Global Research

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Now that Kiev is in possession of such potentially game-changing offensive weapons that have already been proven to have emboldened its aggression in the ongoing civil war over its eastern region’s future political status, there’s nothing that Ankara can do to restrain its partner.

I wrote earlier this summer that “Turkey’s Military Engagement With The Lublin Triangle Aims To Balance Russia”, which prognosticated the strategic impact of that country’s drone sales to Ukraine, Poland, and perhaps soon also Lithuania as well. Humbly speaking, my work accurately assessed the strategic dynamics in hindsight after one of Kiev’s Turkish drones just struck Donbass, prompting Russian presidential spokesman Peskov to once again warn about their destabilizing impact on regional conflicts such as that one.

Turkey’s “drone diplomacy” has become the primary pillar of its larger “military diplomacy”, which refers to the use of military means to advance political and strategic ends. In the case of Turkish-Ukrainian military cooperation, this aims to asymmetrically “balance” Russia’s military superiority in the Black Sea region. It can also be interpreted as tacit Turkish backing of NATO’s regional goals despite Ankara’s problems with many of that bloc’s Western members in recent years.

President Erdogan is practicing a very careful “balancing” act between East and West, which explains the unexpected diplomatic de-escalation between Turkey and the West a few days ago following 10 Western ambassadors’ joint statement last week demanding the release of a jailed businessman who they regard as a “political prisoner”. Turkey would prefer not to become too dependent on East or West, to which end it still tacitly coordinates with NATO in the Lublin Triangle while simultaneously enhancing ties with Russia and China.

The problem is that the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle when it comes to that country’s “drone diplomacy” with Ukraine. Now that Kiev is in possession of such potentially game-changing offensive weapons that have already been proven to have emboldened its aggression in the ongoing civil war over its eastern region’s future political status, there’s nothing that Ankara can do to restrain its partner. To the contrary, it’s now compelled to continue providing more equipment, spare parts, and maintenance.

This counterproductively serves to make Turkey an unofficial military participant in the Ukrainian Civil War. Although its role is much less than other NATO countries, it’s disproportionately significant because of the impact that its “drone diplomacy” has already had in reviving Kiev’s destabilizing aggression. If left unchecked, which is extremely likely for reasons of “military diplomatic” inertia, then this development could contribute to further complicating Russian-Turkish relations.

President Erdogan might therefore have gone a little bit too far in his attempts to “balance” Russia in the Lublin Triangle, which represents the northern reaches of the increasingly tense Black Sea region. Selling drones to NATO-member Poland and potentially to that country’s Lithuanian neighbor are one thing since neither are involved in any hot conflicts at the moment while providing them to Ukraine is another matter entirely because of its ongoing civil war that’s regarded (whether rightly or wrongly) as a NATO-Russia proxy war.

For comparison’s sake despite being an imperfect example, it would be as if Russia outfitted Syria with similar offensive weaponry then let it loose to bomb Turkish-backed “rebels”. Selling unarmed drones to Ukraine or Syria on the condition that they not be deployed until Turkey or Russia approves and then subsequently provides their armaments could be a creative use of “military diplomacy”, but exporting these wares already armed, ready to go, and under the full control of the recipient can lead to an uncontrollable situation.

Just as Russia unofficially seems to regard Turkey as an undeclared military participant in the conflict, so too would Turkey regard Russia as the same in the above example, especially if Turkish-allied “rebels” were struck by Syria’s Russian drones in that admittedly imperfect example. One can only imagine the Turkish reaction in such a scenario, yet Russia is remaining cool for now considering the immensely sensitive nature of its relations with Turkey. Be that as it may, as was already written, the genie is out of the bottle and won’t be put back in.

The new regional reality in Eastern Ukraine is that Turkey provided potentially game-changing weapons to Kiev which have already been proven to have emboldened it to carry out more acts of destabilizing aggression. Turkey might not have thought everything fully through, or perhaps it did and decided to up the stakes in its regional competition with Russia with the expectation that it can succeed in asymmetrically restoring a sense of military “balance” with it in the broader Black Sea region.

The first possibility would be the best-case scenario since it would at least enable Turkey to retain a degree of “plausible deniability” over its potentially hostile intentions towards Russian interests. The second, meanwhile, would worsen bilateral relations, especially if any of Turkey’s representatives – especially President Erdogan – publicly lent credence to these motives. Hopefully that won’t happen and this potentially major challenge to Russian-Turkish relations can be responsibly managed as effectively as possible given the new circumstances.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

Nature of the COVID Era Public Health Disaster in the USA: From All-cause Mortality and Socio-geo-economic and Climatic Data

By Dr. Denis G. Rancourt, Dr. Marine Baudin, and Dr. Jérémie Mercier, October 26, 2021

We investigate why the USA, unlike Canada and Western European countries, has a sustained exceedingly large mortality in the “COVID-era” occurring from March 2020 to present (October 2021). All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.

The Covid-19 Timeline. No Evidence of a “Pandemic”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 26, 2021

September 19, 2019: The ID-2020 Alliance. Establishing a Vaccine Digital Passport. GAVI held their Summit in New York, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”. The  focus was on the establishment under the auspices of GAVI (Alliance for Vaccine Identity) of a vaccine with an embedded digital passport. The stated objective was the creation of a global digital data base.

Video: The Vaccine is More Dangerous than COVID-19: Dr. Peter McCullough

By Dr. Peter McCullough and Michael Welch, October 26, 2021

They produce a lethal spike protein in insensitive organs like the brain or the heart or elsewhere. The spike protein damages blood vessels, damages organs, causes blood clots. So it’s well within the mechanism of action that the vaccine could be fatal. Someone could have a fatal blood clot.

Fully Vaccinated Are Suffering Far Higher Rates of Infection than the Unvaccinated, and It Is Getting Worse

By Brian Shilhavy, October 26, 2021

10 months into the COVID-19 mass vaccination campaigns in the UK, statistics provided by the UK’s Health Security Agency now clearly show that those who have been fully vaccinated are suffering far worse health and are susceptible to infections at greater rates than the unvaccinated.

Governor de Santis Says that If People Are Forced by Their Employer to be Vaccinated, and Then Become Ill, the Employer Will be Liable for Damages

By Dr. Meryl Nass, October 26, 2021

Well, a lot of negative information is now known, but it isn’t being provided on the “Fact Sheets”. And people are not being given the right to refuse. Furthermore, as the Governor points out, employees are not being issued religious and medical waivers, as required by federal law.

Tiffany Dover. Two Dead Students. A Nurse Quits. Is Tennessee Eventually Waking Up?

By John Goss, October 26, 2021

Suddenly there has been an re-awakening in the case of “Pfizer-vaccinated” nurse, Tiffany Dover, who was recorded as having died following the injection. Her place of employment, CHI Memorial Hospital, Tennessee, deny that she is dead and told me in a short email: “We have made several statements. Tiffany is alive and continues her work as a nurse manager.”

Canadian Public Health Report Reflects Increased Heart Condition Side Effects for 12-17 Year Old Males as Vaccination Rates Increase

By Sundance, October 26, 2021

Many academic institutions and athletic organizations are requiring vaccinations as a condition of participation.  This puts increased pressure on teens and young adults to take the vaccine despite any concerns of side effects. Many parents are also willing and eager to face the risks.

Pressure to Dissolve the UN Security Council: Putin Warns of League of Nations Revival. What Are the Implications?

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, October 26, 2021

As walls separating east and west along Manichean Cold War lines of “democratic/free” vs “authoritarian/enslaved” are quickly being erected before our eyes, it is worth pondering not only the deeper implication of the Russian president’s message but also those healthier pathways out of the coming storm before it is too late.

Billions of Euros to “Innovate” the Nuclear NATO

By Manlio Dinucci, October 26, 2021

NATO has ended up in the attic,” wrote the political commentators of several newspapers a month ago, after France had withdrawn its ambassador from Washington on September 16.

What Next after Sudan Changes Guards at the Crossroad?

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, October 26, 2021

As reported October 25 by the reputable state media, Al Arabiya, Sudanese army and a cross-section of its population have returned, expressing dissatisfaction about the government. What is really at stake all these years is closely linked to the level of development and the living standard of the majority among the estimated 45 million population.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Sudan was subject to another military coup, two years after its previous one.

October 26th dawned with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de-facto leader of the country, dissolving the military-civilian Sovereign Council.

It was previously established to guide the country to democracy following the overthrow of long-ruling autocrat Omar al-Bashir two years ago, that was also carried out by the military.

In the entire history of Sudan, the military has always played a significant role and intervened in politics, essentially defining it.

On October 25th, General Burhan announced a state of emergency, saying the armed forces needed to protect safety and security.

He then vowed to hold elections in July 2023 and hand over power to the elected civilian government, until then a military junta would be in charge.

The Sudan information ministry, which is still loyal to ousted Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, said that the transitional constitution gives only the prime minister the right to declare a state of emergency and that the military’s actions are a crime.

Some citizens opposed to the coup barricaded streets and clashed with troops, but a significant part of the population supported the military.

The main opposition coalition, Forces of Freedom and Change said that it was calling for peaceful actions in the streets to overthrow the military takeover, including demonstrations, the blocking of streets and civil disobedience.

That didn’t work, as at least 7 people have been killed and 140 have been injured, so far.

The information ministry urged resistance saying tens of thousands of people are opposed to the takeover and many have even been subjected to live fire near the military headquarters in Khartoum.

Meanwhile, social polls demonstrated that the majority of the population was dissatisfied with the work of the overthrown government.

The government under Prime Minister Hamdok was mostly guided by the recommendations of the IMF, and as a result brought the country’s economy almost to collapse.

With much of the population starving.

In addition, the United States said that it was withholding $700 million in economic aid until further notice.

The United States supports the ousted government, as do the the United Nations, Arab League and African Union all of which expressed concern.

Great Britain condemned the coup, while Egypt said all sides needed to exercise restraint.

Sudan is in a strategic area, and can be considered as the “gateway” to the Central African Republic and neighboring regions.

It is of great interest for world and regional leaders.

Sudan has always been famous as one of the key transport hubs in the northeast of Africa.

This includes various kinds of illicit smuggling as well.

It is also no surprise that the military could quickly mobilize and take power in their hands, as it is quite capable, as well as being well-equipped according to regional standards.

Both Russian and Belarusian military instructors have made sure that the soldiers and officers are primed for most scenarios.

However it is difficult to say that foreigners, whether Russians, Turks or Americans, take any active part in the ongoing events.

The Sudanese army elite simply does not need it.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

SUPPORT SOUTHFRONT:

PayPal: [email protected], http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

We are living in an age of mayhem, madness and monsters.

Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

What we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

Through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

We have let the government’s evil-doing and abuses go on for too long.

We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

We’re living in two worlds: the world we see (or are made to see) and the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing; pandemic lockdowns (both mental and physical), real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation; and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers, disease, etc.).

They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.

They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Sound familiar?

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.

We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.

But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?

The answer is the same in every age: fear.

Fear makes people stupid.

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

As the Bearded Man warns in John Carpenter’s film They Live: “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”

In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age or Carpenter’s other dystopian films.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.

Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.

Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.

The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?

Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

If we’re watching, we’re not doing.

The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

So where does that leave us?

The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.

When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

In other words: we need to get active.

Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.

The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.

All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

Wake up, America.

If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

A military coup was carried out in the Republic of Sudan on October 25 as the contradictions within the Sovereignty Council (SC) burst asunder.

This coalition of political and military interests was formed in the aftermath of tumultuous political events between December 2018 and June 2019.

The Chair of the SC, Maj. Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan engineered the removal and detentions of the interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok along with several other leading cabinet ministers within the transitional regime. Events leading up to the military coup can be traced back to the announced arrest of 40 people including military officers and civilians on September 21 ostensibly for plotting a seizure of state power.

A very limited and sketchy amount of information was published about the personalities and motivations of those arrested in September in what was described by Prime Minister Hamdok as a preemptive act. Differences among the political and military leadership of the SC had become well known over the last several months. The attempted coup in September was blamed on the supporters of former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir who remains in detention in Sudan pending the outcome of criminal charges levelled against him. Also, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands has warrants out for the arrest of al-Bashir yet he has not been extradited by the administrations which have governed since April 2019.

An agreement between the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) which led the demonstrations against the former administration of ousted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir beginning in December 2018, and the Transitional Military Council headed by al-Burhan and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (aka, Hemeti), created the political atmosphere for the formation of an interim administration. Hamdok, an economist who has held several administrative and diplomatic posts, was selected to be the political face of the SC.

During the early morning hours of October 25, reports emerged from Khartoum that a military coup was underway. Hamdok had been moved to an undisclosed location while the media remained silent on the rapidly unfolding events.

Later Gen. al-Burhan made a videotaped statement to the people of Sudan and the international community acknowledging the removal of Hamdok and other officials of the interim government. He claimed that the actions of the military were designed to carry out the ideals and objectives of the “December 2018 Revolution.”

Such an assertion is counter-intuitive since it was the military under the direction of the generals that seized power from President al-Bashir in April 2019. These actions were taken by the military in order to stave off a genuine popular revolution in Sudan.

Soon enough the military revealed its brutal and undemocratic character by carrying out a massacre of protesters on June 3, 2019. The attack on demonstrators occupying areas around the Ministry of Defense in the capital of Khartoum resulted in more than 100 deaths. Hundreds of others were wounded and injured while assaults on women and youth continued for several hours.

The October agreement which jump-started the SC set a timetable of 39 months for the transferal of power to a civilian government after multi-party elections. This deal resulted in placing Gen. al-Burhan as chairperson for the first 21 months. Later the civilian members of the SC were slated to take over the leadership of this alliance. The events since October 25 have

aborted this accord, known as the Draft Constitutional Declaration, while at the same time placing the negotiations for the end to rebel insurgencies in Darfur, Blue Nile, North and South Kordofan in jeopardy. A Juba Agreement was signed in South Sudan in October 2020 between the transitional administration and various rebel groups aimed at bringing the armed elements into a political process.

After it became clear that a coup had occurred on October 25, the Associated Press reported that:

“As plumes of smoke rose, protesters could be heard chanting, ‘The people are stronger, stronger!’ and ‘Retreat is not an option!’ Social media video showed crowds crossing bridges over the Nile to the center of the capital. The U.S. Embassy warned that troops were blocking parts of the city and urged the military ‘to immediately cease violence.’ Pro-democracy activist Dura Gambo said paramilitary forces chased protesters through some Khartoum neighborhoods. Records from a Khartoum hospital obtained by The Associated Press showed some people admitted with gunshot wounds.” See this.

One day after the coup it was reported that at least seven people had been killed and 140 injured in demonstrations across the country. Mass demonstrations began almost spontaneously after the announcement of a coup. Internationally, the African Union, the United Nations as well as the U.S. has issued statements opposing the military takeover.

Another Failure in U.S. Africa Policy

For decades now the political affairs of the Republic of Sudan have been a preoccupation of the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Prior to the partition of the country in 2011, Sudan was the largest geographic nation-state in Africa. The country of 50 million was becoming an emerging oil-producing state maintaining ties with both the West and the developing countries.

During the 2000s, Sudan had good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China through trade agreements and other forms of bilateral and multilateral relationships. However, international pressure from the U.S. under the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, sought to balkanize and destabilize the country. The U.S. engineered the creation of the Republic of South Sudan along with Britain, the former colonial power, and the State of Israel. Today, both North and South Sudan are in economic and political turmoil. The governments in Khartoum and Juba in the South are beholden to the whims and caprices of imperialism and its allies.

Since the overthrow of al-Bashir, the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have pledged monetary assistance. The U.S. then pressured Hamdok into accords that are at extreme variance with the priorities and needs of the Sudanese people.

Hamdok and al-Burhan knelt to U.S. pressure and revoked without any legitimate authority, the Israel Boycott Act of 1958 which prohibits recognition and trade with Tel Aviv. In addition, the interim government accepted a proposal from the administration of President Donald Trump to pay hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to survivors of victims of terrorist acts carried out in 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania and in 2000 in the Port of Aden off the coast of Yemen. There was no concrete evidence presented to the international community which could link the government of al-Bashir, which was toppled, to these bombings. Yet the people of Sudan will be forced to pay restitution for crimes ostensibly committed during a previous deposed administration.

This reckless disregard of the political and economic sovereignty of Sudan could only serve to weaken its national institutions and foment social chaos among the working class, youth, women’s organizations and professional associations. The coup has been condemned by numerous opposition groupings including the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) which has called for mass resistance against the putsch.

Biden Administration Maintains Same Imperialist Policy

The current administration of President Joe Biden has paid limited attention to foreign policy. His orientation has been quite similar to that of his predecessors Obama and Trump. Biden has continued and enhanced the hostility towards China, Iran, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Cuba, Venezuela, among other states. The potential for an international conflict over the strategic control of geo-political regions could very well erupt in the coming months. The failure of the Biden administration to intervene constructively in the Horn of Africa is fostering greater discord and instability.

With the seizure of power by the Sudanese military, this scenario lays focus on the need for a political revolution in the country along with several others. Despite the promises of monumental economic and security assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Sudanese people continue to be mired in a cycle of declining wages, rising prices and political uncertainty.

It will be up to the workers, youth, women, professional associations and genuine political parties to build a coalition of popular forces that can secure victory over the military apparatus and construct a domestic and foreign policy independent of Washington and Wall Street. The intervention of the military in governmental affairs is once again becoming widespread on the African continent. In Chad, Mali and Guinea, similar developments have taken place. The African Union must address this crisis in order to prevent a further deterioration of the security situation on the continent.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Featured image: In this frame taken from video, the head of the military, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, announced in a televised address, that he was dissolving the country’s ruling Sovereign Council, as well as the government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, in Khartoum, Sudan, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. Burhan said the military will run the country until elections in 2023. His announcement came hours after his forces arrested the acting prime minister and other senior government officials.  (Sudan TV via AP)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Three major Australian supermarket chains are adopting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that will see 300,000 workers across the country get vaccinated or lose their job.

According to the Australian financial journal The Financial Review, the movement is being led by Woolworths, with rivals Aldi and Coles joining the fray.

The Woolworths mandate will be imposed on all staff members across its 1,200 retail outlets and Big W discount department stores; workers at its warehouses, distribution centers and offices will also be required to get the jab. Most Woolworths stores serve around 20,000 in-store customers every week.

The deadline for full vaccination in some areas of the country is January 31, while others will have until March 31 to get both shots. The company has said it will consider practical and individual issues staff members might have in complying with the mandate, with a final policy expected to be announced in November that will include provisions for legitimate religious and medical exemptions.

Coles, meanwhile, will require vaccination in most Australian states; their workforce totals 120,000 people across 837 supermarkets. Those in the affected areas must have received at least one dose by November 5 and a second one by December 17.

Meanwhile, German-owned discount grocery chain Aldi will be introducing similar rules that are expected to be announced following a consultation period that may last several weeks. The chief executive of the company, which has 12,000 staff working across its 570 stores there, said: “Our view is that requiring all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the future is the best measure to ensure the health and safety of our teams and our customers.”

Other grocery chains, however, are taking a different approach. For example, Wesfarmers, owner of Target, Kmart and the Bunnings hardware chain in Australia, have said that only new employees will have to be vaccinated. Existing employees will not be subjected to a mandate given the high take-up rate among them that managing director Rob Scott attributes to informational sessions and vaccine leave arrangements.

Australia’s extreme measures don’t seem to be reducing cases

Australia has resorted to extreme measures to curb the virus, including an extended lockdown affecting most of the country and closing its borders, yet cases have continued to rise there and the government eventually chose to loosen some of its restrictive measures due to the toll they were taking on the economy. Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, has had lockdown measures in some form in place for 245 days, making it the home of the world’s longest enduring lockdown.

Meanwhile, Western Australia recently announced COVID-19 vaccine mandates for most workers, including not only supermarket staff but also teachers and other groups. The mandate will be rolled out across three groups that together make up 75 percent of the Western Australia workforce.

The first group includes meat processing workers, fire and emergency services workers, community workers, healthcare and elderly care staff, police officers, port and freight workers and mining workers, who must be fully jabbed by December 31.

Supermarket staff falls under the second category, whose deadline will be January 31. This group also includes restaurant and pub workers, childcare workers, construction workers and those working in public transport. Teachers and other school staff must be fully vaccinated by the time the school term begins. A third group includes government employees, parliament members and other retail workers, who must be fully vaccinated to go to work in the event of a lockdown, The Guardian reports.

Some Australians are already calling for boycotts of Woolworths, with thousands of people on Twitter registering their opposition to the company forcing its workers to take an experimental vaccine to maintain their employment, many of whom have been posting their weekly or yearly grocery expenditures to show the company how much money they will be losing.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Medical Tyranny

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

With President Biden succumbing to the CIA’s demand to continue keeping the CIA’s records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret, the question naturally arises: What is the CIA still hiding? (See my blog post of yesterday entitled “Surprise! Biden Continues the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up.”)

To understand what they are still hiding and why they are still hiding it, it’s necessary to go back to the 1990s during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board — and even further back than that to November 22, 1963 — the day that Kennedy was assassinated. 

People often say that if the CIA and the Pentagon had orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, someone would have talked by now. 

That’s just not true. When it comes to murder, people don’t talk. They know that if they do talk, they run the risk of themselves being murdered, maybe their families too. People who participate in murder schemes know that they had better keep their mouths shut or else.

One example is Mafia figure Jimmy Hoffa. We still don’t know who killed Hoffa. That’s because no one talked. Another example is Johnny Roselli, the liaison in the CIA-Mafia partnership to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. We still don’t know who murdered Roselli. No one has ever talked.

People who talk also run the risk of being prosecuted because there is no statute of limitations for murder. A good recent example is real-estate heir Robert Durst. He was recently convicted of murdering a person twenty-one years ago.

So, it was always a safe bet that the CIA and the Pentagon would be able to keep their regime-change operation in Dallas sealed in secrecy.

However, not so with respect to the fraudulent autopsy that the Pentagon carried out on President Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination. When the ARRB released people who had participated in the autopsy during the 1990s, they talked.

As I detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and in my online presentation in our Zoom conference last spring, a fraudulent autopsy was an essential part of the cover-up in the assassination.

The problem that the plotters had, however, is that in order to carry out this part of the cover-up, they had to enlist the assistance of many people within the vast national-security establishment who played no role in the assassination. Since all those people were innocent and mostly unwitting participants to the cover-up, they didn’t have the same incentive to stay quiet as the people who knowingly participated in the assassination itself.

The military did its best to keep everyone quiet by telling the autopsy participants that what they were doing was classified. Everyone in the military knows what that means — people are expected to take classified secrets to the grave with them. Participants to the autopsy were required to sign written secrecy oaths. They were also threatened with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever revealed what they had done or seen.

As I pointed out in The Kennedy Autopsy, the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was actually set into motion at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, announced his intent to conduct an autopsy on the president’s body, as Texas law required. That was when a team of armed Secret Service agents, brandishing guns, told Rose in no uncertain terms that they would not permit him to do the autopsy. Forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital, they took the body to Dallas’s Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body back with him to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he delivered it into the hands of the military.

Although the mainstream media always treated all this as normal, given the dominant role that the national-security establishment was playing in Cold War America, it was actually quite bizarre and aberrant. The military never had any jurisdiction or legal authority to conduct the autopsy. At that time, killing a president was not a federal crime. The United States was not at war with any nation state. Kennedy was not killed on the field of battle. His killing was a straight murder case under Texas state law. Any criminal prosecution for the assassination would take place in Dallas. A genuinely honest autopsy would be a critically important part of that criminal prosecution, especially since a sharp team of criminal-defense lawyers would inevitably be defending the accused.

The military was mostly, but not entirely, able to keep its fraudulent autopsy secret for some 30 years, until the ARRB began releasing people who had participated in the autopsy from their vows of secrecy. As the ARRB began forcing the military to release its records relating to the autopsy, the dam of secrecy surrounding the autopsy broke wide open. That’s when the fraud became apparent. That’s why the JFK Records Act was such a nightmare for the Pentagon and the CIA. If it hadn’t been for that law, there is no doubt that the military’s fraudulent autopsy would still be shrouded in secrecy today. 

What the Pentagon and the CIA learned from the era of the ARRB is that the community of assassination researchers is composed of some very smart people. By analyzing the evidence that the ARRB was succeeding in getting released, assassination researchers were able to put together the pieces of the puzzle that established a fraudulent autopsy, along with lots of other pieces of circumstantial evidence establishing that what occurred on November 22, 1963, was a highly sophisticated national-security state regime-change operation.

The leading figure in this endeavor was Douglas Horne, who served on the ARRB staff. Anyone who reads Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board will inevitably conclude that the autopsy that the military conducted on the Kennedy’s body a few hours after the assassination was fraudulent to the core. 

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy being conducted on President Kennedy’s body, especially given that the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was launched at the moment Kennedy was declared dead.

It stands to reason that if a government agency is being forced to reveal records relating to a regime-change operation, that agency is going to keep the most incriminating evidence secret for as long as possible. We still don’t know what the CIA is still hiding, but we can safely assume that there is a good reason why the CIA does not want to let those super-smart assassination researchers get a hold of it. 

That’s why the national-security establishment will fight tooth and nail for permanent secrecy on their remaining JFK assassination-related records. Oh, the Pentagon and the CIA will most likely authorize Biden and the National Archives to release some innocuous records for appearance’s sake. But make no mistake about it: They will make certain that Biden, the National Archives, and all future presidents comply with their demand for permanent secrecy on what they need to hide on a permanent basis.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

Featured image is from HowStuffWorks

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The Turkish Parliament has voted to extend a military mandate that allows Ankara to carry out military operations in Iraq and Syria until 30 October, 2023.

According to Turkish media, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the opposition Good Party (IYI) backed the motion proposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week.

Meanwhile, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) voted against it.

According to Ankara, this mandate will allow them to confront the presence of paramilitary groups in Iraq and Syria, as Erdogan has claimed that the presence of armed groups backed by Iran in the besieged nations will create a “terrorist corridor.”

The motion also emphasizes that the establishment of peace in Syria must be followed through the Astana peace process.

In recent weeks, Turkey has been heavily criticized for its destructive role in northern Syria, as their military and political interventions have catastrophically backfired on both Iraq and Syria.

According to experts, without Turkey’s involvement, Damascus would have been able to put an end to western-backed protests and initiate promised reforms, bringing the country one step closer to peace back in 2019.

Political analysts also believe that without Turkey’s intervention, Syria would have emerged from the war with a limited number of victims, little damage, few internally displaced and fewer refugees.

The news also comes following reports by the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) saying Turkey has deployed reinforcements for its allied armed groups in Hasaka governorate in northwestern Syria.

Local sources in the Hasaka countryside told SANA that military reinforcements belonging to the Turkish occupation included vehicles, armored personnel carriers, weapons, and logistical supplies, which were sent to armed groups in Ras al-Ayn area and were synchronized with an intense use of Turkish drones in the region.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Turkish Parliament. (Photo credit: Hurriyet Daily)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

All indications are that the regional states are preparing to accord recognition to the Taliban government. The meeting of regional states and Taliban officials in the so-called Moscow Format last Wednesday signalled that the Taliban government is a compelling reality and constructive engagement is needed. read more

A week is a long time in politics. The foreign-minister level conference in Tehran tomorrow with the participation of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries is sure to deliberate on formal diplomatic ties with the Taliban government. Unsurprisingly, the Taliban has not been invited to the event. 

All eyes will be on the Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Wang left Beijing on Monday and headed for Doha en route to Tehran where he held talks with the top Taliban government leaders Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. 

This is the highest level political contact so far since the announcement of the Afghan interim government in early September. The symbolism is profound that Wang is heading for the Tehran conference after consulting the Taliban leadership. 

Significantly, Chinese President Xi Jinping also had a call with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan today. The Xinhua report underscored Xi’s call for building an even closer China-Pakistan community “with a shared future in the new era”. 

In a veiled reference to the US’ strategic competition with Beijing, Xi referred to the “profound changes unseen in a century, with more sources of turbulence and risks around the world”. Xi exhorted that in such conditions, China and Pakistan should “stand together even more firmly and push forward the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.” 

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China

Xi touched on the CPEC and the need to strengthen counter-terrorism and security cooperation. The Pakistani readout disclosed that the two leaders also discussed the regional and international situation, including Afghanistan. 

It said the sides “called on the international community to provide immediate humanitarian and economic assistance to the Afghan people to alleviate their suffering, prevent instability and flight of people, as well as continued engagement for the rebuilding of the country.” 

Xi’s conversation with Imran Khan most certainly took on board Wang’s structured discussions in Doha with Mullah Baradar on Monday. 

The Chinese foreign ministry readout on the Doha meeting highlighted Wang’s remark that “Afghanistan, now standing at a critical stage of transforming from chaos to governance, is currently facing a historic opportunity to truly master its own destiny, achieve inclusiveness and reconciliation, and advance national reconstruction.” 

Wang acknowledged the imperative need for “more understanding and support” from the international community for the Taliban government to meet “quadrupole challenges” — humanitarian crisis, economic chaos, terrorist threats and governance difficulties. 

Wang listed China’s expectations from the Taliban government and called on “all parties to engage with the Afghan Taliban in a rational and pragmatic manner to help Afghanistan embark on a path of sound development.” 

Importantly, he reiterated Beijing’s expectation that  Taliban “will make a clean break” with the ETIM and other terrorist organizations, and “take effective measures to resolutely crack down on them.” 

The Chinese readout highlighted Baradar’s assertion that “the overall situation in Afghanistan is under control and improving, with the governments at all levels being gradually established and government decrees being carried out effectively.” 

It singled out Baradar’s firm commitment that Taliban “will learn from historical experience” — Taliban government “will continue to take inclusive measures to expand the representation of the regime”; will recruit induct “more outstanding personnel of all ethnic groups”; will “strengthen the efforts to protect the rights and interests of women and children, and will not deprive them of the rights to education and work.” 

Interestingly, Baradar added that

“For now, women in medical institutions, airports and other places have resumed their work, and girls in primary and secondary schools in many provinces have returned to school, but they still face difficulties such as lack of facilities and funds.” 

The crux of the matter is that Wang heard from the Taliban government leadership at the highest level that

“Pursuing a friendly policy toward China is the firm choice by the Afghan Taliban, and Afghan hopes to strengthen cooperation with China in various fields. The Afghan Taliban, which attaches great importance to China’s security concerns, will resolutely honor its promise and never allow anyone or any force to use the Afghan territory to harm China.” 

Conceivably, conditions exist more or less for Beijing to move toward to accord recognition to the Taliban government should it decide so. 

For an optimal Afghan strategy it is useful that in the soonest possible way formal government-to-government ties with Kabul are restored so that alongside humanitarian assistance, Beijing can also beef up security cooperation and set the ball rolling for Afghan reconstruction within the ambit of the Belt and Road Initiative. 

To be sure, the bottomline is that China (and the Central Asian states and Iran) is convinced of the urgency of strengthening the hands of the Taliban government if the fight to vanquish the ISIS and other terrorist groups is to be effective. 

The shootout in Herat in northwestern Afghanistan near Iran’s border on October 24 between the Taliban and the ISIS militants testify to the criticality of the emergent security situation. 

Will Russia go along with China to recognise the Taliban government? The short answer is ‘Not yet’. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has expressed inability to travel to Tehran on Wednesday. 

However, Russian presidential envoy on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov acknowledged yesterday, “Beyond a doubt, this (Moscow Format discussions) creates a good basis for the start of the process of recognising the new authorities.” He disclosed that the reopening of the Russian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif is in the cards. 

Russia may empathise with the regional consensus on recognition but the archaic legislation in its statute books prohibits any form of formal dealings with the Taliban. President Putin anticipates that the day is not far off when the legislation can be done away with. 

Moscow and Beijing would have a coordinated approach that the recognition of the Taliban government should not smack of “bloc mindset”. Meanwhile, Russia is saddled with its pet project, ‘Troika Plus”, which notionally keeps the door open to cooperate with the US, which the Taliban views positively. 

That said, Moscow also would have en eye on the European Union’s active plan to reopen the mission in Kabul by next month.  

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Joe Biden’s administration seems determined to surpass its predecessors in taking actions that are certain to antagonize Russia. In just the past two weeks, the United States and its NATO allies have gone out of their way to provoke Moscow on four separate occasions. Such irresponsible behavior exacerbates already dangerous tensions with a nuclear-armed great power.

Washington set a belligerent tone with its choice of a special envoy to the Kremlin in what was supposed to be an effort to repair badly frayed bilateral relations. Instead of selecting someone who was at least tolerable to Russian leaders, the administration sent Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland. Not only is Nuland an outspoken Russophobe in general, but she is especially notorious for her role in helping demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014, when she served as an assistant secretary of state in Barack Obama’s administration. The Russian government imposed a travel ban and other sanctions on her – measures that were lifted just before her latest diplomatic mission as part of a deal in which Washington removed similar restrictions on a high-level foreign ministry official. Choosing Nuland as the envoy for negotiations with Vladimir Putin’s government was either incredibly tone deaf or a deliberate display of contempt.

Other recent U.S. actions strongly suggest that it was the latter. Just days after Nuland finished her largely fruitless negotiations, the United States flew 2 B1-B bombers over the Black Sea. The area is considered especially sensitive to the Russian military because the country’s principal naval base is located on that body of water. US and NATO warships and planes have noticeably expanded their presence in the Black Sea in recent years, but sending nuclear-capable bombers was especially provocative. Predictably, the Russians scrambled fighter planes to intercept and “escort” the American aircraft. It was a classic case of Washington creating a gratuitous provocation.

Even more provocative were comments that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made during his visit to Ukraine in mid-October. In remarks at Ukraine’s defense ministry, Austin emphasized that NATO membership for Kiev was very much on the table and that “no third country has a veto over NATO’s membership decisions. Ukraine . . . has a right to decide its own future foreign policy and we expect that they will be able to do that without any outside interference.” Days earlier, the Pentagon leaked a story to the ever-hawkish Washington Times about Austin’s forthcoming trip that made US support for Ukraine’s NATO membership bid even more explicit.

To be sure, it was not a new message; Washington has maintained that position for years, insisting that Ukraine and Georgia have a “right” to join NATO, if they meet the alliance’s standards for membership. However, coming now from the secretary of defense despite Moscow’s repeated warnings that adding either Ukraine or Georgia to NATO would be among the actions that cross a “red line” as far as Russia’s security is concerned, was particularly unhelpful timing. It also is a supremely arrogant stance, based on the assumption that Moscow should not complain even as the most powerful military alliance in history establishes an ever-greater, menacing presence on Russia’s border. Russian officials immediately responded to Austin’s comments, warning that adding Ukraine to NATO would be “extremely dangerous” and would be met with unspecified retaliatory measures.

Other incidents occurring at the same time as Austin’s European trip have left the NATO-Russia relationship in tatters. Earlier this month, NATO expelled 8 Russian diplomats from its liaison office at NATO headquarters in Brussels for alleged spying activities. The Kremlin responded a few days later by suspending all of its own remaining activities in the Brussels facility and ordering NATO’s office in Moscow closed as of November 1. “Following certain measures taken by NATO, the basic conditions for common work no longer exist,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov tersely told reporters.

Amazingly, US officials reportedly seem both surprised and chagrined about the rapidly deteriorating relationship with Russia. They are especially concerned because it complicates Washington’s professed desire to focus on China as the principal security threat to the United States. Predictably, though, the national security establishment and its echo chamber in the news media place all the blame on the Kremlin for the soaring tensions.

If the Biden administration does not change course soon, relations with Moscow could become even worse than they were during the Cold War – and that development would place world peace in great danger. Ever since Bill Clinton’s administration decided to expand NATO into Central and Eastern Europe, the United States and its European allies have taken one step after another to antagonize Russia, and the depressing results are readily apparent. Unfortunately, instead of reversing Washington’s arrogant, provocative policies, Joe Biden’s administration is doubling down on that dangerous strategy. The outcome could be extremely tragic for all concerned.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books and more than 950 articles on international issues.

Featured image is from Activist Post

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

If we take him at his word, then General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan was one of three Sudanese military figures to tell Omar al-Bashir that it was time to bring to a close his three decades in power.

“I went to see him and informed him,” Burhan told the BBC shortly after he was named head of Sudan’s transitional military council in April 2019. “I told him the leadership of the armed forces had decided the situation was getting out of hand and therefore he should step down.”

According to Burhan, Bashir simply said “OK”, then went on to express a desire that citizens were protected.

It must have been a difficult conversation for Sudan’s top general. A veteran soldier, Burhan had long been one of Bashir’s reliable lieutenants – both literally and politically.

Not long after the conversation, on 12 April 2019, he became chief of the military council that deposed Bashir, just one day after the president’s immediate successor – and former defence minister – General Awad Ibn Ouf stepped down.

As news broke this morning of another military coup in Sudan, Burhan, who has served as the chairman of Sudan’s Transitional Sovereign Council (TSC) since 12 April 2019 and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took centre stage, declaring a state of emergency and dissolving the government.

Friends in Egypt, friends in the Gulf

Born in 1960 into a Sufi family in a village north of Khartoum, Burhan studied in a Sudanese army college, then later in Jordan and at the Egyptian military academy in Cairo, where fellow alumni included future Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He is married and has three children.

Burhan and Sisi are longstanding friends, though the Sudanese general has lifelong affiliations with the kinds of Islamist movements that Sisi has outlawed. Still, as Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told MEE, the two military leaders are united by “the greater good of stopping democracy”.

His first international trip after becoming Sudan’s de facto head of state was to Egypt in May 2019. From there he went on to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia.

Earlier in his working life, Burhan served briefly as Sudan’s defence attache in Beijing, but his military career under Bashir was defined by prominent roles played in South Sudan, Darfur and Yemen where, as head of the armed forces, he helped supply the Saudi-led coalition with Sudanese mercenaries.

Burhan has described Riyadh as an “eternal ally” and has longstanding relationships with military commanders there and in the UAE.

‘Blood on his hands’

“He was absolutely instrumental to the devastation caused in Darfur,” Smith says of Burhan, who fought in the region and was a military intelligence colonel coordinating army and militia attacks against civilians in West Darfur state from 2003 to 2005.

The Sudanese soldier has denied committing atrocities, but leaders in Darfur are in no doubt as to the role he played. Sheikh Matar Younis of Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement described Burhan as “a bloody murderer of the people of Sudan in Darfur since before 2014”.

Residents and displaced people in Central and West Darfur said he had “blood on his hands”, and that he was involved in “planning and carrying out genocide, burning of villages and displacement of unarmed residents”.

Burhan’s response to such accusations has essentially been to say that he was following orders, and that what happened in Darfur – widely viewed as a genocide – was a war in which each side would quite naturally accuse its opponent of doing awful things.

Burhan’s time in Darfur is significant also because it brought him into contact with the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, widely known as Hemeti. Hemeti became leader of the Janjaweed, the Arab militias that brought death and despair to Darfur, and which have since morphed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with Hemeti still at the helm.

Sources of power and money

As head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces respectively, Burhan and Hemeti are both allies and rivals. Hemeti serves as vice president of the transitional military council, but his family and the RSF benefit enormously from their control of gold mines in Darfur, as well as from the patronage of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Sudan’s military has, in theory, a bigger budget, and is in control of a significant military industrial complex.

These various sources of power and wealth have come under threat from Sudan’s civilian-led government and it is thought that this is partly why Burhan and Hemeti have moved when they have. Burhan was due to step down as the military’s chair of the sovereign council this year, to be replaced by a civilian appointee.

Both he and Hemeti are said to be mindful of being held accountable for past actions in Darfur, and Burhan had been lobbying to dissolve the civilian-led council of ministers, according to Africa Confidential.

This is Burhan and Hemeti’s coup, Smith said, but the relationship between the two men is difficult “because, among other things, Hemeti projects himself as a leader abroad”, and is closer to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Burhan is considered to be Egypt’s man.

Hemeti is a more charismatic, more cartoonish figure than the quietly spoken, methodical Burhan, and the RSF leader is more closely associated with the atrocities surrounding the transition to democracy – most notably, the massacre of more than 128 people in Khartoum in June 2019 – than the armed forces general.

Once considered the archetypal apolitical soldier, Burhan is now in the middle of a very political situation. The streets of Sudan are full of people calling for democracy. Burhan’s allies in Egypt and the Gulf will be watching to see how he moves from here.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

First posted by Global Research on September 15, 2021

***

Nicholas Wansbutter, a criminal defense lawyer and host of Don’t Talk TV, talks about vaccine passports in Canada. According to him, vaccine passports are extremely problematic for two reasons: 1) issue of consent and 2) human rights implications.

Watch the video below.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

«La Nato è finita in soffitta», scrivevano un mese fa i commentatori politici di svariate testate giornalistiche, dopo che la Francia aveva ritirato l’ambasciatore da Washington il 16 settembre. Era la protesta di Parigi per essere stata esclusa dal partenariato strategico-militare tra Stati uniti, Gran Bretagna e Australia, annunciato il giorno prima, e aver perso un lucroso contratto per la vendita di sottomarini all’Australia, che saranno sostituiti da sottomarini nucleari forniti da Usa e Gran Bretagna.

Una settimana dopo la clamorosa rottura diplomatica, però, il generale francese Lavigne veniva messo a capo del Comando Alleato della Trasformazione, con quartier generale a Norfolk negli Usa, e i presidenti dei due paesi, Biden e Macron, pubblicavano una Dichiarazione congiunta (qui la versione dell’Eliseo, qui quella della Casa Bianca, ndr).

Biden riaffermava «l’importanza strategica dell’impegno francese ed europeo nell’Indo-Pacifico» (la regione che nella geopolitica di Washington si estende dalla costa occidentale degli Usa a quella dell’India).

Il perché veniva esplicitato dal Comitato militare dei capi della Difesa dei 30 paesi della Nato, riunito ad Atene: «Mentre le azioni aggressive di Mosca minacciano la nostra sicurezza, l’ascesa della Cina sta spostando l’equilibrio di potere, con conseguenze per la nostra sicurezza, la nostra prosperità e il nostro stile di vita».

Di fronte a tali «minacce», concludeva, «abbiamo bisogno che l’Europa e il Nord America siano forti, legati insieme». Come debbano essere legati, lo ribadisce Biden nella dichiarazione congiunta con Macron: «Gli Stati uniti riconoscono l’importanza di una Difesa europea più forte e più capace, che sia complementare alla Nato».

Quindi un’Europa militarmente più forte, ma come complemento della Nato: alleanza asimmetrica, a cui appartengono 21 dei 27 paesi dell’Unione europea, nella quale la carica di Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa spetta sempre a un generale degli Stati uniti, i quali detengono tutti gli altri comandi chiave in Europa (come il JFC-Naples con quartier generale a Lago Patria).

Su questo sfondo si è tenuta, il 21-22 ottobre al quartier generale della Nato a Bruxelles, la riunione dei 30 ministri della Difesa (per l’Italia Lorenzo Guerini, Pd).

Essa ha creato un «Fondo per l’Innovazione» con un primo stanziamento di 1 miliardo di euro, a carico di 17 paesi europei tra cui l’Italia, ma non degli Stati uniti, per lo sviluppo delle più avanzate tecnologie ad uso bellico.

Ha varato la «Strategia per l’intelligenza artificiale», un ancora più costoso programma perché la Nato mantenga il vantaggio in questo campo che «sta cambiando l’ambiente globale della difesa», ossia il modo di fare la guerra.

Ha deciso «il miglioramento della prontezza e dell’efficacia del nostro deterrente nucleare», ossia lo schieramento in Europa di nuove armi nucleari, naturalmente con la motivazione di difendersi dalla «crescente minaccia missilistica della Russia».

Alla vigilia della riunione Nato, il ministro russo della Difesa, Sergei Shoigu, ha avvertito che «gli Stati uniti, con il pieno sostegno degli Alleati Nato, hanno intensificato il lavoro per modernizzare le armi nucleari tattiche e i loro siti di stoccaggio in Europa» e la Russia considera particolarmente preoccupante il fatto che «piloti di paesi Nato non-nucleari siano impegnati in esercitazioni per l’uso di armi nucleari tattiche». Un messaggio diretto in particolare all’Italia, dove gli Usa si preparano a sostituire le bombe nucleari B61 con le nuove B61-12 e i piloti italiani vengono addestrati al loro uso ora anche con gli F-35. «Consideriamo ciò una diretta violazione del Trattato di non-proliferazione delle armi nucleari», conclude Shoigu.

Il messaggio è diretto all’Italia e agli altri membri europei della Nato che, pur avendo ratificato il Trattato di non-proliferazione quali paesi non-nucleari, ospitano armi nucleari Usa e si addestrano al loro uso.

Il significato implicito del messaggio è chiaro: la Russia considera questi paesi fonte di minaccia e sta prendendo delle contromisure. Il messaggio è stato come al solito ignorato dal nostro governo e parlamento e, ovviamente, dai media che hanno messo la Nato in soffitta.

Manlio Dinucci

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Suddenly there has been an re-awakening in the case of “Pfizer-vaccinated” nurse, Tiffany Dover, who was recorded as having died following the injection. Her place of employment, CHI Memorial Hospital, Tennessee, deny that she is dead and told me in a short email: “We have made several statements. Tiffany is alive and continues her work as a nurse manager.”

A Reddit thread is hot in pursuit of the truth – one way or another. This follows a recent article which questions why CHI Memorial “deleted all of its tweets about Tiffany Dover, who has since completely disappeared, from its official Twitter account.”

The recent deaths of two Soddy Daisy High School students might have aroused interest in a story now ten months old.

Even more revealing is the testimony of Maria Wright RN who resigned as a nurse at CHI Memorial Hospital in September. She makes serious revelations about mask-wearing – having to wear the same mask for a week. But it was really the vaccinations that caused her the most concern.

I NEVER thought I would see the day that working for a CATHOLIC hospital where I can pray with my patients that I would have to defend my judgement and religious beliefs of not wanting a forced aborted baby tissue based medical treatment. Therefore, I will not. I simply say NO and no means no.

Her letter is well worth reading in its entirety, because it shows that here is a caring nurse, who knows that what is being done is wrong. I have no idea what inducements have made CHI Memorial continue administering its Pfizer-shots when the whole world has seen what damage they can do. Her faith is more important than her job. Her knowledge of true health is wisdom itself.

Nothing is going to bring Tiffany Dover back it seems. She is gone. But more nurses and doctors can take the courageous step of following their conscience rather than following the money. I let Maria Wright sum up what is happening in healthcare in the United States and elsewhere.

Lastly, there will be a day coming soon when more staff walk away, get terminated, or those left behind after the mass exodus become weary, when there will be no more nurses or staff to hire. If this company thinks it is so bad now because there is a “bed shortage” when we all know its a staffing shortage, there are darker days ahead. During all this pandemic if CHI Memorial and Dignity Health would have just taken care of those loyal to them then you would not be facing have to pay travel nurses up to $110 an hour to fill my shoes. My last date of employment, caring for patients and families, precepting residents, and contributing to all the awards this hospital receives will be October 4, 2021.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, All the Goss.

Featured image: Nuns in London outside their sanctuary on one of the biggest rallies against government constraints ever seen. (Source: All the Goss)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

10 months into the COVID-19 mass vaccination campaigns in the UK, statistics provided by the UK’s Health Security Agency now clearly show that those who have been fully vaccinated are suffering far worse health and are susceptible to infections at greater rates than the unvaccinated.

Natural immunity is quite obviously more effective than “vaccine immunity,” which wanes very quickly, and apparently in the process destroys one’s natural immunity as well, providing the perfect repeat-business model craved by the pharmaceutical companies, who will now pitch regular booster shots, along with all their side effects including twice as many people dying than people who have died after all vaccines for the past 30 years.

And of course the COVID-19 shots do not stop transmission (they never even claimed to do this), so the vaccinated will keep on infecting each other.

This is great news for Big Pharma, and devastating news for the public who were fooled into taking these experimental gene-therapy shots.

***

Fully Vaccinated are suffering far higher rates of infection than the Unvaccinated, and it is getting worse by the day; there is no justification for Vaccine Passports

IT’S OFFICIAL: Most of the UK’s vaccinated population are suffering far higher rates of infection than the unvaccinated, and it is getting worse by the day.

by Martin Zandstra

The Expose

The UK’s Health Security Agency publishes detailed Covid statistics, which, for the last 7 weeks, have been tabulated by age-group and vaccination status. This now allows important questions to be answered.

The Agency says most vaccinated suffer substantially higher rates of infection, and their latest chart provides a snap-shot:

All of the UK’s 30-and-over vaccinated now endure far higher rates of infection than their unvaccinated counterparts. But as a snap-shot, this tells us nothing of how this arose, or how it may yet develop. Here we re-present the agency’s data in a time-series, to promote better understanding of the trends and implications.

The UK has vaccinated its population mostly in age order, from oldest to youngest, and very recently began vaccinating its under-18-year-old cohort. Being the UK’s most freshly vaccinated, they exhibit a very high degree of resistance to Covid infection:

This very recently vaccinated cohort benefits from a 90% improvement in their infection rates, meaning their case incidence is 10 times better than that of their unvaccinated counterparts. This is impressive, and leads us to ask how long this high degree of protection might last?

The answer, unfortunately, seems to be not very long:

The previous UK age-group to be vaccinated was the 18–29-year-old cohort, of which half was fully vaccinated by some 9 weeks ago. While still doing better than the unvaccinated of their age, they have nevertheless lost the greater part of their relative resistance to infection. If they continue their trajectory, week 12 will see that benefit completely gone.

The earlier vaccinated age-group was the 30–39 cohort. Half was fully vaccinated around week 27, and by week 39 (again some 12 weeks later) had lost their enhanced infection resistance. For at least for these two cohorts, it would seem their vaccine induced resistance reduced to zero in under 3 months.

Unfortunately, it does not stop there; Following the data shows the vaccinated descend well into negative territory, which may prompt us to ask how all earlier vaccinated cohorts are now doing?

In terms of vulnerability to infection, the answer is not so well:

The entire 40-79 vaccinated cohort is deeply negative, now below minus 50%, meaning they suffer more than double the infection rate of their unvaccinated counterparts, and there is no obvious end in sight; Given the consistent and strongly negative continuing trend for all adult cohorts, it is impossible to guess where or when these trajectories might bottom out.

But does the trend result from increased vulnerability amongst the vaccinated, or is improved resistance developing amongst the unvaccinated? The answer appears to be both:

Unvaccinated adults are enjoying significantly lowered infection rates, but the vaccinated are very clearly headed in the opposite direction:

This begs the question: Why should the vaccinated suffer mounting infection rates, while case-rates of the unvaccinated both declined and are lower? Surely, we should expect the vaccinated to do better – certainly no worse?

Yet, for all but one adult cohort, the exact opposite is true, and even for them, it seems likely for not much longer:

It has been suggested infection amongst the unvaccinated has induced robust natural immunity leading towards their herd-immunity. That may well be a factor, but, as we have seen, the vaccinated have similarly been infected, and at least for the 40-79 cohort, at much higher rates. Why should this not benefit the vaccinated as well?

Are we to understand infection after vaccination may not produce similar broad immunity?

Vaccination is intended to alter subsequent immune response to infection, which is, of course, the whole point; It is conceivable this altered response may mute the development of broad long-lasting immunity that otherwise typically results from natural infection. That might then leave the vaccinated more open to re-infection, and might help explain these results. But this remains speculation, we simply do not know today.

What we do know from the UK data, is that anyone vaccinated more than few months ago is at greatly higher risk of Covid infection, and is therefore greatly more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts.

Much has been said and written to show the vaccinated are equally capable of transmitting Covid. But because their symptoms are often muted, they are also more likely to be out and about; add this to escalating infection rates, and there can be little doubt the vaccinated now constitute by far the greatest Covid transmission risk.

In light of this, vaccine passports are clearly senseless; They are nothing more than an invitation to infection, for which no justification can now possibly remain.

Read the full article at The Expose.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Although both sides are acting like they’ve moved on after last week’s events, their strategists know better than to naively think that everything will go back to how it was before those 10 ambassadors issued their joint statement.

Most observers were surprised by Monday’s diplomatic de-escalation between Turkey and the West.

President Erdogan announced over the weekend that 10 Western ambassadors would be declared persona non grata after they released a joint statement last week demanding that their host country’s authorities release a jailed businessman who they regard as a “political prisoner”.

The West presumably predicted how the Turkish President would react to such a provocation so it was widely believed that they intended to catalyze a self-sustaining cycle of diplomatic escalations as part of the US-led Hybrid War on Turkey.

Nevertheless, those 10 countries’ embassies unexpectedly took a step back by releasing statements reaffirming their official policy that they don’t interfere in the internal affairs of their host state. In response, President Erdogan said that the issue was resolved, at least for now unless they decide to diplomatically meddle once again.

This development suggests that the West might have bit off more than it can chew last week, perhaps by underestimating President Erdogan’s resolve to respond to their provocations. They might have thought that he wouldn’t risk an all-out crisis with them by threatening to declare their ambassadors persona non grata.

If that’s the case, then it would mean that the West wasn’t prepared to initiate the self-sustaining cycle of diplomatic escalations that was previously speculated. It would also imply that their intelligence agencies don’t have as solid of a grasp of the Turkish leader’s psyche as some might have thought. Another related explanation could be that the European participants hadn’t fully predicted the costs of complying with the US’ presumed demands that they follow its lead. In particular, they might have realized in horror that Turkey could potentially refuse to stop Afghan and other migrants to the bloc, which could destabilize the EU at this sensitive time.

Another explanation is that President Erdogan also realized the mutually detrimental costs of entering into the earlier mentioned self-sustaining cycle of diplomatic escalations and pragmatically offered some of those countries (most likely the EU ones) a “face-saving” way out. That doesn’t mean that he’s “weak”, but just that he would understand better than everyone else how disadvantageous it would be to worsen relations at this particular point in time. In this scenario, he would have delegated his diplomats to explain why he reacted as he did but that he’s still extending an olive branch to them if they take the first step to de-escalate.

After all, Turkey aspires to practice a very complex “balancing” act in the midst of the ongoing global systemic transition whereby it leverages its geostrategic position to comprehensively diversify its foreign partnerships with the intent of preemptively avoiding disproportionate dependence on any one of them. In practice, this means that the self-sustaining cycle of diplomatic escalations that those Western ambassadors set into motion would have unbalanced Turkey’s “balancing” act by abruptly removing its Western component and thus risking disproportionate Turkish dependence on its Eastern half with Russia and China.

From the Western perspective, some of their diplomats might have feared this outcome not because they have Turkey’s best long-term strategic interests in mind, but simply because it could have quickly resulted in them losing most of their leverage over that West Asian country and thus by default leading to the expansion of Russian and Chinese influence there in the coming future like some might have feared. For reasons of simple pragmatism, these comparatively more sober-minded diplomats might have compellingly made the case before their decision makers to step back from provoking Turkey for the time being in order to avert that scenario.

The accuracy of this explanation can only be speculated upon since such diplomatic processes are naturally opaque to those observers relying solely on open sources, but should there be some credibility to it, then this would suggest that those countries’ strategists aren’t in agreement over the most effective way to handle the so-called “Turkish Question”. That provocative term refers to the best way for the West to tackle Turkey’s increasingly independent foreign policy that poses a latent threat to their interests. There seems to be a divide between “hawks” who want to punish Turkey and “doves” who want to continue trying to woo it.

The failure to bridge this divide resulted in the West’s volte face following President Erdogan’s decision to have his Foreign Ministry declare those 10 countries’ ambassadors persona non grata. The hawks provoked this escalation but the doves pragmatically moved in to manage the fallout for the time being. Even so, the general trend is that the West is becoming increasingly hostile towards Turkey. As proven by the latest diplomatic incident, the hawks have the power to provoke a full-blown crisis in bilateral relations, though they’re still being somewhat restrained by the doves.

Trust between Turkey and the West is at an all-time low after what just happened. Although both sides are acting like they’ve moved on after last week’s events, their strategists know better than to naively think that everything will go back to how it was before those 10 ambassadors issued their joint statement. Turkey and the West can thus be described as “frenemies” in the sense that they’re heated rivals yet also understand the need to pragmatically prevent their tensions from spiraling out of control, at least for now. Considering the hawks’ rising influence, though, more such provocations can be expected before Turkey’s summer 2023 elections.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The new social media network announced by former US President Donald Trump could become a refuge for all those who have been silenced. This could pay off for Donald Trump if he has plans to participate in the 2024 election as well, but a major problem he faces is how to bypass the monopoly held by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, among others. The announcement to launch a new social media network called “Truth” is, according to the former president, a way to “stand up to the tyranny of the tech giants.”

Trump said during the launch announcement that we live in a world where the Taliban have a huge presence on television, while, as he says, the most favorite American president has been silenced. He added that a response to the monopoly will soon follow.

There is a real need for such a platform as a large number of social media users have been deleted and prevented from functioning on mainstream platforms. Trump himself has been censored on Twitter and Facebook. At the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump had about three million followers on Twitter, but by the time he was removed from the platform, he had 90 million.

It can be expected that Truth can attract a large number of conservative users from Facebook and Twitter, adding not just an economic incentive for creating a social media network, but a political one too. As announced, his platform should start operating from February 2022, meaning that by the time of the next US election, he would have had two years to rebuild his audience so he can circumvent censorship from rival social media outlets and mainstream media.

However, it can be expected that a new platform would have major problems if wanting to challenge major social media networks because of the sheer vastness of resources that Twitter, Facebook and Google have at their disposal. Facebook, which has three billion users, has thousands of servers to maintain the incredible amount of traffic it has at any given moment. It is not known how many users Truth is expecting, nor the resources that will be available, but it certainly will not be at the level of Facebook.

Amazon, one of the world’s largest hosting providers, suspended Parler, another social media network that came to prominence after Trump was censored in mid-2020. If Trump wants to truly be free from potential censorship, then he must build all the necessary infrastructure, something which will surely be a costly endeavour.

It is recalled that Parler, a network used by American conservatives, was removed from Apple and Google stores due to alleged “protection of user safety.” Parler sued Amazon for the severe blow it suffered from the interruption of web hosting services after Apple and Google stopped distributing its app.

Whether Trump’s platform can overcome all these obstacles, it also raises the question on whether it could attract people of different political orientations. It is unlikely that liberals and leftists would sign up to the platform and will likely remain on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

It is recalled that there are recent witness testimonies from a hearing in the American Congress that claimed Facebook was censor heavy and too liberal. There are likely a large number of dissatisfied users on Facebook and Twitter who might be interested in switching to another platform. Not only are conservatives being silenced on mainstream social media platforms, but even users who criticize Israel. On Facebook, even writing Hezbollah in a post could see the user warned or banned.

In that sense, Trump’s idea is good, but the question is whether he will be able to replace mainstream social media platforms. The idea will certainly not appeal to Trump’s opponents, especially given their heightened control in being able to censor people who do not have similar views and ideologies.

None-the-less, it is unlikely that Truth will be able to topple Facebook or Twitter in the short to medium term, but it will certainly act as a platform to give a voice to many who have been silenced. With Trump likely to get millions of followers once his platform is online, it will be impossible for the former president to again be silenced. At the same time, inevitably mainstream media will be unable to keep their eyes off Trump’s posts on Truth and they will surely write headlines about it. Such a platform could serve Trump favorably if he seeks to be re-elected in 2024.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Twitter user Brad Pilon has noted some concerning statistics from Canadian Public Health [DATA HERE] regarding adverse events for 12 to 17-year-old males as the vaccination rates increase. Myocarditis has almost doubled from 1 in 10,000 (August) to 1 in 5,000 in two months:

• Oct 17th 1 in 5,208
• Oct 10th 1 in 5,491
• Oct 3rd 1 in 5,543
• Sep 26th 1 in 5,938
• Sep 18th 1 in 6,414
• Sep 11th 1 in 6,640
• Sep 4th 1 in 6,752
• Aug 28th 1 in 6,973
• Aug 21st 1 in 7,880
• Aug 14th 1 in 8,361
• Aug 7th 1 in 10,060
• [DATA LINK]

Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium). The inflammation can reduce your heart’s ability to pump and cause rapid or abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias).  Unfortunately, this trend follows a presentation that was made during an FDA hearing in September (video below):

Many academic institutions and athletic organizations are requiring vaccinations as a condition of participation.  This puts increased pressure on teens and young adults to take the vaccine despite any concerns of side effects. Many parents are also willing and eager to face the risks.  The following noted exchange is an almost unfathomable cognitive disconnect in taking risks, and shared only to highlight how far some vaccine advocates are willing to go:

I struggle to understand this level of thinking…

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from The Last Refuge

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

When Stephanie and Patrick de Garay enrolled their 12-year-old child Maddie and her two brothers in Pfizer’s Covid-19 clinical trial, they believed they were doing the right thing. 

That decision has turned into a nightmare.  Maddie, a previously healthy, energetic, full of life child, was within 24 hours of her second dose reduced to crippling, scream-inducing pain that landed her in the emergency room where she described feeling like someone was “ripping [her] heart out through [her] neck.”

Over the next several months the nightmare continued, during which Maddie was hospitalized several times and suffered numerous systemic injuries, requires a tube through her nose that carries her food and medicine, and a wheelchair for assistance.

Ms. de Garay documented every detail of Maddie’s injury and reported it to the principal investigator for the Pfizer trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital where the vaccine clinical trial was occurring and where Maddie was treated and admitted.  They first tried to treat Maddie as “a mental patient,” telling the family it was psychological and in Maddie’s imagination.  Then they claimed it was unrelated to the vaccine (copy of recording with hospital below), and when that argument failed, Pfizer listed this traumatic adverse event as “functional abdominal pain” when reporting to the FDA.

Ms. de Garay reported what occurred to the CDC and FDA through VAERS in June 2021 but nobody from these agencies sought additional information or followed-up with the de Garays.  Ms. de Garay also reached out to Dr. Nath, a Chief in the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, responded by stating he was “Sorry to hear of your daughter’s illness” and that “We have certainly heard of a lot of cases of neurological complications form [sic] the vaccine and will be glad to share our experience with them.”  (Copy of this email is below.)  Unfortunately, other than a call arranged by Maddie’s neurologist, there was no follow-up or response from NIH or any other federal health agency.  Even after Ms. de Garay did a press event on June 28, 2021 with Senator Ron Johnson, neither Pfizer nor any health agency reached out in any manner to address Maddie’s injury or obtain any additional information.

This story is extremely troubling.  Pfizer’s clinical trial for children aged 12-15 included only 1,131 children who were vaccinated and at least one of those children suffered a devastating, life-altering injury which, despite incontrovertible proof and the cries of both the victim and her parents, has not been appropriately acknowledged by Pfizer or the FDA.  Putting aside that one serious injury in a small trial should alone raise blaring alarm bells, one must ask: what other serious adverse events have been hidden and ignored by regulators?

For a virus that rarely harms children, the need to assure safety of the Covid-19 vaccine is high.  A study with only 1,131 children is underpowered.  It will not pick up anything but the most common adverse events.  If what Maddie suffered will occur in 1/1,000 children, that would result in 75,000 children in this country suffering this serious injury.  If it happens 1/10,000 children, that is 7,500 suffering this serious injury.  It could be that the cure is worse than the disease.  But that will only be known if there is a properly powered (a.k.a., sized) clinical trial with children.

International scientists have declared that “inadequately powered studies should themselves be considered a breach of ethical standards.”  Without a clinical trial of sufficient size that reviews all potential adverse events, such as that experienced by Maddie, for a sufficient duration, this potentially catastrophic result will not be identified prior to authorization or licensure.

And as Dr. Woodcock and Dr. Marks have said, “because young children are still growing and developing, it’s critical that thorough and robust clinical trials of adequate size are completed to evaluate the safety and the immune response to a COVID-19 vaccine in this population.  Children are not small adults – and issues that may be addressed in pediatric vaccine trials can include whether there is a need for different doses or different strength formulations of vaccines already used for adults.”

The de Garay family are truly brave to come forward with their story and are doing so in the hope of preventing other children from being injured like their Maddie.  My firm has sent a letter to the FDA regarding Maddie, a copy of which is below.  The de Garay family also released its communication with the NIH and recorded conversations with the trial’s principal investigator – links to both are below.

Will the FDA require Pfizer to actually conduct a properly powered study?  Unlikely.  To do so would be for its leadership, and especially Dr. Janet Woodcock and Dr. Marks, to self-inflict a wound.  It reflects the danger of placing safety in hands of government officials that have been promoting a product, because to admit a safety issue now requires them to effectively cut off their own hands.

The real lesson is not that pharmaceutical companies, or the FDA should act better or do a better job.  That just won’t always be the case.   The real lesson is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure.  Never.  Preserving those rights to choose whether to get a medical product, without any government coercion, is the final and ultimate safeguard.  Removing that right results in dangerous authoritarianism because just as the FDA will not admit to Maddie’s serious injury after having promoted this vaccine, politicians that mandate the vaccine will not want to later admit a mistake by repealing the mandate. 

Click here to read the Letter to Federal Health Authorities Regarding Maddie.

Click here to read Stephanie de Garay’s Email Exchange with NIH.

Click here to listen to Patrick and Stephanie de Garay’s Phone Call with Pfizer trial Principal Investigator on May 17, 2021.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is a screenshot from Fox News via Injecting Freedom

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

He’s one of only about 4,000 perfusionists in America.

Perfusionists use specialized equipment to maintain a patient’s heart and lung functions during open-heart or related surgeries. They operate a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, which keeps the patient alive while their heart is being operated on.

Josh works in two hospitals: Shasta Regional Medical Center, where they are accepting all religious exemptions for the COVID vaccine with no questions asked, and Catholic Dignity Health Mercy Medical Center, a Catholic hospital, where they fired health care workers for refusing to take the COVID jab. According to Josh Watkins, Mercy Medical Center has been very selective in the approval of religious exemptions. Watkins told us some members who used the exact same wording in their application for religious exemptions were denied, while others were accepted.

Mercy Medical Center workers in Redding, CA, threatened their workers that they needed to be fully vaccinated by September 30, 2021, or they would lose their jobs. They warned employees to comply on their website.

Health care workers who only months ago were considered heroes are now being fired in mass numbers across the United States for refusing to comply with a COVID vaccination mandate being used by corporations and businesses with more than 100 employees to fire workers. The mandate is neither based on law or executive order; it is simply a mandate that is being used to steal the livelihood and careers of non-federal workers.

Workers at Mercy Medical Center who are against being forced to accept the COVID jab have been protesting for weeks. Last week, hundreds of health care workers in Redding, CA, took their fight to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, demanding they step in and fight back against what they consider an unconstitutional mandate. Unfortunately, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors responded to the large crowd of frustrated health care workers by simply not showing up for their scheduled meeting. Only district 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones showed up for the meeting. He opened the doors to the facility and allowed the public inside.

Once inside, hundreds of health care workers testified before Supervisor Jones. As testimonies were winding down, 11 -year-old Emma Watkins, who had accompanied her dad to several anti-vaccine mandates for health care workers rallies, told her dad that she wanted to get up and speak. Josh was nervous for her but decided that if she was brave enough to get up and speak in front of everyone, he would stand next to her and show his support. What happened next took everyone by surprise.

We spoke with Josh last week. He explained to us that Mercy Medical Center was trying to cancel the contracts of workers who refused to be vaccinated. When I asked Josh about his plans to support his family since he’ll only be able to work part-time at Shasta Regional Medical Center, he explained that he’s working on getting his contractor’s license so he can start building homes to supplement his income.

Before the tyranny of COVID lockdowns, Josh considered himself to be non-political. However, he told us he believes the tyrannical COVID mandates have actually brought people together and unified them to fight back and stand up for the common goal of freedom. “The irony is, the lockdowns, that were supposed to keep people away from each other, have had the opposite effect,” Josh said. “What they’ve done is they’ve brought people of all different political beliefs together.”

Josh applied to the Catholic hospital for a religious exemption but was denied. After his appearance in front of the Shasta Board of Supervisors that went viral, he received an email telling him to re-apply for religious exemption. He applied again, and again, he was denied—additionally, he was told not to enter the hospital again unless he’s a patient. A confused Josh Watkins told us, “They claim to be a Catholic hospital ‘serving God’, and that’s how they respond to religious exemptions?”

Josh told us, “Usually a medical exemption is a notification and not a request” and “they don’t have a legal right to judge sincerely held beliefs of their employees—as far as I understand the law, that’s 100% illegal.” A local health care worker who administers the COVID jab to health care workers told Josh that health care workers against getting the vaccination but are more afraid of losing their jobs “are coming in sobbing because they know it violates their soul.”

Watkins said he will continue to work part-time for the smaller Shasta Regional Medical Center where “They are accepting all religious exemptions with no questions.” He explained how the smaller community hospital is taking advantage of their overreaching neighbor, “They [Shasta Regional Medical Center] have been able to capitalize on Mercy’s decision to fire people over their mandate.”

Red White and Blueprint, a fantastic group supporting patriots in California, followed Josh and residents of Redding, CA, whose jobs were being threatened by Mercy Medical Center.

A part of the journey of Josh and his daughter Emma was filmed by Red White & Blueprint. Watch the incredible video that is Part 6 of a series of 8 videos showing how grassroots activists are fighting back against a tyrannical government. The video documents the efforts of everyday Americans to successfully get enough petition signatures to start the recall process of the supervisors who refused to listen to their concerns.

Josh shared the importance of family support, as health care workers fight back against mandated vaccines. “We are not the minority; we are the majority by far,” he said.

How many lives will be risked or even lost over the firing of tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of qualified health care professionals thanks to tyrannical vaccine mandates?

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video 

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

President Biden’s “townhall” meeting this past week was a disaster. From his bizarre poses to the incoherent answers, it seemed to confirm America’s worst fears about a president we are told was elected by the most voters ever. Though he didn’t bother campaigning, we are to believe he somehow motivated the most voters in history to pull the lever in his favor. Or mail in a ballot in his favor. Or something.

After the townhall, the Wall Street Journal was early among mainstream media publications to observe that the emperor has no clothes. In an editorial titled “The Confusing Mr. Biden,” the paper wrote, “Even with a friendly audience and softball questions, Mr. Biden’s performance revealed why so many Americans are losing confidence in his Presidency.”

The Journal focused on one of the most shocking and disturbing revelations from the carefully crafted event: asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan should it come under attack by the Chinese mainland, he replied, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”

Anderson threw him another softball in hopes he might correct this dangerous misstatement, but Biden was not nimble enough to see his gaffe. He doubled down.

It was left to the “Chemical Ali” of this Administration, White House Spokesman Jen Psaki, to “clarify” that when the President signaled a major shift in US policy – a shift that could well lead to nuclear war with China – he was just kidding. Or something.

Said Psaki the next day:

“Well, there has been no shift. The President was not announcing any change in our policy nor has he made a decision to change our policy. There is no change in our policy.”

In other words: “Pay no attention to the man who pretends to be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.”

But this is not George W. Bush, who was elected in 2000 with zero experience in foreign policy. This is not Trump, who campaigned on a policy of peace then hired John Bolton to carry out that policy.

No, Biden has twice been Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Foreign policy has always been considered his one area of competence. Surely the Biden of even the Obama Administration would have understood the potentially catastrophic implications of his statement.

Strategic ambiguity has been US policy toward Taiwan/China for decades, but the new Biden China policy could be re-named “strategic incoherence.”

The policy of “strategic ambiguity” is foolish enough – who cares who rules Taiwan? – but advancing the idea that the United States is willing to launch a nuclear war with China over who governs Taiwan is a whole other level of America-last foolishness.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Miley was heralded as a hero for betraying his Commander in Chief Trump by seeking to restrict Trump’s access to the US nuclear arsenal. Milley claimed that Trump was so unsound of mind that he could not be trusted with the nuclear football.

Yet when actual unsoundness is there for everyone to see, Milley and the other “woke” generals are silent as the grave. These are dangerous times.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

“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
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Our communities and our world in this time of pandemic, climate challenges, and injustice call upon us to build and design anew programs and infrastructure reaching beyond earlier models in offering outcomes even better than we could once have imagined.

The role of higher education has been part of this calling to majorly improve and even rethink fundamental purposes and approaches. A legitimate criticism of universities in recent decades and even generations has been their complacency of operating within their analyses and provision of explanations as to the social and environmental problems that extend beyond the educational setting that in many ways consume our lives.

What accounts for ethnic discrimination? How do we explain gender-based oppression? What has brought about economic disparity to such severe degrees? Why are the youth in our world as prone as anyone to incur the highest levels of unemployment? And certainly solutions are analyzed as well in terms of their outcomes and philosophical or theoretical bases, the costs relative to their benefits, and their comparative efficacy.

However, where universities have generally failed societies and student communities is in regard to their lack of participation in those solutions carried forward by the beneficiaries, the civil associations, and the concerned citizens and businesses within those localities.

Certainly, trends are moving in the direction of the vital role that universities play for societies’ betterment and uplifting of the public. At the same time, there remains a tug-of-war within university life between the activist-theoretician (bent of ameliorating the resultant difficulties people endure by way of social operating structures), and the objectivist (so committed to the “scientific method” that worldly conditions are left uninterrupted to ascertain a truth in their nature).

The pandemic and unabated poverty imposed upon most of humanity is behind this renewed effort to build back better than ever before. In Morocco in the city of Fes, we have the example University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah (USMBA) and its Faculty of Islamic Theology. Dean Abdelmalek Aouich and the faculty’s leadership, fully supported by the USMBA President Radouane Mrabet, saw the opportunity to create an organic fruit tree nursery utilizing local seeds to benefit farming families of the Fes-Meknes region as a welcomed contribution, commensurate with their view of the role of higher education institutions. They are, after all, responding to a rural community-determined priority since farmers nationally are transitioning from barley and corn to fruit trees.

USMBA is contributing land to serve as the nursery for farmers of the region because rural families need to harvest every year and cannot forego their essential crop in order to plant the tree nurseries, which they also vitally need. The students gain opportunities to integrate and learn from their community surroundings while being exposed to the reality that everyone has an essential part to play in achieving increasing prosperity for the country.

This university-local community initiative fits squarely within the participatory action research framework, whereby data and knowledge is generated from the people and is used to advance change responsive to locally-defined needs. The experience enhances understanding and fulfills academic outcomes, including published articles that advocate the goals of the people, in harnessing critical professional skills with students and locals as they engage in empowerment workshops, in strategizing for project design, and in forging diverse and helpful partnerships.

Pomegranate tree saplings at USMBA in Fes (High Atlas Foundation, 2021)

The 90,000 trees planted for the people of Fes-Meknes at the USMBA nursery include fig, olive, carob, pomegranate, and almond. These trees live for generations, so the most incredible consequences of the dedication of the USMBA community are ones that we could not know no matter how committed the monitoring team.

Universities across Morocco and nations of the world do have admirable examples of their commitment to sustainable community development. The calling, or the frontier of change, is to make these initiatives integral to the research design in order for them to affect, in both the short and long terms, a positive world change. Student and faculty evaluations and the rankings of universities, in themselves, should be based upon the extent of their energy, dedication, and impact in this regard.

If the students of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah are any indicator of students in the world, then all we must really do is to create the expectation and to provide the guidance. In this way, they will carry forward with utmost vigor and with all the heartfelt commitment and analytical focus that one would hope to see.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is President of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco where this article was originally published. 

Featured image: Olive tree saplings at USMB in Fes (High Atlas Foundation, 2021)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

This blog by Carey Gillam is updated regularly with news and tips about the lawsuits involving Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer products.

October 25, 2021

Stephens trial drags on, toxicologist testifies about studies of herbicide and cancer risk

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

In a massive blow to U.S. efforts to address the climate crisis, the Biden administration is poised to approve a right-of-way through the Ashley National Forest that would take the climate-damaging Uinta Basin Railway one step closer to being built.

The railway would enable crude oil production in the basin to quadruple to 350,000 barrels a day. Over a year, that much oil would produce planet-warming pollution conservatively estimated at 53 million tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the emissions from six of Utah’s dirtiest coal plants.

At an October 22 meeting of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, board members discussed a recent meeting in Utah with U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. They reported that Chief Moore felt the railway “was a viable project” and that the Forest Service would be issuing a draft record of decision approving the right-of-way for the railway in early November.

The Forest Service’s support for the railway, which is intended to quadruple the production of crude oil and other fossil fuels, is entirely contrary to the Biden administration’s Executive Order 14008 on climate change. Approval of the project is slated to come during or just after the meeting of President Biden and global leaders at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.

“The Forest Service’s support for this climate-killing project undermines President Biden days before the administration heads to Glasgow to demonstrate U.S. leadership on the climate emergency,” said Deeda Seed, senior public lands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This administration has no room for rogue agency actions. The administration needs to block this railway before it creates a massive surge in dirty oil production.”

The Forest Service has not responded to a letter and meeting request from 30 environmental and conservation groups to discuss the environmental harm that will be inflicted by the proposed railway.

In addition to climate damage, the railway will harm public lands and wildlife habitat. According to a federal environmental analysis, the 88-mile-long railway would dig up more than 400 Utah streams and strip bare or pave over 10,000 acres of wildlife habitat, including crucial areas that pronghorn and mule deer need to survive.

In Emma Park, a remote sagebrush valley known to birdwatchers, bulldozers and train traffic would drive imperiled greater sage grouse out of their mating and nesting grounds.

“The Forest Service chief will meet with proponents of this environmentally destructive project and express support for it, but he won’t talk to Utahns, climate activists and members of the conservation community,” Seed said. “By backing this destructive boondoggle, Moore is choosing to undercut the administration’s climate work to curry favor with fossil fuel interests.”

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Drilling at night in Uinta Basin (licensed under CC BY 2.0)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

As reported October 25 by the reputable state media, Al Arabiya, Sudanese army and a cross-section of its population have returned, expressing dissatisfaction about the government. What is really at stake all these years is closely linked to the level of development and the living standard of the majority among the estimated 45 million population.

According to the El Sharq TV channel, two of Sudan’s three mobile operators have actually stopped providing services, so during the day people experienced communication problems. According to several media sources, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok together with other officials have been arrested, taken to an unknown location. The leaders of many political parties called for preventing a coup in the country.

UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, the African Union and other regional and international organizations have routinely condemned the undemocratic forced change in Sudan. In a statement posted on Twitter, the Secretary-General said that “there must be full respect for the constitutional charter to protect the hard-won political transition.” “The UN will continue to stand with the people of Sudan,” Guterres assured. 

Head of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission Sudan (UNITAMS), also released a statement, declaring that the arrests of the Prime Minister, government officials and other politicians are “unacceptable.”  

“I call on the security forces to immediately release those who have been unlawfully detained or placed under house arrest”, Volker Perthes said. “It is the responsibility of these forces to ensure the security and wellbeing of people in their custody.”  

The UNITAMS chief, who acts as a Special Representative of the Secretary-General, urged everyone involved to exercise the utmost restraint. “All parties must immediately return to dialogue and engage in good faith to restore the constitutional order,” Perthes concluded.

Some unrests began sweeping the country following Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s meeting with head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The ministers of communication, information, finance and industries were among those in custody. Sudanese people took to the streets following calls by the main opposition movement, the Forces of Freedom and Change. The crisis between the Sudanese military and civilian forces has been going on for several weeks.

In about-turn development, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a general chairing the Sovereign Council of Sudan, announced in a televised address that general elections would be held in July 2023. The general declared a state of emergency in Sudan, dissolved both the country’s government and the Sovereign Council and suspended a number of articles of the Constitutional Declaration, which was signed by Sudan’s military and civilian forces in 2019 for a three-year transition period.

Besides the search for peaceful political pathways, Sudanese authorities need to address the deep-seated economic deficiencies and tackle common problems (basic infrastructure) facing people in micro levels of the society. This also relates many African countries. Sudan, located in the northeast Africa, shares borders with Egypt, Libya, Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan. It is blessed with huge oil reserves and marine resources. The Blue and White Nile rivers meet in the capital city Khartoum to form the bid Nile, which flows northwards through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

While Sudan is encircled by these seven countries mentioned above, it also has to northeast a huge sea, which could be harnessed for the further development of the economy. Revenues could be used to engage in economic diversification projects, thus creating employment for the youth. It is third-largest country in Africa, and the third-largest in the Arab world by area before the secession of South Sudan in 2011.

Over the years, damming the water resources for economy has not taken off the ground. The main purpose of the dam will be the generation of electricity. Its dimensions make it the largest contemporary hydropower project for the region in Africa.

In terms of political developments in Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir came to power in June 1989. During several years of his administration, Sudan’s economy was largely shattered due to political tyranny, deep-seated corruption and poor policies. Al-Bashir held power for more than 30 years, refused to step down, resulting in the convergence of opposition groups to form a united coalition. The government retaliated by arresting more than 800 opposition figures and thousands of protesters, according to the Human Rights Watch.

Many people died because Al-Bashir ordered security forces to disperse the sit-in peaceful demonstrators using tear gas and live ammunition in what is known as the Khartoum massacre, resulting in Sudan’s suspension from the African Union. Eventually, Omar al-Bashir was gone. Sudan opened a new political chapter with Prime Minister, Abdalla Hamdok, a 62-year-old economist who worked previously for the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

Significantly, it is highly expected that his working experience at the UN Economic Commission for Africa must necessarily reflect on performance, and resultantly have a positive impact on the level of sustainable development that connects the daily lives of the population.

With the new administration, Sudan still faces formidable economic problems, and its growth still a little (snail step) rise from a very low level of per capita output. In practical terms, it is desperate for foreign support and one surest way was to get to a donors conference held in Berlin, Germany. The donors’ conference was to provide a lifeline to the ongoing transition, alongside Sudan’s own efforts. It is worth to say that increased international political and financial assistance remain paramount, it was a progressive step for Sudan.

The goal was to also raise enough funds to kick-start social protection programs by the World Bank and the Sudanese Government that could help Sudanese families in need. The partners supported the International Monetary Fund to open up Sudan’s road towards debt relief. Some 50 countries and international organizations pledged more than $1.8 billion, while the World Bank Group offered a grant of $400 million.

“This conference opened a new chapter in the cooperation between Sudan and the international community to rebuild the country,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said at that time during video conference co-organized by Germany with Sudan, the European Union and the United Nations.

Berlin promised to make investments in in areas such as water, food security and education. Germany has urged the Sudanese government to invest in human rights. Germany said that it would contribute €150 million ($168 million) in aid to the sub-Saharan nation of Sudan.

Undoubtedly, Abdalla Hamdok described that conference as “unprecedented” and said it laid a “solid foundation for us moving forward” at least in the subsequent years. Sudan’s new transitional government has sought to repair the country’s international standing, but it still faces daunting economic challenges, and its growth was still a rise from a very low level of per capita output. It continues to experience troubled relationship with many of its neighbors, and especially over oil reserves with South Sudan.

Currently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is working hand in hand with Khartoum government to implement sound macroeconomic policies. Agricultural production remains Sudan’s most-important sector, employing 80 percent of the workforce but most farms remain rain-fed and susceptible to drought. Instability, adverse weather and weak world-agricultural prices ensures that much of the population will remain at or below the poverty line for years.

Right from Sahel to the Maghreb and to northeast Africa are witnessing instability. In the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia) thousands dying daily. Peter Fabricius, Research Consultant from the South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS), noted quite recently in his article headlined – African Coups Are Making A Come Back – that from 18 August 2020, four coups have occurred. Two happened in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), one in Chad (May 2021) and one in Guinea last month.

He further pointed out “what might help prevent that would be better responses from African Union, regional bodies, and international partners to coups and other forms of unconstitutional change of government.”

Perhaps the root causes of coups run too deep within a country for any external actor to influence much. But to the extent that they can, the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) should use their power preventively, focusing more on sanctioning ‘unconstitutional preservation of power’ and other undemocratic behavior to try to pre-empt coups, suggested Fabricius.

But late October 2021 political-military and cross-section of the civilian unrest are inter-connected, both politics and economy. Sudan is rich with natural resources, as it has oil reserves. Despite that, Sudan still faced formidable economic problems. Worse is production practices including agriculture are rudimentary. There has not been efforts, at least, to modernize agriculture to the growing population.

There is still a huge increase in unemployment, and perhaps it is absolutely necessary to make attempts at minimizing social contradictions and economic disparities, unquestionably and of course, these two – politics and economy questions are inseparable. These are some of the issues the government has to address seriously, in order to maintain sustainable peace and long-term stability in Sudan and set that as an admirable example in Africa.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Faced with increasing pressure to dissolve the five member UN Security Council, President Putin warned on October 21:

“If we remove the veto right of the permanent members, the UN would die the very same day – it would turn into the League of Nations. It would simply become a discussion platform”.

As walls separating east and west along Manichean Cold War lines of “democratic/free” vs “authoritarian/enslaved” are quickly being erected before our eyes, it is worth pondering not only the deeper implication of the Russian president’s message but also those healthier pathways out of the coming storm before it is too late.

League of Nations and the Imperial Hoax of WWI

Created in 1919 by forces centered in London and the racist Anglo-American establishment of the USA, the League of Nations was sold to a beaten-down world as the last and greatest hope for peace.

The groups then centered around Round Table leader Lord Alfred Milner (1), had taken control of the British Government in a form of soft coup in 1916 in order to shape the terms of the post-war order.

It was a major gamble of course since there were no guarantees that those imperial plotters who kicked over the world chessboard in 1914 would necessarily come out victorious.

From 1902 onward, Lord Milner, King Edward VII and his coterie of imperial co-thinkers across the Anglo-American deep state had invested significantly into lighting the world on fire via color revolutions, a plethora of assassinations and of course a long-planned global war that turned the world inside out.

In opposition to standard theory narratives taught in sundry history departments, WWI was a war with one aim: Destroy the spread of a community of cooperating sovereign nation states which had been forming in the last decades of the 19^th century. Internationally, statesmen of 1870-1900 were applying Lincoln’s system of protectionism, national credit, industrial growth and win-win cooperation under the banner of “American System” champions Friedrich List and Henry C Carey. By 1890, such policies were championed by Sergei Witte of Russia, Otto von Bismarck of Germany, President Carnot of France, and many Lincoln republicans in the USA.

Despite the fact that Russia was a member of the British-led Entente Cordiale, both Germany and Russia who had historically tended to industrial cooperation along Witte-Bismarck strategic lines were the primary targets for destruction.

This was a fact better understood at the time, with The Daily Mail of December 14, 1909 even publishing an editorial reading: “the king [Edward VII] and his councillors have strained every nerve to establish Ententes with Russia and with Italy; and have formed an Entente with France, and as well with Japan. Why? To isolate Germany.”

It is without a doubt that many Anglo-American grand strategists expected a cooperative United States to be drawn into “the war that was to end all wars” much earlier on. With nationalist President McKinley’s 1901 murder, anglophile traitors quickly swept into power under Teddy Roosevelt who was seduced into King Edward VII’s plans for an Anglo-American special relationship as the basis for a new Anglo-Saxon world order.

Woodrow Wilson’s accession to the presidency from 1912-1920, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 only re-enforced the belief that America was sufficiently under the control of a supranational financier elite which had never quite forgiven the belligerent colony for winning independence in 1783.

When Germany found herself the last nation to be prepared for a war that had been set into motion by the architects of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale (later joined by a bewildered Russia), America was expected to jump in immediately.

Military pacts well known to all geopoliticians of 1914 ensured Russian intervention on Serbia’s side if the latter got in a fight. Similarly, Germany had guaranteed its support for Austria in any fight it found itself enmeshed in.

When an anarchist terror cell from Serbia known as ‘the Black Hand’ was deployed to kill Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, a chain of events was put into motion that led a sleep walking world into the slaughterhouse.

Finally realizing what had happened, Kaiser Wilhelm wrote despairingly in August 1914:

“England, Russia, and France have agreed among themselves… to take the Austro-Serbian conflict for an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us… That is the real naked situation slowly and cleverly set going by Edward VII and… finally brought to a conclusion by George V… So the famous encirclement of Germany has finally become a fact, despite every effort of our politicians and diplomats to prevent it. The net has been suddenly thrown over our head, and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success of her persistently prosecuted purely anti-German world policy against which we have proved ourselves helpless, while she twists the noose of our political and economic destruction out of our fidelity to Austria, as we squirm isolated in the net. A great achievement, which arouses the admiration even of him who is to be destroyed as its result! Edward VII is stronger after his death than am I who am still alive!”

The fight inside the USA

When nationalist forces in the United States saw the fires start across the ocean, it wasn’t interventionist neoconservative Pax Americana instincts that dictated a leap into the mire (as those would only be cultivated by a cult of neo-Trotskyists many decades later).

The USA of 1914 was still very much influenced by the non-interventionist spirit of George Washington and John Quincy Adams.

It was George Washington who warned Americans never to allow themselves to be entangled into European oligarchical intrigue, while Adams re-affirmed this belief in the form of his Monroe Doctrine warning that America must never “go about searching for monsters to destroy”.

Although not attaining a victory on the federal level until the 1921 inauguration of President Warren Harding, these nationalists (sometimes dubbed “The American System Caucus”) fought valiantly to keep the USA neutral. In 1915, an inside job arranged by Anglo-American (mostly Anglo) forces drove the sinking of the Lusitania carrying 1700 people (and 173 tons of explosives) from the USA to Europe. Although it took two years of relentless propaganda, this event was decisive in fueling anti-German sentiment and winning over American support to the war. With America’s 1917 entry, the scales were sufficiently tipped in favor of the “allies” and the Austro-Hungarian empire was soon put down.

Photo: Library of Congress

Among other things, the Ottoman Empire- then allied to Germany was also dissolved with victor nations gobbling up her territories, while imperialists drooled over the potential carving up of the Russian empire after the destruction of the Romanov Dynasty in 1917. Lastly Sykes Picot carving up of the Middle East (also arranged years before the end of WWI) set into motion the divide-to-conquer strategy of Anglo-intrigue in Southwest Asia that has plagued the world until our present day.

The Birth of the League of Nations

Anyone going into the opening January 10, 1920 conference of the League of Nations that emerged out of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, would not have had most of this intrigue in mind.

The world was told that cause of the war was German imperial ambition and the nation state system itself that made expansionism possible. Discussing truth was not deemed appropriate amidst this frenzy of looting as everything that Germany possessed including vital agriculture, mines, rail, industry and colonies went up for grabs. Debts were thrust upon the beaten German state as North Silesia, Ruhr, and Alsace-Loraine were confiscated along with the means of paying their reparations (2).

The acolytes managing the League of Nations demanded that the world finally learn that if nation states were permitted to exist, then such wars would plague humanity forever. The solution was the dissolution of sovereign nation states. No longer would selfish nation states be free to decide for themselves when to war and when to declare peace. Articles 10 and 16 of the League’s Covenant (pre-cursor to the latter Article 5 collective security pact of NATO) would ensure this.

In Defense of Sovereignty

Fortunately, a return to sanity under the short-lived Presidency of Warren Harding (1921-23) brought the USA into a hostile relationship with the League and its Round Table affiliates within the CFR and Wall Street. Harding ensured a healthy belligerence to the League’s anti-national mandate and worked hard to initiate bilateral agreements with Austria, Germany, Hungary, Russia and China outside of the League’s authority.

During the 1920s, many other nations shared this deep mistrust of the new supranational organization and saw it clearly as the cover for a new British Empire. With this awareness, the League was never permitted to take on the teeth which one world government fanatics so deeply desired. From 1921-1932, the increasingly impotent body fell into disarray and saw its last serious battle against nationalism die in June 1933 when American President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed the League’s London Conference on finance and trade.

This little known conference brought together 62 nations and was co-controlled by the Bank of England, the Bank of International Settlements (aka: the Central Bank of Central banks) and aimed at imposing a central bankers dictatorship onto the world. This was a process not that dissimilar from the COP26 Summit, and Great Reset Agenda in motion today.

While the success of the League’s London Conference might have made WWII unnecessary (3), the goal of a Malthusian/eugenics-driven “scientifically managed” priesthood as outlined by the likes of John Maynard Keynes would have been just as deadly.

A Return to our Present Age

Despite the sad fact that neither Harding, nor FDR were able to fully see through their ambitious goals, the possibility of reviving the spirit and intent of the United Nations charter under a paradigm of win-win cooperation would not be possible without their intervention into history.

FDR’s early death resulted in his enemies taking control of Washington and converting his dream into a Cold War nightmare. Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and IMF were turned into instruments for usurious re-colonialization instead of long-term productive credit generators under an international New Deal. Throughout the Cold War, the United Nations became increasingly an impotent servant of empire without any means of giving a voice to the majority of her 193 member nations.

The UN Security Council was among the few important institutions within the new organization that gave an equal voice to leading members on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Over the years, especially since 2011, this veto power has been vital in blocking unilateral acts of imperialism since any official military act of intervention required unanimity of all five members.

The United Nations is NOT the League of Nations

The League of Nations was formally dissolved just as the UN was coming online.

The timing of these two events has been used to induce credulous people to believe that the UN is simply a continuity of the League. That is a provably false assertion.

Where the League of Nations demanded an abolition of national sovereignty, the United Nations made the defense of national sovereignty and non-interventionism guiding principles of its founding charter.

Unlike the technocratic/management-fixated League of Nations Covenant, the UN Charter is guided explicitly by a mandate to enhance large scale economic development, win-win cooperation and the universal needs of all humanity (4). And unlike the League, the UN featured no collective security pact which would make initiating WWIII much easier for a supranational oligarchy. The burning desire for “collective security pacts” was the driving force of NATO’s creation (led as one might expect by the hand of Rhodes Scholars like Escott Reid).

Today, the UN is largely a toothless body whose 52 attempts to criticize Israel since 1973 have been blocked by the USA. But despite this, the security council’s existence has unarguably saved the lives of millions by blocking the countless attempts to destroy Syria and continues to serve as a game changing wedge against the will of unipolar Dr. Strangeloves with delusions of global supremacy.

Modern representatives of the Anglo-American elite that took control of the USA over the dead bodies of Harding, FDR and JFK have clamored for a new post-nation state security doctrine. This doctrine was officially known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and was launched by Soros-affiliated operatives like Lord Mark Malloch Brown, Strobe Talbott and Tony Blair in 1999. Malloch Brown integrated this doctrine into the United Nations while acting as Undersecretary General of the organization and has spent the last years giving speeches calling for the dissolution of the UN Security Council in order to remove “authoritarian nations” like Russia and China from any role in global war-making decisions.

So, when Putin or Xi call for defending the UN Charter, or warn against a new League of Nations, it would do us well to take their words with full seriousness and avoid staining human history with another world war.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. He can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

Notes

(1) Other prominent Roundtable-connected figures of the Milner-led soft coup included Prime Minster David Lloyd George, Leo Amery, Minister of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Lord Balfour. Milner set up a secret group known as the ‘X Committee’ which largely ran most aspects of the war from 1917-1919.

(2) After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany’s army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.

(3) As a transition to global technocratic feudalism might having arisen through more “peaceful” means

(4) The first four sections of article one read: “To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.” And just in case any imperially minded legalist wished to read the charter loosely, Article two quickly made it clear that “the Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

Featured image is from Wikimedia

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Did you know?

On June 20, 1898, as U.S. troops prepared to land in Cuba to “pacify” the island, Assistant Secretary of State Francis Loomis held forth on the larger implications of the U.S. intervention.  Writing to his boss, Secretary of State William Day, Loomis declared, “I think it our destiny to control more or less directly most all of the Latin American countries.”

One means to this end was economic domination.  “It is possible to attain commercial ascendancy in them in much the same way that England does in China,” wrote Loomis, “that is, by lending them money and administering their revenues.”  Another was political annexation.  “I am glad it is to fall to the lot of this administration to strengthen our country by adding to its domain the islands that we may need to sustain ourselves as one of the foremost nations of the earth and the soon-to-be leading one in every good sense of the term.”^[5]

U.S. military interventions in Latin America, 1895-1930s

As the 19^th century came to a close, the United States embarked on a new mission of empire-building.  It was new in the sense that it involved overseas rather than continental expansion, and that it allied with financial and commercial interests rather than land-hungry settlers.  U.S. leaders did not join the European “scramble” for African colonies, but they did vie for influence and territorial acquisitions in Asia and the Pacific, and they pursued outright dominance in the Central American-Caribbean region.

The War of 1898 against Spain provided the catalyst for an overseas empire, as the U.S. gained the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as the spoils of war (see The War of 1898).  Still, the U.S. was playing catch-up in the imperial competition for colonies, markets, and spheres of influence.  By 1900, European nations had colonized 90% of Africa, the whole of the Indian subcontinent, and much of Southeast Asia.

U.S. leaders pursued dominance in the Central American-Caribbean region through economic, diplomatic, and military pressure, including military interventions and occupations.  They claimed that their goals and policies were benevolent and necessary to preserve civilized order.  Most Latin Americans, however, regarded U.S. interventionism as “Yankee imperialism.”

The era is framed by two opposing doctrines, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which set forth the rationales for U.S. military intervention in Latin America, and the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933, which countermanded the Roosevelt Corollary and upheld the principle of noninterventionism.

This essay tells the story of “Yankee imperialism” in the Central American-Caribbean region during the first third of the 20^th century.^[6]  It analyzes U.S. motives and rationales, surveys the policies and doctrines of successive U.S. administrations, and examines six case studies of U.S. occupations – in Cuba, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.  The final section explores what lessons might be drawn from this history.

II.  U.S. motives and rationales

U.S. motives for overseas expansion were similar to those of other imperial powers – military and geostrategic advantage, economic gain, political control, and international prestige – but U.S. leaders were disinclined toward permanent colonies and furthermore refused to admit to any imperial intentions.  The political ideology of the United States, after all, was and is directly contrary to the object of imperialism – control over other lands and peoples without their consent.  “Throughout its history,” writes the historian Jerald A. Combs, “the United States has been wary of the idea of imperialism.  Americans have prided themselves on the fact that their revolution was the first successful rebellion against European colonialism.”^[7]

U.S. leaders past and present have played down the contradiction as well as mischievously twisted American principles into conformity.  As an example of the latter, on July 12, 1900, as U.S. forces fought a war to suppress Filipino independence, President William McKinley told the American people that the United States was bravely engaged in the liberation of ten million Filipinos “from the yoke of imperialism.”  Again, in May 1901, he assured U.S. soldiers in San Francisco returning from the war that there was “no imperialism but that of the sovereign power of the American people.”^[8]  The principles of freedom and democracy, as such, were conflated with American control, as if flying the Stars and Stripes over a foreign country made it free.

1904 Cartoon by William Allen Rogers (Granger Collection)

According to the historian William I. Cohen, the American public’s “traditional anti-imperialism required that empire be disguised and rationalized.”  U.S. leaders disguised their empire-building in Asia in part by promising “eventual independence for the Philippines, after appropriate tutelage.”  They disguised it in Latin America by employing “the concept of ‘protectorate,’ clearly not a colony, [which] facilitated American hegemony in the Caribbean.”^[9]  During the first two decades of the 20^th century, the U.S. made protectorates of Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti.

U.S. leaders also rationalized their budding empire on the basis of race.  Woodrow Wilson, a political science professor at Princeton University before he was elected president, explained in September 1900 that the principle of the “consent of the governed” need not apply to “the affairs of politically undeveloped races, which have not yet learned the rudiments of order and self-control.”  Thus, he concluded, the “‘consent’ of the Filipinos and the ‘consent’ of the American colonists to government, for example, are two radically different things.”^[10]  Wilson’s racially-tinged view of political rights was validated by the Supreme Court in Insular Cases (1901), which held that people living in subjugated territories had no guarantee of Constitutional rights.

Among the “undeveloped races,” in the view of many Anglo Americans, was the population of Latin America, a melting pot of European, Native American, and African peoples.  In 1821 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote of Latin Americans that there was “no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government. . . . Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their habits, and upon all their institutions.”^[11]  Francis Loomis, who also served as ambassador to Venezuela from 1897 to 1901, warned his colleagues in the State Department, “one thing that I have learned . . . is to place no belief in the word of a man of Latin race if he may have anything to gain by lying.  This may be laid down as a rule.”^[12]  General Leonard Wood, who served as U.S. military governor of Cuba, described the Cuban people in 1900 as “a race that has steadily been going down for a hundred years.”  Hence, in his view, it would take many years of American instruction to realize “an enlightened community for self-government.”^[13]

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The north of Syria is in expectation of hostilities flaring up. All sides are waiting for the others to make a first step and open the way for an escalation throughout.

On October 25^th, all sides continued concentrating and regrouping their forces, positioning them in northern Syria, in preparation for the upcoming escalation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that the Turkish military is ready to use heavy weapons against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the northwestern Syrian region of Greater Idlib if necessary.

Over the last few weeks, the Turkish military deployed large reinforcements and established two new positions in Greater Idlib. The region is under control by Turkish-backed militants, and they frequently violate a ceasefire agreed between Moscow and Ankara back in 2020.

Erdogan’s threats are clearly aimed to deter the SAA and its Russian and Iranian allies, from initiating a large-scale ground operation in the region.

The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) renewed their airstrikes on Greater Idlib, targeting underground positions in the outskirts of the towns of Kansafra and al-Bara in the al-Zawiya Mount on October 23^rd. All of the towns are known strongholds of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the de-facto ruler of Greater Idlib.

On October 24^th, the VKS targeted the town of Jisr al-Shughur, an infamous stronghold of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Turkistan Islamic Party and HTS.

Meanwhile, Turkey is preparing its own ground operation in northeastern Syria. The SAA deployed reinforcements in Northeastern Syria in order to deter the operation, or at least to provide an adequate defensive posture. Ankara is fighting against the Kurdish groups in the region, and its actions harm the civilian population greatly.

Despite any local opposition, and a wave of civilian protests in Tel Rifaat against Turkish military actions, preparations are undergoing.

On October 21, a Turkish TAI Anka-S combat drone was spotted over the town of Kobane in Syria’s northeastern region. This took place a single day after a Turkish drone strike on the town resulted in 5 deaths, two of which were members of the Kurdish US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

On October 23, a new Turkish drone strike targeted a car that was moving in the outskirts of Kobane, on a highway linking the town with the government-held city of Aleppo. According to reports, three civilians were killed.

Turkey is likely attempting to provoke the SDF, which responded to similar drone strikes in August. Ankara is looking for any sort of justification that it can use to explain its incoming operation, and such “brief escalations” in violence are expected in the coming days.

If the Turkish Armed Forces and allied factions go over the top, it is highly likely that the SAA and SDF, alongside other Kurdish groups will unite against the common adversary, and the outcome of the fight may be surprising.

At the best of times, northeastern Syria has a tense calm between the SAA and the Kurdish groups, which are hesitant of entirely coming under Damascus’ control. A development in which Ankara begins yet another large-scale operation in the region could be the impetus that Bashar al-Assad’s government needs to consolidate power, if it is able to effectively counter Turkey’s push.

The week beginning on October 25^th, may just be the time when Middle East Pandora’s box is opened, once again.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

SUPPORT SOUTHFRONT:

PayPal: [email protected], http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

If You Take the COVID Vax, You Can Never Achieve Full Immunity Again – Government Stats Unveil the Horrifying Truth

By Ethan Huff, October 25, 2021

The British government has spilled the beans about that fact that once you get “vaccinated” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), you will never again be able to acquire full natural immunity.

In-N-Out Burger’s Explanation for Its Refusal to Enforce Vaccine Passports

By Adam Dick, October 25, 2021

When government mandates related to experimental coronavirus “vaccines” are thrust on businesses, it is heartening to see businesses refusing to comply. It is especially great to see a business back up its noncompliance with a well-stated, freedom-centered explanation.

The World According to Vladimir Putin

By Pepe Escobar, October 25, 2021

Vladimir Putin is a frequent keynote speaker. In Sochi this year, as I related in a previous column, the overarching theme was “global shake-up in the 21^st century: the individual, values and the state.”

The Fake “Delta Variant” and the Fourth Wave: Another Lockdown? Upcoming Financial Crash? Worldwide Economic and Social Sabotage?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 25, 2021

There is a sequence of outright lies and fabrications used to justify far-reaching policy decisions in the course of the last 18 months. The biggest lie, which is firmly acknowledged both by scientific opinion and the WHO is that the RT-PCR test used to “detect” the spread of the virus (as well as the variants) is not only flawed but TOTALLY INVALID.

White House to “Quickly” Vaccinate 28 Million Children Age 5-11 as Deaths and Injuries Continue to Increase Among 12 to 19-Year-Olds Who Received a COVID-19 Shot

By Brian Shilhavy, October 25, 2021

This week the Biden Administration laid out their plans to quickly vaccinate 28 million children between the ages of 5 and 11 with a COVID-19 vaccine, which sounded more like a Press Release from Pfizer, since the FDA has not even authorized the shots for that age group yet.

Video: US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Romania: “Should Deterrence Fail”, U.S. and NATO Positioned for War in Black Sea

By Rick Rozoff, October 25, 2021

Do the following statements confirm US-NATO’s intent to wage war on Russia “if deterrence fails”? Emphasis in quotations confirm this intent. Excerpts from the speech, for complete speech see video.

Governor de Santis Says that If People Are Forced by Their Employer to be Vaccinated, and Then Become Ill, the Employer Will be Liable for Damages

By Dr. Meryl Nass, October 26, 2021

While the PREP ACT provides a huge liability shield for everyone involved with vaccinations of EUA products, the EUA requires that people be informed about what is known about the product and have the right to refuse.

Washington Always Looking for Another War

By Bruce K. Gagnon, October 25, 2021

It didn’t take long for the US to up the ante with China and Russia. So soon after the crushing defeat from 20 years of death and destruction in Afghanistan we find Washington stirring the fire pit and looking for more trouble.

‘An Outrage Against Democracy’: JFK’s Nephews Urge Biden to Reveal Assassination Records

By Marc Caputo, October 25, 2021

The records were scheduled to be made public Tuesday, but the White House announced late Friday night that it would delay their publication until at least Dec. 15 — and perhaps longer if President Joe Biden determines it’s in the nation’s best interest to keep them confidential.

The COVID-19 Pandemic in a Time of Moral and Spiritual Blackout

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, October 25, 2021

If there is a lesson the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that conventional medicine is largely a mockery of its original moral foundations. This is not to deny important advances in saving lives, especially in diagnostic methods, surgical technologies, critical care and emergency medicine.

Natural Immunity is More Durable than Vaccine Immunity. Citizens Petition

By Informed Consent Action Network, October 25, 2021

When the CDC chose to lift restrictions on the vaccinated, ICAN went to work.  Through its attorneys, it formally demanded that the CDC also (at the least) lift restrictions on the naturally immune.

Exposing the Covid Lie: The Day When Podcaster Joe Rogan Confronted CNN’s Chief Medical Propagandist

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, October 25, 2021

CNN is in damage control after its chief medical correspondent and notorious Covid-19 experimental vaccine pusher, Dr. Sanjay Gupta was humiliated on The Joe Rogan Experience when he was confronted for the obvious lie about Joe Rogan taking “horse dewormer” which was actually Ivermectin.

No Time To Think, “No Time to Die”: The Changing Geopolitics of International Blockbusters?

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, October 25, 2021

One effect of this narrative style is to put more emphasis on the story of Bond and less on the usual geopolitics and action we associate with Bond films. Now this is very interesting considering that if one was to ask oneself: which country would be the most likely target and villain of the latest Bond film as a cultural representative of the world’s imperialist and neo-colonial powers?

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

“NATO has ended up in the attic,” wrote the political commentators of several newspapers a month ago, after France had withdrawn its ambassador from Washington on September 16. It was Paris’ protest at being excluded from the strategic-military partnership between the United States, Great Britain and Australia, announced the day before, and at losing a lucrative contract for the sale of submarines to Australia, which will be replaced by nuclear submarines supplied by the U.S. and Great Britain.

A week after the resounding diplomatic break, however, the French general Lavigne was put in charge of the Allied Transformation Command, with headquarters in Norfolk in the U.S., and the presidents of the two countries, Biden and Macron, published a Joint Declaration.

Biden reaffirmed “the strategic importance of the French and European engagement in the Indo-Pacific” (the region that in Washington’s geopolitics extends from the west coast of the US to that of India). The reason was explained by the Military Committee of the Chiefs of Defence of the 30 NATO countries, meeting in Athens: “While Moscow’s aggressive actions are a threat to our security, China’s rise is fundamentally shifting the balance of power, which has potential consequences for our security, our prosperity and our way of life.”

In the face of such “threats,” they concluded, “we need Europe and North America to stand strong, bound together”. Biden reiterated in his joint statement with Macron: “The United States recognizes the importance of a stronger, more capable European Defence Force that is complementary to NATO”. Therefore, a militarily stronger Europe, but as a complement to NATO: an asymmetrical alliance, to which 21 of the 27 countries of the European Union belong, in which the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe is always held by a general of the United States, which holds all the other key commands in Europe (such as the JFC-Naples with headquarters in Lago Patria).

On this background, the meeting of 30 Defense Ministers (for Italy Lorenzo Guerini, Democratic Party) was held on October 21-22 at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. It created an “Innovation Fund” with an initial allocation of 1 billion euros, to be paid by 17 European countries including Italy, but not by the United States, for the development of the most advanced technologies for war use. It launched the “Strategy for Artificial Intelligence”, an even more costly program for NATO to maintain its advantage in this field that “is changing the global defense environment”, i.e. the way war is waged. It decided on “improving the readiness and effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent,” i.e., deploying new nuclear weapons in Europe, of course with the motivation of defending against “the growing missile threat from Russia.”

On the eve of the NATO meeting, the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, warned that “the United States of America has stepped up work with the full support of its NATO allies to modernize tactical nuclear weapons and their storage sites in Europe” and Russia considers particularly worrying “the engagement of pilots from the bloc’s non-nuclear member states in the drills to practice employing tactical nuclear weapons.”A message directed in particular to Italy, where the U.S. is preparing to replace B61 nuclear bombs with the new B61-12s and Italian pilots are being trained in their use with F-35s. “We regard this as a direct violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Russia’s defense chief stressed.

The message is directed to Italy and other European NATO members who, despite having ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear countries, host US nuclear weapons and train for their use. The implicit meaning of the message is clear: Russia considers these countries a source of threat and is taking countermeasures. The message has been ignored as usual by our government and parliament and, of course, by the media that have put NATO in the attic.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

Featured image: NATO heads of state at the alliance’s summit in Brussels (Source: Liberation News)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

I think the Governor has voiced an idea that will destroy the mandates. And he is calling back the legislature to act on the issue.

While the PREP ACT provides a huge liability shield for everyone involved with vaccinations of EUA products, the EUA requires that people be informed about what is known about the product and have the right to refuse. 

Well, a lot of negative information is now known, but it isn’t being provided on the “Fact Sheets”

And people are not being given the right to refuse.

Furthermore, as the Governor points out, employees are not being issued religious and medical waivers, as required by federal law.

I think these failings will void the PREP ACT protections. Employers will become liabile for damages, especially since the federal government did not put into place laws/regulations/orders to back them up.

As soon as employers realize they are the ones left holding the bag, mandates are over.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Anthrax Vaccine.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

When government mandates related to experimental coronavirus “vaccines” are thrust on businesses, it is heartening to see businesses refusing to comply. It is especially great to see a business back up its noncompliance with a well-stated, freedom-centered explanation.

Check out below the explanation In-N-Out Burger provided this week for the company’s restaurant in San Francisco refusing to comply with the San Francisco government’s demand that the restaurant enforce the city’s vaccine passport mandate:

As a Company, In-N-Out Burger strongly believes in the highest form of customer service and to us that means serving all Customers who visit us and making all Customers feel welcome. We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant Associates to segregate Customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason.

We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business. This is clear governmental overreach and is intrusive, improper, and offensive.

Hopefully, In-N-Out Burger’s example of bold freedom-centered action against vaccine mandates will inspire many more businesses to take similar action.

Over the past year and a half, governments at all levels in America have taken huge steps in the exercise of tyrannical powers in the name of countering coronavirus. Power gained is often only grudgingly given up. It will take many individuals and businesses boldly declaring “no more” and “never again” to ensure limitations on government power are respected.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The plenary session is the traditional highlight of the annual, must-follow Valdai Club discussions – one of Eurasia’s premier intellectual gatherings.

Vladimir Putin is a frequent keynote speaker. In Sochi this year, as I related in a previous column, the overarching theme was “global shake-up in the 21^st century: the individual, values and the state.”

Putin addressed it head on, in what can already be considered one of the most important geopolitical speeches in recent memory (a so-far incomplete transcript can be found here) – certainly his strongest moment in the limelight. That was followed by a comprehensive Q&A session (starting at 4:39:00).

Predictably, assorted Atlanticists, neocons and liberal interventionists will be apoplectic. That’s irrelevant. For impartial observers, especially across the Global South, what matters is to pay very close attention to how Putin shared his worldview – including some very candid moments.

Right at the start, he evoked the two Chinese characters that depict “crisis” (as in “danger”) and “opportunity,” melding them with a Russian saying: “Fight difficulties with your mind. Fight dangers with your experience.”

This elegant, oblique reference to the Russia-China strategic partnership led to a concise appraisal of the current chessboard:

The re-alignment of the balance of power presupposes a redistribution of shares in favor of rising and developing countries that until now felt left out. To put it bluntly, the Western domination of international affairs, which began several centuries ago and, for a short period, was almost absolute in the late 20^th century, is giving way to a much more diverse system.

That opened the way to another oblique characterization of hybrid warfare as the new modus operandi:

Previously, a war lost by one side meant victory for the other side, which took responsibility for what was happening. The defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War, for example, did not make Vietnam a “black hole.” On the contrary, a successfully developing state arose there, which, admittedly, relied on the support of a strong ally. Things are different now: No matter who takes the upper hand, the war does not stop, but just changes form. As a rule, the hypothetical winner is reluctant or unable to ensure peaceful post-war recovery, and only worsens the chaos and the vacuum posing a danger to the world.

A disciple of Berdyaev

In several instances, especially during the Q&A, Putin confirmed he’s a huge admirer of Nikolai Berdyaev. It’s impossible to understand Putin without understanding Berdyaev (1874-1948), who was a philosopher and theologian – essentially, a philosopher of Christianity.

In Berdyaev’s philosophy of history, the meaning of life is defined in terms of the spirit, compared with secular modernity’s emphasis on economics and materialism. No wonder Putin was never a Marxist.

For Berdyaev, history is a time-memory method through which man works toward his destiny. It’s the relationship between the divine and the human that shapes history. He places enormous importance on the spiritual power of human freedom.

Putin made several references to freedom, to family – in his case, of modest means – and to the importance of education; he heartily praised his apprenticeship at Leningrad State University. In parallel, he absolutely destroyed wokeism, transgenderism and cancel culture promoted “under the banner of progress.”

This is only one among a series of key passages:

We are surprised by the processes taking place in countries that used to see themselves as pioneers of progress. The social and cultural upheavals taking place in the United States and Western Europe are, of course, none of our business; we don’t interfere with them. Someone in the Western countries is convinced that the aggressive erasure of whole pages of their own history – the “reverse discrimination” of the majority in favor of minorities, or the demand to abandon the usual understanding of such basic things as mother, father, family or even the difference between the sexes – that these are, in their opinion, milestones of the movement toward social renewal.

So a great deal of his 40 minute-long speech, as well as his answers, codified some markers of what he previously defined as “healthy conservatism”:

Now that the world is experiencing a structural collapse, the importance of sensible conservatism as a basis for policy has increased many times over, precisely because the risks and dangers are multiplying and the reality around us is fragile.

Switching back to the geopolitical arena, Putin was adamant that “we are friends with China. But not against anyone.”

Geoeconomically, he once again took time to engage in a masterful, comprehensive – even passionate – explanation of how the natural gas market works, coupled with the European Commission’s self-defeating bet on the spot market, and why Nord Stream 2 is a game-changer.

Afghanistan

During the Q&A, scholar Zhou Bo from Tsinghua University addressed one of the key, current geopolitical challenges. Referring to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, he pointed out that, “if Afghanistan has a problem, the SCO has a problem. So how can the SCO, led by China and Russia, help Afghanistan?”

Putin stressed four points in his answer:

• The economy must be restored;
• The Taliban must eradicate drug trafficking;
• The main responsibility should be assumed “by those who had been there for 20 years” – echoing the joint statement after the meeting between the extended troika and the Taliban in Moscow on Wednesday; and
• Afghan state funds should be unblocked.

He also mentioned, indirectly, that the large Russian military base in Tajikistan is not a mere decorative prop.

Training bunker at Russia’s military base in Takikistan. Photo: Moscow Times

Putin went back to the subject of Afghanistan during the Q&A, once again stressing that NATO members should not “absolve themselves from responsibility.”

He reasoned that the Taliban “are trying to fight extreme radicals.” On the “need to start with the ethnic component,” he described Tajiks as accounting for 47% of the overall Afghan population – perhaps an over-estimation but the message was on the imperative of an inclusive government.

He also struck a balance: As much as “we are sharing with them [the Taliban] a view from the outside,” he made the point that Russia is “in contact with all political forces” in Afghanistan – in the sense that there are contacts with former government officials like Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah and also Northern Alliance members, now in the opposition, who are self-exiled in Tajikistan.

Those pesky Russians

Now compare all of the above with the current NATO circus in Brussels, complete with a new “master plan to deter the growing Russian threat.”

No one ever lost money underestimating NATO’s capacity to reach the depths of inconsequential stupidity. Moscow does not even bother to talk to these clowns anymore: as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, “Russia will no longer pretend that some changes in relations with NATO are possible in the near future.”

Moscow from now on only talks to the masters – in Washington. After all, the direct line between the Chief of General Staff, General Gerasimov, and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, General Todd Wolters, remains active. Messenger boys such as Stoltenberg and the massive NATO bureaucracy in Brussels are deemed irrelevant.

This happens, in Lavrov’s assessment, right after “all our friends in Central Asia” have been “telling us that they are against … approaches either from the United States or from any other NATO member state” promoting the stationing of any imperial “counter-terrorist” apparatus in any of the “stans” of Central Asia.

And still the Pentagon continues to provoke Moscow. Wokeism-lobbyist-cum-Secretary of Defense Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, who oversaw the American Great Escape from Afghanistan, is now pontificating that Ukraine should de facto join NATO.

That should be the last stake impaling the “brain-dead” (copyright Emmanuel Macron) zombie, as it meets its fate raving about simultaneous Russian attacks on the Baltic and Black Seas with nuclear weapons.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

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 frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Vladimir Putin at Valdai. (Source: Daily Sabah)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

When the CDC chose to lift restrictions on the vaccinated, ICAN went to work.  Through its attorneys, it formally demanded that the CDC also (at the least) lift restrictions on the naturally immune.  It provided the CDC with over 60 studies reflecting that natural immunity is more durable and robust than vaccine immunity. 

The CDC’s response is shameful.  It fails to address any of these studies, collectively involving millions of people, and instead cites a single irrelevant study of a few hundred people that does not even involve comparing vaccine versus natural immunity!

As reflected in ICAN’s formal exchange with the CDC, the available data and studies reflect as follows regarding the current virus causing most COVID-19 in the United States:

And here is the full story.  In May, the CDC revised its recommendations for fully vaccinated people, lessening certain restrictions.  This same guidance, however, made no mention of those who have already recovered from COVID-19.

Immediately after the CDC revised its recommendations, ICAN, through its attorneys, demanded that the CDC immediately include those who have recovered from COVID-19 in the same category as those fully vaccinated.  ICAN’s demand was based on a robust body of science.

The CDC responded with a ridiculous form response thanking us for our “interest in” COVID-19.  Our attorneys therefore submitted the letter as a formal petition to the CDC on July 6, 2021, to which the CDC is required by law to thoroughly respond.

In September, after even more studies had come out evidencing the robust and durable nature of natural immunity (and the waning efficacy of the vaccines), and having not yet received a response from the CDC (as they were busy cooking up the Kentucky study), our attorneys supplemented the Citizen Petition with 56 additional studies supporting that natural immunity is, in fact, superior to vaccine immunity.

Months after ICAN first contacted the CDC regarding natural immunity and submitted the petition, the CDC responded that it, “find[s] no basis to further modify the current CDC recommendation in this area until the science warrants it.” The CDC’s conclusion relied on one single study of Kentucky residents and ignored each of the 60+ studies ICAN submitted it the CDC!

ICAN’s attorneys have now submitted a reply to the CDC.  In that reply, the attorneys explain that the Kentucky study, a retrospective study of only a few hundred people, is irrelevant as to whether it is appropriate for the CDC to lift restrictions on the naturally immune because the study did not compare naturally immune individuals with vaccinated individuals.  Instead, it compared the naturally immune to the naturally immune with subsequent vaccination.

Even if vaccinating the naturally immune may improve immunity (which robust studies of millions of people show is not true, as detailed in our reply), it does not change the fact that natural immunity, alone, is better than vaccine immunity.  Hence, if the CDC is going to lift restrictions on the vaccine immune, it is downright authoritarian to not do so for the naturally immune.

This letter exchange with the CDC represents the most comprehensive analysis of the current state of the science regarding natural versus vaccine immunity.  We trust that you will not only appreciate reading and learning from this letter exchange with the CDC, but you will also enjoy it. 

As for next steps, if the CDC does not, as it likes to put it, “follow the science” and lift restrictions on the naturally immune, we will be taking the CDC to court on this issue, that is federal court as well as the court of public opinion.  And we look forward to doing so.

Click here to read the documents below which include extensive scientific evidence as well as a statement by Dr. Peter McCullough

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. (Raed Mansour/Flickr)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa joined Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi to mark the 35th anniversary of the death of Mozambique’s first president Samora Machel, both vowing to go after Islamist insurgents wreaking havoc in the north of the country.

On October 19, 1986, a Tupolev airplane carrying Machel crashed into mountains in South Africa near the border with Mozambique, killing 35 people. Machel’s crash remains a mystery, but speculation has lingered that it was linked to tensions between Mozambique and the then-apartheid regime in South Africa.

Samora Machel, the founding father of the Mozambican State, became one of the most charismatic leaders in Africa and the world, as result of his ceaseless struggle against every form of oppression, discrimination and exploration. His values have influenced many African leaders.

They both revisited the sight of the plane crash that killed Machel while flying home from a conference in Zambia. Ramaphosa paid tribute to Machel for his contribution to the fight against colonial and apartheid rule in southern Africa, urging the region to “continue with the struggle” for freedoms.

“It is for this reason that the peoples of southern Africa… have all decided, collectively, to act in solidarity to help the people of Mozambique to push out and to fight the insurgents who are spreading conflict, insecurity and violence. I have one message for those insurgents. We will come after you,” warned Ramaphosa.

Mozambique’s President, Filipe Nyusi, said that the legacy of Samora Machel – the country’s first head of state following independence from Portugal – is frequently threatened by insurgent attacks in the north of the country, but that the response from southern Africa has been promising.

Nyusi referred to the wave of violence in Cabo Delgado province of the past four years. Since July Mozambique government forces have had military support from Rwanda and from members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Graça Machel, the wife of the Samora Machel and herself a prominent activist, said in her own address that Mozambique’s first president had been “assassinated” to silence an outstanding voice in the region. That tragedy remains a mystery, believes Graça Machel, and further recalled that her husband gave support to the struggles of the Zimbabwean and South African peoples to overthrow white supremacist rule.

Samora Machel Júnior says there doesn’t seem to be any urgency in explaining the disaster that killed his father. Relatives of the 35 victims of the disaster in Mbuzini have asked presidents Nyusi and Ramaphosa to reopen the inquiry.

While acknowledging the complexity of the case, Machel Júnior said that clarification could bring some peace to the family, even after 35 years. “We know this is not a simple process. We realize that it takes some time, but we need to bring some peace of mind to the family. We want to straighten this out and move on,” he said.

South Africans vividly remember the tremendous contribution of Samora Machel and the people of Mozambique in the struggle to ensure our freedom in the fight against the system of racial segregation known as apartheid. The 35th anniversary of Machel’s death was therefore part of a series of government initiatives that aim to redress and change the heritage landscape to authentically, convey South Africa’s liberation history since colonial times.

Mozambique first president died on 19 October 1986 when the Soviet-made Tupolev plane crashed at night in South African territory, in the mountainous area of Lebombo, near the Mozambican border. A flight engineer and nine passengers – out of a total 44 people on board – survived in the crash, which prompted accusations of sabotage against South Africa’s then government. However, a 1994 enquiry into the crash carried out by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) came to no clear conclusion with regard to the causes.

The first Mozambican president died on October 19, 1986, was returning from a regional conference with African leaders in Lusaka, Zambia, when a Tupolev plane crashed in South Africa’s mountainous Lebombo area, near the border with Mozambique.

Samora Machel and another 25 Mozambican members of his escort (26 persons), along with fellow party members, ministers, dignitaries, officials, two ambassadors, four members of the Soviet crew and two Cuban doctors died. As a result, a total of 34 people died in the crash of the TU 134. There survived nine Mozambicans and the Soviet board engineer, thus 10 persons. A total of 44 people were in the plane on this flight. One of the survivors died in January 1987 as a result of the crash: Eusébio Guido Martinho. This increased the number of deaths to 35.

The accident sparked allegations of sabotage against the then South African apartheid administration. An inquiry initiated by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1994 was inconclusive as to its causes. The accident sparked allegations of sabotage against the then South African ‘apartheid’ administration. An inquiry initiated by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1994 was inconclusive as to its causes.

Accident victims (archives document):

• Luís Maria de Alcântara Santos- Minister of Transport and Communications;
• José Carlos Lobo – Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs;
• Aquino de Bragança – Director of the Center for African Studies;
• Fernando Honwana – Special Assistant to His Excellency, the President of the Republic;
• Alberto Cangela de Mendonça – Head of the National Protocol;
• Muradali Mamadhusen– Private Secretary to His Excellency, the President of the Republic;
• João Tomás Navesse – Deputy Director of the Directorate of Legal and Consular Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
• Ivete Amós – Secretary of His Excellency, the President of the Republic;
• Osvaldo de Sousa – English interpreter of the President;
• Bernardino Chiche – French interpreter
• Gulamo Khan – Press Attaché at the Presidency of the Republic;
• Azarias Inguane – Photographer of Jornal Notícias;
• Fernando Nhanquila – Flight Engineer;
• Daniel Maquinasse – President’s private photographer
• Capitão Parente Manjate – member of staff of the Presidency;
• NacirCharamadame -member of staff of the Presidency;
• Adão Gore Nhoca – member of staff of the Presidency
• Eduardo Viegas- member of staff of the Presidency;
• Albino Falteira – member of staff of the Presidency;
• Alberto Chaúque – member of staff of the Presidency;
• José Quivanane – member of staff of the Presidency.
• Orlando Garrine – Flight attendant;
• Esmeralda Luísa – Flight attendant;
• Sofia Arone – Flight Attendant;
• Ilda Carão – Flight Attendant;

The following international collaborators also perished in Mbuzini:

• Henriques Bettencourt – Doctor of His Excellency, the President of the Republic;
• Ulisses La Rosa Mesa – Personal Doctor of His Excellency, the President of the Republic;
• Iuri Novdran – Aircraft Commander;
• Igor Kartmychev- Flight Engineer;
• Amatoli Choulipov – Flight Engineer;
• Cox. C. Sikumba – Ambassador of the Republic of Zambia
• Tokwalu Batale – Ambassador of the Republic of Zaire

The following members of the presidential delegation survived the tragic event:

Eusébio Guido Martinho (later deceased- on January 1987-  as a result of the crash); Captain Carlos Jambo; Captain Carlos Rendição; Fernando Manuel João; Almeida Pedro; Manuel Jairosse; Daniel Cuna; Jossefa Machango; Vasco Langa; Vladimir Novoselov – Flight Engineer.

With an approximate population of 30 million, Mozambique is endowed with rich and extensive natural resources but remains one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world. It is one of the 16 countries, with a collective responsibility to promote socio-economic and political and security cooperation, within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) created in 1980.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

Featured image is from the author

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

There is no escape for Israel from growing Palestinian power. If nothing else, the upcoming Conference of the Alternative Palestinian Path in Madrid (Masar Badil in Arabic) will clearly and courageously embody that rising power on the world stage, at a time when Israel is increasingly fearful and unhinged by the surprising fact that Palestinians, even after decades of horrific colonial oppression, not only have yet to roll over and die as planned, but they are instead gathering more popular support worldwide than ever before.

Palestinians continue to resist their colonization at every turn. Right now, six Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strikes to demand freedom from arbitrary imprisonment without charge, “putting their lives on the line for liberation.”

In Ramallah, young people are affirming the path for liberation, stressing that the Palestinian struggle is an existential struggle, and must therefore never be linked to “solutions,” even if such solutions are interim.

Israel is afraid and the Palestinian people, in Israeli prison and everywhere, are not afraid, because they are not alone today, as the lyrics of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” have it.

How is Israel responding? In tried and true fashion. Israel is expanding its oppression and lawfare manipulations, so as to isolate Palestinians from global support.

Only recently (October 19, 2021), the Israeli “Defense Minister” and war criminal Benny Gantz issued a military order declaring six Palestinian civil society organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to be “terrorist organizations.”

The groups are Addameer, al-Haq, Defense for Children Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees. According to Human Rights Watch: “The designation, made pursuant to a 2016 Israeli statute, effectively outlaws the activities of these civil society groups. It authorizes Israeli authorities to close their offices, seize their assets and arrest and jail their staff members, and it prohibits funding or even publicly expressing support for their activities.”

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network: “Putting their lives on the line for liberation.”

Palestinians and their supporters are fighting back. Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, co-organizer of Masar Badil, is gearing up with the following call: Israel’s “terrorist” designations aim to suppress Palestinian organizing: Confront them with action and resistance!

The International Commission of Jursists (ICJ) is calling on Israel to reverse the designation of Palestinian rights organizations as terrorists, stating that the move is “a cynical assault on independent civil society and on the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and association in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).”

Meanwhile, Israel is desperately entrenching the status quo “from the river to the sea” by planning to construct housing units in the West Bank — i.e., by continuing its colonial, judaizing activities there.

Disregarding “calls for restraint” from the Biden administration (“The Israeli decision will likely cause tensions, and it could push the U.S. to air its criticism in public.”), Israel is set to approve the construction of 4,400 new Jewish housing units in the West Bank, 3,109 of which will be in existing Jewish colonies and 1,300 in the heart of Palestinian villages.

On the Masar Badil conference website are eight “principles of struggle,” with the last one stating, “Every attempt to block or suppress the progress of the Palestinian people’s struggle, in whatever form, constitutes complicity with and support for the crimes of Zionist colonialism that are committed daily against the Palestinian people.”

For a long time now, Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, has been exposing European inaction and complicity, especially when EU governments issue statements regarding their “profound concern” over egregious Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people. He and Palestinian human rights defender Omar Barghouti both believe it is up to European civil society to bring an end to EU complicity in Israel’s crimes.

As I pack my bag to travel to Madrid to participate in Masar Badil, I am eager to find out how many European civil society organizations will heed the call of the conference to support a new stage of Palestinian struggle and mark the end of the Madrid-Oslo process.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. 

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Wall mural at the Aida Refugee Camp (Source: Caoimhghin Ó Croidhean)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

CNN is in damage control after its chief medical correspondent and notorious Covid-19 experimental vaccine pusher, Dr. Sanjay Gupta was humiliated on The Joe Rogan Experience when he was confronted for the obvious lie about Joe Rogan taking “horse dewormer” which was actually Ivermectin. 

The humiliation of the CNN medical correspondent has went viral since the interview.  Newsweek reported the day after the show that “In a clip shared on social media, which had been viewed more than 800,000 times as of Thursday morning, The Joe Rogan Experience host grilled Gupta over CNN reports that criticized his taking the drug ivermectin after being diagnosed with the disease.”

The report also said that “Rogan announced in September he had contracted the virus on Instagram and told his followers he “threw the kitchen sink” at it the disease, with the drug among treatments he used.”

Here is the clip from ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’:

*

CNN’s Don Lemon was trying to cover the lies of his network according to Fox News “CNN anchor Don Lemon was on the defensive Wednesday night after podcast giant Joe Rogan accused his network of “lying” about his COVID treatment” continued “Rogan confronted CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta over the network’s coverage of his bout with the virus, falsely claiming Rogan used “horse dewormer” instead of the common human form of ivermectin, something Gupta conceded his CNN colleagues should not have said.”

Rogan asked Gupta “Does it bother you that the network you work for out and out lied, just outright lied about me taking horse dewormer?” Gupta’s response “They shouldn’t have said that,” Then Rogan asked “Why did they do that?”. Gupta responded with “I don’t know.” Rogan quickly responded with “You didn’t ask? You’re the medical guy over there!”  Gupta pathetically admitted “I didn’t ask” Gupta said, “I should’ve asked before coming on this podcast.” 

The mainstream media (MSM) is in freefall collapse and that’s why Big Tech monopolies including Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube  jumped in to its aid and censored the alternative media.  We were humiliating the MSM, in fact the alternative media was destroying what credibility they had left.

Despite what Big Tech has done, the American people and others from around the world still don’t trust the MSM except for the diehard Democrats based in the U.S.  According to a Gallup poll article from earlier this month, “Americans’ trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year’s reading the second lowest in Gallup’s trend.”  Not surprising, the Democrats have a lion’s share of trust when it comes to the MSM “Partisans’ trust in the media continues to be sharply polarized. Currently, 68% of Democrats, 11% of Republicans and 31% of independents say they trust the media a great deal or fair amount.” 

Joe Rogan did a sensational job in exposing MSM lies.  CNN is at a crossroads where its viewership is in freefall collapse.  I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that the MSM especially CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times are still in business but I understand that Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex and Washington’s political establishment pays their bills to stay on air.  However, the Alternative media is fighting back against Big Tech censorship by creating its own platforms such as Bitchute, Gab, Telegram, Odysee and many others which is very encouraging for those who seek the truth.

Rogan’s confrontation with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta is surely refreshing to see.  Humanity needs more exposure to the truth rather than the MSM’s lies that saturates television networks with propaganda especially in the West, so thumbs up to Joe Rogan who deserves nothing more than praise for standing up to a propagandist who represents one of the worst television networks in the world and that is CNN.

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCN

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

In a recent opinion essay published on the pharmaceutical industry-friendly MedPage Today, Dr. Matthew Wynia, a medical ethics professor at the University of Colorado School of medicine, propagated an old trope by accusing doctors who advocate cheaper, effective drugs and natural supplements for treating Covid patients as a “cult” of “quacks.”  Such derogatory language is not uncommon among the adherents of radicalized Skepticism – an aberrant faction within conventional medicine that espouses a dogmatic faith in a puritanical scientific materialism. Although there are post-modern Victorians to be found within the sciences and humanities alike, medical Skepticism has gained momentum and finds common ground with schoolyard bullying in its defiance against science’s hallmark of objective examination and scrutiny.

Skeptics such as Wynia are fond of expressing their disdain towards medical theories or therapeutic modalities that lie outside their prejudiced and narrow grasp of how valid scientific inquiry progresses. However, during the pandemic, government health officials have likewise been disgracing those who would challenge their undemocratic rules to strip away individual freedoms under the ruse of preserving public safety. Wynia’s background further explains this intolerance; and to use Cornel West’s terms, it tells us something about the “spiritual blackout and moral decrepitude” of US’s culture of governance and the puppet masters behind the official pandemic narrative.

Prior to joining Colorado’s medical school, for thirteen years Wynia was a director at the American Medical Association (AMA), perhaps the most discredited medical institution in America with a long history of speaking on behalf of drug makers’ interests and profits.  For over seven decades, the AMA has served as a watchdog for Big Pharma in its opposition to complementary and alternative medical professions. Following an earlier mass exodus of doctors from the AMA, today only about 12 percent of American physicians continue to hold membership. Although the AMA’s credibility has been lost, it nevertheless retains its influence from enormous private funding. Despite its detractors, and the erosion of it’s social contract with the larger medical community, the AMA, along with the CDC and NIH, are determined to unify the profession into a monolithic organism that can dictate approved and disapproved medical theories and interventions. But it has been during the pandemic that this effort has become more aggressive, as dissident doctors and healthcare professionals who speak out against federal pandemic policies and their failures are being threatened with loss of licenses and jobs.

Wynia is only a recent example among many. Repeatedly, and in unison, we hear federal health agencies’ and the media’s incantation to “follow the science” as an assault against those who have lost faith in the epistles preached by Anthony Fauci at the NIAID and other federal health officials from their vexing pulpits. This begs the question concerning whose science we should follow. Moreover, do we even have the courage and integrity to honestly evaluate the evidence to answer such a question?

In an earlier article, we noted that modern medicine has failed to be revered as a hard science. Its long legacy of intrinsic biases and questionable motives, keeps conventional medicine far away from being counted in the same league as authentic and more transparent sciences such as mathematics, theoretical physics, chemistry, etc. For this reason, since the late 19^th century there have been sporadic debates as to whether medicine should properly be understood as an art or a science. Moreover, today, proprietary pursuits and conflicts of interest have further transformed medicine into a commercial enterprise rather than an honest quest for impartial discovery to uncover facts and truth. The ancient ethic of medicine as a healing art, which upheld high moral standards and was practiced out of physicians’ deep compassion and empathy to relieve human suffering, has today been buried by institutional bureaucrats, professional medical school administrators and pharmaceutical executives. So deep has been medical ethics’ burial, nobody can find its grave anymore.

If there is a lesson the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that conventional medicine is largely a mockery of its original moral foundations. This is not to deny important advances in saving lives, especially in diagnostic methods, surgical technologies, critical care and emergency medicine. Risk versus benefit ratios to drive health policies have become fabricated theatrical displays for the media to reenact to a passive public. For example, what are people to make of the wide discrepancies between the Pfizer and Moderna trial reports claiming 95 percent vaccine effectiveness for infection when real world evidence confirms the contrary? An Israeli Ministry of Health report – the most vaccinated population in the world – shows only a 39 percent prevention rate.  And this figure will dwindle further during the passing of months following inoculation because it is certain that Covid-19 vaccine immunity is very short-lasting. And a Harvard study published in the September issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology reveals that the highest rates of new Covid-19 cases are among the most fully vaccinated nations.

When Fauci tells CBS that unvaccinated persons account for 99.2 percent of presumed Covid deaths, and Biden’s newly appointed CDC czar Rochelle Walensky decides to re-define SARS-2 infection rates as “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the actual data should warn that we have been drawn into a fantasy world of Alice in Wonderland hallucinations. Because the real data is now in; and, it provides an utterly contrary picture. In mid-August, Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 60 percent of Israelis hospitalized with Covid-19 were fully vaccinated. Another study reported by the Israeli National News found that natural immunity was six times greater than that offered by the vaccines; and a subsequent study published by Bloomberg increased that percentage to 13 times greater.

Therefore, we must conclude that somebody is flamboyantly wrong!  Either our government officials or the medical data are wildly incorrect. Now approximately ten months since the vaccine roll out, more accurate independent data piles up. And this data indicates that practically everything we have been told about the benefits of the Covid-19 vaccines to reach herd immunity is more hyped fiction than fact. It is permeated with untruths.

Favoring a vaccine regime and surveillance controls to track every American’s movements, our leading health officials’ blatant neglect of their pandemic policies’ serious health consequences is a clear sign of their moral decrepitude.  Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole approval of the costly and ineffective drug Remdesivir at the exclusion of cheaper medications that can treat SARS-2 infections for a mere $2.56 have brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children.  These drugs could have been prescribed at the pandemic’s start and saved countless lives. As early as April 2020, Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had already published a study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no one in authority paid any attention.

Aside from destroying what average people believe is normal life, the Fauci-Gates-WHO manifesto has likewise destroyed what is natural to our very humanity by erecting and fomenting a culture of fear and mental trauma across the globe. What is equally worrisome is that all indicators suggest this has been intentional rather than by medical shortsightedness, unexpected accident or sheer stupidity. And the architects of this manifesto are not stupid people; neither are the manifesto’s harshest critics stupid people, such as Drs. Peter McCullough, Michael Yeadon and Wolfgang Wodarg, and Robert Kennedy Jr. Yet when highly intelligent people reach the pinnacle of power, wealth and influence, and steadfastly control the narrative of law and order, they are more susceptible to being bombastically wrong about practically everything.

Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer Vice President, has charged governments with engaging in “psychological terrorism” in order to turn everyone into a threat to everyone else in the streets. When Anthony Fauci lectures the American people that to criticize him is identical to chastising science itself, we are hearing the rhetoric of a mob boss. Fauci is the exemplar and poster child of medicine’s degeneration: an authoritarian regime of oppressors determined to force the citizenry into obedience.  The promulgated message is that unless you have an MD or PhD behind your name, you have no authority, knowledge or capacity to judge what is sound science from what is false; therefore, we must listen to those experts who have risen up the chain of medical command and are qualified to dictate what is in our best interests. And unless you have achieved that level of jurisdiction you are a pariah, a treacherous heretic, if you dare to question their words.

Sadly legions of medical professionals and a largely naïve public continue to believe that our federal health agencies take the public’s health and genuine well-being to heart. Consequently, the establishment is making every effort to compare those who refuse the Covid-19 vaccines with climate change denial, conspiracy theory, Trumpism and religious fanaticism. Of course, there is little truth to these analogies. Yes, there are those who espouse such ideologies and are also anti-vaccine. But they do not represent the majority of people who are pro-vaccine but oppose the Covid-19 vaccines or very sound reasons; and a large percentage of this group are highly educated and medical professionals. Consequently this premeditative and deceptive messaging has been intentionally designed to create an illusion that the unvaccinated are a threat to the health of the nation. Therefore, employers, schools, and businesses should obey the decrees from on high and exercise their authority to bar anyone who refuses vaccination.

What Biden and Fauci deny is that an ever-increasing minority of vaccine opponents have now been injured by the vaccines or have had family members, friends, classmates and co-workers severely damaged or die. The numbers will continue to grow exponentially during the passing months as the vaccines’ long-term adverse effects begin to manifest serious medical complications. How long will our health and political leaders manage to subordinate and conceal the hard facts with abstract computer modeling, algorithms and massaged number crunching? Medical professionals working in the nitty-gritty of healthcare’s trenches are readily coming out in droves to declare they have had enough. They describe a real life scenario that contradicts every meme the government dishes up to the media.

In an interview on the Progressive Radio Network, Deborah Conrad, a physician assistant relieved of her job at Rochester Regional Health’s United Memorial Medical Center in upstate New York, recounted the growing number of incidents of vaccine injured patients requiring medical attention. In a legal letter to her former employers’ President and Chief Medical Officer by the Manhattan law firm Siri & Glimstad, Ms Conrad:

“… personally treated five patients that presented new unprovoked deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolisms within 6 weeks of Covid-19 vaccination. She has also seen patients that, after receipt of the Covid-19 vaccination, presented with a new stroke, autoimmune hepatitis, sudden bilateral pneumonia or Covid-19 infection… new arrhythmias, new seizure disorders, new chorea movement disorder and more.”

During a four-week period alone Deborah submitted 50 vaccine adverse event reports, including 4 deaths, to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Despite the rules put into place that vaccine-associated injuries and deaths must be reported to VAERS, healthcare workers are not being instructed by their superiors to do so. In Deborah’s case, she was reprimanded for her conscientious efforts. For her actions, she was accused of being an anti-vaccine proponent and fired.  This is only the report of a single healthcare worker at a medium-sized medical facility. Now imagine the cumulative extent of Covid-19 vaccine injuries and deaths across the nation’s nearly 14,000 hospitals and the personal experiences of a significant number of America’s 1 million active physicians and 3.8 million registered nurses.

This carnage is not accidental. It has deeper causal effects that reach beyond the debate over good versus bad science in the Covid wars. More accurately, it is a sign of the deterioration across the length of modernity’s moral integrity.

The decline of the nation’s spiritual fortitude has steadily declined during the past half century, with significant spikes of systemic institutional moral decay during the Clinton White House and fast-forward. However, it has been during the past several years that the nation’s political apparatus can be formally declared morally and spiritually bankrupt. The federal handling of the pandemic is only one symptom of the gangrene of corporate and capitalist cupidity infecting government and healthcare policies. The mendacity of the Fauci-Gates-WHO manifesto’s faux scientific hubris and self-righteousness, similar to the SARS-2 virus itself, is poisoning the population’s very circulation in order to curtail opposition. This is one of the defining characteristics of Cornel West’s “spiritual blackout” that can also be applied to the pandemic’s public discourse.

The second characteristic is the systemic indifference and callousness throughout the federal health system and pharmaceutical industry.  Where has there been any effort whatsoever by Pfizer, Moderna and J&J to publicly provide an explanation for this human-made pandemic of vaccine adverse events threatening the international community?  The same is true for the Biden White House and its clan of medical autocrats. Instead, there is deafening silence as injuries and deaths from the Covid vaccines alone far outpace severe cases for all vaccinations combined during the last four decades. Yet not even a word of defense. Instead the vaccines’ failures have opened doors for new opportunities and greater profits, with compromised and obliging agents sitting as the heads of the CDC, FDA and Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease ready to rubber stamp approvals for vaccine boosters and expand vaccination to younger age groups. Trials are already underway to administer Pfizer’s vaccine to 6 month-old infants. In the meantime, Fauci and the NIH will graciously reward grant-hungry researchers at medical institutes and universities with lavish funding to conduct more studies for peer-reviewed publications to keep the vaccine scam alive.  Those who buy into this naturalization of criminality within the dominant medical establishment, West might caution, are making “cowardice and avarice fashionable and compassion an option for losers.” Behind the backstage dressing room, the media has transformed Fauci into a propaganda-driven celebrity to keep the pandemic rolling, perhaps for years to come.

Cornel West’s third proof for our national spiritual blackout is the enabling of “public interest, common good, or even rule of law [to be] undercut by big money.” During the course of the pandemic alone, billionaire wealth has grown 54 percent to a value of nearly $4 trillion. The Cato Institute estimates that Pfizer will earn $33.5 billion this year from its Covid-19 vaccine alone. Fear tactics have succeeded in driving millions of Americans to expose their shoulders to the jab while clinging on a delusional hope that getting vaccination will return their lives to normal.  However, following West’s line of reasoning, these will only be “short-term gains and superficial successes.” A return to the night clubs, indoor concerts, sporting events and other entertainment, access to certain private and public spaces, entry to school or college and other carrots in the manifesto’s psy-ops are temporary covers for other nefarious strategies for full spectrum population surveillance. It also impersonates Big Pharma’s predatory capitalism and its commodification of medicine as Big Government takes every advantage of the deep superficiality that imbues the collective American psyche.

Fortunately, there is a growing pushback. We will not speculate whether it is a sign of the nation returning to its innate moral and spiritual senses, or simply the biological drive to survive when overwhelmed by the fear that the Covid-19 manifesto has seeded. Increasingly, Americans realize that getting vaccinated is a losing game of Russian Roulette. We are playing with a three-chamber loaded revolver, labeled Johnson and Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer respectively.

During this month alone there are promising signs of rebellion. The message is being heard that the Biden administration and our federal health officials, as well as many leaders in the developed world, have been feeding the public a false narrative built upon lies. In Chicago, a third of the city’s police force defied vaccine mandates. The 203,000 member strong International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation workers union, which represents the majority of America’s transportation employees, publicly stated their opposition to “unilateral” Covid vaccine mandates.  In New Mexico, 114 workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including a few dozen of the nation’s top nuclear scientists have sued the private contractor, Triad National Security, which runs the lab for the US Department of Energy for violating their constitutional rights over vaccine mandates.  And the most recent promising news is that a lawsuit is being filed against the CDC, the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum for crimes against humanity under the Nuremberg Code criteria. Whether successful or not, the suit will nevertheless further brighten the moral darkness that pervades the halls of these institutions.

In the struggle ahead to expose the Covid-19 manifesto’s violent criminal assault on each of us individually, it is critical to remember history’s great visionaries and the sterling activists who stirred movements to beam light during times of widespread spiritual blackout.  Cornell West calls these exemplary figures “love warriors”. We need to find the courage to act and sacrifice out of deep compassion for the victims of the horrendous callousness exhibited by the pandemic’s engineers and their misguided and heartless schemes. West would encourage each of us to become a “love warrior.” But not as a cliché to wear on a shirt lapel nor placard to bring to a demonstration; rather the inspiration to burn selfless compassion deep into our conscience as a reminder of certain universal truths that trump all the lies disseminated by the powerful, and to challenge those who wish to exalt themselves as the rulers and masters over our lives.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow

They are frequent contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from Vaccine Injury News

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

This statement published on March 3, 2021 has been the object of a massive media campaign to discredit Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association. On the following day, March 4th, the WHO released a statement  accusing Kenya’s Catholic Doctors of “falsification”, not to mention the statements issued by the Catholic Church.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 25, 2021

***

3rd March 2021

To our fellow Kenyans and people of goodwill

RE: Stopping Ravages and Loss of Human Life from COVID-19

We greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus the Christ.

The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association brings together doctors who have sworn to practice and audit the practice of medicine guided by Catholic faith and the Hippocratic oath, including the respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life. We also strive to expose falsehoods in medical practice and to establish the truth as best practice and ensure it takes center stage in establishing policies and laws. 

We appreciate the fact that COVID-19 has presented unprecedented new challenges in the management of health nationally/globally with tremendous negative impact on the economy and the livelihood of our people. It’s also becoming clear that there are partisan interests that are seen bent on keeping some important truths from coming to the fore at the expense of human life.

We know for a fact that there are drugs that have been re-purposed and used effectively to treat COVID-19. We also know that vaccination for this disease is totally unnecessary making the motivation suspect.

Find our full advisory below hoping that we can stop the ravages and any other preventable loss of human life.

Yours faithfully,

Dr. Stephen K. Karanja

*

Read the document below or click here for full view.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from The Sociable

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Mainstream media have incorrectly insinuated that ivermectin is purely a veterinary drug that could be dangerous to humans; CNN falsely stated that Joe Rogan took “horse dewormer”

Rogan recently interviewed CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, getting him to admit CNN lied

The FDA started the “horse dewormer” fallacy based on a Mississippi health department report that said 70% of poison control calls were related to veterinary ivermectin. It was actually 70% of ivermectin-related calls, six in all, four of which were about accidental use of ivermectin in livestock. Overall, these calls made up only 2% of all poison control calls

A total of 20 deaths have been linked to ivermectin since 1992. Compare that safety profile to Remdesivir, the primary drug used by hospitals across the U.S. against COVID-19. Since the spring of 2020, VigiAccess has received 7,491 adverse events in all attributed to the drug, including 560 deaths, 550 serious cardiac disorders and 475 acute kidney injuries

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson has issued a legal opinion on the off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. According to this legal opinion, health care providers in Nebraska can legally prescribe these medications for off-label use for the treatment of COVID, provided they have informed consent from the patient. The only causes for disciplinary action are failure to obtain informed consent, deception and/or prescribing excessively high doses

*

In early September 2021, Oklahoma’s KFOR news ran a falsified story about emergency rooms being overrun with patients who had overdosed on horse ivermectin.¹ Other mainstream media followed suit — all incorrectly referring to ivermectin as a dangerous veterinary drug.

In the real world, ivermectin is a human drug that has been safely used by 3.7 billion people since the early 1990s.² In 2016, three scientists received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of ivermectin against parasitic infections in humans.³ It’s also on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.⁴

There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to disparage ivermectin as a “horse dewormer” that only a loony person would consider taking. Yet that’s what mainstream media have done, virtually without exception.

When comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan revealed⁵ he’d treated his bout of COVID-19 with ivermectin and other remedies — fully recovering within three days — NPR reported Rogan had taken “ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug that is formulated for use in cows and horses,” adding that “the Food and Drug Administration is urging people to stop ingesting” the medication, saying animal doses of the drug can cause nausea, vomiting and in some cases severe hepatitis.⁶

Sanjay Gupta Admits CNN Lied

CNN, among many others, also reported on Rogan’s use of “horse dewormer.” In mid-October 2021, Rogan interviewed CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, grilling him on why CNN would outright lie about his use of ivermectin.

“It’s a lie on a news network,” Rogan said, “and it’s a lie that they’re conscious of. It’s not a mistake. They’re unfavorably framing it as a veterinary medicine …

Don’t you think a lie like that is dangerous … when they know they’re lying? They know I took medicine [for humans] … Dude, they lied. They said I was taking horse dewormer. It was prescribed to me by a doctor, along with a bunch of other medications.”

Gupta finally relents and agrees that ivermectin should not be called horse dewormer. When asked, “Does it bother you that the news network you work for out and out lied about me taking horse dewormer?” Gupta replied, “They shouldn’t have said that.”

When asked why they would lie about such an important medical issue, Gupta replied “I don’t know.” Gupta also admits he never asked why they did it, even though he’s their top medical correspondent.

FDA Attacks Ivermectin

While CNN and mainstream media are certainly at fault for spreading disinformation here, they got the idea from a supposedly reputable source — the FDA. In an August 21, 2021, tweet,⁷ the FDA linked to an agency article warning against the use of ivermectin, saying “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

This blatantly misleading post seeded the lie that then spread across mainstream media. In an article posted on RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo substack, two independent investigative health journalists, Mary Beth Pfeiffer and Linda Bonvie, detail how the FDA’s anti-ivermectin campaign began:⁸

“Within two days, 23.7 million people had seen that Pulitzer-worthy bit of Twitter talk. Hundreds of thousands more got the message on Facebook, LinkedIn, and from the Today Show’s 3 million-follower Instagram account.

‘That was great!’ declared FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock in an email to her media team. ‘Even I saw it!’ For the FDA, the ‘not-a-horse’ tweet was ‘a unique viral moment,’ a senior FDA official wrote to Woodcock, ‘in a time of incredible misinformation’ …

When CNN retweeted ‘not-a-horse,’ FDA was gleeful. ‘The numbers are racking up and I laughed out loud,’ wrote FDA Associate Commissioner Erica Jefferson in one email … There was one problem, however. The tweet was a direct outgrowth of wrong data — call it misinformation — put out the day before by the Mississippi health department.

The FDA did not vet the data, according to our review of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and questions to FDA officials. Instead, it saw Mississippi, as one email said, as ‘an opportunity to remind the public of our own warnings for ivermectin.’”

The now infamous tweet was born out of a single sentence in a Mississippi poison control health alert, which stated that “At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.” The problem? That wasn’t accurate either.

As it turns out, the real percentage of recent calls to poison control related to veterinary ivermectin was 2%, not 70%. In an October 5, 2021, correction, the Mississippi health department clarified that it wasn’t 70% of all poison control calls that involved veterinary ivermectin, it was 70% of all ivermectin-related calls.⁹

In absolute numbers, there were six such calls, and four of those calls actually related to livestock accidentally receiving the drug. Investigation by Pfeiffer and Bonvie also revealed that between July 31 and August 22, 2021, 40%, 10 of 24 ivermectin-related calls to the Mississippi poison control center were mere requests for information, which is a common occurrence.

“Without question, people should not take drugs made for animals, given issues of dosing and medical oversight, to name just two. That much is clear,” Pfeiffer and Bonvie write.¹⁰

“But in hopping on the Mississippi bandwagon, the FDA … turned ivermectin, which doctors and health ministers in several countries say has saved many from covid-19, into a drug to be feared, human form or not.

This highly effective bait-and-switch began last March with a webpage, to which the FDA tweet linked, that conflates the two ivermectins. On one hand, the FDA tells of receiving ‘multiple reports of patients who have required medical attention’ after taking the animal product.

On the other, it describes the fate awaiting people who take large amounts of any ivermectin, ending a long list with ‘dizziness, ataxia, seizures, coma and even death.’

The medical literature,¹¹ nonetheless, shows ivermectin to be an extremely safe medicine … Last March, a safety review¹² of ivermectin by a renowned French toxicologist could not find a single accidental overdose death in the medical literature in more than 300 safety studies of the drug over decades.

The study was performed for MedinCell, a French pharmaceutical company … Since 1992, twenty deaths have been linked to inexpensive, off-patent ivermectin, according to a World Health Organization drug tracker called VigiAccess …

So how big was the surge that FDA described as ‘multiple’? Four, an agency spokesperson said just after the page went up. Three people were hospitalized, but it wasn’t clear if that was for COVID itself.

When pressed for details, FDA cited privacy issues, and said in an email, ‘Some of these cases were lost to follow up.’ This is how government gets away with some whoppers, and with the media’s help.”

Ivermectin Is Safe; Remdesivir, Not so Much

According to VigiAccess, the World Health Organization’s drug tracker, a total of 20 deaths have been linked to ivermectin since 1992.¹³ Compare that safety profile to remdesivir, the primary drug used by hospitals across the U.S. against COVID-19.

Since the spring of 2020, VigiAccess has received 7,491 adverse events in all attributed to remdesivir, including 560 deaths, 550 serious cardiac disorders and 475 acute kidney injuries.¹⁴

The question is why remdesivir is being used at all, with the World Health Organization recommending¹⁵ against it and a new Lancet study¹⁶ finding “no clinical benefit.” Could it be that Fauci is involved with the fraud? Pfeiffer and Bonvie write.^17,18

“The other question is why ivermectin is not. The FDA tweet arrived just as ivermectin prescriptions were soaring, up twenty-four-fold in August from before the pandemic.

These were legal prescriptions written by doctors who, presumably, had read the studies, learned from experience, and decided for themselves. Indeed, 20 percent of prescriptions are written off-label,¹⁹ namely for other than an approved use.

The effort to vilify ivermectin broadly has helped curb the legal supply of a safe drug. That’s what drove people to livestock medicine in the first place.”

State AG Calls Out Medical Establishment for Misinformation

In better news, in early October 2021, the Nebraska Department of Health asked Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson to issue a legal opinion on the off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

October 15, 2021, Peterson issued a legal opinion^20,21 stating health care providers can legally prescribe these medications for off-label use for the treatment of COVID, provided they have informed consent from the patient.²² The only causes for disciplinary action are failure to obtain informed consent, deception and/or prescribing excessively high doses.

Peterson concluded that, based on the available evidence, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin “might work for some people.”

He highlighted studies demonstrating the safety and benefits of these drugs against COVID-19, as well as the shocking scientific fraud that led to worldwide shunning of hydroxychloroquine, and the cherry-picking and exclusion of data in studies that are critical of ivermectin. He also pointed out how illogical it is to discourage early treatment.

“Allowing physicians to consider these early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of the hospital, and provide relief for our already strained healthcare system,” Peterson wrote.^23,24

Peterson also called out the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci on their hypocrisy, detailing how the FDA and National Institutes of Health seeded confusion by issuing contradictory guidance. The NIH has taken a neutral position to ivermectin, which Peterson “clearly signaled that physicians should use their discretion in deciding whether to treat COVID-19 patients with ivermectin.”

NIH officials, however, have ignored the agency’s official position. At the end of August 2021, Fauci “went on CNN and announced that ‘there is no clinical evidence’ that ivermectin works for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19,’ and that ‘there is no evidence whatsoever’ that it works,” Peterson writes, adding:

“Yet this definitive claim directly contradicts the NIH’s recognition that ‘several randomized trials … published in peer-reviewed journals’ have reported data indicating that ivermectin is effective as a COVID-19 treatment.”

AG Blames FDA for Seeding Confusion

Peterson goes on to review the FDA’s behavior with respect to ivermectin:

“The FDA has similarly charted a course of confusion. In March 2021, the FDA posted a webpage entitled ‘Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Great or Prevent COVID-19.’

Although the FDA’s concern was stories of some people using the animal form of ivermectin or excessive doses of the human form, the title broadly condemned any use of ivermectin in connection with COVID-19.

Yet there was no basis for its sweeping condemnation. Indeed, the FDA itself acknowledged on that very webpage (and continued to do so until the page changed on September 3, 2021) that the agency had not even ‘reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or prevent COVID-19.’

But without reviewing the available data, which had long since been available and accumulating, it is unclear what basis the FDA had for denouncing ivermectin as a treatment or prophylaxis for COVID-19.”

Peterson also highlights the fact that while the FDA claims ivermectin “is not an antiviral (a drug for treating viruses),” on another FDA webpage they list a study in Antiviral Research that “identified ivermectin as a medicine ‘previously shown to have broad-spectrum antiviral activity.”

“It is telling that the FDA deleted the line about ivermectin not being ‘anti-viral’ when it amended the first webpage on September 3, 2021,” Peterson writes.

He also points out that while the FDA now claims off-label use of drugs “can be very dangerous,” and that this is why they don’t recommend ivermectin for COVID, doctors routinely use drugs off-label, and ivermectin has a well-established safety record.

So, “it is inconsistent for the FDA to imply that ivermectin is dangerous when used to treat COVID-19 while the agency continues to approve remdesivir despite its spottier safety record,” Peterson writes.

AG Puts Professional Associations Under the Microscope

Peterson also questioned the stance of professional associations such as The American Medical Association, American Pharmacists Association and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which in September 2021 issuing a joint statement²⁵ opposing the use of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID outside of clinical trials.

Their statement, Peterson points out, relied on the FDA’s and CDC’s “suspect positions,” and a statement by Merck, in which they opposed the use of the drug due to a “concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”

“But Merck, of all sources, knows that ivermectin is exceedingly safe, so the absence of safety data in recent studies should not be concerning to the company,” Peterson writes, adding:

“Why would ivermectin’s original patent holder go out of its way to question this medicine by creating the impression that it might not be safe? There are at least two plausible reasons.

First, ivermectin is no longer under patent, so Merck does not profit from it anymore. That likely explains why Merck declined to ‘conduct clinical trials’ on ivermectin and COVID-19 when given the chance.

Second, Merck has a significant financial interest in the medical profession rejecting ivermectin as an early treatment for COVID-19. [T]he U.S. government has agreed to pay [Merck] about $1.2 billion for 1.7 million courses of its experimental COVID-19 treatment [molnupiravir], if it is proven to work in an ongoing large trial and authorized by U.S. regulators.

Thus, if low-cost ivermectin works better than, or even the same as molnupiravir, that could cost Merck billions of dollars.”

Another excellent article²⁶ detailing the FDA’s questionable actions, and Merck’s incentives to disparage their old drug, ivermectin, was published by the American Institute for Economic Research.

“While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones,” David Henderson, a senior fellow with AIERS, writes.²⁷

“Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth. The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.”

Early Treatment Is Crucial

There’s no doubt that many have died unnecessarily due to our health authorities’ incomprehensible decision to discourage all prevention and early treatment of COVID-19. As noted by many doctors, early treatment is absolutely crucial for preventing hospitalization, death and long-term side effects of the infection.

There are several proven protocols to choose from at this point, including the following. Whichever treatment protocol you use, make sure you begin treatment as soon as possible, ideally at first onset of symptoms.

• The Zelenko protocol²⁸
• The MATH+ protocols²⁹
• Nebulized hydrogen peroxide, as detailed in Dr. David Brownstein’s case paper³⁰ and Dr. Thomas Levy’s free e-book, “Rapid Virus Recovery”

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Notes

¹ KFOR September 1, 2021

² Newswise December 4, 2020

³ Nobelprize.org October 5, 2015

⁴ WHO Essential Medicines August 2015

⁵ YouTube Joe Rogan September 7, 2021

⁶ NPR September 1, 2021

⁷ FDA Twitter August 21, 2021

^{8, 9, 10, 13, 17} Rescue.substack.com

^11, 12 Expert Review Report: Medical Safety of Ivermectin

¹⁴ Nebraska AG Opinion October 14, 2021, page 11

¹⁵ WHO November 20, 2020

¹⁶ The Lancet September 14, 2021

¹⁸ Pharmaceutical Fraud August 9, 2021

¹⁹ Congressional Research Service Off-Label Use of Prescription Drugs February 23, 2021

^20, 24 Nebraska AG Opinion October 14, 2021

²¹ The Defender October 18, 2021

^22, 23 KETV7 Omaha October 15, 2021

²⁵ AMA.org September 1, 2021

^26, 27 AIER October 18, 2021

²⁸ Zelenko protocol

²⁹ Covid19criticalcare.com

³⁰ Science, Public Health Policy and The Law July 2020; 1: 4-22 (PDF)

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Within just a few days, the United States will once again make its case in a UK court that it has a right to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be tried under the Espionage Act, in what remains this century’s most dangerous attack on global press freedom.

These hearings, taking place on October 27 and 28, are an attempt to appeal the decision that Judge Vanessa Baraitser made earlier this year to not extradite Assange to the United States because it is likely he will commit suicide if subjected to the inhumane conditions of the U.S. prison system. However, while this decision was focused on his health, these hearings are really about what the Assange case has always been about: the United States’ determination to silence anyone who exposes the crimes of the U.S. empire.

Leading press freedom and human rights organizations have been clear about the implications of a potential Assange extradition and have called on President Biden to drop the case. If there were still any doubts that the Department of Justice’s focus on Assange was corrupt and politically motivated, those who remain skeptical should consider two major revelations about the U.S. campaign against Assange since the last hearing.

Earlier this year the Icelandic news outlet Stundin reported that a key witness in the prosecution against Assange admitted to lying in his indictment. This witness was Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a convicted pedophile and fraudster. The FBI promised Thordarson immunity from prosecution under the condition that he lie about his relationship with WikiLeaks in an indictment which would strengthen the DOJ’s conspiracy charge against Assange. Along with the debunked claim that Assange pressured whistleblower Chelsea Manning into hacking a U.S. government computer, Thordarson’s indictment was supposed to paint Assange as having a pattern of pressuring sources to commit cyber crimes. The Stundin article should put to rest any belief that the United States is being honest about its stated reasons for going after Assange.

But the Stundin article is not even the most concerning glimpse into the prosecution’s true character. Just this month, Yahoo News reported that Mike Pompeo, the main force behind Trump’s decision to pursue extradition, was obsessed with punishing Assange for publishing the Vault 7 documents which revealed the CIA’s activities of electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare. Though The Grayzone initially broke this news in May 2020, the recent Yahoo News report includes additional details of Pompeo’s obsession. Most shockingly, Pompeo held such a vendetta against Assange that he considered arranging a shootout in the streets of London with the British government to assassinate Assange.

It is still unclear if either of these facts will be considered in the UK court’s upcoming hearings. There remains a dangerous lack of solidarity with Assange from the press, which is exactly why it is so important that this extradition not happen. As mainstream news outlets become increasingly complacent, and even supportive of pro-war policies, it becomes more essential that anti-war voices, and anti-war journalists in particular, resist the attempt by the United States to set the precedent that the act of publishing war crimes is a punishable offense.

After 20 years of the United States military destroying entire countries under the guise of fighting terrorism, there is finally a partial reckoning with U.S. warmongering around the world. It cannot be said that Americans are particularly anti-war now, but at the very least, Biden’s decision to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan was widely popular across the political spectrum. Yet, many news outlets instead chose to emphasize the minority position on Afghanistan by prioritizing commentary from interventionists and weapons lobbyists over anti-war scholars and activists, and by falsely representing the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as a positive. This sudden emphasis on the supposedly positive role of U.S. occupation in Afghanistan is a particularly dangerous line for journalists to push considering how little effort the U.S. media placed on covering the conflict prior to withdrawal. One study found that in 2020, three major news outlets gave the conflict a combined coverage of less than five minutes.

In contrast to publications that take such a careless or outright supportive stance on the irreparable harm of U.S. foreign policy are WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Following his view that “if wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth,” Assange has published some of the most vital information on U.S. foreign policy of the 21st century with perfect accuracy. Some of the information provided to the public (thanks to the anonymous online source submission system developed by Assange) includes the CIA rendition program, detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and more. It is this view on publishing which understands war as something to be exposed and resisted that has made Assange such a hated figure by warmongers in the United States.

However, as every Assange supporter knows, a potential extradition of Assange will not just stop with Assange. The fear is that the torture he has endured and a possible extradition and even sentencing under the Espionage Act would enable the U.S. government to do the same to anyone else who exposes the crimes of the U.S. military. Even if the United States cannot successfully imprison every journalist who exposes its crimes, such a precedent would likely scare publications into even greater submission to the state. The desired outcome is the complete neutering of anti-war journalism.

Despite the many problems with the mainstream press, journalism as an institution remains one of the most effective methods of resisting, and at times, ending wars. Even those distrustful of the press should be willing to oppose attacks on the right to a free press when such attacks occur. It is the guarantee of press freedom that enables anti-war reporting to make its way into the mainstream at times, shifting people’s understanding of what their government does.

One recent example of the power of the press is the reporting that the New York Times and Washington Post did on the U.S. military’s drone strike of an Afghan aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and his family. Though these two publications are often the principal cheerleaders of U.S. foreign policy, their recent independent investigations into Biden’s drone strike brought the U.S. drone program to the attention of the American public. As a result, the Pentagon had to admit it not only killed a civilian and his loved ones, but knowingly lied to the public by falsely claiming they had proof that this man was an ISIS-K operative. That admission of guilt and dishonesty may not have come if not for the power that the reporters at the Times and the Post chose to wield over the warmongers in the Pentagon.

One has to wonder: if these publications chose to routinely use their immense resources and platforms to scrutinize the military, rather than provide PR for it, would the drone program even still be operating? Would the war in Afghanistan have ended much sooner? Could the invasion have been avoided entirely?

These are questions that cannot be answered, but they should be asked of journalists as the U.S. continues to prioritize military spending and beat the drum for a new war with China. The press still has the power to challenge and prevent U.S. wars. However, this power hangs in the balance in the form of Julian Assange’s fate. Recent coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal shows the potential for two types of press. One which sees its role as the mouthpiece for the most war-hungry members of a global empire or one that shows the true nature of war to the public, enabling them to oppose it and giving its victims some justice. For anti-war advocates who would rather see the latter option covering foreign policy, it is essential to show strong support for Julian Assange and demand the charges against him be dropped immediately.

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

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Sam Carliner is a journalist based in New Jersey. His writing focuses on US imperialism and the climate crisis. He is also the Weekend Social Media Manager at CodePink.

Featured image is by Elekhh licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Following his death from Covid-19 earlier this week, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell‘s legacy will be examined by many people for many different reasons. Some will eulogise him as one of America’s top diplomats and presidential advisers. Many more, I suspect, will remember him as the man who lied for his country again, and again, and again.

One of the Greek sages, Chilon of Sparta, said we should not speak ill of the dead (what is now the Latin aphorism “De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est”), a maxim with which I would generally agree. However, it is precisely because of the dead that I am writing these words.

The dead to which I refer come from many nations around the world; countless men, women and children who left this earth in the absence of mercy, a voice or justice. Millions of others have yet to have any sort of closure or peace due to US militarism, wars, interventions and atrocities over many decades. Powell supported, excused and covered up most of them from Vietnam to the present day.

A memorial service for General Powell will be held at the Washington National Cathedral in the US capital next month. The so-called great and good will eulogise the first African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Secretary of State. My own contribution is not for Powell and the mourners, but for the forgotten survivors who will have been propelled back into very dark places at seeing his name in the headlines this week.

To the Iraqi people, Powell was the man who did the dirty work in arguing the case for a war that created more than a million widows and orphans. Estimates of the number of dead in Iraq continue to be amended. It was Powell who stood before the UN on behalf of President George W Bush in February 2003 and spoke with great authority, using photographs to “prove” that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This was a lie, and he knew it.

A couple of weeks ahead of his speech, some Algerian refugees were arrested for allegedly producing ricin in Wood Green, North London. The British media splashed with the headlines that anti-terror police had uncovered an Al-Qaida cell poised to unleash the deadly poison on an unsuspecting public. The more lurid reports also claimed that the “ricin factory” contained bomb-making equipment. British Prime Minister Tony Blair — another man with a long-distance relationship with the truth — whipped up a frenzy of hysteria claiming that, “This danger is present and real, and with us now.”

Blair was backed up by Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council; both men were pushing the case for war against Iraq. Powell cited the London “find” gravely as an “Iraq-linked terrorist network”. Despite the fact that the British government’s chemical weapons research facility at Porton Down knew that there was no ricin in Wood Green in early January 2003, Powell went ahead and peddled his lies regardless. Blair and Powell both appear to have ignored the facts. In a nest of vipers, it’s always difficult to separate one snake from another.

Two years later a very different story emerged during the Old Bailey trial of the Algerian refugees: there was no ricin and no sophisticated Al-Qaida plot. Jury foreman Lawrence Archer was so outraged at what emerged during his seven-month odyssey in court that he co-wrote a book with journalist Fiona Bawdon exposing the lies told by Powell backed up by “shamelessly distorted” words from the British government, media and security agencies.

Powell claimed later to regret his performance at the UN. That didn’t help the Algerians, though, who were held in a high-security prison for more than two years until the case against them in their infamous trial by jury collapsed. The US official knew that there was no ricin plot; indeed, that there was no ricin, so what was the white powder in the vial he waved around so dramatically in the Security Council meeting?

To the people of Vietnam, Colin Powell was the soldier who covered up the war crimes carried out in Mỹ Lai by a unit of US troops who slaughtered 500 civilians. Powell admitted in a 1968 memo that there might have been be “isolated cases of mistreatment”, but in August 1971 he eventually told the truth in a sworn affidavit during the war crimes trial of Brigadier General John Donaldson who, it was alleged, had routinely “killed or ordered the killing of, unarmed and unresisting” Vietnamese civilians from his helicopter.

Powell ingratiated himself in 1985 as a senior assistant to US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, when he helped cover up the selling of weapons to Iran so that the Reagan administration could funnel money to the US-backed and funded right-wing Contra counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. Weinberger faced five charges related to the so-called Iran-Contra scandal only to be pardoned by President George H.W. Bush before he could be put on trial. It emerged that Powell took part personally in at least one covert weapons sale in exchange for hostages.

He had his finger in many pies in subsequent years which saw the demise of some dictatorships and the rise of others in US military action in Panama, the Philippines, Somalia, Liberia, Bangladesh, Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

To the Palestinians — and myself, I must add — Powell will always be the man who was treacherous and duplicitous towards them. He lied about Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) tried desperately to hide one of its many war crimes committed in the occupied West Bank when its soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the refugee camp between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada. Ariel Sharon’s cowardly troops would have made a quick exit but for the dilemma of how to cover up the killing of so many people. It’s a dilemma that focused the minds of those in charge of so-called Operation Defensive Shield.

As I wrote in MEMO last year,

“[They] decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s ring of steel; it was a total lockdown and lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city…

“The atmosphere was tense and the UN announced that it was planning to launch an investigation into compelling allegations of Israeli war crimes said to have been committed in the refugee camp. The Israelis did what they do well, and mobilised malleable politicians and government advisers to mislead a gullible media and public.”

The then US Secretary of State Powell was brought in to use calm, authoritative tones at a press conference in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which Zionist terrorists blew up in 1946, killing 91 people and wounding 41 others. The irony wasn’t lost on the Palestinians and the watching world.

He claimed to have seen “no evidence” of a massacre. In last year’s article I pointed out: “By 23 April Powell was back in Washington briefing senators: ‘Right now, I’ve seen no evidence of mass graves and I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.’ He wasn’t lying, of course, because he never went to Jenin, so could not have ‘seen’ the evidence even if he had wanted to.”

I was one of the first journalists on the scene, though, and was in the refugee camp in Jenin on the day that the former general presented his less than honest briefing to the world’s media. The anger and frustration I felt listening to his lies was probably nothing compared with the feelings of the Palestinians in Jenin who told me how their mothers, wives, children and other relatives had been killed before their eyes. I remember seeing a group of Palestinian women tearing at the rubble with their bare, bloodied hands trying to find the bodies of loved ones. The stench of death was overwhelming. Moreover, while Powell said that he saw “no evidence” of a massacre, Human Rights Watch disagreed, and said so when it published a hard-hitting report on what happened in Jenin.

The Jacobin online magazine has published a brutally savage obituary of Powell. “There’s Nothing Honourable or Decent About Colin Powell’s Long List of War Crimes” was the headline. I and millions like me couldn’t agree more. He was buried on Friday morning, but as yet there’s no official tombstone. When it is eventually fixed on his grave, it should be very simple: “Here lies Colin Powell – in death as in life”.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

Do the following statements confirm US-NATO’s intent to wage war on Russia “if deterrence fails”?

Emphasis in quotations confirm this intent.

Excerpts from the speech, for complete speech see video below.

***

As President Biden affirmed at the Bucharest Nine Summit in May, “this Administration is committed to strengthening our Euro-Atlantic bonds and to ensuring a secure Eastern Flank.”

…

I also wanted to be here to honor the Romanian service members who served side by side with us in Afghanistan over the past 20 years… including the 27 Romanian troops who died in Afghanistan.

…

Now, as most of you know, Romania is one of a handful of NATO Allies that hosts a significant number of U.S. rotational forces….

…

Later today, I’ll get a chance to visit our forces at MK [Mihail Kogălniceanu] Air Base… and see first-hand the outstanding relationship between our two militaries.

….

Now, this year marks a decade since we signed the Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration and the Ballistic Missile-Defense Agreement.

It also marks five years since we established Europe’s first and only operational Aegis Ashore site in Romania.

…

Now, we also spent some time today discussing the importance of deepening cooperation among our Black Sea Allies and partners to deter and defend against Russian malign activities in the region.

As I mentioned during my visit to Kyiv, the United States will continue to provide assistance to enhance the maritime capabilities of Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Georgia in support of these efforts.

…

I think our posture in the region continues to present a credible threat against Russia and it enables NATO forces to operate more effectively should deterrence fail. And I think this is borne out of our commitment to sustaining a rotational U.S. force presence. We continue to have about 1,000 rotational forces in Romania, including heavy infantry, rotary assets, enablers, and as you heard me mention earlier, Europe’s first and only operational Aegis Ashore.

Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor missile of the sort the U.S. and NATO have stationed in Romania.

Regarding our force posture, I think you heard me say earlier that our posture in the region continues to present a credible deterrent against Russia and should deterrence fail, it allows us to be in a better position to operate more effectively….

***

Security and stability of the Black Sea are in the U.S. national interest and are critical to the security of NATO’s Eastern Flank. It goes without saying that the region is vulnerable to Russian aggression, and we have seen evidence of that by ongoing actions in Eastern Ukraine, occupation of parts of Georgia, militarization of the Black Sea, and provocative actions in the air and at sea. I would go further and say that Russia’s destabilizing activities in and around the Black Sea reflect its ambitions to regain a dominant position in the region and to prevent the realization of a Europe that is whole, free and at peace.

Video. Complete Speech

Press conference with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III and Romanian Defense Minister Nicolae Ciucă, now being proposed for the prime ministership of Romania.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

It is pretty clear these days that corporate America is now controlling the State Department along with their “health agencies” such as the FDA and the CDC.

This week the Biden Administration laid out their plans to quickly vaccinate 28 million children between the ages of 5 and 11 with a COVID-19 vaccine, which sounded more like a Press Release from Pfizer, since the FDA has not even authorized the shots for that age group yet.

ZeroHedge News reported:

The Biden administration on Wednesday unveiled its plan to ‘quickly’ vaccinate roughly 28 million children age 5-11, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The jab – which doesn’t prevent transmission of Covid-19 will be available at pediatricians, local pharmacies, and possibly even at schools, according to the White House, which expects FDA authorization of the Pfizer shot for children – the least likely to fall seriously ill or die from the virus, in a matter of weeks, according to the Associated Press.

Federal regulators will meet over the next two weeks to weigh the benefits of giving shots to kids, after lengthy studies meant to ensure the safety of the vaccines.

Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale. -AP

According to the announcement, the White House has secured enough to supply more than 25,000 doses for pediatricians and primary care physicians who have already signed up to deliver the vaccine, while the country now has enough Pfizer vaccine to jab roughly 28 million kids who will soon be eligible, meaning this won’t be a slow roll-out like we saw 10 months ago when doses and capacity issues meant adults had to wait.

Meanwhile, the White House is rolling out an ‘advertising’ campaign to convince parents and kids that the vaccine is safe and effective. According to the report, “the administration believes trusted messengers — educators, doctors, and community leaders — will be vital to encouraging vaccinations.” (Full article.)

There is actually no data supporting the claim that the Pfizer COVID-19 shot is “safe and effective” for children, and plenty of data showing that it is harmful, causing severe reactions such as death and heart disease.

The most recent data entered into the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows that for children and teenagers between the age of 12 and 19, there have been:

• 54 Deaths
• 315 Permanent Disabilities
• 4381 Visits to an Emergency Room
• 2433 Hospitalizations
• 465 Life Threatening Events

(Source. Note that the search separates 12-17 year olds, and 17-44 year olds, although we only searched through age 19, so you need to add the two tables together to get these numbers.)

Everyone agrees that VAERS is vastly under-reported, as many whistleblowing nurses and healthcare workers have testified that doctors are reluctant to report vaccine injuries. See: Unvaccinated Hospital Staff Only Ones Telling the Truth Regarding Vaccine Injuries as They Prepare to Leave the Medical System

PhD researcher and statistician Dr. Jessica Rose has conducted an analysis of COVID-19 vaccine adverse reaction reporting in VAERS (study here), and her analysis shows that a conservative estimate of the under-reporting of COVID-19 vaccine adverse reactions in VAERS would necessitate that we multiply the results by X42.

So the true numbers for adverse events from 12 to 19-year-olds would be closer to this:

• 2,268 Deaths
• 13,230 Permanent Disabilities
• 184,002 Visits to an Emergency Room
• 102,186 Hospitalizations
• 19,530 Life Threatening Events

Note that most of these stats are for only 5 months, since it was in May, 2021 that the FDA authorized use of these shots for 12 to 15-year-olds.

How do these numbers compare with the risk of this age group for dying from COVID-19 for the past two yearsaccording to public data?

Source.

So when the CDC, FDA, and the White House assure you that these shots are safe for your children, and that any known side effects resulting in death and heart disease (which they admit) are “rare,” and that the “benefits outweigh the risks,” this is a LIE. It is simply a marketing slogan to promote their products.

Big Pharma in corporate America is running this country’s medical system, and the decisions they are making regarding COVID-19 “vaccines” have everything to do with their “bottom line” in profits and future control of endless “booster shots,” and nothing to do with public health. See: All 3 FDA-Authorized COVID-19 Vaccine Companies Employ Former FDA Commissioners

The entire population in the U.S. knows now that there are two differing narratives to COVID-19 shots, as millions of people in this country are choosing to give up their careers and jobs rather than comply with COVID-19 mandatory vaccinations.

If you or someone you know chooses NOT to research the other side, to hear why these people are making this choice, but instead chooses only to listen to what the Pharma-owned corporate media publishes, then even though criminals are now running the medical system and the political system here in the U.S., it is 100% YOUR FAULT if you choose to allow your child to receive a COVID-19 shot and they end up permanently disabled or dead.

You will be complicit with these crimes against humanity, and the blood of your child will be on your hands, and you will have to give an account before God for your decisions, and I don’t think he will accept the excuse “I didn’t know.”

This video report will show you grieving parents who have lost their children after choosing to allow them to receive a COVID-19 shot, and they would probably give anything to have their child back, regretting their foolish choice to allow their child to be vaccinated.

This is on our Bitchute and Rumble video channels.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video 

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The German Federal Statistical Office reported an excess mortality rate of 10 percent above the mean value for previous years in Germany. The mainstream is silent on this increase.

The Ministry of Health only gave a meaningless answer to journalist Boris Reitschuster’s question about the shocking statistics. There were fewer Covid-19 deaths, they announced instead. The fact is: Vaccination critics expected this development.

For months there have been increasing reports of the high mortality in old people’s homes after vaccination appointments or an increase in intensive care patients due to vaccination. However, they are difficult to prove, as they are mostly based on hearsay and small samples. Data protection and medical confidentiality usually prevent gleaning direct evidence.

But there is now an increase in total mortality that cannot be denied. The increase in deaths may not yet constitute solid evidence, because, as statistics expert Thorsten Wiethölter pointed out, the data on the age structure are missing for more precise conclusions.

But this is how the German government explained excess mortality: By saying nothing at all. When Reitschuster asked the German government how they explained excess mortality, he also raised the question of whether it could be the “Israel effect”. By this he meant the observed increase in intensive care patients after the start of the vaccination campaign.

The answer of the spokeswoman for Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) was: The government does not explain the excess mortality and it does not care, because “Covid-19 deaths have decreased”.

Parissa Hajebi replied for Spahn: “It is the case that statistics on excess mortality cannot be interpreted in real time. The comparison data is missing for this. The number of Corona deaths has decreased significantly. That is also a very good development.”

The mainstream media became exalted when Spain vaccinated itself “to the top of the world”. Spain is indeed at the “top”, namely the number one in excess mortality.

„Spanien impft sich an die Weltspitze“.

Und in Europa an die Spitze der Übersterblichkeit (KW41).https://t.co/k2nsVal51M pic.twitter.com/X5Qz7My3se

— henning rosenbusch (@rosenbusch_) October 21, 2021

In Great Britain a report by the Telegraph shook things up, with doctors observing an increase in illnesses and deaths. They justified this with the “misguided Corona policy”.

On the other hand, because of vaccine damage to the immune system, more people are also getting viral diseases such as the flu, which in turn also leads to an increase in deaths.

Not only has mortality increased in Germany since the start of the vaccination campaign, but children and adolescents are increasingly filling Germany’s intensive care units. At the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), three deaths after vaccination and a large number of heart infections were registered in the first three weeks after the STIKO recommendation for vaccinating children. The three children who died in the first few weeks after the onset of the children’s vaccinations are said to have suffered fatal pulmonary embolisms, bleeding and multiple organ failure, as well as circulatory shock.

The government and the mainstream are also silent on this. And the Paul Ehrlich Institute has also been silent on the causes. As reported by Russia Today, the PEI has not yet issued a further safety report since their first one – that is, for a whole three months so far.

Apparently vaccination side effects and vaccination deaths are not that important as far as the government is concerned. After all, German health authorities maintain that anyone who dies from vaccinations or a weakened immune system can no longer die from Covid-19. And according to the statement of the Spahn spokeswoman, this is ultimately a success.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Covid-19 mortality. Photo credit: Isaac Quesada

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

A few days back, I took a peek at the COP26 climate conference website in order to try and track down its official sponsors, because – in these over-monetised times – no self-respecting conference goes without its sponsors, partners, supporters or whatever title is in vogue these days.

Sign up for Professor Bill McGuire’s newsletter.

In retrospect, I was probably being a bit naïve, but I expected to see the names of big environmental organisations, Greenpeace perhaps, or Friends of the Earth, and maybe ultra-green energy companies like Ecotricity. What I didn’t expect to see was the names of big polluters, their supporters and their funders.

According to the COP26 website, the UK Government is seeking sponsors who – amongst other commendable aims for tackling the climate emergency – are making real progress in the fight against climate change and are aligned with the aims of COP26. They are also required to have strong climate credentials and short-term plans to meet net zero emissions in 2050 or earlier.

Plastic

So far, so good. Let’s see, then, which admirable companies have signed up as so-called Principal Partners. Well, there’s Nat West Group, who made real progress in the fight against climate change by pumping more than US$13 billion into the fossil fuel sector between 2016 and 2020.

Conveniently, in advance of COP, they claim now to be phasing out financing of oil and gas companies who don’t have plans in place that are in line with Paris climate agreement goals – whatever this means in the real world. Apparently, this makes everything OK and wipes the slate clean.

Alongside Nat West Group, we have SSE Power. This is the energy company that operates the most polluting facility in Scotland, the Peterhead gas power plant. SSE are also in the process of building the huge Keadby 2 gas plant in Lincolnshire, locking fossil fuels into the energy mix for decades.

National Grid are on the list too, despite being keen supporters of carbon intensive ‘blue’ hydrogen, which is derived from fossil fuels. Then there is Unilever, one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, generating a staggering 700,000 tonnes a year.

They are promising to cut plastic use by 100,000 tonnes a year by 2025, to which my response is, big deal! Sainsbury’s are there too, a company that managed to get the lowest marks in a Greenpeace report on supermarket progress to cut plastic packaging.

Victory

So much for the principal partners. One step down are the Partners who, presumably, haven’t shovelled in enough money to be worth the ‘principal’ tag. Here we have a company referred to on the COP website simply as BCG.

Clicking on the name links to the BCG Centre for Climate & Sustainability, and reveals the company’s full name, the Boston Consulting Group. Funnily enough, nowhere on this page does it mention that advising oil, gas and coal extractors about how to make the most of their business, is a major part of the group’s consultancy work.

Alongside BCG is a company called SalesForce, which describes itself, on its website, as a ‘customer relationship management solution’, whatever the hell that is. It doesn’t take much browsing to discover that, like BCG, SalesForce has close links with the oil and gas sector.

Step down another level and we have what are called conference ‘Providers’, although it is not clear just what they are providing. The UK government has only managed to attract one provider so far, but what a provider. DLA Piper is a law firm with considerable involvement with the fossil fuel industry.

Astonishingly, it actually boasts on its website about ‘achieving victory’ for the Central New York Oil and Gas Company in a case that cleared the way for development of the US$257 million Marcellus Shale gas pipeline project in the Appalachians.

Fracking

Unusually, for a conference, COP26 has so-called ‘Friends’ as well as partners and providers. It is not clear whether those invited to be friends need to pay for the privilege or not. Given that a number are academics and NGO representatives are on board, it seems unlikely.

The role of the Friends of COP is, it seems, to advise the UK government and inspire action from their sectors ahead of the conference.

When I spotted the name of Sir Ian Cheshire amongst the list of friends I thought, initially, that it must be some sort of joke or a case of mistaken identity. But no, the non-executive director of Barclays plc and Chairman of Barclays Bank, UK is pictured in full glory.

My belief has never been so beggared. Barclays is one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel bankers, and the biggest in Europe. It is the largest non-US funder of fracking, and has increased its funding of the fracking sector by almost a quarter since 2019.

Climate-clobbering

Over the last five years, it is also one of the biggest non-Chinese funders of the coal industry. In total, Barclays pumped a staggering US$144 billion into the fossil fuel sector between 2016 and 2020.

It took me a while to get my head around this and to try and figure out what the hell is going on. COP26 is arguably the most important meeting in the history of humankind, yet it apparently counts a leading representative of one of the world’s biggest investors in carbon pollution as a friend, and welcomes other companies with dismal environmental records on board.

The answer lies in the fact that sponsors appear to be invited and appointed by the UK Government, I assume with no involvement from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which organises the COP meetings.

This explains a great deal. In it’s usual slap-dash way, my assumption is that the government has simply taken the corporate dollar and asked no questions. There can’t surely, have been any real and effective vetting procedure, given who has been allowed on board. As for due diligence, either there has been none, or the government simply does not care about the climate-clobbering activities of those it has appointed as sponsors.

Agenda

Even before it begins, the involvement of such corporations and individuals is in danger of devaluing the whole event. It allows them to hijack this critical meeting as an opportunity for green-washing, to access and rub shoulders with key decision makers, and to influence the agenda.

Most of those I have mentioned are also slated to host public events in the conference ‘green zone’, where they will have the opportunity to pull more wool over the eyes of those watching and listening.

It really is despicable, and an awful look, to have the names of those who are part of the problem rather than the solution on board. It should be in the power of the UNFCCC to decide who can participate as sponsors and contributors – based upon real green credentials – and not Boris and his mates.

I doubt that the choice of supporters is part of any hidden agenda or plan to embarrass the organisers. Far more likely is that it is simply the latest example of the serial incompetence of those currently running the country.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. He was a contributer to the IPCC report on climate change and extreme events. His latest book, Skyseed – an eco-thriller about climate engineering gone wrong – is published by The Book Guild.

Featured image: Satirical Barclays adverts were installed by Brandalism activists, adding pressure to banks to divest from fossil fuels. (Source: The Drum/Brandalism)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan — originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

You know, the “classified” stuff — like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!

At the time of the release of that particular video, in 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decried the fact that the public was seeing a fragment of the war on terror “out of context.” And, indeed, he was right. As I later wrote:

“The Department of Defense is supposed to have total control over context; on the home front, war is 100 percent public relations. The public’s role is to be spectators, consumers of orchestrated news; they can watch smart bombs dropped from on high and be told that this is protecting them from terrorism and spreading democracy. That’s context.”

Assange’s crime was collaborating with whistleblowers to expose hidden data and disrupt that context. Over the course of a decade, WikiLeaks published some 10 million secret documents, more than the rest of the world’s media combined, according to a Progressive International video. This is the organization that has launched the Belmarsh Tribunal, which is demanding that Assange be released from British prison and not be extradited to the United States. The Tribunal, modeled after the 1966 tribunal organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the U.S. accountable for its actions in Vietnam, will put the country on trial for its 21st century war crimes.

The government’s desperation to extradite, try and essentially get rid of Assange is profoundly understandable. He is a threat to war itself — that is to say, to the abstraction of war, i.e., “national defense,” which claims a trillion dollars a year in unquestioned (and ever-increasing) funding and sits in the public consciousness as just the way things are. By penetrating the realities of war and pulling it out of its carefully orchestrated public context, by publicizing its raw horrors, he became a danger to the country’s political status quo.

So much so, in fact, that:

“In 2017,” Yahoo News reported a month ago, “as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.

“Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries.’”

The disaster known as the Vietnam War, which ended in U.S. disgrace — which had to end because the country’s own troops had turned against it in huge numbers — led to something called “Vietnam Syndrome,” a public disgust for war itself. What an inconvenience for the government, which was still engaged in its Cold War with the communists but could only wage proxy wars, e.g., in Nicaragua, where the contras had to do the dirty work.

Finally, in 1991, as George H.W. Bush launched Gulf War One in Iraq, he declared: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

The U.S.A. was finally free to militarize its propaganda again, that is to say, to spread democracy around the globe with the help of bombs and bullets. Since the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War had ended, a new enemy had to be found, but that was no problem. A decade later, Bush Jr. launched the War on Terror and the endless wars of the 21st century began.

And they were good.

Well, they were good as long as the Department of Defense had control over their context. Assange, by defying all restrictions on the truth and exposing the raw realities of these wars — the lies, the hell — could bring the statistics of war to life, e.g.:

“At least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan,” according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.”

And:

“Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.”

The U.S. government has apologized for ten of those deaths, and only — only! — because the incident was investigated and came to public attention.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Two nephews of John F. Kennedy are calling on the Biden administration to release the final trove of secret documents on the 1963 assassination of the former president.

The records were scheduled to be made public Tuesday, but the White House announced late Friday night that it would delay their publication until at least Dec. 15 — and perhaps longer if President Joe Biden determines it’s in the nation’s best interest to keep them confidential.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The probability is that the US President Joe Biden committed yet another diplomatic gaffe at a CNN town hall last Thursday that Washington had a commitment to come to Taiwan’s defence if it were attacked by China.

Yet, like Biden’s gaffes usually, this one too was not without an element of deliberateness. Biden was even insistent. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate in the US on this topic and Biden tapped into it.

Nonetheless, the very next day, the White House sought to walk back Biden’s comments, explaining he “wasn’t announcing a change in policy nor have we changed our policy. We are guided by the Taiwan Relations Act.” The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 commits the US to providing Taiwan with arms for its self-defence but does not commit sending American troops to defend Taiwan. 

Again, on Friday, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and State Department Spokesman Ned Price signalled to Beijing that the status quo hasn’t changed — and to Taipei cautioning against declaration of independence.

Interestingly, on Friday itself, Senator Edward J. Markey, Chair of the East Asia Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Dan Sullivan introduced a bipartisan legislation titled the Taiwan Actions Supporting Security by Undertaking Regular Engagements (Taiwan ASSURE) Act that “invests in stability measures to lower the risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait by supporting dialogues to mitigate misunderstandings and promote transparency.” 

Senator Markey, the veteran lawmaker from Massachusetts, has been closely associated with Biden and former secretary of state John Kerry and stepped in for damage control in consultation with the White House. He said, 

“We must find ways to lower tensions and avoid miscalculation in the Taiwan Strait. This legislation will invest in crisis stability measures as an essential part of the United States’ regional security strategy with the goal of avoiding armed conflict. Consistent with our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States must continue to support Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the international community and help the country withstand cross-Strait coercion, while taking clear action to avoid conflict in the region.” read more  

Clearly, at the responsible level of US leadership, there are no takers for the steady drumbeat among the hawks and neocons to play chicken with the US-China relations. Both within the Biden Administration and the Congress, there is level-headed understanding that the US national security is not at stake here and to gamble the fate of humanity is sheer madness. Biden has more foreign policy experience than any US president in modern history since Eisenhower.

Beijing reacted forcefully to Biden’s remark but to set the record straight. Meanwhile, could Biden have been in the dark about the 20-year energy deal last week between the US exporter Venture Global LNG and the Chinese state oil giant Sinopec on supplying a combined 4 million tons of liquefied natural gas annually and a second deal with the trading arm of Sinopec to supply another 1 million tons of LNG for three years? 

Reports also appeared last week that the Chinese natural gas distributor ENN Natural Gas Co signed a 13-year deal to buy LNG from US supplier Cheniere Energy Inc starting July 2022. This is the first time in 3 years that major LNG deals were inked between Chinese and US companies. 

Global Times wrote that the deals could “make China and the US to strike for a return to normal bilateral relations.” Due to logistics snags and other factors, the US currently has little ability to meet China’s cascading demand for natural gas. China is forecast to overtake Japan as the world’s biggest buyer of LNG this year. To be sure, energy cooperation with China is crucial for the US export of natural gas in the long run. In the Asian market, energy prices are skyrocketing. 

As it is, China-US trade volume grew 35.4% from January to September in dollar terms from last year (US exports to China jumped 43.5% in this period), and is expected to surpass the $630 billion pre-trade war level in 2018 to touch $700 billion.

Such growth testifies to the intertwining character of the world’s two largest economies and underscores that China and the US are deepening economic and trade ties and getting back to a normal track since Biden took office. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told CGTN in an interview on Tuesday that China and the US are “an inseparable community of shared interests.”  

That said, the big question still hangs in the air: Why did Biden sound belligerent? Three — possibly, four — reasons can be attributed. First, post-Afghanistan, be it on Ukraine and the Black Sea or NATO expansion, the Biden Administration is flexing muscles. Second, the US feels exasperated that like at no time, its pathway is getting blocked as others keep testing its resolve. Look at North Korea’s chutzpah. 

For instance, things look as if the JCPOA is about to collapse and all that remains is “a perception of movement in the negotiations,” as Trita Paris, the well-known American expert on Iran, has written, while a “shift to more coercion under an undefined Plan B” is fraught with grave dangers. read more 

Ironically, even as Biden spoke, news appeared that a Chinese-Russian joint naval flotilla is displaying “freedom of navigation” by making a circle around Japan and sailing toward the US Navy base in Yokosuka, headquarters of the US Seventh Fleet, from which the US has been making provocative moves in the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea. 

There is a taunting message here to the US and Japan, as many key military installations are located on the east side of Japan. A Russian Defence Ministry statement said, “The tasks of the joint patrolling were to demonstrate the state flags of Russia and China, maintain peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and also protect facilities of both countries’ maritime economic activity. During the patrol, the group of warships passed through the Tsugaru Strait (to western Pacific) for the first time.” read more

Third, Biden is fully well aware that China has no intentions to annex Taiwan through military means and his grandstanding wouldn’t change Beijing’s grand strategy. On the other hand, at a juncture when his political capital is depleting and public rating plummeting, it looks good to sound resolute and strong. 

The reality is that Biden began his presidency with an ambitious agenda to remake the US economy that drew comparison with FDR’s New Deal. But, bogged down in negotiations and Senate rules, and coping with a schism within his own party, Biden has been forced to trim sails and his most ambitious proposals have been dropped, some of them indefinitely. 

Meanwhile, as Axios puts it, “Former President Trump is telling most anyone who’ll listen he will run again in 2024… Trump is the heart, soul and undisputed leader of the Republican Party and will easily win the nomination if he wants it, the polls make unmistakably clear.”

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: China-Russia naval exercise Joint Sea-2021 kicked off in Russia’s Peter the Great Bay on October 14 focusing on mine countermeasures, air defence, live-fire shooting, maneuvering & anti-submarine mission (Source: China Military)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Review of All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists by Caitlin Petre (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Journalism is in crisis. The past two decades have seen tens of thousands of newspaper jobs vanish and hundreds of communities become news deserts. Run-amok commercialism continues to hollow out and distort our news media in increasingly dangerous ways. Yet, despite such worrying signs, the precise contours of these structural transformations often escape scrutiny, and it’s often unclear what’s truly new. After all, profit-driven media have always underserved and misrepresented large segments of society along socioeconomic divides. Informational redlining is baked into the very DNA of a commercial press that privileges profits over people.

What we’re witnessing today, however, is the late-stage decay of advertising-dependent, market-driven journalism. Many of the most visible maladies — the feeding frenzies of vulture capitalist hedge funds, the far-right propagandists exploiting news vacuums, the platform monopolies voraciously devouring ad revenue and amplifying misinformation — are opportunistic parasites exacerbating the crisis, not the root cause. The entire commercial structure is rotten to its core, and the far-reaching implications of this decomposition, especially for those working toward a more democratic future, have yet to be fully appraised.

While the symptoms of commercial media’s structural pathologies are legion, one that’s increasingly visible and yet under-studied is how the desperate search for ever-diminishing revenues worsens labor conditions — which in turn degrades journalists’ well-being, the content they produce, and society writ large.

Caitlin Petre, a media sociologist at Rutgers University, has published a timely and important book that vividly captures these transmogrifications. Her engagingly written and deeply researched All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists exposes a particularly glaring manifestation of intensified commercial pressures: the growth of “newsroom metrics” that measure and gauge reader engagement with digital news content. By fetishizing these audience analytics, journalists are driven to optimize their content for clicks, ultimately in ways that deteriorate their own working conditions.

Through careful, painstaking ethnographic research with the New York Times, Gawker (the pre-Peter-Thiel-destroyed version), and the audience analytics firm Chartbeat, Petre lays bare how such accelerating pressures are restructuring newsrooms and warping journalistic labor in profoundly troubling ways. She traces how the logic driving newsroom metrics aims to maximize profits by extracting greater productivity from news workers and greater commercial value from the content they produce.

News outlets increasingly rely on these metrics to provide incessant feedback about their content’s online performance. Gawker even kept in full view a wall-mounted, large-screen data dashboard — sometimes referred to as the “big board” — that was essentially a scoreboard displaying the traffic metrics of specific stories. Petre notes that Chartbeat’s specialty was to go beyond simple page views to calculate engagement metrics of time spent with the content and whether the article was shared. By compulsively following real-time analytics flashing across their screens — and reinforced by various rewards — many journalists develop a perverse obsession with such metrics. This growing fixation, according to Petre, is “reshaping the journalistic labor process.”

Petre observes that audience metrics are part of an emergent set of managerial strategies to discipline news work. This new kind of Taylorism is gradually creeping into so-called creative and knowledge work — areas of expertise that typically enjoy more autonomy than industrial labor. While such professional expectations were perhaps always misguided (cultural workers are, after all, still workers and still exploited by capitalism), journalists’ sense of personal agency and independence is particularly acute, and therefore especially affected by these changing work regimes.

By foregrounding journalism as a form of labor, a framework often ignored within the subfield of journalism studies, Petre gains purchase on interrogating key power relationships within the broader news industry. She notes that news metrics serve as a “form of labor discipline that shapes both the organization and lived experience of journalistic work under capitalism.” Drawing from Harry Braverman’s classic work showing how Taylorism “deskills” workers as a means of managerial control, Petre also integrates Michael Burawoy’s contributions to this critique to underscore how this regime requires workers to become “willing participants in the intensification of their own exploitation.”

For this managerial strategy to succeed, then, workers must maintain some agency throughout the process. This arrangement is rendered more palatable for journalists by the gamelike characteristics of the analytics dashboards, which have an addictive quality as media workers constantly try to win what Petre calls “The Traffic Game.” Petre argues that this habit-forming user interface with real-time newsroom metrics serves as a “regime of managerial surveillance.”

Having spent many weeks studying their daily activities “in situ,” Petre notes that Chartbeat’s strategy paid off handsomely, with journalists obsessing over ways to increase traffic numbers for their stories, pushing themselves to work ever harder, serving managerial interests more than their own despite the absence of direct coercion. Recalling Dean Starkman’s observations about the “hamsterization of journalism” from a decade ago, Petre reveals how struggling news organizations force journalists to work more for less under increasingly casualized and precarious conditions.

Petre’s analysis implicitly draws attention to the not-so-hidden eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room: the monstrosity that is Facebook (a subject to which the book could perhaps have devoted more attention). Given the platform’s gatekeeping position as the primary portal to a massive global readership, reporters internalize an almost-instinctual awareness as to what types of content capture attention and perform well on the Facebook news feed. Such dynamics incentivize journalists — many of whom face intense job insecurity — to craft their reporting according to clickbait criteria that emphasize controversy, conflict, sensationalism, and anything that prompts people to engage with stories, thereby generating more advertising revenue.

Critics have long argued that metrics-driven journalism privileges fluff over high-quality news, while conditioning journalists to treat audiences as apolitical consumers and entertainment seekers rather than engaged participants within a democratic polity. By conflating consumer choice with democratic needs, these market-based values reduce audience engagement to a commercial transaction and devalue other less easily measured concerns, such as how well the press serves democracy.

Much to her credit, Petre often returns to such normative concerns, even as she provides thick description of how journalists negotiate these dynamics. A fundamental meta-question that she poses, along with several others midway through the book, that could serve as the overarching query is: “Can the profit imperatives of commercial news production coexist with the profession’s civic mandate?” The evidence featured in this book and elsewhere suggests that these aims are increasingly incompatible.

Early boosters suggested that metrics enabled journalists to be more responsive to their audiences’ desires, thereby democratizing the news. Overall, however, the metrification of news labor is yet one more blow to the dignity and quality of life for news workers, and increasingly other creative and knowledge-work sectors as well.

While Petre clearly shows news metrics’ many harms — and how they can be stressful and demoralizing for journalists — she also argues they can be empowering, defying an overly simplistic narrative of managerial exploitation. In her nuanced attention to “interpretive ambiguity,” Petre adopts what she sees as a dialectical relationship between managerial control and worker autonomy, where “journalists and analytics tools engage in the mutual shaping of each other.”

Petre also shows how journalists strive to establish ethical boundaries between “clean” and “dirty” uses of data, and they have some leeway in how they make sense of the traffic data relentlessly fed back to them. Citing Erik Olin Wright’s “contradictory locations within class relations,” she nods to editors’ divided loyalties in managing the use of newsroom metrics, sometimes siding with workers and other times management. And she notes significant differences between the New York Times strategy of subordinating the role of analytics in the editorial process compared to Gawker’s metrics-driven managerial strategy.

A counterintuitive potential benefit to metrics that Petre teases out is that they “may also inadvertently (her emphasis) cultivate a sense of shared grievance, collective identification, and class consciousness among knowledge workers.” It is notable that, in 2015, Gawker Media became the first major digital media outlet to unionize when their editorial employees voted overwhelmingly to form a union with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), helping kick off an ongoing series of newsroom labor victories over the past six years.

In her conclusion, Petre highlights this glimmer of hope on the labor front within an otherwise dismal landscape. She points to the growing unionization efforts within traditional and new digital newsrooms as evidence of an increased sense of shared struggle and solidarity among news workers, which is necessary to counteract workplace abuses and the predations of capitalism. In the final analysis, Petre argues, metrics remind journalists that they are workers regardless of how “creative, prestigious, and autonomous [their work] may seem, and however passionately they may feel about it.”

Petre’s book is an antidote to the exuberance about the grand affordances of data-driven journalism that characterized so much writing and thinking in the 2010s. It brings into focus yet another startling example of how commercialism debases every facet of our news and information systems. But like other more visible problems — from the loss of jobs to the proliferation of mis- or disinformation to the Foxification of our news media — journalists’ worsening labor conditions are epiphenomenal of deeper institutional corruption.

Petre offers what’s essentially a meso-level analysis of workplace power relationships, centered between a macro-level political-economic critique of corporate ownership structures and capitalist ideology in the media industry, and a more micro-level view of journalistic routines and values. She deftly connects these layers while noting that the phenomena she studies are both symptoms and symbols of larger structural shifts, namely those involved in the unimpeded ascent of neoliberalism.

Petre’s invaluable research is another contribution to a growing body of research critiquing profit-driven journalism, which provides the necessary context for imagining systemic alternatives to failing commercial media models. To build on this intellectual foundation, we must begin envisioning and endeavoring toward a system that empowers news workers by giving them ownership and control over their newsrooms.

Leftist critics have been quick to indict corporate media, but less adept at articulating a new kind of media system, one that’s truly democratized under public ownership. This disconnect is surprising, given how the Left historically has seen the press as a crucial terrain for struggle. Social movements have long relied on various types of journalism, even within mainstream corporate media, to advance progressive causes. Reliable journalism and a functional news media system are vital components of any effort for progressive social change, from fighting fascism to halting climate change.

In short, we ignore news media’s death-by-metrics at our peril. The unholy union between capitalism and journalism is finally fraying beneath the weight of its many contradictions, and the industry’s worsening labor conditions are part of this broader reckoning. Petre’s book reveals the scope of the problem, while also encouraging us to view commercial journalism’s crisis as an opportunity to create something entirely different.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Victor Pickard is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest books are After Net Neutrality, coauthored with David Elliot Berman, and Democracy Without Journalism?.

Featured image: The Gawker “big board,” a scoreboard displaying the traffic metrics of the publication’s stories. (Scott Beale / Laughing Squid via Flickr)

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

It didn’t take long for the US to up the ante with China and Russia. So soon after the crushing defeat from 20 years of death and destruction in Afghanistan we find Washington stirring the fire pit and looking for more trouble.

It’s really no surprise. Just take a close look at US history – one filthy war after the other.

Just this past week we’ve seen ‘F the EU’ Victoria Nuland go to Moscow hoping for an audience with Putin. She only got to meet with lower level, but competent Russian diplomats, and came away with nothing other than furthering the divide between our two nations. Actually, that might have been the US strategy.

The word is that Nuland went in with a list of Washington’s demands. Russia said ‘nyet’ and handed Nuland a list of their own. Of course Nuland said ‘No’ and was then sent packing back to the US.

Secretary of War Lloyd Austin (former Raytheon board member) just stopped in Georgia, Ukraine, and Romania before heading to Brussels for hand-wringing with the NATO clowns.

Austin stated during a news conference in Bucharest that the purpose of these visits was to highlight “the importance of deepening cooperation among our Black Sea allies and partners to deter and defend against Russian malign activities in the region.”

That’s the political hype. His real purpose in Georgia, Ukraine, and Romania? Spur them to make trouble for Moscow in any way and every way they possibly can. And I’m sure Austin said the magic words, ‘Of course the US will back you if you get into a fight with Russia. First, we’ll supply you with more weapons and plant more of our troops in your nation to protect you from the Russian bear.’

At the Brussels meeting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the following:

• Allies will kick off a $1.16 billion NATO Innovation Fund to develop dual-use emerging and disruptive technologies. NATO will also establish its first artificial intelligence strategy to incorporate data analysis, imagery, and cyber defense.

• The allies are spending more on defense and they agreed to increase the readiness of forces.

• Significant improvements are being made to alliance air and missile defenses. NATO calls for strengthening conventional capabilities with fifth-generation jets, adapting exercises and intelligence, and improving the readiness and effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent.

• We exchanged views on how to preserve the gains and ensure Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists.

• NATO’s new strategy ensures that the alliance will have “the right forces in the right place at the right time.”

They also characteristically took at shot at China from behind the safe walls of NATO HQ in Brussels with a stream of rhetoric.

Austin’s remarks followed the completion of a two-day NATO ministerial where he said officials offered “unique perspectives” on China, which he noted remains the Pentagon’s “primary pacing challenge.”

“Indeed, I applaud NATO’s work on China and I made it clear that the United States is committed to defending the international rules-based order which China has consistently undermined for its own interests,” Austin told reporters.

At an October 21 CNN town hall, Joe Biden was asked about China.

“I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back, we are not going to change any of our views.” Biden said. Asked whether the US would come to Taiwan’s defense if it were attacked, he replied: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”

Now let’s analyze this NATO meeting and the comments on China just a bit.

First, who has Russia invaded? Since the US orchestrated coup in Ukraine in 2014 (when the Russian-ethnic people in Crimea voted to ask Russia to take them back into the federation) there has been no invasion of anyone near its borders. At the same time US-NATO has been holding war games repeatedly all along Russian borders. When Moscow has responded by holding counter-war games inside its own country Washington and Brussels have howled in condemnation. Talk about a double-standard!

And please note the words above by Austin – “I applaud NATO’s work on China” – just what does that mean?

NATO has gone global. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance has now decided that it should be ‘defending democracy in the Pacific’. Who is the aggressor in this case? What right does NATO have to decide it is the new global cop?

Can’t lick Afghanistan so let’s take on China & Russia

NATO has no legitimate reason to exist today – the Soviet Union and their Warsaw Pact Alliance are long gone. Russia just built an undersea natural gas pipeline called Nord Stream 2 to furnish fuel to Europe in order to help alleviate their current energy crisis. It’s a big business deal for Moscow. Why would Russia want war with Europe?

The insanity of US-NATO is exposed for anyone willing to see the obvious. Washington and Brussels got their high-tech asses kicked by a ill-armed rag-tag but determined Taliban in Afghanistan. Now they somehow dream that they can take on both China and Russia who have formed a military alliance as they watch the NATO endless war machine heading their way.

I understand that all these moves by US-NATO absolutely benefit the military industrial complex which has installed one of their agents (Lloyd Austin) as secretary of war. But do these psychopaths actually believe they can start a war with China and Russia and possibly win? Don’t they know that such a war would go nuclear in a hot flash?

It’s obvious that the US-NATO war cabal are blinded by power and greed. There can be no other explanation that comes close to making sense.

It’s a dangerous and dirty game these fat cats are playing – at the same time that climate crisis rages in our faces, legions of people face evictions from their homes, and the basic cost of living goes sky high.

Are we heading for a collapse in the US and around the globe? How could that not be happening under these present conditions?

And the US-NATO response?

How about another war?

Which party in Washington is leading this descent into hell?

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

The Fake “Delta Variant” and the Fourth Wave: Another Lockdown? Upcoming Financial Crash? Worldwide Economic and Social Sabotage?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 25, 2021

From the outset in January 2020, all far-reaching policy decisions upheld and presented to the public as a “means to saving lives” were based on  flawed and invalid RT-PCR case positives coupled with false mortality data pertaining to Covid-19 related deaths: Tn the US “The underlying Cause of death” is Covid-19 “more often or not” (CDC). No autopsy required.

‘It’s Absolutely Appalling’: Unvaccinated Canadians Become Social Outcasts and the New Persecuted Minority

By Eva Bartlett, October 24, 2021

In Canada, the supposedly benevolent country that prides itself on inclusivity, Covid totalitarianism has become unavoidably apparent, with its decision that soon only the fully vaccinated can travel.

COVID and Zero Tolerance for the Unvaccinated

By Peter Koenig, October 24, 2021

It is not more deadly than the common flu. And this according to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s own words, when he writes in a peer reviewed paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in February of 2020 – “Navigating the Uncharted”, where he says that covid-19 mortality is about the same as that of the common flu.

Sinister Rockefeller Food System Agenda — They Created It and Now Want to Destroy It

By F. William Engdahl, October 24, 2021

No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.”

The Dangers of Human Gene Editing

By Ulson Gunnar, October 24, 2021

From laboratory experiments to emerging software used to create code genetically almost as easily as code for a computer, gene editing has never been easier, opening the door to never-before-possible applications.

Taliban Is the Winner at Moscow Conference

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, October 24, 2021

The Moscow meeting of ten regional states and the Taliban officials on Wednesday has produced an outcome that by far exceeds expectations. The salience of the consensus opinion is four-fold, as reflected in the joint statement issued after the event.

China and the British Empire’s Opium Wars: The Role of Synthetic Cults and the Haunting of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, October 24, 2021

Whether we are looking at religious sects masquerading as Christian or Muslim fronts, or Asian scientology-esque Falun Gong cults Xi Jinpinghas some messy problems to deal with both within China and abroad.

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival: A Conversation with Richard Heinberg

By Michael Welch and Richard Heinberg, October 23, 2021

Not to boast, but we humans have been gifted with remarkable abilities to not only be able to adapt to our changing environment, but to actually adapt the natural world to our own needs.

Will this Conference that Celebrates the Palestinian Revolutionary Struggle Cut Through the Still Deafening Media Static of Israel’s “Narrative?”

By Rima Najjar, October 24, 2021

Will the revolutionary struggle for Palestinian liberation end up deleting Israel and “replacing” it with a country called Palestine? As I responded to Eyal on Facebook, this language is inappropriate. Palestine cannot “replace” Israel. Palestine is already placed there!

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

Nobel Prize Laureate Kary B. Mullis was the inventor of  the polymerase chain reaction technique (PCR-RT)

Dr. Kary B. Mullis, who passed away on August 7, 2019 at age 74, stated emphatically that no infection or illness can be accurately diagnosed with the PCR-RT. 

“PCR is a Process. It does not tell you that you are sick”. 

“The measurement is not accurate”. 

Mullis described the PCR-RT as a “technique” rather than “a test”.  

It is a useful technique which allows for “rapid amplification of a small stretch of DNA”.

Had Dr. Kary B. Mullis been alive today he would have been an outspoken critic of the Misuse of the PCR-RT by the WHO and national health authorities. The PCR-RT has been used as a so-called “test” to “detect” the spread of the virus as well  as “measure” the incidence of SARS-CoV-2.

The PCR-RT designed by Dr. Mullis is a technique. It is not a test 

This misuse of the PCR-RT technique has now been formally acknowledged in a January 2021 statement of the WHO. Despite its shortcomings, the use of the PCR test remains widespread. 

The data pertaining to so-called Covid-19 positive cases is misleading and invalid. 

See:  The WHO Confirms that the Covid-19 PCR Test is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” are Meaningless. The Lockdown Has No Scientific Basis

Michel Chossudovsky, October 12, 2021

***

***

See also Dr. Kary Mullis’ 1996 hour long interview with Dr. Gary Null

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). 

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

First published on August 11, 2021

.

Introduction

Is a new worldwide lockdown envisaged as a means to combating the “dangerous” Covid variant entitled “Delta”?

The fear campaign has once more gone into high gear.

Let me briefly review the history of this crisis. 

There is a sequence of outright lies and fabrications used to justify far-reaching policy decisions in the course of the last 18 months.

The biggest lie, which is firmly acknowledged both by scientific opinion and the WHO is that the RT-PCR test used to “detect” the spread of the virus (as well as the variants) is not only flawed but TOTALLY INVALID. (Michel Chossudovsky, Chapter III)

From the outset in January 2020, all far-reaching policy decisions upheld and presented to the public as a “means to saving lives” were based on  flawed and invalid RT-PCR case positives coupled with false mortality data pertaining to Covid-19 related deaths: Tn the US “The underlying Cause of death” is Covid-19 “more often or not” (CDC). No autopsy required.

These Covid “estimates” were used to justify confinement, social distancing, the face mask, the prohibition of social gatherings, cultural and sports events, the closure of economic activity. 

The crisis was marked by several important phases:

1. Crisis in Air Travel and International Transport

The calling of a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by the WHO Director General on January 30, 2020 was instrumental in launching the coronal crisis. There were 83 positive cases outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion. There was no emergency:  Ironically, the flawed and invalid RT-PCR test was used to estimate those 83 positive cases.

On the following day president Trump’s ordered the closing down of air travel with China which marked the onset of a crisis in International Air Travel and Transport which has extended its grip over a period of 18 months leading to the bankruptcy of airline companies Worldwide, the destruction of the tourist industry, a major crisis in commodity trade, etc.  This was a deliberate act to précipitate the demise of Air Travel Worldwide. There were 5 positive cases in the US, which were used to justify Trump’s decision on  January 31st, 2020.

2. The  February Financial Crash on February 20, 2020

It was the most serious financial crisis in World history, far surpassing that of 1929. It occurred immediately following “warnings” by the WHO that a covid-19 pandemic was imminent, thereby spearheading the fear campaign. There was  ample evidence of outright “conflict of interest” and fraud including foreknowledge, inside information, etc. which resulted in a massive concentration of money wealth by a handful of billionaires. That same day, millions of people Worldwide lost their lifelong savings. What was the justification for the WHO’s shock and awe statements. This imminent threat was based on 1078 (flawed) RT-PCR Covid positive cases outside China.

3. Barely three weeks later, the March 11, 2020 lockdown with 44,279 cases Worldwide outside China were used to justify home confinement, social distancing and the closure of economic activity Worldwide leading to poverty and mass unemployment.

And then in early November 2020 it was the launching of the MRNA “Killer Vaccine” which has resulted in a trend of mortality and morbidity. See the latest figures below.

The Delta Variant and “The Fourth Wave”

Starting in May-June 2021 extending in October , we have the Delta Variant. It’s the new talking point.

The alleged dangers of the Delta Variant are being used to speed up the vaccination program as well as the imposition of the vaccine passport.

“A Fourth Wave” has been announced.

Is a second Worlwide lockdown on the drawing board, requiring stay at home confinement, social distancing and the closure of economic activity coupled with another devastating financial crash similar to that which occurred on Black Thursday March 12, 2020?

The Deadly Variants Sustained by Media Disinformation and Fake Science

Media disinformation is a deadly weapon which sustains 24/7 the illusion of a dangerous SARS-2 Delta Variant.

First identified last year in India, The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was  “thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India”. According to so-called “scientific opinion” it is now said to be spreading worldwide, to some 80 countries.

“Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever.”

That’s a lie.  The original virus categorized by the WHO and the CDC as “similar to seasonal influenza” is not a killer virus. Moreover, virus variants are always “less vigilant” and “less dangerous” than the original virus.

Joe Biden’s proposed “solution” is  “the Killer Vaccine”, which has already in the course of the last seven months resulted in countless deaths and injuries:

“Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late.” (emphasis added)

Health authorities are now claiming that the new cases of the Delta B1.617 variant, increase the risk of hospitalization by 2.7 times.

What is the “science” behind these assertions.

Ferguson’s Infamous Lockdown “Mathematical Model”

Prof. Neil Ferguson is Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s  trusted “advisor”. He was the architect of the infamous Imperial College “mathematical model” which was used to justify the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of the global economy, leading to mass unemployment, extreme poverty and despair.  

Image on the right: Neil  Ferguson (Source: Financial Times)

Ferguson’s March 2020 mathematical model based on “predictions” of 600,000 deaths in the UK borders on ridicule. It’s more than a lie. It’s a crime against humanity. It was used by the financial establishment as a justification to trigger economic and social chaos Worldwide. Ferguson’s endeavors have been generously funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The economic and social devastation of the March 2020 so-called lockdown is beyond description: 190 member states of the United Nations accepted to “close down” their national economy coupled with the face mask, social distancing and the derogation of fundamental human rights.

The stated intent was to protect people against V the Virus. The March 11 lockdown was followed by the Black Thursday “financial crash” (March 12, 2020), which created havoc on stock markets Worldwide. The March 11, 2020 lockdown was heralded as a means to containing the alleged “pandemic”. Nonsense.

“Mathematical Model” in Support of a “Fourth Wave”

And now a second authoritative “mathematical model” has been put forth to “justify” another lockdown.

The same “scientist” (Ferguson) has been called upon to design a new “mathematical model” which is being used to justify a “Fourth Wave Lockdown”. 

The erroneous “assumption” behind the modelling exercise is that the Delta Variant is “deadly”.

“New modelling for the government’s SAGE committee of experts [to which Ferguson belongs] has highlighted the risk of a “substantial third wave” of infections and hospitalisations, ….” The official outlook is “now more pessimistic”.  (BBC Report, June 2021, emphasis added).

According to Prof Neil Ferguson:

“the Delta variant of coronavirus is 30% to 100% more transmissible than the previously dominant variant”. (quoted by the Guardian).

Where does Ferguson get his data and estimates? The flawed and invalid RT-PCR test?

What he fails to mention is that virus variants are always “less vigilant” and “less dangerous” in comparison to the original virus. And how does he establish the “identity” of the original virus?

Both British and UK officials are intimating the possibility of a Fourth Wave lockdown, tentatively scheduled for  Autumn.

According to Britain’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty (member of the SAGE Committee)

“The NHS needs to brace itself for another difficult winter ahead, with the possibility of a further “very significant Covid surge”.

According to the SPI-M modelling sub-group of the government’s SAGE panel (to which Whitty and Ferguson belong):

“restrictions would have to be reintroduced”. … the Delta variant posed a “higher risk of hospitalisations”

These announcements are frivolous. Their intent is to justify drastic policy measures (lockdown, mask, social distancing, closure of economic activity, disruption of health services) as well as the speeding up of the vaccination programme and the repression of the protest movement.

Moreover, the statements by British, US and EU health officials regarding the so-called spread of “the more infectious Delta variant” are now also being used to justify the implementation of  “Fourth Wave” lockdown policies internationally in a large number of countries.

The World Economic Forum to the Rescue

The World Economic Forum (WEF) which represents the financial elites, played a key role in the launching of the March 11, 2020 lockdown. And now what they are saying is that another devastating Worldwide economic and social crisis is likely to occur in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The WEF is now pointing to:

“A cyber-attack with COVID-like characteristics”, which promises to be far more devastating and chaotic than the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World Economic Forum’s “Concept 2021”. Cyber Polygon Scenario

In recent developments, the World Economic Forum (WEF) which co-sponsored Event 201, the table top simulation of the corona pandemic together with John Hopkins and the Gates Foundation in October 2019, is now involved in another strategic exercise entitled Concept 2021. The latter is described as an “international capacity building initiative aimed at raising the global cyber resilience”.  It is not a table top simulation comparable to Event 201. 

Last year it was conducted at the height of the lockdown via video conferencing. This year the 2021 Conference “discussed the “key risks of digitalisation”.

Those participating in the Cyber Polygon Exercise (2020) included high tech companies including IBM, numerous banks and financial institutions, internet companies, cyber security agencies, corporate and government media, think tanks, law enforcement agencies including Interpol with representatives from 48 countries. The exercise is an obvious means to secure reliable partners and develop strategic alliances. In this regard, there were numerous representatives from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, including major Russian banking interests, communications and media companies. All in all 42 partners. No corporate /governmental partner from China.

There was also a training program with 200 teams from 48 countries.

WEF Video

 

 

Klaus Schwab, founder and Executive Director of the WEF and architect of the “Great Reset” describes the crisis scenario as follows:

“The frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack.” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Jurgens, WEF Managing Director:

“I believe that there will be another crisis. It will be more significant. It will be faster than what we’ve seen with COVID. The impact will be greater, and as a result the economic and social implications will be even more significant.” (emphasis added)

The implications of these bold “predictions” which represent the interests of the financial establishment are far-reaching.

What they describe is a scenario of economic and social chaos involving the disruption of communications systems, the internet, financial and money transactions (including SWIFT), the power grid, global transportation, commodity trade, etc., as well as likely “geopolitical dislocations”.

The opening session (July 2021) of Cyber Polygon 2021 was conducted (video below) by the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin together with the Director General of the WEF Klaus Schwab.

Is this scenario a dress rehearsal for a forthcoming cyber crisis?

Why was China excluded from the Cyber Polygon Exercise? The major partners were from the former Soviet block.

Video. The Opening Session (July 2021).

The Simulation conducted in July 2021 is entitled Cyber Polygon 2021

 

Is  a “Cyber Attack Scenario” contemplated by the financial establishment?

While one cannot speculate, the matter must nonetheless be addressed.

The Delta Variant

Will the “deadly” Delta Variant be used as a pretext to justify the launching of a new phase of the corona crisis, resulting in a further process of billionaire enrichment coupled with rising public and private debts, inflation, unemployment and poverty?

Moreover, at this juncture of an unfolding crisis, governments and the media are now engaged in a fear campaign largely focussing on the “deadly” SARS-CoV-2 variants.

With a view to saving lives, the health authorities are intimating that if the Variants are not brought under control, a major  lockdown should be contemplated.

This narrative is based on outright lies and distortions. There is no scientific evidence derived from the flawed and invalid RT-PCR test which confirms the existence of  the alleged deadly SARS-CoV-2 “Variants”.

Is the Covid Agenda Part of  A U.S. Hegemonic Project?

Is the covid crisis engineered by the financial establishment part of a hegemonic project, pertaining to control over strategic sectors of the global economy as described by the WEF director general Klaus Schwab?

It’s an act of economic warfare?

It’s “imperialism with a human face”, committed to “saving lives”.

Visibly, it is part of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy agenda. It has geopolitical and strategic implications.

US intelligence and the Pentagon (including DARPA) as well as NATO are directly or indirectly involved in the corona crisis. Cyber Warfare is already on the drawing-board.

The March 11, 2020 Lockdown leading to closure of national economies Worldwide has also been instrumental in   destabilizing several countries which are categorized as “Enemies of America”.

No need for Washington to impose piecemeal sanctions on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. These countries have endorsed the covid narrative. They have accepted the “ultimate sanction”, namely the closure of their national economy as a means to combating “V the virus”.

The situation in Cuba is particularly dramatic. Resulting from the March 2020 lockdown, Cuba’s tourist industry which constitutes the country’s main source of foreign exchange is destroyed. Since the 1980s, the forex revenues from tourism have been used to import food. And now as a result of the closure of the tourist industry, Cuba is experiencing serious food shortages.

Yet the Cuban government has accepted the “Big Lie” and has endorsed the lockdown which is literally destroying the achievements of the Cuban Revolution.

And unfortunately progressive intellectuals are totally blind. They are not only supportive of the Covid narrative, they fail to understand how the Covid lockdown policies as well as the deadly mRNA vaccine are being used to destabilize and destroy countries one after the other. These countries are now fully controlled by Western creditors and the billionaire foundations.

Engineered economic and social chaos. Is that not part of a US hegemonic project?

Bastille 2.0: “Real Regime Change”

What is the solution? The complexities of this crisis must be addressed including the power structures of global capitalism.

What must also be understood are the astute mechanisms including threats and bribes which are used systematically to take control not only of corrupt politicians but of the entire governmental fabric of what used to be “sovereign countries”.

Is a second Worldwide lockdown contemplated? We must ensure that it does not take place, which means that we must confront the powers of so-called “global governance”.

Protest movements must question the legitimacy of both the financial actors as wells the politicians in high office:

The legitimacy of politicians and their powerful corporate sponsors must be questioned, including the police state measures adopted to enforce the closure of economic activity, the imposition of a digital vaccine passport as well as the wearing of the face mask, social distancing, etc.

This network must be established (nationally and internationally) at all levels of society, in towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate this movement.

The first task would be to disable the fear campaign and media disinformation as well put an end to Big Pharma’s Covid vaccination programme.

The corporate media should be directly challenged, without specifically targeting mainstream journalists, many of whom have been instructed to abide by the official narrative. This endeavour would require a parallel process at the grassroots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of  virus, the impacts of the vaccine and the lockdown.

“Spreading the word” through social media and independent online media outlets will be undertaken bearing in mind that Google as well as Facebook are instruments of censorship.

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the financial elites as well as the structures of political authority at the national level, is no easy task. It will require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history.

It will also require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society (i.e. between political parties) and acting with a single voice.

We must also understand that the “corona project” is an integral part of the U.S. imperial agenda. It has geopolitical and strategic implications. It will also require eventually unseating the architects of this diabolical “pandemic” and indicting them for crimes against humanity. (Michel Chossudovsky, December 2020. With some minor changes)

What is required is  a “real regime change”, the restoration of democracy and what used to be called “The Welfare State”.

Solidarity must prevails. A complex task and commitment ahead for all humanity.

About the Author

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),  UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)

He is the author of twelve books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005),  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).

He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]

See Michel Chossudovsky, Biographical Note

Michel Chossudovsky’s Articles on Global Research

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

First published by GR in October 2020

One year later, it is worth recalling the WHO’s historic statement, which was made one month prior to the launching of the Covid-19 vaccine on November 8, 2020.

***

The World Health Organization has finally confirmed what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.

The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board on Monday October 5th, it’s just nobody seemed to really understand it.

In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves.

At the session, Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s Head of Emergencies revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected with Sars-Cov-2. This is their “best estimate”, and a huge increase over the number of officially recognised cases (around 35 million).

Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokeswoman, later confirmed the figure, stating it was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence studies done around the world.

As much as the WHO were attempting to spin this as a bad thing – Dr Ryan even said it means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk.” – it’s actually good news. And confirms, once more, that the virus is nothing like as deadly as everyone predicted.

The global population is roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million cases. The global death toll currently attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections is 1,061,539.

That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14%. Right in line with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from all around the world.

0.14% is over 24 times LOWER than the WHO’s “provisional figure” of3.4% back in March. This figure was used in the models which were used to justify lockdowns and other draconian policies.

In fact, given the over-reporting of alleged Covid deaths, the IFR is likely even lower than 0.14%, and could show Covid to be much less dangerous than flu.

None of the mainstream press picked up on this. Though many outlets reported Dr Ryan’s words, they all attempted to make it a scary headline and spread more panic.

Apparently neither they, nor the WHO, were capable of doing the simple maths that shows us this is good news. And that the Covid sceptics have been right all along.

In the interest of thoroughness, a desire to rely on primary sources, and not depending purely on mainstream sources (which may remove or amend articles), I decided to find the actual video of Dr Ryan’s remarks.

For some reason, although this was an important WHO meeting during an allegedly hyper-serious pandemic, the video is hard to find. The only place you are able to see it is the WHO’s own website, and even then you have to scrub through almost 6 hours of footage. Well, I did that, and you are welcome.

You can’t embed the WHO’s stream, but I can tell you to go to this page, click “Session 1” and skip to 1:01:33 to hear the exact quote:

Our current best estimates tell us that about ten percent of the global population may have been infected by this virus. This varies depending on country, it varies from urban to rural, it varies between different groups.”

I will work on getting an audio clip, for ease of sharing and to make sure it does not get memory holed.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Introduction

The COVID crisis engineered by the financial establishment is part of a hegemonic project, pertaining to control over strategic sectors of the global economy.

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair. 

An unelected “public-private partnership” under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has come to the rescue of  Planet Earth’s 7.9 billion people. The closure of the global economy is presented as a means to “killing the virus”. 

This hegemonic project consists in adopting The Great Reset under the helm of what the late David Rockefeller entitled “Supranational Sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers“. This “alliance” according to Rockefeller is “preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

Image on the right: David Rockefeller meets Argentina’s military dictator General Jorge Videla (right) (mid 1970s)

This diabolical project consists in scrapping representative democracy and the Nation State in favour of a New World Order dominated by the financial elites and their “selected intellectual partners”.

Planet Inc.

What is ongoing is a process of concentration of wealth (and control of advanced technologies) unprecedented in World history, whereby the financial establishment is slated to appropriate the real assets of both bankrupt companies in all major sectors of economic activity as well as State assets.

What we are witnessing is the outright privatization of the Nation State, integrated by corrupt politicians who are controlled by a gamut of global creditors and financial institutions.

Economic and Social Warfare

The COVID crisis is an act of Worldwide economic and social warfare. A massive concentration of wealth is ongoing.

The entire fabric and institutions of civil society are in jeopardy including national health care, schools, colleges and universities. All avenues of social and cultural life are affected.

People’s lives are destroyed.

The Worldwide impacts on mental health are devastating. Anxiety and depression resulting from unemployment and loss of income is a Worldwide phenomenon, unprecedented in World history.

U.S. Foreign Policy

This project is an integral part of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy agenda. It has geopolitical and strategic implications.

US intelligence and the Pentagon (including DARPA) as well as NATO are directly or indirectly involved in the corona crisis. The Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, the Bio Tech and IT conglomerates are partners, in liaison with the World Economic Forum (WEF) which is in the process of taking control of the United Nations.

The WHO “Guidelines” for issuing so-called “Digital Certificates for Covid-19” are generously funded by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations.

The March 11, 2020 lockdown leading to closure of national economies Worldwide has also been instrumental in destabilizing several countries which are categorized as “Enemies of America”.

No need for Washington to impose piecemeal sanctions on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. These countries and their governments have endorsed the COVID narrative. They have endorsed the “ultimate sanction”, namely the closure of their national economy coupled with the acceptance of the COVID killer vaccine as means to combating “V the virus”.

And unfortunately progressive intellectuals are totally blind. They are not only supportive of the COVID narrative, they fail to understand how the COVID lockdown policies as well as the deadly mRNA vaccine are being used to destabilize and destroy countries one after the other.

Engineered economic and social chaos. These countries are now fully controlled by Western creditors.

In the US, the billionaires (including Bezos, Musk, Gates and Zuckerberg) have increased their wealth by more than 60% since the outset of the pandemic, “from just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, 2020, to $4.8 trillion on August 17, 2021”. (IPC Study)

Video

Click the lower right corner to access full-screen.

Bastille 2.0: “Real Regime Change”

What is the solution?

The complexities of this crisis must be addressed including the power structures of global capitalism.

What must also be understood are the astute mechanisms including threats and bribes which are used systematically to take control not only of corrupt politicians but of the entire governmental fabric of what used to be called “sovereign countries”.

Is a second Worldwide lockdown contemplated? We must ensure that it does not take place, which means that we must confront the powers of so-called “global governance”.

Protest movements must question the legitimacy of both the financial actors as well as the politicians in high office.

The legitimacy of politicians and their powerful financial sponsors must be questioned, including the police state measures adopted to enforce the closure of economic activity, the imposition of a digital vaccine passport as well as the wearing of the face mask, social distancing, etc.

This network must be established (nationally and internationally) at all levels of society, in towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate this movement.

The first task would be to disable the fear campaign and media disinformation as well as put an end to Big Pharma’s COVID vaccination programme.

The corporate media should be directly challenged, without specifically targeting mainstream journalists, many of whom have been instructed to abide by the official narrative. This endeavour would require a parallel process at the grassroots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of virus, the impacts of the vaccine and the lockdown.

“Spreading the word” through social media and independent online media outlets will be undertaken bearing in mind that Google as well as Facebook are instruments of censorship.

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the financial elites as well as the structures of political authority at the national level, is no easy task. It will require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history.

It will also require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society (i.e. between political parties) and acting with a single voice.

We must also understand that the “corona project” is an integral part of the U.S. imperial agenda. It has geopolitical and strategic implications. It will also require eventually unseating the architects of this diabolical “pandemic” and indicting them for crimes against humanity. (Michel Chossudovsky‘s E-Book)

What is required is a “real regime change”, the restoration of democracy and what used to be called “The Welfare State”.

Solidarity must prevail. A complex task and commitment ahead for all humanity.

***

What is presented above is a summary of a very complex process. For details and analysis see:

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book (13 Chapters) entitled

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

About the Author

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),  UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)

He is the author of twelve books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005),  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).

He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]

See Michel Chossudovsky, Biographical Note

Michel Chossudovsky’s Articles on Global Research

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Shortly after this interview was recorded by Central TV Russia, the European Parliament issued a bombshell – a Statement Opposing the Vaccine Mandate Agenda on the grounds that it is against basic human rights. This is breaking news, signaling yet another step of conscious awakening, of bringing back human dignity and human rights, that no dictatorship can take away what belongs to humanity – fundamental Human Rights – as much as does life itself. See this.

Below is the transcript of the interview of Peter Koenig with Central TV Russia.

*

Central TV Russia: Is the course taken for zero tolerance against the unvaccinated in the world?

Peter Koenig: Yes, it seems that’s what’s going on, especially in the western world, a stark discrimination against the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated have a very good reason for not wanting to be vaccinated with an experimental mRNA injection, which according to many scientists and even US (CDC), as well as European (EMA) statistics have killed more people than covid.

The mainstream media are paid to lie to you on behalf of the governments, actually on behalf of all the 193 UN member governments. That already should tell you that there is something fundamentally very very wrong. That all the 193 UN member governments, plus the UN body itself, unilaterally defend the same false narrative, namely that the covid pandemic is a deadly disease. It is not.

It is not more deadly than the common flu. And this according to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s own words, when he writes in a peer reviewed paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in February of 2020 – “Navigating the Uncharted”, where he says that covid-19 mortality is about the same as that of the common flu.

Strange enough, the common flu had all but disappeared in 2020. Have all the common flu victims been converted into “covid cases”?

CTV: Why has a strict policy been chosen in relation to the unvaccinated? And will it get worse?

PK: Yes, it may get worse, if we the people do not stand up firmly against this nonsensical and oppressive, forced vaccination policy.

In fact, what is going on at least in the western world, I know not enough to say the same about Russia, is a relentless coercion and blackmailing of people to be vaccinated, or else – meaning, that people who decide not to be vaccinated with this often-deadly experimental mRNA jab – will actually lose their jobs, will lose their income and sustenance for their families.

Excluding and discriminating against non-jabbed people with a so called QR-code “Vaccine Certificate” is a crime against humanity.

This is, in almost every country in the world which calls itself a “democracy“ or the resemblance of a democracy, a crime against humanity. This is blackmail – and is a government crime that should be prosecuted similarly as the Nazi criminals were prosecuted by the Nuremberg process.

CTV: What are the restrictions in Switzerland for those who are not vaccinated?

PK: They are pretty much the same as elsewhere in Europe. To enter a restaurant, you have to show the QR-code on your cell phone, with your ID, which is proof that you have been either vaccinated, or have been tested negative (this is valid only 5 days), or that you have been healed and have antibodies. This latter condition, though, is only valid if your covid infection had been proven by a PCR test – which in itself is an absolute aberration, because any laboratory can attest that you have had covid and that now you have covid antibodies.

The government employees are strongly encouraged to be vaccinated, meaning that if by a certain date they are not vaccinated, their work contract may be terminated.

Likewise, the government recommends the same strict rules to Swiss private employers, and many follow the rule because of fear that they may be “sanctioned” by the government in one way or another.

There is no doubt that we are moving very rapidly into a health dictatorship. Actually, we are already there – and this in the span of less than 2 years.

The good thing however is that the people who are not vaccinated and have so far resisted vaccination are getting stronger. With every new restriction, their number increases and their unwillingness to get the deadly jab gets stronger.

CTV: Why, in the 3rd year of the pandemic, the virus has to be dealt with by administrative measures, such as QR codes and certificates?

PK: Because the governments have a very strict agenda. The virus, that is not stronger than a common flu, could have been eliminated a long time ago.

But there is another, much stronger agenda behind it. Those evil beings who are behind this “plandemic” – which isn’t really a pandemic, they want to achieve the following in the span of ten years that’s why it’s called the UN Agenda 2030 –

i) A massive reduction of the world population, they are eugenists;

ii) A total digitization of everything, including the human brain, that’s why the QR-code. It will store every detail of each of us individuals, including our DNA, so that we can be manipulated by such shortwaves like 5G and soon 6G, for which antennas have been propping up everywhere in Europe and the US – and they will eventually span the entire globe.

According to the WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s book, “The Great Reset” humans will be made into “transhumans” – this is what Klaus Schwab said in a 2016 Swiss French TV interview; and

iii) By untold and endless bankruptcies of small and medium size enterprises around the globe, capital will be transferred from the bottom and the middle to the top. That’s why the 20 largest billionaires have increased their fortune in the first 18 months of this plandemic by more than 250 billion dollars equivalent, while the rest of the world, especially in developing countries slipped into abject poverty.

That is something to think about. 

CTV: Why is it impossible to fight the virus with vaccines, because the whole world, including children and newborns, is not vaccinated?

PK: Because there is no effective vaccine, at least not in the west. I’m not talking about Russia. Russian listeners may make their own conclusions.

But especially, because there is no need for a vaccine. This is a disease similar to the common flu and can be treated with many different medications, some of them have actually recently even been admitted by the US CDC, like Ivermectin, and Hydroxychloroquine and more. They are simple and cheap medications that can heal patients. Proven. But they are not liked because Big Pharma doesn’t make money on them; but more importantly, they do not fulfill the 3-point agenda mentioned before.

Since you hinted at children, yes, now they want to vaccinate even children – all the way down to 2-year olds, and in some parts of Europe and the US, children – under pressure from their schools can decide for themselves without parental consent – I repeat, without parental consent, to be “vaccinated” with this experimental mRNA gene-modifying jab.

This is another crime against humanity.

If we, the people, do not wake up to this fraud of biblical dimensions, we will indeed be in this net of lies and deceit, and new variants and so on, for the next 9 years.

We must not allow this.

CTV: Do you agree that only the next generation will be able to defeat covid because of anti-vaxxers, in order to achieve collective immunity, more than 90 percent of the world needs to be vaccinated, is it unrealistic in the coming years?

PK: No, I do not agree that only the next generation can eradicate covid.

We can do it, but we have to stand up against tyrannical governments – imagine, all of the 193 UN member countries basically follow the same narrative!

Isn’t there something wrong.

This situation may be completely different in Russia from what it is in the west. For example, Russia and China do not inject people with an unproven mRNA injection, but with a traditional type of vaccine, an approach that has been proven in the past for decades to be effective.

Now, back to the West, the people who do not want to be inoculated “against covid’’ are not anti-vaxxers, but they are awakened people. They know what they are doing and why they do not want this potentially deadly experimental jab.

And as the number of these people, these awakened and well-informed people, grows, we actually may overcome this tyranny, and return to human values again.

Perhaps a different set of human values – values that are not just focused on consumerism, but on solidarity, on sovereignty of states and of societies – and with people and societies, who will distance themselves from this destructive, very destructive – GLOBALIZATION.

Only because we live in this from outside imposed Globalization, covid could happen.

The answer is:

• Back to solidarity
• Back to sovereign states
• Back to autonomy and friendly relations.

*

Video: Towards Digital Tyranny with Peter Koenig

Click here to link to bitchute version

.

***

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Mercola

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Although the world has stood up for Palestine repeatedly through widespread global demonstrations against Israel’s crimes (see The Electronic Intifada’s video clip of May 2021), it still takes a lot of courage for Palestinians to stand up for themselves and declare a clear and unapologetic revolutionary path for their liberation.

That courage will be on full display at the upcoming Alternative Palestinian Path (Masar Badil) conference in Madrid, Spain (October — November 2021). The General Preparatory Committee of the conference has been working hard for over a year to mark the end of the Madrid-Oslo process, declare a new revolutionary commitment and chart a path towards a new stage of struggle for the liberation of Palestine.

Despite all past tragic setbacks, Palestinian resistance and courage have never waned; the history of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is the history of a revolution.

The best place to learn about this history ahead of Masar Badil is on the site The Palestinian Revolution (Learn the Revolution), a bilingual Arabic/English online learning resource that explores Palestinian revolutionary practice and thought from the Nakba of 1948, to the siege of Beirut in 1982:

The Palestinian revolution took on huge global significance, drawing on energies and resources from across the world, while influencing politics, thought, and culture throughout it. The website introduces readers to this remarkable phenomenon entirely through primary and contemporary sources.

It is this revolution, derailed since Madrid-Oslo of 30 years ago to the day, that Masar Badil aims to revitalize in Madrid now.

But will this conference that celebrates the Palestinian revolutionary struggle for liberation cut through the still deafening media static of Israel’s “narrative?” And by static, I mean such loaded questions as the one put to me by Eyal Nhaisi on Facebook: “Do i understand you correctly.. you want to delete Israël (from the river to the sea) and replace it with a country called Palestine?”

Or what about the static displayed on Canary Mission that conflates Zionism with Judaism and sees the Palestinian struggle for liberation in the following insidious terms: as defending and inciting violence against Jews (after all, “hasn’t the term ‘intifada’, [let alone ‘revolution’], carried the connotation of violence?”), supporting Hamas and spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, glorifying and defending terrorists and terrorism, demonizing Israel, and (horror of horrors) engaging in BDS activity?

Eyal Nhaisi’s question above is on the minds of many people, including some who support Palestinians in their struggle, supporters who don’t seem to understand that apartheid and inequality are not what’s wrong with Israel. Rather, what’s wrong is Israel’s very existence as a settler-colonial Zionist Jewish entity in Palestine.

An example of the above confused mentality was recently expressed by American writer Michael Chabon, who says that he supports the Palestinian people in their struggle because he wants Israel “to survive and thrive.” He says this while simultaneously considering joining the boycott of Israeli publishers [as Irish writer Sally Rooney has done] in the future.

Will the revolutionary struggle for Palestinian liberation end up deleting Israel and “replacing” it with a country called Palestine? As I responded to Eyal on Facebook, this language is inappropriate. Palestine cannot “replace” Israel. Palestine is already placed there!

If the Palestinian struggle for liberation succeeds (most Palestinians and their supporters believe when, not if), the Palestinian Nakba will be reversed, all Palestinian rights in their homeland will be restored and restitution made. Only then, as Omar Barghouti put it back in 2013, can we begin to focus on the ethics and mechanics of decolonization:

Accepting modern day Jewish Israelis as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society — free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model — is the most magnanimous, rational offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors. So don’t ask for more.

The conference comes as Israel is set to approve the construction of 4,400 new Jewish housing units in the West Bank, 3,109 in existing Jewish colonies and 1,300 in the heart of Palestinian villages.

Chabon’s confusion will disappear if we all finally understand the Palestinian struggle within the historical framework of decolonization struggles, part of a late twentieth-century drive of colonial peoples to become sovereign nation-states, just as the former colonial Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and apartheid South Africa did.

Achieving this goal, says Masar Badil’s conference statement and call, requires

taking up this national responsibility at the individual and collective levels. It also requires collective convergence and cooperation to achieve a clear framework of struggle and direct and strategic objectives. Above all, it requires a willingness to sacrifice and broad popular participation in rebuilding our national and popular institutions on the one hand, and confronting the Zionist movement, its institutions and its racist colonial entity in occupied Palestine on the other hand, without neglecting the need to confront simultaneously the project of the Palestinian class that monopolized political decision-making and squandered the sacrifices of the Palestinian people. The major national achievements of the people were destroyed and this sector established, through the disastrous Oslo Accords, a powerless and illegitimate authority, which is the authority of “limited self-government” in areas and cities within the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Which is why, as I pack my bag to travel to Madrid, I am most excited about the event that will take place on Sunday, October 31, 2021: Popular March for Palestine — Open discussion with the organizations and institutions participating in the conference.

Yes, we are not afraid and we are not alone today.

Related: A Giant Leap for Palestine? Stay tuned!

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. 

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: [Rima Najjar: Packing my bags to travel to Madrid, Spain: The Alternative Palestinian Path Conference (Towards a new revolutionary commitment) October-November 2021