weird agreement with some retail consortium.   You head to the oil change place that conveniently pops up in the citizen compliance App –it’s only two blocks away– they clear the alert after they do the oil and you are gateway compliant again.

Missed your booster shot? We’re sorry citizen, your bank account is frozen until your compliance is restored… please proceed to the nearest vaccination office as displayed conveniently on your cell phone screen to open access to all further gates (checkpoints)…. tap to continue…

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What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

In a three-pronged blitz from the north, east and south, Russian ground forces, backed by close air support and volleys of cruise missiles launched from ships, have overrun Ukraine and laid siege to the capital, Kyiv, whose impending fall is days away, reminiscent of precipitous fall of Kabul last August with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport.

Chairman Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his historic Congressional testimony that couple of hundred Pashtun cowboys riding motorbikes and brandishing Kalashnikovs overran Kabul without a shot being fired, and the world’s most lethal military force fled with tail neatly folded between legs, hastily evacuating diplomatic staff from sprawling 36-acre US embassy in Chinook helicopters to airport secured by the insurgents.

Apart from indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids mounted by Americans, Afghan security forces didn’t put up serious resistance anywhere in Afghanistan and simply surrendered territory to the Taliban. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15.

The sprawling Bagram airbase was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.

In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.

What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups. In recent years, however, the Taliban has made inroads into the heartland of the Northern Alliance, too.

The ignominious fall of Kabul clearly demonstrates the days of American hegemony over the world are numbered. If ragtag Taliban militants could liberate their homeland from imperialist clutches without a fight, imagine what would happen if it confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological than real.

Although cutting a dashing figure sporting military fatigues and urging compatriots to rise up in arms against “Russian invaders” in a sentimental address while at the same time pandering to NATO patrons to provide military assistance and impose harshest sanctions on the Kremlin, the fate of Ukraine’s comedian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would be no different from deposed president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who fled to neighboring Tajikistan on the eve of the Taliban invasion with suitcases stashed with $69 million stolen cash and is now comfortably sojourning in the UAE.

In contrast, in a televised address to the nation following the Ukraine intervention, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin uttered a chilling warning to adversaries: “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.”

Warships are transiting the Mediterranean Sea and nearby waters in numbers rarely seen [1] in recent decades, adding another dimension to the ongoing tensions between NATO and Russia. The USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group arrived in mid-December as part of a long-planned deployment. Another four destroyers began operating in the European theater in mid-January and early February.

Although the US rarely announces submarine deployments, it also is common for carrier groups to have undersea support. The scale of US ships deployed to 6th Fleet is impressive — including about 12 destroyers and at least one cruiser.

The Truman sailed with the French Charles de Gaulle and the Italian Cavour carrier strike groups. The three carrier strike groups sailing together in the Mediterranean not only was unusual but also a significant show of NATO power.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced earlier this month it soon would send warships — some with Kalibr and hypersonic Oniks cruise missile capabilities — from its Caspian Sea flotilla to the Mediterranean and Black seas.

That’s in addition to at least six Russian amphibious assault ships from the Baltic and Northern fleets that recently sailed through the Mediterranean before entering the Black Sea for military exercises. A Russian Kilo-class submarine armed with Kalibr cruise missiles and a patrol ship also entered the Black Sea.

NATO said earlier this month that their Russian counterparts had conducted themselves professionally at sea. But CNN reported that a Navy P-8 maritime patrol plane had a “very close” encounter with multiple Russian jets, which US officials described as unsafe.

With the sheer scale of naval deployments by the both sides, it’s obvious that any inadvertent skirmish could trigger an apocalypse that would not only be perilous for the belligerents but also for the wider world.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October, 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.

According to an Oct. 2017 Turkish parliament report [2], there were around 15,000 nuclear warheads at 107 sites in 14 countries, and 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons belonged to Russia and the US. Russia had 7,000 nuclear weapons, the US 6,800, France 300, China 260, Britain 215, Pakistan 130, India 120, Israel 80 and North Korea had 10 nuclear weapons.

It added that some 4,150 of the weapons in arsenals were ready to be used at any minute, while 1,800 were in “high alarm” status, which meant they could be prepared for use in a short period of time.

The report also noted that nuclear weapons belonging to the US were deployed in five NATO member states that did not themselves have developed nuclear programs. “There are nearly 150 US nuclear weapons in six air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey,” it added.

During the Cold War, the US placed nuclear weapons in NATO countries, including Turkey, as part of the organization’s nuclear sharing program. Some of the nuclear weapons placed in the 1960s are still deployed in Turkey.

The safety of fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs deployed at Incirlik airbase in Turkey became a matter of real concern during the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan government after the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report[3] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

Following the Second World War, the covert Operation Paperclip was launched in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, including Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were kidnapped from Germany and shuttled to the United States. The V-2 rocket program was later adapted to send Apollo missions to the moon. Thus, the US nuclear and ballistic missile programs were actually stolen from the Nazi Germany.

Notwithstanding, the mainstream reporting nowadays seems prosaic screeds extolling the virtues of patriotism and loyalty to the “Western democracy” and striving desperately hard to expose imaginary plots hatched by “vile dictators,” notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take undue advantage of “gullible patsies” in the alternative news media unwittingly playing the role of Putin’s “useful idiots.”

After sufficiently proving their loyalty to the “American democracy” and the US-led “benevolent imperialism” that has ended “the age of darkness” in the post-colonial world and ushered it into “the age of enlightenment” under Washington’s neocolonial tutelage, the spin-doctors go on to draw the attention of the readers to the misleading notion that since the catastrophic Second World War, the Ukraine intervention is the first ever war in Europe in the living memory.

It’s worth recalling that the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed thousands of fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of refugees for which nobody is to blame but Washington’s militarist policy of subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western capitalist bloc.

Incidentally, one of the leading reasons Putin defensively intervened in Ukraine is to save himself from the fate that befell his predecessors, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and are judged harshly by Russian masses as well as the Leftists around the world.

Biden approved on Thursday, Feb. 24, an additional 7,000 US troops [4] to be deployed to Germany, bringing the total number of American forces sent to Europe to 12,000 this month, including troops previously deployed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Besides Ukraine, all these states on Russia’s western flank were its staunch allies and the whole Eastern Europe used to be in the Russian sphere of influence, not too long ago, before the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But today, the perfidious East European states are hosting thousands of NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside the regional clients are provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills meant to intimidate Russia into submission.

Who’s the aggressor here? Before attempting to answer the rhetorical question, bear in mind that Ukraine is Russia’s backyard whereas the distance between New York and Kyiv is over 7,500 kilometers. Wouldn’t it be a cause of immense consternation for the US military strategists and policy-makers if Russia or China deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable strategic bombers and provocatively exercised “freedom of navigation” right by deploying nuclear submarines in the Gulf of Mexico straddling the US borders?

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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] Naval presence in Mediterranean and Black seas at highs rarely seen since Cold War

[2] US has 150 nuclear weapons in five NATO countries

[3] The H Bombs in Turkey by Eric Schlosser

[4] An additional 7,000 US troops to be sent to Germany

Featured image is from Donbass Insider

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***

During a grand jury hearing held by an international group of attorneys, including Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, Alex Thompson, a veteran of Britain’s equivalent of the U.S.’s National Security Agency details how London is the power center of the world and how the handful of elites who control it—along with their Wall Street proxies in the U.S.—have been working to gather the world’s population, or “livestock” as they refer to the world’s people, under their rule, using wars, psychological operations and crises (manufactured or otherwise), like the pandemic, to further their one-world government agenda.

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This article was originally published on The Whistleblower Newsroom.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

The Economic Consequences of the Ukraine War

February 27th, 2022 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

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***

It may be premature somewhat to consider economic consequences of the Ukraine war with the Russian invasion still less than a week old. However, certain outlines of where things are going are nonetheless possible. With that caveat, the following represent some early considerations of the likely—in some cases already occurring—economic consequences of the war for Russia, European Union, and the USA.

Economic Consequences for Russia

The immediate effect on the Russian economy in the initial days was a sharp fall in its stock and financial asset markets. Investors began cashing out and running for the sidelines to wait out subsequent developments. But not too much should be made of that. Financial asset price deflation is just paper value and doesn’t impact the Russian consumer or its general economy all that much.

A large collapse of financial markets is typically accompanied by a fall in the value of a country’s currency and Russia’s Ruble was no exception. It too fell. A currency collapse means a country must pay more for imports of goods. However, existing import contracts don’t change in price. Thus there’s a delay for new contracts to reflect a price hike only when the prior contracts have ended. So there’s a delay in the inflation effect caused by a fall in the country’s currency. That may not stop retailers from raising prices, however, in the interim in anticipation of the rise in import costs due to Russia’s currency fall. In short, some inflation is an immediate effect with more coming later.

To offset the inflation effect, Russia could impose some price controls to limit the impact on consumers in essential consumer goods. Similarly, the central bank can take steps to put a floor under the collapse of the currency. A government can even step in and purchase certain strategic stocks to mitigate a stock market contraction if it wants. Japan has been buying stocks for years to prop up its financial markets. It appears Russia’s central bank has taken steps to stabilize the Ruble. No actions as yet have occurred to control prices or prop up the stock markets, however.

More medium and longer term is what are the effects of increased sanctions by the USA and NATO EU countries on Russia’s economy?

Sanctions on Russian Goods Flows (Exports & Imports)

There are sanctions on goods and services flows, sanctions on individuals, and sanctions targeting banking and money capital investment flows, and on international payments.

Traditionally US sanctions have focused on cutting off goods (products) flows into and from Russia. That is, imports from the rest of the world economy into Russia (inflow) as well as exports from Russia (outflows) from Russia to the rest of the world economy.

A reduction of imports into Russia would result in a reduced supply of the particular product in Russia and therefore a rise in its price—i.e. more inflation. A reduction of exports from Russia can mean a fall in production in Russia and therefore layoffs in those industries affected. The negative impact on production and employment, however, occurs only with a significant time lag. The impact on imports depends on how much of an inventory the country, Russia, has accumulated prior to the sanction. So sanctions impact on goods flows typically take weeks and months, as does in turn any consequent effect on either inflation and unemployment. In the meantime there are numerous ‘work arounds’ Russia could implement in order to ensure the flow of key goods via alternative channels of trade. Russia could continue to purchase or sell through a third country, most notably China perhaps.

In the longer run a reduction of Russian exports due to sanctions over time results in Russia earning less in foreign currencies (especially dollars). Cutting off Russian oil and gas sales would deny Russia its major source of earning foreign currency which is needed for trade for other goods and services. Cutting Russia off from obtaining dollars from oil-gas sales would be especially significant, since 85% of all global oil transactions are done in the global trading and reserve currency—i.e. the US dollar!

That cut off would seriously disrupt global oil supplies as well as crude oil prices. Russia is the second largest producer of oil in the world, generating more than 10 million barrels per day. (The USA is the first due to its fracking technology, producing 11m per day normally). Cutting off Russian oil sales reduces the global supply of crude by around 15%. A 15% reduction of supply results in massive roiling of oil markets and likely historic increases in the price of oil. Gasoline prices at the pump in the US could rise a $1 a gallon or more.

While the US is the largest producer of oil, it also purchases oil from other countries—notably Canada, Mexico, and even some from Russia. Why is that, if it’s the largest producer? Because US oil companies export a lot of refined US oil products to the rest of the world while it also imports crude. It is unknown what the impact of a 15% reduction in global oil supplies would have on US oil prices or oil prices globally. Major market restructuring and shifts would have to occur. It may not go smoothly. Disruptions could be chaotic. That is why the US and EU have been reluctant to target Russian oil and gas deliveries to Europe.

This brings up two areas also potentially affected by sanctions on Russia: the effect of the suspension of the Russia-German Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and the possible consequences of the US/NATO/EU decision to deny Russia access to the SWIFT international payments system. Let’s examine the possible effects of both, on Russia as well as rest of the world.

Nordstream 2 Natural Gas Pipeline

Image on the right is from InfoBrics

Much is made in the media about the Russia-Germany Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline. To listen to US media, Biden has permanently shut off its gas flow. But how can one shut down what has not even been opened up yet? There is no gas flow via Nord2 yet. Moreover, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Sholtz, has merely indicated Nord2 won’t be opened soon. It has been suspended. Not shut down. Meanwhile, Germany depends on more than 50% of its natural gas from Russia. That is not going to change soon, since it gets that 50% from 7 pipelines that flow through Ukraine to southeast Europe and from there to Germany.

Additional gas pipelines flow from Russia through Turkey into Europe. There is no talk by the USA or Europe about shutting down those pipelines. So Russia will continue to earn significant foreign currency from gas sales to Europe. In fact, it may earn even more gas revenue since gas prices are spiking and the volume sold will be at a higher price.

Sanctions are thus irrelevant so far as Nord2 is concerned, since they don’t exist. There’s only the ‘shutdown’ of the gas pipeline, Nord2, that doesn’t yet even provide gas.

A lot is said about the USA and other countries (Qatar, Azerbaijan, etc.) providing Germany and Europe natural gas in lieu of Nord2. But that’s irrelevant in the short run. Germany lacks port facilities to accept US liquid natural gas (LNGs). And it will take five years to build those facilities. In addition, it will take Qatar and other sources two years just to expand its production facilities in order to generate the extra gas to sell to Germany.

It should be noted as well that all of the current inflow of Russian natural gas to Europe comes from the existing seven gas pipelines flowing through Ukraine into East Europe and from there to Germany and the west. Several more pipelines flow through Turkey to Europe. It’s unclear if US sanctions are intended to cut this gas flow as well. Reportedly all of Europe gets 40% of its gas from these pipelines currently. To cut that off means a likely collapse of EU industries.

The US has been trying for years to get Europe to buy US natural gas in lieu of Russian. US gas is multiple times more expensive due to transport costs and the need to convert it into liquid form (LNG) and then back again to gas form when offloaded again at European ports. When the US introduced widespread fracking under Obama it raised the production of US natural gas (and oil) significantly. Exporting that oil and gas serves to prevent a supply glut in the USA that would reduce prices in the US. So getting Europe to buy US gas raises US energy corporations’ profits: it achieves more sales revenue from Europe and it gets to keep prices high in the US as well. It’s been difficult to convince the Germans up to now to buy much more expensive US gas. The war in Ukraine is the answer to this US dilemma. It may now get Europe to shift to US gas even though the cost is so much higher. (Some estimate five times as high).

SWIFT International Payments System

Image below is from Zero Hedge

The international payments system refers to how countries and their businesses selling of goods and services are paid for. The payments for purchases and sales—i.e. the money flow—occurs through the network of connected global banks, of which the US banks are the biggest players since most of the payments are in the global trading currency, the US dollar.

SWIFT is the means by which the US banks and government can ‘look into’ global inter-bank transactions to identify which country or business might be violating US official sanctions. US big banks are at the center of SWIFT and can determine the violators on behalf of the US government. But SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and the US would have to get the EU on board to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT to sell its oil or any export. Initially the EU—and especially Germany and Italy, was not at all amenable to doing that. So SWIFT has been initially exempted from Biden’s US announcement of recent sanctions. On the other hand, political forces in the US and especially in Ukraine and East Europe NATO began immediately to push hard to implement SWIFT sanctions on Russia. Biden and the US have been pushing hard to get the rest of the EU/NATO countries (especially Italy and Germany) on board.

The US has apparently succeeded in doing so. As this writer predicted at the outset of the Russian invasion, US/NATO would include denial of SWIFT to Russia as one of its sanctions. This is a qualitative new step—and a risky one— in the history of sanctions on Russia. It can backfire causing serious economic impact on US, EU and global oil markets and thus consequent sharp rise in oil related inflation globally and via oil prices into the economies in general price inflation. Already rising everywhere due to the structural impacts on supply chains by Covid and the recent recessions, inflation could accelerate even higher in Europe and US and ret of the global economy. That price acceleration might bring the tentative, weak recovery of the US, EU and global economy to a halt. Nonetheless, it appears that including denial of SWIFT to Russia with the goal of shutting down its oil and gas revenues is on the agenda and likely within days. The political war hawks pushing more confrontation with Russia in Ukraine have thus won the day so far as SWIFT is concerned. Russia’s responses to this move can be expected.

There are ways Russia could do an ‘end run’ around SWIFT. It could simply use the China Yuan currency in its transactions. Or it could join with China and others to establish a parallel international payments system bypassing SWIFT. That possibility was raised and piloted as far back as 2012 when the USA imposed sanctions on Iran’s sale of its oil.

There’s yet another ‘work around’ SWIFT possible: Russia could join China using digital currency. China is already well on its way to a digital currency, having already introduced it in China.
Whether SWIFT sanctions are introduced soon (likely) or not, it is clear that US control of the SWIFT system—through the US dollar and dominance of US banks globally—is a key instrument of US financial imperialism. It is as important as US control of other global economic institutions, like the IMF, World Bank, and the US dollar as global trading and reserve currency.

Many US Corporations Exempted from Russian Sanctions

Thus far Biden has not imposed sanctions directly on Russian oil and gas because its impact on global oil supplies and prices would be significant. (Denial of SWIFT would of course mean indirectly a major sanction). But at the behest of US and EU oil companies Biden specifically exempted oil and gas from sanctions. Initially SWIFT was excluded as well. But that’s not the entire list of exemptions. Biden in day 2 of the invasion announced Aluminum exports from Russia are exempt, after he met with US auto, Boeing, and canning industry CEOs who it seems are dependent on Russian raw aluminum imports to the US. At least 10% of raw aluminum comes to the US from Russia. Europe is even more dependent on Russian aluminum imports. So the corporate lobbyists have gotten themselves exempted from Russian sanctions as well. It can be expected other critical metal based commodities imports from Russia will lobby and quietly get exemptions from sanctions as well.

Russian Banking Sanctions

Biden initially announced sanctions on Russian banks, but left big holes in those initial sanctions exempting Russia’s two biggest banks, Sber bank and VTB bank. These two were central to the processing of SWIFT on the Russian side. Clearly, big US oil corporations did not want to roil the global markets. Pressure on Biden, however, rose to expand the sanctions. VTB was added to the list. Sberbank apparently still is not although that may have, or soon will, changed.

Banking sanctions not only mean interrupting the flow of payments revenue from sale of exports from Russia, whether oil and other resource commodities and productions. Banking sanctions are designed to prevent Russian banks and investors’ access to financial markets in the west.

Russian corporate and government bonds are often initiated for sale in the west, mostly it appears in London financial markets. Banking sanctions are designed to cut this off. Banking sanctions mean Russian companies’ ability to sell debt (bonds, etc.) in western markets may also be cut off. So may raising of investment capital in the west for Russian start up companies. Russian government debt (i.e. sovereign bonds) sales through foreign banks would be cut off as well, according to the new sanctions.

But Russia’s central bank could step in here and absorb (buy) both the corporate and government debt as a ‘buyer of last resort’ in the crisis—just as the US central bank, the Fed, and other central banks in the west due in emergency situations.

It’s reported that Russia in recent years accumulated up to $680 billion in an emergency cash hoard in anticipation of getting out from under US and western dependence on the US dollar and banking system. That cash hoard, in liquid currencies and gold, is available to offset western sanctions on its banking & financial system. It could also be used to subsidize Russian investor-Oligarchs’ interim losses from the US sanctions levied on individual wealthy businessmen. It should also be noted in turn, however, that US sanctions tactic cut both ways: Russia can in turn freeze foreign investors’ assets in Russian banks. And there’s a lot of western investors’ deposits held in Russia’s big five banks that serve Russia’s giant oil and gas producing industries.

Summing up Russian Sanctions

To sum up the recently announced Biden sanctions: they won’t likely prove very effective—except perhaps if the access to the SWIFT payments system is quickly implemented. Sanctions on Russian exports and imports do not have an immediate effect and there are third source ‘work arounds’ that western companies (and even governments) would be willing to ‘look the other way’ in order to ensure the supply of critical Russian commodities sales. The same applies to sanctions on the Russian banks and global money capital flows. There will be some disruptions longer term, but no major short term impact on Russia’s economy. Goods and money capital flows sanctions all have potential ‘work arounds’.

Financial experts and investors know this. That’s why, when US and EU financial markets initially fell by 800 points when Russia invaded the first day, the financial markets quickly bounced back quickly when Biden announced initial sanctions that same day. Global investors know the Biden sanctions are full of perforations. And if slipping out one or more of the holes is not possible, Russia has a big back door through which it can exchange money and goods with the rest of the world. It’s called China.

Russia will therefore experience in the short run significant volatility in its financial markets and its currency. It will experience inflation—as will all economies worldwide as supply disruptions of commodities (oil, gas, metals, even grains and other food) results in higher prices worldwide. It may even experience some initial production slow down, and thus unemployment, as goods markets and therefore demand are disrupted globally. But it won’t suffer a major economic crisis due to the war in Ukraine. And should that worst scenario occur, it has its cash hoard of reportedly more than $680 billion.

The major wild card in the US sanctions is the SWIFT system. If it is denied to Russia, it will have to create work arounds that will be somewhat more difficult—either using the China Yuan and other currencies or even joining China in significantly expanding the use of digitial currencies in foreign trade transactions.

European Economic Impact

Like Russia, the EU will experience significant financial market and currency volatility in the short run. Both declined sharply first day of the invasion and then recovered.

Europe is far more energy insufficient compared to the USA which is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. The EU will therefore experience more significant price inflation driven by the chronic and steady rise in the global price of oil and gas. Global oil prices are projected to rise from around current $100/barrel levels for benchmark Brent (northsea) crude at the time of the invasion, rising to at least $120-25/barrel. As noted previously, natural gas prices will rise as well in the shorter run. And should in the longer run the EU have to purchase natural gas from the Mideast or USA in the form of LNG, prices will be much higher.

Europe’s economic recovery from Covid is also more tentative compared to the US economy’s. As its central bank plans to raise interest rates as inflation rises, it’s more likely those rate increases will dampen the recovery of the real economy more quickly than would a similar rate hike by the US central bank on the US economy. Wage increases have also been slower to recover in the EU compared to the US recently. Rising energy and commodity prices will discourage household consumption more and sooner in the case of the EU as well. Food prices may also rise as the EU obtains some agricultural goods from the Ukraine. In short, the inflation and greater EU real economy’s sensitivity to central bank interest rates will slow its economic recovery further. Added to the slowdown may be the new Covid Omicron2 variant that appears even more infectious than the earlier Omicron and currently is spreading rapidly in parts of the EU and will exacerbate the trends toward economic slowdown and recovery due to the war effect via inflation and interest rate policy.

Europe will also feel the effects relatively more of Russian reciprocal response to Russian banks’ asset freezes, Russian debt access, and export-import sanctions on Russia. Europe’s economy is integrated with Russia’s not just in energy, but in a long list of industrial and consumer products.

Yet another negative effect in the longer run is that the US will likely demand that the EU shoulder a still greater share of its total defense burden and expenditures. Diversion of tax revenues from social spending programs to defense will result in a net real disposable income decline for many European households. Like inflation, that too will impact consumer spending and slow economic recovery and growth.EUgovernment debt and corporate debt will likely rise in the longer run due to slower growth and inflation.

In short, the EU stands to experience significant negative real affects to its economy as a result of the Ukraine war. In the shorter run more asset and currency volatility, but in the longer term higher chronic inflation, declines in real wage incomes, loss of markets in Russia, and consequent slower economic recovery and growth. Central bank monetary policy response stability are also not promising. Will the European Central Bank raise interest rates to try to slow inflation? When it’s economy is simultaneously experiencing war related developments that are already slowing its recovery and economy?

The USA Economic Impact

Like the EU the USA was already experiencing significant consumer price inflation before the war’s occurrence. In fact, higher chronic inflation than Europe. While the USA is more energy independent than the EU, it will nevertheless have to deal with still higher inflation due to the global energy shock in oil markets. Oil companies raise prices not because of legitimate supply or demand causes, but because as monopolies in their respective home economies they simply can. That has already been going on in the US economy before the Ukraine war. Recent US consumer inflation has been driven by oil prices. Nearly half of its latest 7.5% annual inflation rate has been oil price related.

US financial markets in the short run have also fallen sharply but recovered just as quickly—as in Europe and to a lesser extent in Russia. The US currency, the dollar, has been less volatile than the Euro and even less so than the Ruble. US financial markets may soon, however, experience a second major negative impact from its central bank, the Fed, rise in interest rates in March. That rate hike will likely be larger than any Europe may take. So the higher inflation, combined with higher rate hike, plus the Ukraine war may constitute a combination of negative economic events that cause a second more volatile fluctuation in US financial asset markets.

The combined rate hikes, inflation, and war perception—should the latter continue and deteriorate—will also slow the US economy recovery, as it will Europe’s.

A relatively greater effect on the US economy, compared to the EU’s, will be a further surge in US defense/war spending in the wake of the Ukraine war. With Pentagon spending this year already at $778 billion (and more than $1 trillion for all sources of US defense spending), tens of billions more in military spending can be expected as a result of the Ukraine war. That spending will surge in what remains of the current fiscal year, but continue thereafter as well in subsequent annual defense budgets for next and following years. That will exacerbate still further US deficits and national debt and, with higher interest rates, cause a higher cost of debt servicing that impacts later budget deficits as well. Rising deficits and debt—in the wake of already record deficits and debt due to Covid related policies, 2020-21, may lead to political pressures to cut social spending programs once again—i.e. austerity fiscal policies.

Chronic rising inflation, social program spending cuts, and rising central bank interest rates will together slow an already tentative economic recovery. If all these are severe in scope and magnitude, it may very well result in a double dip recession sometime late 2022 or early 2023.

In short, the US economy will feel the contributing negative effects of the Ukraine war in terms of inflation, disposable household incomes, and unstable central bank monetary policies. In some ways the effects of the war will be less than the effects felt in Europe; in other ways perhaps more severe.

Long Run Consequences for Global Capitalism

The global capitalist economy today is highly integrated: In the flow of real goods and services; in money capital flows between financial markets; in currency relative exchange rates; and in banking systems and interest rates—to name but the most obvious. The Ukraine war’s economic consequences will impact all the three economies—Russia’s, Europe’s and America’s. The impacts may be relatively different qualitatively and quantitatively. But actions taken against one have their inevitable economic reverberations on all.

Inflation due to escalating oil and commodity price inflation will negatively impact all. Central bank policy responses will be weaker across the board. Slower economic growth will result as goods and services flows are interrupted and global supply chain problems continue and perhaps even worsen. The war and US-EU economic and political policy responses will likely accelerate fundamental structural changes in relations between countries and global economic institutions.

It remains to be seen whether these economies, and the global capitalist economy itself, can absorb the stresses of the war and its fallout—so soon after the devastating impact of the Covid global crisis. Meanwhile, the other two systemic challenges will likely not disappear either: the worsening global health crisis of constantly mutating viruses and the deteriorating climate.

While nations continue to fight each other in wars hot and cold the War of Nature against Man—in the form of chronic diseases and global warming—will also continue. As nations fight the former, the latter will likely not be attended to. And if so, the scenario for mid-century will not be pleasant.

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Jack Rasmus blogs at http://jackrasmus.com and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern time. Join him at twitter for daily updates at @drjackrasmus.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.  Their hypocrisy and nihilistic thirst for death and destruction are so extreme that it boggles my mind.  They accuse Russia of starting a New Cold War when they did so decades ago and have been pushing the envelope ever since.  Now they act shocked that Russia, after many years of patience, has struck back in Ukraine.

In 2017, Oliver Stone released his four part interviews with Russian President Vladimir PutinThe Putin Interviews were conducted between 2015, the year after the U.S. engineered the coup d’état in Ukraine installing Nazis to power in that country bordering Russia, and 2017.  Stone was of course bashed for daring to respectfully ask questions and receive answers from the Russian leader who the American media has always cast, like all the mythic bogeymen, as the new Hitler intent on conquering the world, when it is the United States, not Russia, that has over 750 military bases throughout the world and has attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria – the list is endless.

In his Putin interviews, Oliver Stone, a man of truth and honor, lets viewers catch a glimpse of the real Vladimir Putin and the matters that concern him as the leader of Russia.  In 2018, I wrote of those interviews:

 . . .  he [Putin] makes factual points that should ring loud and clear to anyone conversant with facts. One: that the U.S. needs an external enemy (“I know that, I feel that.”). Two: the U.S.A. engineered the coup d’état in the Ukraine on Russia’s border. Three: the U.S. has surrounded Russia with US/NATO troops and bases armed with anti-ballistic missiles that can, as Putin rightly says to Stone, be converted in hours to regular offensive nuclear missile aimed at Russia. This is a factual and true statement that should make any fair-minded person stand up in horror. If Russia had such missiles encircling the United States from Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, what American would find it tolerable? What would CNN and The New York Times have to say? Yet these same people readily find it impossible to see the legitimacy in Russia’s position, resorting to name calling and illogical rhetoric. Russia is surrounded with U.S/NATO troops and missiles and yet Russia is the aggressor.

In the years since those interviews, U.S./NATO has consistently tightened the noose around Russia, including fueling the Ukrainian attacks on the Donbass, killing thousands, all the while pleading innocent and expecting no reply. Now the reply has come.

Although I have no inside information, I get the sense that the Western Empire is planning/initiating counter-measures far more extreme than the highly publicized economic sanctions.  While it is true, as many commentators such as Ray McGovern and Pepe Escobar have pointed out, that a paradigm shift is underway and the once dominant U.S./NATO bully boys must now contend with the Sino-Russian alliance that has ushered in a dramatic change, nevertheless, as in the past decades, the so-called leaders of the U.S. are a dumb bunch driven by unquenchable demons.  As McGovern says:

Yet, there remain unsettling indications coming from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan that senior administration ‘dolts’ (copyright North Korean leader Kim Jong Un) in the Washington Swamp still don’t get it.

I’m afraid they don’t and never will.  That is what frightens me.  While it seems counterintuitive and totally irrational that these people would be planning to use some type of nuclear weapon in this current situation, I am not so sure.  They obviously pushed Russia to have no alternative but to attack Ukraine, and now that they have accomplished that goal, it seems to me that they will up the ante.  Diplomacy is not their way; violence is.

Pepe Escobar has just written:

This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.

From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

As usual, his analysis is correct, but it may fail to grasp the unspeakable nature of the madness that drives desperadoes.  If those running U.S. foreign policy feel that a new geo-political order is being born “at breathtaking speed” as a result of Russia’s move into Ukraine, then they are capable of extreme acts. And they have all the mainstream western media behind them, barking out their non-stop propaganda.

We are inexorably moving toward a global war that will become nuclear if an international movement doesn’t quickly arise to stop it.  Most people bemoan the thought of such a war to end all wars, but refuse to analyze the factors leading to it. It seems so unimaginable, but It happens step-by-step, and many steps have already been taken with more coming soon.  It’s so obvious that most can’t see it, or don’t want to.  The corporate main stream media are clearly part of the continuation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, and those who still rely on them for the truth are beyond reach.  We need to use all alternative means to raise the alarm and make sure the ultimate nightmare never occurs.

Perhaps hyperbole is the only way to do so, for it may be closer to the truth than we want to believe.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image is from The Unz Review


He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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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What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

“Oh the gift that God could give us, to see ourselves as others see us.” -Robert Burns

This famous quote by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns stands as one of the clearest reminders of a precondition for any matured identity.

Burns understood that without having learned to use our God-given ability to place ourselves in the shoes of another, then those powers needed to self-examine our false prejudices, exercise humility (upon which creative insight is premised) and correct our false motives, actions and beliefs would be completely lost.

It is thus disappointing, albeit no small surprise that those basic tools of self-criticism are entirely non-existent when one listens to the gossipy make-believe speeches of so many helmsmen manning today’s ship of fools, sometimes known as the Trans Atlantic “rules-based international order”.

A Clash of Paradigms

After seven years of civil war in East Ukraine, 14 thousand casualties, broken peace deals and countless appeals by those living in the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics for independence from the Nazi-infested militias embedded in the Kiev defense forces, Russia decided to finally recognize the East Ukrainian republics as sovereign nations. A few days later, Russia unleashed a program of de-militarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine featuring targetted military strikes that (as of this writing) have annihilated over 74 military bases, US biolabs and entrenched radical neo-nazi forces that have been entrenched in the Ukrainian military since 2014.

But despite this intervention which is NOT an annexation, we see endless instances of western sock puppet statesmen denouncing Russia’s imperial ambitions and antagonism to western democratic values.

From Canada, where Justin Trudeau and his handlers have used an Emergency Measures Act to justify the violent crushing of peaceful protestors in Ottawa (including the freezing of bank accounts of hundreds of citizens who donated money to a freedom convoy), we hear only buzzing threats of anti-Russian sanctions and pompous condemnation of “Russian aggression” with more comparisons of Adolph Hitler to Putin than one can count.

In response to Russia’s recognition of the East Donbass republics, Justin stated “Canada and our allies will defend democracy”. Referring to the wide array of sanctions and Canadian troop deployments to Latvia, Trudeau said “we are taking these actions to stand against totalitarianism.”

He then stated “the people of Ukraine, like all people must be free to determine their own future”. This last remark implies that the people in East Ukraine who have been demanding independence are not actually people.

These remarks are coming from a Canadian regime that had only days earlier arrested nearly 200 people for the terrible crime of “causing mischief” in Ottawa and freezing bank accounts using “secret information” which none of those representatives or Senators expected to vote for the act were allowed to see. Deputy Prime Minister Freeland herself (who has more than a few uncomfortable connections with outright pro-Nazi Ukrainian networks) has even publicly stated that many extraordinary powers created under ‘emergency conditions’ should be continued indefinitely after the emergencies act is revoked. [1]

Across the Trans-Atlantic Five Eyes cage, similar virtue signalling in defense of “democracy” has resounded with the USA, European Union and UK moving in lockstep to condemn Russian aggression, and impose similar sanctions on Russian parliamentarians, businessmen and banks, with the USA and UK joining Canada in sending troops to Russia’s border.

While an energy crisis has already made a hard life harder for millions of Europeans struggling with a self-induced economic crisis under pandemic conditions, the German government has been pressured to accelerate its own self-destruction by cancelling the desperately needed Nord Stream 2 in order to “punish” Russia.

Nazis and Operation Gladio

European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans has demonstrated the typical level of over-exaggerated hypocrisy asserting that February 22 was “one of the darkest days in Europe’s history” apparently forgetting that WWI or WWII happened.

Timmermans is a character who has distinguished himself as a technocratic sock puppet by pushing anti-Russian sanctions for 8 years beginning with the highly flawed MH-17 bombing investigation in 2014, while covering up the true Kiev-connected hands behind that atrocity. Amidst his current crocodile tears over the “darkest days” Europe has ever faced, Timmermans appears oblivious to the mass atrocities committed by Nazi “stay behinds” used by western intelligence operations under Operation Gladio during the Cold War. This is especially strange since it was during Timmermans’ time as Deputy Chair on the Commission of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands that an extensive 2005 report on Nazi stay-behinds was published by the Dutch Ministry of Defense.

After having been established by the CIA, NATO and MI6 in 1956, Operation Gladio saw hundreds of terrorist cells deployed by former leaders of Nazi intelligence embedded across Europe who were used to kill civilians and troublesome politicians while stoking the fires of anarchy along the way. These acts of terror were in turn used to justify the excessive “emergency management” by oligarchically captured trans Atlantic nations throughout the Cold War based upon the logic that “the war against communism justifies everything… including fascism”.

While some say that the Gladio Operations were cancelled when the Soviet Union disintegrated, evidence points to a very different picture.

One particularly loud case is found in the figure of Andriy Parubiy, founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine who was appointed to serve as Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU) in the post-regime change putsch managed by Victoria Nuland and overseen by Joe Biden.

It is noteworthy that Parubiy, who has close ties to Freeland (herself the proud granddaughter of Hitler collaborator Michael Chomiak) cozied up to Justin in 2016 while seeking weapons, training and other logistical support from Canada. Meetings between Canadian politicians and leading neo-Nazi groups from Ukraine like the Azov Battalion continued to be so frequent that the Ottawa Citizen reported on November 9, 2021 that:

“Canadian officials who met with members of a Ukrainian battalion linked to neo-Nazis didn’t denounce the unit, but were instead concerned the media would expose details of the get-together, according to newly released documents. The Canadians met with and were briefed by leaders from the Azov Battalion in June 2018. The officers and diplomats did not object to the meeting and instead allowed themselves to be photographed with battalion officials despite previous warnings that the unit saw itself as pro-Nazi. The Azov Battalion then used those photos for its online propaganda, pointing out the Canadian delegation expressed “hopes for further fruitful co-operation.”

Then-Deputy Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament, Andriy Parubiy, visited Ottawa in February 2016, meeting with the prime minister. At that meeting (from left) are Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada Andriy Shevchenko, Verkhovna Rada Deputy Chairman Andriy Parubiy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Member of Parliament Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

It is thus no small irony that among those “liberal democracies” of Canada, the USA, UK and EU, we have repeated evidence of actual neo-Nazi collaboration both past and present as well as fascist behavior deployed against the people living in and around those very liberal democracies. Among these self-professed bastions of freedom and democracy, we have numerous cases of torture (Guantanamo Bay), illegal arrests of dissidents who participated in January 6 Washington rallies or Ottawa anti-medical dictatorship mandates, unlawful freezing of bank services for those whose political views are deemed unacceptable to a governing elite, and the imprisonment of whistleblowers.

What is clear is that those managerial technocrats processed through World Economic Forum training camps are generally entirely incapable of self-criticism or recognizing their own hypocrisy. They are wired to move in echo chambers of self-congratulatory flattery without every confronting points of disagreement that need be dealt with through dialogue or reason. The typical unipolarist automaton is entirely incapable of basic fundamental human character traits that allows each of us to see and judge ourselves from the standpoint of people outside of our class, group, or even cultural matrix choosing instead to expect everyone and even the universe itself, to fit into those ivory tower models and values which are wired into the mind of any Davos creature.

At the end of the day, those statesmen who are unencumbered by such mechanical handicaps as those suffered by Davos creatures, have access to a much greater degree of insight, and creative flexibility to lawfully break the rules of rigged games in ways that those control freaks sitting in ivory can ever comprehend. It is precisely this incapacity to either comprehend creative human thinking or self-criticize their own false thinking that creates those systemic conceptual blind spots which will ultimately prove their own undoing.

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This article was originally published on The Canadian Patriot.

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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Thankfully, pushback from a few courageous Senators and Members of Parliament (as well as certain financial institutions petrified of an immanent bank run) have induced the Canadian government to pull back from the act on February 23 although, although an Orwellian “war on disinformation and hate” and a new level of integration between banks and intelligence agencies has now been put into motion.

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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***

Introduction

If there is one thing which will never leave the human world, it is the violation of human rights.

The phenomenon of human rights violation is essentially the process in which the strong exploits the weak and the rich looks down on the poor. And, there will always the strong and the weak; there will be always rich and the poor. Human rights violation may be an integral part of humanity; it is the major shame of humanity. 

No country is free from this dark side of humanity. The violation of human rights transcend the political regime and the state of economic development.

Nonetheless, well-intended people have established numerous institutions and programs to fight human rights violation, but they have proved to be less than efficient or effective.

Moreover, what makes us sad is the reality in which human rights are used as a weapon for political purposes and world domination.

This paper discusses three issues and offers some suggestions to improve the protection of human rights.

First, it will discuss whether or not American wars and economic sanctions violate human rights.

Second, it will examine the violation of civil and political rights in the U.S. and China.

Third, it will focus on the use of human rights violation as a weapon of diplomacy.

Fourth, in the conclusion section, some suggestions are offered to improve the human rights protection. 

American Wars, Economic Sanctions and Human Rights Violation

Former President Jimmy Carter is quoted to have said this:

“The US had only 6 years of peace in 242-year history making the country the most warlike country of the world.”

 

Human Rights and Acts of War

Most of the recent American wars including the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other countries were unauthorized either by the UN or by the US Congress. According to CGTN News (2021.04.09.) in the period, 1945-2001, there were 153 armed conflicts of which 81% was initiated by the U.S.

The most important human right is the right to physical survival of the person. The right to freedom does not mean much for the dead person or those who have lost the means to survive physically (refugees) due to the war.

So can we say that wars violate human rights?

War kills people; it takes away the right to live. In Afghanistan, a great number of people were detained by American intelligence agencies including CIA without evidence and without lawyer. Some years ago, the Human Rights Watch produced 59-page report on human rights violation by Americans. In the report, we read:

“The Bush administration was setting the terrible precedent to the rest of the world by the practice of arbitrary arrests, detention and mistreatment of detainees.”

The Human Rights Now (HUN) urged the United Nations Human Rights Council to conduct impartial investigation by an independent inquiry of the UN on human rights violation in Iraq that happened during the invasion and occupation by the coalition forces led by the U.S.

The crimes committed by allied forces led by American forces include direct killing of civilians, the use of phosphorous weapons, the denial of victims to hospital, the use of uranium weapons, the abusive treatment of detainees by Americans in a prison in Abu Ghraib, physical abuse by torture and other mistreatments. The world does not forget the U.S. crime of pardoning three war criminals who shot civilians and executed captured Iraqis.

According the 2019 estimate by the School of Watson Institute for International and Pacific Affairs at Brown University, the cost of these wars is $6.4 trillion and 801,000 deaths.

The human rights violation by the U.S. in Syria was described by the political and medical advisor to President Bashar al-Assad as follows: :

“We condemn the US violation of Syrian People’s human rights and we condemn the US killing Syrians and plundering of Syrian resources. The US presence in Syria is a naked aggression.”

Thus, there is no doubt that the wars initiated by the U.S. are accompanied by vastly serious violation of human rights of the people of the target countries.

The following table shows the victims of the three wars initiated by the U.S.

Table: Victims of the Three Wars

These three wars killed 280,000 civilians and produced no less than 20,000,000 refugees. 

The sanctions could be the most serious inhumane violation of human rights. In fact, one of the difficult questions to answer, in connection with human rights violation, is about the impact of sanctions on human rights. Up to now, it has been a common assumption that the sanctions are designed to fight against human rights violation in the target country and change the regime. But, it is becoming clear that the sanctions seldom succeed. Instead, sanctions make the civilians and the children starve to die. Sanctions are human rights violators.

A study commissioned by the UN concluded this:

“The amount of information available today on the devastating economic, social and humanitarian impact of sanctions no longer permits to entertain the notion of unintended effects.”

This observation denies the sanction imposer’s common argument that civilian casualties of sanctions are unintended effects.

A member of the UN Social Council stated:

“There can be no doubt that the civilian population in targeted countries are victims of human right violation.”

An independent expert appointed by the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights of the UN is deeply concerned with the recent imposition of unilateral coercive measures on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran by the United States said this:

“The use of economic sanctions for political purpose violates human rights and norms of international behaviour. Such actions precipitate man-made humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportion.”

“Regime Change through economic measures is likely to lead to the denial of basic human rights and indeed possibly to starvation…”

An expert in public health of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) declared this:

“There can be no doubt that civilian population of the targeted countries are victims of human right violation.”

In the UN Website (2019.11.07.), we see that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution asking to stop sanctions against Cuba. According to the UN Website (2019.08.08.), the UNHR High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet pointed out that sanctions against Venezuela have implication on human rights.

The global opinion which is growing is the fact that economic sanctions invite serious violation of human rights. Furthermore, sanctions seldom succeed in attaining their objectives. The expert of the NCBI observes this about the effectiveness of sanctions:

“A State imposing sanctions on its opponent can expect an outcome that is just about the same as would be obtained without sanctions.”

We do not know exactly how many poor countries have been prey of American economic sanctions. But, as of October 2021, 39 countries had been the targets of 8,000 American sanction measures. It seems clear that the U.S. is a major human rights violator.

True, it is difficult to quantify the impact of US wars and American sanctions on the human rights of people of the numerous countries which have been the target of American invasion and sanctions. But, given the sheer number of people who have lost their life and who almost their lost lives, the violation of human rights of these poor people is beyond our imagination.

There are three types of human rights: the civil and political rights, the economic, social and cultural rights and the collective rights. The first type refers to freedom, while the second type refers to the right to life. The third type is related to the right of specific groups such as Native Americans.

We know that war and economic sanctions violate human rights. But which type of human rights do they violate? I am afraid that the wars and economic sanctions violate all the three types of human rights.

The wars and sanctions kill people. A dead person loses all the three types of rights. A dead person has no longer the right to the freedom of speech; a dead person has no longer the right to life; a dead person has no longer the collective rights.

The wars and sanctions produce refugees who lose the right to the means to survive in the short run and even in the long run.

The wars and sanctions destroy the country’s means of production of goods and services leading to economic decline, which threatens people’s right to survive in the long run.

In short, the wars and economic sanctions violate total human rights.

Violation of the Civil and Political Rights in China and the U.S.

The following human rights violations are examined: mass killing, arbitrary detention, freedom of expression, repression of human rights defenders, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, religious freedom and human rights violation in Xinjiang.

In China, two major killing events are known.

  • In 1989, Tiananmen Square Protests resulted in several hundred deaths and several thousand injured people,
  • In the period of 1995-2016, in Xinjiang there were 155 incidence of violence, resulting in 740 killed and 768 injured.
  • In 2013 alone, there were 3 incidences of violence killing 45 people;
  • in 2014 alone, there were 3 incidences of violence killing 83 persons and injuring 169 people. Most of these victims were the results of terrorists attacks.

In the U.S., in 2020, 1,000 were killed by the police. There are 415 incidences of mass killing a year, or more than one incidence a day. In 2019, 39,052 gun related death occurred, one person killed by gun every 15 minutes.

Arbitrary Detention

In China, there are some reported cases of arbitrary detention. There could be more.

  • In June, 2020, the EU demanded the release of Yu Wensheng who was detained for two years in prison for inciting subversion against the State
  • In Xinjiang, in 2017, according reports, one million Uyghurs, Kajakhs and other Muslim people were detained for indoctrination and cultural assimilation at education centers
  • In June 30, 2020, in Hong Kong, the National Security Law was passed

In the U.S., there are no published data on arbitrary detention of American citizens, but in the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there were many persons who were the target of arbitrary detention. 

According to  a UN Human Rights Report entitledGuantanamo Bay: “Ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations”:

“Twenty years of practising arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment is simply unacceptable for any government, particularly a government which has a stated claim to protecting human rights,” said the independent experts, appointed by the Human Rights Council.

“As a newly elected Member of the Human Rights Council, the experts again call on the United States to close this facility and close this ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations.”

In 2003, the facility was holding 700 prisoners. Twenty years later, 39 detainees remain but only nine of them have been charged with or convicted of crimes, 13 have been cleared for transfer. Between 2002 and 2021 nine detainees died in custody, two from natural causes and seven reportedly committed suicide. None had been charged or convicted of a crime.

 

An outside view of Guantanamo Bay prison | Photo: Reuters

Freedom of Expression

In this paper, the freedom of expression is distinguished from freedom of the press. The former refers to the public gathering in order to express opinion on matters of public interests, while the latter refers to media reporters’ freedom of reporting.

In China, the freedom of expression is restricted. The following is the list of reported cases. However, it is interesting to point out that these restrictions have increased during the pandemic.

  • On 2020.07.29, the government began to apply the New National Security Law designed to control free speech and academic freedom.
  • On 2020.08.11, Human Rights Watch asked authorities to release ten democracy supporters who were arrested in August, 2020.
  • In June 2020, Cai Xia, retired professor of the CCP’s Central Party School, called Xi Jinping as “mafia boss” and called CCP as political zombie. She was expelled from the school.
  • Li Wenliang, a Chinese medical doctor who worked at Wuhan Central Hospital, issued warning to colleagues at other hospitals. He was arrested for making false comments.
  • Fang Bin, a Chinese businessman who did broadcast on the Wuhan situation, disappeared since February 2020.
  • Chen Qiushi, Chinese lawyer and active citizen journalist, covered the Hong Kong protests and COVID-19 disappeared since 2020.02.06.
  • Li Zehua, Chinese citizen journalist and Youtuber, tried to trace lawyer-citizen journalist missing since 2020.04.10. with no success.
  • Dr. Li Mengyen, virologist and whistleblower, had to escape to the US after she found a large scale cover up of pandemic situation created by the Chinese authorities.
  • Zhang Zhan, independent journalist, served 4-year prison terms for “picking quarrels” and provoking troubles by going to Wuhan to learn about the situation.
  • In November 1992, 192 Chinese activists submitted a petition to the 16th National Congress of CCP for the reform of the Chinese authority. Zhao Changging, one of the activists, was arrested.

In the US,  freedom of expression is allowed.

Before we go any further, it seems relevant to examine the Chinese policy of the freedom of expression.

The basic philosophy of China’s policy is the importance of harmonizing the right of free expression with Chinese values. For Lee Kuan Yew, former president of Singapore and reputed defender of Asian values, argued for the adaptation of human rights to national and cultural conditions. This is in fact enshrined in the Chinese constitution. Here are the relevant articles.

  • Article 35: freedom of speech, press, assembly association are guaranteed
  • Article 53: citizens must obey laws and respect social ethics
  • Article 54:The above mentioned right should not conflict with interests of the State

China believes that freedom of expression has universal values but its application should be contextualized.

“It is the idea and common need that give rise to universal whilst the implementation of the right in a given context is that which produces the particular. The two concepts must be respected equally in order not to betray either the universality or particularity of human rights.” (P.H. Sun. Human Rights Protection System in China, 20014)

Repression of Human Right Defenders

China restricts human right activities, while in the U.S. such restrictions  are not reported.

  • In June 2020 in China, a legal scholar Xi Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi were arrested for inciting subversion of state power.
  • In February 2020, Hong Kong bookkeeper Gui Minhai was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment for illegally providing intelligence information to foreign entities.
  • In September 2020, Chen Yuan and two others were in the state incommunicado for their anti-discrimination activities.
  • Yang Hengjiun, Australian writer, has been incommunicado since December 12, 2019.
  • In June 17, Yu Wensheng, human rights activist, was convicted for 4-year imprisonment.
  • On August 10, 2020, Jimmy Lai, owner of pro-democratic newspaper Apple Daily in Hong Kong, was arrested for collusion with foreign extreme groups. 

Freedom of Assembly

In China, the only reported case of preventing public assembly was the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest resulting [according to Western sources] in 300 civilian deaths in addition to 5,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians wounded.

During the Summer Olympics of 2018, assembly was restricted in designated places. Public gatherings were forbidden.

In the US, the following cases have been reported.

  • In May-June 2020, there were 125 incidents of police violence against protesters in 40 states.
  • According to the CNN Report (2019.08.11), 100 protesters were arrested.
  • According to the Houston Chronicle Website, 15 protesters were arrested.
  • We find in the Miami Herald Website (2019.11.29) that 40 protesters arrested.

Freedom of the Press

In China, many cases of the restriction of press freedom have been reported.

  • In 2008, ITV News reporter, John Ray was arrested while covering the Tibet protest.
  • In March 2020, the Chinese government expelled employees of New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal in protest to US treatment of state-owned Chinese media employees in the U.S.
  • Ursula Gauthier, French journalist working for l’Obs, was sent home for reporting on China’s treatment of Uyghurs and vocational training at vocational training center where alleged torture, sexual abuse, non-payment for works took place.
  • In 2015, China expelled Melissa Chan from Al Jazeera for reporting “black jails” and government’s land confiscation.
  • Reporter without Borders (RSF) says that “China is the world’s biggest prison of ‘Netizens’.”
  • In 2010, Tan Juran was arrested and sentenced 5-year prison for reporting corruption and poor school construction leading to deaths of thousands of children during the earthquake in Sichuan. He got 4-year imprisonment.
  • Shi Tao was sentenced with 8-year imprisonment for reporting the list of instructions which the state sent to journalists regarding how to report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  • Chen Lei, Australian TV host, was arrested due to Australia-China tension over the COVID-19 investigation.

The U.S. is not free from the guilt of restricting freedom of the press.

  • As of 2020, 28 journalists were attacked during public protests.
  • On 2019.08.11, during the protests against the Immigration and Custom Enforcement, 100 protesters were arrested.
  • According to the US Press Freedom Tracker (2019.08.18), there were 28 incidents in which journalists were denied access to government events; 9 journalists were charged with criminal offence.
  • In 2017, 54 journalists were subpoenaed or their records seized; 36 journalists were arrested while covering protests in the US.
  • In the Guardian Website, we find that the US Administration is mounting the most direct attack on press freedom in American history.
  • According to the Dallas Morning News (2019.12.06), Texas is the secretive surveillance Center for better intelligence for the three levels of government; it has 64.5 million photos.

Religious Freedom

In China, the state protects normal practice of religion. But, there are restrictions.

“No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the State. Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign domination.”

The following shows some aspects of China’s  policy on religions:

  • The members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should be atheists.
  • The government allows some Christian groups which are Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.
  • House-church is illegal. But according to a Protestant church in Korea I know of, it is possible to minister family churches that are quite numerous.
  • In 2017, the Chinese patriotic Catholic Association elected the bishop of Beijing but the Pope did not recognize him.
  • Regarding Buddhism, according to Regulation of 2007.08.03, no living God may be reincarnated without the government approval.
  • The government appointed Pachen Lama which is fake in the eyes of those who regard this as PRC effort to control organized religion.
  • There is a quota on the number of monks to reduce the number of spiritual population.
  • Non-patriotic monks are expelled.
  • Monks are forced to recite patriotic scripts.
  • Religious education cannot be done before the age of 18.

Human Rights Violations in Xinjiang

The Xinjiang region presents one of the major difficulties for China. It is a region which has been the constant threat to the stability of the Chinese society due to value gaps between the Uyghurs and the Hans. Moreover, there  is evidence of  the presence of Islamist terrorist organization supported by foreign powers within Xinjian-Uyghur (see our analysis below).

Xinjiang poses a constant threat of independence by the Uyghurs who are, in majority, Muslims.

We see below some the elements of China’s Xinjiang policy, largely based on Western sources which often present a biased perspective:

  • Article 36 of the constitution protects the religion of all citizens.
  • But since Xi Jinping took over the power in 2012, the Uyghurs Autonomous Region is subject of the state control for the practice of Islam.
  • Religious practice is allowed only in state-approved mosques.
  • Uyghurs under 18 are not allowed to enter the mosques.
  • Education of religion is allowed only at the designated schools.
  • Women are not allowed to wear headscarves and veils.
  • Men are not allowed to have beards.
  • The use of Islamic name is forbidden.
  • In 2012, 1 million Muslims were detained in internment camps with no trial or lawyers. They were re-educated to renounce Islamic belief.
  • According to the Radio Free Asia, in 2018, an Uyghur man, Abduheber Ahmet sent his son to a school which is not approved by the State. Ahmet was sentenced to 5-year imprisonment.
  • In 2018, 1 million Chinese workers were forced to live in the homes of Uyghur families to monitor assimilation.
  • Thousands of children were separated.
  • Number of children living in boarding housing rose to 880,000.
  • According to the Forced Labour Report of Australian Strategic Policy Institute(ASPI), in 2021, an Uyghur woman in internment camps told about the violence, sexual abuse, torture, and rape.
  • No less than 80,000 Uyghur people were sent to forced labour in factories such as Fitch, Adidas, Amazon, Apple, BMW, Nike, Samsung and several others.
  • In February 1997 Yining county located between Kazakstan and Xinjiang, 12 independence leaders were executed; 27 others were arrested; 200 Uyghur people were killed; 2,000 Uyghurs were arrested.
  • In July 2009, anti-Han program was committed in Ruriqi Xinjiang.

The West’s reactions are noteworthy. On 2020.07.19, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accused PRC of “gross and egregious human rights abuse against Uyghurs.” On 2020.07.24, two members of European Parliament Hilde Vautmans and Katalin Cseh wrote a letter to European Commission to punish China for violation of human rights of Uyghurs. On 2020.07.28, the US government put pressure on global businesses to re-examine and cut ties with China.

On 2020.08.31, human rights campaigners requested the US authorities to ban the imports of cotton made by forced labour. On 2020.10.10, the UK shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy urged Britons to block Chinese seat in the UNHR Council. But China is in the Council. On 2021.01.19, Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, claimed without evidence that:

“China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs and crimes against humanity. I believe that genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”

Pompeo calls for “all multinational and relevant judicial bodies to join the United States in our efforts to promote accountability for those responsible for the atrocities.”

Before we demonize China, we should examine the rationale of China’s Xinjiang policy.

There are two basic reasons, namely,

  • the need for cultural assimilation of the Uyghurs
  • the fear of Islamic terrorism (linked to Al Qaeda) related to the independence movement.

Independence Movements

In China, as of 1964, there were 183 registered minority groups of which the government recognized 54. The independence movements have taken place in the  following regions:

Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet, Guangxi.

However, it is Xinjiang where the independence movement is the most radical and intense.

It is interesting to review the Chinese policy pertaining to ethnic minorities. Sun Yat-sen took over the destiny of China in 1912 and he was, in a way, the father of Chinese democracy. He sent Han people, the great majority of the Chinese population, from Southeast to Northwest China in order to assimilate minority groups into the Chinese value system.

Chiang Kai-shek succeeded Sun Yat-sen and adopted an education system for further assimilation of minority groups. For this, the ethnic minority groups were given preferential treatment for jobs, political appointment, business loans, university entrance quota.

However, under Mao Zedong, ethnic minorities enjoyed greater autonomy. For instance, Mongolia became independent in 1921; Xinjiang became autonomous in 1955. Mao’s policy may be explained by the fact that Mao attached greater importance to the value of international communism, thus, he might have felt the need to dilute traditional Chinese values.

On the other hand, Mao’s policy might have led to more cultural autonomy and, indeed, as well as movements towards political autonomy.

However, as it was pointed out above, it is in Xinjiang where the independence movement is the most radical and intense.

One of the most costly independence protest movement took place in 1997. In February that year, in Yining county, located between Kazakstan and Xinjiang, 12 independent leaders were executed; 27 others were arrested; 200 Uyghurs were killed; 2,000 Uyghurs were arrested.

The Xinjiang territory was incorporated into China in 1884. Since then, the independence movement has been a part of Xinjiang history. There are four major organized independence movements:

  • The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIN),
  • The East Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO),
  • The United Revolutionary Front of East Turkistan (URFET)
  • The Uyghurs  Liberation Front (ULF).

The members of these organizations are trained in Central Asia, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. Every year, 5,000 Uyghurs pilgrims in Saudi Arabia get trained for terrorism and, on their return to Xinjiang, they play central role in Xinjiang independence movements.

Violence in Xinjiang and in some part of mainland China is almost a regular picture of collective life. In the period between 1989-2016, there were 268 incidences of violence, 1,033 violent deaths and 2,013 injured.

The detention of an alleged one million Uyghurs sounds harsh. What is China’s position? China seeks cultural and political assimilation of the Uyghurs into the Chinese values as well as the denial of the Turkestan Islamist movement.

The detention centers are reeducation facilities intended to reintegrate the Uyghurs into the mainstream of Chinese society.

According to an article by thediplomat.com of May 2021, Ma Ling, a Muslim teacher at one of the detention centers, said there were eight ethnic groups including Korean Chinese and after having learned Mandarin, they could find jobs. Ma Ling is quoted to have said this:

“Whether Uyghurs or other ethnic groups in Xinjiang, they are shocked and very angry when they hear the West saying there was genocide in Xinjiang.”

It appears that the more serious reason for harsh policies applied to Xinjiang is the genuine fear of terrorism. In 2019, the New York Times published a leaked document and quoted Xi Jinping saying this:

“East Turkistan terrorists who have received real war training in Syria and Afghanistan could anytime launch terrorist attack in Xinjiang.”

According to moderndiplomacy.eu of May 3, 2020, the CCP is aware of the link between the Uyghur separatists and Islamist militant organizations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, in particular, the Philippines and Malaysia.

There are also several thousand Uyghurs fighting alongside militants Islamist groups in the Middle East. Moreover, the possible covert operation of Western intelligence services to destabilize China is another source of fear on the part of China.

As a matter of fact, in 2014, Xi Jinping established the Comprehensive Security Framework requiring the CCP to focus on the increased vulnerability to Jihadist infiltration.

The Chinese policy of Xinjiang is also based on the belief that the detention and re-education should psychologically and politically make the population resilient to Jihadists infiltration.

The Weaponization of Human Rights

Another major challenge of human rights is the use of human rights as a weapon of hegemonic war. The Sino-American conflict has been degenerated into unhealthy demonization of China on the basis of political human rights violation.

In order to use human rights violation as a weapon of diplomacy, high ranking bureaucrats make bold statement and sell the idea through friendly media. The statement of Tony Blinken, the State Secretary of the U.S. is a good example. He said this:

“Amid growing international condemnation, the PCR continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. The United States reiterates call on PRC to bring an end to the repression of Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslims, and number of other Muslim and religious minority held internment camps and detention capacities.”

In 2017, a US State Dept. memo confirmed that the US has a standby policy of using allegation of human rights violation as a bludgeon against countries like China while ignoring human rights violation against states of the empire like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Image below: Rex Tillerson

In 2017, Politico published an internet memo sent to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by virulent neo-con Brian Hook. The memo reads:

“Human rights are really just a tool to be cynically exploited to advance the goal of planetary hegemony like old veteran explaining the back story to the new guy in pilot episode of a new TV show.”

“One realistic guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently-and-better than adversaries. We do not look to bolster American adversaries. We look to pressure, compete with, and out-manoeuvre them. For this, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to the US relations with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practice in these countries. It is because pressing these regions on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter pressure, and regain initiative from them strategically.”

“It should be clear to you now. Neither Washington nor its vassal states harbour any interests of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, they are using that narrative to impose cost, counter pressure and regain initiatives from them strategically.

These incredible statements make us to review the evolution of Washington’s diplomacy with China. From 1970 Kissinger’s Beijing visit and the normalization of bilateral diplomacy in 1979 to the rise of China in the 2000s, the human rights issue was not a problem. During this period, the China’s Xinjiang policy was not very different from its present policy. But, suddenly, human rights issue of Xinjiang has become the main feature of the Western media. This proves that the current demonization of China with human rights violation in Xinjiang is not a human rights issue; it is a part of strategy of China containment policy.

Conclusion

To conclude, I have tried to show that neither China nor the U.S. are free from the guilt of human rights violation.

It is not easy to say which of the two violates more human rights. But, when you consider the impact of American wars and sanctions imposed by Washington, the U.S. may be considered to be the worst human rights violator.

One thing is clear is that Washington is not “clean enough” to accuse China, North Korea or any other country of  violating human rights.

Human rights violation has been an integral part of human life.

As it was pointed out above, human rights violation is essentially the process in which the strong exploits the weak; the rich despises the poor.

There are too many violators of human rights. Individual violates them; the business violates them; the governments violate them; the international institutions violate them. And, there are as many possible targets of human rights violations as there are stars in the night sky.

The so-called “international community” does not have the array of devoted individuals, institutions, governments and international organizations which are dedicated to prevent human rights violation.

True, there are numerous well-intended international conventions designed to fight human rights violations. But, there is no effective legal backing.

True, each country has institutions to protect human rights, but there are no strong laws to support them.

To make matters worse, even if there are carefully formulated laws, their application are often useless because of the corruption of the judicial and penal system.

While I am not terribly optimistic about the future of human rights, these are my suggestions:

  • First, human rights should not be used as political weapon, which will surely put peace further away. Besides, the use of human rights as a political weapon is illegal and immoral.
  • Second, there are two basic types of human rights: the civil and political rights which value freedom and the economic, social and cultural rights in which the right to life has priority. My suggestion is this. The economic, social and cultural rights should be regarded as important as the civil political righs, if not more important. This is so especially in the U.S. After all, the right to life is more important than the right to freedom of speech. A dead person cannot talk.
  • Third, there should be more and better legal backing not only to national human rights protection systems in each and every country but also to international conventions on human rights.
  • Fourth, the fight against human rights violations should be accompanied by the fight against the corruption culture which is main source of human rights violations
  • Finally, the UN Human Right Council (UNHRC) should be more aggressive and bolder in denouncing human rights violators, whether they are individuals, businesses or governments.

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Joseph H. Chung is professor of Economics at Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM) and member of the Research Center on Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of UQAM. He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Michele Bachelet, Presidente of Chile speaks during Special Session of the Human Rights Council. 29 March 2017.

Ukraine: Understanding the Concern of the Other

February 26th, 2022 by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

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Important analysis

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

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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The mainstream Western media is almost unanimous in demanding that Russia and Vladimir Putin stop their military operation in Ukraine immediately. This in their opinion is the only solution to the current conflict. However, if one attempts to understand how the current conflict had evolved, one would ask not Russia but the US led Western alliance to bring down the political temperature as a first step.  

The roots of the present conflict have to be traced back to the end of the Cold War in 1991. The leader of the Union of  Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia’s predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev felt that if peace is to greet the demise of the Cold War then the military posturing that signified that era should be buried once and for all. For his part, Gorbachev was prepared to dismantle the Warsaw Pact that the USSR helmed which was his country’s response to the US led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). All that he asked for in return was a firm commitment that NATO would not expand eastwards, extend its military power to the states adjacent to Russia thus posing a security threat to the latter. Though the undertaking that Gorbachev sought was not engraved in written language, American leaders at that time like President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Chris Baker had some notion of the gravity of the verbal pledge they had given to their Russian counterpart.

It is a pity that in the years that followed, the US government made no attempt to give substantive meaning to that pledge. On the contrary, in 1997, three former Warsaw Pact states. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, were invited to hold talks on joining NATO. On 27th March 2020, all 3 joined NATO, in spite of protests from elements in the Russian leadership. A few other states that were once part of the USSR and others allied to Russia in the past have now joined NATO.

It is against this background that one should view events in 2014 that exacerbated Russia –Ukraine ties in relation to NATO. These events are directly linked to the current conflict in Ukraine. The democratically elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, who was not prepared to follow blindly the dictates of Western powers was unceremoniously removed from power through the manipulation of parliamentary procedures and replaced by a new regime more inclined towards Washington. Though the Yanukovich government was seriously flawed in some ways, his engineered ouster which strengthened the hands of neo-Nazi and fascist elements, spawned virulent anti-Russian rhetoric and spiked street violence has left deep scars upon Ukranian society. The separatist tensions and turmoil in parts of Eastern Ukraine in the last eight years  that have taken the lives of at least 14,000 people can only be understood within the context of this post-2014 scenario. It is also this scenario that explains in part why Russian president Vladimir Putin acted the way he did in Crimea in Eastern Ukraine. The overwhelming desire among the vast majority of the people of Crimea to re-link their land to Russia affirmed in the 2014 Referendum is irrefutable proof of how ordinary citizens view their security and well-being.

This is why loose talk in Kiev and Washington in the last few months that ‘Ukraine should join NATO’ or that ‘ Ukraine should acquire nuclear weapons’ in the end produced a backlash effect. It increased anxiety among both elites and citizens in Russia about security concerns. It is important to emphasise yet again that this concern for their collective security as a nation and as a people is what Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov and other Russian leaders have tried to convey to their counterparts in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin  and indeed every other Western capital for more than  20 years since the end of the Cold War. Simply put, Russia does not want a Western military alliance—NATO—perched at its gate. The West has refused to address this very legitimate concern. Worse, it has wilfully chosen to brush aside Russia’s fear.

Bluntly put, Moscow has now been provoked to act. Since Washington in particular was not willing to use diplomacy to address Russia’s fear, its concern, Moscow has opted for a special ‘military operation’. Moscow’s response is perfectly understandable. It is completely rational.

Perhaps we should all remind Washington and the West of a fragment of their own history to help them appreciate better what is happening now in Ukraine. In 1962, there was a huge international political crisis. We thought we were on the verge of a world war. The USSR had deployed missiles in Cuba, on the soil of its ally, facing their common foe, the United States.  Cuba was just 90 kilometres from the US shoreline. The US president, John Kennedy, saw it as an act of provocation. He wanted the missiles removed immediately. Otherwise, he would attack Cuba. After some negotiations, Cuban leader Fidel Castro requested his Soviet friends to remove the missiles. The Cuban crisis was defused.

In response to Castro’s decision, Kennedy, it is alleged, undertook not to overthrow Castro through illegal means. Whether he kept his word or not, it was not really tested because Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 before he could complete his second term as US president. Some of his successors tried to undermine Castro but that is another story.

Cuba 60 years ago  is relevant to the present situation in Ukraine.  Just as the US did not want Russian missiles at its doorstep 62 years ago, Russia in 2022 does not want overwhelming Western military power at its gate today. The Cuban leadership understood what had to be done to assuage American fears. One hopes that the US and Western governments today realise why it is so important to allay a legitimate Russian concern about its security.

In a nutshell both situations demand an appreciation of that ancient truth found in all spiritual and moral traditions: do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you. It is a truth that has been described as the fundamental ethic in relations between human beings, communities and states. It is, in plain language, the  Golden Rule of Life. The US elite in particular has shown so little regard for this golden rule  in international affairs.

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Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Founder and President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), prominent human rights advocate, author and academic, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

CKUW Fundrive 2022: A Commitment to Decolonizing Radio

February 26th, 2022 by Michael Welch

“The words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

-Martin Luther King Jr (April 4, 1967) [1]

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Something not well understood in the West about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was that in addition to fighting against the agonizing reality that is racism, he was also a devoted critic of America’s imperialist wars.

In April of 1967, a year to the day in advance of his assassination, Dr King was speaking to a huge audience at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, New York City. At this church, the beloved orator of hope, fellowship and crusader for the rights of Black people shocked a lot of listeners with his speech decrying the War in Vietnam, and ending the current trends of U.S. foreign policy generally. [2]

The man had strayed beyond a civil rights leader, so to speak, to entering into a much larger role, that of an antiwar activist. This stance ended up alienating white allies like President Lynden Johnson and Billy Graham as well as union leaders and major publishers. But it also moved and motivated several in the Columbia community and in Harlem. [3]

The story serves the purpose of witnessing links between racism against Black in America and wars and aggression committed against people living abroad who sit on material or other resources the elites covet. It is also witnessing a rise in the tradition of several black radicals including the membership in organizations like Black Agenda Report and Black Alliance for Peace in making the antiwar movement a fundamental piece of their overall approach to justice.

This subject and the associated need to decolonize our station and our audience encompasses the breadth of this week’s program on the Global Research News Hour. It is also the core of the station’s second edition of the CKUW Fundrive!

It features show host Michael Welch together with fellow station host Ras Rico discussing the subject of decolonization at length touching on Haiti, Angola, Cuba and other places in the cross-hairs of the U.S. Empire. We also allow cameos by Volunteer Coordinator Ugonna Chigbo and by Program Director Scott Price. We also talk about the station itself and encourage listeners to support it with a pledge. And we host musical numbers as well!

The drive has ended shy of its $60,000 goal. However, you are still encouraged to send whatever you can to the station at fundrive.ckuw.ca. (Please don’t use the number quoted repeatedly on air!)

As an alternative, direct your funds to the Global Research donation site, highlighting funding for the Global Research News Hour.

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Thanks again to our regular listeners who have given their all to keep this program going. It is most appreciated!

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

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CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

  1. Martin Luther King’s 1967 Riverside Church Speech (JANUARY 17, 2011), Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence; http://www.listics.com/201101175996/
  2. https://bac.alumni.columbia.edu/50_years_ago_dr_king_at_riverside
  3. Dyson, Michael Eric (2008). “Facing Death”. April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s death and how it changed America. Basic Civitas Books
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***

The Covid-19 narrative is broken, that battle is over. Yes, there are still pockets of token resistance, little embattled squares who aren’t ready to give up the ghost just yet, but for the most part the establishment are letting it go.

Country after country after country are “relaxing” their Covid restrictions, abandoning vaccine passport plans and attempting to “get back to normal”.

It seems every week some new “expert” who spent the last two years predicting we’re all gonna die turns up on the news claiming we should “treat Covid like the flu”.

But just because they’re giving slack on Covid does not mean the agenda behind Covid is gone. Far from it.

In fact, even as they seek to dump this pandemic in a shallow grave, they are already prepping the public for the next health scare – AIDs.

In December Joe Biden claimed it was the aim of his administration to “end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030”. A similar campaign, launched in the UK at the same, uses the same exact phrase, word for word.

Then, just last week it was suddenly reported there was a “new variant” of HIV circulating in Europe, this new strain is allegedly “more virulent”,“more transmissible”, and “progresses to AIDS faster”.

At the same time, papers are reporting that for the first time in years heterosexuals are more likely to contract HIV than homosexuals, and they are “more at risk of AIDS” because they’re “diagnosed late”.

On the back of this “news”, a Guardian opinion piece claims we need a “new strategy” for dealing with AIDS.

Following hot on the heels of this fresh wave of fear is a push for everyone to get AIDS tested as soon as possible, from politicians and celebrities and everyone in between.

Prince Harry is leading the charge, in a video that caused the press invoke the spirit of his mother Princess Diana, Harry insisted we all have a “duty” to get HIV tested “to keep other people safe”, comparing it to the COVID outbreak.

“Know your status“, the video says. Which will probably be a hashtag in the near future. (I just checked, and it actually is already.)

They’re really cranking through the gears on this one.

Even while the problem and reaction are still barely out of the research and development stage, they’re already talking about the solution.

Guess what it is?

If you said “another mRNA vaccine”, well done for paying attention

Yes, Moderna has apparently learned so much from making their rushed Covid vaccine which doesn’t work that they’re already making an HIV vaccine they hope will be just as “safe and effective”.

In a truly startling coincidence, Moderna’s HIV vaccine began clinical trials the exact same day the “new variant” of HIV hit the headlines, and the same week as the NHS’s annual “HIV Testing Week”. Funny old world, isn’t it?

Anyway, everyone get ready to line up for the AIDS shot.

Oh, and the cancer one as well.

The Covid battle might be slowly winding down, but the mRNA “vaccine” war has potentially only just begun.

*

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Why Putin Took Military Action

February 25th, 2022 by Joe Lauria

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***

Important analysis and historical review by Joe Lauria

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Russia says it has no intentions of controlling Ukraine and its military operation is only to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine in an action taken after 30 years of the U.S. pushing Russia too far, writes Joe Lauria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a TV address Thursday morning that the goal of Russia’s military operation was not to take control of Ukraine, but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” the country.  Moments after he spoke, explosions were heard in several Ukrainian cities.

The Russian Defense Ministry said these were “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations and that civilians were not being targeted.  It said Ukraine’s air force on the ground and its air defenses had been destroyed.

The Ukrainian government, which declared a state of emergency and broke off diplomatic relations with Russia, said an invasion was underway and that Russia had landed forces at the port city of Odessa, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, as well as entering from Belarus in the north.  It said it had killed 50 Russian troops and shot down six Russian fighter jets, which Russia denied.

Putin said one of the operation’s aims was to arrest certain people in Ukraine, likely the neo-Nazis who burned dozens of unarmed people alive in a building in Odessa in 2014. In his speech Monday, Putin said  Moscow knows who they are.  Russia said it aims to destroy neo-Nazi brigades, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion.

Putin said the aim was not to occupy Ukraine, but he gave no indication when Russia might leave. It could be over quickly if Russia’s objectives are met. But war has its own logic and often lays waste to military plans.

The BBC reported that according to Ukrainian authorities 50 civilians have been killed so far. President Joe Biden is certain how this will turn out.

“President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” Biden said Wednesday night. “Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.”

Diminishing Russia

Biden is to make a televised address on Thursday after he coordinates a response to Russia’s military action in Ukraine with the G7 and NATO. Biden said he will announce a new package of economic sanctions against Russia, in addition to those imposed on Monday, but reiterated that U.S. and NATO forces would not become involved.  According to TASS, Russia’s news agency, the EU said it intends to weaken “Russia’s economic base and the country’s capacity to modernize.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson even hinted at British military involvement.

“Our mission is clear,” he said. “Diplomatically, politically, economically and eventually militarily this hideous and barbaric venture of Vladimir Putin must end in failure.”

In a White House readout after the last phone call between Biden and Putin this month, Biden said Russia would be “diminished” if it invades, a longstanding U.S. goal.

In addition to the sanctions, Russia has faced widespread condemnation from most of the world, expressed at United Nations meetings this week, including an emergency session of the Security Council on Wednesday night.  Several nations spoke in melodramatic tones about the military operation changing global security. Many of those nations supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

On Monday, Putin said he would send Russian “peacekeepers” into Lugansk and Donetsk, which he recognized as states independent from Ukraine.  The West denounced it as an invasion, triggering the first round of sanctions against Russia.  Putin said the Russian troops were sent in to protect ethnic Russians, many of whom have now fled for safety over the border to Russia.

Combat in Donbass

Fierce fighting was reported Thursday along the line of separation between Ukrainian forces and militias from Donetsk and Lugansk. It is not clear to what extent Russian forces are taking part in the Donbass battle and if the aim is to capture all of the two breakaway provinces.

Both had voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 after a coup overthrew the elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  The new Ukrainian government then launched a war against the provinces to crush their bid for independence, a war that is still going on eight years later at the cost of 14,000 lives.

Neo-Nazi groups, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, who revere the World War II Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, took part in the coup as well as in the ongoing war against Lugansk and Donetsk.

A Matter of ‘Life or Death’ 

The Russian military action follows demands made in December by Russia to the U.S. and NATO in the form of treaty proposals that would require Ukraine and Georgia not to join NATO; U.S. missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed; and NATO deployments to Eastern Europe reversed.  The U.S. and NATO rejected the proposals and instead sent more NATO forces to Eastern Europe and have been heavily arming Ukraine.

In his address on Thursday morning, Putin said the military operation he was launching was a “question of life or death” for Russia, referring to NATO’s expansion east since the late 1990s. He said:

“For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”

Detailed Explanation of Causes and Aims of Operation

Silets Sokalskyi Lvivska battlefield monument in Ukraine of Soviets soldiers against Nazi invaders. (Viacheslav Galievskyi/Wikimedia Commons)

In his 3,350-word speech, Putin laid out in full detail the reasons he decided to take military action and what he hopes it will achieve. The speech is a devastating critique of U.S. policy toward Russia over the past 30 years, which no doubt will fall on deaf ears in Washington.

Western media is so far ignoring the speech or superficially dismissing it. But it has to be carefully studied if anyone is interested in understanding why Russia launched this military operation. Just calling Putin “Hitler,” as Nancy Pelosi did Wednesday night, won’t do.

Hitler in fact features in Putin’s address. For instance, addressing the Ukrainian military, Putin said:

“Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.”

He linked the Nazis’ invasion of Russia to NATO’s threat today, saying this time there would be no appeasement:

“Of course, this situation begs a question: what next, what are we to expect? If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. To this end, the USSR sought not to provoke the potential aggressor until the very end by refraining or postponing the most urgent and obvious preparations it had to make to defend itself from an imminent attack. When it finally acted, it was too late.

As a result, the country was not prepared to counter the invasion by Nazi Germany, which attacked our Motherland on June 22, 1941, without declaring war. The country stopped the enemy and went on to defeat it, but this came at a tremendous cost. The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time. We have no right to do so.”

Putin said the existential threat from NATO’s expansion was the main reason for military action:

“Our biggest concerns and worries, [are] the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.

It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.

Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?”

 Putin called the Americans “con-artists” for lying about NATO expansion. He referred to:

“promises not to expand NATO eastwards even by an inch. To reiterate: they have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us. Sure, one often hears that politics is a dirty business. It could be, but it shouldn’t be as dirty as it is now, not to such an extent. This type of con-artist behaviour is contrary not only to the principles of international relations but also and above all to the generally accepted norms of morality and ethics.”

Putin said Russia had long wanted to cooperate with the West.

“Those who aspire to global dominance have publicly designated Russia as their enemy. They did so with impunity. Make no mistake, they had no reason to act this way,” he said.

Cold War Triumphalism & Its Consequences

U.S. soldier conducts search of family’s home in Iraq, 2006. (Navy Journalist 1st Class Jeremy L. Wood)

Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union had led to a redivision of the world and a change to international law and norms.  New rules were needed but instead of achieving this “professionally, smoothly, patiently, and with due regard and respect for the interests of all states … we saw a state of euphoria created by the feeling of absolute superiority, a kind of modern absolutism coupled with the low cultural standards and arrogance of those who formulated and pushed through decisions that suited only themselves.”

Putin then said this “absolutism,” with the Soviet Union no longer as a barrier, led to unchecked U.S. aggression, starting with NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and U.S. involvement in Syria. Russia has been taking note of the destruction Washington has wrought, even as it seems whitewashed from American minds.

“First a bloody military operation was waged against Belgrade, without the UN Security Council’s sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe. The bombing of peaceful cities and vital infrastructure went on for several weeks. I have to recall these facts, because some Western colleagues prefer to forget them, and when we mentioned the event, they prefer to avoid speaking about international law.

Then came the turn of Iraq, Libya and Syria. The illegal use of military power against Libya and the distortion of all the UN Security Council decisions on Libya ruined the state, created a huge seat of international terrorism, and pushed the country towards a humanitarian catastrophe, into the vortex of a civil war, which has continued there for years. The tragedy, which was created for hundreds of thousands and even millions of people not only in Libya but in the whole region, has led to a large-scale exodus from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe.

A similar fate was also prepared for Syria. The combat operations conducted by the Western coalition in that country without the Syrian government’s approval or UN Security Council’s sanction can only be defined as aggression and intervention.

But the example that stands apart from the above events is, of course, the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds. They used the pretext of allegedly reliable information available in the United States about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To prove that allegation, the US Secretary of State held up a vial with white power, publicly, for the whole world to see, assuring the international community that it was a chemical warfare agent created in Iraq.

It later turned out that all of that was a fake and a sham, and that Iraq did not have any chemical weapons. Incredible and shocking but true. We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result we see a tremendous loss in human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.

Overall, it appears that nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, non-healing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism.”

Putin said over the past days “NATO leadership has been blunt in its statements that they need to accelerate and step up efforts to bring the alliance’s infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders. In other words, they have been toughening their position. We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us.”

Ukraine, he said, had essentially become a de-facto NATO member posing the greatest threat to Russia.

“Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us. Of course, the question is not about NATO itself. It merely serves as a tool of US foreign policy. The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.”

A Parting Shot at European Vassals

Putin also blasted America’s European allies for not having the strength of principle or the moral fiber to stand up to Washington. He said:

“The United States is still a great country and a system-forming power. All its satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behaviour and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them. Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same ’empire of lies.’”

Read the full text of the speech.

*

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Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe  

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

Ukraine: The US and NATO Created this Mess

February 25th, 2022 by Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War

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Important declaration by The Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War.

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

The US and NATO created this crisis because they tossed aside the reasonable demands of the Russian Federation in two draft treaties submitted on December 21, 2021. One of the key demands was for a neutral Ukraine and a binding pledge that it would never join NATO.

For his part, Ukrainian President Zelensky dismissed the Minsk Protocols, which was the only formula to solve the impasse over the breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Minsk Protocols required the Ukrainian government to negotiate with the breakaway region concerning the restoration of its previous autonomy as well as language and cultural rights, prior to the Maidan coup in 2014.

These failures left the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass alone to suffer the increasing military onslaught of a Ukrainian government, riddled with neo-Nazi parties, egged on by Western arms and money.

All of the above are the festering sores of three decades of betrayal by the US and NATO of their pledges in the early 1990’s to Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, that NATO wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward” of a reunited Germany.

However, in the past thirty years, rather than dissolving itself (because it was set up to protect North Atlantic countries from the alleged danger of communism), NATO expanded 800 km. to the east, and admitted fourteen states which had been broken away from the former Soviet Union or were former members of the Warsaw Pact. Western (including Canadian) military and naval forces were stationed in these new NATO member countries and NATO installed missile systems and held massive drills close to Russia’s diminished borders. Clearly, the US plan was for its aggressive military alliance, NATO, to expand right up to all of Russia’s border with a view to further dismembering Russia and consolidating US hegemony over the entire European continent.

Another festering sore for Russia was the US-inspired coup in Kiev of 2014 whose junta thought it could impose its will on the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass.

Russia, in its desire to protect the people of the Donbass Region, decided quite reasonably to recognize their governments and to create a demilitarized zone in the rest of Ukraine.

We believe that the Trudeau government should mind its own business and butt out of Ukraine. It has already caused enough damage by supporting the 2014 Maidan coup and arming and funding the junta to the teeth, not to mention by leveling coercive economic measures against Russia for many years.

Canada should quit the gang of thieves and land destroyers known as NATO and end all of its participation in provocative military adventures in Ukraine, Latvia, Romania, and the Black Sea.

In addition, the Trudeau Government should redirect the $350 billion CAD, proposed for new NATO-inspired fighter jets, warships, and predator drones, towards social programs and defensive weapons for Canada’s sovereign territory.

It should also sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and refrain from admitting as refugees anyone associated with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

*

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Featured image is from Supratim Barman

Global Research Weekender: Why Did Russia Attack Ukraine?

February 25th, 2022 by Global Research News

The ongoing Russian military invasion of Ukraine is a stark illustration of an ever increasing security dilemma.

Putin maximized diplomatic efforts to resolve the protracted tension between the two states but the warmongers in the West only added fuel to the fire by reneging on NATO assurances, relentlessly spitting baseless propaganda and provoking the military superpower.

Yet, do these premises constitute the legitimacy of the Russian invasion?

As the world embarks on virtue signaling, will the US invoke its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and extend military aid to Ukraine? 

Various opinions are expressed. The geopolitical context is exceedingly complex. Global Research is not supportive of  Russia’s invasion.

***

From the Black Sea to the East Med, “Don’t Poke The Russian Bear”

By Pepe Escobar, February 25, 2022

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

Ukraine Intervention: How NATO Stirred Resting Bear into Action?

By Nauman Sadiq, February 25, 2022

It’s noteworthy that all the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The US Is the Major Instigator of the Ukraine Conflict. The Historical Facts

By Rick Sterling, February 24, 2022

Fact 1. In February 2014, a coup overthrew the Ukrainian government which came to power in an election certified by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation). The president, Viktor Yanukovich, was forced to flee for his life.

Putin Crosses the Rubicon. What Next?

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, February 24, 2022

Russia’s recognition of the ‘people’s republics’ of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass on Monday is a watershed event. In a manner of speaking, by this decision President Vladimir Putin crossed the Rubicon. But a tumultuous period lies ahead.

Eyewitness Reports Indicate Ukrainian Army Fired First Shots in War with Russia

By Don Hank and Jeremy Kuzmarov, February 24, 2022

The U.S. has since provided extensive military aid and training to Ukrainian armed forces as they brutalized the people of Eastern Ukraine who voted to secede after the 2014 coup. The U.S. has also applied extensive sanctions on Russia–tantamount to an act of war.

Hyenas in the Kitchen

By The Good Citizen, February 24, 2022

Listening to Putin’s recent speech that preceded the declaration to recognize the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, it was difficult not to notice that something was incredibly off about his claims. They simply did not match what the western corporate press, those dutiful stenographers for NATO power have been reporting for years.

Sanctions Will Not Stop Russians from Shopping and Partying in Europe

By Paul Antonopoulos, February 24, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on February 21 his decision to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, after which friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance agreements were signed. At the same time, the Russian president ordered the Ministry of Defense to guarantee the maintenance of peace by the Russian Armed Forces in both republics – thus inspiring the pre-emptive strikes against Ukraine’s provocative military.

Russia to the US: Your Aggression Stops Here

By Christopher Black, February 23, 2022

The Americans and their satellites states go further and claim a right to expand their alliance, but on what legal, moral or security grounds this right is based they cannot say. They claim that nations have the right to join NATO of their own free will, but this again is a distortion of the facts.

What Are the Minsk Agreements and What Are Their Role in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis?

By Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman, February 23, 2022

The situation in Ukraine today is attributed to the rise of ultra-nationalist and Russophobe groups that compelled the then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich to resign during the Euromaidan protests in February 2014.

Video: Moscow’s Recognition of Lugansk and Donesk People’s Republics. Russia “Provides Peace Keeping Forces”

By South Front, February 23, 2022

February 21 marked a historic event that shapes a new system of international relations for the entire world community. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia recognizes the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in the east of Ukraine as sovereign entities.

West Remains Divided on Sanctions Against Russia

By Paul Antonopoulos, February 22, 2022

Washington, despite its never-ending rhetoric of an imminent Russian invasion, had a Biden administration official meekly say that the presence of Russian troops in Donestsk and Lugansk alone may not lead to the “swift and severe” sanctions that the White House has been warning about for months now.

The 2014 Neoliberal Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine. The World Is at a Dangerous Crossroads

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and James Corbett, January 22, 2022

This report dates back to the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Kiev coup d’état, which consisted in an act of war by US-NATO directed against Ukraine, leading to the formation of a full-fledged Neo-Nazi government in Ukraine.

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What is happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications.

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

This report provides factual information.

Global Research does not support the Russian military operation.

***

The Defense Ministry has claimed that the main forces of the airborne troops of the Russian Federation joined the units that had landed in Gostomel.  Thus, Kiev is now blocked in the West. 

Tank columns of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation broke through to the near approaches to Kiev and reached the airfield.

On February 24th, the Russian landing in the area of the Gostomel airfield near Kiev ensured the suppression of the Ukrainian air defense, isolated the combat area from the air. Russian paratroopers have been holding the airfield for more than a day, repelling attacks of the UAF.

More than 200 Russian helicopters and paratroopers were involved in the operation, added the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

The Russian Armed Forces suffered no losses during the seizure of the airfield.

The footage shared online proved that the airfield is under control of Russian forces and heavy cargo aircraft with military equipment and military personnel are now landing there.

The Kiev-Zhytomyr highway is occupied by Russian troops. Clashes were reported near the town of Ivankovo. The UAF blew up a bridge near Vyshgorod, northers suburbs of the Kapital, trying to stop the advance of the Russian troops. However, this was not enough.

According to the Ukrainian media, Russian tanks are also going to Kiev, through the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The column of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was destroyed in the city of Bucha in the north-western Kiev region.

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

A column of airborne forces were spotted heading towards Kiev from various directions:

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

Hours before, the UAF began the deployment of heavy equipment in Kiev, on the streets, in residential areas, in the center of the capital.

The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation claimed that intelligence data showed multiple rocket launchers “Grad” deployed on the Shevchenko Square in the center of the city.

The Russian Defense Ministry appealed to Ukrainian citizens:

“They want to use you as a human shield. The Russian armed forces will not strike any residential areas of the Ukrainian capital”

Kiev Assault: The Capital Besieged. Russia And Ukraine To Launch Negotiations (Videos)

Meanwhile, firearms are distributed to civilians. The military distributes weapons directly from KAMAZ trucks, without asking for any documents. Video from the Obolon region, Kiev.

The first victims were not long to wait. Armed formations of the Ukrainian “national resistance” shot a car with civilians in the Obolonsky district in Kiev.

As Kiev was sieged from the West, Zelensky called for negotiations, claiming the Kiev’s readiness to discuss the neutral status of the country.

Putin is ready to send a Russian delegation to Minsk for talks with the Ukrainian representatives, spokesperson for the Russian President said.

According to him, the Russian delegation will include representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin administration.

“Zelensky declared his readiness to discuss the neutral status of Ukraine. Initially, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the purpose of the operation was to help the LPR and the DPR, including through the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. And this, in fact, is an integral component of the neutral status,” he explained.

Minsk was chosen as a platform for the negotiations.

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Ukraine’s Kiev Regime is not “Officially” A Neo-Nazi Government

February 25th, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

This article first published in June 2014 documents the nature of the Kiev regime which is supported by US-NATO.

It was updated on November 28, 2018.

What is 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. A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

***

Introductory Note and update 

Following the Kerch Strait incident, a process of militarization of the Black Sea basin is ongoing. Martial law in Ukraine has been established. 

US-NATO military aid is relentlessly channelled to the Ukraine regime, a coalition government integrated by Neo-Nazis.

American, Canadian and British special forces are involved in military training.  

Most people do not realize that the Kiev regime includes a powerful Neo-Nazi faction, largely because the media never mentions it. 

Andriy Parubiy who is currently president (chair) of the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) (with executive functions within the government) is co-founder of the Neo-Nazi  Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda).

Prior to becoming president (chair) of the Parliament, he was Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU) which overseas the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence.

Andriy Parubiy is a follower of Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera, who collaborated in the mass murderer of Jews and Poles during World War II.

And Neo-Nazi leader Parubiy is routinely received with red carpet treatment in Canada, the US and the European Union. And the Western media applauds.

Military aid is channelled to the Armed Forces and Ukraine’s National Guard.

Screenshot Globe and Mail  February 23, 2015

The Canadian media fail to mention that the so-called defensive weapons will also be used by Ukraine’s National Guard’s Azov battalion which is under the control of the Neo-Nazi faction.

Parubiy received by the Canadian Parliament

Parubiy  with Canada’s Prime minister Justin Trudeau, 2016

Neo-Nazi Training 

Another element which has casually been ignored by the Western media are the Neo-Nazi Training camps for young children under the auspices of the Azov battalion of the National Guard (funded by the US and Canada).

See the Wolf Angel Nazi insignia on their T-Shirts.

Source of images

Today, the Ukraine Parliament (Rada) chaired by Neo-Nazi A. Parubiy, votes in favor of 30 days Martial Law (see image below, president Poroshenko at podium, Parubiy, chairing.

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 2018

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Do they know who they are?

Do we know who they are? 

There are “ultra-conservatives” in the Kiev government but “they are not Neo-Nazis.” According to the Western media, its all part of “a relentless Kremlin-driven propaganda offensive that uses World War II-era terms and imagery”.

The alternative media, however, has acknowledged that the Kiev regime is “a loose Centre-Right coalition” integrated by two Neo-Nazi parties (Svoboda and Right Sector)  “but it is not a Neo-Nazi government”. Both Svoboda and Right Sector display Nazi emblems. 

Is it a loose coalition?  If a government were to officially display Nazi emblems, does that not suggest that the government is committed to Nazi ideology? 

When the Kiev regime “officially” displays Nazi emblems to identify entities of their National Security and Military apparatus one would normally assume that it is a Neo-Nazi government.

Below is the Nazi emblem of the National Guard  [Національна гвардія України] which is defined as Reserves of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They operate under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  The National Guard is part of the so-called “Internal Troops of Ukraine.” The emblem is a stylized swastika (see below).

 

Imagine what would happen if the US National Guard were to display swastika-like symbols.

Of significance, the National Guard of Ukraine is directly financed by the Obama administration, with a view to protecting American style democracy in Ukraine.

Unknown to the American public, the US government is channeling financial support, weapons and training to a Neo-Nazi entity.

Nobody in America knows about it because the use of the words “Neo-Nazi” and “Fascist” in relation to Ukraine is a taboo. The have been excluded from the lexicon of investigative reporting. In media reports they have been replaced by “Ultra-conservative” “Extreme Right” and “Nationalist”.

Another entity –which is part of The Ukraine National Guard– is The Azov Battalion (Батальйон Азов). The Azov Battalion -which displays the Nazi SS emblem– (below left) is described by the Kiev regime as “a volunteer battalion of territorial defense”. It’s a National Guard battalion under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  Officially based in Berdyank on the Sea of Azov, it was formed by the regime to fight the opposition insurgency in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. It is also financed by the US administration.

 These militia bearing the Nazi SS emblem are sponsored by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, equivalent to America’s Department of Homeland Security.

They are casually referred to as “Freedom fighters”.

Its all for a good cause. “Democracy is the endgame”.

In the words of the New York Times, “The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here [Ukraine] as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former Soviet space.” (NYTimes.com, March 1, 2014).

It goes without saying that “support” to the formation of a government in the Ukraine with “Neo-Nazi leanings” does not in any way imply the development of “fascist tendencies” within the White House, the State Department and the US Congress.

Scroll down for Selected Images of the Azov Battalion “Freedom Fighters”

 

Source of images: https://news.pn/en/public/104475

 

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***

In the early hours of Thursday morning, in what will perhaps finally result in the COVID-19 mainstream media narrative being permanently banished from the headlines, almost nine years of Western provocations via its Eastern European proxy state Ukraine would culminate in Russia launching a military intervention into its Western neighbour – with attempts to peacefully resolve the situation peacefully by Moscow over the past several months ultimately proving fruitless due to Kiev failing to implement its side of the Minsk Agreements, which would see a federalisation solution in which the breakaway pro-Russian Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, located in the predominantly ethnic Russian Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, being given a degree of autonomy whilst still remaining under the rule of Kiev – both Republics being given formal recognition by Moscow on Monday instead, in response to the breakdown in negotiations.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin outlining in his speech commencing the military operation that a decisive factor in launching the intervention was a failure by NATO to honour a previous agreement that it would not expand eastwards following the end of the Cold War, and that the intention of the operation is to destroy Ukrainian military infrastructure that would ultimately be used by the alliance against Russia should Kiev become a member, one can only hope that the current situation doesn’t escalate further into a long-term conflict in which ordinary Ukrainian citizens will suffer, or indeed a catastrophic global conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons should NATO decide to intervene directly – with Ukraine having come under the influence of the US-NATO hegemony following the 2014 Euromaidan, a CIA and MI6 orchestrated regime-change operation launched in response to then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s November 2013 decision to suspend a trade deal with Brussels in order to pursue closer political and economic ties with Russia.

The immediate Western reaction following Thursday’s intervention however, was to predictably shift all blame onto Moscow and pay almost little to no attention to the almost nine years of provocations which had preceded it – such as Western support for the notoriously anti-Russian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, established post-Maidan and which played a key role in Kiev’s war on Donetsk and Luhansk following their secession in April 2014, a month after the historically Russian peninsula of Crimea voted to reunify with Moscow.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also accused Moscow of ‘unleashing war in Europe’, seemingly forgetting his own warmongering in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and also Britain’s not too distant history of unleashing war on its nearest European neighbour – Ireland.

In 1974, the occupied north of Ireland had been in a five-year long grip of escalating violence – the civil rights movement, established in 1967 to seek equal rights for the north’s Irish Nationalist community, had been met with violence every time they took to the streets, being beaten and teargassed by a predominantly British Unionist police force, violence which would eventually culminate in Bloody Sunday, the massacre of 14 civil rights demonstrators by the British Army in Derry in January 1972 – London having deployed its forces to the north in 1969, using the pretence of being a neutral peacekeeper between two warring sides as a means to counter the influence of the IRA, re-organised the same year in response to the ongoing violence, and whose membership would grow exponentially following the massacre.

Indeed, such was the violence inflicted on the Nationalist community of the north of Ireland by Britain and its proxies, that the southern 26-county Irish state would soon begin to dissent from its traditionally pro-British stance.

In 1969, during the initial outbreak of violence, then-Taoiseach Jack threatened to send troops to the north in order to protect Irish Nationalists, in 1970 government ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney would be dismissed from their posts following a collapsed trial where they were alleged to have planned to import arms for use by the IRA, and in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Irish police stood by as protesters burned down the British Embassy in Dublin.

Britain, fearing that Dublin would go on to become an official state sponsor of the IRA, decided that a message had to be sent.

On the 17th of May 1974, a Friday afternoon, three no-warning car bombs detonated during rush hour traffic in Dublin, killing twenty-seven people, ninety minutes later, another no-warning bomb would explode in the border county of Monaghan, killing seven. 300 people would suffer injuries as a result of the bombings also, with the Irish Free State returning to its traditionally pro-British stance regarding British occupation of the north in the aftermath.

These coordinated attacks, resulting in the largest loss of life in a single day during the most recent phase of conflict related to the occupation of Ireland, were carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a Loyalist terrorist organisation operating under the command of the clandestine Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) of the British army – the use of proxy terrorist groups by Downing Street later being used as tactic by Downing Street against both Libya and Syria in 2011, having been perfected by Britain’s unleashing of war in Europe in 1974.

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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Could Nepal Become a Player in a Future US-China Confrontation?

February 25th, 2022 by Barbara Nimri Aziz

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***

The formidable peaks stretching across the north of Nepal (or Tibet in the south of China depending on your perspective) have up to now provided sufficient deterrence to military confrontation. With new technology that can easily surpass geographic barriers and with the growing threat of China beyond India to include the USA, the Himalayas hold new strategic interest for Washington. This raises concerns about the proposed American Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) project for northwest Nepal: is it really about economic development? The question is dividing Nepali parties, commentators and citizens like nothing else has in recent years.

Anticipating a controversial vote in Nepal’s parliament, party leaders are scurrying to solidify a coalition to approve the American plan. It’s fiercely debated in the press and by an aggressive display of opposition in the street.

On the surface MCC looks like a blockbuster gift to a land traditionally perceived as desperate for aid and with primitive infrastructure. The MCC project is an American scheme offering $500 million in aid to construct roads and expand the nation’s electricity grid. A substantial project, it’s a nice supplement to what Washington generously dishes out to a land whose actual governance it shows little interest in. On its side, Nepal rarely rejects aid from any source. Whether for a massive dam or for local endeavors like women’s craft and children’s literature, competing governments and iNGOs (including China) fall over themselves with proposals, however pitiful their outcomes.

The stated aim of this MCC project in Nepal seems simple and worthy: “Reducing Poverty Through Growth: …(that) aid is most effective when it reinforces good governance, economic freedom and investing in their citizens.”). Who could argue with that?

But unlike anything prior Nepalis are scrutinizing the terms of this arrangement. First, it requires parliamentary sanction: why, critics ask, does MCC call for this when no other aid package has? What hidden issues may be irrevocably cemented by a vote of our parliament? Second, the project seems to be directed to Nepal’s northwest, towards its border with China. Aware of the increasing hostility between the U.S. and China, opponents fear Nepal might somehow provide the U.S. an access point to China’s southwest Tibetan frontier. “Critics have used ultra-nationalism and populism to portray the MCC as a form of US neo-colonialism and imperialism. The Americans fueled the fire themselves when a U.S. undersecretary of state admitted in 2019 that the MCC was a part of the US Indo-Pacific Strategy aimed at encircling China. …” wrote editors of The Nepali Times, itself a major supporter of the deal.

Noting the fiasco and chaos created in Afghanistan by U.S. military occupation there, for the first time Nepalis are imagining their country becoming a conflict zone. No one wants that.

Then there’s India: India has a strategic position– politically as a U.S. ally and geographically, with its northern frontier adjacent to that coveted corner of Nepal and abutting China. While India’s MCC role is not openly discussed, there’s concern over a rumored clause in the MCC-Nepal agreement requiring it to bring India into later consultations on the project.

Questions are also asked about Washington’s insistence on Nepal’s acquiescence. There are rumors that payments have already been made to win over political leaders. It’s also suggested that the Americans are threatening severe consequences if Nepal fails to endorse the pact. (So serious is this charge that Washington’s ambassador in Nepal issued a denial.)

The political destabilization created by the issue in a country whose democracy is barely fourteen years old does not seem to concern Washington.

When MCC-Nepal was introduced more than five years ago, then-Prime Minister K.P. Oli signaled his approval. There followed objections from Nepal’s parliamentary speaker (subsequently forced out) and other party leaders. Debate has persisted through these years, intensifying in recent months when MCC leaders visited officials in Kathmandu. A new deadline of Feb 28th was set. The current prime minister, S.B. Deuba, is ready to ratify, while Oli, now out of power, has tentatively joined other party leaders withholding support. The question is not a simple difference between major parties, but a jockeying by leaders of small parties to assert influence by aligning with major figures to swing the parliamentary decision on MCC. With the vote imminent, tension is swelling; more and more protesters are pouring into the streets.

(Important local elections are due in Nepal within two months when all parties will seek to reinforce their membership. Since locally elected officials can bring their weight to bear on parliamentarians, this upcoming election is another factor bearing on party ratification of the MCC deal.)

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Barbara Nimri Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author


“Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”

By Barbara Nimri Aziz

A century ago Yogmaya and Durga Devi, two women champions of justice, emerged from a remote corner of rural Nepal to offer solutions to their nation’s social and political ills. Then they were forgotten.

Years after their demise, in 1980 veteran anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz first uncovered their suppressed histories in her comprehensive and accessible biographies. Revelations from her decade of research led to the resurrection of these women and their entry into contemporary Nepali consciousness.

This book captures the daring political campaigns of these rebel women; at the same time it asks us to acknowledge their impact on contemporary feminist thinking. Like many revolutionaries who were vilified in their lifetimes, we learn about the true nature of these leaders’ intelligence, sacrifices, and vision during an era of social and economic oppression in this part of Asia.

After Nepal moved from absolute monarchy to a fledgling democracy and history re-evaluated these pioneers, Dr. Aziz explores their legacies in this book.

Psychologically provocative and astonishingly moving, “Yogmaya and Durga Devi” is a seminal contribution to women’s history.

Click here to order.

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Antarctica: Where Realpolitik and Science Meet

February 25th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

A frozen continent.  Another potential frontier for conflict and competition.  Antarctica is a part of the world were realpolitician meets scientist; the desire for finding exploitable resources meets environmental expectations and fears.  Countries have vied for their little slice of ice, sometimes citing reasons of scientific collaboration, and often national self-interest.  Much of this culminated in the establishment of the Antarctic Treaty System, comprising four major international agreements beginning with the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and ending with the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty.

During the Cold War, it became an area of exceptional interest.  The United States and other partners eyed off the Soviet Union, which they wished to exclude from any regulatory regime.  In 1950, the Soviet government made it clear that such opposition would be futile; it would be part of any such negotiations.

Riding the wave of scientific research as part of the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958), an initiative of numerous international organisations, the Soviets established the Mirny laboratory on February 13, 1956.  This immediately caused discomfort to various participants, particularly the Australians, who had asserted a claim – unrecognised in international law – to a good deal of East Antarctica in 1933.

Editorials and opinions of warning proliferated.  A piece in Sydney’s The Sun Herald wondered whether the Russians would “abandon Mirny to the penguins after 1959” or stay.  The Advertiser saw the Soviet mission as “a potential threat to the security of Australia”.

Fears also circulated about the possible establishment of missile and submarine bases.  This was despite the conclusion by an Australian Defence Committee in August 1955 that, “if Russia had any intention of attacking Australia it is unlikely that she would do so from the Antarctic”.  In 1957, the External Affairs Minister Richard Casey expressed Canberra’s prevailing angst: “[W]e do not want the Russians to mount installations in the Antarctic from which they could drop missiles on Sydney or Melbourne”.

Scientists, as they tend to in such endeavours, nurse mixed feelings.  Strong personal relationships were forged between nationalities, including the Australians and Soviets.  The scientific explorer and physicist Keith Mather, after a visit to the Mirny Station, recalled a standard, boozy gathering between colleagues.  “They have a most appropriate expression in Russian which means ‘I’ll meet you under the table’.  That’s where we made our best friends”.

The eventual answer to Soviet intentions, and a rationale since used by other powers interested in the South Pole, was given by the Soviet delegate Boris Dzerdzeyevsky at the third Special Committee for Antarctic Research: “[a]s long as there is a need for scientific investigation, the Soviet expedition will be in Antarctica”.

For Australia’s political establishment, the continent is a vast problem and singular opportunity, even if Canberra has exaggerated its own contributions.  The announcement by Prime Minister Scott Morrison of a boost in funding to the Antarctic effort came with much fanfare.  In a government media release, the government promised to “send a clear international signal of Australia’s world-leading Antarctic leadership with an $804.4 million investment over the next ten years to strengthen our strategic and scientific capabilities in the region.”

Lapsing into the usual voice of the failed advertising executive, Morrison suggested that the package would aid things never before done.  “The money we are investing in drone fleets, helicopters and other vehicles will enable us to explore areas of East Antarctica’s inland that no country has never been able to reach before.”

There would be continued support for “our world class scientists and expeditioners […] because their research on the frozen continent and Southern Ocean is critically important to Australia’s future.”  But there would also be – and here, the electoral incentives ring true – benefits for Tasmania, which Foreign Minister Marise Payne described as “an international science hub”.

Scientists can certainly look forward to receiving some of the funding, even if it is conspicuously alloyed with politics.  A new krill aquarium will be established in Hobart. The ice-breaking RSV Nuyina can look forward to “additional shipping support” to aid its “focus on extended science voyages.”  But the stress upon observational capacity and transport is unmistakable, including $136.6 million for inland traverse capability, charting activities and “mobile stations” and $109 million “to increase aerial and inland capability”.

Environment Minister Sussan Ley gave a better sense about the broader political motivations in this funding increase.  Ever lurking in the fine print is the threat posed by other powers.  “We need to ensure that the Antarctic remains a place of science and conservation, one that is free from conflict and which is protected from exploitation.”  By investing in science, Ley stated, Australia was showing a “commitment to our sovereignty in the Australian Antarctic Territory and its leading voice in the region.”

To journalists, Morrison was more explicit about those other nations, foremost among them China, seeking to assert control over a continent Australia had some obligatory undertaking to protect.  “Well, we are a treaty nation when it comes to Antarctica, and we take those responsibilities very incredibly seriously.  Now, not everybody respects those obligations and those stewardship responsibilities.”  It was for such reasons that Canberra needed “to keep eyes on Antarctica”.

If only such keen eyes could be better focused on environmental concerns such as the exploitation of fish stocks and other conservation measures.  No mention is made by the Morrison government of China and Russia in the context of frustrating various initiatives such as the creation of vast maritime protected areas or overfishing the keystone krill species.  Given that the Morrison government has proven itself an environmental and ecological vandal, this can hardly puzzle South Pole watchers.

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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:  Susan A. Romano / US Indo-Pacific Command

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***

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the West that any action to push NATO forces close to its borders while Washington sends lethal weapons to Ukraine’s military would leave Moscow with no choice but to retaliate. 

Putin also mentioned that the Minsk agreements from 2014 and 2015 which was intended to end the conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine does not exist anymore. Russia has retaliated by recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine as independent republics followed by sending in Russian peacekeepers to stop continued attacks on the civilian population in that region by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi forces. 

Donbass 

The resistance in Donetsk and Luhansk have been fighting for independence against the fascist forces of  Ukraine since 2014 which has killed thousands of people.

According to RT news, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia wants to “neutralize the [Ukrainian] military potential, which was boosted considerably lately, including with the active assistance of foreign nations.”  Of course, those foreign nations are part of the NATO alliance backed by the US who is the main driver of aggression towards Russia.  The US and its NATO lapdogs want to destabilize Russia because their hegemonic power is in decline.

So why are they targeting Russia?  The answer to that question is the US dollar.

In the last decade or so, Russia, China, Iran and others have been challenging the world’s reserve currency status and that worries the US establishment.

The US uses its reserve currency status to control the world’s economy and its politics in its favor, for example it uses economic sanctions as a tool against countries who don’t do what Uncle Sam wants them to do.

On April 5th, 2021, Newsweek published an article ‘Sanctions Are Destroying U.S. Dollar’s Status as World’s Top Currency’ that basically admits that Washington’s use of sanctions will eventually cripple the US dollar in the long-term, “the continual use of sanctions to pressure countries and companies perceived to be acting against U.S. interests may also be weakening the dollar’s global position.” The article quotes a member of the Council of Foreign Relation (CFR), Benn Steil who said, “It’s certainly not an imminent threat to the dominance of the dollar, but it’s by far the biggest one.”

Today, the US dollar is still used in international trade deals, to purchase gold, oil, agricultural products and other commodities.  However, that demand for the US dollar or what is called the greenback has allowed the US government to print trillions of unlimited dollars leading to $30 trillion in debt that will never be repaid to its creditors, one of them being China.  This power has allowed the US to run wild without any repercussions until now.  The world has had enough.  Back on August 6th, 2018, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tweeted

“The use of the US Dollar as the standard unit of currency in global markets and the world banking system is the key strength of the American Empire. Things need to change, current orders should be reordered. #Newworldorder #DollarDictatorship.” 

Then on September 21st, 2018 Newsweek published Russia and China Think U.S. Dollars Are Ruining the World, So They’re Finding a New Way revealed how major powers around the world view the US dollar: 

Russia and China lashed out at U.S.’s control over the global financial system after being hit by fresh sanctions that have left the two rising powers increasingly frustrated.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that his country was making extensive efforts to distance itself entirely from the U.S.-dominated international financial system, much of which runs on the U.S. dollar, and urged others to do the same

Lavrov’s statement was probably a wake-up call for Washington, so in bi-partisan fashion, the political establishment from both sides of the aisle became more aggressive towards Russia.  The Trump regime at the time kept the Magnitsky Act in place sanctioning high-ranking Russians, then added new sanctions on several influential Russians and some Chechens over claims of human rights abuses.  Trump also approved sending lethal arms to Ukraine, but King Trump says war between Russia and Ukraine would have never happened under his watch because he was a strong leader and Biden is weak.  However, US President Joe Biden and his regime is taking similar actions as his predecessor by imposing more sanctions on Russia since he was “elected” to office.

De-Dollarisation?

Whatever Washington decides. whether to cut Russia from the SWIFT system or impose more severe sanctions, it will impact the US dollar.  Washington’s actions will bolster further economic cooperation between Russia, China and the rest of the world as it will allow them to ditch the US dollar in its entirety and further expand their use of their own currencies that will include both the ruble and the Yuan for trade and investment purposes.

This would also reduce the dependency of the US dollar on the world stage.

It is a sign that the US dollar is on its last leg and that’s why the West will do whatever it can to destabilize Russia by supporting NATO and the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv.  Would it work?  Not a chance.  Russia will win this battle because as the world knows, they have advanced military capabilities and the support of the Russian people.  Russia is stronger than ever before.  One important fact to keep in mind is that the biggest loser in this conflict will be the US dollar along with its sphere of influence.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCN

Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act in Canada

February 25th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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***

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the trucker Freedom Convoy

Under this act, financial institutions can seize bank accounts of protesters and anyone who has donated $25 or more to the protest. Government can also revoke the drivers’ licenses of protesters

Trudeau is showing the world what Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset is really all about for the average person. If we go along with their financial reset to a centralized global digital currency, the central bankers can and will financially cripple anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason

The Emergencies Act also gives Trudeau the power to prohibit public assemblies (including blockades), compel individuals and companies to provide “essential services,” and impose fines of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to five years for breaching any of the declared emergency measures

Opposing the prime minister’s unprecedented power grab are the premiers of Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney pointed out that the nation already has “all the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order,” and that “no relevant additional powers of resources” can be granted by the Act

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Well, well, well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just let the deep state cat out of the bag for all the world to see. The premature disclosure and honest preview of what’s in store for the people of the world is perhaps the silver lining in all of this.

By invoking the Canadian Emergencies Act1 of 1988 to allow for the blanket revocation of protesters’ driver’s licenses and seizure of their bank accounts — and anyone who made even a nominal donation to their cause — Trudeau is showing the world what Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset is really all about for the average person.

If we go along with their financial reset to a centralized global digital currency, the central bankers can and will financially cripple anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. That’s more than sufficient leverage to keep most people in line.

The World Economic Forum didn’t declare that by 2030 “you will own nothing and have no privacy”2for nothing. They mean it. You won’t even own your own body, if they get their way. Their aim is complete control over every minutia of your life. Only they will be free to live and rule as they please.

Trudeau Gives Himself Dictatorial Powers

As reported by The Defender:3

“In a move that gives him ‘sweeping powers,’ Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked — for the first time in history — Canada’s Emergencies Act in response to what political commentator Krystal Ball characterized as a ‘pretty much completely peaceful’ protest.

Those powers include giving Canadian banks the ability, without a court order, to ‘immediately freeze or suspend accounts’ of any Canadians’ who have donated $25 or more to the trucker convoy fundraising accounts.

In an episode of ‘Breaking Points With Krystal and Sagaar,’ Ball’s co-host, Saagar Enjeti, said the Canadian government also will be ‘seizing any funds that go towards the protests, including cryptocurrency.’

With the powers granted to the government by the Emergencies Act ‘they can not only seize and suspend your driver’s license forever, they can also go and take money out of the owner of the truck’s bank account,’ Enjeti said.

‘So, we are looking at full-fledged financial warfare on the truckers … You have here the Canadian Prime Minister, who is our neighbor to the north, invoking the Emergencies Act, declaring all out financial warfare on his own citizens and suspending civil liberties … in a supposedly free and open society,’ Enjeti said. If this is happening in your country, ‘you [clearly] don’t live in a free country,’ he argued.”

In addition to giving the Canadian government the authority to seize bank accounts of citizens without court order, the Emergencies Act also gives Trudeau the power to:4,5

  • Prohibit public assemblies (including blockades)
  • Bar travel to and from certain areas
  • Regulate the use of certain types of property, including goods used in blockades
  • Compel individuals and companies to provide “essential services”
  • Impose fines of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to five years for breaching any of the declared emergency measures

To understand just how ridiculous the invocation of this Act is under current circumstances, consider that it was designed for use only in times of extreme crises,6,7 such as a wartime emergency where there’s an express threat to the security and sovereignty of the nation. The situation must be “urgent and critical” and “seriously endanger the lives, health or safety of Canadians.”

Moreover, the Act may only be invoked if the emergency cannot be addressed by any other federal law in existence, and/or if it exceeds provinces’ ability to effectively address the situation.

Trudeau Accused of Untruthful and Hateful Rhetoric

Opposing the prime minister’s unprecedented power grab are the premiers of Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney pointed out that the nation already has “all the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order,” and that “no relevant additional powers of resources” can be granted by the Act.8

Kenney also stated the obvious when he told the prime minister to “end the cross border trucker vaccine mandate, as it serves no useful public health purpose.” That would be the peaceful solution to the blockade.

The Canadian Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has also denounced Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, calling “the use of emergency powers unjustified by Ottawa facts and reality.” Despite that, the Canadian Parliament voted to approve Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Act, with 185 votes for and 151 against, Monday February 21, 2022.9

According to Trudeau, the trucker protest is impeding commerce and preventing people from going to work and making a living. With that, he’s basically condemning his own actions, as Trudeau himself has shut down businesses and prevented people from making a living, on and off, for the last two years. The hypocrisy is grotesque beyond words. Yet he’s gone even further than that.

‘Trudeau Has Gone Too Far’

In a February 15, 2022, editorial, the Toronto Sun denounced the prime minister’s hateful rhetoric against Canadian citizens and accused him of fanning flames of hate of his own making:10

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country. Ever since the freedom convoy first touched base in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, the PM has gone out of his way to increase the tensions.

The Liberal government appeared to be hoping for some sort of Jan. 6 style event as happened in the United States last year. All of their rhetoric indicated they were keen to see such an event go down. It never did. The convoy has been peaceful throughout …

Trudeau has called protesters every name in the book even though they are a diverse crowd in every sense of the word. Now he is giving himself extraordinary powers to deal with these protests. One of the most disturbing parts is how they can now dictate that banks freeze people’s accounts without a court order …

Trudeau … wants division and more hostility … The protests may be a nuisance and many people may disagree with them, but that doesn’t justify this decision. The only thing that can be said in defense of Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergencies Act is that it was his incompetence that made such an extreme measure necessary.”

Indeed, Trudeau’s rhetoric has been anything but unifying. First, he called the Freedom Convoy a “small minority fringe” that are expressing “unacceptable views.” He must’ve changed his mind, albeit privately, seeing how a sane leader is unlikely to invoke radical emergency powers for a small group honking horns.

Then, he insisted that the protesters were a bunch of “racists” and “misogynists” waving Nazi flags and stealing food from the homeless. Several have now publicly demanded he retract such statements and issue apologies.

Parliament Members Demand Apologies

Click here to watch the video.

Among them is conservative parliament member Candice Bergen, who demanded Trudeau apologize for his “hateful rhetoric” against “peace loving, patriotic Canadians.”11 In an impassioned speech, Bergen also reminded House members that Trudeau himself “wore blackface more times than he can remember.”

Another is Melissa Lantsman, a Jewish conservative MP, whom Trudeau accused of “standing with people who wave swastikas.” Lantsman called Trudeau’s words “dangerous and disgraceful.” According to the Toronto Sun:12

“The controversy stems from an ugly exchange in the House of Commons Wednesday in which Lantsman accused Trudeau of fanning ‘the flames of an unjustified national emergency’ by calling Freedom Convoy truckers ‘racist’ and ‘fringe.’

Trudeau’s response was a shocking low blow. ‘Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas, they can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag. We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get their jobs, who need to get their lives back,’ said Trudeau.

Suggesting a Jewish MP would stand with a Nazi flag was so repugnant that Speaker Anthony Rota scolded members, and ‘that includes the Right Honourable Prime Minister,’ for using ‘inflammatory words in the House.’

Calling it ‘terrible,’ Trudeau’s half-brother Kyle Kemper said ‘he’s acting like a bully.’ ‘A new low, even for Trudeau,’ tweeted Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre. ‘He falsely accused a Jewish MP and descendant of Holocaust survivors of standing with people who wave swastikas. She did not.’”

Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, a Jewish service organization, also condemned Trudeau’s comment to Lantsman, saying “This misperception should not be permitted to stand. We would hope the prime minister promptly addresses this matter.” So far, Trudeau has done nothing of the sort.

Long-Term Consequences

Click here to watch the video.

In a video (above), free speech advocate and trucker convoy organizer Tamara Lich predicted her arrest and made a tearful plea to protesters to remain peaceful. The next day, Lich was picked up and put in handcuffs by Ottawa police.

Legal experts are now warning that Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act could have consequences for generations to come. According to Marco Mendicino, “public reports” indicate that people with “extremist ideological positions” may be participating in the blockade, hence the government’s need for emergency powers.

However, as noted by law professor and executive director of Rights Probe, Bruce Pardy, that’s hearsay at best, and acting on rhetoric alone sets a dangerous precedent.13

“Just for a moment, consider the implications. This is a government that has invoked an emergency statute on its own admission on the basis of something that somebody has said,” Pardy said.14 “They have no actual violence occurring. They have no intelligence about threats of violence occurring. I’m sure you can work out what the consequences are if this is to be considered a proper use of the Emergencies Act …

Freedom now means, apparently, safety. The rule of law means governments taking control of things for ‘proper outcomes.’ Violence can now mean words. Honking has been called violence, and they now are taking that literally.

They have said they’re proceeding against violence, and what do they have? They have words, they have rhetoric, they have an expression of a political position. And it is that rhetoric, it is that political position that they are afraid of, and that constitutes the emergency …

If this invocation of the Emergencies Act is valid, then governments have the power to declare emergencies and crush any peaceful protest, any dissent, that threatens their political fortunes and ideology, and that’s not the kind of country we want to live in …”

Cecil Lyon, a dispute resolution legal expert from Ontario, also vehemently opposed Trudeau’s actions, calling it a “sledgehammer approach” that shows the government is “losing its way and not looking at how you should resolve a dispute.”15 

Trudeau Is Profiting From COVID Jab Monopoly

Thankfully Trudeau lifted the Emergency Powers Act on Wednesday two days ago. Clearly, Trudeau is wedded to vaccine mandates, and willing to do just about anything to keep them in place. One wonders whether the Trudeau Foundation’s ownership stake in Acuitas Therapeutics — rumored to be around 40%, per Dr. Robert Malone16 — might be influencing his behavior?

Acuitas makes the lipid nanoparticle delivery system that Pfizer/BioNTech uses in its COVID shot.17 In a February 12, 2022, video (above), David Martin, Ph.D., discussed Trudeau’s conflicts of interest at depth, saying:18

“Trudeau is controlling the illegal monopoly on BioNTech’s and Moderna’s form of injection. You heard me right. The thing that’s being injected into people across the country and around the world is in fact an economic boon … that pays right into the pockets of Trudeau.

He’s not interested in public health. He’s interested in lining his pockets, because regardless of the shot you take, Canada gets the coin …

Trudeau is running a monopoly. This is Chicago in the 1920s, this is the mob, and we need every American, every Canadian and everyone around the world to join together and inform themselves on the crimes that Justin Trudeau is pushing under the guise of public health.”

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Notes

1, 7 BBC February 16, 2022

2 Forbes November 10, 2016

3 The Defender February 16, 2022

4, 6 Canada’s Emergencies Act

5 CTV News February 14, 2022

8, 10, 12 Toronto Sun February 15, 2022

9 Breitbart February 21, 2022

11 Fox News February 1, 2022

13, 14, 15 Epoch Times February 18, 2022

16 Rumble February 16, 2022

17 Pfizer January 10, 2022

18 Red Voice Media February 12, 2022

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Along with trying to militarily absorb Ukraine into NATO, another major factor that’s becoming more apparent in the Biden administration’s unceasing talk of war with Russia is the desire of U.S. energy producers to invade European markets with fracked natural gas.

Though the mainstream press is saturated with talk of a forever-imminent Russian assault on Ukraine and speculate about Moscow’s supposed desire to freeze Europe by cutting off gas supplies, few reporters in the corporate media are asking who stands to gain economically from the standoff in the east.

Put together a few pieces of the puzzle, though, and some clear winners begin to emerge in the Ukraine crisis, whether or not there is an actual war: multinational gas and oil corporations. And it would appear that their industry has found the most powerful spokesperson in the world to represent their interests—the United States government.

Companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell, along with the hundreds of drilling and shipping contractors that work with them, want to massively step up exports to a Europe starving for gas, but standing in the way is Russia and its state-owned Gazprom company. Currently, Russian natural gas accounts for over 30% of all imports into the European Union. Leading EU powers Germany and France get 40% of their gas from Russia, while some other countries, like the Czech Republic and Romania, use only Russian gas.

In order to dislodge the competition and grab market share, the Western multinationals need to slow the flow of gas from the east. And when it comes to incentives, the energy giants have plenty.

Market opportunity

World market prices for natural gas have skyrocketed in recent months, driven by several factors: record high demand in Europe and Asia as manufacturing recovers from the pandemic, constrained supply as some facilities only begin to come back on line, depleted reserves due to a long and cold winter in 2020, and the shift of countries like China and Germany away from dirtier fossil fuels like coal and always-unpopular nuclear power.

U.S. producers want to get in on the bonanza, especially in Europe, where gas prices rose five-fold in 2021. The U.S. is the world’s biggest gas producer, extracting more from the ground by the day. That’s especially been the case since 2005, when production—which had been relatively flat for decades—soared.

That’s when the EPA under President George W. Bush declared that hydraulic fracturing of shale to release underground gas posed no threat to drinking water supplies. The environmentally damaging practice, known as “fracking,” really took off once a Republican-dominated Congress passed a law prohibiting any future regulation of fracking. The government’s Energy Information Administration estimates that almost all the gains in U.S. gas production since then are thanks to fracking.

U.S. natural gas production, after being flat for several decades, soared after 2005 when President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress prohibited regulations on the environmentally-dangerous practice of fracking. Efforts by the Obama and Trump administrations helped further fuel the boom. | EIA

Seeing natural gas as a way to meet green(er) energy goals and achieve emissions targets, the Obama administration encouraged the shale gas boom and resisted calls from the environmental movement and progressives in the Democratic Party to ban fracking. By the end of his time in office, natural gas accounted for a third of U.S. power generation, mostly at the expense of coal.

Gushing with gas, U.S. producers these days increasingly look to Europe as a customer, and the U.S. government has eagerly acted as salesman. Thanks to a 2018 agreement concluded between the Trump administration and the EU, U.S. gas sales to Europe have been steadily climbing, from 16% of EU imports in 2019 to 28% at the end of 2021.

There’s a problem that could cap the growth, however: U.S. natural gas is expensive.

Hydraulic fracking adds to production costs substantially. Plus, in order to be exported to international customers, U.S. gas has to be liquefied and loaded/unloaded on tanker ships at pricey specialized terminals. Turning fracked shale gas into liquefied natural gas (LNG) can more than double the cost for American companies, putting them at a disadvantage against cheap Russian gas that travels via pipelines.

And one international pipeline project, known as Nord Stream 2, stands as a particularly threatening constraint on U.S. sales. Constructed jointly by Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea, the pipeline would provide easy and affordable access to gas for the EU. For Russia, it is a guaranteed means of accessing its biggest buyers. For both the EU and Russia, Nord Stream 2 is a way to bypass the added costs of middleman Ukraine, whose territory current pipelines pass through. Once operational, it will carry more than double the amount of Russian gas that currently flows under the Baltic.

A convenient crisis

How convenient then that tensions between the U.S. and its Ukrainian ally on one side and Russia on the other heated up just as the finishing touches were being put on Nord Stream 2 in late 2021. With its own pipeline revenues in trouble, the right-wing government of Ukraine lobbied Washington all summer last year to impose sanctions on Nord Stream 2 and the German and Russian companies behind it.

The House and Senate delivered for Ukraine’s rulers, slipping the desired sanctions into a defense spending bill. Biden—knowing both that his European allies were staunchly opposed to anything threatening their energy supplies and that the infrastructure simply wasn’t in place on either side of the Atlantic yet to fill the gap left by a sudden drop in Russian supplied-gas—said he wouldn’t approve Nord Stream 2 sanctions.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike in Congress pushed back, presenting sanctions as a way to “deter Russian aggression against Ukraine.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—who represents the top fracked gas-producing state in the U.S. and ranks #1 in campaign donations from the industry—has been one of the strongest sanctions advocates. He’s blocked more than 50 Biden nominations for the State Department and other government positions in retaliation for the president’s waiving of sanctions.

The Biden administration appreciates reality enough to know that it’s probably too late to totally stop Nord Stream 2. The longer the project can be delayed and the more that fear of a Russian chokehold can be increased, however, the more time U.S. gas producers will have to capitalize on the situation.

Endless warnings of an “imminent” Russian invasion and the rushing of NATO troops and weapons to eastern Europe are doing the trick. And with Europe’s energy security put at risk by supposed Russian aggression, who is standing by to render assistance? None other than the U.S. gas industry, of course.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week, Frank J. Macchiarola, head of the American Petroleum Institute, announced that “U.S. oil and natural gas producers can help” defuse the war danger. Macchiarola, the industry’s chief lobbyist in Washington, said that “America is positioned to provide stability amid any energy disruption.” Numbers show that his clients are answering the call.

Spurred on by the Ukraine crisis and increased sales to Europe, the U.S. became the world’s top exporter of LNG for the first time ever in January. The corporate press was quick to blast out the message, and said even more U.S. gas must be rushed to Europe to guard against “Russian energy blackmail”—despite the fact that Gazprom has complied with the contracted export volumes agreed to with its European customers.

Germany has remained slow to get on board with the U.S.-NATO war drive and is reluctant to put Nord Stream 2 in danger. Even if expensive U.S. gas imports increase, they’re not enough to heat Germany’s homes and power its factories—by far. Nor are they affordable. The country will still need other sources of energy.

That isn’t stopping Biden from elbowing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to put a pause on the pipeline and get in line with the NATO campaign in Ukraine. Biden pledged that if Putin sent troops into Ukraine “there would be no Nord Stream 2.”

Scholz isn’t caving, but a number of concessions have been made to possibly satisfy Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at least for now. A range of new delays, many based on technicalities, have pushed the pipeline’s activation date late into 2022. And last weekend, Germany announced the revival of a previously canceled plan to construct another LNG terminal for U.S. tankers.

Days later, hints began to emerge of a possible dial back of tensions. Ukraine’s leader pondered whether NATO membership for his country—a central factor in the whole dispute with Moscow—may have to “remain a dream.” The U.S. media report a possible reduction of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border could be in the offing. Some commentators imply Putin is backing down.

That doesn’t mean there will actually be an immediate pullback from confrontation, though. Ukraine is still going to needle Washington for more diplomatic and economic support if it loses revenues from its own pipeline cash cow. Domestically, Biden will continue to face pressure from Republicans to take drastic sanctions action to cripple Nord Stream 2. And the military-industrial complex that lords over U.S. foreign policy isn’t going to give up on its plans to dominate eastern Europe.

Global market prices for natural gas have skyrocketed as tensions over Ukraine increased. The sharp jump in price has helped make expensive fracked U.S. gas more competitive on the world market, and the threats of war have pushed Europe to accept higher imports of U.S. LNG. | CNBC

A profit ploy?

So is the whole Ukraine affair simply a scheme to protect and grow the profits of U.S. natural gas producers?

The crisis certainly wasn’t provoked solely for the sake of gas sales. That would be an oversimplification of a very complex situation with historical roots stretching back long before the fracking boom in the U.S. ever got underway.

The U.S. and NATO have been engaged in a campaign against Russia since the 1940s. NATO was founded as a military alliance to target the Soviet Union—an instrument to advance U.S. imperial interests in Europe and contain the growth of socialism on the continent. When the USSR fell and the anti-communist cause lost its cache, the West took advantage of Russia’s weakness to deploy its armed might right up to that country’s borders. As it rebuilt itself, the new rationale became “containment” of a supposedly aggressive Russia.

The effort to pull Ukraine—one of the major republics of the former USSR—under U.S. military control remains at the heart of the crisis in eastern Europe. Russia’s key security demands still revolve around that issue.

But the wishes of the powerful oil and gas industry in the U.S. have certainly added a complicating factor into the equation. There is a convenient confluence of imperialist geopolitical goals and capitalist economic interests at work. And barring an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear Armageddon, some people stand to come out on top no matter what happens.

If a war is actually provoked, then the bet of the U.S. gas giants is that Western Europe will immediately join in sanctioning Russia and Germany will pull the plug on Nord Stream 2, at least for awhile. Overnight, U.S. gas sales would have to jump if Europe is not to freeze. Even more U.S. ships would set sail for European ports carrying LNG and return to America loaded down with profits.

But the frackers don’t even need an actual military fight to come out ahead. If there is no war but the conflict manages to sufficiently poison Russian-European relations, then the EU will still turn to the U.S. to supply more of its energy needs and lower its dependence on Moscow.

For American gas and oil producers, the situation is win-win—war or no war.

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C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.

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What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

February 25th, 2022 by Bryce Greene

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As tensions began to rise over Ukraine, US media produced a stream of articles attempting to explain the situation with headlines like “Ukraine Explained” (New York Times, 12/8/21) and “What You Need to Know About Tensions Between Ukraine and Russia” (Washington Post, 11/26/21). Sidebars would have notes that tried to provide context for the current headlines. But to truly understand this crisis, you would need to know much more than what these articles offered.

These “explainer” pieces are emblematic of Ukraine coverage in the rest of corporate media, which almost universally gave a pro-Western view of US/Russia relations and the history behind them. Media echoed the point of view of those who believe the US should have an active role in Ukrainian politics and enforce its perspective through military threats.

The official line goes something like this: Russia is challenging NATO and the “international rules-based order” by threatening to invade Ukraine, and the Biden administration needed to deter Russia by providing more security guarantees to the Zelensky government. The official account seizes on Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula as a starting point for US/Russian relations, and as evidence of Putin’s goals of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.

Russia’s demand that NATO cease its expansion to Russia’s borders is viewed as such an obviously impossible demand that it can only be understood as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Therefore, the US should send weapons and troops to Ukraine, and guarantee its security with military threats to Russia (FAIR.org, 1/15/22).

The Washington Post asked: “Why is there tension between Russia and Ukraine?” Its answer:

In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. A month later, war erupted between Russian-allied separatists and Ukraine’s military in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. The United Nations human rights office estimates that more than 13,000 people have been killed.

But that account is highly misleading, because it leaves out the crucial role the US has played in escalating tensions in the region. In nearly every case we looked at, the reports omitted the US’s extensive role in the 2014 coup that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Focusing on the latter part only serves to manufacture consent for US intervention abroad.

The West Wants Investor-Friendly Policies in Ukraine

The backdrop to the 2014 coup and annexation cannot be understood without looking at the US strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations.

A key tool for this has been the International Monetary Fund, which leverages aid loans to push governments to adopt policies friendly to foreign investors. The IMF is funded by and represents Western financial capital and governments and has been at the forefront of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The civil war in Yemenand the coup in Bolivia both followed a rejection of IMF terms.

In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms to make the country more attractive to investors. These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors (which made up the bulk of employment in Ukraine), and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. Coup plotters like US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland repeatedly stressed the need for the Ukrainian government to enact the “necessary” reforms.

In 2013, after early steps to integrate with the West, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned against these changes and ended trade integration talks with the European Union. Months before his overthrow, he restarted economic negotiations with Russia, in a major snub to the Western economic sphere. By then, the nationalist protests were heating up that would go on to topple his government.

After the 2014 coup, the new government quickly restarted the EU deal. After cutting heating subsidies in half, it secured a $27 billion commitment from the IMF. The IMF’s goals stillinclude “reducing the role of the state and vested interests in the economy” in order to attract more foreign capital.

The IMF is one of the many global institutions whose role in maintaining global inequities often goes unreported and unnoticed by the general public. The US economic quest to open global markets to capital is a key driver of international affairs, but if the press chooses to ignore it, the public debate is incomplete and shallow.

The US Helped Overthrow Ukraine’s Elected President

During the tug of war between the US and Russia, the Americans were engaged in a destabilization campaign against the Yanukovych government. The campaign culminated with the overthrow of the elected president in the Maidan Revolution—also known as the Maidan Coup—named for the Kiev square that hosted the bulk of the protests.

As political turmoil engulfed the country in the leadup to 2014, the US was fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED), just as they had done in 2004. In December 2013, Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European affairs and a long-time regime change advocate, said that the US government had spent $5 billion promoting “democracy” in Ukraine since 1991. The money went toward supporting “senior officials in the Ukraine government…[members of] the business community as well as opposition civil society” who agree with US goals.

The NED is a key organization in the network of American soft power that pours $170 million a year into organizations dedicated to defending or installing US-friendly regimes. The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius (9/22/91) once wrote that the organization functions by “doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.” The NED targets governments who oppose US military or economic policy, stirring up anti-government opposition.

The NED board of directors includes Elliott Abrams, whose sordid record runs from the Iran/Contra affair in the ’80s to the Trump administration’s effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government. In 2013, NED president Carl Gershman wrote a piece in the Washington Post (9/26/13) that described Ukraine as the “biggest prize” in the East/West rivalry.  After the Obama administration, Nuland joined the NED board of directors before returning to the State Department in the Biden administration as undersecretary of state for political affairs.

One of the many recipients of NED money for projects in Ukraine was the International Republican Institute. The IRI, once chaired by Sen. John McCain, has long had a hand in US regime change operations. During the protests that eventually brought down the government, McCain and other US officials personally flew into Ukraine to encourage protesters.

US Officials Were Caught Picking the New Government

On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk—Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats”—should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.

Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.

At the time the call leaked, media were quick to pounce on Nuland’s saying “Fuck the EU.” The comment dominated the headlines (Daily Beast,  2/6/14; BuzzFeed, 2/6/14; Atlantic, 2/6/14; Guardian, 2/6/14), while the evidence of US regime change efforts was downplayed. With the headline “Russia Claims US Is Meddling Over Ukraine,” the New York Times (2/6/14) put the facts of US involvement in the mouth of an official enemy, blunting their impact on the audience. The Times (2/6/14) later described the two officials as benignly “talking about the political crisis in Kiev” and sharing “their views of how it might be resolved.”

The Washington Post (2/6/14) acknowledged that the call showed “a deep degree of US involvement in affairs that Washington officially says are Ukraine’s to resolve,” but that fact rarely factored into future coverage of the US/Ukraine/Russia relationship.

Washington Used Nazis to Help Overthrow the Government

The Washington-backed opposition that toppled the government was fueled by far-right and openly Nazi elements like the Right Sector. One far-right group that grew out of the protests was the Azov Battalion, a paramilitary militia of neo-Nazi extremists. Their leaders made up the vanguard of the anti-Yanukovych protests, and even spoke at opposition events in the Maidan alongside US regime change advocates like McCain and Nuland.

After the violent coup, these groups were later incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces—the same armed forces that the US has now given $2.5 billion. Though Congress technically restricted money from flowing to the Azov Battalion in 2018, trainers on the ground say there’s no mechanism to actually enforce the provision.  Since the coup, the Ukrainian nationalist forces have been responsible for a wide variety of atrocities in the counterinsurgency war.

Far-right influence has increased across Ukraine as a result of Washington’s actions. A recent UN Human Rights council has noted that “fundamental freedoms in Ukraine have been squeezed” since 2014, further weakening the argument that the US is involved in the country on behalf of liberal values.

Among American neo-Nazis, there’s even a movement aimed at encouraging right-wing extremists to join the Battalion in order to “gain actual combat experience” in preparation for a potential civil war in the US.

In a recent UN vote on “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism,” the US and Ukraine were the only two countries to vote no.

As FAIR (1/15/22) has reported, between December 6, 2021, and January 6, 2022, the New York Times ran 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, but none of them reference the pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s politics or government. The same can be said of the Washington Post’s 201 articles on the topic.

There’s a Lot More to the Crimean Annexation

The facts above give more context to Russian actions following the coup, and ought to counter the caricature of a Russian Empire bent on expansion. From Russia’s point of view, a longtime adversary had successfully overthrown a neighboring government using violent far-right extremists.

The Crimean peninsula, which was part of Russia until it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954, is home to one of two Russian naval bases with access to the Black and Mediterranean seas, one of history’s most important maritime theaters. A Crimea controlled by a US-backed Ukrainian government was a major threat to Russian naval access.

The peninsula—82% of whose households speak Russian, and only 2% mainly Ukrainian—held a plebiscite in March 2014 on whether or not they should join Russia, or remain under the new Ukrainian government. The Pro-Russia camp won with 95% of the vote. The UN General Assembly, led by the US, voted to ignore the referendum results on the grounds that it was contrary to Ukraine’s constitution. This same constitution had been set aside to oust President Yanukovych a month earlier.

All of this is dropped from Western coverage.

The US Wants to Expand NATO

In addition to integrating Ukraine into the US-dominated economic sphere, Western planners also want to integrate Ukraine militarily. For years, the US has sought the expansion of NATO, an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance. NATO was originally billed as a counterforce to the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, but after the demise of the Soviet Union, the US promised the new Russia that it would not expand NATO east of Germany. Despite this agreement, the US continued building out its military alliance,growing closer and closer to Russia’s borders and ignoring Russia’s objections.

This history is sometimes admitted but usually downplayed in corporate media. In an interview with the Washington Post (12/1/21), professor Mary Sarotte, author of Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, recounted that after the Soviet collapse, “Washington realized that it could not only win big, but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off-limits to full NATO membership.” The US “all-or-nothing approach to expansionism…maximized conflict with Moscow,” she noted. Unfortunately, one interview does little to cut through the drumbeat of pro-NATO talking points.

In 2008, NATO members pledged to extend membership to Ukraine. The removal of the pro-Russian government in 2014 was a giant leap towards the pledge becoming a reality. Recently, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg announced that the alliance stands by plans to integrate Ukraine into the alliance.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times (1/11/21) maintained that if Ukraine wasn’t allowed to join the organization, it would “break the spine of NATO” and “end the Western alliance as we have known it since the Atlantic Charter.”

The US Wouldn’t Tolerate What Russia Is Expected to Accept

Much has been written about the Russian buildup on the Ukraine border. Reports of the buildup have been intensified by US intelligence officials’ warnings of an attack. Media often echo the claim of an inevitable invasion. The Washington Post editorial board (1/24/22) wrote that “Putin can—and will—use any measures the United States and its NATO allies either take or refrain from taking as a pretext for aggression.”

But Putin has been clear about a path to de-escalation. His main demand has been for direct negotiations to end the expansion of the hostile military alliance to his borders. He announced, “We have made it clear that NATO’s move to the east is unacceptable,” and that “the United States is standing with missiles on our doorstep.” Putin asked, “How would the Americans react if missiles were placed at the border with Canada or Mexico?”

In corporate media coverage, no one bothers to ask this important question. Instead, the assumption is that Putin ought to tolerate a hostile military alliance directly across its border. The US, it seems, is the only country allowed to have a sphere of influence.

The New York Times (1/26/22) asked: “Can the West Stop Russia From Invading Ukraine?” but shrugs at the US dismissal of Putin’s terms as “nonstarters.” The Washington Post (12/10/21) reported: “Some analysts have expressed worry that the Russian leader is making demands that he knows Washington will reject, possibly as a pretext for military action once he is spurned.” The Post quoted one analyst, “I don’t see us giving them anything that would suffice relative to their demands, and what troubles me is they know that.”

Audiences have also been assured that Putin’s reaction to Western expansionism is actually a prelude to more aggressive actions.  “Ukraine Is Only One Small Part of Putin’s Plans,” warned the New York Times (1/7/22). The Times (1/26/22) later described Putin’s Ukraine policy as an attempt at “restoring what he views as Russia’s rightful place among the world’s great powers,” rather than an attempt to avoid having the US military directly on its border. USA Today (1/18/22) warned readers that “Putin ‘Won’t Stop’ with Ukraine.”

But taking this view is diplomatic malpractice. Anatol Lieven (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22), an analyst at the Quincy Institute, wrote that US acquiescence to a neutral Ukraine would be a “golden bridge” that, in addition to reducing US/Russia tensions, could enable a political solution to Ukraine’s civil war. This restraint-oriented policy is considered fringe thinking in the Washington foreign policy establishment.

The Memory Hole

All of this missing context allows hawks to promote disastrous escalation of tensions. The Wall Street Journal (12/22/21) published an opinion piece trying to convince readers there was a “Strategic Advantage to Risking War In Ukraine.” The piece, by John Deni of the US Army War College, summarized the familiar hawkish talking points, and claimed that a neutral Ukraine is “anathema to Western values of national self-determination and sovereignty.”

In a modern rendition of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Afghan Trap, Deni asserted that war in Ukraine could actually serve US interests by weakening Russia: Such a war, however disastrous, would ​​“forge an even stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe,” refocusing NATO against the main enemy, result in “economic sanctions that would further weaken Russia’s economy” and “sap the strength and morale of Russia’s military while undercutting Mr. Putin’s domestic popularity.” Thus escalating tensions is a win/win for Washington.

Few of the recent wave of Ukraine pieces recount the crucial history given above. Including the truth about US foreign policy goals in the post-Cold War era makes the current picture look a lot less one-sided. Imagine for one second how the US would behave if Putin began trying to add a US neighbor to a hostile military alliance after helping to overthrow its government.

The economic imperative for opening foreign markets, the NATO drive to push up against Russia, US support for the 2014 coup and the direct hand in shaping the new government all need to be pushed down the memory hole if the official line is to have any credibility. Absent all of that, it is easy to accept the fiction that Ukraine is a battleground between a “rules-based order” and Russian autocracy.

Indeed, the Washington Post editorial board (12/8/21) recently compared negotiating with Putin to appeasing Hitler at Munich. It called on Biden to “resist Putin’s trumped-up demands on Ukraine,” “lest he destabilize all of Europe to autocratic Russia’s advantage.” This wasn’t the only time the paper has made the Munich analogy;  the Post (12/10/21) ran a piece by former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen headlined “On Ukraine, Biden Is Channeling His Inner Neville Chamberlain.”

In the New York Times (12/10/21), Trump NSC aide Alexander Vindman told readers “How the United States Can Break Putin’s Hold on Ukraine,” and urged the Biden administration to send active US troops to the country. A “free and sovereign Ukraine,” he said, is vital in “advancing US interests against those of Russia and China.” Times reporter Michael Crowley (12/16/21) also framed the Ukraine standoff as another “Test of US Credibility Abroad,” after that credibility was supposedly damaged after ending the war in Afghanistan.

In a New York Times major feature (1/16/21) on Ukraine, the US role in bringing tensions to this point was completely omitted, in favor of exclusively blaming “Russian Belligerence.”

As a result of this coverage, the interventionist mentality has trickled down to the public. One poll found that, should Russia actually invade Ukraine, 50% of Americans support embroiling the US in yet another quagmire, up from just 30% in 2014. Biden, however, has said that no US troops will be sent to Ukraine. Instead, the US and EU have threatened sanctions or support for a rebel insurgency should Russia invade.

The past few weeks have seen several failed talks between the US and Russians, as the US refuses to alter its plans for Ukraine. The US Congress is rushing  a “lethal aid” package to send more weapons to the troubled border. Perhaps if the public were better informed, there would be more domestic pressure on Biden to end the brinkmanship and seek a genuine solution to the problem.

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Biden’s Cuban Missile Crisis

February 25th, 2022 by Jeff Deist

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***

Joe Biden’s perverse legacy, if that term even applies anymore, may well be determined in coming weeks by his handling of events in Ukraine. He can improve it by showing restraint against the relentless neoconservative chorus. One wonders what the results of a pure popular vote on the question of going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be, vs. a vote solely within the DC beltway. 

Note: Biden was silent on the recent imposition of emergency martial law by the Trudeau government in Ottawa (a few hundred miles from Washington, DC), but has plenty to say about Kiev (4,881 distant miles). This is not coincidental. As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, we are required by western propaganda to denounce actions by Putin (such as freezing the bank assets of political opponent Alexei Navalny) while cheering the same actions taken by the Canadian government against money donated to truckers. Crackdowns in “democracies” are subject to a more enlightened standard:

(w)hen these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.1

Much of today’s western rhetoric about the former USSR employs this language of treason, accusing war skeptics of siding with Putin. American politicians and media often veer into outright Russophobia, sometimes with a not-subtle racial animus. This flows in large part from the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which somehow had to be the result of Russian interference and not Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings. It was remarkable to see so many politicians and pundits risk resurrecting a Cold War with a nuclear power simply to hurt Trump politically. But it worked: they got rid of Trump and now the Cold War is back.

At this writing, Putin has declared the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent of and autonomous from Ukraine. Russian forces have entered Ukraine and launched missiles; deaths and injuries are reported. Those troops reportedly have control over the Chernobyl power plant. Mises’s birthplace, today called Lviv, is threatened.

In response, Biden today announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia and promised severe economic consequences for Putin’s actions. Military and aerospace technology will be blocked, while Russian banks will be shut off from international markets. US and EU officials also have considered the more severe option of removing the country from the SWIFT system of international payments, which would cut off foreign currency purchases of oil, gas, and other Russian exports.

Still, Biden has shown restraint. Let’s hope he keeps to this commitment made earlier today:

Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict,” he said. “Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but defend [sic] our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.

There will be plenty of voices in Biden’s ear demanding more, much more. The subcurrent to Biden’s election in 2020 was the return of neoconservatism with a vengeance. Many of the worst foreign policy hawks, from David Frum to Max Boot to Bill Kristol, have found their home in the Democratic party. The GOP, for its part, is scrambling to outdo the Democrats in their bellicosity for Putin in a nauseatingly transparent effort to make Biden look weak for the upcoming midterm elections. Hence the sorry spectacle of former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton– among the worst war promoters in modern history– solemnly lecturing us on MSNBC about Biden’s failure to have placed US troops in Ukraine weeks ago. Unless Putin’s foray is short-lived, rest assured Congress, the Pentagon, the spy agencies, Biden’s cabinet, and his own party leaders (mindful of polls) will call for US military strikes. Some will call for American troops to defend Ukraine on the ground.

President John F. Kennedy faced similar pressures in his brief years as president. Regardless of one’s views on Camelot, Kennedy was a New England liberal and idealist–not a neoconservative. He sincerely abhorred the possible use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviets. He communicated clandestinely with Khrushchev to avoid just such a conflict, and managed to bring the US back from the brink of an ugly tank standoff in Berlin during 1961– stating, to the chagrin of the Cold Warriors, that the Berlin wall was “a hell of a lot better than a war.”

He similarly resisted calls by the Pentagon, CIA, and Joint Chiefs to back a puppet government in Laos. He was reasonably firm in his opposition to escalations in Vietnam, denying repeated Pentagon requests for thousands of ground troops. Time and again he imagined his reelection in 1964 would be free him politically to remove America completely from Southeast Asia.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the pressure on Kennedy to use nuclear missiles against that tiny, impoverished country was intense. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense  Robert McNamara, CIA deputy Richard Helms, the Joint Chiefs, and one particularly bloodthirsty General named Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay all pressed hard for action. They considered JFK’s Cuban blockade disastrously weak, One CIA operative called his failure to launch a nuclear strike “treasonous.” LeMay compared it to appeasement at Munich. And of course his own vice-president Lyndon Johnson was never an ally when it counted. His only firm and trusted confidant throughout all of it was his own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Like Trump, JFK faced almost mutinous attacks and subterfuge from within: by his own cabinet, administrative agencies, military commanders, and especially the CIA.

Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not posses an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.

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Notes

1 Glenn Greenwald, “The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West,” https://greenwald.substack.com

Featured image is from Trending Politics

Understanding Ukrainian Nazism

February 25th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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In the West, media outlets are claiming that Russia’s agenda to “denazify” Ukraine is unfounded. At the same time, public opinion in Western countries is totally alienated from the Ukrainian reality, tending to believe only what is reported by the hegemonic media. The result of this is strong disapproval of the Russian attitude based on the lie that there is no trace of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine. In this sense, it is urgent that quality information be disseminated to the Western audience to avoid the proliferation of lies about the Ukrainian reality.

On almost every TV channel and newspaper in the West, Ukrainian Nazism is questioned with the worst possible arguments: Zelensky is Jewish, and the Ukrainian state is democratic. This kind of superficial thinking prevents a detailed analysis of the catastrophic situation in Kiev since the Maidan, when, through a coup d’état, an anti-Russian junta took power and institutionalized a racist and anti-Russian ideology, which remains until the current days.

When we talk about “Ukrainian Nazism” we are not saying that Kiev is a contemporary copy of Hitler’s Berlin, but that the neo-Nazi element is a fundamental point of post-2014 Ukraine. The Maidan coup was openly supported and financed by NATO as a way of undermining any Russian influence in Moscow’s own strategic environment. The aim was to make Ukraine a puppet state, commanded from Washington, ending any link with Russia. There was not only the objective to annihilate political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Kiev and Moscow, but also to eliminate cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties between both nations.

Since then, anti-Russian plans have been implemented. Ethnic Russians have been persecuted for the past eight years – even through systematic extermination in some regions. The Russian language has been criminalized in entire cities where the population does not speak Ukrainian. Schisms in the Orthodox Church have been supported to form a Ukrainian “national church” out of the Moscow Patriarchate. But the question remains: how has this been possible if Ukrainians and Russians are such close peoples? Many Ukrainians speak Russian and marry ethnic Russians, in addition to the fact that most of the country’s population follows the Orthodox Church. So how was it possible to initiate such a successful racist policy?

This was certainly one of the biggest concerns of the Maidan planners. And the answer lies in the Nazi element, which was very well worked out by Arsen Avakov, Minister of the Interior during the Poroshenko government. Avakov initiated a process of instrumentalizing neo-Nazi militias that had supported Maidan, making these extremist groups key points in the defense of the new Ukrainian regime. In the West, due to collective ignorance about Slavic history, many people think that Nazi racism was restricted to Jews, but in fact, anti-Russian hatred was one of the biggest locomotives of WWII, having led Hitler to the irrational decision to invade and try to annex the USSR. This sentiment is alive in these neo-Nazi militias, who are literally ready to do anything to annihilate the Russians, being much more fanatical in their racist convictions than the Ukrainian armed forces.

Groups such as the Azov Battalion, C14 and the armed militias of rightist parties such as Pravyy sektor and Svoboda operate freely in Ukraine and are most responsible for the extermination of ethnic Russians in the Donbass. These groups act with more violence and using more sophisticated equipment than the Ukrainian armed forces themselves, being the real face of Kiev’s anti-Russian brutality. As neo-Nazis, these militias have no obstacles in complying with the government’s objective of destroying any ties between Russians and Ukrainians, thus being the main allies of the Maidan era.

In a 2020 Freedom House’s report, “A new Eurasian far right rising”, it is said that the far right is one of the strongest and most influential elements in Ukrainian society today, being a sophisticated, highly professionalized, and visible political force. In other words, what would be violent and criminal urban groups elsewhere on the planet have been converted by Kiev into a pro-Maidan parallel armed force. The inspiration for this model of action comes from the original Nazism: the Schutzstaffel (SS) was one of the largest German armed political forces during the 1930s and 1940s, but the group was not part of the German Armed Forces, but a paramilitary militia instrumentalized by the government apart from the official troops. There was a major strategic objective with this: while the German military was commanded by the government, the SS fought for the Nazi Party and for Hitler – that is, if Germany surrendered, the SS would declare war on the German military. This type of “double-shielded” military system is the same one that Kiev has implemented: if one day a pro-Russian government is elected, the neo-Nazi militias will declare war on Kiev – and will be strong enough to defeat the official troops in the same way as the SS was stronger than the German armed forces.

It is necessary to note that these groups operate not only in the sphere of military force, but also in the cultural field, fomenting anti-Russian hatred among ordinary Ukrainians. The exaltation of Stepan Bandera (Ukrainian anti-Soviet nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany) is one of the symptoms of this. Before the Maidan, Bandera was a name like any other in Ukrainian history, but he came to be remembered and venerated as a national hero by neo-Nazis and anti-Russian politicians. In the same sense, these groups vandalize parishes and monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church and are responsible for the consolidation of a Ukrainian mentality entirely hostile to Russia, which is gradually permeating the local population.

Ukraine is in fact ruled by a Jew and the country’s power structure is indeed publicly “democratic”, despite being internally authoritarian and corrupt. But the Nazi element is not in these aspects, but in the structure of protection of the post-Maidan Ukrainian state, which is supported by a national coalition of neo-Nazi militias whose objective is simply to persecute and kill Russians, regardless of who is in power in Kiev. It does not matter to these militias if the President of the Republic is a Jew – what matters is that Russians are dying, which favors both neo-Nazis and the pro-NATO politicians they protect. In other words, the Western media’s arguments to deny Putin’s claims about Ukrainian Nazism are weak and superficial.

Moscow is right in its concern to denazify Ukraine. It is a measure that should be taken in coalition by several countries. All over the world, Nazism is “condemned”, but only when it benefits the West. The closest political experience to Nazism in the present days has been seen and peacefully tolerated by liberal governments that claim to be defenders of human rights and democracy. Russia is simply no longer willing to put up with crimes being committed by neo-Nazis against its people and there is nothing wrong with that decision.

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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: U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com

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***

 

 

Washington-backed organizations describing themselves as charities are leading the charge for the scrapping of Russia and Germany’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline and increased sanctions against Moscow.

In an email, International Renaissance Foundation executive director Oleksandr Sushko called on Western countries to act against “Russian aggression” and warned of a European security crisis.

He described Ukraine as “Europe’s democratic frontier,” ignoring the fact that democracy was usurped in the country in 2014 when the European Union backed a coup against the government of elected President Viktor Yanukovich and that Kiev continues to suppress political critics, including by a ban on the Communist Party standing in elections and through media censorship.

Sushko claimed that Russia was manufacturing the crisis to assert control over Europe, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on Western media to tone down the hysteria over an allegedly imminent invasion, accusing them of creating panic in the country.

“Europe and the international community must support Ukraine against Russian neo-Soviet authoritarian imperialism,” he said. “The West can support Ukrainian freedom by withholding regulatory approval for Nord Stream 2 and must strengthen efforts to track Russian dirty money and immediately freeze the assets of the regime.”

A far from an independent commentator, Sushko previously worked as research director for the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, a political action committee based in Ukraine that lobbies for Kiev’s membership in NATO and the EU.

His former employer is funded by Western donations, including from USAid, and lists NATO and the shady National Endowment for Democracy as its partners.

The International Renaissance Foundation was founded in 1990 and is described as “an integral part” of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. It has spent more than $100 million on funding NGOs, civil society groups, and media organizations in Ukraine.

One of the main priorities of the foundation is financially supporting projects that encourage European integration. Along with the National Endowment for Democracy, it funds the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, which aims to control the media narrative on the country and collaborates with the U.S. embassy there.

Kiev has been accused by the Communist Party of Ukraine of waging an “information genocide” by shutting down opposition news channels. Last week, the official YouTube accounts of the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were closed without warning, triggering accusations of censorship.

The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, which was completed in September last year, is opposed by Washington, which has threatened to block it from operating altogether.

U.S. companies aiming to supply liquefied natural gas to Europe are believed to be among the main beneficiaries should the project collapse.

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Steve Sweeney writes for Morning Star, the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. He is also a People’s Assembly National Committee member, patron of the Peace in Kurdistan campaign, and a proud trade unionist. Steve Sweeney escribe para Morning Star, el diario socialista publicado en Gran Bretaña. También es miembro del Comité Nacional de la Asamblea Popular, patrocinador de la campaña Paz en Kurdistán y un orgulloso sindicalista.

Featured image: U.S. taxpayer dollars are funding the propaganda effort in Europe on behalf of oil and gas corporations via contributions to supposed ‘charities’ from USAid.

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This article provides analysis. Global Research does not support Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

***

This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.

From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon.

Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American construct invented to launch wars was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.

First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since inserting Russian jets into Syria’s airspace in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation…aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” as Putin defined it.

Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandoning any plans to join NATO; negotiating directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarizing and declaring Ukraine as neutral.

Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters, which is the Russian demand for “indivisible security.”

The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian military forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were re-framed as an occupying army in Russian-allied territories that Moscow had just sworn to protect.

Get Out – Or Else

The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air force, navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.

And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) artillery that hit the Armed Forces of Ukraine headquarters in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.

This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse: not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat – in one hour.

The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established. Humanitarian corridors were set up for the deserters. Ukrainian forces remnants now include mostly surviving Azov batallion Nazis, mercenaries trained by the usual Blackwater/Academi suspects, and a bunch of Salafi-jihadis.

Predictably, western corporate media has already gone totally berserk, branding it as the much-awaited Russian ‘invasion.’ A reminder: when Israel routinely bombs Syria and when the House of One Saudi routinely bombs Yemeni civilians, there is never any peep in NATO’s media.

As it stands, realpolitik spells out a possible endgame, as voiced by Donetsk’s head, Denis Pushilin: “The special operation in Donbass will soon be over and all the cities will be liberated.”

We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now it would be totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria.

Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a ‘gift’ to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.

It’s creative destruction time

It will be fascinating to watch what Prof. Sergey Karaganov masterfully described, in detail, as the new Putin doctrine of constructive destruction, and how it will interconnect with West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and further on down the Global South road.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ceremonial NATO Sultan, denounced the recognition of the Baby Twins as “unacceptable.” No wonder: that shift smashed all his elaborate plans to pose as privileged mediator between Moscow and Kiev during Putin’s upcoming visit to Ankara. The Kremlin – as well as the Foreign Ministry – don’t waste time talking to NATO minions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, had a recent, very productive entente with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. Russia, this past weekend, has staged a spectacular strategic missile display, hypersonic and otherwise, featuring Khinzal, Zircon, Kalibr, Yars ICBMs, Iskander and Sineva  – irony of ironies, in synch with the Russophobia-fest in Munich. In parallel, Russian Navy ships of the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea fleets performed a series of submarine search drills in the Mediterranean.

The Putin doctrine privileges the asymmetrical – and that applies to the near abroad and beyond. Putin’s body language, in his last two crucial interventions, spell out nearly maximum exasperation. As in realizing, not auspiciously, but rather in resignation, that the only language Beltway Neo-conservatives and ‘humanitarian imperialists’ understand is heavy metal thunder. They are definitely deaf, dumb and blind to history, geography and diplomacy.

So, one can always game the Russian military – for instance, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria to conduct a series of visits by Mr. Khinzal not only to the Turk-protected shady jihadist umbrella in Idlib but also the jihadists protected by the Americans in Al-Tanf base, near the Syria-Jordan border. After all, these specimens are all NATO proxies.

The US government barks non-stop about “territorial sovereignty.” So let’s game the Kremlin asking the White House for a road map on getting out of Syria: after all the Americans are illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and adding extra disaster to the Syrian economy by stealing their oil.

NATO’s stultifying leader, Jens Stoltenberg, has announced the alliance is dusting off its “defense plans.” That may include little more than hiding behind their expensive Brussels desks. They are as inconsequential in the Black Sea as in the East Med – as the US remains quite vulnerable in Syria.

There are now four Russian TU-22M3 strategic bombers in Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria, each capable of carrying three S-32 anti-ship missiles that fly at supersonic Mach 4.3 with a range of 1,000 km. No Aegis system is able to handle them.

Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.

So the rules have changed. Drastically. The Hegemon is naked. The new deal starts with turning the post-Cold War set-up in Eastern Europe completely upside down. The East Med will be next. The Bear is back, hear him roar.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Russia endured eight years of NATO provocations in Ukraine before it roared. Now it will clean house in West Asia and beyond. Photo Credit: The Cradle

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***

Quoting acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, the Russian leader uttered an ominous warning: “There is no true happiness in life, only flashes, a mirage of it is on the horizon — cherish those.” But the establishment media mocked the stark warning as nothing more than rants and raves of a deranged mind.

At the time, the British Royal Navy Defender had breached Russia’s territorial waters [1] in the Black Sea and as many as 20 Russian aircraft conducted “unsafe maneuvers” merely 500 feet above the warship and Britain also lamented shots had been fired in the path of the ship.

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not say whether he had personally approved the Defender’s voyage but suggested the Royal Navy was making a point by taking that route,” a Politico report [2] alleged in June.

Boris Johnson didn’t explicitly acknowledge the naval incursion into Russia’s territorial waters was done on his orders. Something a lot more sinister happened behind the scenes that could have ended up in a false flag naval engagement like the Gulf of Tonkin incident before the Vietnam War in 1964, and given the NATO powers a pretext to start a war over and above the heads of elected politicians.

While the responsibility to recklessly provoke Russia ultimately rested with the entire British cabinet, there was a catch. A Telegraph report noted [3] that former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had raised concerns about the mission, proposed by defense chiefs, and that Boris Johnson was ultimately called in to settle the dispute.

Therefore, what Johnson actually did was to play the role of a mediator in the dispute between the civilian cabinet and the UK’s military. The provocation was clearly planned and executed by the UK’s deep state in collaboration with its partners in the transatlantic NATO military alliance led by the Pentagon.

It’s noteworthy that all the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command.

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down [4] to over 100,000 after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

During the last year, the United States has substantially ramped up the US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

Excluding the self-styled global hegemon, the imperial United States, the rest of the Western powers might have been colonial powers before the Second World War but they are no longer “powers” in global politics. In fact, they can more aptly be described as Western regimes that serve no other purpose than act as Washington’s client states via the framework of transatlantic NATO military alliance to maintain the charade of multilateralism.

The national security and defense policies of modern nation states are formulated by civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed as the deep state. Whereas trade and economic policies are determined by corporate interests and business cartels within the framework of neocolonial economic order imposed on the post-colonial world by corporate America following the signing of the Bretton Woods Accords at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Purportedly democratic governments, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process, are reduced to performing ceremonial gimmicks and are meant only to serve as showpieces to legitimize militarist and capitalist exploitation.

Fomenting crisis in Ukraine by audaciously intruding into Russia’s territorial waters isn’t the only instance when the deep state flagrantly interfered into the US foreign policy. It went to the extent of discrediting and, at times, even brazenly assassinating American presidents who dared to refuse to toe the national security policy formulated by the high-command of the world’s most powerful military force.

Image on the right is from TheFreeThoughtProject.com

Oswald

It’s worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the sixties when the US domestic politics was infested with the McCarthyite paranoia and communists were persecuted all over the country, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of a pacifist and non-interventionist American president was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper trained expert marksmanship by the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was murdered in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized his successor Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American national security establishment was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the raging Cold War.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another reason the Kennedy administration fell from the grace of the deep state was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles in April 1961 to topple the government of Fidel Castro that JFK approved but later severely castigated the CIA for the fiasco and sacked CIA director Allen Dulles and several employees. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba following the foiled plot but he “vacillated” and let a golden opportunity to dismantle a security threat close to the US soil slip by.

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential office when he was shot dead by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother, JFK, for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination, and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder by exposing the assassins after being elected president. This was the principal reason he, too, was silenced before he could be elected president.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 77 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied. He was due to be released on parole last August but California Governor Gavin Newsom decided against setting him free in January.

Likewise, the US security agencies turned against Richard Nixon after the deep state helped him get elected in the 1968 elections by eliminating his formidable Democratic opponent Robert F. Kennedy and felt betrayed after Nixon decided to end the Vietnam War.

The Watergate scandal was clearly orchestrated by the deep state, as Nixon was responsible for the Fall of Saigon and the humiliating defeat of the US in Vietnam at the hands of communists. Despite the allegation of illegal wiretapping, nothing was actually recorded at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters.

An additional charge was brought against Nixon that he had installed voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, which is a customary practice for all the presidents before and after him, as all the offices in the White House and the Capitol are known to be bugged, though only a handful security officials have access to recorded conversations.

Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of clumsy wiretapping attempt at the DNC headquarters turned out to be former FBI and CIA agents. All 48 Republican campaign officials who threw Nixon under the bus by becoming approvers and testifying against him were found guilty, but were handed down light sentences, ranging from fines and several months in prison, excluding Gordon Liddy who served four and a half years in the penitentiary and later became a celebrity anchor.

To his credit, despite being a reviled politician in the American political discourse, Nixon ended the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. He also ended the military draft the same year. Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, the first ever by an American president, eventually led to the establishing of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Buttressing his pacifist credentials further, he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union the same year.

On October 10, 1972, the “October Surprise” on the eve of elections on Nov. 3, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relying on an anonymous source “Deep Throat” (likely a Freudian slip implicating the deep state or could be a double entendre even more sinister), subsequently revealed to be an FBI director, reported that the FBI had determined that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee.

Although venerated as credible “investigative journalists” by mainstream audience, both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were formerly rogue reporters for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post before becoming best-selling author, and are known to be unapologetic deep state shills.

In 2019, the Trump administration awarded the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract JEDI [5] to Microsoft over its rival Amazon’s bid. Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos contested the decision in federal court, which ordered the Pentagon to reconsider certain aspects of the contract. The contract was subsequently scrapped by the Pentagon last July due to the controversy.

It’s worth recalling the reason the corporate media took morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 was that Khashoggi was a columnist for the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle [6] with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife MacKenzie Scott divorcing him and taking a significant portion, $35.6 billion, of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post, with its vast network of NATSEC shills having access to insider accounts of the deep state sources, has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract [7] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

*

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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] Britain says don’t get carried away by warship spat with Russia

[2] Russia says next time it may fire to hit intruding warships

[3] British PM Boris Johnson ignored warnings of his foreign secretary

[4] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

[5] Jeff Bezos contests the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract

[6] The Saudi heir and the alleged plot to undermine Jeff Bezos

[7] Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark

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As the media are abandoning COVID, they’re taking aim at AIDS instead. The timing of AIDS-related articles and announcements is indicative of a coordinated PR campaign, which must have a specific purpose

While Prince Harry’s fame is milked for all it’s worth to get people to start thinking about getting HIV-tested, the discovery of a new HIV variant in The Netherlands has also been announced. The variant is more contagious, and causes more severe disease, twice as fast. There are 109 known cases of the HIV variant in The Netherlands

The COVID jab may be causing AIDS-like illness by decimating immune function. Researchers have also warned the COVID jab may raise your risk of HIV infection. Is the media’s focus on AIDS an attempt to cover up COVID jab effects?

The same week as Prince Harry’s media appearance and the publication of the new HIV strain, Moderna announced its launch of a human trial for the world’s first mRNA HIV vaccine

The parallels between Dr. Anthony Fauci’s AIDS campaign in the ‘80s and COVID are strikingly similar. In the ‘80s, Fauci pushed the deadly drug AZT as the only permissible way to treat AIDS. During the COVID pandemic, Fauci’s failed and lethal Ebola drug remdesivir got the greenlight at the expense of far safer treatment alternatives. Fauci has also been pushing for a transition from conventional vaccines to the mRNA platform

*

When media start raising an issue all at the same time, it’s usually a coordinated campaign directed by a PR company on the behalf of a client. There’s a reason for it, and the reason is to sow a desired narrative in the minds of people. They plant ideas so that when something happens, people are already prepped with certain prejudices or assumptions.

So, what then might be the reason for everyone suddenly talking about AIDS? In December 2021, President Biden announced a White House plan to “end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.”1 The same exact vow had been announced by the British Health Security Agency a week earlier.2

Meanwhile, Prince Harry was out there urging everyone to get an HIV test, and Dutch researchers announced the discovery of a concerning HIV strain. All of this is happening at the same time that COVID is starting to fade out.

As noted by Off-Guardian,3 “just because they’re giving slack on COVID does not mean the agenda behind COVID is gone. Far from it. In fact, even as they seek to dump this pandemic in a shallow grave, they are already prepping the public for the next health scare — AIDS.”

Prince Harry Urges Everyone to Get Tested for HIV

In recent weeks, Prince Harry has been making the rounds urging people to get an HIV test. According to a February 10, 2022, report by the BBC,4 “the Duke of Sussex … wants to continue his mum’s ‘unfinished’ work in removing the stigma around the virus.”

Prince Harry has pointed out that during the last two years, HIV testing among heterosexual men and women in the U.K. has dropped by 33%, compared to just 7% lower testing rates among gays and bisexuals. At the same time, AIDS diagnoses among heterosexuals are outpacing those among gays for the first time in a decade.5

Similarly, a February 9, 2022, opinion piece by Ian Green, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust (a British charity that provides HIV-related services), in The Guardian highlighted the need for a “new strategy” to combat HIV. “Continuing to solely target those traditionally most at risk won’t work,” he said. The answer, according to Green, is more widespread testing of all people, regardless of preconceived assumptions about risk.

New, More Infectious HIV Variant Discovered

While Prince Harry’s fame is milked for all it’s worth to get people to start thinking about getting HIV-tested, the discovery of a new HIV variant in The Netherlands has also been announced.6 Is that a coincidence?

According to researchers, this mutated HIV virus, dubbed the VB variant, is more infectious and causes more severe illness, twice as fast. As of early February 2022, there were 109 known cases of the VB variant in The Netherlands. Curiously, scientists said the variant had been circulating for decades. As reported by NPR, February 4, 2022:7

“They discovered a total of 109 people who had this particular variant and never knew it, dating all the way back to 1992. The variant probably emerged in the late ’80s … picking up steam around 2000 and then eventually slowing down around 2010.

People with this variant have a viral load that is three to four times higher than usual for those with HIV. This characteristic means the virus progresses into serious illness twice as fast — and also makes it more contagious …

There’s no need to develop special treatments for this variant … It shows no signs at all of resisting medications, as some HIV variants do. But because the variant moves quickly, people need to receive medicine as fast as possible.”

Researchers said they also observed a large rise in viral load in individuals with this variant by a 3.5 to 5.5 point increase. What this means is that infected persons could develop AIDS faster without immediate treatment; which could explain the sudden call for mass testing, They wrote:8

“By the time they were diagnosed, these individuals were vulnerable to developing AIDS within 2 to 3 years … Without treatment, advanced HIV — CD4 cell counts below 350 cells per cubic millimeter, with long-term clinical consequences — is expected to be reached, on average, 9 months after diagnosis for individuals in their thirties with this variant.”

Are We Looking at Vaccine-Induced AIDS?

To all of this we can also add the concern that the COVID jab may be causing AIDS-like illness by decimating immune function.9 This is not to imply the shot is causing HIV/AIDS.10,11 Rather, a Lancet preprint12 that compared outcomes among “vaccinated” and unvaccinated Swedes found that six months’ post-jab, some of the more vulnerable vaccinated groups were at greater risk for symptomatic COVID than their unvaccinated peers.

Clearly, the jabs are making some people MORE prone to infection and serious disease rather than less so. According to a December 2021 article posted by the American Frontline Doctors:13

“Doctors are calling this phenomena in the repeatedly vaccinated ‘immune erosion’ or ‘acquired immune deficiency,’ accounting for elevated incidence of myocarditis and other post-vaccine illnesses that either affect them more rapidly, resulting in death, or more slowly, resulting in chronic illness.”

In other words, they suspect myocarditis and other chronic health problems associated with the jabs could be the result of vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or “VAIDS,” which is basically very similar to AIDS. The main difference is the initial trigger. In November 2021, the U.K. also reported a 50% increase in ICU admissions of patients with immune system problems in the preceding two months.14

America’s Frontline Doctors warn the shots are creating “vaccine addicts,” in the sense that their immune system won’t be able to ward off COVID without them. However, it’s still a losing venture, as each shot only worsens the immune erosion, making you ever more vulnerable to all kinds of infections — including HIV! As reported by Off-Guardian:15

“We have already seen a plethora of predictions of increases in strokes and heart attacks, all attributed to very much non-vaccine causes. Everything from increased energy prices to lockdown-related depression has been blamed. That certainly appears to be pre-emptive ass-covering behavior. And this ‘new variant’ of AIDS could be too.

If the COVID ‘vaccines’ cause millions of people to suddenly develop dysfunctional immune systems, or some kind of antibody-dependent enhancement a ‘more dangerous new strain of AIDS’ is a pretty good cover story, don’t you think? …

In October 2020 one group of researchers, quoted in Forbes, warned that any potential COVID ‘vaccine’ could increase your risk of being infected with HIV.

One of the few abandoned COVID vaccine candidates, from the University of Queensland, actually used a protein from HIV as a ‘molecular clamp’ to bind their artificial spike proteins together, the researchers claimed. This potential ‘vaccine’ was apparently discarded after test subjects returned ‘false positives’ on HIV tests.16

What’s the PR Campaign Trying to Hide?

We’re looking at several big puzzle pieces here:

  1. Prince Harry and others reminding everyone about the importance to get tested for HIV
  2. U.K. and U.S. governments simultaneously promising to eradicate AIDS by 2030
  3. The discovery of a new, more infectious and dangerous HIV strain
  4. Emerging data suggesting the COVID jabs erode your immune function
  5. The theoretical possibility that the COVID jab might raise people’s risk of HIV infection, thus possibly triggering an avalanche of AIDS cases in the near future

Could the focus on HIV testing, especially in combination with the warning of a new HIV strain, be an effort to hide the fact that the COVID jabs are destroying people’s immune function, and possibly promoting HIV infection?

Perhaps. But there’s also another possibility. The same week as Prince Harry’s media appearance and the publication of the new HIV strain, Moderna also announced its launch of a human trial for the world’s first mRNA HIV vaccine. The timing of all of these reports strongly indicate that this is a coordinated PR plan.

Human Trial for mRNA HIV Vaccine Is Underway

As reported by Bloomberg:17

“Like Moderna’s COVID vaccine, the shot uses mRNA technology to deliver the instructions for key proteins needed to build an immune response … Researchers have spent decades working out a possible way to inoculate people against HIV, and mRNA will make it possible to test the theory much faster than expected.

This work should help companies including Pfizer, BioNTech and Sanofi, all accelerating their own efforts to design and test mRNA vaccines, to understand when the technology can — and can’t — make a difference in disease prevention …

Creating an mRNA vaccine for HIV is trickier than making the kind of SARS-CoV-2 shots we’ve become familiar with. The mRNA COVID vaccines deliver the recipe for the spike protein … This causes immune cells to produce neutralizing antibodies against COVID, much as they would do if they had experienced a COVID infection.

With HIV, there’s no such simple recipe. HIV’s equivalent to the spike protein — its envelope glycoprotein — is wilier. It hides its vulnerable aspects, making it difficult for immune cells to generate antibodies against it. An even bigger problem is that HIV starts to mutate within hours of infecting someone …

HIV behaves like ‘a swarm of slightly different viruses’ … People with HIV rarely develop neutralizing antibodies, and in the very few who do, the antibodies take years to evolve — far too long for them to effectively fight the virus. The immune system can’t keep up.

But what if the immune system could be given a head start? That’s the idea behind the Moderna/IAVI vaccine … The researchers will administer a series of shots to try to coax the immune system along that years-long process ahead of time so that when it is exposed to HIV, it can spring into action.”

Hiding Injuries or Manufacturing Need for Vaccine, or Both?

So, to recap, the media’s focus on AIDS testing and the emergence of a more infectious strain of HIV may well be a coordinated effort to both:

a) Hide devastating COVID jab effects, and

b) Manufacture the perception that we have an urgent need for an HIV vaccine

If true, just think how sick that is. A widely-pushed mRNA injection for one pandemic causes a second pandemic that is worse than the first, allowing them to roll out a second mRNA “vaccine.” That second injection then erodes immune function even more, giving rise to a third epidemic and another injection. Where does it end? This plan has failure written all over it.

When I first learned of the mRNA COVID jab, it immediately struck me as a bad idea. There were several blatantly obvious mechanisms by which they might cause harm. Today, those concerns are borne out in injury and death statistics. The possibility for things to go wrong with an mRNA HIV vaccine is also assured, if you ask me. As reported by Bloomberg, the entire premise behind it is speculative.

The Moderna HIV vaccine will target a certain subset of B-cells known to loosely bind to HIV. The idea is that by prodding these B-cells with mRNA instructions, delivered through a series of shots, they might develop the capacity to produce neutralizing antibodies against HIV.

My fear here is that if the COVID shot can cause immune depletion after repeated doses, what kind of dysfunction might a series of HIV shots trigger? Endless COVID-19 booster shots are being presented as the solution to the pandemic, as repeated injections increase the level of antibodies in your body,18 but artificially inflated antibodies caused by repeated booster shots signal to your body that you’re always infected.

The resulting immune response may actually do more harm than good, and may accelerate the development of autoimmune conditions such as Parkinson’s, Kawasaki disease and multiple sclerosis, for example.19 Will an HIV vaccine based on a similar process be any safer? I doubt it.

The Fauci Connection

As noted by James Corbett in the video at the top of this article, there’s another interesting parallel between COVID and AIDS, namely Dr. Anthony Fauci himself. He was in charge of both of these epidemics, and without doubt — unless our justice system wakes up before then — he’ll be in charge of the coming AIDS campaign as well.

The parallels between Fauci’s AIDS campaign in the ‘80s and COVID are so strikingly similar, it’s almost like a handbook that’s being repeated, Corbett says. In the ‘80s, Fauci pushed the deadly drug AZT as the only permissible way to treat AIDS. During the COVID pandemic, Fauci’s failed and lethal Ebola drug remdesivir got the greenlight at the expense of far safer treatment alternatives.

Fauci is also a connecting link between the COVID shots and the HIV jab, as he’s been eagerly pushing for a transition from conventional vaccines to this new mRNA platform. As recently as October 2019, he participated in a panel discussion about how this transition might be achieved in light of regulatory hurdles and public distrust of gene transfer technologies.20

Fauci acknowledged it would indeed be very difficult to change people’s perception about vaccines (in this particular case he was referring to the flu vaccine). His advice? “Do it from within and say, ‘I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem.’”

Not only does Fauci not care about public perception, he doesn’t care who he hurts either. He didn’t care about AIDS patients in the ‘80s, and he doesn’t care about COVID patients today. If he did, he’d insist on doctors using whatever works, and not just the products that he’s personally vested in.

HIV Discoverer Dies

An odd coincidence in the middle of all this is the unexpected death of Dr. Luc Montagnier, who together with Harald zur Hausen and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi in 2008 won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).21

Montagnier, who was 89 years old, died February 8, 2022, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine. No specifics about the cause of death have been released.22 Montagnier was an outspoken critic of the COVID jab from the start. He also suspected SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, as the spike protein shared similarities with HIV.23

Is the AIDS Hype a Real Threat?

So, does the emerging AIDS hype reflect a real threat? Is it just an attempt to keep the population in fear? Or are they simply trying to cover up COVID jab effects? If it’s a cover-up, was HIV infection an accidental consequence or an intentional effect of the jab?

Might the new HIV variant actually be the result of mass COVID injection? After all, the timing of this “super strain” of HIV is interesting, to say the least. Why did it take 40 years for it to emerge?

Will HIV testing now be pushed the way COVID testing has been, and if so, why? As noted by Off-Guardian,24 for all we know, AIDS screening may simply be another way of monitoring this massive health experiment. For now, we have far more questions than answers, but if we keep asking them, eventually we’re bound to unearth the truth.

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Notes

1 Very Well Health December 10, 2021

2 UKHSA December 1, 2021

3 Off-Guardian February 10, 2022

4, 5 BBC February 10, 2022

6, 8 Science February 3, 2022; 375(6580): 540-545

7 NPR February 4, 2022

9, 13 Americas Frontline Doctors December 6, 2021

10 Euro News February 10, 2022

11 Twitter February 11, 2022

12 Lancet Preprint October 25, 2021

14 Daily Mail November 20, 2021

15, 23, 24 Off-Guardian February 11, 2022

16 Top Universities April 26, 2021

17 Bloomberg February 4, 2022 (Archived)

18 mBIO December 7, 2021

19 Marc Girardot, COVID Myth Buster News January 30, 2021

20 Rights and Freedoms October 7, 2021

21 Britannica Luc Montagnier

22 ABC News February 10, 2022

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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Western Media did not report that the population in Eastern Ukraine had been begging Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops to save them from American-backed invaders and Neo-Nazi militias

Russian forces launched “special military operations” in Ukraine on Thursday morning, including cruise and ballistic missile attacks targeting infrastructure near major cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Dnipro, according to media reports.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said that he did not intend to occupy UKraine but wanted to “demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine.”

U.S. President Joe Biden issued a written statement saying that Russia had chosen a “premeditated war that will bring catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” adding that “the prayers of the entire world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces.”

Biden’s assessment is wrong-headed if we consider that Russia has been repeatedly provoked–over the last eight years.

In February 2014, the U.S. supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanulovych after he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan that came with conditions detrimental to Ukraine.

Aerial view of Maidan square protests that resulted in Yanukovych’s ouster. [Source: nbcnews.com]

The U.S. has since provided extensive military aid and training to Ukrainian armed forces as they brutalized the people of Eastern Ukraine who voted to secede after the 2014 coup.

The U.S. has also applied extensive sanctions on Russia–tantamount to an act of war.

Biden’s claim that the Russian invasion was unprovoked is further undercut by the fact that Ukraine precipitated the war by attacking the breakaway eastern provinces in violation of the Minsk peace agreements.

Russia reported on Monday that it had captured a Ukrainian soldier and killed five others after they crossed into Russian territory in Rostov, just over the border with Ukraine. Several hundred American mercenaries were also reported to have arrived in Ukraine in the last week.

American mercenary in Donbass [Source: wprost.pl]

Photojournalist Patrick Lancaster provided photographic evidence of Ukrainian army shelling of a school in the Donbass earlier this week.

Lancaster’s report is corroborated by Organization For Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) maps, which show that shellings that violate ceasefire arrangements have indeed been carried out mostly by the Ukrainian government.

Source: consortiumnews.com

A resident of the Kyivsky district of the city of Donetsk whom Lancaster interviewed, Zoya Tumanova, said that the Ukrainians had shelled her village often since 2015 and burned half of it down. She asked Lancaster: “when will it end, when will Putin come? When will he come to save us?”

Tumanova’s viewpoint is completely absent from the U.S. media. It contradicts the official narrative of Vladimir Putin as a maniacal aggressor, leaving the impression that the people of Eastern Ukraine want Putin to send Russian troops to save them from the real aggressors.

A second-grade teacher at the school in Donetsk that was shelled, Marusina Ludmila, told Lancaster that she knew it was the Ukrainian army behind it because “they don’t let us live for eight years already; they have been shelling us constantly.”

Asked if Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky was telling the truth when he said that Ukraine did not shoot at civilians, she said:

“they always lie. We know it is them shelling because no one can but them—though I don’t know how they can do that to their own Ukrainian people, we used to live together and communicate.”

President Zelensky pays first working visit to Donbas (Photos) | UNIAN

Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky at the front. [Source: unian.info]

Below is a commentary by Don Hank, a professional translator and Russian speaker who studied Russian language and literature at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and studied at Leningrad University in the early 1970s.

Ukraine shells schools in Donbass 

As I have shown before, based on numerous reports and videos on the seemingly senseless attacks on Donbass civilians and civilian infrastructure, there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon.

1—For one thing, since the U.S.-led West and U.S.-puppet regime in Kyiv have de facto very effectively censored most news reports about the atrocities of the Kyiv army and Neo-Nazi militias, there was never any chance that the average news consumer in the U.S.-controlled West could possibly have any knowledge about these atrocities. (Let me point out, however, that Putin, in his speech relating to the recognition of the Donbass republics, does point out that Kyiv has been constantly attacking innocent civilians in that region since 2014.)

Azov demonstration with flag

Members of the Azov battalion in Kiev. [Source: vox.com]

This censorship served the insidious purpose of making the Western public think Russia is the source of all ills in Ukraine (and elsewhere) and that the U.S. was “supporting” Ukraine.

This despite the fact that the year after the U.S. invasion of the Maidan Square in Kyiv in 2014, Kyiv fell to the very last rank in GDP—becoming the poorest country in Europe! Only a skilled—though diabolical—news manipulation on a 24/7 basis could have portrayed good as evil and evil as good to such a complete degree.

Ukraine is Europe’s poorest nation with $220 average monthly wage

Scene from Post-Maidan Kiev. [Source: rt.com]

The U.S. pressured the successive Kyiv regimes to cut all of the old lucrative business contracts with Russia and gradually shut down the Soviet-built factories, making Ukraine a debt slave of the IMF—now a permanent status.

See the link below to details on the Ukraine since 2014 that you are being denied by a U.S.-controlled Western press that systematically pushes an anti-Russia narrative with the ultimate aim of weakening Russia economically and politically in hopes of seeing it disintegrate to the level of the 1990s.

Censored details of Ukraine history since Feb 2014:

Now, should you be surprised that the U.S. Establishment would deceive you to this degree?

Yes and no.

A person with the skill and ambition to fight their way out of the government-imposed ignorance to which the West is subjected could, with a herculean effort of will, dig up all the information necessary to gain an objective overview of the numerous ways the U.S. Establishment has deceived its citizens time and time again since the 1800s for the purpose of wresting illicit gain from foreign countries and even from citizens of the U.S., and for the purpose of excusing inexcusable wars and sanctions on people who are absolutely not the enemies of the American people.

But if you don’t feel up to a Herculean effort of will, here is a rather complete catalog of deceptions in the msm that led to war or other disasters.

2—I have a sneaking suspicion that the Kyiv puppet regime has literally no control over the radical nationalists and Neo-Nazi militias that Kyiv has now foolishly integrated into its military.

Nazi symbol on Ukrainian soldier’s helmet [Source: nbcnews.com]

While it is clear that Biden wants war in Ukraine so bad he can taste it, though it is not in the interests of Kyiv to escalate the Ukrainian attacks on civilians.

Yet there is no let up. The attacks are escalating, even in the face of a potential major retaliatory offensive by Russia.

I had read at one time that the Ukrainian central government, if it can be called that, has no control over the radical elements and that the war has a mind of its own.

If that is the case, then of course we are going to witness this kind of insanity and at some point, Putin will give the order and put an end to it.

Putin signing decree recognizing Luhansk and Donetsk on Monday [Source: consortiumnews.com]

Of course, at the same time, this escalation is to the Biden regime’s benefit, so we have two possibilities:

1—The puppeteers in Washington are behind this escalation, which provides a distraction from the abysmal performance of this White House and all the irremediable problems with the economy and the rampant fuel prices, and

2—the crazy Neo-Nazis are acting on their own.

Or both.

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So what will be the consequences of the sanctions that the U.S. is imposing?

Well, we can safely predict that gas prices will go through the roof now that brain dead Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he was suspending the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Dmitry Mdvedev, Deputy Chair of the Russian Security Council, tweeted:

“German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered to halt the certification of the Nord Stream 2. Well, welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon pay 2,000 euros per thousand cubic meters of gas.”

And for those who are awaiting the glorious day when “green” and “clean” energy makes Russian gas superfluous, here is a little cold water for you:

It turns out that green energy without nuclear (which Germany renounced years ago) simply cannot replace fossil fuel. It’s too expensive. And so what do the incompetents in Europe do about that?

They set themselves up for economic Armageddon.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Don Hank is a professional translator and Russian speaker living now in Panama who studied Russian language and literature at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and studied at Leningrad University in the early 1970s. Don can be reached at [email protected].

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). Jeremy can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Russian intelligence agency video of what it says is a Ukrainian tank after being hit on Russian territory Monday. The location would indicate that Ukraine invaded Russia first and not vice versa. [Source: consortiumnews.com]